War

[Bob Of Burleson]

The War to End All Wars?
Hardly. But It Did
Change Them Forever.

World War I destroyed kings, kaisers, czars and sultans; it demolished empires; it introduced chemical weapons; it brought millions of women into the work force.

By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times

ZONNEBEKE, Belgium — To walk the orderly rows of headstones in the elegant graveyards that hold the dead of World War I is to feel both awe and distance. With the death of the last veterans, World War I, which began 100 years ago, has moved from memory to history. But its resonance has not faded — on land and geography, people and nations, and on the causes and consequences of modern war.

The memorial here at Tyne Cot, near Ypres and the muddy killing ground of Passchendaele, is the largest British Commonwealth cemetery in the world. Nearly 12,000 soldiers are buried here — some 8,400 of them identified only as “A Soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God.” Despite the immensity of this space, the soldiers represent only a tiny portion of the 8.5 million or more from both sides who died, and that number a fraction of the 20 million who were severely wounded.

In Europe’s first total war, called the Great War until the second one came along, seven million civilians also died.

Yet the establishment of these grave sites and monuments, here and in villages all over the Western Front, is more than a reminder of the scale of the killing. World War I also began a tradition of memorializing ordinary soldiers by name and burying them alongside their officers, a posthumous recognition of the individual after the trauma of mass slaughter.

World War I could be said to have begun in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, by a young nationalist seeking a greater Serbia. The four and a half years that followed, as the war spread throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia, reshaped the modern world in fundamental ways.

The war destroyed kings, kaisers, czars and sultans; it demolished empires; it introduced chemical weapons, tanks and airborne bombing; it brought millions of women into the work force, hastening their legal right to vote. It gave independence to nations like Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic countries and created new nations in the Middle East with often arbitrary borders; it brought about major cultural changes, including a new understanding of the psychology of war, of “shell shock” and post-traumatic stress.

It also featured the initial step of the United States as a global power. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately failed in his ambitions for a new world order and a credible League of Nations, setting off much chaos with his insistence on an armistice and his support for undefined “self-determination.” And the rapid retreat of the United States from Europe helped sow the ground for World War II.

Historians still squabble over responsibility for the war. Some continue to blame Germany and others depict a system of rivalries, alliances and anxieties, driven by concerns about the growing weakness of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and the growing strength of Germany and Russia that was likely to produce a war in any case, even if there was some other casus belli.

But the emotional legacies are different for different countries. For France the war, however bloody, was a necessary response to invasion. Preventing the German Army from reaching Paris in the first battle of the Marne spelled the difference between freedom and slavery. The second battle of the Marne, with the help at last of American soldiers, was the beginning of the end for the Germans. This was France’s “good war,” while World War II was an embarrassing collapse, with significant collaboration.

For Germany, which had invested heavily in the machinery of war, it was an almost incomprehensible defeat, laying the groundwork for revolution, revanchism, fascism and genocide. Oddly enough, says Max Hastings, a war historian, Germany could have dominated Europe in 20 years economically if only it had not gone to war.

“The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,” Mr. Hastings said, a point he now emphasizes when speaking with Chinese generals. The Germans, too, are still coming to terms with their past, unsure how much to press their current economic and political strength in Europe.

For Britain, there remains a debate about whether the British even had to fight. But fight they did, with millions of volunteers until the dead were mounded so high that conscription was finally imposed in 1916. The memory of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme — when 20,000 British soldiers died, 40,000 were wounded and 60 percent of officers were killed — has marked British consciousness and become a byword for mindless slaughter.

“The sense that the war was futile and unnecessary still hangs over a lot of the discussion in Britain,” said Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College, London.

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[GFB]

When war is necessary..it's a beautiful thing.

[planosteve]

It was the first war brought to you by the Federal Reserve System.

[GFB]

It was the first war brought to you by the Federal Reserve System.

Where's the "loon" face?

[planosteve]

It was the first war brought to you by the Federal Reserve System.

Where's the "loon" face?

Actually, it's a combination of replacing the gold standard with fiat money and the FED.
People would never stand to be taxed what it costs for war. The FED make it possible to brorrow the money and pay it back with newly printed money which devalues the money already in existence. The resulting inflation can be blamed on all kinds of other things and by the time society catches on to the scam, if it ever does, it's too late.

[GFB]

It was the first war brought to you by the Federal Reserve System.

Where's the "loon" face?

Actually, it's a combination of replacing the gold standard with fiat money and the FED.
People would never stand to be taxed what it costs for war. The FED make it possible to brorrow the money and pay it back with newly printed money which devalues the money already in existence. The resulting inflation can be blamed on all kinds of other things and by the time society catches on to the scam, if it ever does, it's too late.

So you're saying the Fed allowed us to win the war?

[planosteve]

[/quote]So you're saying the Fed allowed us to win the war?[/quote]

It allowed what should have been a normal war which occurred periodicly in Europe to become far larger and the first World War. By the US entering the war, instead of negotiating a settlement, it allowed draconian penalties to be imposed on Germany. It was because of that, that a despot like Hitler could have come to power.

[John in Plano]

It was the first war brought to you by the Federal Reserve System.

All this time the history books have claimed it was because a guy named Ferdinand and his wife were killed which resulted in a bunch of treaties coming into play and various countries in Europe started shooting at each other.

6 months after creation it started the Great War, with out the use of the internet