Today, at the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, what was the bloodiest and nastiest conflict in known history came to a stop; WWI is the first war in which over 50 percent of the soldiers were killed by weapons instead secondary causes (starvation, infections, dehydration or diarrhea). The war didn’t exactly come to an end, that would come later via the treaties. Little did everyone know, this horrendous war would be just a prequel for another, worse six years which would kill three percent of the planet and practically exterminate all the Jews in Europe. With the rise of nationalism across the globe, America included, an inevitable Chinese hegemony, Russian meddling and the Middle East being a clusterfuck, I’d say we may be in for yet another.
Right now our inept POTUS is in France making a fool of himself as expected, demonstrating his ignorance and arrogance and by proxy, millions of less educated Whites. The lessons of WWI are lost and wasted on him. Hell, he’s Kaiser Wilhelm re-incarnated if Bob Woodward’s Fear is even half accurate.
To me the whole thing should’ve been avoided but the major players behaved like drunk frat boys with their chests all puffed up, unable to back down. It also illustrates my other theory, whenever a couple decades pass, the current generation romanticizes the last war too much. This makes them too willing to go to war because they’re deluded into thinking it will be a fantastic, character-building adventure. HA! Cases in point: how everyone thought the American Civil War would be over in weeks as they looked back on how “cool” the Mexican-American War was 15 years earlier; ditto for the Spanish-American War; and I saw it in the jingoism for Gulf Distractions 1 and 2. I don’t know how well this is applied to WWI. I’m confident WWII was an exception via the collective mood being, this is going to be difficult and we need to roll up our sleeves to do our best to end it. My theory is getting applied to Americans. Europeans? It probably has it flaws since there were dust ups between WWI and the Franco-Prussian War, they just don’t get mentioned much.
May the majority of us continue to remember the lessons WWI taught us and find a way to drive out the batshit minority running the world into oblivion.