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The War That Made the World We Live In
Steyn Online ^ | 11 Nov 2018 | Mark Steyn

Posted on 11/11/2018 4:23:06 PM PST by Rummyfan

This is no ordinary Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth and much of Europe, and Veterans Day in the United States. Today we mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Armistice that brought to an end the most terrible war in history. Exactly a century ago - on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month - the guns fell silent on Europe's battlefields. The belligerents had agreed the terms of the peace at 5am that November morning, and the news was relayed to the commanders in the field shortly thereafter that hostilities would cease at eleven o'clock. And then they all went back to firing at each other for a final six hours. On that last day, British imperial forces lost some 2,400 men, the French 1,170, the Germans 4,120, the Americans about 3,000. The dead in those last hours of the Great War outnumbered the toll of D Day twenty-six years later, the difference being that those who died in 1944 were fighting to win a war whose outcome they did not know. On November 11th 1918 over eleven thousand men fell in a conflict whose victors and vanquished had already been settled and agreed.

It was that kind of war. Four years earlier - at dusk on August 3rd 1914 - Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk watching the lamplighters go about their daily business in the Whitehall gloaming. And then he made a remark that endured across the decades:

The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: 19181111; armisticeday; commiefascism; foreign; italygermany; marksteyn; russia; steyn; thegreatwar; veteransday
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1 posted on 11/11/2018 4:23:06 PM PST by Rummyfan
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To: Rummyfan
And in a more oblique sense the horrors of the trenches caused the ruling classes of the Great Powers to lose their civilizational confidence - and across a century they have never recovered it.
2 posted on 11/11/2018 4:25:33 PM PST by Rummyfan (In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel.)
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To: Rummyfan

Ping.


3 posted on 11/11/2018 4:33:49 PM PST by Chainmail (A simple rule of life: if you can be blamed, you're responsible.)
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To: Rummyfan

I read some 20 years ago a couple great articles on the ramifications of WWI, one in American Heritage and the other in American History mags.

It should be far from a forgotten war, and really appreciated for shifts in thinking that happened due to it. Of paramount importance, probably the insidious change in mentality that shoehorned in Marxism as the increasingly accepted mindset.


4 posted on 11/11/2018 4:35:20 PM PST by the OlLine Rebel (Common sense is an uncommon virtue./Federal-run medical care is as good as state-run DMVs.)
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To: the OlLine Rebel; Rummyfan

We are still all eating the ashes of WWI.

“The past isn’t dead: it isn’t even past.” - Faulkner


5 posted on 11/11/2018 4:41:32 PM PST by Mrs. Don-o ("For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God." - 1 Peter 4:17)
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To: Rummyfan

It’s far better than the world we’d live in, if our forefathers hadn’t fought and won.

Here is Germany
(much about some of the wars that led to WW2, including WW1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la6J7yRnEus


6 posted on 11/11/2018 4:49:19 PM PST by familyop ("Welcome to Costco. I love you." - -Costco greeter in the movie, "Idiocracy")
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To: Rummyfan

Communism is the close cultural sibling of fascism.


7 posted on 11/11/2018 4:51:01 PM PST by familyop ("Welcome to Costco. I love you." - -Costco greeter in the movie, "Idiocracy")
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To: Army Air Corps

Bookmark


8 posted on 11/11/2018 4:51:52 PM PST by Army Air Corps (Four Fried Chickens and a Coke)
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To: Mrs. Don-o; the OlLine Rebel; Rummyfan; ebb tide; sitetest; Salvation

WWI ended the Napoleonic (Masonic) Wars against the old aristocracy, replacing them with socialist “democratic” states that embraced a secular, anti-Christian 20th Century.


9 posted on 11/11/2018 4:58:07 PM PST by narses (Censeo praedatorium gregem esse delendum.)
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To: familyop

Yes and no.

WWI was one of the most miserable, horrifyingly unnecessary wars ever. How did Germany even end up the big boogie Man? What had it done prior that suggested it should be the big bad guy? Except being even more unstable than much of Europe.

WWII was more an outgrowth of evil forces bristling from the insults dealt by English and French in their terms. But really, the question isn’t so much “Germany reacted” to WWI, but that WWI happened at all, and Germany took it upon itself to bear the brunt of the offense and defense rather than those who actually started it. All stupidly picked up the yoke of “well, you hurt my friend...” and before they knew it, friends of friends were the main participants in a massive street brawl over “honor”.


10 posted on 11/11/2018 5:00:22 PM PST by the OlLine Rebel (Common sense is an uncommon virtue./Federal-run medical care is as good as state-run DMVs.)
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To: Rummyfan

Our European allies were starving during World War 1. There was a United States Liberty Garden program (later known as Victory Gardens) to facilitate increasing exports of food to Europe. Our forerunners did the same in World War 2.


11 posted on 11/11/2018 5:04:22 PM PST by familyop ("Welcome to Costco. I love you." - -Costco greeter in the movie, "Idiocracy")
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To: the OlLine Rebel

Very well put!

Few people realize in Imperial Germany the right vote was more widespread then Imperial UK. The common man had far more rights in Austro-Hungary then in our ally Russia.


12 posted on 11/11/2018 5:09:51 PM PST by Reily
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To: Rummyfan
We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

And literally the next morning Germany invaded Belgium

He could have accurately said "We shall not see them lit again in our grand-children's grand-children's grand-children's lifetimes."

13 posted on 11/11/2018 5:32:14 PM PST by DuncanWaring (The Lord uses the good ones; the bad ones use the Lord.)
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To: Reily

It is interesting to find out about some background on Japan, too. Apparently, Japan was somewhat insulted at being left out of the armistice proceedings, having been on the allied side. Yes, they were physically there, but not involved in helping negotiate. Additionally, by the ‘20s Japan had quite a lot of contact with Germans both culturally and politically. I don’t know a lot about it all except what I recall from the programs I’d seen, one about WWI, and the other “the Samauri and the Swastika”, but it all starts coming together when one hears about that background.


14 posted on 11/11/2018 5:33:25 PM PST by the OlLine Rebel (Common sense is an uncommon virtue./Federal-run medical care is as good as state-run DMVs.)
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To: Rummyfan

Here’s what we Americans need to know about World War 1.

A German submarine sank a British ship with over a hundred U.S. citizens on it. President Wilson, being a “progressive,” negotiated with the Germans to persuade them with talk to stop attacking commercial ships and used his anti-war accomplishment as a slogan to get reelected the next year (1916).

The Germans decided to resume attacking U.S. ships with submarines in 1917 and invited Mexico to be Germany’s ally with a promise to help Mexico conquer and take Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Germany sank 7 U.S. private commercial ships before the U.S.A. decided to stop the Germans

Feeling all gooshy about Heinrich’s crazy descendants in our midst, yet, and wanting to join him in his fourth effort to brainwash and conquer the world? I’m not.

The real error committed by Wilson and his men was their “progressive,” peacenik assumption that winning World War 1, was that it would end all wars. Silly.

Human beings won’t stop wars from happening again. Some nations want to conquer and steal other countries and enslave people, and we must be prepared to stop them from doing that to us.


15 posted on 11/11/2018 6:10:51 PM PST by familyop ("Welcome to Costco. I love you." - -Costco greeter in the movie, "Idiocracy")
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To: Rummyfan

Bump


16 posted on 11/11/2018 6:44:32 PM PST by foreverfree
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To: Rummyfan

bump


17 posted on 11/11/2018 7:23:01 PM PST by Albion Wilde ("The word 'racist' is used to describe 'every Republican that's winning'" --Donald Trump)
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To: Mrs. Don-o

I thought that was Fitzgerald. Shows what I know.


18 posted on 11/11/2018 7:47:59 PM PST by Tax-chick ("Kindness and truth shall meet." Ps. 85:10)
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To: familyop
The real error committed by Wilson and his men was their “progressive,” peacenik assumption that winning World War 1, was that it would end all wars.

Wilson and his intellectual idealists gave us the failed League of Nations which reincarnated as the UN--the "gift" which keeps on taking.

19 posted on 11/11/2018 7:56:45 PM PST by lightman (Obama's legacy in 13 letters: BLM, ISIS, & ANTIFA. New axis of evil.)
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To: the OlLine Rebel
"WWI was one of the most miserable, horrifyingly unnecessary wars ever. How did Germany even end up the big boogie Man?"

I honestly do see the point of WWI. It really was fought to make the world safe for democracy. Since it didn't begin with an overt aggression, like Pearl Harbor, or the shelling of Danzig followed by the invasion of Poland, it's hard for us to pin down what started it all, and therefore easy to say that it was an absurd pointless diplomatic mistake, made worse by inflexible railroad schedules, which nonsensically somehow swallowed nations, monarchies, and tens of millions of combatants and civilians. It seems inexplicable to us because we no longer grasp what the world was like before 1914. We see people in old films and pictures that look quaint, but not unrecognizable as like ourselves, and we naturally assume that they are like us, sharing our values and beliefs. They didn't; they were born into a much different world than we were.

WWI was the end of a series of increasingly bloody wars which started in the late 18th century with our revolution, and were fought to overthrow the notion that a birthright, a King or a Queen, or a ruling class, had title to the world. Even Napoleon, albeit an emperor, claimed to be the protector of the revolution, and he claimed to be freeing Europe with history's first mass armies. The world before 1914 was a world of colonial rule, monarchies, Tsars, Kaisers, and the British Commonwealth. As the industrial mass production of goods created an historically unprecedented middle class, the contradictions of piled centuries were bent and compressed like springs, ready for any incident, like the shooting of a bumbling archduke, to release them with unbelievable, inhuman, slaughter on a modern industrial scale. That was WWI.

It may be, as one poster pointed out, that Germans had more voting rights that others, but they were ruled by a Kaiser, and oppressed by a military which under his authority could overrule civilian authority whenever it pleased them. All that, and how many other royal houses, were swept away, and while Britain and France kept their colonies, the future was clear.

We can write endlessly about how WWI lead to the even more disastrous WWII, and probably it did, but that does not mean that the First World War was pointless.

20 posted on 11/11/2018 11:39:18 PM PST by PUGACHEV
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