Ping.
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.
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
Communism is the close cultural sibling of fascism.
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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.
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."
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.
Bump
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It should perhaps be pointed out that the terms dictated by the Treaty of Versailles were far less harsh than those demanded by the victorious Prussians over the French, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
The sheer fact that Germany was not invaded or occupied, that the war ended by armistice, rather than unconditional surrender, helped fan the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth that provided the cesspool for the Nazis to flourish.
We would not make that mistake again with WWII.
WW1 made the world we live in...by destroying the old world and a lot of people in the process, even over and above those who perished directly on the battlefields. Among that group was the family of my paternal grandfather, of blessed memory.
Before the war started in 1914, my great grandparents had 8 children from ages 4 to 27, plus several grandchildren, and he had a thriving water delivery business and owned 14 houses that were rented out. By the time the war was over, 1 child was dead, one had literally walked across Siberia to escape the carnage and come to the U.S., and the remainder were destitute and hungry, like the rest of the population. Four years later, after the Revolution, my grandfather left, never to see his parents again, and only seeing his remaining siblings for a couple of weeks some 46 years later. Within a short time, my great grandfather had what was left of a lifetime of hard work seized by the Communists, who only came to power because of World War 1, being left with only the home that he and my great grandmother lived in. In 1936, 73 and sick with cancer, they rented 3/4 of their home to others to put food on the table...and he was arrested for being a Capitalist, savagely beaten and left to root for several months in an NKVD jail. He was released, then rearrested a few months later, beaten badly and released to die at home. The rest of the remaining family got to live in a giant open-air prison for 75 years, those not killed in the fighting if WW2 (which was Round 2 of WW1) or murdered by the Germans, that is.
So, as can be seen, WW1 was pretty much an unmitigated tragedy for my grandfather’s family, except for the fact that he an his older brother were able to get to this country and build lives in freedom. This is, of course, far from a unique story, but I write about it to show the effects of events that are no longer a living memory for anyone.