THE DAY A WORLD DIED Today marks the 100th Anniversary of the beginning of the most disasters and catastrophic event on this planet in the last 148 years. And when you think of the enormity of this event and the changes this war brought and the shock waves through history in time.... any student of history... any human with any empathy at all can only weep at the carnage and destruction and waste and suffering of WW1. And what makes it even worse... is that all of us ...all of humanity across the entire planet is still paying for that assassination today. In a very large sense World War 1 happened because many of the politicians and leaders in Europe did not think that a major war in Europe was possible. More importantly they did not think the cost and risk would be as severe and as long-term. The last European major (the Napoleonic wars) occurred before industrialization exploded across the world... so the reference points about how serious a war could be .... Napoleonic reference points... no longer had any meaning. Interestingly the great British historian JFC Fuller makes a interesting point about about the American civil war and WW1 . Since the birth of the modern era .. the time of the enlightenment say 1750 to 1800... the two really big pivotal events in the western world have been the U.S. Civil war and WW1. The resolution of the U.S civil war was a close call. The Union/ North COULD have lost the war politically by the military victories of southern armies in 1862 or by the defeat of Lincoln in 1864 . However the end result is that by 1895 -1900 some 30-35 years later the America was essentially a unified nation with a booming economy .. a still open western frontier and none of the crippling amount of political baggage associated with the European System. Yes the southern region was still behind economically be cause of the lingering effects of the civil war... the country as a whole was booming and much stronger. WW1 professor Fuller argued was also a civil war but a European one --- essentially a war between the European Royal houses and nobility. The ending of that war which also lasted for years was completely unsatisfactory and led to another war 30 years later. The combination of both world wars... that began in Europe and which featured years and years of prolonged industrial combat on a massive level destroyed the world that saw Europe and the worlds Power center. Europe was headed for golden age as was most the western world. The standard livings across all areas even Africa and Asia in 1914 rapidly rising. While the age of empires ( 1870-1914) was NOT exactly an era of TRUE fee trade... it was the first period of globalization. The British historian Nial Ferguson once wrote that the actions of Sarajevo in late June 1914 and the catastrophe of WW1 were not only the pivotal event of the last 100 years . One can imagine a alternate planet Earth with a alternate timeline. A timeline where there is no Somme or Verdun... No gas attacks.... No trench warfare... NO Ypres .... No region known as no mans land where the mud was so thick the whole solders were swallowed up and never seen again.... Where there is no communist revolution in Russia... Where the U.S. does not intervene into world affairs and stays a relatively pure and somewhat unsophisticated nation of the new world.... Where 20,000,000 people did not die from the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19.... where Hitler does not come to power.... where Japan does not achieve supremacy in Asian matters and gets sucked the morass of western militarism . And... And...and.... The shock waves of that assassination and the war that followed has weakened spome over time especially since 1991 in the fall of the Soviet Union. But it certainly has not dissipated... even the troubles in the Middle East and in Asia are deeply connected to that single assassin and his gun. Some were out there I like to think there is an alternate timeline for the planet earth over the last 100 years. Sometimes I wonder how humanity ever survived the 20th century
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 04:38:24 +0000
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