by Eric S. Margolis
November 11, 2024
This week we observe the end of the `War to End All Wars,’ also known as World War I. The memorial week will be filled with the usual platitudes and patriotic guff designed to benefit the politicians who sent millions of young men to their deaths in this most stupid of all wars.
I consider World War I as the greatest tragedy to befall civilization. World War II killed more civilians but World War I killed or wounded more soldiers and it destroyed much of Europe after a century of glittering civilization.
We still feel the consequences of this brutal conflict today: the war in Ukraine, the butchery in Gaza, high tensions in the Balkans. WWI led to the collapse of the Russian Empire and the advent of Communism that killed millions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This included six million Ukrainians starved or shot by the Soviets.
The rapacious Treaty of Versailles led directly to the rise of National Socialism in Germany and, in part, to fascism in Italy. Europe’s Jews became the main target of hatred after being blamed for the crimes and mass murder caused by Communism.
The destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy by France and Britain gave birth to many of today’s ethnic and political problems in the Mideast, North Africa and East Europe.
At least 17 million died in World War I, not counting China or India. This conflict was the direct result of Serbia’s efforts to draw Russia into war with Austria- Hungary, as well as Great Britain’s efforts to crush growing strategic rival Germany and France’s lust to reconquer Alsace Lorraine. Germany struck first in fear of being surrounded and crushed by Europe’s two leading military powers, France and Russia.
19h century Europe was the highwater mark of world civilization. Germany was the most socially progressive nation in Europe. Both Hitler and Stalin were determined to regain territories lost during World War I – not, as we are misinformed, to conquer the world. Highly effective British propaganda has convinced many that Germany was an aggressor that ignited the first world war. This untruth is still believed even today.
Germany did terrible things, but so did the other allied powers. The horrors we are seeing today in Gaza and Lebanon resemble the fate of German and Japanese cities in WWII brought on by massive American and British firebombing of half of their cities. We still don’t know the truth about both world wars. They remain shrouded in propaganda. As is often said, history is the propaganda of the victors.
One major crime remains to be told: the deaths of millions of horses, donkeys and mules in both wars. In Britain, 128,800 horses were reported killed in the war. Millions of animals died in the world wars, beaten and lashed into hauling shells, guns and supplies or killed with ax-blows to their heads as easy food for the troops.
France’s cities and towns near the German border remain semi-ruins to this day. Plants barely grow in these poisoned border zones contaminated in the so-called ‘Great War’ between the murderous imperialist powers.
I have been a soldier and war correspondent. I have walked many of WWI’s battlefields and cemeteries. For me, there is nothing good to say about the ‘War to End All Wars.’ It was a vast butchery carried out by incompetent or stupid generals and even more loathsome politicians. Their successors are in office today. As the great Benjamin Franklin said, ‘no bad peace, no good wars.’
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2024 (reprint by permission of author)