ARMISTICE AND REMEMBRANCE

Srdja Trifkovic, www.ChroniclesMagazine.org

...the day when the Great War ended, when the guns fell silent on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918.

In reality the Great War was the most important event in the past two thousand years and arguably the most tragic event in all of history. It marked the end of an often unjust but on the whole decent world, and opened the floodgates of hell: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Tito, and countless lesser demons were all its heirs and beneficiaries.
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as America continues its futile quest for global dominance and its cultural suicide at home, it seems incredible that a mere century ago, the European, Christian world dominated the planet. The suicide of 1914 was a catastrophe rooted in an imperial hubris of neoconservative proportions.
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President Wilson’s Fourteen Points—the device that was allegedly meant to end the war in early 1918—espoused the principle of self-determination. It threw a revolutionary doctrine at an already exhausted Europe, a doctrine almost on par with Bolshevism in its destabilizing effect. It unleashed competing aspirations among the smaller nations of Central Europe and the Balkans that not only hastened the collapse of transnational empires, but also gave rise to a host of intractable ethnic conflicts and territorial disputes that remain unresolved to this day.
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Two decades after Wilson, burdened by Clemenceau’s untenable revenge of Versailles, Europe staggered into a belated Round Two of self-destruction. Before 1939 it was badly wounded; after 1945 mortally so. The result is a civilization that is aborting and birth-controlling itself to death, that is morally bankrupt, culturally spent, and spiritually comatose. We are living—if life it is—the consequences of what had ended on that November morning at Compiegne.