A mãe de todas as guerras: WWI

O fim das monarquias, o inicio do comunismo e fascismo, a segunda guerra, a guerra fria, as descolonizações, o grande estado social, o crescente envolvimento do "ocidente" no médio oriente, o terrorismo. Ainda hoje ainda sentimos os efeitos do fim do "much civilized world of pre-WWI": Perhaps the Los Angeles Times said it best after World War I and its "peace" were concluded: "It is quite impossible to tell what the war made the world safe for."

Uma seleção do texto para quem não o puder ler na íntegra:

The United States and World War I

"The Treaty of Versailles officially ended the war in May 1919. The crushing effect of this "peace treaty" on an already-reeling Germany is as staggering as it is forgotten.

The defeated nation lost nearly one-third of its total land area, along with millions of German citizens. Its foreign colonies were divvied out to the victorious Allies.

The brazen and humiliating requirement for the Germans to admit all responsibility for the war – when Serbia, Austria, Russia, and France all held equal or greater roles for its inauguration – set the stage for the half-starved nation to pay financially for the whole war as well, to the tune of $7.5 trillion in today’s dollars.

This, along with later punitive actions taken by France, set the Germans on a course of runaway inflation, Communist uprisings, economic ruin, social chaos, moral breakdown, and Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

On a more personal level, the German nation itself faced the danger of mass starvation. Between the November 11, 1918 armistice, which stopped fighting, and the signing of the Versailles treaty, the British and French insisted on continuing the strangling naval blockade of Germany.
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During this time, eight hundred adults were dying of starvation every day in northern Germany alone. By the final tally, hundreds of thousands of Germans had starved.

E voltando ao início:

The United States’ 1917 entry into World War I represents one of the crucial turning points in American history. Its significance, however, scarcely exceeds modern America’s collective ignorance of it.
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"Wilson talked – and talked and talked – about neutrality and apparently convinced himself that he was neutral. But the United States he was supposedly running was not neutral, in thought, word or deed, thanks to Wellington House (the engine of British government propaganda) – and the international banking firm of J. P. Morgan in New York."

By the time America declared war on Germany, Morgan was having a bang-up war of its own. The company had already loaned Britain and France $2.1 billion (around $30 billion by 2004 standards), and had cleared $30 million – around $425 million in 2004 dollars – in profit.
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Texan James Slayden called it "a conspiracy to force our country into a war with Germany" and reminded his audience of "the sound advice of George Washington" in Washington’s farewell address regarding foreign entanglements and attachments. Slayden exhorted other leaders to mobilize the American public "against the majority of the newspapers and great commercial interests."
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The well-publicized May, 1915, German sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania is typically cited as one of a series of outrages to which President Woodrow Wilson reacted with restraint and patience.(...)Yet few in America at the time suggested the nation should go to war because of the sinking of "a British ship flying a British flag." In fact, that British ship carried over four million rifle cartridges and 1,250 cases of shrapnel shells – destined for use against German soldiers.

"It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany," First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill wrote. The more neutral "traffic" the better, he insisted, and "If some of it gets into trouble, better still."

It was the first of two World Wars in which Churchill would exert the full strength of his being to drag America into the conflict in order to preserve victory for the British.

Overlooked by most "popular" historians is the brutal toll taken on the men, women, children, and aged of Germany by actions given the antiseptic term "naval blockade."

Hundreds of thousands of Germans starved to death or perished due to other malnutrition-related maladies during the war because Britain and her allies would not let supplies and food into Germany or even into Europe in many cases. Hundreds of thousands of others suffered serious or debilitating illnesses. This was the context in which the Germans launched their submarine warfare against ships traveling into British waters.
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...Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge; after their roles in America’s imperialistic adventures with Spain, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, these men – with evident disregard for the Constitution and the Monroe Doctrine alike – considered it a disgrace for America not to throw its weight into the much-larger fracas of World War I.

Wilson went so far as to campaign for re-election in 1916 with the slogan, "He kept us out of war." Less than ninety days after beginning his second term, however, he called upon Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in order to "make the world safe for democracy."
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The late conservative scholar Robert Nisbet wrote that Wilson "was an ardent prophet of the state, the state indeed as it was known to European scholars and statesmen…. He preached it…. From him supremely comes the politicization, the centralization, and the commitment to bureaucracy of American society during the past seventy-five years."

Noted contemporary conservative historian Paul Johnson describes Wilson as having "…a self-regarding arrogance and smugness, masquerading as righteousness, which was always there and which grew with the exercise of power."

REQUIEM

World War I killed nearly ten million people, ...the fall of Christian Russia to the mendacious Bolshevik strain of Communism, which led to Stalin’s slaughter of between ten and forty million of his own countrymen in the 1930s, and to the half-century enslavement of ten Christian countries in Eastern Europe to atheistic Communism; the millions of deaths that meant the loss forever of the flower of British and French manhood and the greatness of their nations
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"The blunt fact is that when [under Wilson] America was introduced to the War State in 1917, it was introduced also to what would later be known as the total, or totalitarian, state," wrote Robert Nisbet.

In the final accounting, the Great War was only the opening chapter of a new Thirty Years War. That war climaxed more than fifty million deaths later with the incineration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, and children. And it launched a bitter half-century Cold War involving triumphant Bolshevism.