WW1 (5) - os desastres dos estatistas e as suas "alianças"

"British casualties in the war numbered 723,000 – more than twice the number suffered in World War II."The Pity of War_ Niall FergusonBasic Books • 1999 • 563 pages

Niall Ferguson is a history professor who taught at Cambridge and is now a tenured Oxford don.Ferguson asks and answers ten specific questions about the First World War, one of the most important being whether the war, with its total of more than nine million casualties, was worth it. Not only does he answer in the negative, but concludes that the world war was not necessary or inevitable, but was instead the result of grossly erroneous decisions of British political leaders based on an improper perception of the "threat" to the British Empire posed by Germany. Ferguson regards it as "nothing less than the greatest error in modern history." He argues that the British had no legal obligation to protect Belgium or France and that the German naval build-up did not really menace the British.(...)He argues further that the Kaiser would have honored his pledge to London, offered on the eve of the war, to guarantee French and Belgian territorial integrity in exchange for Britain’s neutrality. Ferguson contends that in the absence of British intervention, the most likely result would have been a quick German victory with some territorial concessions in the east, but no Bolshevik Revolution. There would have been no Lenin – and no Hitler either. "It was ultimately because of the war that both men were able to rise to establish barbaric despotisms which perpetrated still more mass murder.