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One hundred years after World War I, are we heading back to the abyss?

July 7, 2019

One hundred years after World War I, are we heading back to the abyss?

On the anniversary of the Great War’s end, we should reflect on its causes, consequences and lessons for the future.

Cloth Hall, Ypres, Belgium, during World War I. | Flickr/National Library of Scotland. No copyright restrictions.

Today we live in a world that is not dissimilar to the pre-WWI world, when a few emperors and their families controlled the fate of the vast majority of the world’s population. In 1914, all it took to trigger the Great War was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a nationalist Serb. The assassination took place on June 28. Five years later to the day, on June 28, 1919 – almost exactly 100 years ago – the Great War formally came to an end, but at the cost of approximately 40 million lives.

There are no empires in the old sense now, but there are self-centered leaders who are just as powerful as any emperor in history. Some of these leaders are the kind of bullies who would not think twice before making potentially catastrophic decisions, merely to keep up the appearance of ‘strong men.’ Consider this list: Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro. What do they all have in common? They have too much power and display autocratic tendencies when exercising it.

Whether you are a genius scientist in the United States, a peace-loving poet in Brazil, or a great philosopher in Iran, the truth is that your fate is, to some degree, in the hands of a man who, in a more rational world, would not even be allowed to care for a pet. Whatever we tell ourselves about the elite who control politics nationally, regionally, and globally, there is one embarrassing fact we need to face: we have surrendered our destiny, and the well-being of the planet, to a bunch of bullies. This should be disturbing for everyone.

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Three Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’ Today

November 12, 2018

Three Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’ Today

Still think globalization will bring peace? They thought that in 1914, too. 

Things exploded quickly.     Photographer: J. J. Marshall/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Last month, I traveled to Vienna, the former seat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a fitting place to contemplate the approaching 100th anniversary of the conclusion of World War I.

That conflict began with Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia in July 1914, following the assassination of Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand. It ultimately led to more than 15 million deaths, the collapse of four empires, the rise of communism and fascism in some of Europe’s leading states, the emergence and subsequent retreat of America as a global power, and other developments that profoundly altered the course of the 20th century.

World War I was “the deluge … a convulsion of nature,” remarked Britain’s Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George, “an earthquake which is upheaving the very rocks of European life.” Although that conflict ended a century ago, it still offers three crucial lessons that are relevant to our increasingly disordered world today.

First, peace is always more fragile than it seems. In 1914, Europe had not experienced an all-out, continental conflict since the end of the Napoleonic wars a century earlier. Some observers believed that a return to such catastrophic bloodletting had become almost impossible. The British author Norman Angell would immortalize himself by suggesting, just a few years before World War I, that what we would now call globalization had rendered great-power conflict obsolete. War, he argued, had become futile because peace and the growing economic and financial linkages between the major European states were producing so much prosperity.

Angell had good company in the multitude of thinkers who believed that improved communications were knitting humanity ever more tightly together, that international arbitration was making war unnecessary, and that nationalism was being suppressed by newer, more enlightened ideologies and improved forms of international cooperation.

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Should we Prepare for a New World War? Answers from the Patterns of Past

November 11, 2018

Should we Prepare for a New World War? Answers from the Patterns of Past

 I know that I have crammed together too many ideas here: Tolstoy, St. Francis, critical phenomena, thermodynamics, and more,  – it is contrary to the rules of blog posts. But the centennial of the end of the Great War gave me the occasion to write about the nature of war. in 1914, the European states sleepwalked into the Great War just like we may be doing nowadays, blundering toward a new gigantic conflagration — a true “big one,” in terms of wars. If the Great War couldn’t end all wars as it was said to be able to do, the greater one that may be coming could actually do that, but in a very different way. The new war could lead to the extinction of humankind. So, what hope do we have? I don’t know, but the first step to solve a problem is to understand it. So far, humans so far haven”t learned anything much from the mistakes of the past but, who knows? Maybe one day they will.

The centennial of the end of the Great War is a good occasion to rethink a little about wars: why, how, and when wars occur and if there is any hope to stop blindly walking along a path taking us to the possibility of the complete annihilation of humankind.

It is a question that has been posed many times and never satisfactorily answered. Perhaps the first to try to answer it was Leon Tolstoy in his “War and Peace” novel, (1867), where he wondered how it could be possible that a single man named Napoleon could cause millions of men to move all together eastward with the purpose of killing other men whom they had never met and they had no reason to hate.
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Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, The Great War in the Middle East

October 23, 2015

Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, The Great War in the Middle East

Sometimes I imagine the last 14 years of American war policy in the Greater Middle East as a set of dismal Mad Libs.  An example might be: The United States has spent [your choice of multiple billions of dollars] building up [fill in name of Greater Middle Eastern country]’s army and equipping it with [range of weaponry of your choosing].  That army was recently routed by the [rebel or terrorist group of your choice] and fled, abandoning [list U.S. weaponry and equipment].  Washington has just sent in more [choose from: trainers/weaponry/equipment/all of the above] and [continue the sentence ad infinitum].  Or here’s another: After [number, and make it large] years and a [choose one or more: war, air war, drone assassination campaign, intervention, counterinsurgency program, counterterror effort, occupation] in [Greater Middle Eastern country of your choice] that seems to be [choose from: failing, unraveling, going nowhere, achieving nothing], the [fill in office of top U.S. official of your choice] has just stated that a U.S. withdrawal would be [choose from: counterproductive, self-defeating, inconceivable, politically unpalatable, dangerous to the homeland, mad] because [leave this blank, since no one knows].

The president recently made just such an announcement about Afghanistan 14 years after the U.S. first invaded.  Undoubtedly, his “legacy” would have been at stake if he had withdrawn U.S. forces from that country (as he promised to do in 2013) and the Afghan army and police into which the U.S. has sunk an estimated $65 billion had unraveled, as American officials clearly now fear might happen. This means that a baby born somewhere in the United States on September 12, 2001, who is already 14 years old, will turn 16 with America’s second Afghan War still ongoing and, given the trend in American wars in the Greater Middle East (always in, never out), might at 18 be able to join the U.S. military and continue the fight either there, in Iraq, or perhaps in Syria or elsewhere.

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Great War of the American Empire or Great War II

February 16, 2015

Great War of the American Empire or Great War II

Looking at a map of current American military engagements overseas, one cannot help but notice their wide geographical spread and their seemingly interminable nature. Battles have raged in Europe (Yugoslavia and Ukraine), in Africa, in the Middle East, and in central Asia. The American Empire has launched this country into a series of battles that have no end in sight and no location that may not become a focal point of military force. These battles, each a war in its own right, have drawn in forces and resources from U.S. allies in Europe through NATO and even drawn in Japan. The scope of this war is global. In fact, one part of this war has been called the Global War on Terror. To understand this war and grasp its meaning, in the hope of bringing it to an end, a descriptive name is needed that tells us what this war is about. The name suggested here is the “Great War of the American Empire”. Since World War I, another disastrous war that American joined, is called the Great War, we can refer to the Great War of the American Empire also as Great War II.

Great War II comprises a number of sub-wars. The American Empire is the common element and the most important driver in all the sub-wars mentioned below. American involvement has never been necessary in these sub-wars, but the decisions to make them America’s business have come from the Empire’s leaders. The name “Great War of the American Empire” emphasizes the continuity of all the sub-wars to produce one Great War, and the responsibility of the American Empire in choosing to participate in and create this Great War. Had America’s leaders chosen the radically different path of non-intervention and true defense of this continent, rather than overseas interventions, Great War II would not have occurred and not still be occurring.

 

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The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow Wilson’s War

January 21, 2015

The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow Wilson’s War

Remarks by David Stockman To the

Committee for the Republic, Washington DC

January 21, 2015

 

My humble thesis tonight is that the entire 20th Century was a giant mistake.

And that you can put the blame for this monumental error squarely on Thomas Woodrow Wilson——-a megalomaniacal madman who was the very worst President in American history……..well, except for the last two.

His unforgiveable error was to put the United States into the Great War for utterly no good reason of national interest. The European war posed not an iota of threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, or Worcester MA or Sacramento CA. In that respect, Wilson’s putative defense of “freedom of the seas” and the rights of neutrals was an empty shibboleth; his call to make the world safe for democracy, a preposterous pipe dream.

Actually, his thinly veiled reason for plunging the US into the cauldron of the Great War was to obtain a seat at the peace conference table——so that he could remake the world in response to god’s calling.

But this was a world about which he was blatantly ignorant; a task for which he was temperamentally unsuited; and an utter chimera based on 14 points that were so abstractly devoid of substance as to constitute mental play dough.

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