[ad_1]
At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month ago, the guns fell silent throughout the world, marking the end of what was called "Great War".
This "auspicious" time, supposedly forever. This was the "war to end all wars", as the politicians of that time were fond of saying. Only that, of course, it was nothing of the kind. That war is well known as a world war I because it was followed by an even greater confrontation only two decades after the first one ended.
To our generation, World War I stands for just pointless carnage. This was not a clash of principles or ways of life, a confrontation between good and evil, as World War II certainly was.
And when the guns are going down, people are already struggling to understand what it was all about.
"The ending, in its ferocity, bloodiness, and uselessness, contained the entire war in microcosm." The fighting went on for the hollowest of reasons: no one knew how to stop it, "American historian Joseph Perso wrote Views shared by all the generations which followed after the winter of the year when the guns went silent.
Yet in many subtle ways, the scars of that are still with us, and everywhere.
The powers of the state, as we know them now, with governments' ability to control and deploy all national resources in emergencies, are largely World War I inventions. Before that war, there are few border checks between states, and almost no immigration control; all the paraphernalia of passports, visas and immigration checks we are so familiar with today dates back to that wartime.
Before World War I, the idea that a state should be unimaginable. Today, these are considered as the very basic duties of any government. On the eve of the World War I, Britain, which included the office caretaker. When the war is closed, tens of thousands of Britons were employed in intelligence collection and analysis, and the positions created largely remain to this day.
The Great War spurred on a race that continues to define our own leading races. Aerial photography, wireless communications, sophisticated encryption methods, and missile technology have all been developed a century ago, and have been successful in their fields.
No historical comparison is ever perfect, but nowadays Europe has a lot to do with the world, with some powers on their way down and others on their way up, with plenty of trade integration. That does not mean that another world is in the offing, but it does not mean that we would be advised to look at it.
And we look at the use of poison gas in the world of war in Syria or the use of nerve substances in the world of terrorism. of all subsequent generations.
This is mainly a European war, the conflict eventually embroiled all European colonies. African soldiers – and particularly the fearless Senegalese – were sent to defend territorial France. Britain enlisted up to one million Africans from its colonies, and over 100,000 of them died fighting for their colonial master, more than the World War I deaths of Australia, New Zealand and Canada combined.
More than 90,000 members of Britain's Chinese Labor Corps were in the battlefields of France, whose sacrifice for the British Empire was memorably summed up with one sentence engraved on the tombstone of every Chinese who fell in that war : "A good reputation endures forever."
And then, there was India, which supplied 1.4 million soldiers, the biggest contingent of any country in the British Empire. Some of India's men were deployed on the front line in Europe within a month after the beginning of the war in 1914, and by the end of the war, they even changed the English language. The word "chat" for a casual conversation is probably derived from the Hindi word "chatt", which means a louse; the practice of soldiers in a group, picking their clothing out of their clothing, getting to know "chatting".
But the European empires of Britain and France emerged from the conflict ostensibly strengthened, the seeds of their destruction were also sown in World War I. Mahatma Gandhi, the father of modern India, supported the enlistment of Indians in Britain's ranks with the argument that "if the empire wins with the help of our army, it is obvious that we would secure the rights we want". The fact that nothing of the kind has happened recently Gandhi's subsequent tactics.
The Australians and New Zealanders also acquire their own national identity as a result of their experience of the botched gallipoli campaign, in which 10,000 of their colonial troops perished, the most important annual national commemoration for both nations.
World War I was also the first time Japan emerged as a global player. Little did France or Britain suspect that, after two decades of World War I, the Japanese would look to their allies to end up seizing Europe's Asian empires.
The United States also emerged at the end of the World War I in Europe, which is the ultimate defender and the world's security arbiter. The British and French empires would be here on the 1960s, but their death knell was sounded a century ago today.
However, the biggest impact of that is a dark war. On the eve of World War I, Europe seems more integrated and peaceful than ever. In 1910, British journalist Norman Angell wrote a book arguing that the economic interests of European powers have been intertwined and their national education so advanced that they are both irrational and impossible. His book The Great Illusion sold over two million copies and won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Yet four years after Mr Angell made his prediction, the continent slid into a horrible war not because anyone wanted it, but because nobody knew how to prevent it.
The British were worried that they would be overtaken in industrial and military power by the Germans. The Germans, in turn, knew that they were on their way up, but wanted to accelerate their ascent.
The French were looking for any opportunity for revenge against the Germans, while the Austro-Hungarians were looking to avenge their honor with their smaller neighbors. And Russia wanted to strike because it had no alternative.
Everyone piled in oblivious of the consequences; the Europeans "sleepwalked" into the war, as the Australian historian Chris Clark aptly put it in his recently published history of the period.
No historical comparison is ever perfect, but Asia today is one of the world's leaders in Europe, with some powers on their way down and others on their way up, with plenty of trade integration, and arms races everywhere. That does not mean that another world is in the offing, but it does not mean that we would be advised to look at it.
By a quirk of fate, the grave of the first British soldier to be killed in the Great War and the last British soldier to fall in that war buried in a plot in France. And, by another bitter twist of history, the cemetery in which they stay to be a German one, built by the enemy they fought.
No other example is more poignant for Europe's modern history. And no better contribution to the memory of an estimated 40 million others who perished in World War I
If only in order to prevent similar events from
[ad_2]Source link
