Tag Archives: World War I

The World Is Looking At You, by Batiushka

Posted on June 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

Is Russia the last great hope for civilization? From Batiushka at thesaker.is:

A huge and historic injustice took place in Europe in 1914, which over the next four years left many, many millions dead. Who was responsible? The power-lusting Prussians of Germany, using Austro-Hungarian imperialism as their pawn, or the power-lusting Establishment of Great Britain, using French revanchism as their pawn? Some would say that all were to some extent responsible, though the spontaneous 1914 Christmas Armistice on the Western Front suggests that this was not a War of the peoples, but of the elites. But we shall leave the debate about responsibilities to the academics. We are not concerned by apportioning blame or conspiracies, here we are concerned only by the tragic consequences.

That War, become to some extent worldwide, left millions of dead, the flower of European Youth massacred by sadistic politicians, by greedy arms merchants who also largely controlled the Press, and by heartless generals. Apart from the dead, the forces of evil left behind them a Continent traumatised, tens of millions of shell-shocked, maimed, widows, orphaned and also spinsters, who sixty years after were still dying in lonely and childless old age, as there had been no man to marry. How many hundreds of millions of human tragedies had been caused by human evil, the lust for power and riches. But it was all much worse even than this.

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Posted in Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, Religion, War

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The Terrifying Lessons of COVID-19, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on January 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

The most terrifying lesson is that most Americans are sheep. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

During the past 18 months, the relationship of the American people to the government has changed radically, as the Constitution’s failure to restrain the federal and state governments and to protect personal liberty has become manifest.

We know that for the past 100 years the growth of the federal government has been exponential. And we know that while formally the Constitution still exists, functionally it has failed miserably, as the deterioration of personal liberty since the spring of 2020 has been as grave as the losses of freedom in the past 100 years.

I am using 100 years as a benchmark because it marks the completion of the takeover of the federal government by the Theodore Roosevelt Republicans and the Woodrow Wilson Democrats who collectively comprised the Progressive movement. This movement brought us in a short 15 years the useless World War I, the destructive popular election of senators, the corrupt Federal Reserve, the theft of property called the income tax and the unconstitutional administrative state.

The war killed millions for naught. The popular election of senators undermined state sovereignty. The Federal Reserve destroyed economic freedom. The federal income tax legalized theft. And the administrative state created an unconstitutional fourth branch of government “experts” answerable to no one.

Yet the iron fist of totalitarian government visited upon the American people in the name of COVID-19 has struck at the heart of the Constitution and landed heavy blows on average Americans in far more acute and direct ways.

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Posted in Banking, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Geopolitics, Government, History, Law, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Science, Taxes, War

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The Christmas Truce of 1914 – Why There Is Still No Peace On Earth, by David Stockman

Posted on December 28, 2020 | Leave a comment

When the Soviet Union collapsed the world had its best opportunity since World War I for peace. That chance was not seized by the US government. From David Stockman at antiwar.com:

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later when Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the Red Army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an end.

The world had descended into a 77-Year War, incepting with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations that germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history into World War II and the Cold War that followed inexorably thereupon.

Upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and Vietnam.

At the end of the Cold War, therefore, the last embers of the fiery madness that had incepted with the guns of August 1914 had finally burned out. Peace was at hand. Yet 29 years later there is still no peace because Imperial Washington confounds it.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, Politics, War

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Doug Casey on the End of Western Civilization

Posted on November 4, 2020 | Leave a comment

Western Civilization is faltering because its intellectual foundations—reason and the primacy of the individual—are being ceaseless undermined. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

End of Western Civilization

International Man: The decline of Western Civilization is on a lot of people’s minds.

Let’s talk about this trend.

Doug Casey: Western Civilization has its origins in ancient Greece. It’s unique among the world’s civilizations in putting the individual—as opposed to the collective—in a central position. It enshrined logic and rational thought—as opposed to mysticism and superstition—as the way to deal with the world. It’s because of this that we have science, technology, great literature and art, capitalism, personal freedom, the concept of progress, and much, much more. In fact, almost everything worth having in the material world is due to Western Civilization.

Ayn Rand once said “East minus West equals zero.” I think she went a bit too far, as a rhetorical device, but she was essentially right. When you look at what the world’s other civilizations have brought to the party, at least over the last 2,500 years, it’s trivial.

I lived in the Orient for years. There are many things I love about it—martial arts, yoga, and the cuisine among them. But all the progress they’ve made is due to adopting the fruits of the West.

International Man: There are so many things degrading Western Civilization. Where do we begin?

Doug Casey: It’s been said, correctly, that a civilization always collapses from within. World War 1, in 1914, signaled the start of the long collapse of Western Civilization. Of course, termites were already eating away at the foundations, with the writings of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. It’s been on an accelerating downward path ever since, even though technology and science have been improving at a quantum pace. They are, however, like delayed action flywheels, operating on stored energy and accumulated capital. Without capital, intellectual freedom, and entrepreneurialism, science and technology will slow down. I’m optimistic we’ll make it to Kurzweil’s Singularity, but there are no guarantees.

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The Long Shadow of World War I and America’s War on Dissent, Parts 1 and 2, Danny Sjursen

Posted on February 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

World War I was not just an unnecessary war for the US, it also sparked a dramatic diminution of Americans’ civil liberties, setting some of the precedents used to justify later abominations, including the Patriot Act. From Danny Sjursen at antiwar.com:

Part 1

“War is the health of the state.” So said the eerily prescient and uncompromising antiwar radical Randolph Bourne in the very midst of what Europeans called the Great War, a nihilistic conflict that eventually consumed the lives of at least 9 million soldiers, including some 50,000 Americans. He meant, ultimately, that wars – especially foreign wars – inevitably increase the punitive and regulatory power of government. He opposed what Americans commonly term the First World War on those principled grounds. Though he’d soon die a premature death, Bourne had correctly predicted the violations of civil liberties, deceptive propaganda, suppression of immigrants, vigilantism, and press restriction that would result on the home front, even as tens of thousands of American boys were slaughtered in the trenches of France.

This, the war on the free press, free speech, and dissent more generally, is the true legacy of the American war in Europe (1917–18). More disturbing, in the wake of 9/11 and Washington’s two-decade-old wars for the Greater Middle East, the dark, twisted, underbelly of World War I’s legacy has again reared its ugly head. Bipartisan, interventionist presidential administrations – unilaterally tyrannical in foreign affairs – from George W. Bush to Barrack Obama to Donald Trump have sought mammoth expansions of executive power, suppressed civil liberties, trampled on the Constitution, and waged outright war on the press.

All this was done – in 1917 and today – in the name of “patriotism,” what Oscar Wilde (perhaps apocryphally) labeled the “virtue of the vicious.” World War I produced the repressive and now-infamous Espionage and Sedition Acts, along with brutal vigilante attacks on Germans and other immigrants. The 21st century’s endless wars have engendered the equally autocratic USA PATRIOT Act, and their own reinvigorated brand of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim abuses. It is for this reason that a brief reflection on America’s troubled – and oft-forgotten – experience on the home front during the First World War is more relevant than ever.

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The Christmas Truce of 1914: Proof that Peace Is Possible, by Thomas Knapp

Posted on December 25, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Christmas truce of 1914 was the best thing that came out of WW I. From Thomas Knapp at antiwar.com:

As 1914 drew to a close, Europe had been at war for months. On the Western Front, opposing armies faced each other across a stalemated front line running from the North Sea to the Swiss border. On December 24, 100,000 soldiers from both sides of that line decided to create some peace on Earth.

They decorated their trenches with holiday spirit. They sang carols to each other across “No Man’s Land,” then walked into the space between their trenches, met, smoked and drank together, and exchanged what gifts they could round up. Chaplains conducted Christmas services for all comers. Impromptu football matches were played between shell craters (Germany’s Battalion 371 beat the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, 2 to 1).

A similar truce occurred on the Eastern Front between Austro-Hungarian and Russian troops.

The “Christmas truce” didn’t end “the war to end all wars.” It dragged on for nearly four more years, at a cost of more than 20 million lives.

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Silent Night, by David R. Henderson

Posted on December 25, 2019 | Leave a comment

If soldiers refused to right each other, who would fight? The living carcasses who are always promoting wars fought by other people’s kids? Not likely. War could be stopped by a mass refusal of the soldiers to shoot at one another. From David R. Henderson at antiwar.com:

Originally published December 24, 2008

In my Veterans Day column last month (November 2008), I quoted free-market economist and World War II veteran Richard Timberlake, who wrote:

“Yet, any U.S. soldier or airman who thought even briefly about his job of trying to kill and destroy ‘the enemy,’ knew that he was not within range of damaging Hitler and other Nazi leaders. We could not reach their personal environments or influence their decisions; our activities were many magnitudes removed from hurting them. We could only chip away at the peripheries of their domain and hope that they would realize the futility and fallacy of their ways. To do so, we had to try and kill our enemy counterparts with whom we had no personal quarrel at all.”

I thought of that these last few days as I reread Stanley Weintraub’s Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce. While Timberlake, a pilot of a B-17 bomber, realized that he had no quarrel with his German counterparts, it was difficult for him to act on that. He was dropping his bombs on unknown victims. But during World War I, troops on both sides of the front slicing through France and Belgium not only understood that they had no personal quarrel with the “enemy,” but also acted on this understanding during the Christmas season of 1914. Silent Night is the detailed story of that amazing aspect of World War I. (An excellent movie, Joyeux Noël, was based on this event.)

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The Christmas Truce of 1914 – Why There Is Still No Peace On Earth, by David Stockman

Posted on December 25, 2019 | Leave a comment

The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 presented the US with a golden opportunity to dramatically reduce military spending and to promote peace. George H.W. Bush blew that opportunity. From David Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner.com via lewrockwell.com:

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later when Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the Red Army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an end.

The world had descended into a 77-Year War, incepting with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations that germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history into World War II and the Cold War that followed inexorably thereupon.

Upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and Vietnam.

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Tragically Unlearned Lessons from World War I: the Christmas Truce of 1914, by Gary G. Kohls

Posted on December 24, 2019 | Leave a comment

If you’ve never seen the movie, “Joyeux Noel,” mentioned towards the end of this article, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s one of the best Christmas movies ever made. From Gary Gary G. Kohls at lewrockwell.com:

(When Christian frontline soldiers on both sides of No Man’s Land saw the obvious futility of war and just stopped the killing, thus disobeying orders from the out-of-touch Christian Generals and Christian Bishops to whom they had pledged obedience.)

“Good morning; Good morning,” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff – (those) incompetent swine.”
– An excerpt from Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “The General”, commenting on the standard use of World War I frontline soldiers as “cannon fodder”

“…the ones who call the shots (in war) won’t be among the dead and lame,
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same” — John McCutcheon, from his powerful antiwar (and therefore censored-out) song “Christmas in the Trenches”

“The first casualty, when war comes, is truth”. — Hiram Johnson (1866-1945) – a Progressive Republican US Senator from California, who died on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

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November 11: Remembering the Tragedy and Legacy of World War I, by H. Patricia Hynes

Posted on November 11, 2019 | 1 comment

World War I is probably America’s least remembered and least understood wars. From H. Patricia Hynes at antiwar.com:

Watching Londoners reveling in the streets on Armistice Day*, November 11, 1918, the war critic and pacifist Bertrand Russell commented that people had cheered for war, then cheered for peace – ” the crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror.”
~ Adam Hochschild. 2011. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion

World War I was the first industrial war: poison gases, flamethrowers, aerial bombing, submarines, and machine guns intensified the scale of war wreckage and war dead, setting the norm for 20th and 21st century wars. By government policy, British war dead were not sent home lest the public turn against the war. Instead they were buried in vast graveyards near battle sites in France and Belgium. Even today Belgian and French farmers plowing fields in places of intense, interminable fighting and mass death on the Western Front unearth an estimated ½ million pounds of war debris and soldiers’ bones each year. (During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Pentagon policy prohibited media coverage of US war dead arriving at Dover Air Base in Delaware until the ban was lifted, with conditions, in 2015. Many regarded the ban, like the Word War 1 British policy, as hiding the human cost of war that could turn the public against the war.)

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