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Showing posts with the label "first world war"

11 November 1918

The 'end' of a war that was supposed to end all wars laid the foundations of the biggest slaughter in human history, WWII, when it imposed a humiliating and crippling treaty on Germany, a humiliation that was coupled with the impacts of the Great Depression, spawning the Nazis, who wanted a place under the sun, and propelled the U.S. to occupy a hegemonic place and displace the old empires. "The structural reality is that the First World War took place over empires, for empires, and between empires. For a clear-eyed portrait of the world that it yielded, there is no better place to start than the opening chapter of Dominic Lieven’s study of Tsarist Russia’s road to war,  To the Flame , the latest major contribution to the scholarship of the conflict. In it, Lieven lays out the codes and aims of conduct shared by the ruling classes of Europe, saturated with considerations of honour, prestige and virility, for whom territorial aggrandizement was an automatic criterion of
On the 9th of March Noske ordered the Reichswehr to shoot on the spot anything that moved. Then the butchers set about their work. While the facades of houses collapsed under the fire of machine guns and mortars and whole families were buried under the rubble, the proletarians were herded with live fire and bayonets into the schoolyards and stables. Alone, by twos, by threes, in groups: against the wall and shot. At night on the river Spree, the revolvers touched workers’ temples and shot. For weeks the Spree washed up corpses onto the shore. Again and again: “A Spartacist nest has been dug up” and eight human beings shot, thirty shot, thirty four shot, and so it went hour by hour, day and night. The German revolution, 100 years ago
UK Those who now talk about the atrocities of the First World War and patriotism are the same people who would tell you "get over it" and "you have a chip on your shoulder" when you mention the British empire and neo-colonialism.