One hundred years ago, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the armistice to end The Great War went into effect. The leaders of the "great powers" finally decided the time had come to stop sending their subjects into the meat grinder of attrition warfare in the trenches. The real peace that had been possible at the informal Christmas Truce where the men on the front lines chose to briefly recognize their shared humanity was replaced at long last with a government-brokered deal that set up the subsequent conflicts of the next 100 years.
The colonialism that had been the status quo was shattered, and while that is no bad thing, the power vacuum established warlords across Africa as petty tyrants. The middle east was subdivided into new territories resulting in new tribal conflicts for political power. Russia collapsed into a revolution that would eventually replace a corrupt aristocracy and monarchy with a new corrupt oligarchy under its own brand of Marxism. The terms imposed upon Germany created resentment that would simmer until someone with a silver tongue would rise up and promise peace and prosperity through a tyrannical central government and military expansionism. The central banking systems that had pumped inflationary money into the world economy would continue to distort the market for the next decade until the inevitable correction could no longer be forestalled, resulting in a massive global financial collapse and lingering depression.
The end of war should always be celebrated, but the causes and results are never what the belligerents intended as they recklessly went to war in the first place. The chaotic conflict of World War One was the result of a nationalist assassin attacking a monarch, but the entangling alliances and familial ties across Europe dragged the whole populace into a fight that was never their own. Nationalism was the cancer that allowed this bloody mess to fester into a bloodbath.
The lesson of World War One should be to reject the toxic nationalism that turns strangers into enemies just because their self-professed rulers squabble. We are not chess pieces to be sacrificed for their ambitions. Never trust a government that says war is necessary. Ask instead, "necessary for whom, and at what cost?"
