It began inauspiciously enough: On New Year’s Day, 1914, The New York Times carried a story about the merger of two
British colonies, one Muslim, one Christian, to create
Nigeria. There was a piece on
Mexico’s
revolution, another on a march by suffragists from Manhattan to Albany
demanding the vote for women, and a notice that the North German Lloyd
shipping line cut its rates to encourage trans-Atlantic passenger
traffic.
Such was the prosaic start to the year that would launch
the bloodiest war the world had ever known — one which, in one form or
another, has raged on in different, ever more insidious forms for a
century now. The idea that World War I can be viewed merely between 1914
and 1918 is absurd. It is the war that has never ended.
The year
2014 will bring remembrances of the Great War that began after the June
28, 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian
throne, by a nationalist Serbian zealot. That set off a series of
overlapping treaties, diplomatic miscalculations, military outrages and
misplaced loyalties that plunged the entire world into war, with
Germany and its imperial allies on one side and the British and French empires — joined late in the game by the
United States — on the other.
If
you don’t know the grim statistics, this anniversary year undoubtedly
will remind you. Historians believe that 37 million people perished,
many of them soldiers, but, for the first time ever, a majority of them
civilian non-combatants.
World War I marked the true beginning of
modern, mechanized warfare. The submarine, the tank, chemical weapons
and armed aircraft, among many other innovations, first made their
terrible mark in this war.
The results shocked the world and shook the faith of average citizens and elites.
Some
60,000 British soldiers died in a single day, on July 1, 1916, in the
Battle of the Somme. The British constituted the third largest army at
Somme, after the French and Germans, all of whom suffered comparably.
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For
a sense of the scale, consider the worst day of casualties recorded on
US soil: the 1862 Civil War Battle of Antietam that claimed more than
28,000 from both the Union and Confederacy.
In geopolitical terms, World War I set in motion changes that continue to remake our planet.
Entire
empires crumbled: Austria-Hungary splintered into the Central and
Eastern states that endured Nazi occupation and then Soviet communism
for much of the 20th century.
The Ottoman Empire shattered into the half-formed nation states of the
Middle East,
few of which to this day have a singular national identity. It also
divorced Islam and its sects, the Sunni and Shia, from the Ottoman
Caliphate, leaving doctrine open to reinterpretation. Even today,
restoring the caliphate — albeit a far less tolerant one than the
Ottomans — is a staple of Al Qaeda propaganda.
Amid the snow- and
blood-choked battles on the Eastern Front in 1917, the Romanov dynasty
that had ruled Russia for four centuries fell, ultimately to be replaced
by the Bolsheviks. They laid the groundwork for a communist system that
held sway throughout the Cold War. In its first decades, the resulting
civil war and Stalinist purges eliminated another 40 million people.
Stalin then signed a cynical deal with Adolf Hitler to divide
Poland in
1939, setting up a betrayal that would cost another 20 million Soviet
lives as the two tyrannies turned on each other during World War II.
While
historians endlessly debate the causes of World War I, they have left
little question about the war that followed. While marking Germany and
its fascist allies (
Italy,
Japan)
as the clear aggressors, the seeds of the 20th century’s second, even
greater global bloodletting sprouted from the punitive, ultimately
self-defeating demands imposed on Germany by Britain and
France in the peace at Versailles.
Stripped
of territories in the east and west that left millions of German
speakers under new management, saddled with war reparations that ensured
its economy could not recover, stripped of its international rights,
monarchy, colonies, flag, military power and dignity, Germany was a
cauldron of resentment. In that cauldron, the Austrian-born World War I
veteran Adolf Hitler concocted his hateful ideology of Aryan supremacy,
retribution and racial hatred. Before the war he launched ended in 1945,
another 60 million people would perish.
As these geopolitical
torrents swept Europe, the multitudes ruled in the name of
“civilization” saw ever more clearly the hypocrisy of imperialism. World
War I’s collapsed empires freed millions in new states like
Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria — and accelerated demands for
self-rule in far-flung colonies like
India,
Vietnam,
Indonesia, Iraq and the Philippines.
So
it is that in today’s headlines we see the echoes of 1914: Sunnis and
Shia fighting over Iraq — or what the Ottomans called the Vilayet of
Basra. The unfinished business of Palestine, of India-
Pakistan, of
China’s claims on areas of the seas around it, all derive from what was set in motion by that assassination in 1914.
And
the clumsily drawn post-colonial borders that afflict Africa make our
headlines on a regular basis. Just last month, a Nigerian court gave a
life sentence to a member of Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamic militant
group, for the bombing of a Christian church on Christmas 2011 that
killed 37 people.
And the casualty count continues into a second century …
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