The Trivial Causes Of World War I ...And By Extension, World War II

More than a third of the soldiers killed in World War 1 were listed as missing in action. Their corpses rotted where they lay and "the earth swallowed them" - greatly assisted  by the constant upheaval of artillery barrage.

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Although I am not a keen student of World War I, I have examined it sufficiently to satisfy myself that its causes were primarily trivial, and secondarily exacerbated by diplomatic pose-striking.

It is also clear to me that World War II was a continuation of World War I whose concluding Treaty of Versailles was so inordinately punitive that one could argue Hitler's inevitable rise to power.

Read Wikipedia's entry, "Causes of World War I" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I  -- and when done, ask yourself: Do the purported causes of World War I make sense now?

I recently asked a retired general friend - a very smart fellow who has traveled in 200 countries and visited both poles twice - what caused World War I.

He answered that he didn't really know.

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"One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolf] Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. . .  The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake." 

"A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann" in Raids on the Unspeakable." Thomas Merton - New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1964 

http://alanarchibald.homestead.com/ThomasMerton.html

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"The history of the 20th century proves the view that as the vision of God fades, we first become clever monkeys; then we exterminate one another." 

Paul Johnson