Peggy Noonan on 1914

The World the Great War Swept Away

On the whole, a good piece.

But Spain was not part of the Great War - nor indeed of its continuation, World War Two

Oddly, though she laments with historian John Keegan that the war was started in 1914 by European politicians who could and should have avoided it, she does not lament that Woodrow Wilson in 1917, a Democrat and a progressive, dragged American well out of its way to get into it.

Find an American pundit anywhere near the conventional wisdom who deplores American participation in either or both of the World Wars, if you can.

And how is it this conservative writer draws no more immediate lesson from these, her own remarks on what led to the war in 1914, than a pompous affirmation of the Dogma of Original Sin?

Too scary?

Too very far from conservative in the light it throws on America, our leaders, and our wars?

[See Original Sin.

Every part of this article in the old Catholic Encyclopedia is very interesting and very revealing.

See especially the discussions of Aquinas and collective guilt, rejected by 19th Century liberalism but an essential part of the moral armory of the contemporary brand.]

Europe as a cultural entity was coherent and becoming more so. 

By the beginning of the 20th century tourism "had become a middle-class pleasure" because of railways and the hotel industry that followed.

But Europe was also heavily armed. 

All countries had armed forces, some large and costly ones led by influential, respected figures. 

What do armies in peacetime do? 

Make plans to kill each other just in case. 

Keegan: "[A] new era in military planning had begun; that of the making of war plans in the abstract, plans conceived at leisure . . . and pulled out when eventuality becomes actuality." 

What do soldiers who've made brilliant plans do? 

Itch to use them. 

Europe's armies came to see their jobs as "how to assure military advantage in an international crisis, not how to resolve it."

Soon enough they had their chance.