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We still live with Paris 1919

With Remembrance Day solemnly observed, commentary on where we stand a century after what Margaret Macmillan titled "Paris 1919" can commence.
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With Remembrance Day solemnly observed, commentary on where we stand a century after what Margaret Macmillan titled "Paris 1919" can commence. Nothing written here is meant to belie the ultimate sacrifices and immeasurable pains borne by soldiers of the Great War or its sequels. Yet we cannot ignore the fact that the methods employed to finish "the war to end all wars" and the treaties that framed the peace have essentially underwritten all the unrest since.

There is not much to add to the already well observed tragedy that is industrialized, total war. But it bears repeating that disembodying the violence haunting us since Cain and Abel did not make war any more humane. Indeed, from the sleet of flying metal just above the trenches produced by machine guns and artillery, to the use of mustard gas that suffocated those at the front indiscriminately, it is obvious why "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" rang quite hollow.

The Great War was prosecuted in such a way that eventually ensured the total collapse of its belligerents on the losing side. What most people do not realize about the last days before the guns fell silent on Nov. 11, 1918, is that Imperial Germany was on the verge of a revolution due to shortages caused by war and blockade, just as the Austrio-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires had already begun to fracture after four long years of destructive conflict.

This meant that the consensus developed after the defeat of Napoleon would not go on, with notions of international relations as yet untried girding the rhetoric echoing inside Versailles' glassy halls. As Aldous Huxley reminds us in Brave New World Revisited, a British aristocrat suggested a compromise ought to conclude the Great War, as was custom since the days of Agincourt. The opposition his offer met on all sides proved only radical ideas would be heard.

But the capstone ensuring future wars in Europe and around the globe was the influence of President Woodrow Wilson and his fundamental belief in progressive policy. The cerebral, former Princeton University president and professor had no patience for notions of tradition and monarchy, which he saw as the casus belli in the first place. Instead, the Old World would be brought into modernity willingly or not by redrawing the map and reconstituting governments.

This did not work for any state, with the exception of Poland, which had a defined sense of national culture, religion, and territory before the war began. The rest is history: Czechs and Slovaks managed an amicable divorce 70 years later, but every other redrawn nation fell into either totalitarianism or fratricidal strife unknown since the Wars of Religion. As the Supreme Allied Commander Marshal Foch foresaw, "this isn't a peace - it's an armistice for 20 years."

It is impossible to overstate the upheaval that accompanied the pronouncements from Paris: families woke up in new countries with new rulers who governed by alien means, all while noble lines dating back as far as Charlemagne had their titles and lands removed. Add to this the growing fear of communism fermenting in old Russia, and the disruption of that era looks eerily similar to much of the instability as well as tension experienced around the globe today.

Lastly, it must not be forgotten that before the Great War, urbanization and centralization of authority were a figment of the hyper-progressive imagination; after, it was the growing trend, as everything from income tax to mass production was deemed "necessary" to vanquish the enemy - yet when the war was over, it remained a permanent fixture. Again, the complaints of nationalists, localists, and populists of the present are reactions to the legacy of the First World War.

Every Nov. 11, we pray for peace. Perhaps we would do well to recall the legacy of the conflict that has put us on a permanent wartime footing, lest we forget our proper liberties.