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The 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month


I'm rarely doctrinaire about anything. But I am about this: Every geopolitical calamity we face today can be traced to the wrapping up of the Great War on 11/11/1918.

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns on the Western Front fell silent.

But that wasn't the end of the war.

Serendipitously, I just started listening to an audiobook: The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End. (You can pick it up at your favorite library.)

In the West, we think that when the guns ceased firing across France, the war ended. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

From the Russian Civil War, to the Greco-Turkish War—which led to the largest population swaps between two states before those of the Subcontinent upon the British withdrawal from India—the years between 1918 and 1924 were years of war, massacre, rape, and famine.

There's a parallel between the world from 1871 to 1914, and our own post-World War II world.

In the time before the outbreak of the Great War, Europe enjoyed a time of peace it hadn't enjoyed in all the previous centuries of war and strife. The Continent—which encompassed most of the world's major powers, aside from the United States—was much like the European Union is today. It was at peace, commerce flourished, and open borders allowed a trade in goods and ideas.

For better and worse, the West held a monopoly on military violence. Aside from Meiji Japan, no non-white, non-Christian power could stand up to the West. And this accounted for the unprecedented peace among the major Western states.

But, and even I don't understand why, the seeds of the West's destruction were sown in that peace. France wanted revenge against Germany for the humiliation of 1871. Germany wanted its place in the sun and to supplant Britain. Britain was set on maintaining the balance of power across the Channel. And sclerotic Russia wanted to stave off revolution at home.

World War I was the suicide of the West. It set in motion not only the unresolved issues which led to the Second World War, but even those which persisted afterwards. Russia—the Soviet Union—established the buffer zone it felt it needed against a revivified Germany in the Cold War. The Middle East as we know it, with its wars and anarchy, was established in the interwar period. China reclaimed its place after the myriad humiliations inflicted upon it by the West.

The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month wasn't an ending of a war; it was the continuation point for the troubles which afflict us still. Islamic State wouldn't exist save for Sykes-Picot. Neither would Kurds be slaughtered in northern Syria by Turks right at this instant save for the lines drawn on a map by British and French civil servants. Brexit would have been made much simpler save for the issue that Britain held on to six northern counties on Eire.

The chaos we're facing now is redolent of as yet unresolved issues from that time a century ago. The ghosts of that time haunt us, and inform everything we do. As Americans, we like to think we're beyond history, that the past doesn't hold us captive. Nothing could be more wrong. The old hatreds are gaining purchase, as the order that we imposed collapses, and collapses more precipitously as the regime in power in Washington relinquishes its leading role, at the behest of one of the losing powers of the Great War.

As we commemorate an almost-forgotten war, remember this: it still informs our world. We're still living in its shadow. Its history still holds us in thrall. Ahistorical Americans need to realize that history is real, and people all around the world will seek to resolve their unresolved conflicts, one way or another. We don't create our own reality, but inhabit the reality created by countless billions of human beings. We ignore this to our own destruction.