You can find it over at Inside Catholic.
Students of history will always find the month of August a little ominous. In August 1920, the Red Army invading Poland (led by neoconservative hero Leon Trotsky) nearly captured Warsaw and spilled into central Europe, whence it might well have conquered a prostrate Germany, Austria, and Hungary — just for starters. The heroic Polish defeat of the Soviet forces will always be known in that land as the “Miracle of the Vistula,” since the battle raged in the octave of the Feast of the Assumption, and many Polish soldiers claimed that they saw Our Lady appear over the battlefield, which spurred them on to fight.
It was on August 25, 1939, that Adolph Hitler sealed an alliance with Joseph Stalin to jointly invade the very same Poland — a country that had relied on empty promises of protection from faraway England and France, and defied his demands for territory.
On August 6 and August 9, 1945, our country became the only nation in history to use atomic weapons — on cities, not on armies — to end the war begun six Augusts before.
It’s easy to forget that all these appalling Augusts have their origin in August 1914, when a series of diplomatic blunders, crossed signals, and bureaucratic mechanisms (such as interlocking alliances and automatic mobilizations) set loose the monsters that would rage for the rest of our history’s bloodiest century — when more civilians were murdered by governments, the numbers suggest, than in every other century of recorded history combined. Unlike the Second World War, whose brutality can be blamed on the sociopathic hatreds of a single man, the First began in a welter of confusing claims and counterclaims over disputed territory, demands by ethnic minorities for autonomy, and crackdowns by central governments. Then followed appeals by those minorities to neighboring Great Powers, which set off a chain reaction as other Great Powers stepped in to “safeguard their interests” and “contain aggression” on the part of rival nations.
In other words, the First World War started in the same way that the Russian-American War of 2008 might well begin. It ended with the destruction of three of the regimes that had entered it, 40 million casualties, a bankrupt continent, and the replacement of fairly benevolent monarchies with ideological dictatorships.
The comments on this one should be lively.
If this causes collapse of the regimes in power, perhaps the anti-Christian republics will be replaces with benevolent Catholic monarchs.
I can dream, can’t I?
Sorry, but I didn’t read past the second sentence. Any article that blithely IDs Leon Trotsky as “neoconservative hero” is an exercise in blind score-settling, not political or historical analysis.
The tragedy of 1914 was not so much the outbreak of war itself, but rather its outcome four years later. If Germany had beaten France by Christmas of 1914, say, then Europe would still be Christian - and still pre-eminent in the world.
Zmirak is dead-on as always.
” Apart from the enormous Iraq-shaped hole in our country’s budget, most of us have paid rather lightly for our callous willingness to “trust the president — he’s pro-life!” ”
zing!