Sunday, July 27, 2014

Cautionary Tale: "The mighty combustion of small events."

Governor Malloy of Connecticut and Sen. Harry Reid ought to read both of these articles and contemplate what relevance they have for each of them today. The mighty combustion of small events, and other lessons from the First World War and How Nicky and Willy could have prevented World War I.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Both of them, like most of those belonging to what you call "the Mandarin Class", are too self- centered and conceded to get it..

Anonymous said...

You are making the assumption that they did not want WWI.

Anonymous said...

It looks to this observer that the problem lies not so much in the "leaders" but in the underlings. Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria unquestionably started the ball rolling, but I think the one truly responsible for the war getting started was the German Chancellor.

I found this paragraph in the "Nicky and Willy" story to be very enlightening:
[b][i]The kaiser told the German chancellor to communicate this proposal to Vienna. But the chancellor privately opposed the “halt in Belgrade” policy and did not deliver the message clearly. Instead, he instructed his ambassador in St. Petersburg to tell the Russian foreign minister that if Russia continued preparing troops for battle against Austria, Germany would also mobilize and “a European war could scarcely be prevented.”[/i][/b]

It would appear from Nicky's subsequent cables that, had Willy's chancellor relayed his Kaiser's wishes more faithfully, the 1st world war might have never occurred. Imagine a world where a certain failed painter was never in battle, never wounded (gassed) and never really developed the full virulence of his hatred for the Jews. A world where, absent the war, there was no "Treaty of Versailles". Might never have been a 2nd World War. Would the Japanese still have attacked Pearl Harbor absent the Berlin, Tokyo, Rome Axis? Alas, we shall never know. That pissant Chancellor ordered his Ambassador to say what he did and everything proceeded from there.

Sidenote: Both "Kaiser" and "Tsar" are derived from "Caesar". So the two loving cousins held the same title.