Monday 10 November 2008

Ninety Years On

I am wearing my poppy with pride, and will of course be observing tomorrow's two-minute silence, to remember the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, namely the American breaking of the stalemate between the Allies and the Central Powers, resulting, not in the return to the pre-1914 position that would otherwise have been inescapable (though with bellicosity exorcised from all the cultures in question), but instead in the disastrously cack-handed carve-up of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires, in the emergence of the Soviet Union, and in the spitefully triumphalistic, manifestly unjust war guilt clause, which made the rise of Nazism inevitable.

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