Europe Then, America Now: A Centenary of Senseless Slaughter for Profit
You wouldn’t think someone who dislikes guns as much as I do would be such a fan of war documentaries, but I absolutely eat them up. World War I, in particular, fascinates me, partially because my grandfather was a French soldier at the front, but also because no one on either side could really say what they were fighting for. Even now, after a century of study, the best historians can’t adequately explain why Europe — more peaceful, prosperous and advanced during the Gilded Age than at any time in history, basically chose to implode.
The only explanation that makes sense to me involves the momentum of inevitability. By the turn of the century, arms manufacturing had turned into a huge business, with far more complex and advanced weaponry brought about by recent technological advances. The arms race was making a lot of money for a powerful group of industrialists, but without a war to justify the need for all that spending, eventually they would have been left with warehouses of unused inventory and no need to replace it. Pretty bad for the bottom line.
To justify a war, each nation had to convince its own population that those funny-talking types over the mountains were a threat to the homeland itself. In reality, you’d be hard put to have found much of anything to substantially differentiate a…
