The war to end war, still going on
Lest we forget
Anzac Day (the anniversary of the disastrous Gallipoli landings in 1915) is always a sad day, but even more so this year, with the horrors unfolding before us in Gaza.
The carve-up of the Ottoman Empire by the British and French, of which the Gallipoli campaign was part is the direct cause of the current catastrophe. As well as grabbing colonial possessions for themselves, the Allies made promises to Jews (seeking a homeland) and Arabs (seeking independence from Turkey) which could not both be kept. The resulting conflict has never ended.
The war in Ukraine is also a consequence of the disaster that was rightly called the Great War, and of which the 1939-45 War and the Cold War were continuations. But that’s enough sadness for one day.
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I was thinking about historical contingency the other day, actually. I mean everything is contingent from the Big Bang to this moment, but I think contingency is particularly salient when discussing WW1. I mean as things like the Palestinian Mandate and Balfour Declaration demonstrate, WW1 was really an inflection point, a rift in time to Thomas Mann, that shifted the world into another track of causality. I think the only other event in modern history that shifted human affairs onto another track was the French Revolution of 1789.