95 Years Ago

The guns fell silent on the Western Front.

The First World War was not the longest war in the 20th Century. It was not the deadliest. But when one combines the reasons for the conflict with the butcher's bill, it was arguably one of the most moronic wars in modern history.

A stupid beef in the Balkans (as foreseen by Otto von Bismarck decades previously) cost the lives of tens of millions of people and led to the collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires. And, as also foreseen by Bismarck, by the end of the war, the reasons for the start of the war were unrecognizable.

The guns were not silent for very long. Before the second chapter of the war, there were close to two dozen armed conflicts in Europe before the Germans rolled into Poland.

And the the Sykes-Picot Agreement set the stage for a mess in the Middle East that has been going on for nearly a century.