In the introduction to a recent survey of the origins of World War I, the author begins with a quote from British scholar C. V. Wedgwood: "The war solved no problems. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict."Although Wedgewood was not writing on the 1914-1918 War, but on the Thirty Years' War in the Seventeenth Century, the sentiment expressed is relevant. Europe was never to recover from The Great War. It destroyed a relatively peaceful century of progress, destroyed the very dynasties which it was initiated to save, and laid the foundations for Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler. In the ethnic hatred, racism, and nationalism of the post-war period lay the seeds of a second terrible conflict. The war solved nothing. The sacrifices were to produce no security; the decisions of the Peace Conference were to produce no peace. Perhaps the Germans could have accepted a straightforward "YOU LOST-YOU PAY" attitude. By placing the chief blame for the war on Germany in the famous "War Guilt Clause," the Allied Powers crippled the new democratic government of Germany and alienated every German patriot. While it is true that the Germans as a whole were and are unwilling to face the truth of their own guilt in bring on he war, the Allies - who had won the propaganda war against Germany from 1914-1919 - gave their victorious weapons to new enemies like Hitler. In the 1960s with the publication of new scholarly works by German historians, led by Fritz Fischer, the origins of the Great War became again a major topic of historical investigation. As one historian has written, the publication of Fischer's works "forced the West German establishment, both at academic and governmental levels, to reopen a question that...
