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Great War incubated Russian Revolution, Mideast conflict

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  • Great War incubated Russian Revolution, Mideast conflict

    The Asian Age, India
    Aug 4 2014

    Great War incubated Russian Revolution, Mideast conflict


    "It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood."The line from
    Shakespeare's Macbeth might easily have been written about the legacy
    of World War I. As the guns fell silent in 1918, the victors all
    agreed on one thing: Germany must pay.

    How much was a matter of debate but there was never any doubt that the
    post-war settlement enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles was going to
    be punitive.Germany did pay, but it was not alone. A century on, the
    world lives with the consequences of a peace accord that, even at the
    time, was criticised as making another war in Europe inevitable.

    The economist J.M. Keynes, then a British treasury official, resigned
    rather than be associated with a Treaty he denounced as "Carthaginian"
    in its harshness. France's Marshal Ferdinand Foch judged it "not so
    much a peace as a 20-year armistice."

    The "war to end all wars" turned out to be the exact opposite. By
    ensuring Germany's economic ruin and political humiliation, the
    post-war settlement laid the foundations -- or at least provided
    fertile ground -- for the rise of Nazism and the horrors that
    ensued.Just as important, the war served as the incubator for the 1917
    Russian Revolution.

    Against a backdrop of desperate food shortages, military failure left
    the Tsarist state crippled and vulnerable to an assault by Lenin's
    Bolsheviks.A civil war ensued in which the Western powers offered
    backing for counter-revolutionary forces. But war-fatigue restricted
    the scale of intervention and ultimately Lenin and co. won and
    established the Soviet Union as an authoritarian Communist state.

    Disastrous agricultural policies resulted in more than three million
    people dying in the famine of the early 1930s, millions more under the
    Great Terror unleashed by Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin.
    By the mid-1930s, all the conditions were in place for the post-World
    War II division of Europe.
    That in turn produced the Cold War and its associated carve-up of the
    rest of the planet into Western or Soviet spheres of influence and an
    unstable global equilibrium that helped to fuel countless conflicts
    across the developing world.
    The first World War also left a lasting mark on the Middle East. By
    encouraging an Arab revolt, Britain helped precipitate the collapse of
    the Germany-allied Ottoman Empire.A secular Turkey emerged and Britain
    and France assumed post-war control of much of the Arab world.

    By then, Britain had also declared, through the 1917 Balfour
    declaration, its support for the principle of a Jewish state on land
    it had pledged to the Arabs.The creation of Israel might still have
    never happened but, by the end of WWI, it was a much more realistic
    prospect than it had been at the start.

    The collapse of the Ottoman Empire also resulted in the killing of up
    to 1.5 million Armenians in what they see as a genocide. The world's
    muted response to the massacres is credited by some historians with
    inspiring Hitler to think he could get away with annihilating the
    Jews.

    Events in Russia cast a long shadow over the rest of Europe,
    generating a fear of upheaval that helped accelerate reforms while
    also inspiring other revolutionaries, including the nascent fascist
    movement that was soon to seize power in Italy.

    Worker uprisings in Germany and Hungary in the immediate aftermath of
    WWI were crushed or collapsed internally. But waves of militancy in
    other countries -- in the Fiat factories of Turin, Italy or the
    shipyards of Scotland's Red Clydeside -- delivered major advances in
    terms of working conditions and the rights of trade unions to
    represent their members.

    More broadly, the aftermath of World War I was a period of rapid
    social progress in much of the industrialised world. This was most
    notable in terms of women's right to vote, which, in the popular
    memory, is often seen as having been "earned" through female
    participation in war-related activities.

    http://www.asianage.com/year-will-change-india/great-war-incubated-russian-revolution-mideast-conflict-422

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