This month the world remembers the outbreak of the First World War (1914-1918). Among the books I explored in the bookcases at home when I was a small boy, a good number were written as contemporary interpretations of the First World War. My father was in high school when the war ended, and perhaps he had a special interest in the events reported in the news when he was a boy.
When my mother commented, rarely, on the First World War, she said with irony that it was supposed to be, according to President Wilson, “the war to end all wars.” In fact, as is widely recognized now, it was the war that dealt such a terrible blow to the European countries that the history of the 20th century can be read as a footnote to World War I, a series of attempts to come to terms with the damage inflicted on the then greatest nation states in the modern world. Beginning with the 15 million soldiers and civilians killed from 1914 to 1918, the 20th century was the bloodiest in the history of mankind. The engine of war was not religion but nationalism, which for many is their only religion.
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