Friday, August 1, 2014

World War I and Its Century

As the centenary of World War I begins...

[The following is a slightly revised version, with photos added, of a piece that I wrote for Against the Current (#171, July/August 2014)]

In his Age of Extremes, the great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm marked the start of World War I in August, 1914 as the beginning of the “short twentieth century.” In his account, that short century ended with the reunification of Germany and the breakup of the Soviet “East Bloc” in 1989-90. The “Great War” of 1914-1918, he argued, was the defining event of the century.