The First World War saw the point at which capitalism became addicted to war and to a permanent arms economy. The war demonstrated the capacity of capitalism to create industrialised waste, carnage and destruction on a colossal scale. The remembrance of the war is appropriately a time for mourning the horror, the loss and the waste of it all, but it should also provoke a determination to resist our rulers’ insistence on promoting war to further their interests.Here in the US we see in our mainstream media the ritual-like statements made by our leaders on our Veterans Day (Remembrance Day in Great Britain and their former colonies) extolling veterans for their service and sacrifice for our country. It always seems so hollow to me. I wonder how many of my fellow Americans are taken in by these leaders and their statements. I have no doubts about the reactions of veterans with disabilities and other medical problems as they try to obtain medical services from the Veterans Administration.
When I spent a lot of time in Canada for several years in the middle 2000s, I noticed a much more serious regard for the deaths of their veterans. Every soldier who died in Iraq or Afghanistan was commemorated with an elaborate public event, whereas here in the US, the media were prohibited from showing any caskets of our soldiers and discouraged from any intimate reports of these lost veterans and the effects on the families they left behind. What the US media frequently showed on their TV channels were the happy scenes of soldiers arriving home to their spouses and sweethearts.
Anyway, this article paints a rather accurate picture of what WWI was all about: a contest between and among empires and their ruling classes for world dominance.