{"id":3677,"date":"2013-09-01T17:14:48","date_gmt":"2013-09-01T22:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3677"},"modified":"2013-09-02T17:52:16","modified_gmt":"2013-09-02T22:52:16","slug":"ww1-in-a-tweet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3677","title":{"rendered":"WW1 in a Tweet"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not very good with short twitter-like messages; just can’t seem to think of anything that would come across in 140 or even 200 characters. Especially not about stuff like World War 1 and its lessons for today’s Middle East.<\/p>\n

But here’s a good short thought<\/a> that I recently read about World War 1. I think it serves nicely to explain what that war was really all about.<\/p>\n

[Our belief that] when a government we find unsatisfactory is overthrown, we can expect a better government to follow, goes back at least as far as President Woodrow Wilson. His intervention in the First World War — a war “to make the world safe for democracy” — turned out to be a war whose actual end results replaced old monarchies with new, and far worse, totalitarian governments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, WW1, the war for democracy, was really the bridge between a world dominated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Tsarist Russia, Imperial Germany and the Ottoman Empire, and the reign of Stalin and Hitler (and throw in a few additional tinpot dictators like Franco and Mussolini). It took another big war and a long cold war thereafter to get to a better situation, where democracy could flourish — in Europe, anyway. The vacuum created in the Middle East by the fall of the Ottomans was finally filled after WW2 by nationalistic strongmen. Recently the last of them had their downfalls (or in Syria, are still having it); but how many future wars or bloody uprisings will it take until the Middle East finally becomes “safe for democracy”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not very good with short twitter-like messages; just can’t seem to think of anything that would come across in 140 or even 200 characters. Especially not about stuff like World War 1 and its lessons for today’s Middle East. But here’s a good short thought that I recently read about World War 1. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3677"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3677"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3679,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3677\/revisions\/3679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}