STEPHEN EDWARD SEADLER: Armistice Day 2005 (Profoundly Interesting Read)

By Stephen Edward Seadler -- World News Trust

During my childhood, November 11th was called Armistice Day -- to commemorate the day that the Armistice was signed that ended the World War, The Great War, The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, The War to End All Wars. Since then we have been through so many wars that the day’s name has been changed to Veterans Day.

Understandably, all the attention on this day has been on those who were killed, with no notice taken of the killers and why they started the War. Understandably -- because no one in public life or among the veterans knows, or has even thought about it. That sad ignorance and indifference will be compensated for here now, albeit all too briefly.

The minds that manned the guns of August that blew open the 1914 Epoch began arming during the century that followed The Congress of Vienna, 1814-15, which sought to restore Europe following the Napoleonic Wars. British Viscount Castlereagh and Austrian Prince Metternich are standardly credited with having engineered there a balance of power that ushered in and maintained the so-called Hundred Year Peace, which has served as a model for balance-of-power politics in the 20th Century. Rubbish. Monumental Muddleheadedness. In reality that period constituted the Hundred Year Cauldron of War. In that cauldron were forged the ideology of Communism, the scourge of the 20th Century, and Reichism II, the ideological foundation of the Second Reich and the fundamental engine of the First World War.

One may say that The 1914 Epoch began in 1862, when Bismarck became Prime Minister of Prussia. Building on the warlike spirit that had been indelibly impressed on the Prussian people and Army by the 18th Century Prussian King Frederick The Great -- a spirit we will call Reichism I, after Frederick’s First Reich -- Bismarck concocted a modern warlike spirit. From the philosophies of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, and a distorted sense of Christian mission, he and the Junkers forged the prototype of modern aggressive, religio-secular national ideologies. It legitimated Bismarck’s famous program of ‘Blood and Iron’ and diplomatic deceit, and unified and motivated Prussia and the Hohenzollern dynasty behind it. The growing momentum and intensity of those ideas permeated Wilhelmian Germany, especially the Court, the General Staff, and ultimately the Kaiser himself.

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