On 25 Dec 2010, at 19:04, Geoffrey Heard wrote:
It was the last Feudal family dispute -- the sovereigns of all the principal nations when the war started were cousins. Of course, underlying that was the treasure generated by power over less developed lands that could be sucked dry.
This should clinch you the Us and Them Chair of modern history at Mel Gibson University.
You are overlooking the role of jingoism among the masses. Italy went to war in 1915 largely as the result of popular demand, not least from (the until then socialist) Benito Mussolini.
T
seen in the Economist:
In the spring of 1854, as the Crimean fighting began in earnest, an Anglican cleric declared that Russian Orthodoxy was as “impure, demoralising, and intolerant as popery itself”. What could be more natural, then, than to team up with Islam and popery to cleanse that terrible impurity? A French newspaper, meanwhile, gave warning that the Russians represented a special menace to all Catholics because “they hope to convert us to their heresy”.