![]() ![]() ![]() But this is not a story in which the rebels carry the day, and so To End All Wars does not have the Whiggish uplift that buoyed Hochschild's earlier studies-whatever the obvious brutality associated with their subjects. The periods political struggles forced participants to declare which side they were on, and for Hochschild the inner dynamic of the Great War pivots on the question of loyalty and rebellion. ![]() ![]() Hochschild effectively sums up the dilemma in the subtitle to his new To End All Wars-A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918. The Great War also proved a major setback to the European left, which was helpless as the international socialist movement's working-class constituencies fanned out in support of their home countries' nationalist causes.įor Adam Hochschild, author of two well-regarded accounts of Europe overcoming some of the ugliest parts of its past- King Leopold's Ghost, a 1998 account of the legacies of colonialism in the Belgian Congo, and Bury the Chains, a 2005 chronicle of the nineteenth-century crusade to abolish slavery in the possessions of the British Empire-the Great War still resonates with cautionary lessons for champions of social improvement. If the American Civil War was the first modern "total war," World War I greatly accelerated the West's passage into such conflict, involving fully mobilized home fronts and new modes of technological combat that produced unprecedented casualties. There's not much good that reform-minded liberals can take away from the First World War. ![]()
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