WORLD WAR ONE COMMEMORATION

I have been encountering sites lately that seem to be gearing up for the 100 year commemoration of WWI in 2014.  In light of my own interests in WWI history and the fact that my upcoming novel has a lot to do with it as well, maybe I should be gearing up to send out my own "barbaric yawp" against what promises to be a great deal of sentimental hogwash.  What needs to be said about WWI that has not already been worked and re-worked into the fine Flanders dust of cliché?  Well, for one thing, imperialism.

Saying that imperialism was the root cause of the war is nothing new.  But it is not one of the strains of WWI discussion that has really made it into the popular consciousness of that war.  Instead, we tend to get more shallow analyses about how this or that overly-ambitious or stupid leader zigged instead of zagged and so set the course for millions of dead.  What tends to get criticized in all this is not the system itself, only the players.  And the analysis of the players, apart from the system, is inevitably shallow.

But what was the context of all this?  How is it that the "powder keg" of Europe was even set up as a powder keg to begin with?  To answer this question we must look at the nature of capitalist imperialism.