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To an extent you are right. ww1 made much more sense at the time then it does today. And it wasn't as clear during ww2 that it was in fact the greatest conflict of good vs evil ever.

The extent of the German and Japanese atrocities only became clear after the war and they were so great that even the Soviet Union were on the side of the angels.

I wouldn't say they were perfectly content. It was more that they were cowardly and apathetic.



WWI makes no sense (or perhaps, we understand it better) because over a hundred years have passed, and the highly emotive propaganda of the time no longer persuades us. If you were listening to your pastor thundering in the village church about (say) nurses in Belgium in 1914 you might not have had the emotional distance, or education in cold politics, to recognise that what was really going on was the death throes of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the fight for hegemony in the empires that remained. (Not to diminish the crimes in Belgium, btw, but they were part of a bigger picture that would have been hard to read in 1914.)




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