It has become traditional here to blame Germany for the ills of the 20th Century.
I rather prefer to blame the liberal democracies, imperial and otherwise, which sat back, dazed, during WW I, and allowed not only this war to run a disastrous course in the West, but did little to dislodge the Soviets from their takeover, and then permanent retention, of the largest nation state empire on the planet.
Not only did the United States not act against the Bolsheviks, then or later, but actually considered their takeover of Russia a good thing, and the main reason for entering the war.
Hitler was only allowed to emerge, really, against the spectre of the USSR to the East. They both knew their pact was temporary.
WWII presented a similar sorry spectacle.
a little heritage from WW I today:
' The Syrian civil war is setting off a contagious sectarian conflict beyond the country’s borders, reigniting long-simmering tensions between Sunnis and Shiites, and, experts fear, shaking the foundations of countries cobbled together after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. '
I would put this slightly differently: Usually, these
' countries ' were created by the winning Western democracies out of a butchered Ottoman Empire, as punishment for being on the losing side.
The article makes it sound like we were doing them a favor in 1919, by cobbling something together. We were cobbling things apart.
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