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Im fascinated by the transition period around the turn century as it is simultaneously remote and foriegn and yet at the same time immediately accessible in the sense that primary sourses are widely available and the seeds of our modern world for all its good and ill are immediately visible.
Mine is hardly a unique take (better historians than I have already written whole books on the subject) but i think that WWI was an inflection point, and the seminal tragedy of the 20th century. I say tragedy specifically because it is so hard to pick out any one cause or villian. Sure some might point to Gavrillo Princep, but he was less the cause and more the careless spark that finally lit the pile of oily rags. That the situation was allowed to progress to the point where a single idiot could plunge all of Europe into war for want of a sandwich was the real problem. It almost feels fated in a way. Everyone involved seems to have been making reasonable decisions and assumptions for the information they had available the problem (if one can call it that) was that the world is messy and complex and a lot of their information wad either incomplete or just plane wrong.
In contrast the opening of WWII might as well be a Saturday morning cartoon in its simplicity.
Sure there is the argument to be made that Britain could have avoided both wars simply by reneging on previous agreements with Belgium and Poland and renouncing the RN's role as guaranteurs of maritime trade/safety but I don't see how anyone remotely familiar with early 20th century British politics and culture would see that as a realistic option. In alternate history terms that is pretty close to an "alien space bats" type scenario.
Regarding Cooper in particular i find it interesting that his complaints about Churchill seem to mirror a lot of the longstanding complaints about him from the far left. IE that his stubbornness and devotion to outmoded/obsolete ways of thinking prevented him from meeting the socialists and anti-colonialists half-way and subsequently brought ruin to the nation. Of course the classical rejoinder from the trad-right is that it is precisely this stubbornness and devotion to "outmoded ways of thinking" that made him the man for the job.
A "reasonable man" would not have been able to credibly deliver a line like "we shall fight on the landing grounds".
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