World War I
From Infoshop OpenWiki
World War I was a war primarily limited to Europe and to some extent the Middle East. The main contenders of the war were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey against France, Great Britain, Russia (and to some extent Italy, the United States, and Japan). It ended with the defeat of the Central Powers.
This was the first war fought by capitalists, all wars thereto were fought by feudal empires, and with the great technological advances created by the new class of working people, this war would be the world's most deadly. Germany had established itself as the most powerful nation in Europe after the Franco-Prussian War, and was eager to flex its muscles once again and win more territory and thus economic power. An excuse for war was needed, and for this the old fashioned aristocracy retained some usefulness to the capitalists. When a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, this was reason enough.
Anarchists mostly opposed all sides in World War I, arguing that the people had no interest in taking either side in a war between capitalist states. The Industrial Workers of the World and Emma Goldman's and Alexander Berkman's Mother Earth were heavily persecuted in the United States for their stance against the war, and the State and pro-war vigilantes attacked the IWW during and immediately after the war in such things as the Palmer Raids and the Centralia Tragedy. Peter Kropotkin was an exception and welcomed an "allied" victory believing that German militarism was a greater evil, while simultaneously agitating for revolution in Russia. After the war many of the social democratic left who had supported the war while it was happening later retracted their support as a revisionism movement sought to uncover the real reasons for the war and expose how countries like the United States were tricked into it by big business interests. A great body of antiwar literature dates from the interwar period between the first and second world wars: Smedley Butler's War is a Racket, M.H. Cochran's Germany Not Guilty in 1914, etc.
Near the end of World War I a breakdown in the German military occurred similar to that later experienced by the United States during the Vietnam War, with GI resistance and spontaneous movements to democratize the military. Hitler later stirred up resentment in Mein Kampf against this having happened, and militarism and extreme military discipline became core parts of the Nazi program. Also near the end of World War I was the Russian Revolution in which the statist Bolsheviks were eventually dominant and set up a Leninist dictatorship, suppressing anarchist and democratic-liberal tendencies who had also supported the revolution alike.
