The Guns of August fell silent on this day in 1918.
The 20th Century is said by some to have begun with World War I.
It cannot be denied that there was a paradigm shift with the war, one that solidified with the end of the second war in 1945, and only now is finally breathing its last.
I would not call this a change for the better. I call this the Doloros Stroke of the West, inflicing a mortal--but not immediately fatal--blow. Much like those men that survived the war, it would be a wound that forever changed the West and would inevitably get worse over time, leading to eventually creating the conditions that killed those that bore it.
In short, if you want to know why Boomers (and all the damage they've done) are a thing, consider their grandparents. The 1920s weren't "Roaring" in the United States and similiar chaotic elsewhere for no reason, and that reason roots itself in this war and its consequences. Dissidents today throw around the following meme, but many don't see how far back its rot set it.
That world wasn't destroyed in 2001. It wasn't destroyed in 1965. It died in Sarajevo, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the immediate plunge via a network of binding treaties of an entire continent--many of which were global imperial powers--into total industrialized warfare on home soil.
We are subjected, especially in the West, to endless World War II narratives. World War I--by far the more important of the two, considering the consequences--is all but forgotten for many in the Americas and overshadowed in Europe outside of occassions like today. If there is a clear demarcation line to make in Western Civilization, it is at this point; for all the technological advances out of the West since this war, Western Civilization has been on a downward slide from this point and like all declines it's a trickle until a critical mass point hits and then a sudden collapse strikes.
And "sudden" doesn't necessarily look sudden to ignorant Normies. It does to the historically literate, and I see it- and I also see that this is not an accident, not a tragic mistake, but a deliberate murder by enemies within our gates.
We may survive. We may not. What is already certain, however, is there is no going back. The West may yet regain its greatness, but it will never again be what is was in the 20th Century, and by this time next century our descendents will be glad of that fact.
And World War I was also the conclusion to the 19th century, with all of its Progressive changes so thoroughly defended by Conservatives then and now. That demarcation line was less "the end of what was good" and more "the acceleration of specific, ongoing evil".
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