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It wasn’t called WWI until there was a second one.
This is a common myth, while it wasn’t primarily called WW1, the name had been used before it even finished.
Source for that?
Wikipedia says Time Magazine coined the term World War 1 in 1939. Relatives of mine, now long dead, who participated in it told me personally that it was called The Great War or the War to End All Wars.
Ernst Haeckel called it First World War in September 1914.
It was called that by other authors in the interwar period, for example Charles à Court Repington published The First World War in 1920.
Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erster_Weltkrieg#Aufarbeitung_und_RezeptionYeah, but that’s just like ‘this is the first time we’ve had a war that pretty much encompasses the whole world’. Not that it really even did, but that’s beside the point.
Reread the headline - Naming it World War 1 was a bad omen. The first of anything is very normally called “the first” because it’s just that. Headline is about actually numbering it with a One.
It makes more sense if you hit ‘world’. It was the first war involving the whole world. A sea change in the nature of warfare at the time. Very few places were untouched by it.
Before, wars were regional affairs at worst. This was the first WORLD war.
This is how I’ve heard it described.
Someone else already provided a source. I didn’t say it didn’t have other names, just that WW1 had been used too even if it wasn’t as popular initially.
The great war!
second world war happens
The first world war!
Of course he’s right to be mad, but also it was very naive to belief wars would be ended
We kinda fucked up, again and again and again and again…
Kids be like that.
World War 2, 2 world 2 war
But how get America into the war when her people were expressly against it? Didn’t they elect Wilson as President on the clear promise to keep the country out of war?
In former days, under absolute monarchs, the subjects were simply compelled to obey the king’s command. But that often involved resistance and the danger of rebellion. In modern times there are surer and safer means of making the people serve the interests of their rulers. All that is necessary is to talk them into believing that they themselves want what their masters want them to do; that it is to their own interests, good for their country, good for humanity. In this manner the noble and fine instincts of man are harnessed to do the dirty work of the capitalistic master class, to the shame and injury of mankind.
Modern inventions help in this game and make it comparatively easy. The printed word, the telegraph, the telephone, and radio are all sure aids in this matter. The genius of man, having produced those wonderful things, is exploited and degraded in the interests of Mammon and Mars.
President Wilson invented a new device to snare the American people into the war for the benefit of Big Business. Woodrow Wilson, the former college president, discovered a ‘war for democracy’, a ‘war to end war’. With that hypocritical motto a country-wide campaign was started, rousing the worst tendencies of intolerance, persecution, and murder in American hearts; filling them with venom and hatred against every one who had the courage to voice an honest and independent opinion; beating up, imprisoning, and deporting those who dared to say that it was a capitalistic war for profits. Conscientious objectors to the taking of human life were brutally maltreated as ‘slackers’ and condemned to long penitentiary terms; men and women who reminded their Christian countrymen of the Nazarene’s command, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, were branded cowards and shut up in prison; radicals who declared that the war was only in the interests of capitalism were treated as ‘vicious foreigners, and ‘enemy spies’. Special laws were rushed through to stifle every free expression of opinion. Dire punishment was meted out to every objector. From the Atlantic to the Pacific hundred-percenters, drunk with murderous patriotism, spread terror. The whole country went mad with the frenzy of jingoism. The nation-wide militarist propaganda at last swept the American people into the field of carnage.
Wilson was ‘too proud to fight’, but not too proud to send others to do the fighting for his financial backers. He was ‘too proud to fight’, but not too proud to help the American plutocracy coin gold out of the lives of seventy thousand Americans left dead on European battlefields.
The ‘war for democracy’, the ‘war to end war’ proved the greatest sham in history. As a matter of fact, it started a chain of new wars not yet ended. It has since been admitted, even by Wilson himself, that the war served no purpose except to reap vast profits for Big Business. It created more complications in European affairs than had ever existed before. It pauperized Germany and France, and brought them to the brink of national bankruptcy. It loaded the peoples of Europe with stupendous debts, and put unbearable burdens upon their working classes. The resources of every country were strained. The progress of science was registered by new facilities of destruction. Christian precept was proven by the multiplication of murder, and the treaties were signed with human blood.
The World War built huge fortunes for the lords of finance — and tombs for the workers.
And to-day? To-day we stand again on the brink of a new war, far greater and more terrible than the last holocaust. Every government is preparing for it and appropriating millions of dollars of the workers’ sweat and blood for the coming carnage.
from Now and After by Alexander Berkman, Chapter 6: War? Available to read for free here.
Written between WW1 and 2.
