Just in passing; as a Netizen I would request that posters use Usenet
protocols in identifying their own posts [not Google] - or at least not
complain about innocent mistakes - this would avoid missatribution of their
own remarks, but as a European there are a few things to say on what follows
about 'the other war'.

Thinking up horrors, and actually creating them, has
long been one of man's great skills. I think a more
plausible guess is that had Germany won WW I in some
alternate universe's 1917, there would still have been
an ample supply of "central horrors" not significantly
different from those our history records.

[[[[[LARRY PARR: Kingston's point is puerile. With
the exception of the relatively brief period of the
Napoleonic wars and the French Revolution, Europe had
been largely at political and social peace since 1648,
when the Treaty of Westphalia ended the 30 Years' War.
There had been no people's wars, only limited wars
with aims that did not deny the right of sister
European nations to exist. In the famous "century of
peace" from 1815-1914, human progress was phenomenal.
Both Russia and Germany were modernizing and
democratizing under royal houses, the Romanoffs and
the Hohenzollerns, that were understood by most men of
thought to be declining forces. NOTHING LIKE
totalitarianism existed in mainstream political
thought until after the Great War dissolved the moral
glue holding together Western Civilization.

Okay, and 'in the smoke' mischievous men roamed the landscape.

I would have preferred that, having won on the Western
Front in 1918, the Allies had marched into Germany
itself. By clearly demonstrating to the German people,
on their own soil, that they had in fact been
militarily defeated, there would have been no myth
that "the army had been betrayed" for agitators like
Hitler to use later.

Mr. Kingston should understand 2 factors - vast economic hardship was the
'clear demonstration', but the fear in Europe was that there would be
revolutions in England and in Germany. Certainly any continuance of the war
was likely to bring it about. Even those people who agitated for a Socialist
revolution were afraid of a communist one - and after all, Marx was a
Londoner and had had his influnce there before moving to Germany.

From Buchan to Lawrence there was dismay at the destabilization in the
mid-east, largely a British betrayal of ratifying and consolidating the
newly emerged Arabic sense of themselves as nations - but the real fear was
of a British revolution, since no one in Britain can have felt 'victorious'
any more than people in Germany. Economies and polities in both countries
were undermined, indeed, practically exhausted.

To a starving man, bread is reality. And Marxism was about bread, and little
else.

Phil Innes