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David Hart on the (so-called) ‘Great War’

My original plan was to include this link in today’s Some Links.  I changed my mind.  This contribution by my talented friend David Hart, of Liberty Fund, is so important that it deserves its own separate post.  Exactly 100 years ago the governments of Europe were just days away from declaring what we now call ‘World War I.’

Slaughtering people, including the innocent: now that’s an activity that governments perform with astonishing efficiency, dispatch, creativity, and cold-bloodedness.  Governments are also pretty good at glorifying their murderous rampages.  They build monuments to the genocides they commit and ‘teach’ school children how glorious and honorable those blood-soaked events were.

And capitalism, all the while, is falsely accused – especially by those who are inspired by centralized state power – of coarsening human existence.  How bizarrely backwards.

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