Docta ignorantia

Learned ignorance. I have plenty.

World War I. Seems to me if you want to paint war as a pointless disaster or as a tool of the powerful only, you've got your prime example. Such carnage. And for what?

The ignorance part is "the Zimmerman telegram." If I ever knew what it was, I had completely forgotten. It is the reason why the US finally entered WWI, after three years of neutrality.

It was an intercepted coded message from Germany to the Mexican government, offering an alliance if the Mexicans would invade the US. They could take back Texas, New Mexico and Arizona! This is what shifted Professor Wilson from principled neutrality to principled engagement.

There was little chance Mexico would have agreed. They were in the midst of a revolution (how unusual) and..get this...the American military was already engaged in fighting Mexican bandits along the border! Plus ca change.

The documentary's POV on America is telling. Usually we hear that America goes to war to enrich the rich. This narrator tell us, with moral distaste in his voice, that it was profit and business which kept America out of the war.

I am sure historians have done this with far more knowledge than I have, but you could easily make a case that WWI was the determinative event of the 20th century: leading to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the rise of Hitler, to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the origins of the contemporary Middle East. Just to name a few of its many outstanding effects.