Follow up, as I forgot to address this point before: "battle against tyranny" - nearly half of the British soldiers didn't even have the frigging vote.

(As an aside, we didn't "earn" the vote either: it was given out of fear that returning soldiers who had seen action would do what the Bolsheviks did, and murder all the rich people.)

He chose to because of his belief that the war poets were more accurately reporting the horrors of the front than the journalists of the day.

The peace movement in the UK was spawned from people returning from war who said "never again". In the UK we've had a century of people acknowledging how many people died and for how little, done through song and music and culture more generally.

We don't acknowledge the fact that the war achieved little (except for creating the conditions for the Nazis to thrive in Germany) and was generally opposed by lots of forces around Europe who felt it was not in the interests of workers. By way of example, there was a conference of socialists held in Basel in 1912 which saw the war coming, and which apportioned work to the different social democratic and Labour parties around Europe which was mostly concerned with making sure war didn't break out.

Large numbers of people oppose the war long before it even broke out, and even now, it is hard to say what purpose it served ("plucky little belgium" actually being a substantial force for evil in the world at that point..).

> The peace movement in the UK was spawned from people returning from war who said "never again".

And yet just a couple of decades later, the country went to war again. I don't believe everyone had already forgotten the horrors of 1914-18; but we realised that sometimes it was necessary, despite the cost.

The point is that the alternatives to war are hard but they are always there. The people returning from the first world war wanted them pursued more readily, and had they been pursued more readily in 1914, there would perhaps not have been a war on the same scale or even at all. WW2 was the consequence of the failure to find a rational settlement after WW2.

To say the first world war - or any other - was senseless, is to recognise that there was no existential threat, and there was little real attempt at diplomacy. There were alternatives that didn't involve millions of people being marched to their deaths. At the point at which we acknowledge that, we have to ask why so many died and what for.

Diplomacy is the natural response of normal working people, because historically we're the ones who get mown down by machine guns at the behest of our betters - people who start wars but don't fight in them.

If you feel WW1 was necessary and proportionate in the face of Europe's challenges at the time, I'd be intrigued to hear why. Can you outline the case for war?

> Power, like fire, can warm or burn. Thousands of years before we vowed "Never again," God commanded us: "Never, ever."

-- Arik Ascherman

I would rather say, a couple of decades later, the Nazis went to war. It's not like not "taking them up on it" would been peaceful. The Nazis would have murdered and razed to the ground either way. The defense against their war was necessary...

> "An end with terror is always better than terror without end."

-- Leaflet #2 of the White Rose

...but I would say their war was not necessary. So bottom line still is that war is good for nothing, if you know what I mean.

And don't forget that there were also fascists in the UK. Those were the people who learned the exact wrong things from WW1, and if only they had existed, the UK would have simply joined the Nazis.