by Nomad
They often say history repeats itself but that's not actually true. Usually some elements of past history are re-formed to create something vaguely familiar.
The downing of Malaysian Flight MH 17 bears some strange and ominous similarities to the sinking of the RMS Lusitania nearly one hundred years earlier.
Last month marked the 100-year anniversary of the advent of World War I. On 28 June 1914, a seemingly regional event, the Sarajevo assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist, set off a chain of unexpected events that led to global war.
It seems, historians tell us, that no nation was prepared to back down. The inescapable gravity of war pulled nations into a conflict that would eventually lead to the deaths of millions of lives.
That conflict also marked the
first use of poison gas on the battlefield. In January 1915, the German military fired
shells of a lethal gas, xylyl bromide, at Russian troops near the Polish village
of Bolimów
on the eastern front. More than 1,000 were reportedly killed as a result of this
frightening new weapon. Had it not been for the cold weather, the number of fatalities could have been far higher.
Yet as dreadful as that was, it turned out to be just a preview of things
to come.
On April 22, 1915, German forces
shocked Allied soldiers along the western front by firing more than 150 tons of
lethal chlorine gas against two French colonial divisions at Ypres, Belgium. The release of the gas formed a gray-green cloud that drifted across positions held by French Colonial troops from Martinique. The soldiers were terrified and fled, abandoning their trenches and left the front line exposed. In spite of that "success", the German army was unable to seize the advantage. They too were terrified of the effects of the gas.
This was a red line that no other nation had yet dared to cross.
When Allied armies claimed the gas was a clear violation of international law, the Germans simply argued that technically it was not. That ban, they claimed, cover chemical shells. The lethal gas in this battle was released through gas projectors, (or spraying mist projectors similar to those used in neighbors mosquito eradication.)
The Dangerous Illusion of Security
As horrible as the escalation was, it too, only a month later, the world would be shocked speechless into abject revulsion.
On May 15, 1915, the British
ocean liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat while en route from New York to Liverpool, England. Warnings
from the German Embassy had been published in newspapers about the risks of
traveling into a war zone.
In February of that year, the German navy had adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and ,had decided to up the ante by blockade the British shipping lanes (Later investigations proved that the Germans were correct in their assumptions that munitions were being shipped via the passenger ship. That did not make the sinking of an unarmed passenger liner any less of an atrocity, of course.)
To the travelers, however, that risk was thought to be exaggerated. The
very idea of any civilized nation daring sink a huge commercial liner filled with
innocent victims.
It was unthinkable.
It was unthinkable.
And yet, tragically, the
unthinkable sometimes happens.
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