Genocide haunts the 20th century. The Holocaust, the German attempt to exterminate the Jews, comes immediately to mind -- though similar policies against the Roma, gays, and others are less well known. The genocide in Rwanda, where the world watched the massacre of the Tutsi by the Hutu and did nothing, and the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs are fresh in our memory.

In 1948 the United Nations defined genocide as a crime against humanity subject to prosecution. The word "genocide" itself, is of recent vintage as history goes. It was coined by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1943/4.  He had the Armenian massacre, the intentional killing of up to 1.5 Armenians by the Turkish government during the First World War, very much in mind.

Strip away all the talk of glory and heroism and making the world safe for democracy and what remains is how each side in a war is murdering the other while itself committing suicide. Except that every so often, in small ways, ordinary human decency breaks through, and lingers on in the collective memory.

The French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, had this to say in a recent interview: "A lot of people argue that the First World War in particular was a sort of nationalist response to the very high social tensions and inequalities that characterized pre-World War I European countries and I think that there is a lot of truth in that." 

The scholar Karl Polanyi is arguably the most distinguished of such people. Among the enormous tensions and trauma generated by the transition from pre-industrial to industrial societies, Polanyi, paradoxically, saw the widely worshiped international gold standard that sprung up to underlie the great wave of globalization as itself a key part of the problem.

When I began delving into the voluminous literature on the First World War, including the most recent, I repeatedly encountered an unfamiliar name: Stefan Zweig.  I went to the movies last year to see the just released The Grand Budapest Hotel, a marvelous and magical film about lost times and, lo and behold, the first of the credits was to Stefan Zweig for inspiring it.

What caused the First World War?  A long list can be assembled from the history books: capitalism, nationalism, imperialism, militarism, sleepwalking by the decision makers, screaming for blood by the press, just plain stupidity widely spread amongst men, all of the above.

Maybe the list is still too short. How about bad luck, even extremely bad luck?

Since the publication of his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the runaway bestseller that documents the Marx-like tendency for inequality of wealth to increase as capitalism marches onward, Thomas Piketty has become that rarest of things: a celebrity economist. You may be thinking, "OK, but what does that have to do with the First World War?"

In India in the eighteenth century, British soldiers with the skill to shoot an elusive bird, the snipe, were called "snipers." The word morphed to describe those able to kill each other, notably the enemy in war, one at a time.

The sniper - or marksman, or sharpshooter, as he was also called  --  fought on both sides of the American Revolutionary War and remains a military mainstay today. The First World War was the war between the trenches, a gunshot apart. The addition of optical sights to the guns in the early twentieth century gave the sniper a new relevance, such that in due course each side used snipers to kill the other side's snipers.

The great Canadian scholar Harold Innis fought and was wounded in the trenches in the First World War. The experience changed his life forever. So argues A. John Watson in his brilliant biography, Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis, on which this blog draws.

The initial anniversaries of the First World War are upon us. And it will surprise few Canadians that, at the centenary war's beginning, Prime Minister Stephen Harper weighed in with blood-and-iron sentiments. These echoed the patriotic themes of the aristocrats and jingoistic politicians who started the war.

For Canada's Prime Minister, it is all about heroes and honours. A veritable war of independence fought "to preserve the universal values of freedom, peace and democracy that we hold most dear."

Marx and Engels famously wrote: "Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains." They should have added: "And if you don't pull together, a lot of you will die in bloody wars." For if the workers of Britain and Germany and of all the other countries had heeded Marx and Engel's call and refused to fight each other, then there could have been no war in 1914. But there was such a war because Marx and Engels failed to see, in the Great Powers game that was building up, that lethal popular nationalisms would erupt, that workers in each country would rally round their own flags, that nations would trump class, and that war would trump peace.