This is KZSU,

Welcome to Entitled Opinions.

My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus. I don't want to sing an ode to dejection today, yet like many of my fellow Americans, I look on in disbelief as our new administration in Washington fiercely and single-mindedly attacks the foundations of a system of government,

that all things considered has served us remarkably well for 250 years.

I tell myself that the vested interests of the capitalists and corporations, of the elites and political classes,

and of we the people, will never stand by and allow the Republic to unravel.

Nations are not meant to self-implode for no good reason.

And yet, and yet.

When I look back on history for reassurance that entire societies do not allow paroxysms

of irrationality to destroy them from within, I find instead the Medusa leering at me.

In 1914, Europe went to war against itself for no good reason,

unless you consider hysteria a reason.

Four years later, after 17 million dead and 25 million wounded,

the Great War officially ended, yet it didn't end at all.

The worst was yet to come.

The Russian Civil War that ushered in Lenin and murderous Stalin, the Spanish flu which claimed

anywhere from 17 million to 100 million lives, depending on which sources you believe, the Second

World War, the Holocaust, the Chinese Communist Revolution.

All of these catastrophes, each with its mountains of cadavers, were the direct consequences

of an unnecessary and insane war.

Search history books for why the Great War broke out, and you won't find any answers.

Not really, unless you think the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Serbia

...