A few days ago I watched a documentary from Timeline that claims it is time for a different approach to WWI: > [00:48:51] We have remembered the soldiers and t

A few days ago I watched a documentary from Timeline that claims it is time for a different approach to WWI: > [00:48:51] We have remembered the soldiers and tried to imagine the warfare they endured, but that's got in the way of understanding the great war's full character and impact. > Of course we can't ignore the mud and the suffering, but I believe that a hundred years on from 1914 it's time to let go of the dead. > We can't just feel the great war as a piece of poetry, or a stark morality play. We need to understand it as history. History that cast long shadows over the years that followed. > A hundred years on, the great war still has enduring resonance, but our understanding of it is often a caricatured mixture of mud and death, poets and poppies. > In this series I want to clamber out of the trenches to explore the deeper meaning of the great war and its momentous legacies. > One paradox of the war is that it wasn't caused by profound political or ideological divisions but it did create them in its wake. > The war made politics red-hot. It gave birth to an age of mass democracy with the vote extended to ordinary men and women. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eanOqoHS-ZQ&t=33s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eanOqoHS-ZQ&t=33s