Prelude to World War I  Email Print  This article is excerpted
from chapter 1 of Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian
Rebuttal (2010). This chapter is a much expanded version of an
essay that originally appeared in The Costs of War: America’s
Pyrrhic Victories (2001).  With the World War mankind got into a
crisis with which nothing that happened before in history can be
compared…. In the world crisis whose beginning we are
experiencing, all peoples of the world are involved…. War has
become more fearful because it is waged with all the means of
the highly developed technique that the free economy has
created…. Never was the individual more tyrannized than since
the outbreak of the World War and especially of the world
revolution. One cannot escape the police and administrative
technique of the present day.  Ludwig von Mises (1919)[1]  The
First World War is the turning point of the 20th century. Had
the war not occurred, the Prussian Hohenzollerns would most
probably have remained heads of Germany, wit