By William S. Lind, The American Conservative

In the 1930s, a minor British novelist started writing a new book, which was not a novel. Instead, William Gerhardie proposed a theory of history he called “God’s Fifth Column,” which was also his book’s title. His theory was that, just at the point where everyone who was anyone agreed events would go in a certain direction, they instead headed off on a wild, wholly unpredicted tangent.

Gerhardie was inspired by the events of 1914 and their catastrophic consequences, in which we are still enmeshed. Prior to Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s ill-timed trip to Sarajevo—the head of Serbian military intelligence had multiple assassins positioned there—the elite consensus was that another great European war simply was not possible. All the powers’ economies were too intertwined. International trade was essential. Everyone’s stock market would collapse, banks would fail, there would be riots in the streets. Within Europe, the labor market was international; one German soldier taken early in the war said to his British captors, “I hope this is over soon so I can get back to my job driving a cab in Liverpool.” But war came anyway, though no one wanted it, or, afterward, could explain why it had been fought. And the Christian West died in the mud of Flanders and Galicia.

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