More On The Bitter Legacy Of The Great War

Much of private life was nationalized:

All this was in direct opposition to both the conservative and liberal values of the 19th century, but liberals in Europe and the United States underwent a transformation: starting as champions of individual autonomy, they became slaves to group security. In this scenario, the war became, as Murray Rothbard and others have pointed out, fulfillment.[8] The policies are too familiar to enumerate: economic intervention on all sides, heavy-handed cheerleading to join the war "system," continual denunciation of internal enemies, disregard of the rule of law, massive transfer of wealth from the hands of individuals, families, and other private sources to the state. Not least of these trends was the overpowering of private lives and even privacy. From the vacuous propaganda extolling groupthink in all the societies of the belligerents to the very real breakup of family units by the Bolsheviks, the war was the cover for multifarious inroads of the interference of the state in private life.