by John Zmirak
8/19/08
Students of history will always find the month of August a little ominous. In August 1920, the Red Army invading Poland (led by neoconservative hero Leon Trotsky) nearly captured Warsaw and spilled into central Europe, whence it might well have conquered a prostrate Germany, Austria, and Hungary -- just for starters. The heroic Polish defeat of the Soviet forces will always be known in that land as the "Miracle of the Vistula," since the battle raged in the octave of the Feast of the Assumption, and many Polish soldiers claimed that they saw Our Lady appear over the battlefield, which spurred them on to fight.
It was on August 25, 1939, that Adolph Hitler sealed an alliance with Joseph Stalin to jointly invade the very same Poland -- a country that had relied on empty promises of protection from faraway England and France, and defied his demands for territory.
It's easy to forget that all these appalling Augusts have their origin in August 1914, when a series of diplomatic blunders, crossed signals, and bureaucratic mechanisms (such as interlocking alliances and automatic mobilizations) set loose the monsters that would rage for the rest of our history's bloodiest century -- when more civilians were murdered by governments, the numbers suggest, than in every other century of recorded history combined....
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