by Jacob Davies
The twentieth century kicks off with the wizard invention of the concentration camp by the British in South Africa, who are engaged in a battle over Lebensraum with a bunch of Dutch guys, neither side having the slightest interest in the brown people previously occupying the area except as a sort of irritating natural resource to be strip-mined where possible. Whatever the original intent of the British, the key features of the concentration camp rapidly assert themselves, which is to say once you have a whole lot of annoying people gathered in one place and prevented from wandering around by barbed wire and guns, you can make them significantly less annoying to you by sort of, well, accidentally forgetting to feed them.
That’s just a warm up though; we quickly go to the War to End All Wars That Doesn’t, in which approximately one kerbillion soldiers from every civilized nation on the planet are ordered into an unremarkable area of France about the size of Vermont to die by various exciting means including being crushed by tanks, shot, stabbed, starved, bludgeoned, blown up, diseased, machine-gunned, and having the occasional bomb dropped on their heads in an amateurish fashion (they get better at this later). This accomplishes absolutely nothing for anyone and ends only when the Americans get tired of Germans randomly blowing up their stuff.
Everybody learns a Valuable Lesson about the Importance of Peace, which they all put into action in the same way: a determined effort to ensure that this time they will be the ones with the biggest guns, goddammit. Russia has a proletariat revolution which scares the crap out of all the moneybags businessmen in the rest of the world, which just goes to show that their imaginations were a bit limited at the time, since they could have treated them like China today, i.e. a giant source of cheap labor for foreign corporations under a government that doesn’t tolerate any silly talk about worker’s rights because, hello, you live in a socialist paradise – haven’t you read the newspaper today?