The Futility of War?

First of all in the forefront of the events due to come to Europe is the great war. That war of which the world is so frightened and which at the same time, it expects with such a morbid, painful curiosity. A war in the centre of Europe between two (or more) first rate civilized powers, armed to the teeth with all the grandiose madness of present day technical equipment – with the participation of ground, sea, undersea and air forces. [This will entail the loss] of an incredible number of casualties and such financial losses, direct, indirect and reflected – one gets the impression that there will not be enough figures in the mathematical lexicon to count [them] all.

So predicted Jabotinsky on 1 January 1912. And yet the outbreak of the Great War that changed the lives of untold millions in the twentieth century and the destiny of the Jewish people was more than two and a half years away. He believed that Britain would not accept any challenge to its naval supremacy. ‘Young Germany’, he wrote, ‘is stretching her muscles’ and the best solution would be ‘a change on the throne of the Hohenzollerns’. With a prescience of the events of 1917 and 1918, he commented that ‘what Germany is brewing is a revolution, a revolution on a global scale, designed to move the political axis of the world’.

Jabotinsky's views on the war four years later, in 1916, were ones of deep ambivalence and profound regret:

The war has suddenly poured into the world's cauldron a bucket of some terribly corrosive acid. Not for a long time has humanity been shown so clearly that ‘everything is possible’; that principles, agreements, promises, progress, traditions, liberty, humanity are all rot and rust and rubbish. Everything is permissible: you may drown women and children, burn people alive, smoke them out like vermin, turn out tens of thousands onto the high road and drive them the devil knows where, hang and beat and rape. All these are lessons, they ‘stick’, they sink into minds and hearts, changing the very tissues of human conscience.