On 11/11/11 this is the 97th anniversary of the start of World War I, or the Great War. We are almost at the one hundredth anniversary of the Hundred Year’s War that most people don’t realize has never ended. It is the event that ended the nineteenth century and brought us into the modern age — the reason no one writes Victorian novels anymore and no one believes in progress or the perfectibility of mankind. My husband’s great aunt is quoted as saying that it is the reason that “Nothing has been the same since. The world is much nastier.”

Prefigured in the eighteenth century by the French Revolution and the American Revolution, the Great War began the drum roll of liberation movements around the world that is still going on. One of the first was guided by Lawrence of Arabia. This year it continued in the Arab Spring. Practically every war that has gone on in the past hundred years, most notably World War II, was part and parcel of the original conflict.

When will it end? Probably it won’t be over until all the world becomes democratic and capitalistic. It was a great force unleashed by the Industrial Revolution that is serving as an equalizing impulse around the world. World War II may have formally ended in the early 1990’s when Germany signed a treaty reunifying itself, but even on the one hundred anniversary of the Great War we will not sign the Armistice to end all Armistices.