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This is a little off the beaten path, but let’s do a bit of World War I blogging. (Need a news hook for this? Here it is.)

Tyler Cowen just read Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I, by Michael Neiberg, and says he was “stunned” by the claims in the book, a few of which can be summarized quickly:

First…few Europeans expected a war and even fewer wanted one. Europe was not a place of white-hot nationalist passions looking for a spark…Virtually no one in Europe sought a war to correct supposed inequities stemming from the turbulent nineteenth century or as a way to adjust borders. Even in France, there was no desire for war as a way to avenge the loss of Alsace-Lorraine…

Third, the people of Europe accepted the necessity of war primarily because they believed their wars to be defensive.

Fourth, disillusion with the war…was well in place by the end of the war’s first year.

Sixth, despite their concerns and suspicions, societies kept fighting. Their reasons for doing so included a desire to avenge the losses of 1914, the quite real threats to their existence which remained from foreign armies, and an awareness that the hatreds unleashed by the war as early as the end of the first month made anything short of total victory or total defeat unthinkable.

I’m genuinely curious about this. All of these four claims seem, to me, not only non-stunning, but almost pedestrian. If you’d put them in front of me with no commentary, I’m pretty sure I would have said that this is pretty much the modern conventional wisdom about WWI.

So: am I completely off base here? Are these claims more unusual than I think? And if they are, why did they seem so familiar to me? I’ve read a few books about the war, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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