I feel this is too reductive in some senses. WWI was a war directed by imperialists sacrificing other people's children to profitier and try to grab power and influence for the elites in each country. Yes some elites did demonstrate egoism and inflame predjudice but that's the show for the rubes to get them to sacrifice their children and labor for the imperial project. Egoist leaders can only get their way if theirprogram works for enough of the people implementing their decisions.
Eugene Debs went to jail in America for imploring the working class not to fighta rich mans war and many soldiers walked away completely disgusted. Just a few miles from the trenches filled with death, the war profitiers were making a killing offering hotels and foodstuffs to soldiers on leave.
We still have a command economy based on war and our imperial project is still ongoing. We should take the lessons of world war one to heart and refuse to fight and fuel wars of domination and conquest. I can't recall the last time the western world was called to fight a defensive war after WW2, perhaps the only "good" war in our history.
Your theory about WWI is hard to reconcile with the fraction of the upper classes in the relevant age brackets who were in the army and were casualties, especially on the western front. In WWI, a lot of the people making the decisions in fact ended up sacrificing their own children.
Or to make this concrete, the prime minister of the UK in 1914 (and through 1916) was H. H. Asquith. Looking at the wikipedia articles about his sons:
I have a hard time seeing Asquith here as "sacrificing other people's children", or at least any more so than sacrificing his own.
That said, I agree that there's way more war-making going on recently than there should be and that it's no longer in style for the upper class to actually put their own skins on the line. But WWI is just not a good example of that tendency.
Eugene Debs went to jail in America for imploring the working class not to fighta rich mans war and many soldiers walked away completely disgusted. Just a few miles from the trenches filled with death, the war profitiers were making a killing offering hotels and foodstuffs to soldiers on leave.
We still have a command economy based on war and our imperial project is still ongoing. We should take the lessons of world war one to heart and refuse to fight and fuel wars of domination and conquest. I can't recall the last time the western world was called to fight a defensive war after WW2, perhaps the only "good" war in our history.
https://www.marxist.com/first-world-war-a-marxist-analysis-o...