Conservative and strongly pro-Israel Professor Bill Rubenstein has had a letter published in the April edition of Quadrant which ends with the following observation:

It might also be worth noting that all of the infamous twentieth-century genocides in the period from 1914 to 1980, from the Armenian massacres in 1915-16 through the Nazi Holocaust to Asian communism, were plainly the result of the breakdown of the European elite and governmental structure in the First World War, and the consequential rise to power of fascism and communism. It is as certain as any counterfactual can be that none of these genocides and massacres would have occurred had the European powers not gone to war in 1914.
William D. Rubinstein
(Professor of History),
University of Wales–Aberystwyth,
Penglais, UK.

I can claim to have anticipated the kernel Professor Rubenstein’s argument in this letter which I had published in the Australian on 24 April 2004:
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