Who is praising anyone? ... Britain had no choice but to resist the German onslaught;

- meaning: no justified choice. This amounts to praising the British leaders for doing the right thing, which you (Teribus) also do explicitly. The onslaught was in 1914, options were earlier, as I wrote many times; the rhetorical trick of nationalists is to confuse this distinction. Another such trick is to write "Britain", "Germany", etc., as if the citizens of a country had a single collective mind; this comes handy for governments to avert criticism as unpatriotic. People who are proud of their country, no matter for what reasons, have fallen victim tho this effect. (Those who are ashamed of their country are wrong as well: they would like to be proud of it, and will take the next opportunity. Same with religion, ethnicity, profession, etc. Be proud of your personal achievements, and ashamed of your personal failures - enough to do. Praise or criticize leaders of your own or other groups for each of their actions separately. Praising or criticizing large groups is pretty pointless.)

Alliances are not a good or bad thing in themselves, it depends on their agendas and politics. The relatively peaceful and successful record of NATO is due to its relatively careful politics, compared to the Entente we are discussing here. Nevertheless, I would not praise all NATO manoeuvres either.

Authocracy: Tsar Nicholas's Russia was one. German and Austrian military and political leaders needed propagandistic justifications to win their (newspaper-reading) citizens' support, without which WWI would not have taken place. French and German newspapers readily heated the mutual propaganda machines, and the British leaders were in the boat, as we saw from Monique's link and many other texts. (British newspapers were a bit late with their part, in accordance with the myth of being totally surprised and outraged.) Politicians would have been required to calm down the athmosphere and to address all the fears and arguments brought fourth by the other side. Often they prefer the opposite, for the (all too short-lived) pleasure of the crowd in their own countries. This must be criticized sharply.

Dictatorship is detestable, but most current international propaganda against it was and is hypocritical. A topic for many other threads.