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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9667 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Nope. How we got WWI was that nobody bothered to stop the war. Blackadder nailed it on the head:

I think you mean it started when the Archduke of Austro-Hungary got shot. Private Baldrick: Nah, there was definitely an ostrich involved, sir. Captain Blackadder: Well, possibly. But the real reason for the whole thing was that it was too much effort not to have a war.

Kissinger's analysis of what went down in his Diplomacy is pretty good. Everybody was warmongering for no reason that aligned with their interests. The generals were drunk with new technologies, and the last deadly wars were either long ago (the US civil war) or far away (russio-japanese). i don't think that anyone realized how deadly the new war will be. And when the corpses piled up it was impossible to stop.

Also both Russia and Germany had recently (in the last few years before the conflict) been in unfortunate situations that made them look like they had sold out their Slavic and Austrio-Hungarian allies, respectively. So when 1914 came around both had to act a lot tougher to compensate for their recent failures, leading to Russia’s maximalist demands and Germany’s “blank check” to Austria-Hungary.

either long ago (the US civil war) or far away (russio-japanese)

From the perspective of the Europeans making the decisions that led to WW1, the US civil war was further away than the Russo-Japanese war - losing the Russo-Japanese war had been a real threat to the regime in a European Great Power, which is the sort of thing that attracts attention.

I meant in the context of the carnage that the then modern technologies can inflict when in peer to peer conflict.

Ukraine and Russia both knew what a meatgrinder is when they decided to follow that course. The WWI powers didn't.

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