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talkpoliticsThe ol' chestnut of the beginning of World War I.
Now on paper it would seem supremely simple, the decaying Habsburg state under its senile philandering octogenarian seized on the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Germans seized on the chance to most optimistically divide the Entente with gunboat diplomacy or steamroll it in the mighty legions of the Kaiserreich's vast teeming hordes. The Allies were no angels but they did not begin the war, though they damned well did fucking finish it. And it fulfilled Engel's prediction of:
The ravages of the Thirty Years' War compressed into three or four years such that dozens of crowns will roll into the streets but nobody shall pick them up.
That's the paper reality. The actual interpretations of WWI that emerged post-WWII, with the Cold War overshadowing the legacy of the First World War (aided by Soviet censorship of how deeply embedded into WWI and German military strategy the origin of the USSR was, and that will be its own topic with ample 2003 analogies that the USA should have heeded but dismally failed to do so) proved very different.
The most that can be said for the classic take, Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August, is that it played a crucial psychological role in mitigating the second most dangerous crisis of the Cold War (the Able Archer one of 1983 the actual most dangerous one and a hilarious farce if not for how close human civilization came to going up in smoke).
https://www.amazon.com/Guns-August-Pulitzer-Prize-Winning-Outbreak/dp/0345476093
Tuchman argued that the people of 1914 did not make real choices but were held in thrall to vast historical things that they could not control. The rigidity in particular of military mobilization and military planning, for which none of the generals in any army bore any responsibility for creating or implementing, only the circumstances unfolding as they did, was the big one she focused on. And the one that was essential to JFK not accelerating the Cuban Crisis into World War III. It was and is a good story, the problem is that it isn't remotely true.
It's also a thesis that still has adherents in the present. Niall Ferguson, who insults humanity by persisting in life and writing asswipes bound in book covers, is one of them. So is the author of this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Sleepwalkers-How-Europe-Went-1914/dp/0061146668
The reality, however, is that the Europe of the start of the 20th Century had an arms race started by the chaotic and unpredictable regime of the Monarchical equivalent of Dorito Benito. The furry Scheisskaiser in Potsdam, who spent time making his courtiers dress up in fursonas and giving them heart attacks with his idea of 'fun' literally created an arms race for vast seagoing fleets that spent almost the entire war rotting in social distancing until they finally mutinied and helped ensure the Kaiser's removal and that of his family and the other German monarchies in the smaller states.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-naval-race-between-britain-and-germany-before-the-first-world-war
The Furry Emperor also decided to compound the offense of his existence while furry by letting the Reinsurance Treaty with the Russians lapse in 1890, leaving Russia looking for a new alliance in its wake. And lo and behold, it found one with the French. It was this alliance that set in motion the first stirrings of the 1914 coalition, compounded by the blundering idiotic German approach to its existence.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/frrumil.asp
The realities that followed included two Moroccan Crises, a Bosnian Crisis, two Balkan Wars, and an opportunistic land grab by the Kingdom of Italy that led to the foundation of modern Libya. The 'peace' of the first decade and a half of the 20th Century saw in the two Moroccan Crises and the first Russian Revolution of 1905 and in the Balkan Wars enough turmoil that it was 'peace' in the sense that the USA and the USSR not going to war directly outside Soviet aerial involvement in Korea was 'peace.' The general war of 1914 replaced a half pseudo-peace with a state of total war, and in this sense, the acceleration of arms and armaments by the two blocs of pre-1914 Europe played a part in making the decision for general war easier when it did come. Germany, in one of the Kafka ironies linking the world wars, spent the period up to 1914 afraid mortally of a vast Russian power that had signally failed to appear in 1904, would again fail to appear in 1914, but very much did appear under Stalin. It dismissed France as the easy soft target and spent four years finding out that the cheap soft target was made of reinforced concrete covered in bouncing betty mines.
The Central Powers would not have begun WWI if they knew the outcome would be what it was for Throne and Altar, but they did begin it. The reality of their war, as laid out in this book and the other recent one, Alexander Watson's Ring of Steel, was that the Central Powers waged a woefully mismanaged conflict reliant on brute force and the same stupid trick a thousand times over and it failing every single time. It would be too unsporting to call this the Wile E. Coyote school of military strategy given the monstrous death toll it created, but it would not be inaccurate.
https://www.amazon.com/First-World-War-Austria-Hungary-1914-1918/dp/0340573481
The willful censorship of the elites of WWI, in particular those of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg autocracies, in deliberately starting a war in full awareness of what they were doing serves its own aims. it permits the powerful to write a blanket absolution. It permits the comforting myths that states do not gleefully march themselves to their destruction with, in the words of one of their military leaders "we were compelled to choose the manner of our deaths, and we have chosen the most terrible" as the mentality behind it. It preserves the comforting illusion that authority, when existing, exists to do things rationally in its own interests, let alone that of society.
In truth the onset of the First World War was the Covid-19 of its time. People willingly and knowingly gambled on decisions that cost astronomical numbers of lives, and when the chaos that was easily foreseen ensued, tried to rewrite history to make themselves innocent. The generation of 1914 is still allowed to get away with it into the 2020s. This generation of leaders who made this crisis what it is need to be held to the most strict means of accountability.
Now on paper it would seem supremely simple, the decaying Habsburg state under its senile philandering octogenarian seized on the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Germans seized on the chance to most optimistically divide the Entente with gunboat diplomacy or steamroll it in the mighty legions of the Kaiserreich's vast teeming hordes. The Allies were no angels but they did not begin the war, though they damned well did fucking finish it. And it fulfilled Engel's prediction of:
The ravages of the Thirty Years' War compressed into three or four years such that dozens of crowns will roll into the streets but nobody shall pick them up.
That's the paper reality. The actual interpretations of WWI that emerged post-WWII, with the Cold War overshadowing the legacy of the First World War (aided by Soviet censorship of how deeply embedded into WWI and German military strategy the origin of the USSR was, and that will be its own topic with ample 2003 analogies that the USA should have heeded but dismally failed to do so) proved very different.
The most that can be said for the classic take, Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August, is that it played a crucial psychological role in mitigating the second most dangerous crisis of the Cold War (the Able Archer one of 1983 the actual most dangerous one and a hilarious farce if not for how close human civilization came to going up in smoke).
https://www.amazon.com/Guns-August-Pulitzer-Prize-Winning-Outbreak/dp/0345476093
Tuchman argued that the people of 1914 did not make real choices but were held in thrall to vast historical things that they could not control. The rigidity in particular of military mobilization and military planning, for which none of the generals in any army bore any responsibility for creating or implementing, only the circumstances unfolding as they did, was the big one she focused on. And the one that was essential to JFK not accelerating the Cuban Crisis into World War III. It was and is a good story, the problem is that it isn't remotely true.
It's also a thesis that still has adherents in the present. Niall Ferguson, who insults humanity by persisting in life and writing asswipes bound in book covers, is one of them. So is the author of this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Sleepwalkers-How-Europe-Went-1914/dp/0061146668
The reality, however, is that the Europe of the start of the 20th Century had an arms race started by the chaotic and unpredictable regime of the Monarchical equivalent of Dorito Benito. The furry Scheisskaiser in Potsdam, who spent time making his courtiers dress up in fursonas and giving them heart attacks with his idea of 'fun' literally created an arms race for vast seagoing fleets that spent almost the entire war rotting in social distancing until they finally mutinied and helped ensure the Kaiser's removal and that of his family and the other German monarchies in the smaller states.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-naval-race-between-britain-and-germany-before-the-first-world-war
The Furry Emperor also decided to compound the offense of his existence while furry by letting the Reinsurance Treaty with the Russians lapse in 1890, leaving Russia looking for a new alliance in its wake. And lo and behold, it found one with the French. It was this alliance that set in motion the first stirrings of the 1914 coalition, compounded by the blundering idiotic German approach to its existence.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/frrumil.asp
The realities that followed included two Moroccan Crises, a Bosnian Crisis, two Balkan Wars, and an opportunistic land grab by the Kingdom of Italy that led to the foundation of modern Libya. The 'peace' of the first decade and a half of the 20th Century saw in the two Moroccan Crises and the first Russian Revolution of 1905 and in the Balkan Wars enough turmoil that it was 'peace' in the sense that the USA and the USSR not going to war directly outside Soviet aerial involvement in Korea was 'peace.' The general war of 1914 replaced a half pseudo-peace with a state of total war, and in this sense, the acceleration of arms and armaments by the two blocs of pre-1914 Europe played a part in making the decision for general war easier when it did come. Germany, in one of the Kafka ironies linking the world wars, spent the period up to 1914 afraid mortally of a vast Russian power that had signally failed to appear in 1904, would again fail to appear in 1914, but very much did appear under Stalin. It dismissed France as the easy soft target and spent four years finding out that the cheap soft target was made of reinforced concrete covered in bouncing betty mines.
The Central Powers would not have begun WWI if they knew the outcome would be what it was for Throne and Altar, but they did begin it. The reality of their war, as laid out in this book and the other recent one, Alexander Watson's Ring of Steel, was that the Central Powers waged a woefully mismanaged conflict reliant on brute force and the same stupid trick a thousand times over and it failing every single time. It would be too unsporting to call this the Wile E. Coyote school of military strategy given the monstrous death toll it created, but it would not be inaccurate.
https://www.amazon.com/First-World-War-Austria-Hungary-1914-1918/dp/0340573481
The willful censorship of the elites of WWI, in particular those of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg autocracies, in deliberately starting a war in full awareness of what they were doing serves its own aims. it permits the powerful to write a blanket absolution. It permits the comforting myths that states do not gleefully march themselves to their destruction with, in the words of one of their military leaders "we were compelled to choose the manner of our deaths, and we have chosen the most terrible" as the mentality behind it. It preserves the comforting illusion that authority, when existing, exists to do things rationally in its own interests, let alone that of society.
In truth the onset of the First World War was the Covid-19 of its time. People willingly and knowingly gambled on decisions that cost astronomical numbers of lives, and when the chaos that was easily foreseen ensued, tried to rewrite history to make themselves innocent. The generation of 1914 is still allowed to get away with it into the 2020s. This generation of leaders who made this crisis what it is need to be held to the most strict means of accountability.
