The Sam
El Dandy
The Brainiest Sam of all
Posts: 8,423
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Post by The Sam on Sept 27, 2014 9:10:56 GMT -5
The July Crisis
In the wake of Franz Ferdinand's assassination, the great powers of Europe scramble to find an answer to the looming threat of war. While Germany urges Austria-Hungary to resolve the matter quickly, Russia begins to mobilize its forces to defend the slavic state of Serbia. A handful of people across the nations recognize the danger and do their best to stop it.
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Sephiroth
Wade Wilson
Surviving
Posts: 29,005
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Post by Sephiroth on Sept 27, 2014 10:14:49 GMT -5
I think the reason the first world war gets so much less attention in pop culture is because it happened for such complex reasons. The second world war can literally be boiled down to one guy-Hitler. The first world war happened because Europe was this incredibly complicated web of alliances and treaties. There was a cartoon from the time that summed it best: it portrayed caricatures representing each of the major powers of Europe reaching out to shake each other's hand with one arm-and then reaching across to strangle each other with the other arm. The part that is always forgotten was that the German Empire actually tried to prevent a war crisis from happening for years.
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Arrow
Hank Scorpio
Posts: 5,122
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Post by Arrow on Sept 27, 2014 11:46:00 GMT -5
I think the reason the first world war gets so much less attention in pop culture is because it happened for such complex reasons. The second world war can literally be boiled down to one guy-Hitler. I disagree. Hitler was the catalyst for the war in Europe but you also have to look at people like Mussolini, Stalin and Chamberlain who, if they weren’t the ones who started the war, they certainly helped to shape it. Stalin is particularly important here. The Soviet Union’s alliance with Germany is a really underrated, but very important, factor as to how the war began. And that’s really just the war in Europe. Boiling things down to Hitler also can’t explain the origins of the war in Asia and the Pacific, which is where WWII really began. Maybe, but I think the German Empire has to take blame for issuing Austria-Hungary the ‘blank cheque’ that convinced Vienna to move against Serbia in the first place. And Germany also declared war on Russia and France first, and invaded a neutral country without provocation because of an inflexible military scheme. In reading on the situation in Germany at that time, the situation there is really fascinating. By 1914 Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, through an over-aggressive foreign policy, had managed to alienate itself from most of the major powers of Europe aside from Habsburg Empire. Militarism had an unchecked influence on the government, so much so that by the end of the war Germany had unofficially became a military dictatorship run by Hidenburg and Ludendorff. I think it was Holger Herwig's World War I book that mentions how Wilhelm was actually criticized by Helmuth von Moltke for backing down in the Second Moroccan Crisis, and that the Kaiser's generals had advocated for war with Russia soon when it was still perceived as being weak enough for Germany to defeat. Whatever inclinations the German Empire had towards peace in, say, Bismarck’s era had gone by 1914. The Habsburg Empire needed a war against Serbia to assert itself in the Balkans, Berlin needed a war against Russia while it still thought to be possible to win it.
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