Thread 17900854

World War I make life worse for all Europeans. If so, why did they start it? Were they foolish, insane, or did they simply not care about the consequences of their actions?

Everyone thought they had the perfect plan for a swift victory.
Wars are usually started under the assumption that its going to be a short and local war.
That includes the 2022 invasion.

>>17900854 (OP)
Read Catastrophe 1914. Every aristocrat in Europe was jonesing for a "European adventure" and the military class of both England and Germany thought a general war between them would amount to gentlemanly fun.

Yes, things were THAT bad.

>>17901030
is that a compelling argument against monarchy?

>>17900854 (OP)
You are a clueless autist who thinks entire nations exist as a HOI4 player hivemind

>>17900854 (OP)
It's almost like they couldn't look into the future

>>17900854 (OP)
Britain maintained a world peace with its bombardment fleet since the end of the Crimean War. Not an exaggeration, almost a sole nuclear deterence of its time.

But when you no longer deal with sensible people, and have an insane country that accepts total destruction of its economy like Germany did? Then you get an insane war.

The war was especially supported among Yugoslavians, as they yearned for independence from Austria-Hungary. A lot of Socialist and Nationalist parties across Europe also supported it.

>>17900854 (OP)
political autoimmune disease

The cycle went like this.

>Incident happens
>Powers engage in brinksmanship/gunboat diplomacy trying to jockey for a favorable settlement
>Some sort of compromise solution is reached when one or multiple powers back down

July 1914 went exactly the same way except nobody backed down this time. And nobody was expecting it, because everybody was expecting somebody to back down, because that's the way it had gone since Napoleon.

The entire European world order rested on an idea that, while individual great powers might shit themselves for a while, cooler heads would inevitably prevail enough in the other great powers to prevent matters from escalating further. Nobody banked on the idea that everyone on the continent would collectively shit themselves at the same time, so there were no safeguards when just that happened.

>>17900854 (OP)
Imagine if today Macron chose to ally with Putin because he was butthurt over Germany having a larger economy.
The only reason there is peace in Europe today is because the French-Russian alliance doesn't exist anymore. But if it did exist then there would be another war

>>17901024
With the exception of appeasement it makes me figure overcaution is better than undercaution.

I really don't blame the lost generation for being so crazy politically, and frankly I'd say they should have strung up every single aristocrat and military class >>17901030 type except that the rank and file people all were as equally gung-ho drunk on jingoism. So it was frankly everyone's mistake.

I'm pretty sure what fucked with Kipling wasn't so much that his son died because he must have known had it been any of the colonial dustups he'd written about there'd have been a chance of that. But those would have been personal and some couching of romance. Not "You never quite know if he actually died, and given that you have no comfort of a body to bury but instead expect he got turned into bloody dust or chewed up into mincemeat and shat out by rats. WW1 then fucking spanish flu, except for people who survived Eastern Front WW2 it's hard to think of a level of misery and 'the world you knew is ending' like that.

Looking it up and apparently they did find his body, but it was identiifed only in 1992 so for Kipling's family it was that terrible unknown.

>>17901195
Would be but every joe blow was for it. The socialist initially tried some brother-worker solidarity but it fell apart as everyone just fell in line with their nations. The tragedy is unless you were some European minority that prospered from it and gained independence it all feels so fucking pointless.

>>17902833
Bullshit. The socialist did not support it. Why would they?
The whole point of the mass-labour movements in the early 1900 was to end the traditional game the elites of society were playing, that included spending on military and imperialism at the expense of the working class, who just wanted healthcare, education and affordable wages.

Borders and map painting and prestige, which was what ww1 was all about, was a matter of indifference to the already suffering working class. They wanted food and voting rights, not greater Russia/France/Austria for X monarch.

The whole reason why over half of all participants in ww1 ended up in revolution was because people got sick of dying and starving for a king. Sure there were nationalistic people, but not the socialists.