Ping!
Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, Britain and Serbia
How did Italy, Montenegro and Andorra avoid blame too?
Self ping for later. i am just a geek for “The Great War”.
To quote George Costanza, “It was the Moops.”
The cousins never fired a shot in anger. The peasants died in droves.
muslims
Well known fact Kaisher Wilhem was a***hole
Thank you for posting this.
I’ve always believed that World War II was a family feud writ large using the armed forces of the various nations that the various Royal houses controlled.
Today though I would say that although the Family Feud theory still holds some water it was much more than that. I think today that it was build-up of internal national tensions. Those tensions and the belief that they would explode in the faces of the various ruling aristocracies needed an outlet and when the excuse for war presented by Arch-duke Ferdinand’s assassination occurred. They grabbed it with the hope that it really wouldn’t be that bad and that the various nationalistic groups would be bottled up for another generation.
I can see that as a form of ‘kick the can down the road’. The assorted colonies around the world had served as an outlet for the more adventurous of their citizens was now seen as soon coming to an end. They were not getting back as much as they putting out to maintain them and that also put another type of tension.
All in all the European continent was doomed to go to war.
Kudos go to the Ukrainians for staging a timely crisis to commemorate the war!
According to the common core curriculum, the great war was started by George W. Bush to kill black people and homosexuals.
“A World Undone” by G.J. Meyer is a GREAT book on this subject.
It was just what had gone on in Europe for centuries. They named wars like this:
—Hundred Years War
—Thirty Years War
Some in the US felt it unwise to be drawn into their perpetual cycles of war, but nevertheless we did enter, to start a new method of naming:
—World War I
—World War II
Germany was the aggressor and that is undisputed....
It was an absolute mess. My suggestion? Read Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” for the best take I’ve seen.
The answer is probably "yes" but it tends to diffuse the blame. German planners probably had the most to do with WWI, but people plan for war all the time that never takes place. Of the sundry heads of state involved, Wilhelm appears to me to be the most bellicose by far. There were simultaneous cases of paralysis within the Austrian, British, French, and Russian state ministries at the time for various reasons having little to do with the actual war (my source for this is The Sleepwalkers). And yes, the Serbian radicals did want to precipitate armed conflict, but not of that type and certainly not of that incredible scope.
Barbara Tuchman thought railway schedules had a good deal to do with the difficulty of stopping mobilization once it started, and if she tended to overemphasize this a bit in The Guns Of August as a cause of war, it does seem to me that it made the thing hard to stop. Britain, Russia, and Germany all had chances to put the brakes on things once the positions of Austria and Serbia had hardened, the Serbs for their part conceding nearly everything demanded. Whether those brakes would have worked cannot be known. But if any one of them had managed to sit the thing out, would it have made a difference, or would they have been sucked in eventually anyway, as the United States was for reasons that are nearly equally difficult to define?
I don't think there's a definitive answer to the question, only the wonder of so many things cascading in the wrong direction that one almost suspects the inevitability of history. And that isn't an answer at all, it's giving up on one.
The Great War was a mistake. The royal couple was found living on the French Riviera two years after the war ended.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuRxjjcPgOo
1916 - Motorhead
16 years old when I went to the war,
To fight for a land fit for heroes.
God on my side, and a gun in my hand
Chasing my days down to zero.
And I marched, and I fought, and I bled and I died.
And I never did get any older.
But I knew at the time that a year in the line
was a long enough life for a soldier.
We all volunteered, and we wrote down our names
And we added two years to our ages
Eager for life and ahead of the game
Ready for history’s pages
And we fought and we brawled and we whored ‘till we stood
Ten thousand shoulder to shoulder
A thirst for the Hun, we were food for the gun
And that’s what you are when you’re soldiers
I heard my friend cry, and he sank to his knees
Caughing blood as he screamed for his mother
And I fell by his side, and that’s how we died,
Clinging like kids to each other
And I lay in the mud and the guts and the blood
And I wept as his body grew golder
And I called for my mother and she never came
Though it wasn’t my fault and I wasn’t to blame
The day not half over and ten thousand salin
And now there’s nobody remembers our names
And that’s how it is for a soldier
So many things can be listed as causes for WW1, that it is impossible to say which ONE was the cause.
We know the spark, but what about the origins?
A case could be made that it wasn’t Wilhelm, but Russia that was the cause of WW1.
They had been humiliated by the Japanese, and again in the First Balkans War, and had embarked on a massive militarization program, so much so that the German High Command feared what would happen if they waited.
bkmk