LogFAQs > #893982498

UnfairRepresent posted...

Then you're pretty ignorant of history.

WW1 was the start of modern war, there had been nothing like it before.

True, there had never been anything of that scale or intensity before, and the constellation of forces that made it possible to escalate the conflict to a global level came about because the balance of power in Europe (which had successfully contained other wars) broke down badly. But to suggest that its reasons were unique because it was fought for "the empowerment of empires" unlike those in the 19th and later in the 20th centuries is patently absurd -- it's at very least blind to Russian foreign policy during three wars with the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century alone. In fact the history of warfare in the 19th and 20th centuries is largely a record of wars fought to enlarge empires, to block the advance of rival powers, or to try to hold onto imperial possessions. Imperialist wars aren't fought only between imperialist powers. What do you think Suez was?

You could even say that the proximal causes of both WW1 and WW2 were similar: imperial powers with a global reach intervening in (and therefore escalating) what were essentially regional conflicts -- over Serbia on the one hand, Poland on the other.

The Cold War was an interlocking series of bloody conflicts over decades: millions died in proxy wars fought between rival power blocs, but because those millions died in Africa and Asia there's a bizarre perception in North America and Europe that it was somehow bloodless. For Western and allied states, Cold War ideology was underpinned by the "domino theory" and the need to contain the spread of Soviet influence even in remote backwaters like Vietnam. (For "Soviet", you could easily substitute "imperial Russian" before 1914.) How is that rationale radically different from French paranoia over the rise of German power and demographic growth, Britain's fear of strategic assets -- the Channel ports -- falling into hostile hands in the event of a German victory, or Germany's conviction that it was encircled by unfriendly states and that Russian military reform and railroad building represented a long-term threat?

You seem to think that WW1 was stupid, irrational, futile and unnecessary because the decision-makers didn't anticipate how destructive it would be -- and that the wars fought before and after it haven't been stupid, irrational, futile and unnecessary, simply because since then everyone has understood the lesson of what happens if industrial warfare is allowed to spiral out of control. But I don't see at all how that argument follows; there have been plenty of minor conflicts fought for bad reasons. (Just because the destruction wrought by unleashing firepower of megaton proportions on Vietnam was one-sided, I wouldn't discount it as an example of industrial warfare running out of control; and it doesn't mean that Uncle Sam's policy wasn't futile or unnecessary.)
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