I read about WW1 and feel absolutely nothing because all those deaths were pointless and all the real happenings were in WW2. I don't know why it is so popular here, its like gushing over Windows 2000 even though XP is widely regarded as the peak of the Windows OS and answered all the problems raised as early as Windows 98. Or talking about how perfect the marbling looked on a slab of chuck before it was turned into hamburger. Its irrelevant because of what became of it.
Clearly the horrors of mechanized warfare and wholesale slaughter in WW1 weren't as earthshattering as you imagine them to be if 20 years later the world restarted the war but with even better weapons, rhetoric, atrocities and body counts. We retroactively paint a picture of a war weary Europe, disgusted with war but also one curiously tainted with foreshadowing of the rhetoric of WW2. Everyone looks to 1918 for all their answers to why communism, fascism and antisemitism rose in WW2, but no one bothers looking before 1914, as if these ideologies are somehow temporally restrained to this period and don't have a long, forgotten history accelerated and catalyzed by WW1. We see Marx, and we see the 1918 revolution, we see Stalin but we don't see the trail leading back all the way to 1848. Fascism, a militaristic, nationalistic ideology is merely the end extreme of a harder, edgier form of normal European imperialism; in the German case, going all the way back to the >H >R >E . Likewise, we see Mein Kampf and the Holocaust as connected, but we don't see centuries of antisemitism and pogroms.
So why do people, ultimately just fans of pointless human misery, see WW1 as having some meaning other than accelerating processes already deeply embedded in European society and culture? Its a speed bump on its way to WW2, and its millions of deaths utterly pointless and meaningless in the grand scale of things. Why the disconnect and blatant fetishism Veeky Forums?
Logan Wilson
Ive seen 4 ww2 threads today Havent seen a ww1 yet this week
Also it kinda spelled the end of monarchy in a lot of places and marked the deaths of historic empires
Dominic Green
How to trivialize periods of history with asinine comparisons in one post
Andrew Diaz
> I read about WW1 and feel absolutely nothing because all those deaths were pointless That's the most amazing thing about WW1. Tens of thousands of men dying just to take few meters of land, no bad side, no great purpose, just endless fighting over status quo.
Dominic Wilson
>Why do you faggots love to discuss WW1 so much? because faggots like you say bullshit like >all those deaths were pointless and all the real happenings were in WW2
Jace Murphy
>no bad side We dindu nuffin t. Wilhelminho segundo
Alexander Martin
WW1 was: - steampunk: the conflict - new machines and weapons never before used in any conflict saw their first use in WW1, including chemical warfare - the dramatic demise of multiple century-old empires - as you said, pointless deaths for pointless causes
>its like gushing over Windows 2000 even though XP is widely regarded as the peak of the Windows OS and answered all the problems raised as early as Windows 98 it's actually more of a case of Batman Begins vs. The Dark Knight [spoiler]The Dark Knight Rises is yet to happen[/nospoilerson/his/]
Cameron Foster
@1232366 Your entire post is memes
Jayden Garcia
Your post is exactly why Veeky Forums should never have been made.
what the fuck was pointless about the war? it certainly wasn't pointless in the geopolitical sense, because literally everyone had objectives they wanted to achieve, agendas, goals and it certainly wasn't pointless in a military sense, because while it's awful and terrible and brutal, attrition warfare is not pointless, it has a very precise point of grinding the opposition down, which for the majority of fighting on the western front was basically the only avenue available to either side, incidentally the point of this kind of warfare is what was ultimately the key factor in the outcome of the war
god fucking damn it i am getting mad over the internet again
Jacob Howard
> muh germs are brutes we good guys. May I just remind you of British India, Belgian Congo, French Africa, Japanese Korea and all of Russian empire. Trust me, there were no good guys.
Jacob Sanchez
It is indeed hard to understand why Britain chose to enter war in 1914. Even more baffling is why Wilson plunged the US into the war, after pledging in 1916 to keep us out of it. All my life I have heard about my mother's Cousin Aub Pate, who died needlessly in France in 1918. Uncle Tom died in the South Pacific in 1943 in a sniper attack, but that is a different story
War should never be undertaken unless the armchair generals are willing to take the field at the head of the army.
Leo Long
Because niggers here believe that OMG EUROPE KILLED EACH OTHER AND LED TO ITS LOSS OF STANDING IN THE WORLD. A TRAGEDY.
As if being European was a fucking solid identity back then.
As if these European powers also did not compete versus each other.
Julian Martinez
>It is indeed hard to understand why Britain chose to enter war in 1914. Because they signed a treaty to protect neutral Belgium, and Germany invaded Belgium Fuck how stupid are you?
Chase Bell
>Uncle Tom died in the South Pacific in 1943 in a sniper attack, but that is a different story How is that at all different?
Parker Edwards
>Why do people love to discuss history on a history board
Justin Ward
Because it killed the monarchies. It killed line warefare. It killed colonialism. It killed the Old World and gave birth to the New. We still live with its unresolved conflicts. Literally everything that happened in the 20th century was because of the Great War.
Not to mention the pure, unrestrained and absolutely unnecessary human horror of the first industrialized war.
Go fuck yourself, faggot.
Benjamin Wilson
Canadian Identity was pretty much formed by THE GREAT WAR, they were able to get more freedom from the UK and the rift between the Quebecois and the rest grew even wider due to their lack of participation
Henry Cook
>Guys, guys, the Europeans were a peaceful neighborly community and not a region consisting of the cores of multiple competing imperial powers! You only have yourselves to blame, Eurocucks.
Oliver Barnes
Treaties entered into with the full cognisance of the working class?, who had their political influence and interests taken away from them, by restricted suffrage to be sent to wherever his 'betters' deemed a good place for him to be stationed, and thousand of his neighbours, to die, possibly ripped apart by shrapnel, in agony? No, it's bad to renege on treaties made by upperclass psychotic, inbred homicidal twits.
You really need to visit the section of the library with thick books with ideas in them more often.
Anthony Edwards
You're a moron, aren't you? Also a racist. Eat pig shit.
Xavier Torres
Up until that point, the largest war in history, that killed more people than all the wars before it combined, and in the end, happened for no other reason than a perfect storm of ambition sitting on a powder keg of senseless violence?
Given that WWII can't even be discussed without everyone /pol/'ing the fuck out... I'm kinda surprised every thread isn't a WWI thread. ...And, really, there aren't all that many WWI threads. We seem much more interested in the dissing the Ottoman empire and Romaboos.
Plus, the reasons for WWII are pretty well documented an obvious. It's an easier lesson of history not to repeat (even though we don't seem to be learning it.) WWI is much more of an enigma in that sense as the various reasons for that world wide swath of blood are much more nuanced, and as such, are much more important to study.
Sebastian Taylor
Literally retarded: the post.
Samuel Nelson
This is a good point,
The Great War is also a turning point in that people finally realize Napoleonic 19th century tactics are not going to work in the 20th. It also sets the stage for the Russian Revolution.
My History professors at my university have said that in a few hundred years WWI and WWII will just be lumped together.
Grayson Bennett
>Up until that point, the largest war in history, that killed more people than all the wars before it combined Didn't even kill as many as the Taiping rebellion, alone.
Aaron Cruz
>The Great War is also a turning point in that people finally realize Napoleonic 19th century tactics are not going to work in the 20th. That's not how you spell the Boer War, the American Civil War, the Russo-Japanese war, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Crimean War, etc. etc. etc.
Daniel Wright
>My History professors at my university have said that in a few hundred years WWI and WWII will just be lumped together.
Chase Clark
>people finally realize Napoleonic 19th century tactics are get the fuck out of here right now
Joshua Rodriguez
>the American Civil War Well to be brutally honest out of those conflicts listed the folks in the ACW were the worst in that realization. Boggles the mind really - they had all those nifty and new and/or widespread concepts outside the battlefields, as in technology, logistics etc... but most of the actual fighting was still pretty backwards.
Levi Smith
Although let's not single out the ACW, the Austrians in the war against Prussia were also rather, well, lagging behind to put it mildly.
Samuel Gray
> in a few hundred years I don't give the human race that much time.
Thomas Ross
>killed more people then all other wars before it combined No.
Joshua Powell
Because it created the greatest group of artists in the modern age
because it destroyed Russia, Ottomans, AH Empire.
Because it started the modern era
it killed honor and the values of a thousand years,
It created the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany leading to the creation of the atomic bomb
It heavily advanced, Aircraft, Medicine, Tanks and submarine
It's alien as fuck, no war had been fought like it.
honestly I could go on and on
Blake Rogers
Why not? We live in one of the most prosperous, peaceful and happy times of history.
Eli Miller
>It's alien as fuck, no war had been fought like it. I think I understand what it is you are trying to say but to flat out label the war as somehow alien and completely unlike anything before is not correct. Many elements both strategic as well as at the lower level and in fairly minute details of the war were known, experienced and sometimes even tested by the powers involved in the decades preceding the conflict. Smaller unit tactics, trench warfare in the context of advanced firearms, mass mobilization, the move towards an industrial/total war, strategic transport capacities, the concepts of aerial observation etc.
Asher Allen
but all those they just keep brute forcing it and by the end of WWI they were like "oh yeah shit is different now"
Colton Morales
Napoleonic wars are in the 19th century like Stratego and shit
Thomas Lewis
stopped reading when you started making idiotic comparisons and allegories. So basically immediately. Learn how to make your arguments like an adult.
Anthony Cox
Possibly, possibly not. Would have to live the time line to possible tell, but things arent so different as they were back then. Nothings as greats as it seems to be you just have some cushion, some people have none and absorb the whole impact of life.
Adam Rivera
Sorry for the grammar, tired and late shit posting.
Juan Taylor
But it's true, it could be described as the second 30-years war.
Grayson Lopez
It wasn't pointless from countries who get independence perspective.
Bentley Robinson
>weapons never before used in any conflict saw their first use in WW1, including chemical warfare
