What is history's most tragic story?

What is history's most tragic story?

Other urls found in this thread:

wsj.com/articles/world-war-i-the-war-that-changed-everything-1403300393
nytimes.com/2014/06/22/arts/the-enduring-impact-of-world-war-i.html?_r=0
classical-music.com/article/what-was-impact-world-war-one-music
cnn.com/2014/10/30/opinion/merjian-art-modern-wwi/
articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/21/entertainment/la-et-cm-world-war-art-20120722
online.wsj.com/ww1/
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

The First Chechen War and the Vietnam War always bum me out.

I can understand both sides motivations, and both sides got really, really fucked up.

...

Humankind

WWII

World War One is pretty goddamn tragic. Warfare suddenly became overtly awful and humanity's innocence when it came to war was forever lost. I consider it a loss of Indo-European culture, because for thousands of years there existed among them a certain fondness for war. Modern combat shattered that.

Are we going by amount of people killed?

Probably the Golden age of the mongols. I've heard ghengis khan was supposed to have been responsible for 40+ million deaths while he lived. (No source, sorry)

If that's true then ww2 (60+ mil) where it was mostly soldiers dying instead of whole villages of people being decimated seems not as bad.

When them homies capped Tupac

My life.

Histories most tragic story is not one that is remembered. It is forgotten by necessity. There will always be romance in suffering, comedy in tragedy. That which is remembered can never truly be a tragedy. Only that which is forgotten.

It was just a return to a well known truth hidden by the invention of ranged combat.

No Greek hoplite would turn down the chance of using a rifle instead of melee combat. Apparently even napoleonic Era troops would run in the face of bayonet charges.

WW1 is where guns became dangerous enough so that people would revolt instead of listening to the guy who needs an army to fight his rivals army this summer.

Firearms are only seemingly less terrible than personal melee combat. A lot of the modern stuff certainly appears more terrible than fighting side-by-side with your buddies, as you're now much more easily separated from friendlies and have no hope of stopping a bullet. I can't imagine a bayonet charge being particularly frightening for a group of people with shields and armor. I think rifles make pitched battle more fatiguing, insurgency less fatiguing.

The psychological effect of loud explosions and their effect on the terrain would probably also have been a factor.

Fall of Constantinople/Death of Constantine XI, Execution of Michel Ney. Their deaths gave me massive respect for the men, when I'd previously never heard of them.

> that one anecdote of the calvary that got killed by machine guns

Women's suffrage

bingo

This pham

When I realized I needed new shoes.

The entire 14th century.

>Mongolian remnant khanates keep raiding and pillaging
>Little Ice Age starts
>Papal schism
>Massive crop fail leading to gigantic famines
>Black Death
>peasant revolts

It was quite possibly the most disastrous period of European history, worse than WW2 or the fall of Rome.

WW2 was mostly about killing civilian in fact.

You forgot the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

this to be quite honest

>"Soldiers, when I give the command to fire, fire straight at my heart. Wait for the order. It will be my last to you. I protest against my condemnation. I have fought a hundred battles for France, and not one against her ... Soldiers, fire!"

>Quebec

Melee combat is terrifying because it also activates that system that tells you "TOO CLOSE TO STRANGER". Smell his sweat, hear his noises, etc.

You deal with conflicting impulses while trying to stab this guy you might not have personal beef with.

Firearms come with their own stimuli but nothing as intense as the cybernetics of melee.

A fitting start to the tragedy of the 20th century. Kill off millions of the best and brightest. So that two decades later you can kill more millions of the best and brightest.

What a fucking disaster. That sort of genetic information takes CENTURIES to repopulate. It'll probably (hopefully) be surpassed by the science of genetic engineering in this century.

It's not only about the loss of information. The worst sort of people populate far more freely in the absence of many others.

1066

>English defeat viking army at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire
>Have to make a forced march to Sussex after having already sustained thousands of casualties
>Meet the Normans
>Your king gets shot in the eye
>Keep fighting anyway
>Your shieldwall and Dane Axes repel their horsemen
>They begin to flee
>The sight of Norman backs signals they've had enough
>Pursue them
>Perfidiously, they reverse course to meet you
>fuggg

i crie evrytiem 2bh freonds

Jesus man

Friedrich Nietzsche.
>Weak and frail
>father dies when he's a child
>constantly sick throughout his life.
>barely made anything on his books until later on in his life.
>outspoken critic of anti-Semitism and Nationalism
>had one girlfriend in his life, and got intellectually friendzoned for another dude.
Has stroke, leaving him a vegetable while her Nazi sister plagerizes his work 'til he dies.
Said desecrated works become the philosophical base of the Nazi Party, slandering his good name for the part of the century that should have gotten his real work the most.

Yeah, pretty sad if you look at it.

Absolute Historical Revisionism that exists today that's more concerned with overturning historical heroes than giving the people of the past a fair shake.

French Revolution

This

great conquerors are not great heroes

The fall of the USSR

When you reply to your own comment twice cause nobody else cares

the plight of the nuns escaping the turks at the final fall of Constantinople always makes me sad

I'm always perplexed that philosophers such as Nietszche and Kierkegaard aren't usually evaluated through their documented shitty and depressing lives. I mean of course someone like that gets into such melancholic existentialism, maybe they were genuinely just sad, not because of a clear view of life and existence but from their own grief

The Islamic conquest of Persia

Winner of this chicken dinner

The Christian conquest of Al-Andalus

& Humanities

/thread

anything regarding fall of Constantinople, partly because of the significance of the event

Also WW2 Eastern Front tragedies, you can find plenty of material there as well.

Why exactly did WWI cause so much anti-war sentiment? How was it different than people killing each other before?

My theory is that people had just forgotten. The western world hadn't really seen any wars since 1871 under Bismarck diplomacy; that's 43 year, and entire generation. And there hadn't been large scale wars since Napoleon, a century before. Did people just forget how horrible war was or did getting shot become more horrible somehow?

I think the black plague was a bit worse.

the death of Julian the Apostate

Mongol invasions were worse...Nah, actually it fucked the west up so good with what sprouted from it, we will never recover

American Slavery

>What is history's most tragic story?
The Sack of Rome by the Visigoths and Vandals
The execution of Majorian by the traitor Ricimer
The fall of Constantinope and the death of Constantine Palaiologos

t. Romaboo

muh Galileans ruining our wholesome paganism!!

christianity was fine until it gained special privileges from the state and began wiping out its competition. I really don't care about whether a religion is monotheistic or polytheistic, I just think it's a shame that so many temples and statues were looted/destroyed and so much culture tied to religion was lost

Aegospotami

>maybe they were genuinely just sad, not because of a clear view of life and existence but from their own grief
Grief reveals new depths of reality, it's not a distortion. Pessimism is realism. Happiness can be regained, but needs to be put on a new footing. Everyone can experience this, you don't need to be a philosopher.

I'd be more suspicious of "philosophers" who have nice lives. De Botton comes to mind.

(((((((culture)))))))

Says the guy that worships (((Jesus of Nazareth))) & (((Jehovah)))

yes, this. not so much because the USSR was great (it wasn't) but because it represented the failure to stop capitalism.

>What is history's most tragic story?
My life

>soldiers dying instead of whole villages of people being decimated
But that's plain wrong. Eastern front saw whole villages and towns shot by SS or even Wehrmacht. Not to mention concentration camps and Japanese war crimes.

>What is history's most tragic story?
this generation

>the failure to stop capitalism.
As a Russian I don't have any problems with capitalism, but the fall of USSR was tragic because it lead to huge amounts of poverty, it lead to death of approximately 20 millions from starvation and lack of basic medicine, that the state could no longer provide.

So yeah, this sort of biggotry is sad:

>Stalin's purge kills 1 million, drought-caused famine (that Holodomor meme needs to die, more Russians died of that famine than Ukrainians) kills 10 million
>MUH EBIL COMMIES

>destruction of USSR caused 20 million death
>LMAO CAPITALISM DUDE SHRUG IT OFF WE ARE GOOD GUYS )))))))

The thing about WW1 was that it was a damn meat grinder. In earlier wars you would see movement or progress, whether positive or negative. Battles had actual repercussions. For 3 yrs, nothing significant happened on the European fronts, despite the constant action and large casualties, so there was a large sense of futility in the affair. And the actual battles that were fought were absolutely disgusting in terms of human capital. Both sides lost exorbitant amounts of men in each engagement. The Battle of Verdun more or less encapsulates the war. I encourage you to look it up.

>Why exactly did WWI cause so much anti-war sentiment? How was it different than people killing each other before?
Mortality rate.

Origin of consciousness

It was only stagnant on the Eastern front. The Middle East, Balkan, and Eastern fronts saw large pushes and a lot of maneuver warfare. It was, however, also a giant meatgrinder. Germany bled Russia white in WW1, something that really shouldn't be possible.

Lots of reasons. One of the big ones was that it was the first full-scale industrial war. The American Civil War is often considered the first true modern war because of the importance or railroads and economic power in deciding the conflict. The Franco-Prussian War could've been WW1-esque had Napoleon III not been such a fuck-up. We do see WW1 on a small scale in the Boer War, but those many of those veterans got a Vietnam-like treatment. Several came back with shellshock, but the overall conflict was too small for people to realize what had changed, so many of them were thought of as a bunch of pussies.

So, all of the sudden, in the early 20th century, we have equipment that outstrips the established military doctrines, and an industrial population that allows for nearly unlimited frontage. Couple that with major technical innovations before the war or during the early phase, ie. gas and machine guns, were well-suited to allowing a few men to hold off a larger force when entrenched, and you've got a really shit situation. The French were convinced that if they could close the gap and meet the Germans in a man-to-man fight, they'd win, so they wasted a lot of lives in frontal assaults. The British had their aristocracy show up in droves, stand at the top of a ditch waving a sword, and then take a bullet to the throat. So, while the British people may not have actually lost that many of "their" men all things considered, they lost the men that were felt the most acutely by the government.

Literally this. I'm not even being edgy, what else could it be?

Before consciousness, nothing was a tragedy. It just was. And since every life lives under the knowledge of death...

>Why exactly did WWI cause so much anti-war sentiment? How was it different than people killing each other before?

Take what this user said And add to that the psychological impact of all that death and violence (on a scale and in an industrialized way never seen before, as user described) to society at large... It affected everything; it changed society itself.

>Now they were left with a shattered continent that had spent down its wealth and weakened itself, perhaps mortally. As the great French thinker and poet Paul Valery said in 1922, "something deeper has been worn away than the renewable parts of the machine."
>Church attendance plummeted, but night clubs were jammed by those who could afford them. Cocaine stopped being a medicine and became a recreational drug along with alcohol.
>Before the war, a new generation of writers and artists had already been mocking the old classical traditions and inventing their own. Now, in the 1920s, the jumbled perspectives of the cubists, the atonal compositions of new composers such as Arnold Schoenberg or the experimental poetry and prose of writers such as Ezra Pound or Marcel Proust seemed prescient—new forms that captured the reality of a fractured world.
wsj.com/articles/world-war-i-the-war-that-changed-everything-1403300393

Also see:

nytimes.com/2014/06/22/arts/the-enduring-impact-of-world-war-i.html?_r=0

classical-music.com/article/what-was-impact-world-war-one-music

cnn.com/2014/10/30/opinion/merjian-art-modern-wwi/

articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/21/entertainment/la-et-cm-world-war-art-20120722

online.wsj.com/ww1/
>100 legacies from World War I that continue to shape our lives today.
includes positive effects of WWI such as progress in the field of medicine (psychotherapy, plastic surgery, prosthetics, etc.)

/thread

>the white man
no such thing

This

Looks like culture to me faggot.

>destruction of USSR caused 20 million death

just....

IESUS HOMINUM SALVATOR

how is this sad?

Perspective

one might say it's sad because there was not enough dead anglo, other might say it's great because it gave motives for the rebellion that became the USA.

And others will just be too irrelevant to have an opinion that mater.

just seems a bit arbitrary to me

WW1

Contantinople
Third Reich

...

Samanid Empire wasn't that bad. If anything, the Mongol Conquest was a million times worse.

It seems to me European women have always been whores. Unlike other women, they have crazy sexual appetites and are more like men.

also the fall of Constantinople.