Is ww1 the worst conflict in history?

Russia did not have to defend Serbia. They knew what the consequences would be. They were losing the arms race and wanted the war sooner rather than later. I think they bear the most blame for the war happening when it did.

The real problem is that all the European powers viewed an eventual general war as inevitable and none were willing to sacrifice long planned strategic advantages to maintain peace. Germany is probably most to blame for this escalation, but their position was understandable. After all they were the new ascendant power; considering European history, aggression was reasonable. How were they to know how horrific the new technology would make war?

Let's not pretend that Serbia itself was anything more than a flimsy pretext.

They agreed to all points of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum except for one, Germany pushed them into the war anyway because they were afraid of Russia industrializing.

I'm not sure which war had better aesthetic, both were great in that aspect

>was it always like this?
Not really, no. Of course a whole generation of men died and it was sad, but there was a positive perception in a lot of countries. Canada and Australia elevated their irrelevant meme-battles to nationalist emblems, and for France Verdun was one of its defining moments in modern western history.

>when did we start having this gray sombre outlook on this war?
My guess would be the 60s, with the slow takeover of cultural marxism (remaining unopposed because Hitler ruined nationalism for everyone). WW1, but especially Verdun, was the act of the men of the nation rising as one and defending their liberties, their homes and all they held dear. We simply cannot have such a celebration of nationalism in THE CURRENT YEAR so instead we must interpret it through a marxist lens: the tragic tale of innocent workers being driven against eachother by the evil bourgeois, a conflict in which nobody was at fault because everyone was nationalist so they were all evil.

>they were fucking war mongering asswipes
They didn't declare WW1 though.

War, war never changes.

>My guess would be the 60s
Your guess? Do you know? No you don't. You don't know shit. The war had a bleak and grey outlook by the time citizens realized a short victory was impossible. Massive soldier strikes in Verdun that butchered the officer class, workers strikes in Britain, Germany and especially Russia. People generally hated the war so much, that civil war broke out all over Eastern Europe and almost erupted in France, Britain, and Germany. The rise of Socialism in Europe is also directly due to the hatred of the war.

World War One was an incredibly tragic tale because the war didn't really achieve any of the goals the major belligerents set out to achieve. Germany got shit wrecked, France lost so many men it couldn't defend itself during the Second World War, Austria-Hungary stopped existing, the Tzars got shot in a basement, and the foundations of the British Empire were shaken to the core. Was the war pointless? No, it had huge long lasting effects on society and the world, but to the men who fought and died this means nothing.

Rudyard Kipling, the man who is responsible for all the memorials and graveyards for the British Army both in France and Britain, did all of that work in the British War Graves Commission because of his son. John Kipling, not an innocent proletariat but an innocent bourgeoise, was last seen at the Battle of the Loos, stumbling around in No-Mans-Land with most of his face torn off by an explosion. His body wasn't identified until 1992.

To say this war was one big heroic show of brave men fighting for their nation and freedoms on a glorious battlefield just isn't correct. It was a horrific war with most brave soldiers being torn to shreds by artillery shells rather than dying like heroes in some climactic charge. Don't celebrate this war, the war was a tremendous waste of human life. It was all bullshit. Mourn the dead and be inspired by their heroism, but don't celebrate the war for fucks sake.

You know this applies to every war, right? The very same could be said of WW2. Hell, the very same could be said of the Thirty Years War, were sometimes after battles men would be found burried under literal piles of enemy corpses. Yet it's only WW1 that's depicted as a tragic, meaningless loss of life. All loss of life is tragic but (at least on the Western front) it was far from meaningless.

In that regard, WW1 isn't any different except for in scale. And in that field WW2 heavily overshadows it.

I'd agree it applies to all wars, so I don't look at all wars as glorious. I hate them all equally. I'd imagine it is because World War One is the first war of its kind, with war photographers taking pictures of mangled bodies, most casualties being from shell fire, massive amounts of trenches, very little movement in the Western Front, etc.. It's hard to paint WW1 as anything but grey and depressing when the front lines of the Western Front were void of all green and life, only black, brown, and red.

The war wasn't meaningless, but for your average German soldier, or French soldier, or British soldier, very little was actually gained. German colonial territories were divided up and so people got a few war ravaged, disease ridden jungles with nothing of use to be found. The war had profound positive and negative effects, but for something that was championed so much as a "war to make everything fantastic", it didn't. Life sucked before, and then after.

WW1 CASUALTIES: 11-18 MILLION

WW2 CASUALTIES: 50-80 MILLION

Just saying.

WAR HAS CHANGED

YES AND IT WAS ALL GERMANYS FAUUUULT !!

It wouldn't have changed anything in France. After 1870's defeat the 3rd Republic started a big nationalist program. In 1870, more than 25% of young people cut their 2nd finger in order to not fight against German. This was mostly due to the fact that we were basically like Italians and Germans: there wasn't any French cohesion between people, you were parisian, alsatian, girondin, but not French. In the end of the century there was a lot of association with a name like "revenge" "the Republican" "give it back",...
It was just a matter of time before we declare war. And so goes for the WWII, we would've our own Hitler if we'd lost. And instead of Jews it could have been the Italian who would have killed (in the early century, Italians were our Arabs in France).

It was literally the end of the world

>They were losing the arms race and wanted the war sooner rather than later. I think they bear the most blame for the war happening when it did.
ebin :D:DD

this is a direct result of interwar antiwar viewpoints, which were sort of understandable given the scope of the conflict, and which were then continued and coupled with postww2 propaganda aimed at integrating and rehabilitating germany

>My guess would be the 60s, with the slow takeover of cultural marxism
get the fuck out of here you meme spouting """""cultural marxism"""" retard faggot
the 60s saw the above and largely misguided "consensus" challenged with the power of nine billion thunderbolts with fischer thesis and a modern take on the historiography that has been slowly gaining ground ever since

>High school
>Drilled into us over and over again that WW1 was the result of the alliance system and no one was truly at fault

>Grow up
Realize that WW1 would not have happened if Wilhelm had not chimped out. Neither France, England, Nor Russia were going to war for the defence of some shitty Baltic "Ally". There would have been violence in the Baltic states but the old powers of Europe would put a stop to it. That would have been the case if the German government at the time had not been a complete fucking joke jumping at the chance to prove themselves superior to France.

God I hate Germans so fucking much.

Austria-Hungary was not some shitty Baltic ally, mongoloid.

If you would get shot poking your head out of the trenches
How come you wouldn't get shot digging them in the first place

>meme history

christ, now I remember why I don't come to Veeky Forums

>For several years I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge. Often when I woke in the night, horrific pictures sprang unbidden to my mind—Satan [one of the apes], cupping his hand below Sniff's chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound on his face; old Rodolf, usually so benign, standing upright to hurl a four-pound rock at Godi's prostrate body; Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from Dé's thigh; Figan, charging and hitting, again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes. ...

You're amazingly wrong, and allowing your modern day politics to cloud your judgement of the past. People were shitting on ww1 and calling it a tragedy two years into the war. While it's true that some people enjoyed it, and I've read accounts of Canadians who called it the best years of their lives, they were odd balls and outliers. The vast majority of soldiers on almost every side were bitter and dissatisfied. Even the allies were happier about the war just being over than they were about winning.

They were losing the arms race though. Russia had called for and agreements in the years leading up to the war and faced massive shortages after it broke out. But If you're mocking him blaming Russia, well that's reasonable.

> Russia
> not going to war to protect Serbia

The fuck are you smoking amigo? Russia definitely was going to defend Serbia with or without German involvement.

* called for arms agreements

Russia mobilised first. Germany literally had no choice but to declare war when that happened, as they directly stated to the russians they would

Pretty much any of the main belligerents could have stopped or contained the war if they had acted differently, all chose actions they knew would lead to general war

If by "worst" you mean the most stupid mess we ever made since the Thirty Year's War then sure.

>when did we start having this gray sombre outlook on this war?
Generally around the time that hundreds of thousands of men started dying, Europe was turned into a cratered hellhole, and poems more grim and brutal than had ever been written started to crop up in the newspapers.

TBF there was a bit of war photography in the American Civil War some half a century before WW1

It took what, 3 months to be deadlier than the entire US civil war?

Only Americans give a shit about that meme war.

Yes. Once again the Germanic threw a tantrum and tore down western civilization.

>Almost all ww2 casulties are Slavs and Chinese

You could almost say ww2 did the world a favour

It was one of the most pointless and avoidable ones, anyway.

Why isn't this a movie? It sounds like a tamer Army Dog but with chimps.

>>it was really sad you had a lot of experimenting going on during battles where dumb stuff happened like wave after wave of guys marching into machinegun fire until the bodies piled up so high they could hide behind the piles and get a little closer to the fort
The problem was that communication was bad at the time, so when troops were walking into barbed wire that had failed to be removed by artillery bombardment and getting machinegunned word couldn't get back to the commanders fast enough to stop the men from continuing to march into no man's land.
A lot of the reason why the defenses were so hard to penetrate in WW1 was because even when the defenses were breached, the people in charge had no way to know that they had been breached quickly enough to exploit the breach before the gains could be reversed, and those on the ground could only act according to the last orders they received because there was no way for anyone to know the overall tactical situation at that level.