Was WW1 the biggest mistake in history?

Was WW1 the biggest mistake in history?

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wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_Austro-Hungarian_Ultimatum_to_Serbia_(English_translation)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Crisis
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Yes.

Here's who made it

The sequel was more worse though.

Fucking Hotzendorf, I hate him so goddamn much.

can't have the second without the first

>ywn be simple rural folk rushed from the fields into uniform and see great cities like London & Paris, fraternize with loose women in the brothels, make life-long bonds with your comrades, feel the exhilaration of a hard-fought victory and come home again with a treasure of memories that will never be lost to time.

>ywn see europe at its apex
CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES

you'd be much more likely to die in a muddy trench and have your corpse eaten by rats

>much more likely
You'd be more likely to die as a british soldier in the Crimean war than WW1. Most soldiers didn't become casualties.

1939: Electric Boogaloo

>black hand leader not in the highest tier

>you will never see any country in its cultural prime

I don't care about technological prime, I'm living that meme, and it's nice and all but I'd like to paint flowers with matisse and shit talk van gogh over cheap coffee.

>you will never lose half your face to shrapnel in an age before plastic surgery and at a time where being a social outcast was suicide

>ywn spend a few months in the trenches, view your friend die of a horrible shrapnel wound, and then get a case of dysentery so severe that you are evacuated from the theater for hospital care, only to be sent back a few months later and temporarily blinded by a gas attack

>ywn freeze to death in some godforesaken mountains hundreds of miles from home because of some dumbfuck with a big hat and a stupid mustache

inb4 buttmad hat worshiping monarchist start talking about what an honor and privilege it is to bleed out fighting someone else's war

Lots of men would fondly recall the war as 'the best time' of their lives. This idea that 'WW1 was universally terrible for everyone involved' is bogus.

Lots of men, as in a few hundreds.
Now think about how many recalled it as the worst thing ever, and how many didn't live to recall it at all.

>Lots of men, as in a few hundreds.
More like a sizeable proportion. It was an experience many men wouldn't trade for anything.

More like you read a few books published by odd souls, the kind that lived in the 19th and 20th century and went on adventures to write memoirs about it, and you think this was the common soldier.

Consider that WWI broke the idea of noble warfare, of war as a manly sport. It was the worst most horrible war, and destroyed military culture. When WWII was happening, for the first time there was a sizable pacifist community and people afraid of and acting against the war, instead of the usual patriotic surge.

There is so much wrong with this graph, dont take it at face value. For instance there is is no French leader up higher on this list, while French revanchism is considered a key factor in the outbreak of the war. Also I dont have a clue what the incompetent Sukhomlinov is doing so low on there.

Sources needed.

>Inb4 Hitler

As far back as we have people who write about war there are men who revel in it. WW1 was no different. For many it was an actual adventure, an escape from the mundanity of the preceding century into something bold and exciting. There's a well recorded trend of boys that were too young to fight in WW1 feeling like they 'missed out'. There is a preoccupation in discussion on WW1 about everything that was rotten and miserable so that the fact that for many it was the experience of a lifetime is met with incredulity as seen in this thread. Certainly more than 'a few hundred' would have seen it that way.

He was probably a puppet (a Russian puppet, but don't know who's Russian puppet).
I've seen a thousand page long book about him, but i really can't be arsed to read through it. Not when i have exams n shiet.

because the French left-wing gov under Ponicare did everything it could to avoid conflict.

And the Russian Defense Minister urged the Tsar against war and threatened to resign if it broke out (his resignation was denied)

Read some basic history, not germany dindunuffin revisionism

The whole identity of "slavs" as one entity is russian imperial propaganda and entirely created by russian agents, so I don't doubt he was (willfully or not) working to aid russian interests.

>Austro Hungarians and Germans

top b8 anglo scum

>AH: We want our military to enter your country and arrest your citizens that we consider terrorists.
>S: Let me ask Russia first...
>>>R: We support your independence, S.
>S: No, you can't enter, that violates our independence, and we have support.
>AH: Let me talk to Germany real quick...
>>>G: We support your invasion of Serbia.
>AH: I insist that you allow our army to arrest your citizens.

Those are the players, and it does look like Russia's support is fair, and they are in the right, while Germany's support isn't.
Germany put a gun in Austria's hand, and Austria fired it. They are the criminals.

I'm not denying the German role in any of this. This graph implies a rather one sided French side which had no interest in the war, which is just plain wrong.

Are you serious every side tried to avoid the war the Germans included you brainwashed moron. How the fuck did you include Von Moltke but not Bismarck in the whole goddamn image?

Did you just forget all of the muh dick expansionism of the British Fleet in response to German growth and competition including the creation of the Baghad Railway?

Suck a dick, all you had to do was let Austria-Hungary and Serbia duke it out

It was more like

>AH: We want our military to enter your country and arrest your citizens that we consider terrorists.
>S: Let me ask Russia first...
>>>R: We support your independence, S.
>The rest of Europe: No, fuck off we are not letting you retake Constantinople like you've been trying to for centuries which we know you will attempt to do
>AH: Let me talk to Germany real quick...
>>>G: We support your invasion of Serbia.
>AH: I insist that you allow our army to arrest your citizens.

I get that Austria Hungary was being especially aggresive in the terms it forced Serbia to pay that were essentially made to start a conflict, but it didn't need to turn into a continent wide conflict that cost tens of millions of lives, and hundreds of millions considering the Spanish Flu that happened afterwards.

>Suck a dick, all you had to do was let Austria-Hungary and Serbia duke it out

If its just AH vs Serbia, Greece would honor their defensive pact, and Bulgaria (with an AH king) would join too. This was would always escalate.
And from there its easy seeing Turkey, led by effectively a military regime, attack Bulgaria to retake land, or attack Greece for the same reason, and Russia moving in against Turkey and so on...

Making it a regional war not a continental war where allies simply provide arms and munitions to their respective allies, which is something they maintained in the beginning when Russia threatened to intervene in the Serbian conflict which would lead to everything you just said, except this time the Russians would probably take Constantinople, as you said.

Germany, France, and Britain didn't have to get involved in direct military interventions over this and the only reason they did was due to colonial interests, it had nothing to do with the pacts they made, the pacts were just excuses to act in their own interests whenever they felt like it. Those three countries and the rest of Europe told Russia to fuck off to maintain the balance of power, then became hypocrites and pursued their own interests. You cant blame only Germany and Austria Hungary for this.

>it would eventually escalate

Yes, it was essentially inevitable which is why putting blame for one side over another means nothing. If you want to blame something blame the industrial revolution for making death possible on an industrial scale.

>Germany, France, and Britain didn't have to get involved in direct military interventions over this and the only reason they did was due to colonial interests
Making sure Russia's Black Sea fleet can't enter the Mediterranean is something all of Europe agreed on.

>Yes, it was essentially inevitable which is why putting blame for one side over another means nothing.
The escalation of war was inevitable. The war itself wasn't. This could've worked out without AH invading Serbia, at least not that quickly.
AH could seek a diplomatic solution, and either get it, or get Serbia to look unreasonable and thus lose the backing of the international community.
If this was kept a diplomatic issue I can see all of western Europe uniting against the Russian satellite eventually, making its annexation a triviality. It was expected to happen soon anyways, and then the terrorist groups could be attacked inside the empire, rather than by invading a foreign state.

So I blame the people who started the war, which would inevitably escalate.

>I need a massive war that claims the lives of tens of millions of people in order to have "muh experiences"

bourgeois trash

>archduke gets assassinated by terrorists
>stand down

In the age of Blood and Iron that is a death sentence to whoever stands down, and initially AH did seek diplomatic solutions, its just these diplomatic solutions were extremely harsh and were designed to cripple Serbia permanently and bring them back into the AH in order to reverse the Revolutions of 1848 and their affect on AH, considering AH was a multicultural state and Serbia broke off from AH in 1848.Had they simply let Serbia off the hook the other ethnic groups within AH would've sought independence as well. Britain should've let Germany restore the Austro Hungarian Empire, then Europe should've blocked Russia from entering the campaign to help them, which everyone knew was just an excuse so that Russia could capture Constantinople.

You said it yourself, Europe was powder keg and war was inevitable. Blaming AH and Germany solely for the mess is ridiculous.

Why? All you have to do is buy a plane ticket.

isn't life just a collection of experiences?

Bismark was not involved in world War one, hell he advised against doing shit in the balkands and predicted it would engulf the world in flames before his death.

You forgot the guy who held the literal smoking gun, retard.
Austria did not make such preposterous demands. Nothing comes close to AH soldeirs entering Serbia as you are implying. They merely asked delegates to participate in the murder investigation that was getting nowhere. Their ultiamtum was not agressive at all.
wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_Austro-Hungarian_Ultimatum_to_Serbia_(English_translation)
Good old Bismarck.
Nicholas actually told the Serbs to accept the ultimatum.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Crisis
Where are you getting your sources from?

Yes undoubtedly.

The Kalergi plan/Balfour agreement/communist revolutions/monarch dissolution/economic collapse are all the grassroots of why we're so fucked in today's world that is ripe with nihilism, perversion, unpatriotic tendencies in Europe and many other issues.

No doubt some of you are going to tell me to go back to /pol/ from what I said but these are the truths.

The destruction of Empire was the destruction of Europe, granted, WW2 is also responsible but it wouldn't of happened without this mess

>no doubt some of you are going to point out that I'm wrong but I'm not QED xp
>wouldn't of happened
Just get the fuck out.