The 100 Years War

And the Serbs dedicated a statue of Gavrilo Princep today. I couldn’t pick a story or image, just google.

Aw Heck This is Nice

I’d have a hard time believing that historians in Putin’s Russia are trying to justify Tsarist alliances, since there is a pretty clear and comprehensive cause-effect relationship between honoring such alliances and lots and lots of Russians dead.

John Quiggin, I know where you’re coming from.

But take a look at these tiny toads!
~

5: those ARE some tiny toads. I think those may be similar to the ones sold in an artificial habitat at our local toy store.

Here’s my chance to get moderated like everyone else.

Adam tooze perspective – “He described the powers, great and small, as members of a chain gang, a lurching, shackled together collective. The prisoners were differently proportioned. Some were more violent than others. Some single minded. Others exhibited multiple personalities. They struggled with themselves and each other. They could seek to dominate the other chain, or to cooperate. As far as the chain would give, they could enjoy some degree of autonomy, but in the end they were locked together. Whichever of these images we adopt, they have the same implication. Such a dynamic, interrconnected system can be understood only by examining the entire system and retracing its movement over time.” – seems right

The Great War was the first OIL war. Performer Robert Newman’s “History of Oil” maintains that WWI started for the British with an invasion of Iraq. The basic set-up was that the German and British navies had just switched from coal to oil, but Germany had no easy access to oil except by extending the railway that ended at Constantinople (known as the Orient Express) another 900 km to Baghdad. The other European powers were opposed because it meant a major German oil and business drive into the Middle East. When Ferdinand was assassinated, all the countries started grabbing what they could:

“The first British regiment to be deployed in the First World War, the Dorset regiment, went to Basra in 1914, where it was joined by 51 other British divisions.”

I still can’t shake the feeling that declaring revolutions undesirable is nothing more than Center-Left apologetic for the world-as-is

What are you counting as ‘the revolution’ re Nazi Germany? I’m sort of inclined to agree about the USSR, but I’d rather go hide behind the sofa than elaborate.

Bolshevism was not brought forth by the First World War: the Social Democrats split over the War Credits vote, thus *ending*, not *starting* the Second International. (The Russian Revolution took advantage of the war, but absent a war the politics would have continued)

Nazism was likewise not a result of the war: in Italy, where Fascism first came to power, the war was won, and there was an economic crisis. Rather it was against the left that Fascism became acceptable, assisted by capitalists.

It’s very easy to be against war when you have a continent to people who like you, in a liberal democracy no one really wants to overthrow. But if you are Oliver Cromwell, William the Silent, or Robespierre, then armed violence is the only means to vindicate your rights or defend the rights of the people. War brought rights to Central Europe, democracy to England, freedom of religion to the Netherlands.

Can hardly disagree with the idea that nothing, or at best very very little, has been learned over the last century, but the claim that this must – or must therefore – be seen as a single Great War feels much more problematic. The idea that 1914-45 should be seen as a single struggle for dominance in Europe isn’t new (not sure if Raymond Aron was the first to put it forward, but he certainly developed it), and makes lots of sense. The Cold War, however, feels less like a continuation or iteration than a tritone substitution – some shared elements, different configuration and different effects. If you want to include the Balkan Wars, Iraq etc., not just as new manifestations of our leaders failure to rethink war but as phases in a single conflict, then the idea that it all starts in 1914 is, as P. O’Neill suggests, arguable; is this not rather the continuation, in different forms, of the war of Europe against the rest of the world, begun in the sixteenth century though intermittently interrupted by internal blood-letting over religion, continental hegemony or ideology?

The First World War was the graveyard of Empire and the feudal aristocracies that still ruled them. It was the apparent inability to think up any other workable mode of government and politics that left the world staggering through the interwar period, economic devastation stalking the survivors. Piketty tells us that the period, 1910-1980 was anomalous, and we will soon enough be back in a neo-feudal order wrought by a patrimonial capitalism, just in time for the collapse of civilization in environmental catastrophe and resource limits. Oh joy! History continues.

Ever try prozac, Bruce?

The World Is Flat!

Vera Mary Brittain Testament of Youth

Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: 24 years, devastated cities from Cadiz to Moscow, killed an estimated 2.5 per cent of Europe’s population. World War 1: lasted 5 years, killed an estimated 2.5 per cent of Europe’s population. Conservatives see the first as a great tragedy, and mourn the violent destruction of the old regime. Both liberals and conservatives see the second as a great tragedy, one mourning the old regime and the other the death of classical liberalism.

That both were great tragedies is unarguable. But once we are done weeping, there’s no shame in trying to understand why they happened. Here the post is more than a little short. There’s plenty of blame to go round, but “leaders made bad decisions” does not really hack it. Yes they did, but they were also part of a set of systems which, in both cases, were manifestly failing to address the urgent issues of the time and which yet blocked peaceful change. The recipe for peaceful revolution continues to elude us.

We definitely need a little Smedley Butler here:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

For the U.S., at least, war’s just too easy, a loaded gun quick to hand. Our armed forces could, theoretically, defeat all the rest of the world, without resorting to nuclear weapons. It reminds me of a Far Side cartoon, one bear asking another “Look at these teeth. Look at these claws. Are we really meant to eat nuts and berries?” (or words to that effect.)

Under the assumption that we can’t be wrong, we’re not crazy to have such overwhelming might, therefore it’s entirely reasonable to deploy it at every opportunity, and consequently dereliction of duty for the commander-in-chief not to do so.

Also recommended for those interested in the causes of WWI is Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, which does superb job of going into the backgrounds and activities of the various governments and leaders in the years leading up to 1914, and the way previous crises had, temporarily at least, shifted things in certain directions and encouraged leaders to act and react in certain ways.

I’ll admit to being somewhat startled to learn how eager some French generals and politicians were for a war, especially one starting in the Balkans; or how Russia’s growing economy (and Western governments’ overestimation thereof) affected things; or the fact that World War I almost started in late 1912 or 1913, instead of when it actually did.

Lee A. Arnold @ 13
The Great War was the first OIL war

No, it wasn’t. Concerns about possible access to oil were way, way down on the list of contributing factors.
(The German navy hadn’t switched to oil; they’d only just started experimenting with mixed oil/coal fueling when the war broke out. Also, although people speculated about the possibility, no oil was actually found in Iraq prior to the 1920s. The sources for British oil used in World War I were primarily Persia and Burma.)

shah8 @ 3
there is a pretty clear and comprehensive cause-effect relationship between honoring such alliances and lots and lots of Russians dead.

As it happens, it was really the French who were honoring their alliance, since the precipitating step was Russia mobilizing against Austria-Hungary (and Germany, since Germany was almost guaranteed to honor its alliance with A-H, and the Russians didn’t really have a plan for mobilizing against just A-H anyway). Once Germany followed by mobilizing against Russia, it was up to France whether or not to fulfill its treaty obligations to Russia (which the French government had already assured Russia they would do).

The Russian mobilization against A-H (and Russian behind-the-scenes encouragement of the Serbian government, which help the latter decide to reject A-H’s ultimatum) was not the result of a formal alliance or treaty, but a mixture of sentimental pan-Slavism and ongoing policy (Russia having decided that Serbia was a more reliable proxy in the Balkans than Bulgaria).

(Not the David above!)
You can look at the last hundred years as a series of failed attempts to deal with the underlying tensions present in 1914. Schematically, these were all related to competition: at the domestic level competition between established monarchies and oligarchies and new democratic forces; internationally, between multinational empires and the growing trend towards nation-states and globally between imperial powers for colonies. WW I was not guaranteed to break out when and how and where it did, so to some extent arguing about exactly who was responsible for what, although interesting, is not fundamental.
More fundamental was the decision, after 1919, to return to competition as a means of settling these underlying tensions, with the recognition that, in a competition, somebody always loses, and generally feels bad about it. Communism, which disowned nationalism and preached international solidarity, was treated as the enemy.
For a while after 1945, it looked as though things might have improved. Factors ranging from the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Soviet Union, to the creation of the UN and the Common Market to the (relatively) peaceful process of decolonialisation, to the adoption of Keynesian economics and managed international trade, suggested that competition was on the way out. But competition, of course, always benefits those who think they can win. And the counter-attack from the 1980s saw the return of nationalism, of neoliberal economics, deregulation and military adventurism. Cooperative ideologies, essentially on the Left, have been shoved mercilessly aside, and Socialist parties themselves have formally embraced competition (in the form of “competitiveness” to replace their old ideology of solidarity.
Perhaps all we learn from history is that some lessons are too difficult to learn.

and additional to Peter Erwin’s comment above: Germany was not just honour-bound to support A-H; all the moves Vienna made were cleared with Berlin beforehand. France did not get a choice: it got a preemptive German demand that it remain neutral and hand over key border fortresses as a surety. Serbia did not reject the Austrian ultimatum. It accepted it with minor reservations. Vienna and Berlin were determined on war, so made the reservations the excuse.

Yes, Quiggin, WWI was the singular cause for all that went wrong in the twentieth century! But for this singular calamity, the world would have continued to enjoy the wonderful and idyllic accoutrements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which most certainly did not include the concentration of civilians, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and all manner of racial bio-politics and state violence. These terrible things cannot possibly have predated the war! Not when Britain ruled supreme and everything was great! Not before those swarthy East Europeans deigned to start the awful war that would undermine our glorious liberal empire. O Britannia!

Yes, let’s ignore a century of historical research in favor of an interpretation first put out at the end of the First World War by Britain’s liberal imperialists.

But those interested in learning about Germany’s policies before and during the war would do well to consult works like Isabel Hull’s ‘Scraps of Paper’ http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?gcoi=80140100174590

Thank you, Peter T

> More fundamentally, despite 100 years of brutal and bloody evidence to the
> contrary, the idea that war and revolution are effective ways to obtain political
> ends, rather than catastrophic last resorts, remains dominant on both the right and
> the left.
The Iraq war was simply a mistake. Made by a moron, but a mistake nevertheless.

To be fair, war and revolution are the slogans chiefly of the Islamists these days.

#47

So now, with the growing complexity of the world, we are given a huge “information problem” IN ADDITION TO the prior emotional, egotistical, greedy criminal problem, and we cannot solve either one. Are global doses of smart pills and entheogens going to help us? At this point, we appear to have few other options. At one time I had hoped that an accelerative language might help, but the intellectual lethargy out there is daunting.

I’d kind of like to see a consortium of academics arrange a series of war games. Get the best evidence available about what each side can and will do. See what happens then. To the extent that the nations involved believe in the outcomes, it will affect their strategies.

This approach will tend to fail when one nation believes it has secret abilities that will provide a quick cheap victory, that only work while the abilities stay secret. Surprise attacks, secret weapons, strategies which depend on the enemy failing to understand the danger and so acting stupidly. They will not reveal their secrets because they want the methods to work, they will not believe the simulation results, and others will not factor the secrets into their calculations. So they are likely to get into a war that nobody would choose if they knew the facts, and the secrets may or may not provide a quick victory (usually not, given past experience).

But maybe a careful analysis of likely outcomes, performed by a large collection of experts, might have some good effect.

It isn’t that uncommon that nations starting wars give their opponents a stark choice — fight or unconditional surrender, with no guarantee at all that unconditional surrender will have a better result than fighting until there’s nothing to fight with. If the likely costs to the plausible victor are large enough, maybe they would see an incentive to actually negotiate.

Of course, if the simulations appear to be bogus people will not believe them as much.

the anon @43 [with apologies to J.Q. if I appear to presume to speak for him]:

Whether or not you have read J.Q. on war before, your comment is astonishingly ignorant.

Nowhere have I ever known Quiggin to put on rose-colored glasses concerning any aspect of the human condition. On the contrary, the man is often generally downbeat to the point of lugubriousness on the prospects for human civilization.

Insofar as the prevailing conditions of the late C19 are concerned: well, the man knows history, and is an ECONOMIST for Christ’s sake.

Quiggin may or not be a pacifist— that depends on one’s definition of pacifist— but I am fairly certain his definition of “just war” would be “highly qualified”; and in both senses of that phrase.

One-hundred years of virtually continuous WAR, beginning in 1914, is the subject of the OP.

Anarcissie #51: “Progress, so-called, would be slower in a social order of democratic communism than with ‘individual initiative’ so-called, but it would not be non-existent if that was what people really wanted.”

In the “social order of democratic communism”, you still have the question of HOW it is agreed-upon what it is that people want, and that is the “information problem”.

Sorry, I keep forgetting this inserts the movie, and anyway it’s the wrong one because YouTube URLs are not vey handy. Here it the right one (I think):

Meanwhile, the British and French imperial War plans, embodied in the (secret) Sykes-Picot treaty

Not to mention the elephant in the room: the fact that Great Britain and France had already colonized everything there was to rule over in the world, and Germany was feeling massively disadvantaged because of that. So the imperial behaviors of France and Great Britain played a very significant role in the rise of the imperial behavior of Germany.

‘”out”, obviously.

On a fairly quick look through the thread, no one here seems to be aware that the severity and amount of armed conflict in the world was on a downward trend until the (tragic and horrible) Syrian civil war produced an uptick in casualty (battle-death) figures. The Iraq invasion was anomalous, I think. The real problem today is civil wars, and other sorts of wars that are not ‘traditional’ (e.g., Israel vs Hezbollah in Lebanon). Interstate wars — country A fights country B — are on the way out. There hasn’t been a prolonged interstate war since the Iran-Iraq war ended in ’88. (The Iraq invasion of ’03 started as an interstate war but quickly devolved into a civil war plus insurgency.) And there hasn’t been a great-power war (war directly between 2 or more great powers) since 1945 (or 1953, depending on one’s definitions).

p.s. The Balkan wars of the 1990s prob. better classified as civil wars, though I admit it’s a murky case and had interstate elements.

sorry italics shd end with ‘Youth’.

Interesting thread chattering.

“Z” makes the most sense if a bit overstated.

In general, wars break out only when underlying tensions have reach breaking points.

However Georgian and Victorian England was built on perpetual global wars, theatre by theatre, for over 200 years.

There was no stopping of killing after 1945. There was a relapse simply because one side was entirely vanquished but America continued killing, either directly or through proxies, right through to the invasion of Iraq.

“The real problem today is civil wars, and other sorts of wars that are not ‘traditional’”

Same shit, different methods. Modern means of mass communications and proliferation of political rights made it easy to split the enemy country, make it fight itself, and destroy it this way. If this method of conducting warfare could be prevented somehow, then perhaps we’d see tanks rolling across borders again.

@69
What a godawful mess….

I hope to god we learned something from it.

/we probably didn’t…

Isn’t at least one common theory that the primary cause was the uneven advance of the Industrial Revolution? Late developer Germany hoping to catch up with colonial powers that had industrialized first?

@Chris Warren
There was no stopping of killing after 1945. There was a relapse simply because one side was entirely vanquished but America continued killing, either directly or through proxies, right through to the invasion of Iraq.

Of course the Soviets and their proxies (and the Chinese and their proxies) did no killing during the Cold War. Only the US and its proxies.

Trivia I hope:

This Russian university has gone back to its roots and, with the education ministry’s permission and with an award from the agriculture ministry, renamed itself after the Emperor Peter I.

http://www.vsau.ru/

LFC @73

Correct.

Well said.

Lee A. Arnold 06.28.14 at 4:55 pm:
‘Anarcissie #51: “Progress, so-called, would be slower in a social order of democratic communism than with ‘individual initiative’ so-called, but it would not be non-existent if that was what people really wanted.”

In the “social order of democratic communism”, you still have the question of HOW it is agreed-upon what it is that people want, and that is the “information problem”.‘

I was thinking that you were talking about asking everyone affected by a project about it and figuring out some way of aggregating and combining the results in an egalitarian manner befitting a communist social order, and actually doing it, which indeed could take a long time but probably isn’t an insoluble problem if approximate solutions are permitted. But you might be talking about a different question-how, like the processing of power conflicts. (Knowledge is power, etc.)

I was thinking more of technological innovations.

NYTimes: Cost of Iraq war ($1.2 trillion)

Pretty sure they mean the one they already had, which would be sort of the second one, if the upcoming projectile fiesta is number 3, or maybe it’s 2.5.
I get a little vague on big money after a few hundred million. That sure seems like a lot of cash for what many otherwise reasonably sane and intelligent people see as a mistake.

Something else that keeps bothering me is the way journalists talk about things “costing” X amount of dollars. As though the money got incinerated, or thrown into outer space. Spent. Gone.
Maybe there’s a key clue to why this shit is happening, again, why it happens at all, in where that money went.
Who got paid?
Can’t be the soldiers fighting for minimal healthcare from the VA.
Can’t be the families of the fallen.
And it sure didn’t trickle down to the Iraqis themselves.
Cui bono, dudes.

Okay, bullshit. Back in 1914 we didn’t have the World Cup. Now we do. It’s such a simple tweak, it’s astounding that we didn’t think of it thousands of years ago, but back then no one knew that countries like Uruguay existed.

Thornton Hall @ 80:

So Germany didn’t have colonies and they were still very agrarian and poor on a per capita basis compared to the UK. It’s argued that military aggression offered a short cut over the long slog of educating the population and moving them to the cities.

Germany’s per-capita income had already surpassed France’s on the eve of the war, and it had a growth rate similar to or higher than the UK’s; see, e.g., the 1913 figures here. I don’t think they were doing too badly on the urbanization or education fronts, either, to put it mildly. (The modern research university is, after all, strongly based on the early 19th C German model, and German pre-eminence in engineering and science in the early 20th C kind of speaks for itself.)

The second part of your statement would suggest that the war was started by, say, Serbia and Russia, not Germany. Which I think is partly correct, but not for the reasons you suggest.

One should also remember that the foundation of the German Welfare State pre-dated that of Britain by more than a quarter of a century. Bismarck introduced social insurance for the German Empire in 1881, with the famous (in Germany) “Imperial Declaration”:

“Geben Sie dem Arbeiter das Recht auf Arbeit, solange er gesund ist, sichern Sie ihm Pflege, wenn er krank ist, sichern Sie ihm Versorgung, wenn er alt ist.”

This translates as “Give the worker the right to work while he is healthy, assure him nursing when he is sick, and care when he is old.”

This is something which Germans are very proud of to this day. I wonder what the modern US right would make of this rampant socialist? ;)

@A. Kelleher:
Uh… Crimea?

My comment @73 is sarcasm, so I don’t know what this question indicates exactly…

Ok I see S. Clarkson @88 already mentioned Ger. colonies in Africa.

The Ages of mass mobilizations, from Bonapartism to Fordism, are over. No longer can million-person armies be inspired, recruited, or conscripted within “democracies.”

I don’t know whether this is true, but say it is. Does that mean that big armies can be raised only in more backward nations? Is there a benefit to them by doing that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_troops#See_also

I looked at the countries that had the largest military per capita.
North Korea 30%.
Singapore, Cuba, South Korea, about 10%.
Israel, Armenia, Taiwan, a bit less than 10%.
Finland, Lebanon, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Vietnam, Eritrea, Mongolia, over 5%.

I’m not sure I can take these numbers completely seriously, but it looks like you’re at least partly right. There are some other factors involved too, like degree of threat or something like that. All of these with the possible exceptions of Israel and Cyprus have big unpleasant neighbors. And it could be argued that Cyprus has got Greece and Turkey, and some sort of argument could be made for Israel too.

p.s. Of course I’m well aware that the US, China, and Russia have v. sizable militaries, even if the US has not had a draft in quite a long time. The evidence is not all in one direction. (But then it rarely is.)

It is a little naive to call it a “hundred years war”. WWI didn’t emerge from a vacuum, as the Austrian historian Manfried Rauchensteiner likes to point out, there was almost no year in the 20th century before 1914 when there was truly peace in Europe. Arguably the Balkan war of 1904 was when the various European powers (especially Russia and Austria) started getting war fever and started actively looking for military opportunities to shore up their troubled empires. A decade and a half of skirmishing on the periphery of Europe and in the colonies both legitimized war as a tool of foreign policy, and created a rabid class of frustrated military officers in all the European powers who were constantly putting pressure on the politicians to let them “take the gloves off”.

And to John Quiggin, the Tsarist Empire was brutal, but to consider it exceptionally brutal compared to any of the other combatants is hard to justify, and very Eurocentric. The idea that the United Kingdom and France were “democracies” in 1914 holds only if you ignore the millions and millions of colonial subjects who had no voice at all. I would submit that none of the peoples under Tsarist rule were treated anywhere near as badly as Sub-saharan Africans were by the British, French and Germans. The Hungarian treatment of Slovaks and Croats was every bit as brutal and repressive as Russian treatment of Poles. The attitude of the US towards its black and native American populations was arguably more vicious, and lasted longer, than the pogroms or the ethnic cleansings in the Caucuses or Central Asia. Not to mention British behavior in India, etc. The Russian Empire was far more vicious towards its native educated populations than the other powers, leading naturally to Russian, Polish and Jewish emigres loudly attacking the crimes of the Tsar in European periodicals, and creating sympathy among European elites who didn’t want to think too much about the crimes their own leaders were commiting in the name of civilization. To be clear, I don’t want to defend Tsarist Russia, I want to focus more attention on the numerous crimes of the other powers.

The alliance system, which had been evolving since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, was aimed at maintaining a balance of power and avoiding a general war among Great Powers. That system had evolved thru several phases. Initially, Protestant Prussia, Catholic Austria and Orthodox Russia banded together in the reactionary Holy Alliance to put down nationalist aspirations and liberal revolutions. This they continued to do, thru the 1848 revolutions, when Russian troops put down the Hungarian revolution, rescuing the Hapsburgs. In the Crimean War, France and Britain joined Ottoman Turkey to check Russian ambitions, and Austria failed to support Russia — Austrian and Russian interests in the Balkans, where nationalisms were rising and the Ottomans receding, conflicted.

Without Russian support, the Hapsburg position was hopeless, and the wars of German and Italian unification — which were largely wars to eject the Hapsburgs from Germany and Italy — followed, culminating in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which made France a Republic and Germany a nation-state with an authoritarian political structure controlling its military and foreign policy. The Hungarians, no longer needing to fear Russian intervention, were able to negotiate a liberal constitution and their place in a newly established Dual Monarchy, which also retained an authoritarian structure in the hands of the Emperor that governed the military establishment and foreign policy.

Bismarck, fearing encirclement, if an alliance of France, Austria, and Russia should form, sought to recreate the reactionary Holy Alliance as a League of the Three Emperors, aimed at maintaining the status quo. To make it work, Germany, without its own interests in the Balkans, would have to play the role of honest broker, arbitrating conflicts between Austria and Russia as both advanced against a crumbling Ottoman Turkey, and coped with rising nationalisms in that region. It didn’t work out as Bismarck planned. Russia preferred to try to control rising Slavic nationalisms, by championing them, rather than risk Slavic nationalism becoming a foundation of opposition to the Czar. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878 after Russia’s successes in the Russo-Turkey War, Russia felt aggrieved, as Bismarck attempted to shore up the Austrian position in the Balkans at Russia’s expense. It was at that time that Austria received what would prove to be the fatal gift of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as part of a scheme to enable Austria to isolate Serbia from Montenegro and the sea, and possibly seize Salonika at some future date, securing its dominance in the western Balkans.

The Great Game of global competition and ad hoc cooperation among the Great Powers continued and accelerated with the race for Africa, as well as the continuing maneuvering about the Balkans and Black Sea. (Around 1870, the oil boom began around Baku, on the Caspian Sea, in the Caucasus.)

There were a great many conflicts and confrontations among the Great Powers, during the last decades of the 19th and first years of the 20th century, but, for the most part, they had the character of a game of cards, in which the players would play a round or two, then show their cards, and settle accounts accordingly, with no further show or use of force, until the next crisis, though the next crisis might be within a few months. The crises were often more public relations battles to capture the favor of international public opinion than they were actual exercises of military power in battles. Wars were brief and, except for the Balkans skirmishing, far away: the Boer War, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War. Mostly, these crises were a kaleidoscope of differing ad hoc coalitions and confrontations. The French confronting the British in the Fashoda Incident or the British and German cooperating to intervene in Venezuela. The Russians and British playing the Great Game in Afghanistan. The U.S. mediating the Russo-Japanese War.

The First World War broke the pattern. The fluid play of alliances (and betrayals) seemed to settle into a fixed pattern very suddenly in the decade before the outbreak of War in August 1914. In retrospect, the precipitant for this crystallization was the weakness of the Hapsburg Empire. The Dual Monarchy was a hopelessly complex, antiquated mess, and it was utterly dependent on its German ally; it could never independently ally with or even confront any other power, without the leave of Germany. From 1878, Austria was no longer in play; she was married to Germany irrevocably. The Germans were drawn thus into the Balkans and into conflict with Russia, France, Britain and Italy, and thus into supporting the almost equally hopeless Ottomans. The French, cut off from the possibility of an Austrian alliance, were forced to cultivate long-term commitments with Britain and Russia, and Russia could no longer afford its antagonism with Britain. Only Italy, which seemed to have grievances with both France and Austria, remained a wildcard.

Before the Entente Cordiale (1904), Britain had never committed to any but an ad hoc alliance in the Great Power game. It stood aloof. It sometimes leveraged its relationship with the U.S. in Latin America and the Far East, and cultivated a protective relationship with minor powers, particularly Portugal and the Netherlands, which had extensive colonial empires, perhaps to keep them isolated. But, its alliance with France was new, and marked the crystallization of the Great Power system into a fixed dichotomy.

The other change, happening beneath the surface so to speak was, as bob mcmanus hints, the scale of political economy and “Fordism”. The Second Industrial Revolution was fully underway after 1870, encompassing not just Britain, but the U.S., France, Germany, northern Italy, and Austria. Cheap steel, electricity, petroleum, chemicals. The falling costs of transport by steamship and by rail increased the scale of markets. Vast industrial business enterprises emerged in the 1880s. Socialism began its rapid rise from political obscurity as the ranks of wage workers swelled and the implications of broadening suffrage were realized.

The implications of the new industrial technologies for naval warfare were recognized immediately. The implications for armies took much longer to digest. The humiliating Prussian defeat at Jena in the Napoleonic Wars had sparked a spirit of professionalism in the officer corps and progressive reform, which carried forward to the German Army. The innovation of a general staff gave the Germans a capacity to plan the logistics and maneuver of an Army on the new industrial scale. Other Great Powers would be much slower to introduce reforms, in part because the Army was a reactionary’s refuge from liberalism in several of these countries.

The scale of military action was increasing, quietly taking on the character of mass industrialization, without anyone fully realizing the implications. Even if many of the Generals had not been stupid fools, the technical means of command-and-control, let alone the strategic and tactical doctrines, lagged behind the industrialization of firepower and the logistics of massing infantry. This combination of circumstances would magnify the scale of horror once war was underway.

The critical question, as we reflect on the events that followed the assassination at Sarajevo, is why, after the decades-long habit of crises and confrontations followed by negotiated settlements did the First World War go so differently?

One would think that the Russians, Austrians and Ottomans would all have understood that their regimes could not withstand the strains of an actual and protracted war. Of course, no one expected a protracted war. Those three also probably thought that their regimes were so weak that they could not afford to be seen as weak.

The new industrial scale of militaries, along with the weakness of their equally new schemes of command-and-control, played a role. To make a credible threat to be able to use force, mobilization had to be set into motion early.

And, here’s where the Germans get blamed. The German General Staff, responding to the French-Russian alliance had come up with a plan that turned on the superior ability of industrialized Germany to mobilize its mass army quickly. And, it was a plan that called on Germany to knock out France early, before the Russians could complete their mobilization and advance, and then, with France out of the way, turn around and fling the whole German Army at Russia. The only way to get the mass of the German Army into France, though, was to violate Belgian neutrality, and not in a small way. Germany would have to seize nearly the whole country just to have the space and rail capacity to move the German Army in a great fast-moving, swinging arc, which was supposed to envelop Paris from the West.

In the event, it was the Germans, who were in charge. The Austrians would do what they were told to do. The Austrians made the ultimatum to Serbia, designing the ultimatum to be something Serbia could not accept. Serbia, advised by the Russians that the Russians could not intervene in time to save them, caved. (In the event, Serbia was completely devastated.) But, it didn’t mattered. The mere demur in Serbia’s acceptance of Austria’s ultimatum became a cause for war; what Germany wanted was Russian mobilization, the signal to put the German plan for mobilization-cum-conquest-of-Belgium-and-Paris into irrevocable motion. The Russians, knowing the long lead-time on putting their forces into motion, did begin mobilization as a signal of support for Serbia. Germany, satisfied that Russia’s mobilization would make Russia seem the aggressor, began its mobilization. But, Germany’s plan of mobilization entailed invading Belgium and France.

Germany’s plan could have been more defensive, or at least more contingent. Germany certainly had the resources to contain a French advance with relatively few forces, given the narrow and difficult terrain of the actual French-German frontier. In fact, the actual German war plan depended on committing only a small fraction of German forces to this task, and they succeeded. Neutralizing France — showing that France was unable to aid Russia — would have been sufficient to set up the circumstances in which Russia could be persuaded to back down. But, that wasn’t Germany’s plan. Germany’s plan was to defeat both France and Russia, and to do so on a massive scale. And, it entailed the irrevocable violation of Belgian neutrality at the outset.

Germany’s outsized ambitions, reflected in its aggressive mobilization plan, would prevent any negotiated settlement in the early days of the war. The absence of firebreaks — openings for negotiated settlement, opportunities for national leadership to alter course or show restraint — in the German war plan has seemed accidental to some analysts. Others find the Fischer thesis more credible, and Fischer found plenty of documentary evidence, including the smoking gun of the Imperial War council of 1912 that committed German to an aggressive war in the Summer of 1914. The German government’s formulation of war aims — its Septemberprogramm was almost absurdly aggrandizing, calling for annexation of Luxembourg, subjugation of Belgium, expansion across Central Africa, and creation of German-dependent buffer states out of western Russia and Poland.

The OP’s point is not refuted in the least by correctly blaming Germany for the First World War (realistically, for both World Wars, as Hitler revived the war program of the second German Empire for his third). The bullying aggrandizement by violence was something all the Great Powers were engaged in, not just Germany — and usually they engaged in it against weak states and peoples ill-equipped to resist, peoples they actively worked to keep too weak to resist.

I think our more modern security thinking fails to grasp the overriding balance-of-power logic of the times. Membership in the Alliance, and Entente, was not based upon shared ideology or cultural affinity, but was created by the vicissutudes of history. It was really an attempt to maintain the peace among predatory imperialistic powers. Any changes which could be construed as threatening that balance were a threat to the stability of the system.

When was that ever the view of the left? The Spanish Civil War was the glorious fight against fascism, the French Revolution the introduction of modernity, the doomed Commune the origin of Communism.

As for firebreaks, there was the War Credits vote on August 4th. Had the SDP kept to the line, there would have been no war.

Sasha Clarkson:
it’s wrong to judge people by standards which were not common in their society

I think I get the sentiment underneath that but it seems like you’re leaving out the possibility of judging a community by much the same criteria you use to judge an individual, if you’re going to be judging people I mean.
Because I’m leaning more and more toward the idea that, beyond pragmatic maintenance issues, human beings are incapable of morally judging each other with any accuracy. Not that it isn’t fun for some to try.

The possibility of an individual operating within a pathological culture, someone whose intentions and moral decisions come from an obedient and co-operative position in that culture, thus their being morally blameless somehow.
“Hey everybody was a cannibal back then.”
Yeah, it’s true maybe. It’s not like running around a modern city eating people. Not a groovy lifestyle either way. But one’s monstrous, the other atavistic “primitive”.
To us, in our culture.
Cultural relativism-sort-of, as you sort of said.
For me it’s a little incomplete.
I’m not putting a rebuttal on it so much as saying we need some kind of collective thinking through of this.
Judgment and understanding forgiveness are not a binary.
Maybe it’s not so much judgment as rejection.
Is it possible to condemn some act without condemning the actor?
This has come up in some other areas a time or two I’ve noticed.

JQ @106
Your reply noted/understood. (As for the Vietnam war in particular, that wd be a whole other thread.)

I don’t think there was a hero’s journey defined by individual intention until the modern period (i.e. starting around Shakespeare etc.). Before that, heroes were firmly ensconced in the body of God along with the rest of us, they suffered tragedy by getting out of line with that, and individuation was still a mere spark. The rise of the Romantic period added a new dressing to the hero’s journey, that individual achievement was still the divine plan (or in some cases the hero was aided by magical devices) but the glory was here on Earth, until the ongoing secularization drowned out the transcendent impulse entirely, to leave us with the watered-down gabble of consumerist culture + anti-depressants.

The Great War ended the brief ascendancy of the romantic soldier: yes, it was the old heroism and glory going in, but coming out, the useless devastation was recognized by everyone. There had been smatterings of this feeling expressed after the US Civil War 50 years before — even the Europeans were concerned about its appearance (and its lessons for the future) as the first big rail-mechanized war, the first semi- “total” war in which civilians were regular targets too (and Lincoln may have been the first to warn of the coming influence of corporate war profiteers). But the Great War brought it home to everybody, and the advent of World War II was greeted more as something of a wearying and horrifying replay, and not as an opportunity for the glorification of heroes. Those who came back could barely speak of it. WWII may one day be seen as chapter two of The One Big War.

I am not so sure there will be a chapter three. Now, I think we are in a different era, and I think it is correct to call it the post-Great War Era, because the public attitude toward heroism and vainglory seems to be permanently changed. There may always exist the brash needs of young men, but that is a slightly different issue. Note that recent U.S. wars have had to be sold to the public as wars waged for the freedom and democracy OF OTHERS, as well as safety to the “homeland” — a new form of colonial propaganda. And indeed the U.S. sometimes follows through by withdrawing, as from Iraq. Of course, another convenient change is that market colonialism only requires adherence to the capitalist world market — the freed client does not have to sell directly to the United States, although that is encouraged.

The rise of religious fundamentalism is another part of the new era, and, although it has arisen in the United States too, it looks like the danger is in colonial blowback from people who were kept in despair, and are noe organizing upon religious emotions, and can now with modern weapons do lot of damage to others.

The news today? The Taliban has reclaimed more area in Afghanistan, ISIS has declared itself to be the world Sunni Caliphate, and the U.S. is getting in way over its head.

Ack! Sorry about that un-closed URL in my first paragraph. Also would appreciate a boost out of moderation.

Roy @(currently) 111 “beyond pragmatic maintenance issues, human beings are incapable of morally judging each other with any accuracy”

In looking at the past, perhaps the best one can attempt is to judge people by their own declared standards, and also whether they succeed or fail in their objectives.

For example a number of prominent Brits, like TE Lawrence, were dismayed over the betrayal of the Arabs over Syria, as was McMahon who reportedly resigned over the Sykes-Picot agreement. In 1918 Allenby reported to the cabinet “… I reminded the Amir Faisal (son of Sharif Hussein bin Ali) that the Allies were in honour bound to endeavour to reach a settlement in accordance with the wishes of the peoples concerned ….”

This did not happen. Lloyd-George allowed Clemenceau to ignore even the limited protections given to the Arabs in the Sykes-Picot agreement. Not only was this morally wrong, it was bad policy. Trust between Britain and the Arabs was poisoned, and the French involvement in Syria and Lebanon turned out to be a disaster from start to finish.

@Peter T – ” all the moves Vienna made were cleared with Berlin beforehand.”

That is overstating the case, I think. Austria was even more hawkish than Germany. It would be fair to say that Austria pushed and persuaded a Germany that was still kind of wavering in mid-July. It was the Austrians that made the ultimatum against Serbia so harsh, even the Germans were taken by surprise. Von Hötzendorf was certainly no German puppet, he had pushing aggressively for war with Serbia for over a decade.

The Habsburg Empire really deserves a lot more blame for WWI than common wisdom allows. In most English language stories about WWI Austria-Hungary practically vanishes from the stage after FF is killed (Tuchmann is very guilty of this), which makes the history even more confusing to the uninitiated. The fact that Austria-Hungary suffered significantly more casualties in WWI than the United Kingdom (not to mention civilian deaths by an order of magnitude) is rarely mentioned. Austria was certainly still a major power in 1914, even if we don’t remember that anymore. Some of this neglect is because the Empire vanished completely after the war, so there are no political points to be gained today by assigning blame, some of it is due to the fact that Central Europe disappeared from our cultural radar during the Cold War, and some of the neglect is due to the condescension we often unconsciously share towards the losers , and no country lost as abjectly as the Habsburg Empire.

One point that confuses historians to this day, and confused senior military officers and statement in at the time, is that mobilization did not actually mean war. It meant mobilization. The mobilization plans envisaged calling up reservists and amassing large armies on the frontiers. Where the armies were located made an obvious difference in how the opening campaigns would play out. But once they were assembled the armies didn’t have to necessarily move anyplace. They could be shifted around, or stay in place.

For example, histories often repeat Molkte’s nervous breakdown (though this was part of an emotional collapse that lasted months) when the Wilhelm II suggested at the last minute that the Germans scrap their war plan and move forces to the East. However, the German general staff proceeded to do exactly this, countermanding orders for German forces to cross the western German frontier, until it became clear that Britain would not guarantee French neutrality. I think they should have changed their war plans anyway, but the point is that the German general staff obviously had the capability to alter plans in mid-campaign.

The French mobilization plan acutally provided for an army to be kept in reserve, in addition to the four armies assembled in Lorraine, and this army was historically sent to the Ardennes to try to block the German advance. The Austro-Hungarian plan provided for an army that could be either sent against Serbia or against Russia, in the event they tried to do both, but the fact is that they mobilized an army against Serbia and wound up shifting it to Galicia. On three occassions in 1914 and 1915, the Germans took a reserve that they had amassed for a planned breakthrough on the Western Front, and sent it to deal with perceived emergencies on the Eastern Front instead.

The fallacy that almost everyone (the only exception I’m aware of is Kitchener) is that the war would have to be short, so the opening campaigns would be decisive. The mentaility was that the war would be fought with the forces that showed up on the frontiers in the first few weeks. Everyone underestimated the ability of governments to mobilize their economies and populations for the duration. The Germans for example got all their nitrates from one island in the Pacific and knew they could not count on this, in the event their chemists came up with a substitute but this probably wasn’t something that could be planned on.

I don’t disagree with much of Bruce Wilder’s long post earlier (#105), but this is the first that I have heard that Russia advised Serbia to accept the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum. I’ve read extensively on the subject, from historians agreeing and disagreeing with the “Germany caused it” approach, and the usual account is that the Russian government advised the Serbian government to reject the ultimatum.

As David Fromkin pointed out, though the Serbian response was good enough for Wilhelm II, who belatedly started to try to apply the brakes at that point, there was a fair amount of hedging and evasiveness on the points the Serbs accepted. The one point they rejected essentially would have allowed Austro-Hungarian investigators to find out how high in the Serbian government the Black Hand had penetrated.

(anyone) What does contemporary research say about the Fischer thesis ?

Re: Russia and the ultimatum, Fromkin at 190: the Russians “advise[d] Serbia to offer the least possible resistance to any Austrian agreement.” As he adds later, the Russians offered only “moral support” and advised giving way to Austria & letting the egregiousness of the Austrians provoke support from Serbia from other powers.

Thanks Anderson (I’ve been meaning too read Annika Mombauer’s book, but probably won’t get around to it for a while)

History has never been one of my obsessions and I think part of the reason is that when one moves past Bailey/Kennedy or McCulloch, it seems to dive into an absolute mess of details. What’s worse, it seems like every single historian independently develops a unique nomenclature for every book. It wars, for instance, I frequently want to know: who had the power to make decisions, who fought, and what mechanism was used to connect them? I keep almost understanding things only to be frustrated when the next author reframes the whole mess. But it seems like the patterns involved could be illustrative if someone would deign to “oversimplify” and get it a little wrong. I’m imagining like the back of a baseball card that could be quickly compared.

128 et al.: The issue with Liege and the other Belgian fortresses and fortress cities was that the German war plan required that victory against the French would take no more than six (I believe) weeks. If they had bypassed Liege et al. there would have been the possibility of an attack by Belgium in the German rear. If it took too long to subdue them too much time would be wasted and the six week deadline missed. So the plan was to attack them quickly and with overwhelming force immediately.

The “deadline” was set based on the idea that the German army couldn’t defend Prussia from a Russian invasion. In practice the troops in Prussia held them off quite successfully, but that couldn’t have been predicted.

I agree with the idea that the Austro-Hungarians and the French deserve more of the blame than they usually get.

Austria wanted to smack Serbia and insisted on doing so in spite of Serbian acquiescence to an ultimatum even Germany characterized as humiliating.

France (more accurately French generals) was eager for war as they saw German power (military, economic, demographic) growing and theirs shrinking. That was also why republican France was willing to ally with despotic Russia. Their detaching of Russia from the German-Austrian-Russian alliance was a diplomatic coup of the first order; without that, they would never have risked war.

I think the argument with regard to the French alliance with Russia would be that France made itself the hostage of the Czar’s dubious foreign policy acumen, in order to avoid having to submit to the Germans at the first threat of war. If the Czar had been an intelligent and far-sighted leader, atop a secure and competent administration, one might have some confidence in his prudence in avoiding war, but that was not the case. He might choose war, when it was unwise to do so, and his regime might well collapse underneath him during a war (which, of course, it did). So, France took a losing bet as a hedge — not an entirely sensible risk reduction strategy, on the whole.

I am somewhat sympathetic to the French — it was not like they were turning down any great alternatives staring them in the face. Belgium and the Netherlands were determined to remain neutral; Britain didn’t have a standing Army at home comparable to the other Great Powers; Italy was willing to listen, but was nominally one of the Central Powers before the war. The most important thing the French could do to improve their position — reform the French Army command — appeared to be politically impossible — indeed, it wouldn’t happen until DeGaulle, during and after WWII.

I’m going to refrain from being provoked by a phrase as insulting as “micro-metric casuistry of blame”. I don’t think that’s what we’ve been doing here.

History is an account of the activities of (potentially) millions of people over all the hours of their lives over a period of years and years. To compress that meaningfully into a few pages, or a few hundred pages of narrative is a daunting task. But, for there to be any “truth” value to such a highly compressed narrative, it must have a definite relationship to the details. It is not enough to say, for example, “the American Civil War was about slavery”. The narrative has to unpack its theses in ways that faithfully account for the details — at least the details we can document from the detritus and documents left behind. You’d have to go with something a bit more substantive, like, “The United States experienced a constitutional crisis over the issue of slavery (expansion), which resulted in civil war.” And, you’d do that because it unpacks in a way that (better) accounts for the documentary evidence of the course of events.

The First World War was one of the most destructive, bloody senseless events in human history, and understanding how it happened is important as well as inherently interesting. There are a lot of competing narratives of the “causes” of the First World War, that can account for many of the known facts. But, if any of them are to be regarded as facially true, they have to also account for, and accomodate, key details of how and why particular human beings decided to go to war. Broadbrush treatments that dispense with such facts without acknowledgment are liable to descend quickly into mere fatuousness.

The “truth” of an interpretation can not be tested by replicative experiment. You cannot reproduce history in some alternative time-line to test a counterfactual line of speculation. All that you can do, to test the truth-value of an interpretation is apply it to the facts, and extend it to additional facts. Any reasonable thesis will account for the facts already known to the narrator — unless he’s a complete tool — but the powerful theses will unpack and extend, to account for additional facts. The best theses expand to account for a lot of information.

I think the commenters here have been sorting through alternative theses, that cover a lot of history, even as they’ve been sorting through a few key facts, which are, arguably, dispositive concerning which theses have power and truth-value.

139: what you said. Indifference to the causes is indifference to the effects.

I guess I’m fundamentally opposed to the conservative politics that seem to underlie a thesis like Clark’s in The Sleepwalkers. (NB I’m ignorant of Clark’s personal politics.) It Was All an Unavoidable Mistake suggests there’s no blame, no fault, and shit just happens with humanity along for the ride. This may be true, but I’m against it. It’s Burke turned up to 11. Rather: People made bad choices. It’s at least theoretically possible to learn not to screw up.

Put another way, I’m against a theory of history that might in 2103 decide that Bush & Cheney just couldn’t help themselves.

@Omega Centauri

I don’t disagree w you that some technical lessons have been learned, but I think the more important lessons that have been — at least partly — learned are not technical. They are lessons, e.g., about the costs vs. the (supposed) benefits of territorial expansion. As Martha Finnemore wrote 10 years ago in The Purpose of Intervention, today most leaders of most countries don’t want more territory. “Start war of territorial expansion next Monday” is not on their to-do list.

Individual leaders and decision-makers do still matter. I shudder to think what might have happened had LBJ rather than JFK been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I wdn’t esp have wanted Nixon as pres. during the Cuban Missile Crisis either. As E. Scarry reminds in her new bk w the (perhaps somewhat unfortunate) title ‘Thermonuclear Monarchy’, Nixon while the impeachment proceedings vs him were going on said to reporters “I can go into the office, pick up the phone, and in 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead.” I don’t have the context, but it’s not a pleasant quote regardless of the context, which was prob. Nixon’s increasing psychological instability.

OK, very off topic. Back to WW1, the July Crisis, and all that.

LFC:
No doubt there are harder more fundamental lessons than just the technical ones. Especially I would include the cultural memes that the create/promote pass-on. Ultra-nationalism, that glorifies past violence, and justifies violence against those not in the in-group for one. Attitudes towards militarism. Lack of thinking at the level of the system as a whole, rather than just my organization’s litle part of it, and how we can maximize our local objectives.. And so on.

I don’t think we’ve done all that well with the technical lessons either. Despite some good progress, we had the Cuban missle crisis, and the 1983 nuclear crisis, where but for a local Russian commander, disobeying orders and refusing to launch nukes when his technical indicators were indicating an attack was in progress, we narrowly avoided accidental armegeddon.

Bruce Wilder @139: “I’m going to refrain from being provoked by a phrase as insulting as “micro-metric casuistry of blame”. I don’t think that’s what we’ve been doing here.”

Why do I do it? I am a drive-by commenter who gets himself in trouble by coming in a little too heavy at the end of dead threads! I should know better, as I have plenty to do to occupy my time. (This is as good an opportunity as any to remark on how impressed I am at the sheer volume of writing some of you folks are able to do here!)

[To be clear, I am not crying. I don’t feel nearly as persecuted as Jesus or Geronimo or Rosa Luxemburg or that other guy!]

Anderson @141: “Indifference to the causes is indifference to the effects.”

No doubt: But I have never beaten my wife.

BW: I am sorry you found that particular phrase insulting; it was intended to be descriptive of the comments of some others, and not those of your admirable self. I generally find your comments in line with my own views.

Yes, I exaggerated when I said it applied to most of the comments. Rather, 30-40% of them, I would guess. I won’t name names, but I am talking about all the arm-chair von Moltkes who always show up whenever Quiggin puts up one of these anti-war posts. I understand completely his impulse to post and then bow out. He is right to anticipate the arrival of the war-gamers and warboys.

I intended to explain my position at some length, but bob mcmanus mmostly obviated the need with his comment at 140.

Thnx, Bob.

So, just a few cursory remarks:

Briefly, I am a historical determinist. Those here who think it matters what “choices” were made by individuals at the “proximate” level of causation are, in my opinion, deluded. Even the highest-ranking players in that game (the run-up to the GW), so . . . so fucking PROUD, and so fucking IMPORTANT, were minor pieces shuffled about the board by forces beyond their comprehension. If you will pardon the scholastic language, I think we should be more concerned with examining the “efficient” causes of events. These are such as human bio-geography, the development of various political and social systems and institutions, socio-economic stratification within and between societies, etc.

In a word: HISTORY. Not meaning to shout. The caps are to indicate reverence. History is the story of the succession of the physical states, in space-time, of the human race and its environment.

I could, like bob mcm and some others here (I mean CT, not this thread. geo, maybe; one or two others) be a Marxian. What prevents me being one is my pessimism. I am far from convinced that History will unfold a Workers’ Paradise or Socialist Utopia of any kind. Ι alluded to the Gibsonian society up-thread (a kind of “u/dys-topia” in which the “u/dys” dimension is in a more-or-less exact scalar correspondence to the socio-economic stratification of the society). That is where I think we are headed. We are almost there.

Revolution is, most likely, not a serious option. The models we have suggest that it would be retro-grade. There will surely be serious convulsions. But in the West, world conditions (climate change, ) will conspire with politics to create revolution-proof societies. Our governments will save us by exterminating whole nations of Other People. Our soldiers, safe and sequestered from society in their club, will not hesitate to mow down the mob. As institutions become increasingly neo-fascist, today’s gun-nuts and “libertarians” will discover that they are statists after all. What they have really wanted anyway, all along, is just to kill us (environmentalists, peaceniks, union activists such as myself, et al).

I really hope I am wrong!

And while we don’t all agree on everything, let’s work together to stop the killing.

P.s.: Unfortunately, in addition to being a determinist, genetics, circumstance, and opportunity have conspired to make me a hedonist. Tonight, I made some delicious fried rice, with veg, chicken, egg, and bacon (good soy, oil, cumin, garlic), and drank too much Riesling, so slightly buzzed.

G’night, all.

[BTW: As I threatened up-thread, I did go out Saturday to shop for LPs at antique stores. In this hick town, where few listen to opera, and fewer still listen on LPs, I found FOUR Maria Callas LPs in pristine condition (as though literally never played) for ONE DOLLAR EACH. FY!]

And again, I have to salute bob mcmanus @140 (not 141, as I had it above), for his awesome, very moving comment.

She gives her body.

Indeed. There are depths . . .

Briefly, I am a historical determinist. Those here who think it matters what “choices” were made by individuals at the “proximate” level of causation are, in my opinion, deluded. Even the highest-ranking players in that game (the run-up to the GW), so . . . so fucking PROUD, and so fucking IMPORTANT, were minor pieces shuffled about the board by forces beyond their comprehension.

Yes, sure. When according to the institutional wisdom of some particular institution there is one best decision to make, the institution will arrange to promote leaders who will make that decision. People who don’t reliably make the “correct” decisions will tend to get weeded out. It’s predictable that they will do as they are required to. Betting that they might not is a sucker’s game.

Sometimes they are faced with choices where the institutional wisdom does not say what to do. Then they might do something unpredictable, with random results. This is not necessarily an improvement over them doing the predictable thing.

People who are not so heavily selected are not as certain to be predictable. The system is designed to make their choices matter less. But it’s hard to guard against threats you can’t imagine….

It’s as if we’re puppets, and the system uses a variety of methods to control our behavior, from subtle to brutally direct. But every now and then one of us does something that changes the rules, and then pretty soon the system requires us to something different.

Americans used to laugh at communist organizations where one day everybody would take one stand, and then in a matter of days they’d all switch and take a radically different one — because that’s what the organization did and they had to go along if they wanted to stay in it. That joke is getting less funny….

I don’t know whether this post will work, but not long after Thornton Hall posted @133, I saw the cartoon (hopefully) linked below somewhere else, and it seemed approprate :)

I want to read a lot of what followed my last comment more carefully. In the meantime, I think there’s a value to asking, “what is the purpose of *this* history?” If it is to help us learn the lessons of war, then it seems there would be a particular kind of simplification applied consistently across eras would be useful.

“Most here have probably read William H. McNeil’s The Rise of the West, but I can’t recommend it highly enough. It is a monumental work of analysis and synthesis. One of the best bits: In the later chapters, Professor McNeil anticipates (IMHO) William Gibson’s C21 Western mass society by forty years.”

I haven’t read that specific book, but what I have read from McNeill (while interesting) can’t really tell us much about specific, contingent events like WW1. (Although my own biases would prefer an analysis based on the system as a whole, looking at how the parts interacted in that specific context to create the war , rather than examining each actor in isolation and building a case from there.)
Anyway, I think this Timothy Burke post is a good defence of particularism

https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/02/20/particularism-as-a-big-idea/

(also, I am not Marxist. It seem’s to me that mainstream Marxists have all but given up on explaining the world and have fallen back on whatever mode of analysis best supports their priors ? )

@142 Omega Centauri.

I would suggest that the system indeed had a catastrophic failure mode but in fact they didn’t know it. There hadn’t been a world war since the fall of Napoleon. There had been the Franco-Prussian War but that was short and decisive. The various crises leading up to 1914 (Morocco, the Balkan Wars) had all been settled. Even if they had led to war, the international consensus (based partly on the Franco-Prussian War) was that it would be short and decisive, not “catastrophic” except in the sense that all wars are catastrophes.

That consensus was still strong in the summer of 1914.

The memory of that consensus and its utter failure to predict what actually happened should be in every policy makers’ mind as they consider bombing Iran, annexing Crimea, expanding into the South China Sea, or what have you.

It’s all in the game, yo. Аll in the game…

I was only trolling with my last line @157, btw.

I really couldn’t tell.

My limited experience has been that there is no longer any real organization behind Marxism, so pretty much anybody can say they’re a Marxist if they want to. Kind of like Christianity, it used to be the Papacy could declare you a heretic if they didn’t like you, but now anybody can call himself a Christian and who would know better?

So there’s no coherency. There isn’t very much you can say “Marxists do” and be right more than 65%. You can usually depend on them to complain about capitalism and a few things like that, but the agreement doesn’t go very far.

These days Marxists are splintered worse than Protestants.

So when I hear somebody say “Mainstream Marxists do X” usually what I get is that here is somebody who has had even less contact with Marxists than I have, who is so utterly clueless that he doesn’t know how clueless he is.

I didn’t see any particular reason to expect you were trolling, since I meet lots of people who do that sort of thing for real. But I’m glad you were.