> Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."
Very strange how WWI makes almost no sense from today's perspective. Every country was damaged either directly by the conflict, or indirectly through its protracted (and still ongoing) resolution.
Had those young men simply decided to do nothing rather than join, the world would have been a better place.
I'd be curious to know Butler's take on WWII (he died in 1940). That's the one that people seem most hung up on. It's the only war in living memory considered near universally "good" by those in the US. It's the war that's invoked by every administration trying to stir up popular support for a military adventure in a country most voters can't place on a map.
I'm doubtful our current reverence for WWII will stand the test of time. Long after Hitler has been replaced by the next boogeyman, history students of the future will scratch their heads at what could have possibly motivated a young man to volunteer for such a fool's errand.
>Very strange how WWI makes almost no sense from today's perspective. Every country was damaged either directly by the conflict, or indirectly through its protracted (and still ongoing) resolution.
US won big in that war. WWI nearly bankrupted the British Empire, guess who it was loaning money from? (Hint: it's the US[1]). The only finally paid it off in 2015.
WWI turned the US into a world power, and marked the end of many (other) Empires.
As for the European powers, the war made a lot of sense before it started, as a lot of money was spent on making the shiny toys that killed so many people. Maybe not to the citizens of the countries that took part in the war, but surely to the profiteers.
Finally, one can argue that the war made sense for Germany in the long run, in spite of all the losses. Before the war, Germany was surrounded by Empires: the Russian Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman ones. Germany was allied with some of them, threatened by others, but the history shows how fickle the alliances were.
Fast-forward to today, and Germany is still there, while the Empires are gone. WW1 effectively took down the Russian Empire, and was the beginning of the end of the British one (to say nothing of the others).
I am being facetious here, but if the goal of WW1 was to establish a more friendly Europe for German ambitions, then that goal was eventually accomplished.
That's to say, the war made sense for Germany because it was surrounded by states that stood to lose more (if you ignore human life).
Of course, this argument doesn't make sense if you care about people to the slightest extent. But the people who start the wars rarely do.
Also, world war 1 was revolutionary in terms of politics.
The many countries (sometimes newly established after the fall of an empire like austrian-hungary or russia) suddenly found themselves with a completely new political system.
The november revolution in germany resulted in the abolishment of the monarchy and firmly entreched social-democrats inside the political spectrum. It also shows us why having a young democracy without a strong sense of institutional-ism and tradition is incredible fragile.
The whole “white feather” campaign during WWI (women would hand unenlisted young men a “white feather” which was understood to represent cowardice and shame men into enlisting) really contrasts with the unemployment that British soldiers faced after the war: “no former servicemen need apply” was a common warning on shops in the early 20’s. They were treated like garbage before the war, during the war, and after it, too.
WW1 and 2 were the same conflict. The apparent stupidity of WW1 is really a function of how accustomed we are to modern industry, communications, and some of the things hard-won by that conflict.
End of the day, it was all about resources, and is no different than today’s conflicts, which boil down to oil on the supply and the control of money on the demand side.
Except now Iran shoots missiles at a US base in Iraq and the price of oil barely budged. Times have changed, and the US is much more energy independent. And over the next decade even more so as the EV revolution and renewable energy continue to dominate.
IMO the increasing irrelevance of the Middle East will continue to increase world peace and prosperity, at the expense of some truly awful regimes which will crumble.
>Had those young men simply decided to do nothing rather than join, the world would have been a better place.
I am not so sure. I think the main reason that decolonization happened is that a whole generation of young men were lost and Europe was too exhausted and poor from the two world wars to keep its colonies.
Without WWI, there would not have been WWII which would have left the European nations as the premier powers in the world who would have held on to their colonies in Asia and Africa.
So without WWI, there would still be a pretty high chance that India would still be a British colony.
Europe may have been a better place, but probably not the rest of the world.
> Very strange how WWI makes almost no sense from today's perspective. Every country was damaged either directly by the conflict, or indirectly through its protracted (and still ongoing) resolution.
We get to look back with hind sight and only remember negative consequences from positive actions. The US entered WW1 after Germany began unrestricted submarine ware fare for the second time, and coming on the heels of the Zimmerman telegram. France and Belgium were invaded by hostile power. Germany feared Russian modernization and fear of not being able to Compete with France and Russia. Russia sided with the Serbs. France Sided with Russia whose alliance it has sought to counteract the power of a newly unified Germany which had defeated France in 1871 taken territory and imposed a large reparation payment. Austria an absolute monarchy wanted to quite serb nationalism.
WWII was the last time modern industrialized nations were openly at war with each other. The nuclear bomb changed everything. That's one reason WWII is regarded differently than anything that has come since.
Hitler's extermination of the Jews will have him as a historical villain for a long, long time.
The stupid thing about WWII is the whole thing was could have been avoided by people being reasonable with the Treaty of Versailles. The deal they signed effectively putting Germany into debt bondage made something going pear shaped pretty much inevitable, as predicted quite clearly by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Of course by the time Hitler had tanks rolling it was too late to sort things peacefully. Thankfully they learned the lesson and were economically easy going on Germany and Japan after WWII but it was a darn expensive lesson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_t...
The other thing that happened was the Weimar Republic under Heinrich Bruning responded to the onset of the great depression with austerity measures. Just like the US did with similar results; deflation, industrial collapse, massive unemployment, and civil unrest.
The difference was the US got FDR instead of Hitler.
Modern Economists hate talking about this and have managed to drop it down the memory hole.
Also, the weimar republic was a very young democracy in a country with very little democratic traditions.
Many germans simply didn't believe democracy was the form of goverment required to battle the great depression and return germany to it's former glory. Both on the left side aswell as the right side of the political spectrum. The nearly endless turmoil during the 20's was a result of that.
Always seems to me that political culture is long lived and difficult to change. Seems really common that revolutionaries once they take over find it impossible to govern without mimicking the previous government. AKA how the Soviet Union ended up looking a lot like the Czarist Russia. Ditto a bunch of former states. And how China seems to be slipping back into rule by mandarins under an figurative emperor.
It depends how you measure it as there were worse people in the same era as Hitler. If I recall the stats correctly it is a much better bet to be led by someone like Hitler over Stalin or Mao.
The ethnically targeted nature of the holocaust is the main claim to 'worst of the worst' status, but honestly it isn't obvious to me that a dead Jew is more horrific than a dead anyone else. They are both pretty bad.
>The ethnically targeted nature of the holocaust is the main claim to 'worst of the worst' status, but honestly it isn't obvious to me that a dead Jew is more horrific than a dead anyone else. They are both pretty bad.
What made the holocaust particularly heinous, apart from the ethnic cleansing and antisemitism (the latter of which was not entirely uncommon in Western culture, unfortunately) was the industrial scale and effort applied to it. The Nazis weren't just killing Jews, which would have been bad enough, they set up (possibly the first ever) large scale automated data collection and processing network using IBM tabulators to efficiently process census data and find the Jews to kill, as well as organize and correlate the resources, personnel and urban infrastructure to be able to kill them by the trainload, with the eventual goal of killing every single Jew in Europe.
While it is true that other groups were targeted by the Nazis, the holocaust was still in a class of evil all of its own. It's one of the events that led to the coining of the word "genocide," after all.
Do note the Nazis didn't target the Jews exclusively. They had a plan calling for the near total extermination of all people of Slavic origin. They just were stopped before they could bring it to completion -- though they did manage to start it!
The crimes of Nazism are horrific and put them in an entirely different level of evil.
Hitler was horrible. Stalin was horrible. Stalin killed more people. But Stalin had more years in which to do it, and ruled a larger population. If you calculate (total body count) / (people-years ruled), I suspect Hitler was worse. (He might not be worse than Pol Pot, though...)
Famine deaths [1] still outclass genocide deaths [2], and there is still insufficient data on the Native American genocide, though it is likely on the same order as the Holocaust. You are right that the death rate per unit time wasn't as high, and the Holocaust is probably up there on that basis. The Holodomor is pretty on par with the Holocaust for death rate per unit time at the low end of death estimates, and outstrips the Holocaust at the high end of estimates, happened first, but wasn't publicized until relatively recently.
Never underestimate the depths of muderous intent those who wield power can potentially inflict.
>The Holodomor is pretty on par with the Holocaust for death rate per unit time at the low end of death estimates, and outstrips the Holocaust at the high end of estimates, happened first, but wasn't publicized until relatively recently.
It wasn't publicized because the New York Times was involved in covering it up.
So WWII as being necessary to stop Hitler, I can see withstanding the test of time.
The things that caused WWII, Hitler's rise to power, and the systems that enabled and, frankly, bent him and the Nazis towards the evils they committed, I think we were culpable for, for how Germany was positioned on the world stage post WWI. Germany was ripe for a demagogue, and people needed the sense of security mindlessly following one provides.
Increased unaddressed income inequality, a growing partisan divide that led to a large group feeling disenfranchised enough to rally around a candidate whose whole platform was "burn the status quo to the ground", etc?
I mean...we didn't have an unnecessary war that left us in a bad state; we got there ourselves.
The capitalist project has failed, and our Constitution - poorly written even for the time - is wholly unequipped to deal with the crisis, nor the emergence of highly ideological political parties.
I agree overall on both points, but it's worth noting that the founders intended for the constitution to be amended much more frequently than it has been.
The challenge becomes what to do next. Do we follow Lenin's teaching and attempt a revolution, do we structure our society around trade-unionism, do we need to invent a new form of government, or are we destined to a fascist future ruled by increasingly imperial powers?
This is the kind of whitewashing bullshit proliferating in the west that drives me mad.
Hitler wasn’t the fruit of Great Depression suffering. Most of the world was suffering the consequences of the Great Depression. Hell, many countries had autocrat leaders at the same time. None have committed anywhere near the level of atrocity that Hitler has.
Because Hitler was a product of German people’s fanatical antisemitism and anti-slavism. The roots of which reach back long before World War I.
Bismarck was famous for and boastful of his antipolonism and often called Poles “animals”, “wolves” etc. And he’s thought of as that “progressive” father of modern Germany.
With a dad like that it’s hardly a wonder that the kid turned out to be shitty.
Everyone had huge anti-semitism at the time. The US had extremely common "No Jew" rules for clubs and such. We didn't end up gassing jews.
I was not referring to the Great Depression. I'm talking about the War Guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles. It left Germany with a huge financial burden to other countries, and did nothing to actually address any of the issues that had caused WWI.
Yeah, the Jews were a convenient "other" to blame. The playbook is pretty straightforward - blame the status quo, the economic pressures (fair or not) that the poorest are facing (which only works if those feeling they're poor are sufficient in number), while doing nothing that would actually benefit them, and blame some 'other'. You've seen it repeat time and again.
The point I was making is that the status quo in Germany at that time -was- onerous. Being economically liable for the entire cost of a war, both the damages inflicted on both sides, AND the financial cost incurred in waging it for both sides, is going to be felt. And people are going to chafe; after all, the country probably had a reason for going to war in the first place, even if it was just public sentiment. And forcing such a treaty on Germany was the decision of the Allies.
Well, as the entirety of my people were saved from extinction, I for one am glad that some "fools" decided to risk their lives to end what was otherwise a very effective genocide.
As it stands, a third of us were murdered by the "Third Reich", and our numbers have still not recovered.
> Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die... They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure.
Told by whom? Oh that's right, the news media. People really need to go look into why the NYTimes, WashingtonPost, Pulitzer's properties, Hearst's properties, etc were created and how their yellow journalism played into wars even to this day.
Also keep in mind, the biggest ( proportionally ) benefactor of war isn't defense contractors, it's the news industry.
People forgot that WashingtonPost went bankrupt in the first half of the 1900s and the news industry was in danger of collapse. What saved the industry? War.
Keep in mind that the news industry, especially the NYTimes ( a company created by a banker ) editorial board, attacked Butler as a "hoaxer" ( aka conspiracy peddler ). How times change, but the propaganda remains the same.
> Very strange how WWI makes almost no sense from today's perspective.
WW1 makes total sense. By WW1, the entire world had been conquered by European powers and America. Every piece of land on earth was under European/American control or influence. So european powers had no one left to fight but themselves.
> Every country was damaged either directly by the conflict, or indirectly through its protracted (and still ongoing) resolution.
Europe was in ruins and more importantly fractured. Go read TS Eliot's The Waste Land. It's partly about his angst of over a broken europe and the collapse of western civilization and the ultimate pointlessness of that war.
> It's the only war in living memory considered near universally "good" by those in the US.
It's considered good because propaganda tells us it's good. Propaganda tells us its good because we came out on top. But I don't see how a war with nukes and upwards of 120 million dead could be considered good. That's more dead than the worst pandemic in recent history - spanish flu which killed upwards of 100 million. I doubt anyone would say the spanish flu was "good".
> I'm doubtful our current reverence for WWII will stand the test of time.
Reverence of ww2 will be determined by who is in power. History, as all other propaganda, is written by those in power.
> Reverence of ww2 will be determined by who is in power. History, as all other propaganda, is written by those in power.
I think this occurs within some time frame of the event, and even then only among the better known, funded and "court approved" historians. There will be outcast historians that plug away at recording various facts surrounding the event (e.g., continued investigation into whether FDR was intentionally bellicose, was it truly necessary to nuke Japan, was fire bombing the German civilians tactically useful, etc.).
WWII had a compulsory draft where it was already established by then that congress had the power to initiate a draft. It was also hashed out that it was a federal issue and not a state one.
Which we all know is hot garbage. The government quite literally says, your individual freedoms are not greater than our goal for the country. If you ask me, that sounds NO different than communism! But when you fight for uncle sam, it must mean "the greater good" is good, just because the "greater good" isn't commie red "greater good."
I know it is not a popular view but I think WWII was a major mistake. We could of course not have stopped Hitler's initial actions, but it was the West's choice to wage war against Hitler. I think that was a mistake.
The rational was to keep Poland and the Czech republic free. However at the end of the war neither country was free. They had fallen under the Soviet sphere of influence. The goals they set hence failed.
They KNEW Hitler planned to attack Russia. He had spoken for years about that. That meant they would go through Poland. The sneaky but rational solution would have been to sacrifice Poland temporary and let Hitler attack Russia. Russia and Germany would have worn each other out.
At the end a heavily built up allied military could have marched in and cleaned up.
Note that while this wasn't widely known in the West at the time and therefore cannot be their justification for going to war against Hitler, Nazi Germany's "Generalplan Ost" [0] (their "General Plan for the East", a plan of global genocide so vast it defies belief) called for the almost total extermination of the populations of most Slavic countries, Russia and Poland included. If I remember correctly, the quota for Poland was 80% Poles -- and note I say Poles, not Jewish Poles -- to be exterminated.
So on the one hand, Cold War Poland ended up a puppet of the Soviets. Repression of dissidents, etc. But the Poles were alive. On the other hand, had Nazi Germany won and completed their plan there would be no Poles left to complain about their lack of freedom.
Except I doubt it would ever have happened. Germany would have struggled mightily with Russia. Likely Germany and Russia would have fought each other to some sort of standstill. They would have bled each other out and which point allied forces could have moved in and beaten both Germany and Russia. We could have avoided the whole cold war and east block.
I don't think that is given. If Germany had sent massive forces towards Russia and there had been no war in the west, France and Britain would have been free to launch a major assault on Germany while German troops where tied down in Russia.
> We could of course not have stopped Hitler's initial actions
Germany was not ready to fight a war in 1937, 1938, or even 1939, when it actually invaded Poland. Had the West actually responded to German aggression with a land assault, even as late as the actual invasion of Poland, then it's rather likely that the war could have been cleaned up before the Soviet Union would have invaded Poland.
Furthermore, an appropriate Western response to actually supporting the Central European states would probably have given the USSR pause before invading, as it would have demonstrated that the defensive treaties were not mere pieces of paper.
Ironically, none of the countries in WWI were actually obliged to enter into the war by virtue of their treaties.
The Triple Alliance didn't kick in unless one of the parties was "without direct provocation on their part, [...] attacked or [...] engaged in a war with two or more Great Powers nonsignatory to the present treaty" (or Italy attacked by France alone). But France and Britain declared war after Germany did, so the "two or more" doesn't kick in. Not to mention that the "direct provocation" is an ample loophole for anyone wanting to wriggle out of the treaty (as Italy, in fact did).
The Triple Entente wasn't a single treaty. The Franco-Russian Alliance was the strongest, requiring France and Russia to attack Germany should Germany attack one of them or merely mobilize in response to any of the Triple Alliance mobilizing. But again, this is a defensive trigger, and Russia mobilized before Germany did [1], so the clause didn't kick in. The Anglo-French Entente was not backed by any military alliance treaty, nor was the Anglo-Russian Entente. The Treaty of London merely guaranteed Belgian neutrality, and did not oblige anyone to enter into war against someone who violated Belgian neutrality.
For extra irony, in WWII, Britain and France went to war against Germany in defense of Poland, with whom they did not have a binding defensive treaty, but not in defense of Czechoslovakia, with whom France did.
[1] We know now that Germany actually decided its full mobilization before Russia did, but held back on announcing it just long enough to have the Russian mobilization announce first. In the event, France actually did not mobilize until after Germany mobilized against it, the German military having convinced Kaiser Wilhelm that mobilizing against only Russia was impossible.
You might find Garet Garrett's writings against World War II interesting [1]. He was not a socialist (he was an ardent anti-communist), which makes his conservative arguments against joining all the more interesting.
History doesn't tolerate what-ifs, but just in case. Soviet Union wouldn't stand war with Germany without Allies. Hitler would get access to all the Soviet's resources: cheap slaves' workforce, food, oil, coal, steel, Arctic and Far East seaports. Then attack on the US together with Japan, both East and West coast. The US would not have a chance. Game over.
As far as I know, current consensus is that the Soviet Union would have defeated Nazi Germany regardless of Western intervention, it just would have taken more time (and a lot more casualties) to get to Berlin.
It really is a case where the Nazis picked a fight they just couldn't win.
Current consensus where? I live in Russia, we currently have a state-induced wave of unhealthy "patriotic" hype here, mostly based on WW2 events. But even in these circumstances I rather got an opinions like "without West we wouldn't make it against Hitler" in my circles.
The keyword is "lend-lease" [0]. About 5% of weapons for 1942 Soviet offensive operations, decisive for the final outcome, were US-made. And 80% of cars and trucks. And lots of raw material.
Consensus in the West, by historians not trying to score a political point about current world affairs.
Lend-lease, while critical help, is often overplayed in the West as a way to diminish the Soviet contribution to the war -- this is in itself the legacy of historical views shaped by the Cold War and (unsurprisingly) by ex Wehrmacht officers who collaborared with the West after WW2. There's no credible mainstream analysis that has Germany winning against the Soviet Union. In fact, it is often argued that by starting Barbarossa, Hitler effectively lost the war. Germany didn't have the manpower, logistics capabilities or equipment to take on the Soviet Union.
That's not to say it wouldn't have cost the Soviets a lot more time, effort and bloodshed to defeat the Nazi war machine without the help of the Western Allies.
I'm not Russian and I'm completely uninterested in how current Russia and Putin are spinning this, by the way.
> Had those young men simply decided to do nothing rather than join, the world would have been a better place.
Words cannot express how disappointed I am with people who say things like this.
Assuming you believe that your country's political system is not worth overthrowing, then serving your country is an honorable act, and people who have served should not be criticized for taking on the burden that is service. Quite the opposite.
Now if your political system is beyond repair and unsalvageable through reform, then sure, service is not honorable.
It's unfortunate that so many of my fellow citizens seem to take the intellectually lazy way out: Criticize the choice to serve, but be unwilling to reform/overthrow their government. This line of thinking is so widespread, it's truly disheartening.
Very strange how WWI makes almost no sense from today's perspective. Every country was damaged either directly by the conflict, or indirectly through its protracted (and still ongoing) resolution.
Had those young men simply decided to do nothing rather than join, the world would have been a better place.
I'd be curious to know Butler's take on WWII (he died in 1940). That's the one that people seem most hung up on. It's the only war in living memory considered near universally "good" by those in the US. It's the war that's invoked by every administration trying to stir up popular support for a military adventure in a country most voters can't place on a map.
I'm doubtful our current reverence for WWII will stand the test of time. Long after Hitler has been replaced by the next boogeyman, history students of the future will scratch their heads at what could have possibly motivated a young man to volunteer for such a fool's errand.