So, World War I. An opening question would be "what are you taught about World War I?" and then "What do you think happened in World War I?"

Besides the obvious. I mean, what do you think was going behind the scenes.

I'm seeing world war 1 right now during history. We're seeing why

1. why it was a world war
2. why it was a total war
3. what started it
4. to be continued


what i think happened?
well, to stay it in a little story
*: frenchman
-: frenchman's mother
*hey mom, we're in war with germany again, going to the battlefield, see ya next week
-see ya, honey, there is some food on the table.

*hey dude, going to the war too?
** yea, shoot some germans in the head, get defeated again eventually, same old story
*Yea, no problem

"at the battlefield"

*damn, they have gas!
**Need to protect ourself, dig some trenches!

"3 years and 10m deaths later"
*damn it, we lost 5 cm² of land again!



sounds stupid, that's kinda how it went.
lot's of deaths, no land won.

My completely unhistorical view:

--Lots of high-up politicians and royalty wanted far more land than was good for them and made a huge mess of alliances because they were paranoid
--Because some people in Bosnia wanted to be part of Serbia, a terrorist organisation called the Black Hand assassinated Franz Ferdinand
--Thanks to the mess of alliances most of the countries in Europe were dragged into war
--Ordinary people were the ones that fought, suffered and died in the politicians' war when it should have been the politicians because most the general public had nothing against 'the enemy'.

WW1 seems utterly pointless to me, I mean at least with WW2 the Allies were fighting for a good cause, although by no means does that make it any less tragic.

I agree, from what I've been reading on WWI of late it appears the support for the war was built on a lot of fabrications and stories. In the US propagandists claimed that the Germans were committing horrible atrocities when they violated Belgian neutrality that absolutely nobody on the ground could confirm, such as German soldiers eating people. The truth was that the Germans were repaying the Belgians for all the problems they caused while marching through, in exchange for Belgium not being assimilated.

If it's not a call of duty based game, it's not war I think it was crazy for a war to happen over the assasination of archiduke ferdinanz (or however you pronounce it) period

there were lots of "small things" happening that was making everyone mad. and then the assassination of archduke of whatever happened and then the war started. the assassination was an excuse to start the war

It was more of the straw that broke the camel's back.

Basically the last real war in Western Europe was a quick, decisive war between Germany and France with Germany winning. They gained lots of land in a short amount of time. All the other European leaders decided that this was good foreign policy so they built up their armies for the opportunity. They also created alliances with anybody who would put a rifle beside them and not at them so you had major forces getting built up. When Serbian separatists killed Ferdinanz, who was also the heir to the thrown, Austria-Hungry wanted to remove any Serbian influence in the region. They deliver a list of ten things that were impossible for Serbia to agree with and, when only eight were accepted, war was declared. Russia, which had a large serb population, wanted to keep their influence in the region and mobilized their troops against Austria-Hungary. Germany, Austria-Hungary's ally, was mobilized troops for a quick fight in Western Europe as they could use a war with Russia as an excuse to attack Russia's ally's, France and Britain.

Germany, cause they realized France would expect an invasion from the south cause that's what Germany did last time, attacked through neutral Belgium trying to encircle the French army and ending the fight in the west so that they could attack Russia. Some troops got held up fighting the Russians so that plan wasn't fast enough and France was able to halt them. Germany decided to dig some trenches and the standstill in along the Western Front began. Britain bolstered France so it could hold it's own but it was still a standstill.

The entire time, the US was neutral but had sympathies for England and France. They were secretly supplying England and had an extreme dislike for German U-Boats for sinking anything they could see from their periscopes in British waters. When the Lunistinia was sunk by German U-Boats, it was loaded with ammo and sunk quickly. The thing was, there were over 100 Americans on it so President Wilson demanded that Germany stop unrestricted submarine warfare. Germany complied cause they didn't want the US in the war against them. Germany went back to unrestricted warfare later and this didn't turn out so well for them. They knew they had only so much time so they sent a message to Mexico that said, if the US should enter against Germany, Mexico should join the Central powers, declare war against the US, and enlist Japan as an ally. This would stop the US from helping out it's Western Europe allies and would have given Germany some time to finish it's conflict with Europe. They also promised Mexico financial support and the lands they lost in the Mexican-American war: California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. It would have been a great plan if it weren't intercepted by England... They published it and Mexico, being smart, said no. It also gave the US more then enough of a reason to enter the war.

Since the US had no standing army, Germany knew it would have to act quickly. When Russia collapsed and became the Soviet Union they made peace with Germany. All those German soldiers on the Eastern Front were moved to the Western Front and Germany was beginning to make ground. Then the waves of American troops came pouring in. It was a slow but steady stream that halted the Germans and eventually turned the tide. Instead of crushing Germany, though, the allies stopped short and instead encouraged Germany to rebel against their Kaiser and make peace, promising a fair peace as they hadn't been broken yet. Germany did that.

The winning Western European nations then got greedy and created an extremely unfair treaty against Germany. Russia was left completely out of the talks so they weren't in a good mood towards the west. The US went back to Isolationism and that gave the League of Nations, which was the new international presence designed to PREVENT this from happening again, no way to actually enforce it's policies. Germany felt cheated, cause they were, and had anti-French -British ideas in their heads. That led to what we call Nazism! Since Germany was not completely defeated, they were able to slowly gain power and, when Hitler took power...

So ya, Europeans played chess on a map of Europe and this lead to some of the most unnecessary losses of life in history and, if looking farther down the line, World War II.

Wikipedia/History Channel =

Power doesn't prevent war, someone will be desperate. The Cold War was much worse than most people think.

I read a book containing soldier's stories in World War I, which also covered the key events. Other than that, my US History class hasn't covered it yet. I think Sleepy gave a very nice summary of it.

Anyway, World War I had few, if any, positive consequences:

An unfair treaty towards the losing side, thus creating more hostility
An economically fragile Europe
World War II
The Cold War (to some extent)

World war 1 was weird, why in the hell would to opposing armies play sports with each other, and act all friendly like just because the battle had stalled due to trench warfare. Even going as far as to give warnings to the other side when they were about to fire routine bombardments. Thats weird and stupid.

Also Germany was more in the right in WW1 then Britain and America. The British were just jerks during WW1 blatantly lying and swindling. America was supposed to remain neutral but Britain kept getting supplies from us while Germany couldn't do the same. My sympathies are with Germany for WW1.

I don't get how it contributed to the Cold War.

More like an excuse - Austria would have declared war on Serbia in any case, regardless of the casus belli. If a Serbian guy tripped any Austrian guy on the street, Austria would have declared war anyway. Von Hotzendorf had already laid out plans for the invasion of Serbia way before 1914.

It's apparently stupid to realise that we're all humans after all: perhaps not all of us, actually. Not all of us are fanatics, you know.
What's more stupid: needlessly killing people for no cause, or avoiding that?

They didn't want to invade Germany in the slightest: first off, because the Entente (not the Allies, just a nitpick) had no intentions of controlling entire countries of a size comparable to the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and because urban warfare was rightly seen as a useless loss of life which no country could bear, especially if you think about the massive losses of the war.

Why so? How is the aggressor "more in the right" than anyone else?

In case you don't have a dictionary available, neutral != isolated.

Uh...no. Until 1933, Germany spiralled downward economically, given the French occupation of the industrial region of the Ruhr. If you check out Wikipedia a bit more, you can see that the 20s in Germany were characterised by hyperinflation (up to the point that it was cheaper to burn money rather than wood - go figure!), and a hyperinflating economy can never be powerful. What Hitler did was: first, renegotiate the treaties with the UK and France, bolster industrial production by mass-producing weapons and military supplies, recreating a military force for Germany (which was limited by the Treaty of Versailles to 100,000 men, if I remember correctly). All of that, of course, had two possibilities of development: either a stall and a terrible economic crash, or actually use those supplies for war. Hitler, obviously, tried his luck with the latter.

You've forgotten the southern front!

Unbridled nationalism.

Seeing that a lot of us agree on this particular question, I'd like to bring another one up: what do you think of the aftereffects of the war (restrictions on Germany, peace treaties, etc.)?

it was blatant stupidity and arrogance and directly caused WWII

All I know about the war to end all wars is that it didn't follow through. >:(

@Egghe: Fully agreed.

I'm finding in what I've been reading that the British and the US were not behaving very appropriately during the war, leading up to the US' entry in 1917. The US was falling over itself to help the British, in order to stop "the greatest atrocity of our time" (as Wilson called what the Germans were doing). This involved assisting the British maintain a hunger blockade of Germany in order to "starve the will out of them".

And that's just the start...all very disgusting behavior to me with no apparent reasoning. Germany was goaded into blowing up ocean liners because of what the British did with their warships and their ammunition carriers. So in retaliation the US gave themselves the right to sail on British ships on the basis that we're the US. That just led to unhappy times.

They at least tried to act with a gentlemanly conduct until Britain and the U.S. started cheating. U.S. is supposed to be neutral so either the U.S. should have traded with both sides equally or traded with neither side insteade of supported blockades against Germany, supplying Britain, attacking German ships even though we weren't at war with them and just being all around jerks. President Wilson was a damn Englishophile and made little secret about that.

What we should have done is repeated the same actions we took in the Napoleonic wars and that is to ignore Europe's squabbles.

Invading a neutral country is a gentlemanly conduct?

As I said, being neutral in a conflict does NOT mean not supporting one or the other.

1) All's fair in love and war.

2) It's their choice who they trade with.

3) American supply ships and civilians ships looked identical, German U-Boats sunk them, America got angry as they had lost alot of innocent civilians and money from cargo, which is why they joined. I wouldn't not want to join a war if my countries civilians were on ships visiting family in another country, even if it is in another continent not that near!

Not according to various conventions, traditions and common ethics.




The difference between manslaughter, second degree and first degree homicide is simply intent and length of.


Newsflash, ships carrying civilians were often carrying military materials as well. I think that is a breach of international law.




Yes, it does. Being neutral means total abstinence.

The US was about as anti-neutral as they could be, between assisting the British with their hunger blockade and allowing Americans to travel freely through war zones.

Just to add to what Arianna said: it wasn't stupid, it was soldiers on both sides showing compassion. Most of the soldiers fighting in the trenches in WW1 soon realised that the enemy soldiers were just the same as them, just ordinary people with ordinary families who had formerly lived very ordinary lives. Most of the soldiers there had no hatred towards the enemy - they continued fighting because they would have been shot for cowardice otherwise, as many were. The scene in 'All Quiet on the Western Front' when Paul kills a French soldier in a shell hole and then has to wait there for hours listening to him dying, and realises that 'the enemy' is no different from him demonstrates this point excellently, I don't whether you've seen it. It's quite a moving scene, and really helps you understand why the soldiers were willing to have ceasefires or warn the enemy before an attack.

Its stupid because they know they are going to have to eventually either kill them or be killed. Same reason you don't name the Christmas goose before its in the oven. Don't want to grow attached in any way to that which you must kill.

And that's the horror of war for ya.

(I assume that you mean NEUTRAL =/= ISOLATED)
America tried to keep out of WW1, adopting "a policy of neutrality and isolation." (source) When a message intercepted on its way to Mexico from Ambassador Zimmerman asked Mexico to fight the U.S. should things turn out poorly, and Germany announced that they would start attacking all sea vessels (violating the Sussex Pledge),the U.S. declared war on Germany. (source)
But during all this, America was trading with both sides, meaning they were not isolated. So they pretty much forgot half their foreign policy right there (second line of this post).

That's a commentary of America's actions, not America's policy, though. If it supplied Britain, it means its policy was neutrality but not isolation.

That's quite far from the truth, in fact. In an armed conflict, neutrality is defined regarding participation in armed conflicts. Supplying does not mean participating.

Okay, so here we have 2 giant armies - The Allies (France, Britain & her empire, Italy, Romania, Portugal, Greece, Serbia, Russia, and Belgium), and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Bosnia), to 'prevent war' in Europe. However, Bosnia wanted to go over with their allies, Serbia. A Serbian terrorist group took this out on Austria-Hungary, wanting to get Bosnia on their side, by plotting to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand (I suppose you could say they wanted to 'take him out'). When they did kill him, the giant armies were dragged into a large war. Austria blamed Serbia (the country the assassins were from), and then Germany march through Belgium to get to France. Britain join to help 'poor little Belgium'. Germany beat Russia on the eastern front, too. One by one, each country get dragged into the war. This leads to the First World War.

Now, I won't say too much about the actual war and I'll skip on to the end. The Armistice was on the 11th of November, 1918, 4 years after the war broke out. This is where the everlasting legacy of the war I think begins. German soldiers "don't feel defeated" and "feel like they've been stabbed in the back by their politicians". They blamed the communists and the jews. Eventually the Weimar Republic was formed in Germany. They signed the Treaty of Versailles. This angered many people, including a young Adolf Hitler, and it meant that Germany went to pot. They needed to pay so much money to every nation, and they were on a shoestring budget anyway. They had to print more money. Before the war, 6000 Reichmarks was a small fortune. After the Treaty of Versailles, it wasn't enough for a loaf of bread. Inflation went through the roof (like in modern Zimbabwe).

The biggest legacy (in my opinion) of the Treaty of Versailles was how it twisted one young Austrian. Adolf Hitler felt like he'd been stabbed in the back on more than one occasion by this new government, and eventually joined the Nazi party. Nazism was basically born through the end of one war and was the cause of another.

Sorry about the last two paragraphs mainly featuring Germany, but I'm currently working on that in History now and that will probably help then .

Hague convention states that a neutral party is not allowed to supply war materials only private export is allowed. And America was far from providing just Private export.

Also in other ways America ripped the spirit of neutrality to pieces by going out of its way to prevent other countries from exporting food to Germany.

In a war, neutrality is determined by who you fight or not in the case of neutrality

If you supply one side and not another, you're still neutral in a war but you're biased towards one side, if you get what I'm saying. They didn't actually do anything to put Germany at a disadvantage.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague13.asp

Yale is an American university. Where is your god now? oops

Does it even matter if America were neutral? In the end they joined on the side of the Brits. In the same way charities go to war torn places to give aid (with money paid by us, the public, who are supposedly neutral), America gave aid to Britain to ease our short supplies a little bit.

Oh yeah, all we did was send some ammunition and shizzle. Nothing belligerent there.

The Hague convention defined what being neutral entails. Does it matter what site I got the details from?


Well, it is kinda the whole point of this thread to talk about WW1 and so yes.

America chose not to send supplies to Germany.

The conditions of the common man in the Russian Empire were made even worse by the war, eventually leading to the communist takeover and the Soviet Union.

They were going to get worse and worse regardless of whether or not they were in the war. And even if there wasn't a communist takeover, how do we know that the Czar government going on in Russia wouldn't have acted in the same way?

Instead, American propagandists made up complete lies about Germany in order to ensure that public opinion was pro-British.

Keep in mind that part of what made Lenin (and thus the Bolshevik party) so popular was his claim that he'd pull Russia out of the war, no matter what the conditions were. Of course, you can argue that Lenin took power by force, but you can't deny that a majority of the Russian population wanted out of the war. If my memory serves me right, Lenin brought Russia out of the war in 1917.

Edit: You saw nothing... It was March 1918 with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It's still a couple months earlier than the other countries.

I think the reality that most of you are over-looking is the reason why it was a "World" war ...

Although mostly fought in Europe, this was a war about "Empire Building" and controlling the some-what "limited" world-wide resources, of which each of the Great European Powers wanted their own lion's share. Each of these great powers were sitting elbow-to elbow in the resource-rich "open" spaces of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and each of them wanted to have the world dominance to exploit those regions to their own selfish benefit.

In the end, there was no single Great Power that remained sufficiently powerful enough to maintain its pre-WW1 global influence. What is more, the very issues of the current Middle-East/African conflicts -- the "War" on Terror -- all of these things likewise are a result of the causes of WW1 and the war's own inability to finally settle these matters amicably.

It was actually mainly British newspapers that were distributing the stories of atrocities. Keep in mind that Americans were only receiving news from British and French news sources, since the Germans had been blockaded (and, possibly, their telegraphs to America cut - I wouldn't know). As such, the British could pretty much make up whatever they wanted to get the Americans on their side - and, as the two nations had only been on positive terms for about 20 years (since when Britain realized it was alarmingly short on allies and began to "ardently woo their American cousins," in the words of The American Pageant), they really needed this fabrication to attract sympathy rather than animosity from some Americans (like the large German and Irish immigrant populations).

IMO, lying to your allies to try to get them to help you out and potentially save the lives of hundreds of thousands of your soldiers is a little harder to morally condemn than most other lies.

Also, the British were the ones who blockaded Germany so that it couldn't trade with the United States. It wasn't the latter's fault that it only traded with the Allies; the United States was pretty much forced into it. Its government was pretty hands-off when it came to trade interference, so merchants would almost certainly have been allowed to trade with Britain if they were able to.

DJ has a point. America made many many many lies about Germany.

Yeah. Once the British press got to the US...

And the Lusitania incident didn't help things, even though that was provoked by earlier British and American activity.

That was a joke, thus why it was crossed out.


In a debate you use other subjects to put things into context. I used a modern day example to counter your example.

To be honest the whole thread is about what we think about World War 1, not America giving Britain supplies. The fact idiots like you can't back down in a debate means you're just pathetic, you really need to learn to debate.

Or it could have just as easily been you trying to get the last word in while at the same time trying to end the argument.


Your example didn't include charities that give out machine parts, metals ready for making into war things, ammo, and other military supplies. And I said it does matter whether America was neutral or not, it is part of WW1.


Its even more pathetic when one can't admit one is wrong. America giving Britain supplies against the Hague convention colors my entire opinion of WW1. So it is important relative to me in the context of this thread. And I'm not stopping you from giving your opinion of WW1, nor am I forcing you to keep on saying that it was perfectly fine for America t give Britain military supplies while trying to maintain a facade of neutrality. You are just trying to avoid the argument by calling me pathetic.

Demutig, you're worse than Blyante because you lack ANY logic. Not only do you refuse to back down, you refuse to let others have their opinions when there is no way to know for sure what happened.

I can't grasp what the problem is here, nor why anyone is upset. I don't see anything implicitly wrong with Demutig's opinion of the Hague Convention's relevance, and I don't see why Scrum is being attacked for his (IMO) even more valid opinion. Can we please avoid quasi-flaming when possible?

Okay, whether or not the United States was by definition neutral, it was aiding its ally. As far as I know, there's no international rule that stated America had to be neutral in the conflict, nor that it couldn't sell anything to Britain, war materials or not. There's such a thing as a "non-neutral non-belligerent," like Spain in World War II (Spain didn't fight, but the Nazis had free access to its ports, etc.).

I don't think America was acting immorally when it sold war supplies to Britain without issuing a declaration of war against Germany. It's not as if Germany wanted it to declare war before sending the Brits ammo and such. The Germans had every right to sink ships they had good reason to believe were carrying supplies to the enemy, but then the Americans had every right to try to stop them from doing so, and to retaliate when they could no longer stand the Germans killing civilians in the course of their desperate attempt to win the war.

I mean, internationally speaking, of course. Obviously the fighting was all wrong and horrible and everything, but if we all agreed on that and only spoke in those terms, this debate would be more boring than the topic on Logical Fallacies.

You're the one who's wrong! My example of charities is perfectly valid, and that fact you won't back down means you're impossible to have a PROPER debate with. Until you learn it, I'd advise you bugger off out of the debate room.





I agree here, America didn't have to be neutral, and helping it's allies isn't breaking any rules.

Except that Wilson was allowing Americans to travel on ships sailing through war zones, and then expecting Germany to be liable for any ships that were destroyed--including ships of belligerent nations, i.e. Britain. Furthermore he allowed American ships to carry armament, regardless of what type of ship, and that they could use the arms if "threatened". But what threatened meant was never fully disclosed, and thus American ships could fire on U-Boats or even pursue them if desired, simply because they felt "threatened".

epic wait what.

Well, first off, the war had obvious effects on the Russian economy and overall general conditions in the country. In other words, Russia got worse. The Czar kept in the war, continuing to worsen the conditions of the common people, and therefore the vast majority of Russians wanted out of the war. Lenin and the Bolshevik party offered to end the war as soon as possible, so they accepted the Communist party's offer, resulting in the Communist takeover.

I strongly doubt the Czar would have acted in the same way and become communistic itself, although I don't have solid 'facts' to prove this.

Back down is what a person does when they are losing, your example is not valid. The Hague convention says no military supplies, America supplied Britain with military supplies, charities don't give out military supplies like ammo. So in no way is your example valid.


Back down = quit. And what is illogical about

Hague convention states neutrals are not to supply countries at war with military supplies like ammunition.

America supplied Britain with all sorts of materials, not just food and medicine.

Therefore America was breaking international law, again.

Therefore my opinion being Germany being more in the right is valid.

And who is Blyante?


Who is scrum? And who is he being attacked by?