Post for January 22nd

Submitted by Christopher Hol... on Mon, 01/21/2013 - 21:56

When reading "The First World War: A Very Short Intorduction", what surprises me the most is the way in which the war quickly snowballed from a relatively unimportant dispute between two comparatively insignificant countries, to a gruesome bloodbath which embroiled the mightiest countries in the world, all do to a set of bass ackwards alliances. It really shocked me to learn that after the first year or so, both Austria-Hungary and Russia, the two original beligerants, wanted to try and come to some sort of agreement, but couldn't because the larger powers were far too concerned with being able to defeat eachother. Looking at it historically, it's almost like the European powers had built some sort of Rube-Goldberg machine of alliances around themselves.

Comments

Jeff Drouin

Mon, 01/21/2013 - 22:12

I like the analogy of a Rube-Goldberg machine, which leads to a very interesting point. It was the seemingly automatic nature of the politics and, later, the fighting, that scared so many people so deeply. That was in fact one of the realities that contributed to the popularity of Freudian psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the unconscious as having the lion's share of influence on our waking actions, the notion that the largest part of our selves is unrecognizable, and that we seem to have an irresistable drive to conflict and death. Surrealism was a post-war movement that dealt explicitly with psychoanalytic theory and the idea of the "automatic" nature of waking behavior -- going so far as to invent a technique called automatic writing to attempt direct access to the unconscious.

Toby Decker

Tue, 01/22/2013 - 00:33

I was also really interested by the fact that the original belligerants were not the ones who insisted on continuing the war.  It definitely shows how balance-of-power policies can cause snowball consequences that in the case of WWI cost several millions of lives.

Katie Boul

Tue, 01/22/2013 - 09:10

The initial causes of WWI have always seemed a bit petty to me, and certainly disproportionate to the widespread bloodshed that came about because of the war. Because of this, I also find it interesting that the original belligerents grew tired of the war quite quickly. Though they seemed to ultimately realize their massive overreaction, it was too late. For me, this adds even more to the tragic nature of WWI.