It was indeed. A hamfisted attempt to convince rebels and communists that they were unwitting catspaws for those dastardly semites that unfortunately has become the root of basically all modern antisemitism and has even infected the older dominionist strain.
historical moral narratives: which was the 'good' side, if any, during WW1?
- Thread starter spoonzandforkz
- Start date
kholieken
Banned
I think overall Entente is "good" side, with Russia mobilization in support of Serbia contribute to "bad".
Germany is in "bad" side, with belligerence starting in Morocco or Agadir crisis years before war started, and mobilization and invasion of Belgium is obvious "bad".
A-H is innocent, assassination is "good" casus belli to starting war. French and British decision to aid Belgium is also "good".
Germany is in "bad" side, with belligerence starting in Morocco or Agadir crisis years before war started, and mobilization and invasion of Belgium is obvious "bad".
A-H is innocent, assassination is "good" casus belli to starting war. French and British decision to aid Belgium is also "good".
Literally the entire modern world shaped by a coincidence and a twenty year old who stopped to get a sandwich.
They invaded Serbia after they accepted literally all but one of their conditions which was the one that gave Austrian police, powers inside Serbian territory and would have thus violated their sovereignty.
kholieken
Banned
Eh, I think assasination is good enough casus belli to invasion without bothering with ultimatum or anything. Sovereignty is de facto violated in any war.
WWI is predating rule about national sovereignty, illegality of war, and LoN/UN rules. Having your heir assasinated is acceptable casus belli for war of conquest/vengeance.
There wasn't any proof that Serbia was actually behind the assassination.
That would be true. Even if I personally don't consider the deaths of thousands of innocent people a fair trade off for the deaths of two people. Shoot Princep, sure whatever but leave the people of Serbia out of this they had nothing to do with it(Really I am skeptical that the Serbian Government had anything to do with it, mostly because it strikes me as both stupid as hell and not even providing any actual benefit to Serbia from what I can tell.). But the war was not actually about that. Franz Joseph didn't give a single fuck that his nephew got shot and it was Germany who tried to convinced the Austrians not to go to war who started the war after they decided that Germanys message that they would back them in case of a war was actually Germany telling Austria that it wanted a war. You know you suck when you make Kaiser Wilhelm the Second look reasonable in comparison.
Grey vs Grey(which does bring up the joke of it all being his fault).
At most you can say Britain tips it towards the Entente being worse due to the fact they meddled everywhere, and so simply had more chances to cause harm, but the great powers were all terrible and behaved the more or less the same way, the only meaningful difference in harm caused is opportunity not intent.
Or thinking more widely the Entente's propaganda did create and enforce the notion of 'good side in a war' instead of the more common 'everyone involved is assholes' which has certainly caused a lot of harm historically. So if you consider that then the Entente could be said to be the greater evil since that sort of deeply toxic narrative is not one Germany(and Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans) used.
At most you can say Britain tips it towards the Entente being worse due to the fact they meddled everywhere, and so simply had more chances to cause harm, but the great powers were all terrible and behaved the more or less the same way, the only meaningful difference in harm caused is opportunity not intent.
Or thinking more widely the Entente's propaganda did create and enforce the notion of 'good side in a war' instead of the more common 'everyone involved is assholes' which has certainly caused a lot of harm historically. So if you consider that then the Entente could be said to be the greater evil since that sort of deeply toxic narrative is not one Germany(and Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans) used.
Last edited:
dcharles
Banned
Not if old Winnie had had something to say about it!
"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits."
IIRC it would only have taken around 500,000 shipments of rice from Bengal to prevent the famine out of a total amount shipped to Greece of 5 million or so, but since Churchill decided that the supposedly more "sturdy" greeks needed the food more. The British also went out of their way to stoke communal tensions between Muslims and Hindus, went back on their word to grant dominion status to India after the war and the Raj Police force brutally put down the Congress parties non violent protests with Gandhi and Nehru spending years in jail. Whatever those British officials said in their memoirs Britains actions don't exactly fill me with confidence that they were looking to get out of India in the near future.
Looking back, I get that Germany was practically the aggressor, and so was on that front "worse". But that is a marginal "worse", I feel, considering both sides were brutal imperialists who would have abandoned "honor" and "democracy" in the name of crushing the other side into dust. And even America (or at least, Wilson's movement) had its own demons and vested interests in bringing peace to the continent, leaving both sides dissatisfied at best and brutalized at worst.
For that matter, the British track record in Ireland is nothing short of atrocious.
For that matter, the British track record in Ireland is nothing short of atrocious.
And even Albania managed to commit atrocities a few decades later when they got the chance lol, I agree the 20th century was destined to be a shitshow from start to finish the second WW1 kicked off
No they weren't. The ultimatum to Serbia that Austria-Hungary gave after the assassination was a demand to completely give up Serb national sovereignty and freedom when it didn't suit the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, or else. Nobody sane in Serbia would or could have accepted it. The Austrians felt confident about doing this because they thought the Germans were super keen on backing them up. Austria-Hungary was a borderline non-country run by inbreds hellbent on interbreeding with Czechs and a broken Tower of Babel parliament in Vienna. As soon as the war started its near-inability to function as a state or have a cohesive army was revealed. Austria-Hungary was a tumour and it collapsing is one of the only arguably good things to come out of WW1.
Last edited:
David Flin
Gone Fishin'
I've no intention of getting involved in the debate on the merits (or otherwise) of Austria-Hungary, but I will take issue with the second clause.
Some good things did emerge from what was generally not a good time.
There were significant advances in Medicine. The fact that there were so many wounded gave medical practitioners plenty of practice, and numerous techniques were developed. How to treat burns, for example, came on a long, long way.
On the social front, it brought about a lowering of the class barriers by a significant amount. MacMillan, for example, (later to be PM of Britain) remarked that prior to the war, he'd had no occasion to interact with the "working class". However, while he was in the trenches, he came to see them as people, with hopes and fears and emotions and all the rest, whereas previously, he'd regarded them as somewhere between "real people" and "working animals". That revelation informed his politics. In memoir after memoir - British, French, German - similar discoveries are made with the enforced intermingling of social classes, transforming the perceptions between them.
It also brought about a significant change in women's rights. Not just the vote, but in the recognition that they could do useful work. Medical schools became more open to accepting women to study to become doctors (previously, it had been - difficult).
In some countries (UK I know for sure - I can't speak for others), the link between unhygienic conditions and poor health was demonstrated, leading to attempts to create more hygienic conditions for those living in squalor.
In France, antisemitism took a big hit; Jews volunteered in large numbers, specifically requesting to be assigned to the Infantry - the most dangerous posting - to prove their loyalty to France. This was noticed, and the sentiment that had been around pre-war (see the Dreyfus affair and fall-out from same) that Jews weren't loyal to France was laid to rest. For a time, anyway. It rose again after a couple of decades, peaking with Vichy France. But, for a couple of decades, antisemitism had taken a knock.
Me. I'm a direct consequence of WWI. My four grandparents all came to London precisely because of the war: (from Ireland as a soldier, and ending up settling in London post war; from the far north to work in a factory in London; from Sicily by volunteering for the RN because there was no way he was going to fight for Italy but wasn't going to be called a coward, and unvolunteering in London when the war was over; and from Jamaica, as a trained nurse). Without WWI, none of them meet. So, me.
Actually, there would be those that would say that my existence is not a good thing, but I pay them no heed.
English and French speaking countries have never backed genocidal regimes?
France had a huge empire in Africa and to this day they are benefiting from it exploiting the natural resources and imposing their will on the African people.
The majority of the inhabitants of the Dual Monarchy at the time would've disagreed with your assessment of their nation as a "tumour", and many of their descendants (incidentally, not limited to those of German and Hungarian extraction), would disagree with that assessment today.
David Flin
Gone Fishin'
I think I specifically said: "Explanations as to why France paid and Germany didn't are varied, some more plausible than others."
Because of the nature of the debating here, I have zero intention of getting drawn into discussions of which country was more evil than another.
Why France paid off the reparations (which were more onerous than Versailles) and Germany didn't is beyond the brief I am engaging in. The fact that France did and that Germany didn't remains a fact.
None of the nations (not even America, which has some fairly unpleasant skeletons from the period) emerge with clean hands. To claim that any one country is innocent is risible nonsense, with which I have not the slightest intention of engaging.
Ukrianians IIRC had warm feelings about Austria Hungary long after its dissolution and there was a lot of controversy over a statue of Gavirelo Princep being erected in Bosnia due to Austro Hungarian rule being remembered fondly there. Of course not all parts of Austria Hungary look back on it fondly. "Poverty in Austrian Galicia" has actually become a proverb in Polish due to how poor and badly managed Austrian Poland was, with the food situation being apparently more desperate than in British Ireland with the province losing 3 million people to immigration from the 1870s onwards, including some that moved to Russian Poland. I think we can all agree that losing immigrants to Tsarist Russia regardless of the context is proof that something bad is going on.
Last edited:
IIRC though, Social Democrats (and S-D aligned parties) were doing quite well in both Germany and Austria-Hungary prior to the war, consistently gaining larger proportions of seats (despite, in Germany, the attempt to gerrymander them into irrelevance by giving excess weight to conservative, rural districts...)
The Social Democrats in Germany had gained some good will from the traditionally-conservative, aristocratic-leaning Imperial Government by (for the most part), committing to fully support the war effort, once the war had commenced.
It seems likely to me, that in the case of a CP victory, it wouldn't take long for the pre-war voting patterns to re-establish themselves... a successful outcome to the war wouldn't have caused every voter in Germany and A-H to become a rabid, reactionary nationalist overnight...
I think the answer is obviously that the Entente was a little better, but mainly by virtue of not having the actually genocidal Ottoman Empire on their side. That doesn't mean that they didn't carry out massacres or kill civilians subject to their rule through neglect, of course, but I'm not aware of any of the Entente powers trying to wipe out an entire national group during the war. Given that the question is "which side was the good side (if any) during World War I," I think actions such as colonialism that took place prior to the war (and anyway were done more or less equally by all parties) are essentially irrelevant to the question, so I'm not sure why people keep bringing them up. If we were asked to evaluate which side was more moral in a much broader sense then those would be applicable, but as it is the question seems strictly limited to their morality during the war itself.