What a Waste

I think it would have happened anyway. It's not the diplomacy or the politics, it's the psychology of the thing.

You have to read Ludendorf and then realize that he was the just the German version of what was a general thing.

They WANTED war, they honestly thought a good war was just what everyone needed. Especially the youth, they all had these incredibly romantic ideas of going off to cavalry charges and swordfights. Sure, lots of people would die but, hey, people died all the time. The war would bring out the brightest and the best in people, everyone (who survived) would go home with a new sense of honor and pride, a 'band of brothers' and the dead, well, they'd be heroes

I sympathise with that part of your argument, it's a reasonable sketch of what we know about the upper echelons of 19th century society, and these leadership groups all came out of that era.
Didn't work out that way. Major reason why the 20thc has been so pessimistic in its outlook, not just that WWI was so catastrophic and preventable (after the fact) but that what everyone thought would be a generally good thing turned out to be the worst possible development
Well, many think the 20th century bagan at Sarajevo.


Which is why I sort of don't like most of the Luddite tendencies of present day liberalism. Most of them can be traced to WWI if you dig hard enough and they're really a very arrogant type of recalcitrant militarism. Wasn't nothing wrong with the idea of the war being good, what was wrong was the 'modernism' employed in fighting it

Dude, honestly, there's Pat Buchanan/Jonah Goldberg-levels of wrongness in your analysis of modern day idealogical forces.

In fact, that last paragraph is about as confusing as an actual Goldberg/Buchanan collaborative effort might be.
 
On reflection, it occurs to me European powers might've defused things awhile more by trying to carve China & having some success. IIRC, tho, things'd begun to change by 1900 & China was considered a bit off-limits to that... If it started sooner? Or does that demand faster expansion in Africa, bringing the "scramble" there to an end sooner?
 
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