Our reading this time was chapter V, The First World War, 1914-1918, and chapter VI, The Versailles System and the Return to “Normalcy”. Please post in this thread only if you’ve read these chapters.
For next week, let’s read chapter VII, Finance, Commercial Policy, and Business Activity, 1897-1947. I’ll post the thread on Tuesday June 4.
If you want to join the reading group, details are at >>1706. You’re welcome to start at the beginning and resurrect old threads, or to skip ahead and join where the group is currently, whichever you prefer.
In the spirit of keeping the discussion anonymous, I’ll put my own thoughts in a separate post, which will go up between 10 and 1000 minutes after this one.
A lot to talk about this time. I have a hard time whenever I’m looking closely at the First World War because it’s all just so senseless. With other overwhelmingly horrible wars, like the Second World War or the Thirty Years War, at least people are fighting over something real, something that you can understand dying for. But WWI wasn’t really *about* anything at all. At root it seems like a bunch of statesmen just decided that they’d enjoy a good war, and didn’t expect it to become such a big deal. (I think about this whenever I hear Americans today egging on a war with China.)
Everything about the war was a tragic farce like this, from the comedic, escalating declarations of war from larger and larger countries, to the generals insisting that *this* time a headlong charge against machine guns will work, to the big useless circle of American bankers loaning Germany money for reparations payments to England and France so that those countries could repay war loans to American bankers. Altogether it’s the most shameful and embarrassing episode in the history of Western civilization, which is not a statement I make lightly.
>The establishment of a German Empire dominated by the Kingdom of Prussia left Bismarck politically satisfied One thing this is really driving home for me is how much of diplomatic history depends on the specific goals and tactics adopted by the leading statesmen. This is especially true for the great men like Bismarck, but it also comes across from men like Wilson or Clemenceau or Balfour.
The series of diplomatic crises and war scares in the years running up to the war, some of them very flimsy, seems like the ultimate proof that the war was all but baked in by the elites’ intention to fight. These crises don’t arise naturally, there was a constituency pushing for them, almost certainly on both sides. If they’d avoided war over the assassination, then it would’ve been the next crisis, or the one after that.
The breakdown of the laws of war is a very important and overlooked point. Of course we have “law of war” today, in the sense of humanitarian restrictions on tactics, but the diplomatic norms that sharply distinguish war as an exceptional state are long gone.
I’m always amused by Mr. Quigley’s attitude towards the Rothschilds. He hates them with the exact tone of naked revulsion that I’m used to seeing from unapologetic antisemites, but he doesn’t care that they’re Jews. It’s that he thinks all *international bankers* are cockroaches, and he talks about e.g. the Morgans the same way.
Despite the larger failure of the disarmament movement, the Washington naval treaty seems like a pretty impressive success.
>The inflation was not injurious to the influential groups in German society, although it was generally ruinous to the middle classes, and thus encouraged the extremist elements. Those groups whose property was in real wealth, either in land or in industrial plant, were benefited by the inflation which increased the value of their properties and wiped away their debts (chiefly mortgages and industrial bonds). Relevant to the discussion at >>1804.
>The only victors in the episode [of the Ruhr occupation] were the British, who had demonstrated that the French could not use force successfully without British approval. This is true, but it seems as much a consequence of the French unwillingness to use *really* harsh methods as anything else. As Mr. Landau-Taylor writes at https://www.benlandautaylor.com/p/book-review-the-great-illusion:
>World War II shows that, when they disregard claims of legal ownership, modern regimes are no worse at seizing the factors of production than medieval regimes. … Seizing the factors of production at scale is always a bloody affair. It requires mass graves, tearing parents away from children, kicking in doors at 3 AM, and shooting 13-year-old saboteurs in the back of the head. Most people hate doing this, which is a big part of why it’s so rare. Even the architects of the Treaty of Versailles, who are not known for their soft hearts, refused to contemplate something so extreme.
So, the French failure to achieve their goals through occupation rhymes with the American unwillingness to use harsh but effective methods in the occupation of Afghanistan. In both examples, there’s a good case to be made that the occupier’s goals were not worth the humanitarian and psychological cost of using the harsh methods which would have actually worked. But if one accepts that argument, then launching the occupation at all, while being unwilling to use those methods, is as the saying goes worse than a crime—it’s a mistake. It’s essentially a gigantic bluff, in a situation where the enemy has no choice but to call the bluff.