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Anybody want to talk about World War I? This is culture war in the sense that the culture war led me here, and its application definitely seems to fall along tribal lines, even though this is all ancient history.
So on a recommendation on Twitter from MartyrMade, I've started reading Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War so I can figure out who the real villain was in WWII. But I guess we can't get there without discussing WWI, so that's where the book begins. A fundamental cause of the war, according to the author, is that Germany and England had conflicting views of security. In general, England's policy was to play European powers off each other, always supporting the second-strongest power against the strongest power to ensure that no one country would dominate the continent and thus be in a position to challenge Britain. In the early 1900s, that meant supporting France in opposition to Germany. Germany's idea of peace, on the other hand, was precisely to dominate and unify the continent under German rule, thus ensuring that they would have no problems on the continent.
As an uninformed person, I am struck by a similarity in current politices with America and Russia. It seems that America finds itself in the same position as Germany before WWI, seeking to unify as many countries as possible under NATO, effectively ensuring that America's vision dominates world politics. On the other hand, Russia's best available strategy is to weaken America wherever possible, by supporting America's most troublesome enemies, e.g. Iran.
The point of all this is I'm wondering whether there is any way to achieve Trump's goal in the Ukraine war, which is for "people to stop dying". America being dominant means they can't really allow Russia to challenge their world order by taking over Ukraine and stopping NATO expansion. But if Russia is going to be able to exert its will at all in the world, they can't really allow Ukraine to become just another part of the Western bloc.
Still, Trump says he'll solve the issue and the war will be over within 24 hours of becoming president. What do you think his plan is?
There were a few more powers involved in WWI than Germany and Britain.
And they all had overlapping war goals that got varied levels of success.
Hell, the Ottomans almost sided with the Entente, Germany brokered a separate peace that secured a lot of the eastern lands they wanted and Russia, well, had a revolution.
WW1 is not exactly a simple affair, but I do think the comparison with Ukraine is relevant because it was mostly about interlocking spheres of influence and nations being afraid of each other in a way that seemed to require escalation.
There is a good argument that can be made for both being failures of diplomacy even if you think that Europe was due a bloody conflict.
To the extent that all conflicts can be described as about 'overlapping war goals', yes, and all war is a failure of diplomacy.
The whole exercise just seems to be about embedding the same old Russian gripe about NATO expansion in more respectable, historiographical context. Learned and wise. Except anything is analogous to anything at a high enough level of vague generality.
Well, it would be more productive if you could explain what you think are the relevant ways in which the analogy fails, unless you don't actually want to contribute to understanding whether or not it has merit. You seem to primarily just want to ridicule the Russian position ("same old gripe", implication of not being "respectable", the "learned and wise" snark), which could either be a knee-jerk response (in which case, please don't) or because you think you have a moral imperative to help lower the enemy's status. But in the latter case, does doing that on a niche forum with bounded readership really help your cause? There are few normies here that could be converted or made to pick up subtle status signals, while the ability to maintain niche forums with nuanced discussion is actually one of the bigger status advantages that the West has over Russia, which has been organically and artificially stamping out its nuanced voices. Thus you might just be giving ammo to fence-sitters to point at you and say "see, both sides are exactly the same". (On top of that, we have a sufficiently high contrarian population that going too hard for your side might even just wind up generating sympathy for the other side directly.)
I did, right at the beginning: there were many more powers involved in the international politics of WWI than there are in the Ukraine war.
They don't need me for that. Western contrarians have decided Russia is Really The Good Guy all on their own (well, mostly).
Fun exercise: try to figure who, if anyone, the following statement refers to:
I am a Self Aware Individual, aware of and thus immune to the lies spread by propagandizers. Anyone who disagrees with me is a captured entity, and their failure to acknowledge the validity of my rational position reflects the depth of propaganda capture. What more, they believe THEY are the ones in the right, and that I am propagandized!
Hopefully people don't actually put self worth into internet points. Man, what a tragedy that would be if internet words actually mattered to us and we acted on it!
I have bad news about the modern world.
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