In 1906, a German writer F.H. Grautoff warned
that “a war in Europe… must necessarily set the whole world ablaze.”
I.
Origins
of the Conflict
A.
Dangerous
Nationalism:
1.
European Instability
2.
Alliance
System
Germany,
Austria-Hungary, Italy
vs.
France and Russia (Britain
loosely allied)
B.
Lighting
the Fuse
1.
Assassination
Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, "Unification or
Death."
2. Russia Mobililzes
(Willy and
Nicky Correspondence)
3. Romantic Nationalism and
"Kultur"
4. War in Verse
A. Edgar Guest
B. Wilfred Owen
II.
Bloody
War
A.
Trench
Warfare=Stalemate
B.
Air
War
(Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen)
C.
Trenches in the Sea
III.
War's
End:
A.
Exit
Russia
B.
Enter
the U.S.
C.
Germany's 1918 Offensive
IV.
How
was the Great War different because of global intervention?
The Times History of the World in 1914 wrote,
“The
instinct which made us such sticklers for propriety in all our dealings made us
more reluctant than other nations would feel to employ coloured troops against
a white enemy.”
V.
How
was the globe different for having intervened in the Great War?
Tipperary mbali sana sana (swahili)
“It’s a
long way to Tipperary”: King’s African Rifles marching song
France recruited = 500,000 colonial troops between
1914 and 1918:
166,000 West Africans (mostly laborers, 20% death
rate)
46,000 Madagascans
50,000 Indochinese
140,000 Algerians
47,000 Tunisians
24,300 Moroccans. Most of these French colonial
troops served in Europe.
GENOCIDE
VI. CONCLUSION:
A.
TOTAL
WAR
8.6
million combatants killed
6.5
million civilians killed
11%
France
(casualty
rate=killed or wounded)
9%
Germany
8%
Great Britain
B. HOW NOT TO END A WAR!
Treaty of Versailles
C. WAR IS BEAUTIFUL.
"I esteem the moral values of war rather
highly…it seems to me that a genuine artist would find greater value in a
nation of men who have faced death and who know the immediacy and freshness of
camp life." Hermann Hesse
"War is an aesthetic pleasure without
comparison." Ernst Glaeser
"Poetry, art,
philosophy, and culture are what the battle is all about."
Rudolf Fischer
THE END OF HISTORY, Francis
Fukuyama
"What we may
be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing
of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such:
that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the
final form of human government."
