Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

Discussions on all aspects of the First World War not covered in the other sections. Hosted by Terry Duncan.
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Attrition
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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#346

Post by Attrition » 04 Aug 2017, 01:54

That's hearsay and by 1900, the Victorians managed to shag the population up by eight times the population of 1800, despite exporting several million people to steal other peoples' countries. Morality-schmorality!

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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#347

Post by CJK1990 » 04 Aug 2017, 12:17

Trotsky, who you seem to admire, thought that Britain was highly religious in the 1920s.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsk ... /ch01d.htm


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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#348

Post by Attrition » 04 Aug 2017, 16:40

A silly inference, I have no truck with such right-wing deviationists. ;o)

England hasn't been chris since the reformation and hasn't been protestant since the 1850s.

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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#349

Post by CJK1990 » 04 Aug 2017, 18:58

Well it is certainly my impression, based on my own reading, that Britain was far more moralistic than the continent. But I know that kind of thinking is considered somewhat racist today so maybe it's no surprise that you think differently.

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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#350

Post by Terry Duncan » 04 Aug 2017, 20:46

CJK1990 wrote:That still doesn't explain why they were in such acute competition with each other pre-1945 but able to fully cooperate post-1945.
There are several reasons that all come together in the post-1945 situation. Many in European nations simply felt war to be futile or at the very least too costly, and having already been told they had fought a 'war to end all wars' and then been asked to do it all again a generation later, a large majority focused on the internal situation and improving the lot of the average person. With the Cold War it became clear there was little chance of fighting the USSR without US support, and that a war between the European states was also far from desirable both because it would only weaken them in the face of what was supposedly a far greater threat, and of course that the US would be unlikely to approve of such an event too.

Were the nations pre-1914 moral or democratic? Well, they thought so, but that was by the standards of the day rather than how we view them now. How they treated colonial affairs was quite different to how they treated European ones, but even then they were all prone to very heavy handed measures. Look at MacArthur deploying tanks on the streets of Washington in 1932 to crush a demonstration caused by the government reneging on the terms of service certificates! This incident saw MacArthur ignore the President and Patton lead a cavalry charge into peaceful demonstrators. Such a situation in the US would be most unlikely now, even with the very well armed police actions against people more recently.

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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#351

Post by Attrition » 04 Aug 2017, 23:36

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_upon_Hull

"Well, they thought so, but that was by the standards of the day rather than how we view them now." Not really, this seems like sophistry. Did the British state suddenly decide that slavery was a crime against humanity in 1833? No-one could have been under any illusions about it being evil, just that it was a nice little earner for those able and willing to collaborate. I live in Hull and its good historical points are that the townspeople told Charles I to fuck off in January 1642, when he demanded entry to take the weapons in the city for his army and it never allowed slaving bastards into the port, when those nice Liverpudlians and Bristolians were up to their necks in it. Morality doesn't change, only the lies of those who betray it.

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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#352

Post by South » 05 Aug 2017, 00:06

Good afternoon Terry,

It was a "bonus march", involving a small cash stipend Congress approved in 1924 with disbursements scheduled for 1945.

In 1932, the Great Depression was taking a toll on the WWI veterans and they sought to have the bonus paid soonest.

The Hoover administration did not approve of an expedited payment schedule.

Thus, the gathering in Washington, D.C. and the "bonus march" to gain support for their cause.

~ Bob
Virginia, USA

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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#353

Post by jluetjen » 05 Aug 2017, 00:18

CJK1990 wrote:Well it is certainly my impression, based on my own reading, that Britain was far more moralistic than the continent. But I know that kind of thinking is considered somewhat racist today so maybe it's no surprise that you think differently.
Look up the Pietist movement. Theologically it was limited to the Lutherans (The Hohenzollern's were Calvinist by the way), but culturally it had a huge impact on the German and American cultures, not to mention the Hanoverian British royalty and the Anglican church.

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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#354

Post by Attrition » 05 Aug 2017, 14:35

Perhaps your sources are accurate, I wouldn't condemn them unseen but I'm not sure how moral it is to control the biggest slave empire in the history of the world and put people in prison for being poor. (At least one of my relatives was born in a workhouse.) Perhaps there's a distinction to be drawn between public pantomime and private reality?

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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#355

Post by doogal » 10 Sep 2017, 21:52

Here are some of the multitude of reasons for Negativity being inherently attached to the concept of the First World War:

1)It was Petain who said that the treaty of Versailles would be an armistice for 20 years he was correct and he went on to be Vichy leader in a poor attempt to save a beaten France in WW2 ..
2)Hitler a struggling lazy artist, propelled into joy and dissolution by WW1, politicised through extreme right wing Conservative German anti Semitism and chauvinism to become Der Fuhrer.....
3)Churchill the great war leader of WW2 shamed with failure at Gallipoli.
4)The literature which followed the war, such as All quiet on the western front, the poems of Sassoon, the death of Wilfred Owen, countless prodigies from many countries dead........
5)Pals Battalions in Britain and the destruction of a communities younger generation.......
6)The German armies profligate use of the army corps with newly trained students packing there ranks which left a stain on the German consciousness until it was cleaved from memory by the barbarity of the Nazis, themselves a result of the defeat in 1918.
7)The futility of it all when considering that it didn't end wars (not that the realists believed this ).
8*The second to final nail in the coffin of autocratic imperial regimes, there loss independence and existence in some cases, changing traditions of the elite
9)The Marxist/Leninist revolution in Imperial Russia and the loss of the subsequent revolutionary war.
10)The destruction of the Ottoman Empire its replacement by a western economic bloc which aided the rise of Pan Arab and Arab nationalism.

These are just some reasons why WW1 is seen from a prism of general sadness in many countries, a war where the cost outweighed the gains. And that those gains proved ephemeral in the face of a resurrected conflict in WW2....And the feeling that each country really wasn't that much different pre 1914 -
A message which has been repeated for 100 years until it rests in the psyche of those listening to and telling history, of course not all these reasons where apparent from 1918 - 1939 some are more relevant post 1945 ...

And let us not forget that Western Europe had not up to this point seen so many killed, or faced a similar event in military or socio-economic terms and had not been presented by previous conflicts with the scale and scope of the death and destruction. Which continued post war I might add, in Russia and around the globe with the flu pandemic etc, and conflict in China and the far east.

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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#356

Post by South » 10 Sep 2017, 23:00

Good afternoon Doogal,

Ref: "seen so negatively";

Do you not assign a major reason being the military mobilization of the public opinion molding advertising and cinema ? On this side of the pond we had "Madison Avenue", the advertising folks in Manhattan, NYC working the WWII account. The same for "Hollywood", the cinema section in Los Angeles also mobilized to mold public opinion.

President Ronald Reagan, in military service, worked in the above arena of warfare.

I don't contest your enumerated items other than to ask if there are not parallels for WWII ? For example, the disestablishment of the Ottoman empire can start the list of the Great War's part 2 with British India, incorporating Ceylon, Union of Burma (technicalities abound), Pakistan, etc .......and to parallel Pan Arab nationalism, the other "irredenta" movements. Many new creations post WWII - like Pakistan.......and the new island and archipelago Pacific nations. I concede that the Northern Marianna Islands does have a "compact" with the US - otherwise they might not be able to afford fishing hooks.

Again; I'm addressing the "seen so negatively" rather than the "what happened".


~ Bob
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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#357

Post by doogal » 11 Sep 2017, 08:25

Bob Wrote - Seen So Negatively
Morning Bob...

So from a British standpoint ww1 is remembered in far more sombre terms than ww2. For our part Britain suffered far higher casualties in ww1 than ww2. And while the same effects can be seen from both conflicts in respect to the alteration of the middle east and the European balance of power, literature and entertainment have framed ww1 as an act of wastefulness lead by selfish elites who led the common man into 4 years of misery. This is not really true from a factual standpoint but persists in memorium.... we must remember that everyday man and woman is not neccessarily a historian and is subject to a national belief of the past based on emotional responses ... Also that while there where clear victors the end of ww1 only set the groundwork for ww2 .. interestingly in Britain the blitz of ww2 is not remembered in such sombre terms ...


Doug
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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#358

Post by South » 11 Sep 2017, 08:32

Good morning Doug,

Well received.

Concur completely.

~ Bob
eastern Virginia, USA

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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#359

Post by Attrition » 11 Sep 2017, 14:41

~~~~~is subject to a national belief of the past based on emotional responses~~~~~

Not really, it's in the interest of the state and the corporate media to peddle myths about the Great War to excuse the slaughter of the Second World War. The killing never really ended either; Britain had a civil war and the secession of about 20% of its territory and the US flexed its imperial muscles in central America. Since 1945 the US state has waged a continual war to limit the recovery of the rest of the world from 200 years of slavery and economic plunder. Clearly the US and its protectorates need to camouflage their practices, if they want to perpetuate the myth that they are freedom-loving democracies, in the manner described by Moltke the Elder in the 1870s; it's why every anti-American (and former pro-American) nonentity becomes Hitler of the month.

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Re: Why is WWI seen so negatively compared with WWII?

#360

Post by doogal » 11 Sep 2017, 15:16

Attrition wrote - Britain had a civil war and the secession of 20 % of its territory
To which civil war are u referring ...

As for the myth that the west is full of democratic nation states : well we all know that our projected image differs from the historical truth of our acts.....

I don't recognise the America you are referring to and not in anarchic terms to be honest....

Are you looking for a Marxist utopia

Ps ... we never needed to excuse the death toll of the second world war in Britain .. we messed about in 1939 until we realised that hitler had to be stopped... Even accounting for our own moral ambivalence to the needs of empire subjects trapped by the crown we understood our failings which were brought into sharp relief by ww2.... The fact is that other nations had to do the majority of the dying in ww2 and this is reflected in common attitudes post war in Britain.... Hence we slipped out of the great power group and we're marginalised by the US and Soviets ....

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