| My First Attempt at Writing About History! |
[Feb. 3rd, 2009|07:59 pm] |
Sometime in the summer between highschool and college I made a really stupid mistake. Well, I'm sure I made tons, in fact I can think of a few offhand. Coming home high, that was a mistake. Letting Scott drive my car, that was a mistake. Driving barefoot, that too, turned out to be a mistake. One in particular held different esteem amongst my plethora of mistakes. On my way to a friends house, carelessly, I had been driving without a seatbelt. Luckily, I'm an excellent driver and did not crash my car and send myself crashing through the windshield and sailing off into the sunny summer streets. No, I got caught at a speed trap. I was going a normal speed, and the officer lifted her hand to wave me past, but mid-wave noticed my inadvertant lack of seatbelt. I was promptly pulled over and issued a ticket ranging somewhere around $50. This not only set me back $50, but assured that my college life would be interupted intermitently by court dates. The total cost between the ticket and the transit came to around $100. It was an immature decision to drive without a seatbelt, and because of this lapse of judgement, a series of avoidable circumstances transpired.
On June 28th, 1914, the Archduke Franz (Francis) Ferdinand was assassinated in the streets of Sarajevo by a gang of dumb kids who inadvertantly changed the world, and the face of global politics forever. But the kids were not the only ones who made a poor decision, what followed in the next month were a series of careless mistakes, all of which led to the bloodiest conflict Europe had seen in nearly a century. Like myself, and just about everyone else, the leaders of the Great Western Powers made bad decisions, and those led to entirely avoidable problems. (We, however, do not have the lives of millions of people in our hands..) So, how exactly did the assissination of an Austrian Prince in Bosnia result in soldiers from Germany and France killing one another in Belgium? Well, the story is actually pretty fucking stupid...
It all starts with Neo-colonialism. As we all well know, white guys have always had a talent for going to "new places" and deciding things belong to them, but that had taken a break for a little while. It was as though some section of concience had caught up with Europe and everyone let colonialism go. But in the early to mid 1800s the invention of steam propulsion, screw propellers, explosive shells and finally the 1884 invention of the machine gun gave white guys a whole new reason to kill brown people. It was like falling in love all over again. It seemed like everyone was expanding their empires, hell, even America was getting in on the fun, and they were hardly 100 years old! This new rise of white guys stealing land caused tons of friction between rival superpowers, and especially with the little baby newcomer Germany (they only became a real country in 1871). Having joined the game late, Germany was locked out of all of the cool stuff in Africa and Asia, making them super-angry.
That leads to a key issue, Germany being a bratty little kid. Germany says to the world in so many words "I've been a country for like, 40 years! I'm not sitting at the kids table anymore!" and with this they began to expand. The problem was, Germany was like two little rascals standing on one another's shoulders in a big coat. They looked like an adult, and were as tall as an adult, but in reality, they had no idea what the fuck they were doing or getting themselves into. With little idea of exactly how a country gets big and strong, they figured "hey, Great Britain seems to be doing a pretty killer job," and they were, being the rulers of roughly a quarter of the surface of the Earth. "Lets just copy what Great Britain is doing." So, mimicing their new mentors, Germany starts colonizing, but they only get a bunch of crap (as previously stated). With this terrible start, they decide to mimic the other thing Great Britain seemed to be doing well, controling shit in the water. In fact, it was Great Britain's policy at the time to have double the combined navies of the two largest standing navies below them. That's not a typo, they seriously did this. The thing is, Great Britain had a reason to do this, being an island surrounded on three sides by land, they were very vulnerable to attack from the sea. For such a giant super power, they also had a very small land army, meaning if someone penetrated their navy and managed to land on the island, they were fucked. You can see where this is going.
Germany starts to build up its navy at an astonishing rate, causing Great Britain to become incredibly worried. This caused Great Britain to start producing even more battleships, and at a faster rate than Germany. This caused Germany to increase their speed of production, and so on and so forth until they were locked in a legitimate arms race. This competitive relationship, combined with the implied subtext of "I'm doing this because I'm afraid of why you're doing this" pretty much caused any civil relationship between Germany and Great Britain to all but disappear. Germany's super-scary growth also caused Great Britain to become allies with their age old rival, France. more to come later... let me know what you thought.
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