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What Hacker News says
- Worth noting the book “The Great Illusion” by Norman Angell published in 1909 in the years before WWI. The book is considered probably the best example of Europe’s delusions regarding the nature of peace and war before 1914.
One of Angell’s main ideas was that trade between countries rendered them so close, increasing familiarity and contact, that war would be extremely unlikely because of decreased nationalist sentiment. He believed that contact and connection reduces disagreement.
His book did not really account for the fact that increased connection and encounters simply give you many more things with which to disagree and possibly go to war over.
Charles Lindbergh years later took up this idea again, believing the airplane to be a utopian machine of unity between peoples and countries. He believed it so much he was helping the Nazis and the Luftwaffe well into 1938 without issue.
Finally I want to note I see a concerning amount of similarity between the utopianist rhetoric that came from physicists and aircraft engineers in the 1920’s and those of software engineers today, and I think this is worth considering. Those inventions, while incredible, played a key role in one of the most brutal wars of all time.
- From my understanding the problem was that Germany was growing very strong and threatening Britain's domination.
An interesting book about the topic is The Great Illusion By Norman Angell [1]
Saying a bunch of students started WW1 is quite absurd.
I did find some material pointing fingers at King Edward though, might want to take a look [2]
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38535/38535-h/38535-h.htm
[2] http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1995/eirv22n13-1995032...
- > But there have been no wars between major powers in the last 80 years. Maybe people in power have realized that all-out wars are no longer productive.
People talked like that before WW I. There hasn't been a major war in Europe since 1870 almost half a century and trade is such a large war would bankrupt all the major powers and so would never happen. The Great Illusion was published in 1909 and was positively received at the time:
> In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[4][5] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.[6] He argued that war was economically and socially irrational[7] and that war between industrial countries was futile because conquest did not pay.
- Whether so intended or not, I like to think it was a response to Angell's The Great Illusion.
Both were written at, and the film Moulin Rouge! strives to depict, a time whose specific and rather rancid vibe the phrase fin de siècle (literally 'end of cycle' sharing the relevant root with 'secular,' but in proper translation 'end of the century') was adopted into English to describe. That phrase has been occurring to me with some frequency this year.
- In 1913, Norman Angell published a book called "The Great Illusion" in which he argued that the use of military force had become economically futile due to the interconnectedness of international finance and trade. World War I started one year later. Trade and interconnectedness probably have a net positive effect on reducing war, but not a reliable guarantee.
- This was famously the argument made in the book The Great Illusion, 5 years before the outbreak of the First World War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
Wars are often irrational.
