Comment by BurningFrog
5 days ago
> WW1 kicked off due to a royal getting murdered in broad daylight which triggered a cascade of alliances. Nationality had nothing to do with it.
The murderer Gavrilo Princip was a Serbian nationalist, who committed the murder for nationalist reasons.
That was just the excuse everyone used to have a go at eachother. Russia didn't want its pan-slavic ambitions to get embarrassed again (as they were with the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia), France wanted revenge, Austria-Hungary wanted to remind everyone that they were still around and relevant, Germany wanted to establish supremacy on the continent, the UK wanted to curtail German ambitions, and prevent the rise of a rival empire.
Everyone was itching for a fight, all for incredibly stupid, selfish reasons, and unleashed a war that butchered an entire generation of Europe's youth. Three of the five major belligerents had their governments overthrown, and that was two too few.
I've seen it described as a powder keg waiting for a match.
To me, the Russian Revolution is The Worst Thing That Ever Happened, and I imagine we'd have a much better world if that match was never lit.
> the Russian Revolution is The Worst Thing That Ever Happened,
Worse than the war that spawned it, where 20 million people died over absolutely nothing in four years, and then when it resumed, another 70 million (with an unprecedented attempt at industrial extermination of an entire group of people thrown in for good measure)?
Worse than any of the other globe-spanning empires that plunged their subjects into decades and centuries of slavery and repression?
The Soviet empire, at its worst, only had 400 million people - a mere ten percent of the world's population - in thrall.
The world's history been awash in blood spilled by war, aristocracy and autocracy, imperialism and colonialism. It's rather hard to point at one of the middling empires and go - that one, right there, is definitely the worst thing in history.
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So you’re saying that if we want to avoid World War 3 we have to get rid of nationalism in Serbia?
Having met a few Serbian nationalists that's actually not a bad idea.
Actually, that was absolutely correct until 1990 or so.
When I was young and the world was filled with anti-nuclear grimness, my father took me aside and told me I had nothing to worry about... until Josef Tito died. I didn't even know who that was. When he had been stationed in NATO, he'd served as squadron planning officer. He'd read SIOP and all the war plans, which he said were all ridiculous scenarios- except for Tito dying and Yugoslavia disintegrating.
He said NATO and the Warsaw Pact would go to war over the civil war. It would be impossible to stop as refugees and fighting would be everywhere and the Soviets would roll in.
He was absolutely dumbstruck how long Tito's grip from the grave kept the country together. When the Soviet Union fell, he said at least it won't be a nuclear war now.
This is… not a bad question at all. Serbia is punching above its weight in the current political situation in Europe thanks to being close to Putin and participating in the Chinese new Silk Road and the Serbian Orthodox Church is an amazing hate machine, rivaling their Russian counterparts easily.
While it wouldn’t stop ww3 it would remove one of the hot spots.