You're really upset aren't you? Why is that? Are you an isolationist? Does the fact that the US even entered WWI upset you? It's not easy for me either mister. I find myself almost by default having to justify a war of imperialism, a war that killed something like 18 million people and a war that was waged by, on the British side, a bunch of upper class twits who, in the way of things, fought a contemporary war with outdated tactics, who threw men to their deaths because of their own stupidity. You know why the British Army ceased to recruit on a regional basis after WWI? It was because whole streets in various cities and towns lost a whole generation of men. My own grandfather joined the British Army in 1915 and immediately shipped out to France. Among other locations he fought with his regiment at Paschandael. Just thiink, if he hadn't made it out of that hell hole alive then I wouldn't be here apparently tormenting you.
Start a thread, educate me rather than type insulting words and phrases into your computer. I can be educated.
After the war they called themselves the lost generation.
The French lost so many young men that they had trouble fielding an army 20 years later to fight Hitler.
I'm not an isolationist as such, more of someone that regrets that US history is filled with invasions and ocupations and wars for less then altruistic reasons.
You see, i consider Wilson one of the great villians in history, they don't talk about it these days, but he was in fact a huge racist, his famous '14 points' basically claim that different ethnic peoples must have their own nations and can never live in one nation (which is supremly ironic as he was POTUS of a nation based on the premise they can) and this leads to the fracturing of Europe into little states, and sets up many of the problems that would cause the second world war.
WWI had many unforseen effects, one was that people lost faith for the first time in science, as science had been used to make more effective means of slaughter.
People also lost faith for the first time in governments, it was unthinkable for example in germany that people of authority didn't know what they were doing, yet before the war was over Germany was rife with people's commisariats exactly the same as the Russian model, many formed by sailors of the Imperial Navy (another irony as the Russian version also began with sailors). They groups of 'workers and peasants' refused to follow the orders and decrees of the old order which they blaimed for starting and prolonging the war. Parts of the German empire even had communist governments briefly.
The two 'children' of the war were really Leninist Communism and facism/nazism, these two extremist governments could never had existed as such before the war.
Perhaps the largest betrayal the US had was allowing the allies to blame germany for the war and acting as if they had won the war decisivly (this would have happened by 1919, the germans had begun to fall apart in October of 1918) while the germans could claim that they had not, this lead to the famous Hitler saying of 'the stab in the back' that 'jews' and socialists gave up the war and the army could have won it, a lie of course.
The US congress refused to ratify the Versailles treaty, they recognized that it would lay the ground work for a new war. The USA made a seperate peace with the central powers. But Congress did take one last bit of 'revenge' on Wilson for letting all this happen, they refused to support his idea for a 'league of Nations.' Without US support the league would have no international support and no funds and it proved to be a paper tiger.
The collapse of traditional morality in the 1920s was a direct result of the slaughter of WWI and the pandemic which followed it. Almost ten million men were killed in the war, and 21 million died in 1918-19 of a mysterious influenza that many believed was devine punishment for the sins of man. An attitude erupted of 'who cares about morality' which is understandable after the massive horror and death the war brought.
In many ways WWI was far more influential in changing the world then WWII was, the effects of WWII have mostly vanished now (bi-polar world, USA dominating all), and it is true also that WWII simply finished what WWI began.
The last supreme irony of a war filled with irony is the comment of Conrad, the austrain supreme commander who caused the war to start because of his insistance on invading serbia, which had a Russian garuntee:
'Austria Hungary must wage war for political reasons'
The war ended Austria Hungary.
