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This book was hugely influential in the years just before WW1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
by jbattle 8y ago
This book was hugely influential in the years just before WW1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
Premise: the large nations of the world are far to intertwined by commerce and culture. Large scale war would be suicidal and the leadership of these countries would never do something so foolish.
- jawilson2 8y ago> Large scale war would be suicidal They weren't wrong
- eezurr 8y agoThe book was right about it being suicidal, but before ww1 did we have any evidence for this?
- merpnderp 8y agoThe US Civil War was pretty epic in its destruction.
- mr_toad 8y agoThe countries involved might not stand to gain anything, but that doesn’t mean that the leaders of those countries understood (or cared) about that.
- CamperBob2 8y agoThey didn't have nukes. With nukes, the principal players no longer feel safe, and large-scale war is disincentivized accordingly.
- liftbigweights 8y agoI forget whether it was in medieval europe or in feudal japan ( or maybe both ) where someone wrote that the gun was so horrible and easy to use that it would make war unthinkable. The thinking was that the art and skill of the warrior and nobleness of battle was undone by the gun. Years of training to develop martial skills by the brave knight or samurai were no match for a cowardly peasant with a gun. People forget that the gun was viewed as a coward's tool when it was introduced. A real man would never use such a weapon. Or so they predicted. Boy were they wrong.