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  • Adderbox76
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    2 months ago

    I’ll die on a hill that says that the First World War was more historically significant than the second.

    Just about everything that’s giving us issues on the world stage today is a result of decisions during, and after, the armistice; from the Sykes-Picot agreement fundamentally creating the current middle east crisis, to the American rise to dominance in it’s wake because the vast majority of wealth transferred there as each European country came to them for loans to arm and supply their men.

    By the time the war ended, The entire economic centre of the world had changed from Europe to America.

    • Joshi@aussie.zone
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      2 months ago

      I agree and I’d like to add that education systems that treat WW2 as the war to understand is actively harmful.

      In part due to characteristics of the war and in part due to how it is taught and remembered.

      Just 2 examples

      • WW2 can be quite easily presented as having clear good guys and bad guys which makes it fairly unhelpful to study to understand modern conflicts.
      • Chamberlain is consistently painted as a naive idiot for trying to prevent a war through diplomacy. Whether or not it was futile in that case isn’t really relevant, when WW2 is the only war most people study in any depth then all attempts at avoiding conflict get characterised as naive appeasement.