How could the history of World War I help us navigate today's current political climate? What were the factors that influenced the start of World War I? What were the defining characteristics that made it unique? How did nationalism play a role in this war? How did World War I end? And what lasting effects do we still feel today? What is the Treaty
of Versailles? And how did it influence the rise of World War II? Will it answer these questions and many more in today's episode, A Brief History of World War I? Welcome to Wiser World, a podcast for busy people who need a refresher on all things world. Here we explore different regions of the globe, giving you the facts and context you need to think historically about current events. I truly believe that the more we learn
about the world, the more we embrace our shared humanity. I'm your host, Alli Roper, thanks for being here. So much has been written and produced about World War II countless movies, historical fictions, biographies, documentaries, and for good reason. World War II is a very important war and we feel the ripple effects of that war to this day. But what about World War I? It was once called the Great War and the war to end all wars, but unfortunately that
has not been the case, right? While World War I is often in the shadow of World War II, it's a very important war to know about because it shapes everything leading up to World
War II, which then in turn influences the world that we know today. So if we're looking at the world at large, you know, the big world stage, World War I set a lot of gears into motion that continue to influence the world and the basic concepts that led up to the start of the war and the decisions that were made in the aftermath are still very applicable
in today's issues. So as you're listening, be thinking about how this applies to today's society, politics, even your own community, and how we can learn lessons from the past. So we're not doomed to repeat them. I made this episode for folks who aren't World War experts or lifelong historians, but rather, you know, they're people who want to refresh on this critical time in history and aren't necessarily going to pick up a massive history
nonfiction to regather the basics. So I spend the most time in this episode on the beginning of World War I and the end of World War I because I think some of the best lessons are found in those times. And think of it as a primer episode to give you kind of a skeleton of World War I and then you can find what interests you and go do some of your own digging. There's a lot of history here. I leave a ton out, right? I barely scratched the surface.
And so many excellent resources are available. I share some of those on my Patreon where each episode I give additional resources to help you deepen your knowledge of the subject of that episode of the month. You also get to listen to episodes ad free if you're a Patreon member. So if you want to sign up for Patreon, you can do that by going to patreon.com slash wiserworldpodcast. All right. World War I. Let's do this. World War I happened
from 1914 to 1918 and the final piece treaty was signed in mid 1919. So over a hundred years ago now. And at the time it was called the Great War. I mean, nobody knew that there was going to be a number two coming along shortly after. So this war is roughly four years long and it's called the first World War because it really was fought all over the world. The war itself was fought between two major alliance groups, the triple entente, which is often
known as the allies or the allied powers. That's what I'm going to call them in this episode. And the central powers is the other side. They're sometimes known as the triple alliance. So I'm going to call them the allied powers and the central powers because that's what I was taught. But they do go by different names, triple entente for allies and also triple alliance for the central powers. The main countries of the allied powers were France, Russia,
the United Kingdom and very late in the game, the United States. The central powers mainly were Germany, Austria, Hungary, which at the time was a huge empire. We're going to talk about that. The Ottoman Empire, which controlled a lot of the Middle East at the time and Italy at the beginning of the war. Italy switched sides actually pretty early on in the war actually. And we'll talk about why that was in a minute. Despite these being the major
players of the war, there were other countries involved, right? These countries had influence in many countries around the world. And so again, this war was fought all around the world, but large majority of it was fought in Europe. And a lot of different countries aligned themselves with one side or the other. And I'm not going to mention them because they weren't as major of players. But for example, just to give this a little air time, did you
know that Japan aligned itself with the allies in World War I? I actually didn't know that. Anyway, sometimes in history, you'll hear this word called theaters. There's theaters of conflict. And World War I was fought in multiple theaters. There was the Western Front. This was in the Western part of Europe. The Western Front was several hundred kilometers long. Trenches were built in this area. And they ran from the North Sea and Belgium
to the Swiss border in France. So the Western Front was on the Western side of Europe. Then there was the Eastern Front. This was the battlegrounds in the Eastern part of Europe, mostly between Germany and Austria-Hungary and Russia in the East. There were also battles in Italy as well as in the Balkan states, which are the countries that sit on that peninsula between Italy and Turkey. Africa also saw some of the conflict because there were European
colonies in Africa. The Middle East also saw some conflict because again, Ottoman Empire was involved in the war. For example, the British conquered Jerusalem during World War I, which we talk a lot about in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict 101 episodes. If you haven't listened to those yet, the history of that area, I dive pretty deep into that. There were also many naval battles in nearly every ocean. Hopefully you can see by now this truly
was a global war, never before had a war been fought on such a scale. So naturally, the impact was pretty immense. So let's talk for a minute about the lead up to World War I. I feel like again, there are valuable lessons here to show us how things escalate. And then also the post-war era. Very, very interesting. So when you're listening to this, be thinking about pattern recognition. We talk about that a lot. Pattern recognition is so important
when we're talking about history and current events. So if we look at the state of the world before 1914, what are we looking at? Well, we're looking at a world that has changed drastically in a relatively short period of time. The prior 100 years had seen a massive change in Europe. The industrial revolution had changed everything. Now we have steampower,
railways, iron and steel production factories for increased productivity. We have the rise of urban cities, all of these affecting European countries and other nations throughout the world. In each country handled the industrial revolution differently. Some did more. They made more money than others. This allowed them to start making more military equipment with all of this new technology that was being invented. Airplanes, for example, were
barely an invention in 1903. So think about it. For all the history leading up to this point, mass production of weapons and bullets and technology surrounding military, it really been a thing. Now there's this whole new world opened up by factories and mass production. To add to that, again, we're looking at the global stage here. There's also imperialism
or colonialism. There was a European scramble for various areas of the world, especially Africa and Asia, to establish colonies in these areas to use resources and also to have strategic advantages over each other. Many countries like the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and the United States. I mean, these countries had full blown empires. There was a saying that the sun never set on the British Empire. That's because, again, they had colonies
all over the world. The competition for colonies made the relationships between these European countries, you know, kind of tense. There were rivalries. Right? So these European countries have been working together or to some degree or other competing against each other in this environment of pretty remarkably accelerated growth for quite some time now. The world
had never seen that amount of growth that quickly. And the major players in World War One had all experienced rapid industrialization and the economic competition was fierce, which, again, naturally is going to lead to tension. That's just one piece of the puzzle, though. These European countries always were and still are unique from each other. They have distinctive
cultures and traditions and beliefs and ethnic groups and different languages. And even though Europe is a relatively small continent within that space, there are a lot of cultures. And as these countries developed economically, spread their influence around the world, it became more common for people to have more intense pride in their country or in their culture
or with their ethnic group. Because many of these countries were trying to assert themselves on a world stage, there was kind of this feeling of, I'm super proud of my country where the best other countries are not the best, that kind of feeling. And that is generally called nationalism. Now, I personally believe that nationalism is different from patriotism. I think on just a definition basis, most people would probably agree with me. Nationalism
is like patriotism on steroids. It's like staunch nationalist belief that their country can do no wrong. While patriots love their country, they're proud of their country, but they also recognize the drawbacks. So you can love being Swedish, love living in Sweden without thinking that Sweden's better than every other country, right? And having love of country, wanting self-determination and independence, I think those are good things
personally. But at this time, there was such an increase in cultural and national identities that finding common ground and working together became less and less of a focus. And there was a lot more of us versus them thinking that mentality was really rampant during the time before World War I. Sounds a bit familiar to what we might be experiencing today, doesn't it? Additionally, in the 1800s, several European states went through processes of unification.
For example, Germany and Italy, both of those countries didn't used to be, you know, the boundaries that we know today. And in the 1800s, they once were various smaller states and then were unified into kind of cohesive nations that we now see as, you know, Germany or Italy today. So these unification movements also influenced nationalist feelings. There are also were certain European countries that were asserting dominance over others, not
just outside of Europe and colonies, but also within Europe. So let me give a great example of this to set the stage. So Austria-Hungary was an empire at this time that covered either all of or parts of the countries that we now call Slovakia, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, and Bosnia, Herzegovina, which actually added parts of Bosnia annexed part of that into their empire in 1908. So not that long before
World War I, because World War I started in 1914, right? So parts of these modern day countries that we now see, they were all either all of them or part of them were part of the Austria-Hungary Empire. And on the southeast border of this empire is the country of Serbia, which considered itself to be a Slavic nation. Now the Slavic, the Slavic ethnic group is one of the largest and most diverse cultural groups in Europe with Slavic people mostly
living in eastern and southeastern Europe. Their languages are similar to each other. They share common cultural heritage, they have common historical background. I'm not going to go really deep into it, but Serbia considered itself a Slavic nation and wanted to unite the South Slavic people to be a single political and cultural identity, kind of like a South Slavic state, more or less. Okay? So kind of like Slavic nationalism to put it simply
like pride of the Slavic culture. And Serbia and Russia were tight, they were close. Russia considered itself kind of the protector of the Slavic nations in the Balkans. Now Austria Hungary is right on the border with Serbia, right? So Austria Hungary is not too keen on this idea, because Austria Hungary has a significant Slavic population. And so national movements, nationalist movements like this in Serbia could potentially destabilize the
Austria-Hungarian empire, because it had a lot of ethnicities in that empire. So it's getting nervous here, right? Russia was also a threat to its power in the region. And tensions were very high between Serbia and its nearby countries and the Austria-Hungary Empire. So you can see how like this national Slavic tension is high. One last thing to think about is that in the 1800s mass printing became a thing. And refining the process of
printing newspapers for the masses happened in the latter half of that century. So all of these people are getting information from newspapers and pamphlets. And this was a really, relatively new thing. All of these new nationalist ideas were more and more easy to get out there. And people were able to be more influenced by mass media than probably any other time in history. And along this vein, there was also a lot of social unrest
because of all this economic improvement being in made. And so economic injustice was also being showcased. Some leaders thought that war would stimulate economic growth, create employment, unify their nations around a common goal. So we are seeing increased nationalism, increased tension between countries. There's more information being passed around, true or untrue. There's colonial competition. There's cultural uniqueness. There's unification
going on in some countries. All this is all on the tail end of the Industrial Revolution. There's a lot going on here. And threats start getting thrown around. And some nations begin to form a alliance system. So countries are making deals with each other. We'll back you. If you back us, the idea was if we team up, we can prevent aggression. And this isn't necessarily wrong if you're thinking about prevention. However, with a big web of
alliances, that also can lead to a domino effect when the first shots fired, right? And that's exactly what happened in World War I. So what was the tipping point to actual war? We can see things are escalating, but what makes things go bad? That's next. Let's take a quick break to hear from this episode, sponsors. Even though I was a teacher, it wasn't until I became a parent that I fully realized how many decisions there are regarding
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Okay, so here we are at the tipping point. Do you remember how Serbia was interested in this kind of pan-slavic ideology about uniting Slavic peoples and Austria-Hungary was annexing Bosnian hers-gavina 1908 and this was upsetting things. Things are tense between these countries. Well on June 28th 1914, Bosnian served nationalist shot Archduke-France Ferdinand who happened
to be the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. I've been trying to think about who to compare this to in today's speak but I can't really come up with the right comparison but just no, it's a big deal when this Archduke is assassinated. Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia immediately and issued an ultimatum giving them a list of demands and Serbia did some of those demands but it didn't quite meet all of the demands and so one month later Austria-Hungary
declared war on Serbia. Now because of the nature of alliances, especially at this time in history, it was again like a line of dominoes were set up and this was the first one to go and so the others immediately fell down to. Chain reaction. Russia supported Serbia and Germany supported Austria-Hungary and Germany had other issues to its west, namely France. France and Germany had a long-standing rivalry and Germany had also annexed some land from
France in the 1870s and a war and France was still bitter about it. Germany like many countries had been building up its military during this time and had predicted a conflict with both France and Russia so it had even made a military strategy that if it had to deal with the two-front war, it was going to invade France immediately through Belgium. Kind of like we got to knock out France right away and then move on to Russia in the east.
Well, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Russia supported Serbia, Germany supports Austria-Hungary, Germany knows okay it's going to end up in a war with Russia and so it declares war on Russia and then this military strategy fell into place and Germany declared war on France two days later in August and the German argument was that there
were French troops at the border and they were acting in self-defense. Germany invades Belgium to get to France and since Belgium was neutral, this was like a big no-no right?
Great Britain had made a treaty in earlier years like 1839, earlier years that honored Belgium as neutral and so when Belgium was invaded, Britain honored that agreement and then declared war on Germany so you could just see like boom boom boom we have a lot of countries entering into a large-scale conflict in very quick succession. We have the Allies, France, Russia and the United Kingdom and then we have the Central
Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary and at first Italy. Italy got involved largely because it wasn't friendly with France who had a lot of territories in northern Africa very close to Italy. The Ottoman Empire also joined a few months later with the Central Powers, the Ottoman Empire had been on a decline for some time and this war was seen kind of as a way to boost the economy and revitalize their power in a region where they were losing
power. At this time the US remained neutral though it did favor the Allies especially Britain and France and sold them war supplies gave them loans so they had an economic relationship with the Allies far more than the Central Powers. The US does not stay neutral forever but we're going to get to that in just a minute. Alright so the war has begun. Let's talk a little bit about what made World War 1 unique. What are some of the things that defined World War 1? This is obviously while
these subject it. If I'm sure every World War 1 history could give you a different answer to which things are the most critical but there are some big things that have really stuck in my mind over the years are good anchor points for me in associating World War
1 so I'm going to share those. The first I would say is trench warfare. When the Germans invaded Belgium to get to France right at the beginning of the war French and British troops were able to hold off that German advance and it quickly turned into a stalemate. Sure you know guns had been used for a while now but with technological advances like
machine guns things had changed and so the military had to use new tactics. Both sides began digging trenches usually deep enough for a man to stand up in kind of like hallways dug into the ground and over time there became a really elaborate trench system built up on the western front which is relatively flat land that's also influenced by the dug trenches. They'd shoot at each other and try to make advances but it was incredibly
difficult to break enemy lines this way. Between the trenches was what was called nomans land this was a barbed wire booby trapped mess from everything I've read it sounds
like life in the trenches was pretty unbearable. Sanitary conditions were abysmal rats ran all over the place diseases spread extremely quickly and you know sitting in soggy and cold conditions in leather boots led to something called trench foot which is basically that the tissue on the soldier's feet began to deteriorate cause nerve damage sometimes trench foot got so bad that soldiers feats were amputated so life in the trenches sounds
pretty hopeless this was on the western front especially. Another defining characteristic of World War One was the use of more modernized weapons such as airplanes, U-boats another word for U-boat is submarine automatic automatic weapons like the machine gun also tanks all
of these things were very new for the time period and created an entirely new way of waging war I mean if you think about it wars have been fought for thousands thousands of years but never below the surface of the ocean or above it in the skies and tanks
like just think about tanks World War One saw the first large scale use of tanks which made the way you waged a battle and the way you defended yourself a very very different from the past so it's learning on the ground it was a completely different ball game you
know when I stop and think about it is so astonishing how many things have changed in the last 120 years in history it's mind boggling the advancements that we've experienced and will probably continue to experience and World War One was one of those times when it
was all happening very quickly and all that technological advancement was being learned in the moment you know right on the battlefield 1915 and 1916 were marked by large battles that had enormous cost of human life while the western front was in a pretty static trench
warfare situation the eastern front was much more fluid it had a lot more wide open territory on that side Russia put up a good fight but Russia was having a lot of internal upheaval during this time it was on the tipping edge of revolution so Russia took some
significant hits by the Germans on the eastern front and the the central powers ended up with a lot more wins on that side also during these years the British Royal Navy set up a naval blockade against Germany which made it very difficult for food and essential
supplies to enter Germany the idea was to weaken Germany as much as possible and it definitely succeeded the civilians of Germany suffered terribly feeding the population became a severe issue it's believed that almost a million German civilians died during
World War One from just starvation Germany retaliated to this blockade by using unrestricted submarine warfare it would target both military and civilian boats so it would sink merchant ships who were carrying goods to and from Britain and the lucetaneous one of
those examples and we'll talk about that in just a second so you can see there's retaliation retaliation retaliation in may of 1915 there was a British ocean liner carrying passengers off the coast of Ireland and it was torpedoed by a German U-boat again that's a submarine
when it sunk over a thousand people died including 128 Americans this didn't really help the Germans in their relationship with the United States and Americans started to see Germany in a less favorable light around this time Italy also switched sides and joined with the allies so
this blockade an unrestricted submarine warfare were brutal on both sides when 1917 rolls around everyone's been at war for about two and a half years now and things were looking pretty rough for the allies Russia is in a full blown revolution at this point I have episodes on this
called the Russian Russia 101 episodes if you want to learn more about it but this was the time when the Tsar or the king of Russia essentially was overthrown and Russia became communist so in 1917 that was a big year Russia was very unstable and the allies were not doing well and remember Russia
was on the allies side in January of 1917 British intelligence intercepted a secret telegram that showed that the German foreign minister was trying to make a deal with Mexico against the United States so Mexico had lost a lot of territory to the US and the Mexican-American war in the 1840s
so in this telegram that Britain intercepted Germany's basically saying hey Mexico if you make an alliance with us and we win this thing we can get you all that territory that you lost well Britain intercepted the telegram and let the United States know and the US was not happy I mean
Mexico is its southern border and that's a little too close to home not to mention that the US was still mad about German unrestricted submarine warfare so in April of 1917 the United States declares war on Germany and enters World War One this was a turning point in the war it was a
huge boost for the allied friend which was flagging I mean at this point everyone's so exhausted in Europe they're toast they're all super tired and then all of these young fresh American boys show up and the morale completely changes on the allied side in fact American soldiers were often
called the doughboys some say this is because they looked like fried dumplings compared to the scraggly European boys who had been at war for years so fresh troops from the US money from the US revitalizes the allied side additionally in late 1917 Russia withdrew completely from the war
and shortly after treaty was signed between the central powers and the new Russian government the Bolshevik government that ended the war on that side Russia lost a lot of territory to the central powers so the war was over on the Eastern Front but this made 1918 a big year to
determine the war and there were some massive battles fought that year the allied powers which at the time basically Australian British Canadian French forces they launched what is now called the Hundred Days Offensive which was a series of offensive attacks against the central powers that
were very successful and over time Germany became exhausted in 1918 not to mention that the German population was super unhappy because of the blockade causing massive food shortages in Austria hungry and the Ottoman Empire there was a lot of internal unrest making these empires look like they were
on the verge of collapse and in early November of 1918 the leader of Germany advocated his position and days later an armistice was signed which officially ended the fighting US president Woodrow Wilson pushed for peace based on what he called his fourteen points basically calling for self
determination open diplomacy creation of an international organization that would hopefully prevent future conflicts called the League of Nations the central powers accepted these conditions and an armistice was signed on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month so November 11th 1918
and this began the long road to a peace treaty that took another seven months to pull together all right so we've reached the end of the fighting now let's talk about the effects that happened after World War One we don't know exactly how many people passed away during World War One but we
do know that it's a staggering number the most that had ever happened in such a short amount of time in history up until that point it is believed that between eight and 10 million soldiers died in the war Russia had the most with over two million soldiers passing and then Germany with
1.8 million France with 1.3 then Austria-Hungary with around a million the UK had around 880,000 the Ottoman Empire somewhere around 500,000 and with the US joining Solate around 115,000 US soldiers died but the overall human cost was enormous with somewhere estimated around 20 million
people dying this including obviously civilians never before again in such a short amount of time had there been this cost the scale of this is just astonishing that's just so so many people it's just so heavy let's talk next about the long road to the peace treaty because peace treaty negotiations
they are never easy World War One had multiple peace treaties but probably the most famous one is the Treaty of Versailles and it's a doozy it was signed in June of 1919 and formally ended World War One this treaty is a big deal for a number of reasons but personally I believe the biggest is that
it played a significant role in setting the stage for World War Two so I'm not going to skip over this I think there's some important stuff that we can learn here what to do and what not to do and if you want a good historical like muscle flex or brain flex you really should go read the Treaty
of Versailles because I'm going to leave some stuff out but it's a fascinating look at kind of the collective psyche of the winners of this war these peace negotiations were made between the leaders of the allied powers primarily the major players were the US, UK, France and Italy and then the
defeated central powers which really focused mostly on Germany the main points of the Treaty of Versailles were first that the German Empire which had been run by a king or an emperor called the Kaiser was dismantled it was replaced by the Weimar Republic W E I M A R Weimar Republic
this was a democratic republic with a parliamentary system if you don't know what that means I have an episode on government systems it's episode 26 and I explain what all those terms mean really simply but essentially a constitution was made a parliament was created where people could vote
they're elected officials there was an elected president and to keep things simple I'm going to keep calling Germany Germany but at that time it did go by a different name and we know now that the Weimar Republic ended in 1933 with Adolf Hitler establishing the Third Reich but you can see
here that at the end of world war one Germany had a mark you know had a shift from a monarchy to democracy and even though there are valid arguments on both sides whether or not it was successful it did happen and a lot of people don't know that that happened at the end of world war one
another thing that happened with this treaty was that colonial changes occurred so many areas in Asia Africa and the Middle East that had been territories of the central powers were now being more or less handed over to the allied powers for example this happened with the Ottoman Empire
losing Palestine to the British we learn about that again and the Palestinian is really conflict one-on-one episodes another big thing in the Treaty of Versailles was just territory before world war one Germany had taken lands from France and another war and that land was now returned
back to France Germany lost a significant amount of territory at the end of world war one along its eastern and western borders and this did not make Germany very happy the treaty also required Germany to have military restrictions in other words they wanted to limit the German
army so they wouldn't have the capacity to wage war again Germany was also not allowed to have tanks or aircraft likewise the western part of Germany called the Rhineland was occupied by allied forces and demilitarized Germany was also required to pay reparations to ally powers for war
damages basically financial penalties these were enormous and Germany couldn't handle it and it ended up diving into a massive depression after world war one because of these required reparations the League of Nations was also formally created in the Treaty of Versailles and its founding members
pledged to help promote peace in the future the last thing that i'm going to cover is a clause so a clause was built into the Treaty of Versailles called article 231 and this clause placed full responsibility for the war on Germany and its allies oh the infamous war guilt clause
this clause was a bitter pill for Germany to swallow having played you know they placed all the responsibility for the war on Germany and this becomes a point of contention after the war for sure there are a lot of people who have studied the Treaty of Versailles over the years especially
being able to look back with the lens of what we now know right we know that this treaty did not create world peace sadly another massive larger war was underway only 20 years later right world war two you know many critics say that the allies hit Germany too hard that by placing so much
economic and psychological burden on Germany that set Germany up to fail which led to general acceptance of the extreme Nazi ideology of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s you know who's to say hindsight is 2020 it's a lot easier to look back and criticize leaders than it is to be
in the room where it happened with the knowledge that they had at the time so I do think it's a question worth thinking about if you were a leader in the allied nations you were the winners how would you have handled this win I mean they had choices here the winners had the most power in
the room they got to choose how they managed these defeated nations how would you have handled it what do you think is the best way to handle this kind of thing I always love those discussions in my classes because there's so many different opinions on this but eventually we do know the treaty
of Versailles did not create long standing peace the aftermath of world war one following this was pretty substantial for one there was a profound economic cost tons of money had been borrowed and spent on the war which led to inflation that had lasting consequences Germany in particular
had extreme hyperinflation in the early 1920s the German mark was devalued so rapidly that there was a lot of instability economies across Europe were also very affected by this the one country that does seem to come out of world war one pretty well off was the United States which emerged a
major economic power with a lot more you know a lot more power than it used to have another one of the aftermath effects was that many of these empires had been dismantled at the end of the war the Austro-Hungarian Empire dismantled Ottoman Empire dismantled German Empire changed right dismantled
new nations and borders were created especially in eastern Europe and in the Middle East the maps were reshaped and if you've listened to this podcast a little bit by now you hopefully can recognize how all of this plays into politics today when countries are occupied by new groups have
new boundaries put upon them have different ethnic make-ups than they did before these decisions have profound effects on average ordinary people in their lives and they often lead to unrest in this case with world war one that definitely was the case newly established nations struggle to
define their new identities and there have been some kind of conflict in many of those regions ever since another effect of world war one was there were social transformations the war influenced the way that people thought they you know had to deal with that huge scale of death of humans
lives lost and existentialism became a very popular philosophical movement it really emphasizes individualism personal responsibility a lot more than that but new philosophical ways of thinking became popular in the aftermath of world war one also women's suffrage movements and labor unrest
all gained ground after world war one too but probably the largest effect of world war one was this is just my opinion but that the seeds for future conflicts were sown the Treaty of Versailles did create a lot of resentment especially German resentment and there were issues that never
quite got resolved or were kind of laid to rest and instead of resting they festered and with all of the economic issues that happened after the war totalitarianism and authoritarian leadership became much much more popular in some countries particularly in Germany and in Italy with the
rise of Hitler and Mussolini the Middle East which had been carved up again it had new boundaries were created there also began facing serious unrest so those were kind of the the loose skeleton you know the outline of world war one beginning middle end again very basic but some deeper concepts
that you can chew on I left a lot out you know I left out major leaders battles tons of individual stories that we could talk about but I hope it gives you a little bit of a framework there are so many great world war one resources out there and again patreon members get those from me on patreon.com
slash wiserworld podcast you know as I've studied extra on world war one these past few months I think my major takeaway for everyday life just how I apply this to my own life has been the importance of beginnings and endings why things start and how they end and how this makes a
really big difference and it's often said that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it and I think that's true but I also like the way mark twain put it he said quote history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme and I can see some similar things happening in our world today
that remind me a lot of the world war one era if we look at the beginning of world war one we see a lot of nationalism tribalism people joining together in particular ethnic racial political groups right and being unwilling to see a variety of opinions and welcome different
perspectives and this created isolated silos alliances created a domino effect for conflict and in our day and age you know over a hundred years later every person kind of has a platform with social media that makes this even more in our faces so what I'm taking away from this is that
we have to be more aware of our own personal ability to tolerate diversity of thought and I've talked about this before but this doesn't mean that we can't have opinions or stand up for what we believe to be true or right but I think that it means we have to be more aware of our
own ability to tolerate complexity of thought and meet people that have different ways of saying things and being able to have more real conversations in meaningful productive ways because that's skill the skill of being able to do that really can stop wars not just big violent enormous wars
but also like small wars in our lives it just makes me think about how if everyone had the ability to speak clearly kindly bravely with each other not necessarily to change each other's minds but just to not assault each other's viewpoints you know think about what the world would look like
and not only does this apply in governments across the world we hope that our lawmakers can work together to solve problems but it also applies in like basic friend groups book clubs like middle school elementary school high school the way we interact with our neighbors our communities I believe
that human beings have an enormous capacity to listen and hear each other and to be excellent problem solvers but we also have a propensity to rush and to get angry and to close ourselves off and to just like boom boom boom domino effect you hit my friend I'm going to hit you back
and this leads to violent wars we're seeing that today we saw that in the past but it also leads to non-violent wars like just wars inside of our own homes and in our own communities and I'm just realizing that in trying to prevent wars that requires a level of emotional intelligence
and maturity that I want to have that I want to work on that I also want to like foster in my home and with people around me so I'm realizing also as we end arguments you know in these many wars in our lives how we do that is important you know the Treaty of Versailles did not lead to
long standing peace and so there's something to be learned from that what did it create in Germany it created a lot of resentment and scholars love to debate why this is you know did Germany not get enough of say could it have had more of a say was that the right thing you know we could go
on and on about that but what I'm realizing is maybe the best way to create peace is to repair well and when there's damage and relationships in our own spheres of influence thinking about the way that we repair the way that we create our own peace treaties you know that has an effect on
our lives it has an effect on our communities and in the world at large so I'm just walking away from this episode with more of a desire to open my mind be a little more generous and just put the sword down and be a little more peace-minded and I don't know I hope that that made some sense
because history is being made now we're a part of it and I think that we can probably all do a little bit better at that so those that's my two cents though those are my takeaways if you learn anything today I'd appreciate it if you shared the episode on social media or in person send a
text to someone you love and also if you'd consider leaving a review reviews on Apple podcasts and Spotify really help people to find this show so I always appreciate that and I'll be back soon thank you so much for listening and in the meantime let's go make the world a little wiser