Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
There are two problems with history. The first is a mechanical problem, causation. There is a Newtonian attraction to start with the Big Bang and Universal Inflation and see everything as logically and inevitably proceeding from there since in our own lives Entropy’s Arrow is writ so large. The second is a failure of empathy, to see our own situation as so unique and without precedent that hsitory is nothing but a dull, dusty recitation of dates and dead people with no relevence at all. The fact that these two instincts are contradictory does not prevent people from holding them simultaneously true as a manifestation of our quantum nature where cats are neither/both dead/alive like brain craving Zombies.
There are many ‘Guns of August’ as you can see by scanning our content for the last few days. This date, the 6th, is notable in terms of the Great War because it marks the next to last formal declaration of war of the initial phase, that of Austria-Hungary against Russia (Japan declares war against Germany August 23rd). As of 100 years ago today the combatants are-
For the Entente Cordiale: Serbia, Russia, France, Belgium, Britain. For the Central Powers: Germany and Austria-Hungary.
But at this point we are already almost a thousand years in medias res because to understand the Great War you need to go back to Napoléon and the Congress of Vienna and to grasp the motivations of the British while redrawing the map of Europe you need to start at the Battle of Hastings and take into account their experiences in the Hundred Years War and the Armada.
That’s just the Anglo version, there are other important narratives.
So this is a warning (or a threat, take it how you will) that I’ll be talking about the Great War and not always with much attention to anniversaries because it’s a big, complicated, and messy subject, though the broad outlines and outcomes may not surprise you much (it’s been a whole century after all).
I anticipate at least 3 pieces to bring us up to the Congress of Vienna, one focusing on Western Europe, one on the Ottoman Empire, and one on Russia. After the Congress I will look at German and Italian unification, the Second Age of Colonialism, and the Industrial Revolution and the Ironclad. Finally in the run up to the Great War I’ll look at the establishment of the Entente and the retreat of the Otttomans from the Balkans.
And this is all before Princip fires a shot truly heard around the world.
For the most part I’ll be documenting my story based on Wikipedia, not because it’s the best or most insightful, but simply because that by the nature of its anarchic editing process it represents the lowest common denominator of facts we can all agree on.
And they’re not what you think they are if you had a typical Anglo-American education.
Television, rock and roll and teenagers. In the late 1950s, when television and rock and roll were new and when the biggest generation in American history was just about to enter its teens, it took a bit of originality to see the potential power in this now-obvious combination. The man who saw that potential more clearly than any other was a 26-year-old native of upstate New York named