Astral Codex Ten

World War I

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World War I

Article

World War I is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between February 20, 2021 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “debt European nations owe us from World War I”; ""When did World War I begin""; “World War I happened before the Peace Pact”. It most often appears alongside United States, Hitler, Stalin.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 9
  • Issue count: 9
  • First seen: February 20, 2021
  • Last seen: December 04, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Movie Review: Gabriel Over The White House
February 20, 2021 · Original source
Some people tell the President that he has solved Unemployment, solved Crime, and yet America is still in danger because it's running out of money. The only hope is to collect on the debt European nations owe us from World War I. But the European nations refuse to pay, giving mealy-mouthed excuses like "we're in a Great Depression too" and "help, we are literally starving here". The President declares that he shall make them pay. "Should I prepare a conference room?" asks his handsome male secretary. "No," says the President, "there have been enough conferences in rooms". Instead, he asks that the conference be planned on board the Presidential Yacht, which is apparently a thing, and adds as an afterthought "And tell the Secretary of War to have the whole US Navy there, surrounding us."
Book Review: The New Sultan
March 18, 2021 · Original source
Medieval Turkey was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, officially an Islamic caliphate though in practice only inconsistently religious, ruled by autocratic sultans and a dizzying series of provincial governors. As time passed, they fell further and further behind Western Europe; by World War I, they were a mess. As the stress of the war caused the empire to fracture, General Mustafa Kemal seized power, reorganized the scraps of Ottoman Anatolia into modern Turkey, and was renamed ATATURK, meaning "Father of Turks".
The EU becomes sick and tired of the arduous talks, and calls in candidate countries Serbia, Montenegro, and Turkey for a test on European history. The EU tells the three countries they will be asked one question. If they know the answer, they can join the EU, otherwise they will be rejected. The Serbs are offered the question "When did World War I begin". This is an easy question. "The answer is 1914." The doors open, bells ring, and Serbia joins the EU. Then the Montenegrins are asked "When did World War I end?" This, too is an easy question. "The answer is 1918." Doors open, bells ring, and Montenegro joins the EU. Finally, the Turks are asked: "How many people died in World War I, and what are their names?"
Anyhow, this led to people thinking maybe something suspicious was going on in Turkey. The resulting Deep State conspiracy theories ranged from the obviously true (Turkish elites all knew each other and hobnobbed with each other and had lots of informal connections) to the wildly unbelievable (the Black Hand guerilla organization responsible for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had survived World War I and had been puppeteering Turkey all along).
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
I've found it useful to notice the ways, as H&S exhaustively document, that we don't live in the era of World War I, or even World War II, anymore. In the first world war, war was expected, and the web of alliances that had been built were almost designed to pull us all into war, not because we were trying to right a wrong or stop an evil, but because war was inevitable between nations.
It had little effect in stopping the rising militarism of the 1930s or preventing World War II.
If you find that question confusing, you might, with a little poking at it, start to also wonder why the death of an Austro-Hungarian Prince, in Serbia, at the hands of an anarchist, caused Germany and the US to battle each other in World War I, and when Germany lost, for the allies to humble and punish Germany above all. And that question can lead back to the question of what changed, between World War I, and now, and that, according to H&S, leads right back to the Pact, and the history of the outlawry movement.
Book Review: The Man From The Future
July 13, 2022 · Original source
Berlin street scene. World War I: man at corner yelling repeatedly: “The Kaiser is an idiot!” Out of nowhere two police agents appear and arrest him for high treason. “But I was referring to the Austrian Kaiser, not to our Kaiser.” “You can't fool us! We know who the idiot is.”
Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs
July 28, 2023 · Original source
To expose what in my opinion is the actual point of this book, but which (no doubt due to its many other attractions) all reviews of it I have read have missed entirely. The German Catastrophe The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger. Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive. And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars. This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers. These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went. Germany’s defeat led into Germany’s first real democracy. Everyone was very obviously new to this. The right attacked the new state, falsely claiming it had needlessly capitulated. The left also attacked the new state, because it wasn’t Soviet-Union-like enough. There was a lot of political violence. The massive damage incurred in the war, and the restrictions and reparations Germany had accepted in the peace settlement, put massive strains on an already fragile political system. Elections were tumultuous and frequent. Hyperinflation caused a huge crisis in 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 was another huge disaster for Germany. Overall, the abolition of authoritarianism was widely felt to be a mistake. This seeming mistake was fixed when Hitler stepped in. And you know how that one went. The author in his time One remarkable witness to this entire catastrophe was Ernst Jünger. In 1938, when he picked up the pen to write Auf den Marmor-Klippen (On the Marble Cliffs), he was 43 years old and a complicated man in a complicated situation. He was first and foremost a highly renowned soldier. He had the Pour le Mérite, the equivalent of the Medal of Honor in the Kaiserreich, which would entitle him to a decent stipend if the Kaiserreich hadn't been gone for twenty years. He was clearly brilliant, especially as a writer, very well connected and exchanged many letters with important men on the political right. He made a living as an author, mostly because his first book, the World War I memoir “Storm of Steel”, was a great success and continually got reprinted. He had followed it up with a string of books, all nonfiction — almost all memoirs, about the war, or both. And he had written a flurry of political articles, mostly in ultraconservative and nationalist magazines. On the Marble Cliffs is his very first fiction novel. Or he claimed it was fiction — but he was fooling nobody. Jünger wrote for an audience that was very familiar with Storm of Steel and, because of the autobiographical nature of all of his preceding work, with him as a person. His books revealed him to be a highly perceptive, highly but coldly intelligent, very erudite, sensation seeking… sociopath. He has masterful eloquence and a keen interest in nature. Even in the trenches of the World War, where he enjoyed “hunting down” enemy soldiers with sniper shots, he seemed more interested in the dealings between the insects that bumbled through this hellscape than in how his fellow soldiers inwardly felt about what was going on. And his protagonist in the Marble Cliffs is both the first-person narrator and almost exactly the same guy! All of the following points are true both for the protagonist of this novel, and the author at the time of writing. He lives with his brother on the edge of a small town in a fairly rural area with an old Christian culture and strong traditional crafts of wine making and fishing, overlooking a large body of water, across which is a mountainous foreign country: Alta Plana in the book, Switzerland in reality.
In the beginning of this review, I wrote that the attempt to publish this book was literally suicidal. I don’t know this for a fact. But Jünger appreciated suicide as “part of the capital of humanity” and the callous disregard for his own safety that he demonstrated many times is at least parasuicidal. He appears to see fear of death as a mechanical problem to which he is proud to have found a solution. Because somewhere in that first World War that traumatized him into the author he became, sometime between his many close brushes with death, perhaps when he saw the frontline ahead of him at night as a glowing line of continual explosions and quoting Dante’s “All hope abandon, ye who enter here” went in anyway, Jünger discovered the saving power of beauty. I believe he went to the publishing house with this manuscript much like he’d go over the top in the war, acutely aware of the mortal danger, but so fortified with his duty to beauty that he’d do it anyway.
My Presidential Platform
September 05, 2023 · Original source
(source) The American rich already enjoy spending their money on exciting vehicles - yachts for the normies, rockets for the more ambitious, Titanic submersibles for the suicidal. Why not redirect this impulse towards public service? Imagine the fear it would strike into the hearts of the Chinese when the USS Musk enters Ludicrous Mode in the waters off the Taiwan Strait, with Elon himself at the wheel. Imagine how efficiently the USS Jeff Bezos will deliver its payloads! And does anyone doubt that billionaires - usually careful to avoid taxes - will jump at the chance to do this? The Athenians had a parallel liturgy for rich people who would select and sponsor theater productions, but I think we can skip this one for now. Make Sovereign Citizens Real As President, I would encourage Congress to pass sweeping legislation rewriting the US tax code to have bizarre loopholes based on the difference between “legal” and “actual” people, with special reference to World War I and the beginning of income taxes in the 1910s. These would include, but not be limited to: Legal documents that use someone’s names in ALL CAPS will refer to something subtly different than ones that use names in lowercase.
Inline links: source
Interview Day At Thiel Capital
September 03, 2024 · Original source
“This is why we survived the Cold War. People wonder how we managed to get through so many crises and near-misses without starting World War III, but all the world-branches that started World War III got wiped out, so of course we’d find ourselves in one of the lucky survivors.”
“Maybe not directly, but think about it. People always say that it could happen here. That early 20th century Europeans thought they were so great and civilized, but the Holocaust proves that even the seemingly-most-sophisticated countries can descend into barbarism and genocide at any time. But they can’t! Or there’s only a one in a billion chance that they do, the same as everyone thought in 1900. It’s just that everyone who’s still alive comes from world-branches where the one-in-a-billion thing happened. I even think World War I was a fluke - that was the only way the outcome pump could set up Hitler.”
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
14: Why did Egyptian pharaohs so often marry their sisters? David Roman explains that it actually made sense by the logic of the time. Pharaohs didn’t necessarily consummate their marriages, and their heirs would usually be born from unrelated concubines, so the risk of inbreeding was low. What they really wanted was to avoid having to marry royal-line women off to anyone else - who could then create their own branches of the royal dynasty with competing claims to the throne. 15: The ominously named “cerebrolysin” has a positive reputation in the nootropics community, but Greg Fitzgerald and Dan Elton do a deep dive and find that its manufacturing process is so poor that it ends up being mostly random amino acids - ie it can’t possibly work the way its proponents suggest. Interestingly, cerebrolysin performed about the same as some definitely-real chemicals (eg melatonin, nicotine) on my old nootropics survey, re-emphasizing that most of what the survey measures is placebo effects. 16: Why is the Ukraine war a horrible grinding war of attrition like World War I, instead of resembling more dynamic modern conflicts? I asked this on an Open Thread and got some good answers: PolymorphicWetware says that the Soviets focused on artillery, so the post-Soviet armies of both Russia and Ukraine are both artillery-heavy. Artillery is better at defending your lines than breaking your enemies’, so both sides are great at pushing back enemy troops but bad at pushing forward themselves.
Inline links: David Roman explains that it actually made sense by the logic of the time, Greg Fitzgerald and Dan Elton do a deep dive, my old nootropics survey, PolymorphicWetware
John Schilling says that neither side in Ukraine has established air superiority - Ukraine because it barely has an air force, Russia because the West gave Ukraine cutting-edge anti-air defenses. This is almost unique among major modern wars, and the lack of air power pushes ground conflicts back towards the World War I equilibrium.
Inline links: John Schilling
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
Preeminent among these was Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in Germany in 1919. Their big idea was “starting from zero” - since all previous art had been contaminated by capitalism, we needed a hard reset where people started by (eg) contemplating what color and shape really were, then gradually building a new socialist art from the ground up. This new art must eschew ornamentation, associated as it was with kings and nobles who had money to spare on gold trim or sculpted curlicues. Real socialist art would be brutally functional, the sort of thing a poor worker might build. If this sounds harsh, remember that this was right after World War I, the old order stood infinitely discredited, and starting from zero must have seemed pretty appealing.
After World War I, some Americans visited Europe and brought back reports that the Bauhaus was pretty cool. Some modern art museums did exhibitions on the Bauhaus. Everyone agreed that they were cooler and better than we were, but nothing really came of it.
Second, the first crop of European modern architects were incredibly charismatic and persuasive people. Gropius’ nickname was “The Silver Prince”; Wolfe describes him as “irresistibly handsome to women, correct and urbane in a classic German manner, a lieutenant of cavalry during [World War I], decorated for valor, a figure of calm, certitude, and conviction at the center of the maelstrom … [he] seemed to be an aristocrat who through a miracle of sensitivity had retained every virtue of the breed and cast off all the snobberies and dead weight of the past”. Meanwhile, his colleague, born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, demanded that everyone refer to him as “Le Corbusier” (French for “The Crow-Like One”)1 as some sort of combination artistic pseudonym / branding / flex. How are normal humans supposed to compete with people like these?
Inline links: 1