No Innocents

Europe in the aftermath of the Great War

Hi everyone. So, I’m in that part of the process where all I have to do is pound through a big stack of books. Last year, I put a lot of effort into keeping up a steady stream of content here on the Substack, but diverting myself in that way was a big reason that the episode took as long as it did to complete. This time around, I am making the new episode my first priority to make sure that doesn’t happen again. I will still do my best to put out regular content - I’ve planned some interviews with interesting people, and will be writing about religion, culture, great books, and other topics I know well and can do without having to dedicate precious hours to research beforehand. Thank you again to everyone who continues to support the podcast by subscribing. I’m humbled by it every day, and I’m truly grateful.

---

Everyone knows that the First World War began on July 28, 1918, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, and ended on November 11, 1918, when Germany signed the armistice agreement. Everyone knows that World War 2 began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, and ended on May 8, 1945, when Germany surrendered to the Allies. Well, just as a map is not the same as the territory it represents, history is an approximate image of the events it describes, and the markings on both, though necessary to make the decipherable at all, are often arbitrary.

If you ask a Chinese man, the Second World War began on July 7, 1937, when Japan launched a full-scale invasion of the mainland, or even back in 1931, when Japan moved on Manchuria. The war between Japan and the United States officially began on December 7, 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but many Japanese at the time would have said the war began in late July of that year, when President Roosevelt froze Japan’s assets and imposed an oil and gasoline embargo. The act deprived Japan of 94% of its oil and gasoline supplies, forcing the Japanese to either beat an ignominious retreat out of China, or else go to war with the Allies to secure new energy sources in the East Indies. A Ukrainian or Lithuanian might tell you that the Second World War dragged on into the 1950s, when their partisans were finally forced to give up their fight against the Soviet Union.

The lines bounding the First World War are similarly blurred. People living in the Balkans might point out that their fight did not begin in 1914, but in 1912, when Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria went to war with the Ottoman Empire. A Turk might note the fact that Italy, one of the Ottoman Empire’s opponents in the Great War, invaded and took Libya from them in 1911, and that Turkey would continue fighting in the Balkans and the Caucasus until 1923. A recurring theme is that the winners usually have a clearer and more consistent view of it than the losers, since losing a major war often inaugurates a period of chaos that is often hardly distinguishable from the war itself.