this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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That's the wrong war. Fort Eben Emael wasn't even constructed yet, and there were no paratroopers on any side.
Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28th, 1914. On July 28th, Austria-Hungary began shelling Belgrade, in the first shots of the war. Germany occupied Luxembourg August 2nd and invaded Belgium August 4th.
But regardless, the European powers were always going to end up fighting each other after running out of places to colonize, building up enormous militaries, and forming a bunch of secret alliances. No nation was the "good guys" in WWI, they were a bunch of imperialist colonial states jockeying for power, and sending ordinary people into awful conditions to die for no good reason.
I can understand that perspective, but I'm looking at things from more of a class based and realpolitik perspective. The international order, I would say even now, but especially at that time of peak colonialism, was pretty much like this.
The Allied powers dominated the world, and they achieved that through force, brazen, unapologetic aggression. Germany didn't have a problem with that, except for the part where they weren't the ones on top, that they didn't have colonies to exploit like everyone else.
From my perspective, the real problem is that socialists at the time didn't follow through on the Basel declaration of 1912 where socialists of every country promised to oppose the coming war. When the war actually broke out, everyone rallied around their respective flags, the British and French socialists talked about Germany invading neutral countries and not being as democratic, but the German socialists justified it by talking about serfdom in Russia and the colonialism of Britain and France, and at the end of the day, tons of regular people got drafted to go die in the trenches over these power games.
Admittedly, I've never really considered it from a Belgian perspective before, but I think the bigger nations were all more motivated by power than by a genuine commitment to upholding neutrality and national sovereignty.