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Comment by eadmund | Hacker News Reader

You realise that Germany invaded Belgium and France because France and Russia mobilised against her? And that they mobilised because Germany was supporting Austro-Hungary against Serbia, whose intelligence service had commissioned the murder of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and of his wife? Not countering those mobilisations would have left the German Empire at the mercy of Russia and France.

To the extent that one can talk about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ sides in the Great War (which is not very far, really), Germany was on the good side (unlike in the Second World War).

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> You realise that Germany invaded Belgium and France because France and Russia mobilised against her?

Not sure any country would have accepted the terms of Germany's ultimatum to France, which included not only not starting mobilization, but also giving strong guarantees. Furthermore, if France was to bend and remain neutral, the German ambassador was instructed to add more humiliating terms in order to secure war.

I don't think a country that performed the grotesque "rape of Belgium" can claim to be the good side. The simple fact is, Germany initiated the war, and Germany implemented the worst atrocities of the war. That makes it the "baddie" in my book.

I don't think there is any country in Europe that wasn't guilty of doing evil before the war to stir it up (even neutral countries like Switzerland, though I don't know of anything they actually did I'm still willing to lump them in with the guilty). Even in the rest of the world there were not many parties that were not stirring things up (remember Europe had colonies all over the world)

I mean, I don't really buy this "they were all as bad as each other" argument. We're not talking about some moral assessment of the totality of German and British civilisations, but rather more specifically about WWI itself and the lead up to it. The simple fact is that Germany initiated the war (turned a "cold" rivalry hot), it invaded its neighbour, it treated civilians abonimably, and Britain's involvement in the war was in practice defensive to its ally France and took place mostly on French territory. I don't recall Britain rounding up villages of Germans and executing them.

Even when it comes to the "war crimes" stuff in this thread - something like poison gases were straightforwardly outlawed by the Hague Convention, it was Germany that first decided to "go there" and make mass use of poison gas a feature of WWI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Conventions_of_1899_and_...

Germany was first, but both sides were looking for an excuse to start a war.

"Historian Joachim Remak[0] says:

'The nation that...can still be held least responsible for the outbreak of the war is France. This is so even if we bear in mind all the revisions of historical judgments, and all the revisions of these revisions, to which we have now been treated....The French, in 1914, entered the war because they had no alternative. The Germans had attacked them. History can be very simple at times.[1]'"

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Remak

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_entry_into_World_War_I#...

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