Resolved: Germany was the aggressor against France in WWI

[Jackmannii]

DD is still claiming his beliefs (including that all the great powers, especially France were equally guilty in precipitating WWI) are supported by The Sleepwalkers.

Clearly, he has misstated the conclusions of the book, which itself is a revisionist work at odds with the historic consensus.

For a good summary of the book’s dubious contentions and DD’s misinterpretation of them, check out this post.

I pit DrDeth

In the interests of clarifying things. I assume that his contention derives from Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, a book he intermittently and inexplicably also calls Sleepwalker. This is a revisionist text, although not—I would argue—in an especially pejorative sense. With the caveats that: I did study German history at university (as part of a double major in anthropology), but I never finished the capstone course so I’m maybe 1% more qualified than a layman to comment, and I would cal…

Excerpt:

Notably, Clark (in The Sleepwalkers) does not claim that France and Russia declared war on Germany. He is quite clear that Germany declared war on Russia, and quite clear that Germany’s consequent military planning necessitated preemptive war with France. Nor does Clark claim that France or Russia were responsible for a “lie […] fed to Tuchman, by falsifying records.”

…Clark does not allege that France intended war with Germany—indeed he acknowledges that France was eager to avoid provocation and does not argue that France withdrawing its military from the border was anything other than an attempt at conciliation.

Without Austria-Hungary’s intent to completely crush Serbia, and Germany egging them on and being determined to carry out its version of the Schlieffen Plan to which it had devoted so much study and preparation, there would have been no war.