Kaiser Wilhelm II was pissed off at the French because they made him declare war and invade first, thus saddling Germany with the “odium” of being warmongers.
What a rotten thing for the French to do. 
Or assign blame for WWI not on who started it, but on who had the ability to stop it but chose not to.
The Serbian government knew the Bosnian Black Hand operated freely inside Serbia, knew its own intelligence service gave them aid, and knew about the assassination plan.
The Austro-Hungarians chose to react as if the Serbians fully controlled, not just tolerated, the Bosnians, and overplayed it.
The Russians were looking for a crusade to shift public focus away from internal conflict (as had worked so splendidly in their war with Japan)
But most of all the Germans: because if Bismarck had still be alive and in power instead of Wilhelm, there’d have been no war. Everyone else, including those above and the British and French, could claim national “magic thinking” as an excuse. But only the Kaiser and his generals embraced militarism as a metaphysical philosophy of government before the crisis when all heads were cool. The old saying about Prussia being an army with its own nation.
Pakistan and Kashmir “terrorists”.
We can agree here!
Mind you- I dont like the idea of millionaires getting SocSec, but honestly, fixing that will need stuff like means testing etc- and i dont want to tamper with SocSec.
That is the lie that France fed to Tuchman, by falsifying records. In the Sleepwalker, the author shows France declared first.
However, this is getting to be a hijack. Read the book, and then start a new thread and we can debate it.
Your obsession with Barbara Tuchman and a single dubious revisionist history aside, respected major major sources agree on the sequence of events. An example of many showing the same timeline:
That lil’ old German invasion of Belgium thingy is the major sticking point in your conspiracy narrative.
No need for a new one. There’s a Pit thread covering this and your other claims. Your fans await. 
This is an odd assertion, since Sleepwalkers effectively ends on August 1st and, as far as I can tell, the only mention of Barbara Tuchman is in a footnote in the book’s introduction, to wit:
for a superb example of the distancing ‘world-that-was’ approach to the pre-1914 world, see Barbara Tuchman, Proud Tower. A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890–1914
Which page should I be looking at for the discussion of the French declaration of war?
For a discussion of German belligerence in this matter, might I recommend Christopher Clark’s 2012 book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914? Clark is mostly concerned with the July Crisis before its denouement in the guns of August, but he does set the stage for the initial balance of forces:
The French government did its utmost to offset this disadvantage [i.e. that the British might view France as being drawn into a war that did not directly involve them, and therefore might wish to abstain from intervening themselves, weakening the French defensive posture] by scrupulously avoiding any aggressive measures against Germany: on the morning of 30 July, the Council of Ministers in Paris agreed that French covering troops would take positions along a line from the Vosges mountains to Luxembourg, but without getting closer than ten kilometres from the frontier. The idea was to avoid any possibility of border skirmishes with German patrols and to persuade London of the pacific nature of French policy. It was felt that the moral effect and propaganda value of the exclusion zone outweighed the military risks.
And with regards to Belgium specifically, opines:
French policy combined an offensive posture in the Russian theatre with a defensive one in their own. In Germany’s case, the poles were reversed […] Germany would strike first and hardest in the west and destroy its western opponent before turning to face its enemy in the east.
As the moment approached for German mobilization on 1 August, the policy-makers in Berlin made two further epic blunders. The execution of the western deployment plan required the swift and immediate invasion of Belgium. Delaying the violation was out of the question, Moltke argued, because the completion of Belgian defence measures in and around fortified Liège would block the German advance and cost huge casualties. This insistence on immediate action was politically problematic. Had Germany waited until its forces were actually concentrated and ready for attack before crossing the Belgian border, the Belgian and French armies would have acquired more time to consolidate their defensive arrangement. On the other hand, it would have been much harder (though probably not impossible) for Grey and his colleagues to make a case for intervention. Grey’s opponents could have pointed out that Russia and (by extension) France, not Germany, were forcing the pace; the British interventionists would have been deprived of one of their most effective arguments. Recognizing this, Admiral Tirpitz, a navalist who understood the importance of the British role, later posed the angry question: ‘Why did we not wait?’
The German ultimatum thus turned out to be a ‘terrible psychological blunder’. It resonated in wartime propaganda, overshadowing the complexities of the war’s causation and endowing the Entente war effort with an unshakeable sense of moral superiority.
Many Germans were shocked by the Belgian decision to resist à l’outrance. ‘Oh, the poor fools,’ one diplomat at the German legation in Brussels exclaimed. ‘Oh, the poor fools! Why don’t they get out of the way of the steamroller. We don’t want to hurt them, but if they stand in our way they will be ground into the dirt. Oh, the poor fools!’.
Moderating:
The discussion about the causation and responsibilities for WW1 and by extension, WW2 is getting rather far afield from the OP. I suggest, if all posters want to continue this discussion it is worthy of it’s own thread so that it doesn’t continue to dominate this one.
Linked Topic instructions
If you are responding to something in a thread that is basically off-topic or likely to lead to a hijack, try this:
How to Reply as a linked Topic:
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
Getting back on topic, plenty of white supremacists/anti-semites and Islamic extremists have made valid criticisms of Israel. Unfortunately, their anti-semitism can be so wedded to their critiques that it’s hard to parse them apart.
Or in the opposite political direction, the Communists had plenty of perfectly accurate criticisms of capitalism. It’s just that they used those criticisms to justify installing dictatorships and killing lots of people, which rather poisoned the well and helped prop up capitalism instead of undermining it.
Weren’t all the WW1 peace treaties pretty much of a muchness? The general principle was to strip off all areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, except, of course, where this would benefit a loser. Thus Russia suffered worse than Germany, due to having more minorities, while Austria, Hungary and Turkey suffered worse than Russia (though in Turkey’s case, and to some extent Russia’s, many of the losses were soon undone).
What might these “plenty” of “valid criticisms” be, and how do they differ from the grotesque distortions and wild conspiracies promulgated by these parties?
While exploiting the Gaza situation to promote anti-Semitism, white nationalists also enjoy fomenting hatred against Muslims.
I too try–strongly–to avoid ideology. Nietzsche said that convictions were greater enemies of truth than lies.
But I sometimes have to work hard to keep from delighting in some schadenfreude.
Yeah, me too. I’ve adopted the JBP reframe of “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people”. In a sense it’s true, because good and bad ideas persist despite the demise of individuals that hold them, and it seems we’re somewhat helpless hosts to idea contagions (ether for the good or bad). We either have a mental environment suitable for a particular idea exposure, or we don’t.
Cultivating the mental environment that nourishes good ideas and quarantines bad ones (leaving aside the difficulty of defining good and bad) is the endless pursuit.
Honesty is the mechanism for exploring “ideas” and positioning them on the spectrum of worst to best. Honesty is distinct from “true” or “correct”, because one can be honest and incorrect, but that is the process of truth-seeking.
“JPB”?
Other than that quibble I broadly agree with your POV.
JPB?
I believe you are likely referring to either The Joe Budden Podcast
or possibly Joint Business Plan. But it could be something else.
Instead of leaving people to guess (even though I’m sure I nailed it) wouldn’t it be easier to simply write out what you intend to say instead of random letters? Guessing games are really nifty but… 
Jordan Bernt Peterson (AKA Schrödinger’s Christian)
I was going to mention Marx. Looking at history through a Marxist lens, i.e. the struggle between different social classes, is actually useful. When he talks about the alienation of labor, Marx is making some valid points. But, boy howdy, is that guy wrong about the solution.
My 2-¢: What I think the Marxists got fundamentally wrong was to draw a mistaken analogy between ownership of land in feudal times, and ownership of industrial plant in capitalist times. The two are different enough that “industrial plant redistribution” could never work in the same way that land redistribution would.
In my view what Marxists got wrong was in taking an essentially religious view of economic & social issues. They had faith and dogma on how society should work, which meant that for all their talk of “scientific socialism” they failed a key standard of science: they were unwilling to change their theories to fit the evidence*. So they’d try out their theories, and when they didn’t work as advertised rather than changing the theories, they forced people to conform to the dogma at gunpoint for decades.
Without that attitude, with a genuine willingness to experiment who knows what the Communist movement might have evolved into? Instead it stagnated for decades as a horror show that helped prop up capitalism as a bogeyman.
- Note that the US has the same issue; just substitute laissez faire capitalism for socialism.