Why isn't the Seven Years' War called WWI?

[say1988]

Curiously, WWII was strictly speaking only ended with the treaty of San Francisco in 1951 (almost exactly 12 years after Hitler invaded Poland).

No. The War ended with the Japanese surrender. When your enemy has signed an unconditional surrender (that is put into effect) the war is over.

You would be better off arguing that the start of WWII should be 1937 with the Second Sino-Japanese War, being the first war that would eventually become part of WWII.

 

[Bowsling]

No. The War ended with the Japanese surrender. When your enemy has signed an unconditional surrender (that is put into effect) the war is over.

You would be better off arguing that the start of WWII should be 1937 with the Second Sino-Japanese War, being the first war that would eventually become part of WWII.

For all intents and purposes, yes. But there was still a legal state of war. Much the same way the the Korean war still hasn't officially ended.

This contains some pretty amusing examples of similar situations.

 

[Traitorfish]

Come on, you know what I mean. You can't say the allies were too militant against Germany.
The only thing you can doubt about is the atomic bombs.
Well, it was clear that the USA is not going to nuke the whole world if they won the war. And they can also claim they didn't know terrible it will turn out to be.
On the other hand, you don't even want to imagine how the world would have looked like if Axis had won. This is my point.

Was killing millions of Axis civilians absolutely necessary to prevent their victory? If not, then I don't see why it should be regarded as anything but murder in cold blood, and Truman et al. as war criminals who somehow dodged the noose.

 

[Antilogic]

Consider it as cheapening the effect of the word I suppose.

To me at least, genocide is a powerful word that is suppose to draw out the incredible hatred, intensity, size and calculated cruelty of eliminating a whole group of people for having one or more pertaining characteristic, often used with a specific political or social goal in mind.
Rather than just 'massive murders and killings'.

The massive death toll in the Thirty Years War was just due more to indiscriminate killing and murder, sacking of cities, disease and starvation than an actual concentrated attempt at trying to wipe out 'A' group of people. Sure many were killed because they were 'X' religion, but it's not like a Catholic Army conquered a town and then proceeded to construct an entire organisation whose sole purpose is to drag out and kill Protestants as oppose to just looting everything in sight and killing people who they think are Protestant on the spot.

To narrow it down, IMHO, is to exactly pinpoint a hate, an evil of man, so strong and so disgustingly terrible that man can be driven to organise a killing machine, specifically to destroy a specific group of people.

If we just loosely and broadly applied it to 'a group of people who killed another group of people because they were 'X' people' just weakens it.

Soon we will 'genocide' grass when go mow lawns. Like how we now 'crusade' over everything.

I have been putting off responding to this because I wanted to get some specific examples from Wedgwood, but I haven't had the time to do so yet.

In short: there was a systematic attempt to rid the besieged areas of Germany of heretical faiths. Look at what happened in Bohemia during the early phase. The reason why foraging was so brutal was because of the religious differences--the Catholic armies had no problems devastating Protestant lands and vice-versa.

While ordinarily I agree the cheapening of terms is a bad idea, I think you are splitting some mighty fine hairs here and haven't really given us a solid definition to work with. What qualifies a particular evil man? How can the mass killings of Christian heretics (here meant to cover both Catholics and Protestants) in the Thirty Years War be called an ordinary expectation of war while the mass killings of WW2's Jews be called a genocide? Is it a matter of success?

Something both WWI and WWII had and the others didn't, is the fact the Axis or the Central countries were an isolated minority in the world, a minority which caused alot of troubles to the world, and sometimes made citizens worry about the world.
In WWI and WWII, especially in WWII, one neutral man could see who is the good and who is the bad.. Like the world trying to stop the evil powers..
The Seven Years War was just a conflict between empires. If you live in a neutral country, you support whoever you choose. There are no clear good and bad.

I disagree outright that the moral position of the Central Powers is equivalent to the Axis Powers. That, and the primary reason the Entente in WW1 had the allegiance of territories on all inhabited continents of the world was because the British and French colonized them, hardly a strong argument that the world banded together to fight off the evil of Germany.

Why isn't ww1 called the five years war?

Spoiler :

Because countries from all over the world were involved.

Just giving this post the respect it deserves.

 

[Dachs]

I have been putting off responding to this because I wanted to get some specific examples from Wedgwood, but I haven't had the time to do so yet.

In short: there was a systematic attempt to rid the besieged areas of Germany of heretical faiths. Look at what happened in Bohemia during the early phase. The reason why foraging was so brutal was because of the religious differences--the Catholic armies had no problems devastating Protestant lands and vice-versa.

Ehhhhhhhhhh. You'd be better served by reading something that isn't seventy years old and horribly colored by the contemporary experience of Nazism and the impending Second World War. Like Peter Wilson's book. Or at least Geoff Parker's.

While several specific instances of violence against specific religious groups occurred during the TYW, they were fairly minor and can hardly be used to characterize the war as a whole. They also represented a minuscule portion of the death toll associated with the war, most of which was actually due to massive famines following Habsburg monetary collapse in the early 1620s and the resulting hyperinflation, or to disease breaking out from typical wartime disorder and movement. Many of these religious atrocities can also not be associated with anything like the word "systematic", such as the famous Rape of Magdeburg. And while the Habsburgs in particular did their level best to eliminate all forms of Protestantism from the Hereditary Lands as a matter of state policy, this did not extend so far as actually killing people, most of the time - usually only when they rebelled (which was rare).

 

[Traitorfish]

Let's just not bring up the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, or thing's get so muddy we'll all drown. In Germany you at least had "Protestant" and "Catholic" as two approximately discrete categories, so what religious atrocities occurred possess some sort of broadly consistent logic; in Britain, not so much.

 

[Antilogic]

Ehhhhhhhhhh. You'd be better served by reading something that isn't seventy years old and horribly colored by the contemporary experience of Nazism and the impending Second World War. Like Peter Wilson's book. Or at least Geoff Parker's.

I'll take those authors under consideration--sadly, Wedgwood is the only one I have read at this point. I'll take a look at Wilson to see how his take differs.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Hell, you could make the argument that the Seven Years' War should be the Nine Years' War as the North American theatre started in 1754.

No! Two Nine Years Wars is already too many!

 

[Traitorfish]

How many people that aren't you and mebbe Dachs know what the other Nine Years War actually is?

 

[Dachs]

Don't you? I actually assumed you know more about Irish history than I do; I mostly just know about the fact that it happened, it was a rebellion, and that it was associated with the one, the only Hugh O'Neill.

 

[Traitorfish]

Well, I know what it was, I just thought of it as the "Tyrone Rebellion". Never heard it called the Nine Years War, for whatever reason. (Maybe something to do with the fact that pretty much everything I've read about it was touching on it as a background detail to later stuff? Or maybe the writers just happened to like the symmetry with "Desmond Rebellion". )

 

[Dachs]

Truly, the tradition of viewing events in Ireland as ancillary to some other big thing that's happening at the same time in some other country is saddening.

Then again, it is Ireland.

 

[Traitorfish]

It's kind of funny how that works in a Scottish uni- they're constantly bigging up Scotland's role in damn near everything that's ever happened, but Ireland just gets "oh yeah that was happening too i guess". Slight bias on show, there, I think.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Well, I know what it was, I just thought of it as the "Tyrone Rebellion". Never heard it called the Nine Years War, for whatever reason. (Maybe something to do with the fact that pretty much everything I've read about it was touching on it as a background detail to later stuff? Or maybe the writers just happened to like the symmetry with "Desmond Rebellion". )

That's not really used in modern historiagraphy, the biggest reason being that Hugh O'Neil never actually rebelled.

And yes the tendency to view Ireland as ancillary is annoying, because the Nine Years War was disastrous for England, and they were very fortunate that the English and Scottish states survived the conflict.

It's kind of funny how that works in a Scottish uni- they're constantly bringing up Scotland's role in damn near everything that's ever happened, but Ireland just gets "oh yeah that was happening too i guess". Slight bias on show, there, I think.

This is why I like the new trend to talk about "The Gaelic World" rather than Ireland and Scotland. Of course, I have a lot of reading to do to catch up on that, but every book I find on Scotland is blatantly Lowland-Centric, or disgustingly sentimental.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Also, I would have thought Dachs would know about the other Nine Years War.

 

[sydhe]

The War of the League of Augsburg is also known as the Nine Years' War (and the War of the Grand Alliance, and several other names).

 

[Lord Baal]

I'd heard of the Tyrone Rebellion and the War of the Grand Alliance, but never heard of anything called the Nine Years' War. Please, enlighten this humble seeker of knowledge.

 

[Ajidica]

Shifting the focus a bit, what was Japan's role in WWI? From the very little I have read on the subject, it seems they grabbed some vulnerable German colonies in the Pacific and then sort of did nothing. How wrong am I?

 

[Antilogic]

Shifting the focus a bit, what was Japan's role in WWI? From the very little I have read on the subject, it seems they grabbed some vulnerable German colonies in the Pacific and then sort of did nothing. How wrong am I?

Uh... in the grand scheme of things, not really. They only participated during the final year, much like the United States. I think they sent a squadron to the Mediterranean, but the Central Powers really weren't contesting the seas in 1918 so I don't think it had much impact.

 

[Lord Baal]

Uh... in the grand scheme of things, not really. They only participated during the final year, much like the United States. I think they sent a squadron to the Mediterranean, but the Central Powers really weren't contesting the seas in 1918 so I don't think it had much impact.

Japan mostly used WWI as an opportunity to improve their own strategic position in the Far East. They seized as many German colonies as they could, bullied China, and even turned on Russia before it officially ceased to be a co-belligerent. Funnily enough, Japan's posturing was aimed at Britain (via Australia, Japan's biggest competitor for German territory) and Russia, its own allies, whereas it didn't see Germany as a threat.