Paris 1919

I finished my book today. It was my big goal of the day. That was a big book. It was really interesting, but it could have been edited about 50% and still been really interesting. It seems WWI loses out to WWII in the PR department. I think most people feel like WWI was kind of a world war, but the war itself and the aftermath was not as dramatic as WWII.

I don't think that's right. The most noted fighting was in France and it wasn't all that interesting, because a lot of it was trench warfare. There is some truth to that, but there was a lot more to it than that. There was fighting going on all over the the place. South America and Antartica weren't too heavily involved, but everyone else was knee deep in it. There were some countries involved at the start, but then others started jumping on to one side or the other based on their allegiances or on what side they thought was winning at the time.

And as my book pointed out in excruciating detail, the world became vastly different after the war. The Jews were given a homeland in the Middle East among the Arabs which has led to quite a few difficulties in the time since. The Ottoman Empire went away. Places like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Iraq, etc came into being. The losers of the war lost a lot of their land to these new countries and to the victors. Germany deserved to be penalized, but really got unnecessarily hosed in the final treaty, which gave plenty of future talking points to people like Adolph Hitler.

Way off topic, my favorite fact about Czechoslovakia - I was watching the news with closed captioning on for some reason. There was a story about that region. The TV spelled out Checkle... It stayed frozen like that for about a half minute, then it completely shut down. I guess its so hard to spell, it broke the closed captioning system.

Anyway WWI was obviously important, but I'm not sure I realized how world-changing it really was.