Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Pages 124-137 in our lovely space-themed textbook
I was a little confused about the first question - "What is it about the interwar years that tell us that WWI was a terrible tragedy?" I was confused because there were a lot of things mentioned in the text book that this could be referring to, and depending on your personal viewpoint, you could say these things were either good or bad, or both - the harnessing of the power in the atom, the communication developments, the technological advancements, etc. My first thought as to the answer to this question was that this was the first war in which armies were made of millions, not thousands; the technological developements allowed a lot more people to be killed at once; and the affect of the war lasted a lot longer than previous wars. However, the text book never really said this directly; it mostly talked about individual aspects, not one specific thing that made the war a terrible tragedy. Of course the war was a tragedy; millions of people were killed, many for no reason since the majority of the war was a stalemate and therefore killing people on enemy sides wouldn't weaken them any more than it would weaken your allies. The question just makes it sound like there was one specific thing that made the war a tragedy, not a bunch of things. So my question to everyone is, what was this one specific thing?
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i don't think there is one specific thing that this question is referring to. i think that is why they were saying it is a tradegy, because there were so many things that went wrong. one thing in this war wouldn't have made it such a horrific thing, but all of the events together makes it unbelievable.
ReplyDeleteI interpreted it as what was one thing that shows it was a great tragedy and then run with the idea. I thought it was asking to show one terrible WWI effect and show all the location that it did damage to but now that you point it out maybe that was not the question it wanted answered.
ReplyDeleteI interpreted it as both good and bad. I thought a lot of benefits came to the US and really made us prosper. But I also thought that for the people that had fighting take place on their own turf had a lot of expensive damage control to do.
ReplyDeleteThe fabulous thing about IB is that regardless of the way you interpret a question, if you are able to back up your answer with strong facts- you are golden. So I think the response you gave to that question is valid and correct. Great job.
ReplyDeleteI feel that the most devastating consequences of WWI was that it did nothing to solve the factors which caused the war, and therefore led to WWII. The interwar years are so tragic primarily because the world saw the rise of totalitarian regimes that would cause WWII.
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