Christopher Capozzola: World War I, Ideology, Propaganda, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #320

The lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War, uh, is that human life is not cheap, um, that all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and more material at the front, they would solve their political problems with military force, and at the end of the day in 1918, one side did win that, um, but it didn't actually solve any of those political problems.

You said that World War I gave birth to the surveillance state in the US. Can you explain? The following is a conversation with Christopher Capozzola, a historian at MIT specializing in the history of politics and war in modern American history, especially about the role of World War I in defining the trajectory of the United States and our human civilization in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Christopher Capozzola. Let's start with a big and difficult question. How did World War I start?

On the one hand, World War I started, uh, because of a series of events in the summer of 1914, uh, that brought, uh, sort of the major powers of Europe into conflict with one another, but I actually think it's more useful to say that World War I started at least a generation earlier when rising powers, particularly Germany, started devoting more and more of their resources toward military affairs and naval affairs. This sets off an arms race in Europe. It sets off a rivalry, uh, over the colonial world and who will control the resources in Africa and Asia, and so by the time you get to the summer of 1914, in s- in a lot of ways, I say the war has already begun, and this is just the match that lights the flame.

So, the capacity for war was brewing within, like, the, the leaders and within the populous. They started accepting sort of slowly through the culture propagated this idea that we can go to war, it's a good idea to go to war, it's a good idea to expand and dominate others, that kinda thing. Maybe not put in those clear terms, but just a sense that military action is the way that nations operate at the global scale.

Yes, yes and, right? So yes, um, there's a sense that the military can be the solution to political conflict, uh, in Europe itself, and the and is that war and, and military conflict are already happening, right? Uh, that there's war particularly, uh, in Africa, in North Africa, in the Middle East, um, in the Balkans. Conflict is already underway, um, and the European powers haven't faced off against each other. They've usually faced off against an asymmetrical conflict against much less powerful states, um, but, you know, in some ways, that, that war is already underway.