Idealistic nonsense. I mean, Americans don't care about history. And they really don't care about WW1. But history classes have to at least pretend to cover WW1. Even long before I was a leftist, the official story taught in schools never made sense to me. The Germans sank the Lusitania, and that made Americans mad. Okay it wasn't great of course, but seems kinda flimsy of a reason by itself. So they add the Zimmerman Telegram. It's pretty silly to take it seriously, but I guess it's taught as this is just something that made even more Americans angry at the Germans?
So the way the history is taught, you are forced to conclude that the US public eventually just got so angry with Germany that they demanded the US enter the way. The problem of course is a.) the US public still wasn't frothing at the mouth angry and I think a majority still didn't want to get involved, and b.) politicians NEVER give a single fuck what the public wants or doesn't want with respect to war. Never have, never will. The idea that US politicians just saw Americans getting angry and thus had no choice but to declare war is ludicrous.
So in steps the REAL reason: if the Allies lost, US investors were gonna lose out big on loans made to support the Allied war effort. Reading Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism, it's just so obvious that that's what was going on. After the war, there was an official hearing or something that determined that was the real cause. But all this gets buried because Americans cannot entertain either historical materialism or the notion that the US gets into wars for less than noble reasons.
Anyways, :amerikkka: , as always.
I was taught that the Lusitania sinking was a big deal because it killed Americans and disrupted our commerce (so at least there's some acknowledgment of the business interest in going to war). The Zimmerman telegraph was taught as something that probably wasn't that serious (might have even been faked or exaggerated, and Mexico never seriously considered invading) but was used to push the war on the public. Around the same time we were covering yellow journalism and the Spanish-American War, which was much more obviously pushed on the public. There was also discussion of the American Empire in those terms, complete with thosw political cartoons from the era that show an eagle spanning half the globe. Still not as in-depth as "we'd lose a bunch of money if Britain and France lost," but not terrible.
Thinking of how the Zimmerman telegraph and the sinking of the Maine were taught made me think of a professor's comment in a college history course about how we may have essentially sat on intel that a strike on Pearl Harbor was imminent. If any of those events happened today the suggestion that the official narrative might be false would be considered crank shit. Wonder how 9/11 will be taught in 50 years.
Wouldn't surprise me, we needed an excuse to get our troops into Europe and establish a more... business-friendly anticommunism.