I read the book as a teenager but seeing it in live-action was brutal. You forget that soldiers used gas and fucking flamethrowers on people, and they did it so their ruling class can get even wealthier.
Remembering that the causes of that war were about European empires trying to carve up Germany because capital had reached its zenith under the pre-war status quo unless it acquired new markets and territories to expand into was just eye-opening.
:eu-cool: :germany-cool: :france-cool:
:ukkk:
does the movie attempt to show this?
I'm really just channeling from memory Luxemburg *Call to the Workers of the World" and Lenin's Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism
The film kind of portrays it, or hints at it: the terms of the peace treaty were portrayed as not just humiliating but impoverishing.
e: they also hinted that the social democrats felt a pressure to acquiesce to the armistice to prevent "Bolshevism" from taking over since the war had exhausted the legitimacy of the imperial government and the successor government if peace didn't follow soon. Keeping capitalism alive meant to accept severe loss to prevent total loss to the communists in Germany and throughout Europe.
The Imperialism of all countries knows no “understanding,” it knows only one right – capital’s profits: it knows only one language – the sword: it knows only one method – violence. And if it is now talking in all countries, in yours as well ours, about the “League of Nations,” “disarmament,” “rights of small nations,” “self-determination of the peoples,” it is merely using the customary lying phrases of the rulers for the purpose of lulling to sleep the watchfulness of the proletariat.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/11/25.htm
It's pretty wild listening to libs whine about "sovereignty" and "self determination" regarding Ukraine given, like... everything that has happened in the 21st century.
Sovereignty is when white capitalists are in charge
versailles wasnt that harsh, germany's impoverishment was self sabotage by the weimar government to dodge paying reparations.
If I remember the book, and it's been twenty years so bear with me, it's really about the experiences of a half dozen teenagers and how much of a completely senseless, horrific, unmitigated, and unjustifiable nightmare war is.