Friday, October 14, 2016
Post-Simulation War
The war simulation we did in class Tuesday illustrates perfectly how world war one was started. The simulation was an in-class activity in which separate groups acted as countries, and tried to gain "security". Throughout the class different groups looked at gaining security in a variety of ways. Some believed security was the amount of alliances, while some viewed it as gaining military power. These opposing views led up to the failure of the activity. Group five thought that to gain security the best measure was to try to eliminate the weakest group through the use of war. This, in turn, led us to failing the activity. If this war would have taken place it would also have been a disaster due to the fact that group four (the ones being attacked) had a secret alliance with group 3. This would have caused major issues, because our group (group 1) also had an alliance with group 3. As one can clearly see these secret and public ties between countries would have made this war from being a small endeavor to becoming a war amongst all of the countries. This activity ties back to world war one because the starting of world war one was caused due to the alliances of major countries.
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I agree with your point that the conflicting ideas about what security even was played a key role in starting the war. With even one country looking for war or seeming to do so, the rest feel the need to do the same and for many this means looking for stability in alliances, though those can be messy and lead to many conflicting motives in the war. This simulation showed us the many moving parts in war and how people tend to use the view of "security means security for ME" as Mr. Stewart pointed out in our discussion.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your idea about the point about how the secret treaties were a cause of war in both our simulation and World War I. However, I think that this simulation can be considered successful rather than a failure because the point of it was to simulate what led up to World War I, which is exactly what it did.
ReplyDeleteGreat job summarizing the activity and what happened. I would like to add on that if group four was taken out, group one and two were still the most powerful. This would backfire for group five that originally started the war because one and two would easily be able to take out group five. You're able to see that some groups didn't think of the long run and thought of the short run.
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