Archdukes, Cynicism, and World War I
WWI solved nothing and set the stage for the world to be back at war just a couple of decades later. As an added bonus, it changed the way people look at the world, and normalized cynicism and irony. The assassination of an Austrian Archduke kicked off a new kind of war that involved more nations and more people than any war that came before.
New technology like machine guns, airplanes, tanks, and poison gas made the killing more efficient than ever. Trench warfare and modern weapons led to battles in which tens of thousands of soldiers were killed in a day, with no ground gained for either side.
World War I washed away the last vestiges of 19th century Romanticism and paved the way for the 20th century modernism that we all know and find to be cold and off-putting.
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