I think that often when we learn about the twentieth-century world wars in primary and secondary school, a lot of the nuance and complexity of the situation is brushed over in favor of succinct lists of memorize-able facts and causes. Of course, the period is extremely complicated and there is some necessity to leave out some things just to make it manageable for a high school class to cover, but as per usual, the final product in many high school curriculums is decidedly America-centric. When a wider, more global scope is used when looking at this war-ridden era, the multifaceted nature of the conflicts and the international parallels begin to become very clear. The separation between World War I and II was already decidedly shaky, as the two sides of the war were mostly consistent and the first war in many ways directly caused the second one. Dr. Streets-Salter’s lecture on the roots of Anti-Communism in 1930s South and Southeast Asia really brought the Cold War into even closer contact with the two previous wars, making me question why we even divide them into three separate conflicts, when other violent encounters, like the off-and-on battles of the English Hundred Years’ War, is merged into and titled as a single conflict. Continue reading “Wars Like Dominoes”