Yes, WW1 was taught to me in school as coming out of a tense political situation that spiraled out of control before anyone knew what was happening, almost sort of like a freak natural disaster.

Everything made so much more sense when I read Gravity’s Rainbow with the way it portrayed the world wars as inevitable horrendous colonial violence turned inwards (which was bound to happen eventually). At first I was really confused why Pynchon included so much about the Herero peoples of Southern Africa, what did they have to do with WW2? Then I started to learn more history, I read the great article in the guardian on the 100th anniversary of WW1 about how the violence and genocide of colonialism was a direct path to the mass killing and violence of WW1

https://theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war