The First World War!

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Interesting...
Also, wasn't the de-military zone used to "steal" resources such as coal from the Germans to the French?
Didn't this exacerbate the economic collapse of Germany?

And do you agree the destruction of the German economy was pre-determined/pre-meditated so as to keep it's industrial and economic strength in check to favour the English and French?

And also, while I've got you, as stated above, I was convinced that the Versailles treaty overwhelmingly lead to the Nazi parties rise to power...
However, when I did some digging a while ago, this idea was significantly/heavily debated...
What say you?

Yes, there's no doubt that the Germans were screwed royally. Too much "revenge" exacted on the part of the Allies. We were very sore winners. It backfired on the Allies (and on many ethnic groups) in a big way.

I doubt very much, had the German economy not been an absolute disaster, that the Nazis would have been given a second glance. They would have seemed like the neo-Nazis in America circa 2018.

And there wouldn't have been the equally feral communist party in Germany making a tilt at power, but only at 10 to15% of the votes...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist ... of_Germany

I have the impression that most people think the Nazi party won resoundingly initially when Germany was still a republic...
To my knowledge, this was not the case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_fe ... March_1933

Sound a little like putin's Russia in terms of a campaign of corruption and terror...

The Nazi party became more popular when it overcame the economic and social turmoil of the time...
And of course, when it regained national pride...
Despite it being a dictatorship...<shrug>

The Nazis were able to form a coalition after the 1932 elections. This forced President von Hindenberg (a mostly figurehead President of the Weimar Republic) to appoint Hitler chancellor, despite a great reluctance to do so.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 06 Feb 2018, 10:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Oh...thanks for that...

Yeah, I started reading about how the repatriation created hyper inflation through massive money printing so they could pay for it...
It took Germany around 92 years to pay it back in full...

I have often regretted taking ancient history rather than modern...
Well, I now have time to read up on it...

I don't remember the coal-thing, but it makes sense ... I mean... the Germans went to war with everyone in WW1, and just had no friends - except the Austrians, of course - after the war.
The Allies were trying to keep Germany down, definitely - Germany is a bit of a problematic country, geostrategically.
It was late to form a unified nation, and everyone else was having access to the oceans and colonizing the hell out of everything. And then there's this huge country there, all of a sudden, in the center of Europe, with no good colonies, and a lot of aspirations.
So tensions were running high over the course of the 19th century, and it all erupted into ww1...

re. : Versailles: at least that's how I learned it in school: Versailles was stupid harsh on Germany- of course they'd hold a grudge, being condemned to a century of poverty.... And that was why the population was so gung-ho once the nazi party was actually in power: Make Germany great again! - but of course, it could also have gone the other way and turned communist. It wasn't at all clear in the 20s which way it would go -

And, as I learned in school, the Americans had understood that this huge country in the center of Europe couldn't be weak and poor and holding a grudge against its neighbours, which is why they poured in money after ww2 - also, because it was on the border to the soviet union.

Last edited by shlaifu on 08 Feb 2018, 11:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yep....we finally got smarter, basically.

In this ine case, yes. But I think that Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union was too big and too broken, and it was left alone... and hey, guess what, someone made Russia great again...

We probably coddled the USSR immediately after WW II because they were, after all, supposedly our "allies."

And we had to cooperate with them in administering the "occupation" of Germany, and in successfully implementing the Marshal Plan.

Then everything snowballed.......

Boy did that bite them on the bum...



Only after Germany was "appropriately" punished through Eisenhower's death camps and a man-made famine which killed millions of German civilians...

Ironically, the Russians came to the German's rescue via a threat to entire Europe...
The American's were suckered into initial barbarity via a Russian agent influencing the administration...
The Russians wanted the German nation to collapse so they could pick up the pieces...
I don't think The Marchell plan was implemented primarily through benevolence...



But Trump had nothing to do with that, right?



Hoodwinked...lol
How naive...<shake head>

ooooh!

I was thinking about this thread and remembered another thing: the Krupp family.
The Krupps were a dynasty of weapons manufacturers who basically provided cannons and guns to everyone in Europe througout the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century.
Now, -and that, I did not learn in school- the guy who was leading the family business during ww 2, Alfried Krupp von Bohlen-Halbach was the only person to manage to be indicted for crimes against humanity in both world wars - and not be trialled in either.
And then, he became the richest man in Europe in the 50s and 60s.

There's a fictionalized version of the Krupp family history, with several generations meged together, so the incidents depicted sort of happened, but temporally contractedd (if that makes sense). Luchino Visconti's "Götterdämmerung" (the damned).
It's a weird and severely disturbing film, I highly recommend it, but check the wikipedia entry on the Krupps afterwards, to get the facts straight.

As well, the colonies of the WWI victors were left in the same servile status quo. The liberty that was allegedly won was only for specific white men. Therein were planted the seeds of anti-colonialism that ended up coupling with communism, such as in Vietnam, China, and elsewhere.

Of course it makes sense...errr...to me..

Chronological minimalism with a nip and tuck reductionism of the space/time continuum...
What else could it possibly be?

Not sure what the second "d" stands for though...
It is not referring to a preference of some sort I hope!

I am a butcher of the English language also, if that give you succour......

the d is for bargain. and dyslexia.