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To: miss marmelstein

The world would have been better off had Kaiser Wilhelm at the very least fought the UK and France to a stalemate, which could have happened had the slavish Anglophile Woodrow Wilson kept the US out of the war. Of course, there was that certain telegram about Mexico...


12 posted on 06/28/2014 7:09:52 AM PDT by Clemenza (Lurking)
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To: Clemenza
The world would have been better off had Kaiser Wilhelm at the very least fought the UK and France to a stalemate, which could have happened had the slavish Anglophile Woodrow Wilson kept the US out of the war.

Ahh, the couterfactual thought experiment where all bad things that we know happened are removed from the board, but no thought is given to the bad things that might have happened instead.

I agree that without German defeat in WWI there would have been no Hitler. But a world-dominating German Empire might have been as bad in many ways.

All of the tendencies carried to extremes by Nazism were already active in Wilhelmine Germany. And one thing that is certain is that German victory in the War would have done nothing to tamp down Aryan delusions of racial superiority.

We probably would also not have had a USSR. As the Germans would probably have conquered the rest of Russia after taking a break for a few years to consolidate.

But then you've got a German Empire in control, direct or indirect, of essentially all of Europe plus Russia. Given Willie's peculiar personality, it seems likely he would have struck for total world power by the 40s, anyway. Or possibly his successor.

What is obvious is that with German victory in WWI the world would be a very different place. It's not obvious that it would be a better one.

22 posted on 06/28/2014 7:30:33 AM PDT by Sherman Logan (Perception wins all the battles. Reality wins all the wars.)
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