Posted on 05/18/2006 11:52:13 AM PDT by George W. Bush
Sarkozy's reform bill will "stiffen the rules for immigrants in France, establish a sort of quota system and let authorities cherry-pick who gets in - such as doctors, computer whizzes or sports stars." (Independent Online, South Africa) "The bill, which also makes it difficult for immigrants already in France to have their families join them, is expected to go to the [French] Senate for final approval in June." (BBC)
Sarkozy himself is the son of a Hungarian immigrant. Promoting his reform proposal, Sarkozy had earlier said that "We can't keep welcoming to France everyone who wants to come and to whom we can offer neither housing nor employment." (Le Figaro)
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Well I am just going by the view of the Common German Soldiers and Officers who fought on the Eastern Front.
I agree they were badly led, badly armed, badly supplied, but they were not lacking in courage and a resilience to conditions that even the Germans found hard to bare.
re :On longer scales, the claim is directly falsified - tyrannies lose wars to republics much .
Which claim is this.
If its this.
The Germans and Soviets when well led made better soldiers, coming from dictatorships where life was cheaper, they were able to withstand the horror and death of war. many also were brought up in martial environments the Hitler Youth and Kommosol both had a strong death and glory cult
I stand by it, and its a claim that many Allied senior soldiers on the British and American side made.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375414339/102-7673976-2410505?v=glance&n=283155.
Since the second world war and again the Korean war there has/was a move towards training individual soldiers to kill, in fact there have been a number of papers and documentaries on this subject, including this very good book.
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.
I will be happy to debate this with you.
"The Germans and Soviets when well led made better soldiers, coming from dictatorships where life was cheaper, they were able to withstand the horror and death of war."
Germans yes, Soviets no. Clearly there were some elite Soviet units and many, many brave Soviet soldiers. But the sheer number of Soviet prisoners (several million) precludes any claim for their man-for-man superiority.
The Finns certainly weren't overly impressed with the Soviets during the 1940 Winter War. The Soviets started fighting better at places like Stalingrad once it finally dawned on them that they were in a war of extermination.
You stand by it, and it is rot. Tyrannies in which life is cheap generally produce not better soldiers, but men ruled by fear, cronism and selection for loyalty rather than merit among leaders, lack of initiative, lack of technical means from stunted innovation, to the letter obedience to non-sensical orders issued by out of touch REMFs, useless waste of military material, and tactics as good as the enemy could wish for.
Ruthlessness is not a source of strength, it is a source of weakness. The contrary belief is a piece of rank superstition that is belied by all the evidence of history. The illusion arises from men doing violence to their own conscience and thinking it affects the enemy. It doesn't, but sometimes it prevents cooperation, and generally it dramatically reduces motivation as well.
Justice is the standing policy of the most successful states in history because it simply generates vastly more power through elicited support than tyranny ever can. The parts of the world that believe ruthlessness is the secret of power, to the point where men are willing to eat each other to scare their enemies, are hopelessly backwaters of impotent chaos.
Seppels question and my comment were reguarding WWI or the Great War as it was called at the time, in America we like to say, "Reading is Fundemental".
You have to look at how these men were caught.
My the time the Germans invaded the Soviet Army was emasculated, Officers seniors and juniors who had survived were afraid to make any decisions that may incur Stalins wrath, so there was no real leadership at the start, also Stalin had forbade them to react to any provocations.
What was a provocation they did not know.
Many of those prisoners were men called up and reporting to barracks already overrun or about to be overrun, a great mass of unarmed men waiting to be processed into the prison camps.
re :The Finns certainly weren't overly impressed with the Soviets during the 1940 Winter War.
My points in my first reply to you stand for this as well.
Great masses of men were mobilized and sent to a front, badly led, badly supplied and unmotivated.
The Soviets started fighting better at places like Stalingrad once it finally dawned on them that they were in a war of extermination.
1941 Battle of Moscow was a victory for the Soviets it motivated them and they saw that the German Army could be beat.
By Stalingrad training had improved especially for Officers, there was still room for more improvement, the men were more motivated, and the Factories that had been moved East of the Urals were now on line and producing arms and ammo.
Even during the initial stages of the war when led even badly led the Russian soldier would display almost suicidal courage in attacking the Germans and in many cases blunted and almost turned a German advance.
I will have to look up the quotes from the German military leadership but even during the early stages they started to feel uneasy.
A good book to read is Barbarossa and Ivans War
Pretty speech look up the link I showed you, and read up on the other book.
If I am wrong about the outcome from the Second World war why did British and American Military staff colleges feel it is was a problem and look into ways to make Western Man more aggressive and more ready to kill.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375414339/102-7673976-2410505?v=glance&n=283155..
I am always happy to debate it.
As for why the US intervened, it was the unrestricted submarine warfare decision that brought us in. That was clearly a blunder, and it was one the German politicians tried to avoid, removing Falkenhayn when he advocated it. But then Ludendorf did it anyway, after getting the job by arguing it was unnecessary to win.
They didn't know Russia was on its way out at the time. If they had, they wouldn't have done it and could have avoided US entry.
Betcha didn't know the US outscored the Germans in armor KOed in the west, despite having plain Shermans against cats. (Actually, only about a third were cats and the rest weren't anything to write home about).
As for Hastings, he is a middling quality military historian. His late war German campaign book is an OK book, not a great book but an OK book.
I'd put the American and British airborne divisions against the very best German divisions. But once you got below the top Allied divisions, the quality of the average soldier diminished much more precipitously than with the German divisions.
If that were not the case, then there is no way on earth the breakout at Normandy should have taken 2 months. The allies had a level of air superiority unmatched in military history, they had their best and freshest troops and with some exceptions (e.g. SS Hitler Youth division) they were facing divisions which the Germans considered their second and third rate devisions. Supposedly elite Allied divisions at Normandy such as the British "Desert Rats" division performed poorly. The Allied Airborne troops did superbly, but they didn't have a whole lot of company in that regard.
You will no doubt call this "rot" but I am quite certain it's the truth. Which is why the Allied Generals studied the failed Normandy breakout operations (Goodwood, Charnwood, etc) after the war to see how they could be improved upon.
Basically this just means that France will not be accepting anyone. All the best and brightest in France are leaving to go to the US or Canada because they can't get a well paying job in their own country.
"Germans were constantly outnumbered. That's a reason for their eventual defeat."
Had they been militarily competent, they would have recognized this in 1913 and 1938 and not started either war.
But they were not.
So they made some gains through surprise attacks, and then were ground down to ashes, just as they should have expected to be.
The big question is why German government was so foolish to start wars they could not win, and why the German military leadership was so strategically incompetent as to egg on the civilian leaders to wars that the generals should have known that Germany could not win.
They vastly over-estimated their own capacities, and got killed for it. And they didn't learn a thing and did it all again 20 years later. Dumb, and dumber.
"Fascism or worse. People do things where they feel they're backs are against the wall and their survival is at stake
In the 1920's and '30's, the German middle-class was increasingly scared."
Let's complete the sentence: "...so, in their fear and panic, they rushed to a dicator and went goosestepping off with him into national suicide."
"The Germans ... were so superior to the French and British and Russians that they were losing only about one soldier to two of the enemy."
Equally true of the American Indians whenever they were in fights in the woods.
The bigger truth is that German military thinkers were so stupid that they attacked enemies who outnumbered them 5:1.
So they got creamed.
Didn't learn.
Did it again.
And got creamed again.
That's not just not brilliant, it's apocalyptically bad, titanically incompetent.
The Germans showed some tactical capacity and made some gains in ground warfare. That usually happens when you attack first.
At sea, the Germans were pathetic.
In the air, they were inferior to the French in World War I and the British and the Americans in World War II, not just in numbers, but in overall capacity of operations. The German commanders did not understand either airpower or seapower, and squandered what they had.
In ground forces, German units were good tactically. Strategically, they ranged between mediocre and catastrophically bad. The only truly stunning German military victory was France, 1940, which came about because the French high command was even more incompetent than the German.
"The Germans and Soviets when well led made better soldiers, coming from dictatorships where life was cheaper, they were able to withstand the horror and death of war."
Perhaps.
And for the same reason Russians and Germans were always inferior seamen and inferior airmen when compared to Western forces.
"Hey, I didn't notice any contribution from you.
At least come over and bookmark an FR thread where nice things are being said about French government!"
What is there to say?
The French government is behaving reasonably in the interests of French nationhood.
The American government has chosen the path that best protects the interests of American business, at the cost of American nationhood.
In France, nationalism is more important than business. In America, business is more important than nationalism.
And each country has adopted or is adopting an immigration policy that reflects that fundamental choice.
"All the best and brightest in France are leaving to go to the US or Canada because they can't get a well paying job in their own country."
No they're not.
I think they were probably screwed either way.
If Hitler had not come along, there's a good chance that Stalin would have engineered a revolution in Germany (as the communists almost succeeded in doing in 1918-1919) and from there into the rest of Europe.
The French would not have resisted. The Communist party was very strong there (and still is). I tend to think the weakness of French resistance to the German advance had something to do with the Hitler/Stalin pact, and the Reds being told to impede the resistance of the French side
At the end of the century, I think the body count would have been the same or greater, whether from Hitler, or from Stalin liquidating the middle class
Vincent: And you know what they call a... a... a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
Jules: They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with cheese?
Vincent: No man, they got the metric system. They wouldn't know what the f--- a Quarter Pounder is.
Jules: Then what do they call it?
Vincent: They call it a 'Royale with Cheese.'
Jules: A Royale with Cheese. What do they call a Big Mac?
Vincent: Well, a Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it "Le Big-Mac."
Jules: Le Big-Mac. Ha ha ha ha. What do they call a Whopper?
Vincent: I dunno, I didn't go into Burger King.
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