Enough draft resistance that they made creepy patriotic songs.
Posted on 11/18/2017 5:48:48 AM PST by Kaslin
World War I was the greatest folly by far to befall Western civilization. The second greatest folly was America entering the catastrophe. The totalitarian rebounds that followed were consequences that could have been avoided.
I am not excusing German militarism, which indeed played a major part. The kaiser was arguably mentally ill, with dreams of martial glory and building an empire.
He had ignored the advice of Bismarck, who, though militarist himself, had enough sense to limit his territorial ambitions. Bismarck knew that Germany was surrounded on all sides and that it is not good to provoke rivals. So the kaiser pressured Bismarck to resign. The kaiser wanted Germany to have her "Place in the Sun."
The problem was that the sun was already owned by the British, and it never set on their empire.
Now, to be sure, British complaints about German militarism rang hollow when Britain sought a navy as big as her next two competitors combined, and when the British Empire owned a quarter of the planet, against the wishes of most of its inhabitants. The French Empire was similarly culpable, though not quite as large. Nor can the French be excused of the charge of militarism. After her defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, France went on an arms-building binge. Her policy toward Germany was "revanchism" – revenge.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I have a feeling that the same will be said someday of the Korean War as well. Only that intermission was a lot longer.
The Kaiser opposed the war.
Haig should have been tried as a war criminal for what he put his troops through at Passchendaele/3rd battle of the Somme.
The man was a narrow-minded butcher of his own men.
Enough draft resistance that they made creepy patriotic songs.
Propaganda isn't anything new—I'm not saying it was automatically bad, but it's definitely propaganda.
Agreed. America able to put at least two million fresh men in the field at that time. I spoke to older people as a child, in the early war years of WW2. They emphasised the absolute struggle to put food on the table. Health suffered. The music hall song reverberated.
'Over There, Over There. The Yanks are Coming"
America saved my native countries bacon. Heroic though those British people were.
Corporal George Washington Cummings never said one word about WWI, and nobody ever pressed him. But he did his duty in France (Meuse-Argonne and St. Mihiel) and then in the postwar occupation.
I never was able to figure out whether he was using the old French heavy machine guns (Vickers water-cooled) or whether he later employed the "new" Browning M2. I need to do some more research on that point...
The problem was Britain getting involved, instead of just focusing on Her Empire, once she got into the fray, it was only a matter of time before the US would get dragged into it.
The US and Britain would have both been better of had they not gotten involved in WWI. So what if France fell to the Germans, what was so great about France, anyway?
"The Black Hand," Serbian anarchists who were goaded into starting a conflict by the French secret service.
Wherever there is a steaming pile, there's a muslim with a stick and a Frenchman telling him, "go ahead an poke it."
My paternal grandmother was born in the 1890's to parents who had emigrated to America around the time of the Civil War, and as a child she (and her siblings as well) spoke more German than English. She had something of an accent until she passed away in her nineties. The general sentiment in the area during WWI did pretty much drive the overt "German-ness" out of public sight, but into the 1940's, she and her sisters were still conversing in German if there was a subject that they didn't want my dad and his younger brother listening to. This led to the boys debating about turning "mom" and her sisters in to the cops as German spies.
(Dad had a brother and three brothers-in-law in uniform at the time, so he might have given "mom" more credit. Dad's older brother was second scout in a rifle platoon of 2/47, and as such he visited the "old country" with a vengeance from September of 1944, getting some use out of the German that grandma had taught the older children.)
Mr. niteowl77
The British were just as bad, if not worse, than the Germans.
I am reading “African Kaiser: General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Great War in Africa, 1914-1918 “. After a very typical and horrible start, a few German governors decided that if GEA was part of Germany, by God we will treat the people like Germans.
The native troops fought under von Lettow to the end. They had started thinking of themselves as citizens of the German Reich, and took pride in it. The British viewed von Lettows arming of black troops to fight white men as an abomination.
Great Britain did many good things, and many horrible. We need to be honest about that.
The first Concentration Camps were created by the British during The Boer War.
And you want atrocities, look at what the Belgians did in Africa.
There were no saints in Europe at the time.
-all we really know about his combat situation was that during a gas attack , he was in a slight valley and somewhat affected and brother Roy was up higher and avoided the gas ,due to his location---
--his ,45 automatic (1915 serial number ) and a cartridge belt are all that remain of his souveniers--
My Grandpa was 8 in 1918.
He remembered people breaking into the church where his father was buried and burning the Bibles, hymnals, and everything because it was in German. He remembered the threats of people to force them off the land.
He had no love for the Kaiser, but hated Democrats like Wilson till the day he died.
—I have also seen it asserted that the British Admiralty (with a fellow named Churchill in charge) attempted to steer American shipping into the path of minefields and submarines , attempting to draw the US into the war-—
Yes, they learned from the WWI experience. If that were absent, either would have used it. Although with the prevailing winds, Stalin would have had to be more stupid about it.
What was Zyklon-B?
Hmmm... I wonder if maybe that was why my grandma was a Republican for her entire adult life. She seemed like an odd fit in the GOP given her situation in life, but my dad (a Dem) said unequivocally that grandma was a staunch Republican.
Now my maternal grandparents... they were both Republicans, and my grandpa - who was not a great man for cussing - would add an expletive any time Franklin Roosevelt's name was said. My mother's mom came from a bunch of Noordholland Frisians and Germans Ostfrieslanders, and maybe they weren't fans of Wilson and the Democrats either.
I was referring to war tactics. The CONTEXT was World War I fighting.
Stalin killed more Ukranians than Hitler did Jews, and did it before Hitler ever came to power.
That doesn’t take into account the millions of Russians
Stalin murdered. Churchill called him the worst pig.
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