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 ...
The Great War killed, on average, roughly 10000 men a day.
Every day.
Seven days a week.
365 days a year.
For over four years.
In the Spring of 1918, the Germans were exhausted, but the French/English were even worse-off.
The German Spring Offensive was well on its way to Paris when they were stopped only by the Americans at Belleau Wood.
And how does that compare with the suicidal "democracy" they have there now?
That was quite decisive. The Germans went all-in on that offensive and knew if it came up short they’d have to sign the armistice. Ludendorff knew it was a race against time and the handwriting was on the wall that if the operation failed they were done.
Bump from the grandson of a fellow who help build subs against the Kaiser at the Phila. Navy Yard
You haven’t changed my mind about the Civil War and slavery, but we do agree about the harmful aftereffects of the Civil War. Given the deeply Christian culture of the South, I suspect (without any real evidence) that slavery would ended in a generation or two without the Civil War, and racial reconciliation in the South would have been quicker and more peaceful. But to the bondsman, a generation or two is his entire life.
If the US was so hung up about the Zimmerman Note, we should have simply occupied Mexico....Problem solved, and with a lot less bloodshed.
I agree.
The US did occupy Veracruz in 1914, and Pershing invaded northern Mexico in 1916-17, chasing Pancho Villa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Veracruz
Obviously we needed to go a bit further.
What? Of course alternate histories are guess work. And I've no problem with wishing that bloodbaths like the Somme never happened.
This was a cousin's war, we had no business in it.
10 days after the USA entered WW1, Germany sent Lenin via sealed train to Russia. If our entering had any part in Germany doing this to get Russia out of the war, we have a great amount of blood on our hands.
Ummm... you might want to ask the Jewish people about that one...
I’m not so sure about that. If you’d put it to a vote in 1943 Americans would have quite happily exterminated every Japanese on the planet. We’d have made what the Romans did to Carthage look like a Sunday school picnic.
It's not in our nature, but if you push us... anything is possible. We aren't robots.
Your History teacher should be flogged. Roosevelt "provoked" Pearl Harbor?!? Pray tell, what was the "belligerent" move by FDR that pushed the Emperor to order the attack. We will wait while you try to dream something up.
(Hint: Japan did not care one whit about the US "lend/lease" of arms in Europe, so don't even bother trying to pretend that was a provocation in Japan's eyes.)
Moving the fleet to Hawaii. Cutting off oil to Japan. Supporting China in their war against China. How’s that for starters? Read “Day of Deceit” and then sue YOUR history teacher.
“10 days after the USA entered WW1, Germany sent Lenin via sealed train to Russia.”
There’s an interesting movie about how that came together starring Ben Kingsley as Lenin. The storyline has a lot of pre-revolution Russian personalities that I was unaware of prior to watching it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0174862/combined
I’ll start by wishing that Eve had not eaten the forbidden fruit.
No one could have predicted what would happen, but my point is that had we not intervened, the worst aspects of what did happen, likely would not have happened.
Here I agree with you. I think the economics of it would have failed too, but it might have taken between 20 and 80 years for that to happen. Social pressure would have never abated, and state by state, the South too would have succumbed to the influence that had earlier purged the institution in the Northern states.
But to the bondsman, a generation or two is his entire life.
In the calculus of the lesser of two evils, I lean toward believing it would have been better to not have killed 750,000 people in war directly, along with the claimed 2 million who died as a result of starvation, disease and exposure, as well as setting up the Omni-powerful Federal Leviathan we have now and eroding our original rights as independent states.
What we have now is more lingering and more extensive than what would have resulted from slavery declining naturally.
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