Free Republic

Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself. Less than a year before the end of World War II, then U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish postwar Germany. After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II—along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919—the Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors. When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was...

The Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was to settle the terms for the end of WW I. Wilson US, Clemenceau France, Lloyd George UK led the conference. By the end of it, the Germans were forced to accept these terrible terms whereby Germany gave up big chunks of Germany, gave up all German colonies like Namibia, and Germany was forced to pay these reparations a lot of it to France. These conditions essentially guaranteed the Germans would go into ear again. No country was going to tolerate paying such high reparations to other countries at the expense of their own...

Had you have taken a direct flight from London to Seoul yesterday afternoon, by the time you would have landed you might have been none the wiser that anything had happened at all. At near midnight South Korean time, President Yoon Suk-yeol imposed martial law across the so-called “land of the morning calm.” Only six hours later it was subsequently, and pointedly, revoked. As South Korean citizens continue with their daily lives, the political establishment has once again entered a period of precarity. Yoon has scored a significant own goal; its implications do not end there. It is no understatement...