If this had happened nationalism would still be a serious problem in Germany.
Just because we got dragged into a world war and got blamed for it alone and then out of revenge started one on our own?
Germany is the victim after all, you other nations fucked up hard with your treaty of versailles.
We should get our pre ww1 borders back as a reparation for the biggest shame of history that is the treaty of versailles.
Except if they in fact had executed plans like the Morgenthau plan then we would have a very backwards Europe today possibly under undefeated Soviet influence. There were reasons for why "you should have none" or "you should have been all castrated" were just ideas born out of vengeance rather than political pragmatism besides even Churchill of all rejected that idea. What people have lost was already enough punishment because that effectively equals losing your cultural identity. Germany always was about different cultural identities within one nation due to its history. Prussian culture for instance is pretty much dead and it has been the driving force behind many things in Germany, reforms, industrialization, philosophy and militarism. I think it did what it was supposed to achieve whilst taking everything wouldn't even have come close to that.
WoW: Crowcloak (Druid) & Neesheya (Paladin) @ Sylvanas EU (/ˈkaZHo͞oəl/) | GW2: Siqqa (Asura Engineer) @ Piken Square EU
If builders built houses the way programmers built programs,the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization. - Weinberg's 2nd law
He seeks them here, he seeks them there, he seeks those lupins everywhere!
The light treatment that post-war Germany received was certainly a pragmatic move, but damn if it doesn't make for a fundamentally fucked up historical narrative. To fast forward 70 years and see Germany as the predominant economic and political power in Europe while all of the countries where the Nazis did the most damage are still languishing in poverty just feels wrong on so many levels. And sure, not all of the responsibility for that can be put on meddling by the superpowers and the individual countries deserve credit and blame where due, but man, something just doesn't seem right with how it all turned out. Could make a similar case with Japan as well.
I thought the Jewish people wanted Israel because of its location. No other place on earth would work for them. You could have offered them 100% of Canada, and they would have refused it.
I'd still draw the line between historic Germany and modern Germany. The modern Germany is a merger of two German states, one of them been a communist construct. Before the modern Germany got to this point it had to do a lot of investment within to the point of being called the sick man of Europe around 2000.
The question is rather whether the Nazi-affected countries living in the free Western hemisphere would fare better now if Germany would still be divided. Perhaps, perhaps not, it's a bit of speculation how a Cold War world would look like in 2016. One thing is for sure: It's all down to how the Cold War ended and how things were handled during the interim. There are a lot of things to consider, one being that Mitterand literally demanded of Kohl to agree to the agenda issue of participating in a currency union in order to gain France' voice for support of a reunification. The other being the Euro being a central currency and the ECU's fiscal policy being up to sovereign decisions of each member states. Lastly globalism, if you look around you can clearly determine the post-Cold War losers of globalism and changed political landscapes.
So, I believe that modern Germany tries to make right by not veering off into a warzone again but on the other hand the EU literally depends on its economical well-being now, just as it did on West-Germany's well-being after WW2. Sure, it doesn't feel morally right but what can be said about post-WW2 Germany is that at least from an East German point of view we have paid full reparations, so from material point of view the debts are paid, from a moral point of view debts cannot be paid but on the other hand having lost that much of your country pretty much acts as eternal collateral. This is due to the fact that moral debt does not pass on to generations, however a land lost is lost forever and can serve as reminder for multiple generations.
I have also read that right after WW2 there was a "a lot of guilt". Anyone who has read about the historical processing after WW2 knows that there was not even a shred of guilt but a lot of denial still, the guilt was a process which required some socio-political changes in Germany first like during the 1960-70s which was a time of political unrest as well. In the East that had been cut short and people were flat out told that they are guilty by ideological reeducation.
WoW: Crowcloak (Druid) & Neesheya (Paladin) @ Sylvanas EU (/ˈkaZHo͞oəl/) | GW2: Siqqa (Asura Engineer) @ Piken Square EU
If builders built houses the way programmers built programs,the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization. - Weinberg's 2nd law
He seeks them here, he seeks them there, he seeks those lupins everywhere!
Because had Germany won, it would have offered lenient peace terms like you have shown at Brest-Litevsk? Dont make me laugh, Germany was planing something much worse than Versailles treaty.
That is not to say the Versailles approach was correct. It was not. Germany should either have been shattered into several entities that would never again be capable of threating anybody or it should have been treated leniently. The half way approach pf Versailles was never going to work.
Having said that, you did not get dragged into WW1, you were one of the most guilty instigators of it and you bear the biggest (but not only) share of blame for it.
And you are never getting your pre war borders back.
Would Hamburg be an Isreal colony nowaday in this alternate reality ? Would Isreal in 2016 still be in its "post war border" ? How would you manage giving nothing to URSS after the war ? They took east Germany because they wanted it, west gave them east because they "earned" it.
So many questions !
1. Germany itself was the buffer.
2. You don't seem to consider what lead to WW2. The proposal would be the exact reasons on steroids.
I offer a different idea.
How about we (the world) treats them as what they are? People.
They are nothing special. No snowflakes. They are as good, and despicable as every other people on the planet.
I've a feeling, once we start doing that, things might deescalate.
Last edited by Wildtree; 2016-06-21 at 07:13 PM.
"The pen is mightier than the sword.. and considerably easier to write with."
The Jews wanted the land of Israel because it was their ancestral homeland, not just simply in order to have a land of their own.
Well, they lived 2,000 years away from their ancestral homeland. What they needed was country of their own that they could defend.
And think of the poor Palestinians who where just sitting there minding their own business when hundreds of thousands of European Jews started showing up. That had to suck.
And when Israel took over Palestine remember that they didn't have Jerusalem initially anyway, they didn't seize Jerusalem until the '67 war I think.
Last edited by Independent voter; 2016-06-21 at 11:57 PM.
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"This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can."
-- Capt. Copeland
A large part of traditional Zionism is the religious element associated with biblical Israel which historically belonged to Jews during that period.
If anything, the best place to put Israel would have been in the United States. We had plenty of space, low population density, and a strengthening economy. There was plenty of federal land available, so nobody's land would have to be taken from them. In the end, it would have saved countless lives, as well as trillions of dollars.