Great wars past and present.

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Funny yet it was the losing side that got the civil rights bill passed.

Huh?

I don't follow your reasoning, even if you do begin your statement with "Duh."

Last edited by ArrantPariah on 09 Jun 2012, 11:06 am, edited 1 time in total.

The descendents of the losing side voted heavily against it.

Thats okay I am from North Carolina we where against it too we had the fewest slaves here

What is so great about war?

The History and the impact it had.

The Greek and Persian wars.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

It was unnecessary. Slavery would have died of its own inefficiencies in another generation. The Abolitionist Crazies provoked an unnecessary war, the bloodiest war in American history.

ruveyn

Read -Hitler's Willing Executioners- by Daniel Goldhagen.

The Germans -of that generation- bought the Nazi lie willingly and enthusiastically. They danced and sang and seig-heiled loudly and happily. And then the bombs rained down on the. As Sir Arthur Harris said the Germans sowed the wind and in due course reaped the whirlwind.

Fortunately their children and grand-children turned out better. That is because the Allies occupied Germany and prevented another "stab in the back" myth from arising. The Allies made sure that the herrenvolk know they were beaten soundly and rubbed their faces in the mud just to emphasize the point. When the "super race" finally realized they weren't so super after all, matters improved. Now Germany is a normal country and its not ruled by a demonic evil spirit. That dubious distinction now belongs to the Islamic nations. Satan is alive and well in those nations. The Devil never sleeps.

ruveyn

What makes you so sure about that?

The cost of maintaining a slave (including the cost of preventing his escape) was nearly equal to his output. As soon as a cotton picking machine was invented the slaves would have been an economic liability.

In 1890 the Brazilians abolished slavery for precisely that reason. The cost of importing and using slaves was just too great. Brazil did not have a civil war.

ruveyn

Or maybe not. Slavery was a means of obtaining social status in the Antebellum south. Slavery was already an unworkable, heavy handed institution by the time the war had started, but the south was prepared to secede for the sake of keeping it alive, because social status had become everything to them.
Then there is the question - - why should the slaves wait another generation, or even another minute, to gain their freedom? Would any of us?

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

The Allies just bullied the Germans, or at least, they bullied them half the time, and used them as a meat shield against the Communists the rest of it. They didn't want to "teach" anything.

Very few, anywhere in Europe, made much fuss about the occasionnal pogrom, in Germany or elsewhere, since most were neutral-to-favorable on the matter. Many politicians were open to anti-semitism. Most of what Hitler said wasn't exactly new or original, but he, unlike others, meant it, and did what he said he would with horrible literalness (though in the case of the death camps, he was relatively secretive). There were reasons to be fooled. They bought (relatively) enthousiastically not in a lie, but in a reality: a Germany that held her head high against the world, after years of perceived humiliation, an economy on the way to recovery (though not in a sustainable manner), an end to a democratic regime that was neither loved nor functionnal. Modern democracy as we know it wasn't the given it is today. Germany wasn't very different from France, for example, in its anti-democratic sentiments, except that France was two years late on rebuilding her air force and had it easy during the crisis.

If they "turned out better", it was also because they could do nothing other than see that they were wrong -- not defeated, wrong. Being defeated changes nothing. The French were soundly defeated in 1870-1871, yet wanted revenge for fifty years all the same -- revenge, I say; the Germans only wanted to reopen the Versailles treaty, diplomatically if possible. To my knowledge, few peoples are as critical and neutral when presenting their own past as the Germans, because there is not other way to see it. In the meantime, the Americans are almost incapable of anything but hagiography and self-congratulation, and the French celebrate their Résistance, which was completely benign compared to the Polish or Yugoslavian ones, while forgetting their blatant and very willing Collaboration.

Oh but it does. In WW1 defeat was not brought home to Germany - almost none of the war happened on German soil. Towards the end of the war, Germany had the Novemberrevolution. Communist groups such as the Spartacists seized power in several cities and caused a number of mutinies in the navy and land forces. The government was toppled but as in the Russian revolution, this did not immediately translate into communist seizure of power, but rather a new governing assembly was formed by liberal democrats. Unlike in Russia, this one - the Weimar Republic - was stable enough to last, and was able to put down the Spartacist uprising.

The Weimar Republic signed the peace. These were liberal democrats who had come to power as a result of a communist uprising. The right wing came up with what is called the Dolchstoßlegende (literally, "Stab in the Back Legend") which claimed that the Germans would have won the war if it weren't for the Jews and communists and other doves who had signed the peace treaty. A political cartoon from 1919:



These kinds of ideas eventually crystallized into Nazism. This would not have been possible, had the Allies done what they did in WW2 and demanded unconditional surrender and occupation of Germany, instead of signing a peace as soon as the conclusion became inevitable. Because commanders knew the details of that conclusion and how the war must turn out, but the man in the street did not. Right wingers in Germany could not understand why the peace had been signed when their armies were still fighting on French territory and the Allies had not yet penetrated the German borders signifigantly.

I don't know if war is something i would ever describe as 'great' from what I hear it tends to be more horrible, hellish and well maybe funny if you have a dark sense of humor about things like peoples heads getting blown off. Or do you mean great as in large?

@ edgewaters : I agree about everything you said, but that wasn't my point. As a compromise between the American and French aspirations, the peace of Versailles humiliated Germany without weakening it decisively -- just like Prussia/Germany did to France in that other Versailles treaty of 1871. Many things would have been different, but the basic antagonism would have remained. However, after Hitler was defeated, he was also recognized as the criminal he had been, and Germany had to recognize it had been his accomplice.