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XMNN posted:The Cold War is just about to kick off, but I guess you could convince Stalin to give up East Germany? Or just give West Germany to him? Maybe after 6 years of war and the liberation of the concentration camps everyone would have been on board with just setting up an independent government and letting Germany go on its way?  Just let Prussia be a Soviet puppet and there you go with that. e: altogether Ofaloaf fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 01:50
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Ofaloaf posted:Maybe just try to totally fragment Germany together, but based sort of on historical lines? You know, like Roosevelt's proposal for postwar Germany: Prussia without Prussia. 
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Apr 20, 2014 01:56
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3peat posted:What? I thought they were the same language Ooh, I finally get to use all that information I learned over the years of checking out Yugoslav history! OK, so it's like this: generally speaking, Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian are similar enough that they get lumped together (so for example, if you're taking a class to learn one of them you'll probabl learn all three at the same time). HOWEVER, this is not to say that they are identical. Rather, the various dialects can be lumped into "Croatian" "Serbian" and "Bosnian" subgroups based on geogrpahic/ethnic realities of the region in question. All three also have their own literary traditions that were established long before socialist Yugoslavia became A Thing. One of the big issues Josip Tito had to deal with in the 1950s was a resurgence in Croatian-language literature, as the government was moving to consolidate Croatian and Serbian into a sort of combination of the two called Serbo-Croatian. Croatian intellectuals were outraged as they felt this relegated their mother-tongue to the status of a regional dialect without the literary tradition that it held in reality. It wasn't until the 1970s that the issue was formally resolved when those government officials who spoke in favor of the Croatians (which included some Serbians) were sacked. Farecoal posted:What? Most if not all of the foundations of all the bitter rivalries in the Balkans were laid down in the 19th century. This is absurdly true. It's definitely worth mentioning that the original Serbian uprisings in the early 19th century (think Napoleonic times) were more a reaction against a cabal of Janissary elites who were taxing the dickens out of the countryside. From there, great-power politics (and some internal politics thanks to the work of the Obrenovic family) worked its magic and Serbia gained its independence. I recently read an article regarding Serbian textbooks written during the latter half of the 19th century (when Serbia become unquestionably independent) that posited that those textbooks marked huge swaths of land (essentially what became Yugoslavia) as being populated more or less wholly by ethnic Serbs. As you can imagine, this played really heavily into the Serbian mindset that Croatia et al were Serbian homelands and should be freed from Ottoman/Habsburg oppression at all costs. It also brought up the language question as well but with all that I've mentioned already I don't think I need to tell you what those books said about that. e: if anyone's interested in that Serbian textbooks thing, I found the article I used as a reference on JSTOR. NEED TOILET PAPER fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 02:04
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Ofaloaf posted:Maybe just try to totally fragment Germany altogether, but based sort of on historical lines? You know, like Roosevelt's proposal for postwar Germany: Interesting! I wonder how things might've developed over the second half of the 20th century had this happened? Are there any good alternate-histories out there that explore a broken-up Germany?
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Apr 20, 2014 03:28
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DrSunshine posted:Interesting! I wonder how things might've developed over the second half of the 20th century had this happened? Are there any good alternate-histories out there that explore a broken-up Germany? It would have been great for the Soviets which explains why Roosevelt was in favor of it.
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Apr 20, 2014 03:54
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3peat posted:What? I thought they were the same language The way my Croatian friend explained it was that Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are like British, American, and Australian English. Same language, but with enough different vocabulary/constructions that a native speaker would have no problem identifying where someone's from.
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Apr 20, 2014 04:11
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 The Kangnido, a 15th century Korean world map based off of Chinese maps. Yes, Europe and Africa are present.  Also, note how Japan is tiny, rotated 90 degrees, and placed way in the South. Pakled fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 05:16
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Are you sure what's marked as Arabia isn't India? It would be really weird not to have India on an Asian map and I'm pretty sure that's the Ganges delta there.
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Apr 20, 2014 05:22
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Bloodnose posted:Are you sure what's marked as Arabia isn't India? It would be really weird not to have India on an Asian map and I'm pretty sure that's the Ganges delta there. I think that India's a fat lump southwest of China in that map. You can see a large river in the west of that region that's probably the Indus and several large rivers flowing from west to east that could be the Ganges, plus an island that's probably Sri Lanka. e: of course, now that I think about it, that region could also be Indochina and the Strait of Malacca. Seems weird for that to be absent, too, since they'd have to have passed through it to reach the West. Pakled fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 05:24
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That looks like the Tigris and Euphrates to me, you can see them branching off into Anatolia. India looks like it might be the bit opposite perpendicular to the Shandong Peninsula?
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Apr 20, 2014 05:26
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XMNN posted:Yorkshire is British Texas, pretty much. I can definitely attest to that, minus the whole gun-firing conservatism; Yorkshire, outside of the Celtic nations, has the largest amount of regional pride in the UK.
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Apr 20, 2014 05:27
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OctaviusBeaver posted:It would have been great for the Soviets which explains why Roosevelt was in favor of it. 
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Apr 20, 2014 05:34
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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I realize it probably wasn't meant to convey size realistically, but that huge Korea is hilarious. At least they knew you could sail around Africa.
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Apr 20, 2014 06:37
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Eh, I don't know, that Korea map doesn't seem to account for the fact that every great empire in history was founded by Koreans.
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Apr 20, 2014 06:55
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Peanut President posted:The point of the map, and book, is that the Potsdam Conference, which broke up Germany, was simply an act of revenge. It was more than just revenge, it was an attempt to cripple Germany forever and prevent a united Germany from dominating Europe again. quote:Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that neither the United Kingdom nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany. Thatcher also clarified that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it, telling Gorbachev "We do not want a united Germany". Although she welcomed East German democracy, Thatcher worried that a rapid reunification might weaken Gorbachev, and favoured Soviet troops staying in East Germany as long as possible to act as a counterweight to a united Germany
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Apr 20, 2014 07:31
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He was right insofar Germany dominates the EU.
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Apr 20, 2014 07:50
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Sheng-ji Yang posted:It was more than just revenge, it was an attempt to cripple Germany forever and prevent a united Germany from dominating Europe again. That sounds kind of like vengeance to me.
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Apr 20, 2014 08:52
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Pakled posted:
Conveniently they skipped Southeast Asia, and India and just skipped to Africa.
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Apr 20, 2014 08:57
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TinTower posted:I can definitely attest to that, minus the whole gun-firing conservatism; Yorkshire, outside of the Celtic nations, has the largest amount of regional pride in the UK. I don't know, I've met quite a lot of gun-firing conservatives from the country bits of Yorkshire. Peanut President posted:That sounds kind of like vengeance to me. Poor, persecuted Germany!   Even if it was "vengeance" and not just the inevitable way things were going to work out given the way the war ended, it's not like the mass rapes as the Red Army advanced, or the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans or the bombing of Dresden etc. which were war crimes against the civilian population. I don't think I could condemn anyone for wanting to permanently cripple the German state in 1945. The whole vengeance theory is sort of undermined by the way the western Allies pretty rapidly ended denazification and set about trying to prop up the West German economy, I would have thought.
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Apr 20, 2014 09:36
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Most of the crippling plans were made before anything about the above was known or cared about.
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Apr 20, 2014 09:51
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Most of the crippling plans were also proposed by people who, in the end, received much more limited say in how things went, such as Henry Morgenthau. There was also the fact that the "cripple Germany to prevent her from ever rising against Europe again" plan had kind of been tried before. It not only failed, it failed in an absolutely spectacular manner. Some people got around to realizing that blind vengeance would just start the cycle over again, and took on the more reliable path of carefully purging the Prussian officer's culture from the state.
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Apr 20, 2014 10:11
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Riso posted:Most of the crippling plans were made before anything about the above was known or cared about. Apart from the Saar protectorate, that was possibly a vengeful partition, but they ended up returning that once they realised a strong West Germany was in their interests.
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Apr 20, 2014 10:12
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XMNN posted:Yeah, and they had a go at implementing some actual vengeance to really cripple the German economy before they realised they were going to end up killing millions of people and gave up, but I don't think it's reasonable to call the partition part of that. It is always important to remember that Stalin got off easy in terms of history. If Hitler had not existed, Stalin could easily have gone down as history's greatest monster. In terms of body-count the Stalinists may well beat the Nazis, though this can come down to degrees of definition (and Mao's China may trump them all, but that's even more controversial...). Once Germany was a smashed, burning relic, the Allies took a moment to take a look around and realize that Russia, once pretty far away, was now well into what had long been considered Western Europe, and despite losing twenty million dudes, they still had a LOT of dudes. This was reinforced when Russia turned around in record time and smashed Japan's Manchurian and Korean garrisons to splinters--remember, the turnaround from Germany's surrender to the Russian declaration on Japan is about three months. That's not a lot of time to move hundreds of thousands of troops halfway around the world, when the main artery along the way is a single-gauge rail track, but Russia did it. That is cause for concern. While the Allies didn't want Germany rising again in fire and wrath, it wasn't hard to realize that Germany WOULD rise again. She has a huge population, fertile lands, extensive industrial potential--it's basically inevitable that Germany is one of if not the dominant state in Europe, and like China (if on a much smaller scale) has been held back in history largely by internal division. The Allies figured it was better to have that poo poo on their side.
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Apr 20, 2014 10:20
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Oh yeah, I entirely agree. Actually crippling the West German economy would have been a very poor decision for all sorts of reasons and the Allies realised that pretty quickly. Which is another reason why trying to characterise the partition of Germany after the war as a deliberate act of vengeance seems unfair. e: And as acts of vengeance go, splitting up the state responsible for WWII doesn't seem that outrageous, particularly compared to some of the actual revenge that was going on. XMNN fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 11:11
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Redeye Flight posted:It is always important to remember that Stalin got off easy in terms of history. If Hitler had not existed, Stalin could easily have gone down as history's greatest monster. In terms of body-count the Stalinists may well beat the Nazis, though this can come down to degrees of definition Not saying Stalin wasn't a monster, he was, but his killings had specific goals and were thus finite, where the Nazis were into killing because their ideology demanded it. Redeye Flight posted:(and Mao's China may trump them all, but that's even more controversial...)
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Apr 20, 2014 11:41
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Stalin got off easy? He's pretty consistently put right alongside Hitler in my experience, or at least just right behind. Comparing body count alone also seems weird to me, considering the Nazis were thankfully stopped within a few years of them really getting the genocide business going. How many people do you think the Nazis would have killed had you given them till 1963? In academic comparison, sure, but which one has a law relating to hyperbole relating to them? Whose name has become the absolute metric of evil? Among the general populace, if you asked whether Hitler or Stalin was worse, I'm pretty sure I know the answer nine out of ten people would give. That's what I mean by getting off easy--if Hitler had never risen to power at all, Stalin's exposure by Khrushchev would probably have put him into the spot Hitler occupies now, if not earlier. And yeah, body counts aren't an exclusive measure to judge by, but there's so many what-ifs. I hate genocide study. EDIT: I mean, gently caress, take a look at Stalin vs. Martians, for instance. If the game had been Hitler vs. Martians it would have been instantly slam-dunked into the historical garbage bin alongside all those white supremacist games where you hunt down blacks and Jews. As it is, it still gets slam-dunked, but because it's a horribly built pile of crap, not out of instant revulsion for the dominantly placed protagonist genocidaire. XMNN posted:Oh yeah, I entirely agree. Actually crippling the West German economy would have been a very poor decision for all sorts of reasons and the Allies realised that pretty quickly. Which is another reason why trying to characterise the partition of Germany after the war as a deliberate act of vengeance seems unfair. Definitely. Much worse vengeances were also planned and discarded, too. I would state that there was an element of vengeance to the partitioning of Germany--not into East and West, but into the Control Zones underneath--because the way those Zones were governed and handled varied dramatically. A German at that point in time living in the Soviet Zone was probably the worst off, but living in the French Zone was no picnic either. However, on the whole things could definitely have been much worse given the tenor of some of the people who held power or spoke to power around the negotiating table at the end of the War. Redeye Flight fucked around with this message at 12:38 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 12:27
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For history's greatest monster, I would like to nominate this fine gentleman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot While he and his Khmer Rouge don't have the same body count as others in absolute terms (estimated between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians) it's still around one fifth to half of total Cambodian population. Plus, the lunacy of his forceful de-urbanization is like something from a James Bond novel. Cambodian genocide map (sorry for the lovely quality, couldn't find a better one)  Bombing of Cambodia by US Forces  And not to let the rest of the world feel left out 
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Apr 20, 2014 12:53
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Disco Infiva posted:And not to let the rest of the world feel left out I know it's just supposed to be a 20th century thing, but I like how they start the map at 1900, as if the rest of the Americas didn't commit horrible atrocities against the natives.  E: formatting Backweb fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 13:47
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It's still pretty disingenuous to call the Great Leap Forward as a genocide because it was quite clearly a failure of basic understanding about how industrialization and agriculture work, not a concentrated effort to move or kill people. I mean hell, at the end of it Mao literally said "yeah guys I hosed up" and resigned as the President.
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Apr 20, 2014 13:54
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Redeye Flight posted:EDIT: I mean, gently caress, take a look at Stalin vs. Martians, for instance. If the game had been Hitler vs. Martians it would have been instantly slam-dunked into the historical garbage bin alongside all those white supremacist games where you hunt down blacks and Jews. As it is, it still gets slam-dunked, but because it's a horribly built pile of crap, not out of instant revulsion for the dominantly placed protagonist genocidaire. *If we're talking about games, the insane level of Nazi apologism in wargaming can't be ignored. People happily defend the actions of Germany in places like the official Hearts of Iron forum, and that's not really diving into the real obsessive parts of wargaming. Disco Infiva posted:And not to let the rest of the world feel left out computer parts posted:It's still pretty disingenuous to call the Great Leap Forward as a genocide because it was quite clearly a failure of basic understanding about how industrialization and agriculture work, not a concentrated effort to move or kill people.
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Apr 20, 2014 14:05
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Well, homicides have different degrees of severity - premeditated, emotionally induced and unintended manslaughter. If we apply the same system in defining genocide, Mao is like those parents that feed their babies with no-fat soy milk. While it's not morally the same as Holocaust, it's still genocide with 30 million dead people. EDIT: Ok, I just looked up the exact definition of genocide, and while the definition is hotly debated, legal definition by UN includes intent. ˇˇˇˇ That'll teach me not to leave while I'm editing stuff fuck off Batman fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 14:24
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Disco Infiva posted:Well, homicides have different degrees of severity - premeditated, emotionally induced and unintended manslaughter. If we apply the same system in defining genocide, Mao is like those parents that feed their babies with no-fat soy milk. While it's not morally the same as Holocaust, it's still genocide with 30 million dead people. Genocide is defined with intent: quote:..any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: The most analogous situation I can think of to the GLF is the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression because it was also based in a failure of understanding agriculture (albeit not to the same degree) and it resulted in several million people either dying or being displaced.
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Apr 20, 2014 14:27
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Phlegmish posted:I realize it probably wasn't meant to convey size realistically, but that huge Korea is hilarious. Dusseldorf posted:Conveniently they skipped Southeast Asia, and India and just skipped to Africa. These things are all still more or less true today. Here's a globe a friend of mine found in his classroom here in Korea.  He noticed the ocean color was off, and on inspection there was a sticker. Sea of East instead of Sea of Japan, Dokdo is the size of Okinawa rather than a tiny poo poo-covered rock (and also labeled on a globe as if it were important), and Japan looked rather small.  The globe without the sticker. If you look back you can see part of actual size Japan sticking out from under the sticker with comedy tiny Japan.
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Apr 20, 2014 15:03
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I'm just gonna start calling it "The South Manchuria Sea" around Koreans from now on, I think.
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Apr 20, 2014 17:03
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XMNN posted:Poor, persecuted Germany! I was simply repeating the book's argument. The point of the book was to show that partition sucked. Settle down friend.
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Apr 20, 2014 17:09
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Grand Fromage posted:These things are all still more or less true today. Here's a globe a friend of mine found in his classroom here in Korea. Hahahaha how do you even get away with poo poo like this? Imagine the shitstorm if a globe in a French classroom had a sticker on Europe that makes France twice the size of Germany and the UK.
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Apr 20, 2014 18:03
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Deltasquid posted:Hahahaha how do you even get away with poo poo like this? Imagine the shitstorm if a globe in a French classroom had a sticker on Europe that makes France twice the size of Germany and the UK. Korea loves to do this kind of crap. I remember a few years ago some school kids drew anthropomorphic maps of the two countries, one of which actually included a fanged South Korea chewing on Japan's balls. It was displayed in a major Seoul subway station. I am trying to find the link. E: Here we go: http://www.geocities.jp/bxninjin2004/data_room/05/cache/02/index.php.htm gently caress you, 일본  Balls: 
menino fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 18:06
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I hope they got top marks for those.
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Apr 20, 2014 18:34
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I don't understand this one. And to be clear, I really want to understand it.
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Apr 20, 2014 18:43
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TildeATH posted:I don't understand this one. And to be clear, I really want to understand it. It's a middle finger?
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