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The Germans signed Brest-Litovsk partly because they were still fighting in the West and wanted to end it in the East so they could send those troops over, but it's hard to imagine that they'd tolerate a Bolshevik state on their doorstep if Operation Michael paid off, even if it wouldn't be as racialized a conflict as in WW2
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Nov 30, 2022 02:17
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ModernMajorGeneral posted:The Germans sent troops to fight the Bolsheviks in real life, so I don't think it's weird to imagine them fighting them harder if they won WW1. it's always funny reading wikipedia battles and seeing imperial russian generals with german and english names. there are tons from the 1700s to wwi
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Nov 30, 2022 02:18
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What if you were having a dispute with your neighbor, and threw a Molotov cocktail into their window but then their house flamed up into a greater conflagration than you might even have imagined, and it looked like the fire would spread to your house. I mean, even though you were the one that started the fire in the first place, you'd still work to put it out, just out of your own self interest. Now imagine that the gasoline in that molotov cocktail is a certain radical politician, and the bottle is a secret train
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Nov 30, 2022 02:52
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I suppose at the very least the Bolsheviks couldn’t have executed the Kaiser’s cousin and his family in order to have any relationship to get off the ground. So yeah I guess the Germans and the Allies will be sending over troops together
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Nov 30, 2022 03:21
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The Romanovs were no angels
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Nov 30, 2022 03:38
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Maximo Roboto posted:I haven't read much about the western intervention on behalf of the White Russians, but weren't they pretty logistically constrained? The Allied interventions were pretty half-hearted for a variety of reasons that I've written about before in this thread, but there's no reason to think the same would be true of a victorious Germany. They would have a much stronger incentive to intervene since they took so much Russian territory at Brest-Litovsk and it would be their own now-greatly-expanded eastern border that would be threatened by a chaotic or Bolshevik Russia, and they would have much more straightforward logistics for a sustained campaign. In 1918, much of the occupied Brest-Litovsk territory was not happy about the German occupation and Bolsheviks in the occupied territory continued agitating against the Germans, plus the Bolsheviks pretty openly continued to agitate for a German revolution. Supposedly Ludendorff was concerned that Bolshevik propaganda was starting to affect German troops occupying the east, and in early November 1918 Germany even ejected the Soviet ambassador to Germany after they found he was trying to foment insurrection in Germany. At the time, when all this was happening Germany was far too busy with the Western Front to do much about any of this, but in a scenario where a victorious Germany has their whole army freed up by victory in the west and is looking to consolidate their enormous gains in the east I would think it pretty likely that they would decide to march on Moscow and install a friendly regime that would stop trying to foment a revolution against the Kaiser.
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Nov 30, 2022 04:06
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I guess a big question is when do they win in the west and what's their army like at the time?
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Nov 30, 2022 07:10
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i say swears online posted:it's always funny reading wikipedia battles and seeing imperial russian generals with german and english names. there are tons from the 1700s to wwi The Baltic Germans were enthusiastic servants of whatever empire they were part of after their own military power was broken as in return they got to keep their lands and priviliges. This meant that by virtue of owning most of the land the Baltic Germans were very much an autonomous part of both Sweden in 17th century and Russia from there on.
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Nov 30, 2022 07:49
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gradenko_2000 posted:The Romanovs were no angels Nicholas II must be the most useless dickwad ever as monarch.
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Nov 30, 2022 07:56
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i say swears online posted:it's always funny reading wikipedia battles and seeing imperial russian generals with german and english names. there are tons from the 1700s to wwi There's already plenty of this in War and Peace.
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Nov 30, 2022 10:02
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What does winning WW1 even look like for Germany? are they doing a battle of Britain with blimps?
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Nov 30, 2022 11:32
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probably they occupy paris after an extended battle, france's government collapses in a series of coups and revolutions and france has to bow out of the war. this means that the entente can be shoved off the continent (they would also have to knock italy out, but lol) and threaten the suez canal to make up weight against the blocade, but it's not inconceivable that the war could end on reasonably favourable terms for the germans in, like, 1919 or 1920. whether they at that point would have the capacity to seriously intervene in russia without risking revolutionary violence in their own country is not clear, nor is the political stability of germany after an even longer period of war and deprivation, but it's not imo *inconceivable*.
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Nov 30, 2022 13:20
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from the succ zone:gradenko_2000 posted:https://twitter.com/JonahFurman/status/1597735612773126145?t=GMoBISFZqKMyy6cfWPW0CQ&s=19 bedpan posted:reminds me of the AFL-CIO being used to launder money sent to Polish anti-communist forces during the 80s gradenko_2000 posted:They also laundered money to death squads in the Philippines I wanted to do a little follow-through on this: https://jacobin.com/2018/03/trump-national-endowment-democracy-foreign-policy quote:A wary Congress only agreed to create the [National Endowment for Democracy] in 1983 on the condition that the CIA not be involved, something then-CIA director William Casey promised, but didn’t follow through on: at the last minute he had language prohibiting the involvement of CIA personnel removed from the bill. The NED also appears to have been Casey’s idea in the first place; he wrote a White House official that he was in favor of a “National Endowment in support of free institutions throughout the world.” if you follow that last reference about the TUCP working with a death squad, the citation is "AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers", by Kim Scipes, published 2010: quote:Between 1983-89, the AFL-CIO provided more money to the Marcos-created Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) to use against the progressive Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) Labor Center than it gave to any other labor movement in the world, including Poland’s Solidarnosc (International Labour Reports, 1989). These efforts against progressive labor in the Philippines included supporting the largest affiliate of the TUCP in its efforts against a KMU affiliate at Atlas Mines—and, with no exaggeration, this included active collaboration with a death squad. These efforts continued throughout the 1980s at least (Scipes, 1990, 1996: 116-125, and below). And AAFLI provided $3.7 million to a TUCP leader, while serving in the Philippine Senate, to get him to vote for retention of U.S. bases when that issue was before their Congress (Eisenhower, 1991). And for more information on KADRE, here's a study on vigilante groups in the Philippines: https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/9a765d5c-1000-44a0-b37a-534bac82f646/content quote:In Cebu, a US-Philippine Fact-Finding Mission (Clark et al. 1987:20) in May 1987 reported "anti- communist hysteria" and "vigilante violence" (LCHR 1988:20). The following year a Lawyers Committee for Human Rights report stated: "The vigilante movement in Cebu is highly sophisticated, and the province has become a nerve center for the national movement" (LCHR 1988:70). on a personal note, my mother's family came from Cebu and the Atlas Mines, so I'd heard some stories of the struggles of the PAMA union against management and the Marcos regime even before I tried to dive deep into the history
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Nov 30, 2022 13:51
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i say swears online posted:it's always funny reading wikipedia battles and seeing imperial russian generals with german and english names. there are tons from the 1700s to wwi just part of a matching set with their german and english monarchs
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Nov 30, 2022 14:34
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Lord of Pie posted:just part of a matching set with their german and english monarchs cousin nicky 
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Nov 30, 2022 20:04
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Suplex Liberace posted:was this thread talking about odd westad? whats the general consensus about their books? i generally liked his stuff 10-15 years ago, he usually focused on the non-aligned movement which was often pretty interesting.
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Nov 30, 2022 20:33
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Rutibex posted:What does winning WW1 even look like for Germany? are they doing a battle of Britain with blimps? WWI brought the government's of just about everyone involved to their knees. Winning just means surviving long enough for the other guy to collapse. Which, you'll recall, still happened in the losing countries.
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Dec 1, 2022 01:51
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https://mobile.twitter.com/juniormaruwa/status/1598371042778615812?s=19
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Dec 1, 2022 18:44
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the more I hear about this Hitler fellow the less I care for him
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Dec 1, 2022 19:05
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i mean this guy was a real jerk
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Dec 1, 2022 19:20
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i say swears online posted:it's always funny reading wikipedia battles and seeing imperial russian generals with german and english names. there are tons from the 1700s to wwi Chilean national hero O’Higgins French President MacMahon Who really rules the world?
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Dec 1, 2022 20:42
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FPyat posted:
Girls.
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Dec 1, 2022 22:20
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Rutibex posted:What does winning WW1 even look like for Germany? are they doing a battle of Britain with blimps? i honestly dont get why germany didnt just use the peace settlement with russia as leverage for trying to get a peace settlement in the west too by any objective measurement theyve already won because they had more territory than when they started the west has much worse prospects for winning with the russians out of the war and the russians being out of the war at all suggests that no one actually has to keep fighting they can just stop whenever which isnt exactly a great motivator for a western foot soldier to fight to the death my best guess is that the germans were being very greedy and very stupid both overestimating their military position while underestimating their psychological one but i dunno im not a historian
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Dec 8, 2022 01:08
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The US entered WWI on April 4, 1917 the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government on November 7, 1917 one Corps of the American Expeditionary Force was already in France by January 15, 1918 The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed March 3, 1918 there were one million American troops in Europe by May 1918 ___ what I'm saying is, per the timeline, Germany would probably be rebuffed by the West at trying to strike a peace deal because by the time the Eastern Front was secured, America was already in and was already well on its way to buttressing the Entente
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Dec 8, 2022 02:21
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"by the time the eastern front was secured" being the operative phrase there youve still got a whole lot of chaos going on in winter that was a lot worse for western morale than it was for the germans and a lot of this chaos was prompted by the germans choosing to be bad winners and milking the russian chaos for every extra square acre they could nobody paying any attention to what they were doing could possibly be expected to think the germans would be willing to negotiate in good faith even if they had made an effort you could maybe argue that the english and the french themselves were confident that american entry into the war made victory inevitable but i dont know that this would have held up under the political reality of the time the bolshevik revolution had everybody spooked and america didnt even care who won the war we just wanted everyone to knock this poo poo off so we could send our boats to europe without having to worry about them getting sunk all the time
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Dec 8, 2022 03:11
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Honestly the German war effort in WWI was the greatest public relations disaster in human history, in absolute terms of lives and money lost. If they could've convinced the British that their fight was with France and Russia, if they could've convinced Italy to stay on their side, if they hadn't hosed up the messaging of the campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, appealed to the Indians and Africans under the Entente's boot, not hosed up the whole Zimmerman Telegram fiasco, fully appealed to the minorities in the Russian Empire, emphasized how wrong and illegal the British blockade was, pushed back on fake British atrocity stories, and on, and on, and on. It was an absolute failure of messaging and marketing, not of heroism or military prowess, up and down the line, for years and years. Whether they were villains or not, they acted like it. You should never act guilty whether you're breaking the law or not.
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Dec 8, 2022 03:32
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Von Papen was real dumb but dumbest of all is he didn't really try invading Canada with German-American and Irish-Americans dressed in cowboy uniforms https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/50577/how-realistic-were-von-papens-plans-to-invade-canada-using-german-cowboys-dur
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Dec 8, 2022 04:26
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Honestly the German war effort in WWI was the greatest public relations disaster in human history, in absolute terms of lives and money lost. One of the first things Britain did when the war started was to cut the German undersea telegraph cables so that limited what they could do by a lot.
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Dec 8, 2022 12:02
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Yeah but British doctrine on the continent had long been to oppose the strongest power and the stomping France received in the franco-prussian war scared the bejeezus out of Britain. Once France clawed Russia out of the 3 emperor's league the entente was the best hope to restrict Germany. Plus Germany's colonial ambitions were in largely British spheres ie china, southern Africa and the Pacific.
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Dec 8, 2022 14:21
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I see America's actions in both world wars as a continuation of this British policy of attacking the strongest power. Still going strong through the cold war and today's policy on China.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:25
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Britain pre-WWI also had extensive military ties with France, the extent of which was not widely publicly known and came as quite a shock to many British politicians as essentially the Foreign Office had tied Britain to France behind everyone's backs. Britain likely would have left Germany and Russia to duke it out if France was kept out of it, but the French government at the time was incredibly belligerent and wanted another go at Germany so the Germans were understandably unwilling to take the French and British at their word that they would not invade, especially as the German battle plan relied on taking France out first (though how predetermined the "Schlieffen-Moltke" plan was in 1914 is a hot debate topic to this day). At the end of the day, in 1914 there is absolutely zero chance Britain takes Germany's side against France, it's just a totally ahistorical scenario for all the reasons mentioned. In 1917 the only way the Allied Powers would have accepted peace is at the very least a return to the status quo ante and admission of guilt by Germany (which would have been very expensive) and with US entry into the war the French would have also probably demanded Alsace and Lorraine too. The German army after Brest-Litovsk was in good enough shape to attempt the Spring Offensive so until that went south in 1918 I don't think Germany was contemplating total military defeat being likely. The Allied powers agreed, they expected the war to last till 1919 - the military collapse of Germany was a lot more sudden than expected, though it's possible the home front would have totally collapsed under the blockade if the war had dragged on longer anyway. Any discussion of whether Germany could win the war has to reckon with the fact that Germany was literally starving to death and on the verge of revolution through 1918, and in reality even though Ludendorff said the military situation was hopeless and advised the Kaiser to sue for peace it was an attempted revolution in Kiel that absolutely sealed the deal.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:41
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Did anyone ever interview the construction workers who built the Chicago Pile 1? I'd love to know their thoughts about that scene - it's the middle of World War II, and a short guy with an Italian accent is telling you to stack 350 tons of black bricks on a squash court, occasionally sending you away to discuss secrets with his colleagues.
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Dec 12, 2022 02:41
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Apparently the Manhattan Project did have trouble with workers being careless with radioactive material because they couldn't be properly briefed on it, yeah
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Dec 12, 2022 04:38
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StashAugustine posted:Apparently the Manhattan Project did have trouble with workers being careless with radioactive material because they couldn't be properly briefed on it, yeah Yeah, Feynman wrote about it a bit. It's hard to find anything written by the workers in the Manhattan Project who were kept in the dark, but it's always fascinating. I found one quote from a security guard outside the Chicago Pile who saw the workers bringing in the bricks - "For all I knew, they were building a little house."
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Dec 12, 2022 22:40
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MikeCrotch posted:At the end of the day, in 1914 there is absolutely zero chance Britain takes Germany's side against France, it's just a totally ahistorical scenario for all the reasons mentioned. I do think if the Germans had handled things a little more deftly they could've kept the British neutral which would have helped a lot. Not likely, but not impossible
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Dec 12, 2022 22:58
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The UK was always going to be committed to knocking Germany back as it was the rising industrial star on the continent.
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Dec 13, 2022 02:55
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https://twitter.com/After__History/status/1602486827486937088 as it turns out, calm_hitler.jpg got it backwards
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Dec 13, 2022 08:54
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I had a thought the other day: I think part of the Western conception of what are commonly described as "totalitarian states" stems from the unwillingness to fully recognize and deal with their role in the Holocaust. So when Western press assumes or implies or outright states that people in China or Russia or North Korea or wherever are constantly being watched/monitored by an all-present state (which is through its constant presence almost automatically oppressive) it is because their worldview includes that it is even possible for a state to function in this way. Frequently they'll go even a step further and imply the state is not just omnipresent, but also so centralized that the will of the top leader is ever-present in everyone's daily lives. Real states don't function this way, if only for practical reasons. The closest I can think of would probably be the GDR's Stasi. But obviously it is a useful rhetorical and propaganda device, mixed with probably some othering and racism about inscrutable orientals or whatever. But anyway, what I was thinking the other day was, if states don't actually function in this way, and instead require much more public acceptance and buy-in to achieve their big goals, or otherwise will see big gaps between central authority policy intentions and on-the-ground execution of said policy through negligence, laziness, corruption or even active subversion, then an uncomfortable question will surface: if it was just "the Germans" who wanted to murder all the Jews, how come so many Jews were identified, arrested, deported and murdered all over Europe? The answer being that it wasn't "the Germans" who wanted to murder all the Jews, but Nazis. Nazis wanted to murder the Jews, and there were significant numbers of Nazis in a lot of European countries outside of Germany. And also significant numbers of people who were perhaps not Nazis themselves, but ultimately had no problem cooperating with Nazis. The reality wasn't that the SS or SD with their amazing detective powers would find you if you tried to sabotage these efforts. It's that there was a significant chance that your colleagues, acquaintances, friends or even family would rat you out if they found out you were doing this, because they were Nazis. So thinking that totalitarian states can function in such an omnipresent way provides an excuse and obviation of responsibility for what happened in Europe during WW2. It wasn't us, it was "the Germans". The more you learn about the Nazi state, the more you see just utter disfunction at all levels. To think this state could have organized such a succesful genocidal effort without significant local buy-in is ludicrous. Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 11:58 on Dec 13, 2022 |
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Dec 13, 2022 11:56
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Orange Devil posted:So thinking that totalitarian states can function in such an omnipresent way provides an excuse and obviation of responsibility for what happened in Europe during WW2. It wasn't us, it was "the Germans". The more you learn about the Nazi state, the more you see just utter disfunction at all levels. To think this state could have organized such a succesful genocidal effort without significant local buy-in is ludicrous. the thing I learned from Programmed to Chill's series on Krupp Steel was that slave labor was openly walking around the streets of Essen (and presumably other cities in the Ruhr Valley), and they had to put up signs informing the public to please do not feed the animals (my metaphor) so it was impossible for the average German to not have known that they were running a slave state, to say nothing of all the administrators and bureaucrats that knew directly that it was not just a slave state, but a genocidal, industrialized-murder state my take is, yes, there was a lot of public buy-in, and I tend to feel that there's way too much abnegation of the idea that entire peoples were culpable in the Holocaust
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Dec 13, 2022 12:22
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Orange Devil posted:I had a thought the other day: - Bulgaria - Finland - Denmark Bottom 3 countries in terms of morality in Europe during WW2: - Poland - Greece - Lithuania
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