Necrobama posted:

/reparations-are-biblical/

goochtit posted:

croup coughfield posted:

i know who said the line ive seen the movie!!

goochtit posted:

goochtit posted:

AnimeIsTrash posted:

goochtit posted:

two-time fee posted:

Wait this isn't a bit ?

Nichael posted:

is this a bit

goochtit posted:

Buck Wildman posted:

does it matter

AnimeIsTrash posted:

goldmine before this thread becomes cspam fail imo

Best Friends posted:

lying awake at night, tossing and turning, can’t stop thinking about the cspam tankies. what if they win? What if they give all my money to the…the drat…lotto players.

Jazerus posted:

Hatebag posted:

Sorry, according to exodus the sins of the fathers are passed down for at most 4 generations so slavery is outside of god's statute of limitations. God has no standing here

A Buttery Pastry posted:

The last son of a slave died two years ago.

goochtit posted:

lobster shirt posted:

this is what comes from only posting about video games

lobster shirt posted:

this is what comes from only posting about video games

vyelkin posted:

oh also just in case this wasn't all a bit, it's a myth that reparations from Versailles wrecked the interwar German economy. Germany intentionally wrecked its own economy to try and get out of paying reparations, and when they decided to stop intentionally wrecking their own economy it recovered just fine until the Great Depression meant US banks stopped loaning Germany money and they wrecked their own economy again doing austerity which opened the door for the Nazis. Great historical analogy OP.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

The last son of a slave died two years ago.

lil poopendorfer posted:

Can you suggest further reading on this? A link or a book, I’ve never heard this angle before

quote:

Clauses that crumbled included those about reparations, over which experts and the Four struggled at Paris and thereafter. Myths nurtured by German propaganda were aided by the fact that what the Allies produced was not so much mistaken as deliberately misleading. Early on, Wilson excluded the indemnities normally levied by victors upon losers.41 But he accepted that the word “restored” in three of the Fourteen Points about devastated areas meant payment to repair civilian damage, ultimately defined in an Annex to Article 232.42 After he also ruled out war costs,43 the experts and the Four agreed that, despite the astronomic actual physical damage, the reparations bill should not exceed Germany’s capacity to pay within one generation of thirty years.44 Potential legal claims remained large, but much less than what Germany had intended if it won, namely, to annex economically valuable portions of its neighbors, impose its war costs on the Allies, and squeeze Britain to the uttermost farthing.45 The Four had no thought of such draconian measures.

But popular financial expectations in European victor states, including Britain, were immense, whereas German capacity was finite. Hence the Four, all politicians sensitive to public opinion, wanted the reparations bill to look large but not to be large.46 Berlin knew the concern was with appearance more than reality, for its intelligence was excellent, and its counteroffer, which required massive territorial concessions, looked financially impressive but would yield little. Among the Allies, no suitably misleading formula was found at Paris. For this reason, along with hope that public expectations would abate in time, no figure was specified in the treaty. Germany was delighted: it, too, expected figures to shrink over time, wished to postpone the evil day, and gained the propaganda advantage of claiming it was forced to sign a blank check. In 1921, the victors found a way to disguise a total bill for all Central Powers of 50 milliard gold marks ($12.5 billion) in an ostensible total of 132 milliard gold marks ($33 billion). While remaining in the realm of reality, this enabled the victors to boast of large sums and the Weimar Republic to bemoan vast burdens that did not exist.47

quote:

The entire concept of reparations also produced criticism. Those, especially outside Germany, who sought their cancellation rarely knew whereof they spoke. As the Four realized, cancellation would have reversed the military verdict, leaving Germany victorious because its European economic dominance would be so vast. This complex financial issue was at heart political and fundamental to the balance of power, which is why it was fought over so fiercely in every nonmilitary way for a decade. The victors had enormous foreign debts and reconstruction costs; Germany had neither. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes misleadingly limited damage estimates to the battlefield,50 but the Second Reich engaged in large-scale economic warfare, causing much of the civilian damage for which it had accepted financial liability.51 Final Allied damage estimates by the US Army Corps of Engineers amounted to 160 milliard gold marks ($40 billion), excluding Czechoslovakia, Russia, and Poland, which had been fought over.52 France’s ten richest industrial departments were only horrific ruins, over a thousand square miles now a desert.53 German industry, like that of Britain, was exhausted and needed maintenance, but that of Belgium and northern France and the less industrial Poland was gone, simply gone. For this reason, three- and five-year economic clauses, also criticized, restricted Germany’s trade policy so that a flood of exports from Germany’s intact economy could not strangle those of the victors at rebirth.

There are those, not all German, who claim reparations were unpayable. In financial terms, that is untrue. After 1871, France, with a much smaller economy than Germany’s fifty years later, paid nearly as much in two years (by French estimate) to liberate its territory as the Weimar Republic paid from 1919 through 1932.54 Propaganda contributed to notions of unpayability, and some think only in terms of cash, when in fact Germany received credit for battlefield salvage, state properties in territories transferred,55 payments in kind,56 and an array of goods.57 Much of the cash paid was borrowed and mostly lost to the lenders in the hyperinflation of 1922–23.58 When the 1921 settlement amounted to 50 milliard gold marks, disguised as 132 milliard marks for the sake of Allied opinion, Germans noted if they paid the 50 milliard, they were then liable for more. This was technically true, though nobody expected further payment. Germans did not say the reverse was also true: the tiniest default on the 50 milliard ensured that the larger sum vanished.59

Of course Germans did not want to pay; nobody ever wants to pay, and Weimar was determined not to do so. As Gerald Feldman remarked, “No one has accused the Germans of honestly and forthrightly attempting to fulfil their obligations under the treaty.”60 That does not mean they could not pay. The real reparations bill of 50 milliard gold marks was within German economic and financial capacity. Berlin protested it could not pay or claimed to London that an export drive that would hurt Britain’s battered trade balances was the only means for it to do so. But Germany’s tax rates were abnormally low and remained so, though the treaty required a rate commensurate with those of the victors.61 Raising taxes would have provided ample funds, as the Dawes Committee discovered.62 Weimar could have borrowed from the citizenry, as France did after 1871. Despite the reams written about the need for German economic reconstruction,63 that economy was intact, having been spared devastation and denudation. There were lavish social subsidies, unmatched by the victors. A fiscal and monetary housecleaning would have facilitated foreign loans. And after 1924 Germany’s railways easily contributed substantially to reparations.64 Still, despite economic and financial capacity, Germany could not pay. By 1921, that was politically and psychologically impossible. Weimar’s leaders, like politicians everywhere, responded to intense public emotion. Thus a bitter struggle ensued, with creation in Berlin of agencies to produce propaganda for both home and abroad and to make more myths.65 Meanwhile, Germany paid little, especially after 1921, and it is hard to conceive that something that was not happening or that was occurring only minimally could have caused all that is often attributed to reparations, including the great inflation.66

quote:

Keynes was an added factor, intensifying British revisionism and hostility to treaty enforcement. The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in December 1919, was one of history’s most brilliant and influential polemics, partly because few educated people then knew economics and, aware of their ignorance, accepted Keynes’s distortions and omissions. While Keynes, who rarely admitted error, came to regret his book,112 long discredited by scholars, it lives on in new editions, academic analyses,113 and the assumptions of less profound literature,114 a propaganda triumph second only to the Anglo-German campaign against the treaty.