Posted on 05/05/2005 2:13:21 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Ding, Ding, Ding.
No, that was the beginning of the Night Chicago Died. Brother, what a night it really was. Glory be!
By signing the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939, Stalin deliberately produced the conditions for the world war that he wanted.
What a surprise; the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact was a manifestation that, despite doctrinal differences, tyrants of a feather flock together.
Who'd have guessed.....
There are a number of reasons for the hyperinflation, but this ain't one of them. Even the French and British weren't stupid enough to take inflated German marks in payment of their reparations.
It did, however, allow the government to pay off its entire debt to its own citizens for essentially nothing.
Ooops. My bad -- you're right.
World War II started because of a lot of tragic coincidences, any one of a thousand events, had they gone the other way, could have avoided the war. Imagine if only someone had bought some of Hitler's paintings when he was in Vienna.
Who are those guys? A spell checker is our friend.
It started when the wife of a customs agent gave birth to a son, in Braunau Austria, near the end of the 19th century.
Punitive conditions in the Treaty of Versailles were so harsh that some Germans literally starved. If a family had two cows, the Treaty called that one be taken from them as a form of come-uppance. Most of what the German people produced or earned was confiscated due to the Treaty. It debilitated the German economy to the point that there was little incentive to be productive. It also totally demoralized the German people. It wasn't a matter of being "mean to them." It was a matter of an ugly desire for vengeance on the part the Treaty writers. It backfired big-time, which is perhaps why the bible says to leave vengeance to God.
NOTHING like the Treaty of Versailles was ever inflicted on "the hijackers who flew those planes into the buildings." It's a poor analogy.
Please add this observation to the title question's responses.
The WW1 conditions of surrender are what caused WW2. Therefore, several versions of who started WW2 would exist; none would prevail.
Somebody named Archie Duke was shot by an ostrich.
The real reason, and a mistake not made after WW2.
Who started WWII? That would be the French at Versailles, enabled by the US and Britain who buckled and allowed France to drive postwar Germany into the ground, where it became ripe for Hitler.
"How about the Treaty of Versailles?"
The French and the Russians do seem to be the source of most of the 20th. Century's troubles, don't they? First Russia deploys its army to to attack Germany in 1914 (in those days you didn't do that for show) in defense of Serbian terrorists opposed to the rule of German ally Austria-Hungary. The Kaiser attacks France because they have a treaty to support the Russians in any war. America comes in (for reasons not in our national interest) and puts an end to it. At Versailles, the French demand the looting of German territory and "reparations" heavy enough to destroy its economy.
You know if, and this is a collosal IF, Hitler hadn't been a genocidal, racist maniac, his reaquisition of former German lands, and his war on the French and the Russians would have had my support. I have to admit, when reading accounts of the war between classy Germans like Manstein and Guderian and a loutish pig like Zhukov, I can't help but root for the Wermacht.
Unfortunately, Hitler was what he was. And what he was was just as bad as Stalin. But in terms of Roosevelt's foreign policy I have a question or two:
Why was it that the Japanese invasion of China neccesitated an economic blockade against them that precipitated their attack on us? I only ask because apart from our intervention on China's behalf, the Japanese wouldn't have given a damn about us. Sure, the Japanese murdered about a million Chinese. But Mao murdered over twenty million Chinese, and our Democrat administration wouldn't even support Chaing Kai-Shek against him in the civil war.
Further, when Stalin and Hitler simultaneously launched the war in Europe, why was Stalin not the bad guy? So everyone had to jump in and save Eastern Europe from German domination, just to hand it over to Soviet domination at the war's conclusion.
It does seem that we had a predeliction for fighting evil countries that couldn't have cared less about us, and then losing interest when even bloodier-handed communists, all of whom longed to END AMERICA at their earliest convenience, took home all the spoils. Great thinking FDR. Maybe it had something to do with so much of his administration (including V.P. Henry Wallace) being actual Soviet agents.....
Good answer.
Imperial Japan.
There was a Pacific Theatre too, ya know.
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