04 Aug 2014, 12:51#2
No, Mike.
It was the insanity of the Kaizer that was the catalyst of the First World War. Make no bones about any spin from any other source of Historical propaganda. And it was the biggest family spat that set the whole thing off. He kept losing the annual Regatta's at the Isle of Wight. Simple. So he pushed and pushed and pushed. Had to try and prove he was the best and look what he did ?He had serious issues, you need to research him rather more widely than you have done. As for the Arch Duke, he might well have been the man who was shot, but War was coming, regardless of that fact. Go and look up the Hapsburg Treaty. Every member of that family has a bound duty to see it through, to re-create the Empire. They have been trying for centuries, we even had a member help draft the EU Treaty. And look where we are now with that sorry mess.
No, you simplify a mess of grand proportions that has blame in many quarters, but the majority share is squarely on the man in the metal hat. A man who suffered mental illness and led his country, and the world, into a War that seemingly has no end, even today.
Peace is often harder than a battle and the trying to keep it is an impossibility. We suffer the consequences of the actions of others years down the line.
Falsifications of history are a serious bugbear of mine.
MOMozart
Captain49,914 posts
MOMozartCaptain49,914 posts
11 Nov 2018, 16:11#11
On April 22, 1915, German forces shock Allied soldiers along the western front by firing more than 150 tons of lethal chlorine gas against two French colonial divisions at Ypres, Belgium. This was the first major gas attack by the Germans, and it devastated the Allied line.
..........
There were atrocities on both sides. But Germany was consistently a first mover. They fought most of the war on foreign soil and the war ended with German troops still on foreign soil.
It was not surprising that the Treaty of Versailles was punitive. Nor is it an excuse for the dark acts of the Nazi government. Hitler was in total control by the mid thirties and Germany was recovering robustly.
MOMozart
Captain49,914 posts
MOMozartCaptain49,914 posts
12 Nov 2018, 04:14#15
That is a horse shyte argument, repeated so often that's it believed. The reason for the Nazis was the communist threat, the collapse of the Mark, the great depression...and the inherent anti semitism in German society which still exists today. Versailles is the excuse.
Read and learn:
During the period of reparations, Germany received between 27 and 38 billion marks in loans.[96][97] By 1931, German foreign debt stood at 21.514 billion marks; the main sources of aid were the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.[98] According to Detlev Peukert, the financial problems that arose in the early 1920s were a result of post-war loans and the way Germany funded her war effort, and were not the fault of reparations.[99] During World War I, Germany did not raise taxes or create new ones to pay for war-time expenses. Rather, loans were taken out, placing Germany in an economically precarious position as more money entered circulation, destroying the link between paper money and the gold reserve that had been maintained before the war. With its defeat, Germany could not impose reparations and pay off her war debts now, which were now colossal.[99]
Niall Ferguson partially supports this analysis. He says that had reparations not been imposed, Germany would still have had significant problems caused by the need to pay war debts and the demands of voters for more social services.[100] Ferguson also says that these problems were aggravated by a trade deficit and a weak exchange rate for the mark during 1920. Afterwards, as the value of the mark rose, inflation became a problem. None of these, he says, were the result of reparations.[101] Ferguson says that even without reparations, total public spending in Germany between 1920 and 1923 was 33 per cent of total net national product.[102] A.J.P. Taylor says, "Germany was a net gainer by the financial transactions of the nineteen-twenties: she borrowed far more from private American investors ... than she paid in reparations".[103] P.M.H. Bell says the creation of a multi-national committee, which resulted in the Dawes Plan, was done to consider ways the German budget could be balanced, the currency stabilized, and the German economy fixed to ease reparation payments.[104] Max Winkler says that from 1924 onward, German officials were "virtually flooded with loan offers by foreigners". Overall, he says, the German economy performed reasonably well until the foreign investments funding the economy and the loans funding reparations payments were suddenly withdrawn after the 1929 Stock Market Crash. This collapse was magnified by the volume of loans provided to German companies by US
MOMozart
Captain49,914 posts
MOMozartCaptain49,914 posts
12 Nov 2018, 06:59#17
Germany's foreign policy is pro Iran/anti Israel.....consistently. Every German I have met, and I have met a bunch of them, is anti Israel. It's the back door to anti Semitism, cloaked in supposed concern for the Palistinians.
And the new Nationalists are not the culprits, it's the Globalists who universally, across all countries, see Israel as a problem. And they are in the majority in Germany.
As for the Reparations story.....it's what we were taught at High School. But the real cause of their financial collapse was massive deficit budgeting....which caused the Mark to drop dramatically even BEFORE the war.
Reparations payments were easily covered by more US debt, and funneled to European counries who then used the funds to pay down their US debt. Enthusiastically supported by the US who was afraid England and France might default.
So French and English debts to the USA were 'laundered' into German debt...a nice little Ponzi scheme blown up by the Great Depression.
MOMozart
Captain49,914 posts
MOMozartCaptain49,914 posts
12 Nov 2018, 07:43#18
This Princeton Study fingers the real culprit for the hyper inflation....social engineering, please look past the jumbled text:
In a society where well-organized distributional coalitions contend over a national income that is growing too slowly to requite all desires, inflation emerges as the most likely result. The day-to-day course of the German inflation depended on subtle interconnections between monetary phenomina and their political setting for significant periods, depreciation of the paper mark reflected future expectations and therefore ran ahead of money- supply expansion(Webb,1984).
Over the long haul ,however, a budget deficit that could not be financed except through the issue of floating debt discounted by the Reichsbank represented the real engine of inflation.The decision to perpetuate that budget deficit turned primarily on politics.
The Weimar coalition (comprising the Socialist, Democratic, and Center parties) sought to promote social stability after the war through a calculated redistribution of income and wealth. Transfer payments reached some
50 percent ofthe budget in 1919-23.
The government extended largesse to veterans, widows, and orphans; to the unemployed, the old, and the dis- abled, to consumers generally through subsidized food;and to it's own lower- level employees through disproportionate salary adjustments. It concomitantly kept the social peace by showering lavish compensation on firms that had lost assets in post war territorial changes, by awarding lucrative public- works contracts, and by holding raw-material prices and freight rates below market costs.
These multiple subventions, open and disguised, dwarfed the charges stemming from the Peace Treaty.
12 Nov 2018, 09:57#20
Hahaha! How is it that you boys are always on the opposite end of any discussion? Is there absolutely nothing you can agree on?
Hilter simply manipulated what the German people read and saw in order to alienate the German public against the Jews. People are easy to manipulate in trying times. Just look at how the EFF has grown in support. You simply need a scapegoat, in the EFF's case, it is white people, in the mid 30's in Germany, it was the Jews.
MOMozart
Captain49,914 posts
MOMozartCaptain49,914 posts
12 Nov 2018, 20:22#22
Believe what you wish Tokkie....I have provided you the Princeton study. And the Jewish thing was a major plank of the Nazi party from the off, and immediately implemented when they got power:
"In 1933, new German laws forced Jews out of their civil service jobs, university and law court positions, and other areas of public life. In April 1933, laws proclaimed at Nuremberg made Jews second-class citizens. These Nuremberg Laws defined Jews, not by their religion or by how they wanted to identify themselves, but by the religious affiliation of their grandparents. Between 1937 and 1939, new anti-Jewish regulations segregated Jews further and made daily life very difficult for them. Jews could not attend public schools; go to theaters, cinema, or vacation resorts; or reside or even walk in certain sections of German cities."
But if you think you have better information feel free to believe it.
13 Nov 2018, 00:03#24
Great series of shorts.
Get your Maps out, Europe's changing!
MOMozart
Captain49,914 posts
MOMozartCaptain49,914 posts
13 Nov 2018, 03:40#28
Sadly Europe has turned it's back on Israel, who still exist largely because they are brave men and women and still enjoy the full support of the majority of Americans.
