Is Napoleon remembered as a great leader or a great general? I suspect it’s more the latter than the former. Napoleon Bonaparte undoubtedly had one of the greatest military minds in human history; the fact that his last battle was a defeat doesn’t detract from his former victories, or from the degree in which he revolutionized warfare.
But was he a great statesman? He did promote some impressive legislative innovations, but other than that, I’m not that sure. He certainly didn’t have a knack for making alliances - by the end, all of Europe managed to unite against him. Furthermore, I don’t think he couldn’t have kept his empire together without a constant stream of military victories, which means his success as a ruler was wholly dependent on his success on the battlefield.
What I’m trying to say is this - Napoleon was a great general but a mediocre statesmen. Hitler wasn’t a even great general. He *did *have a few great generals on his payroll, and I believe that any greatness he displayed is largely due to them.
The occupation of Czechoslovakia was significantly different. Hitler’s earlier conquests had all been directed at regions with large German populations (including the Sudetenland). It was possible to argue that Hitler was just trying to restore a larger Germany. When Hitler went on to take the rest of Czechoslovakia, it was the first time he was took over a non-German population. This showed that he was not going to stop at any theoretical German borders and planned on building an empire.
Franco kept Spain out of WWII, a major diplomatic coup. Then, after decades as a dictator, he then arranged for a peaceful smooth transition to a democratic government with a more-or-less symbolic monarch.
Now sure, he was a dictator and did some very bad things to get into and then stay in power. But the other choice would have been a Communist government, which would not have kept Spain out of WWII ( and the Nazis would have invaded it easily) and then there would have been generations of communist dictators- doing some very bad things to get into and then stay in power. And the transition to a democratic government would have been delayed for decades and the ecomony ruined even through today. Look at Yugoslavia.
Certainly, an elected, left of center government as opposed to forcing Republicans into the arms of the communists would have been an absolute disaster. The guy was a fascist thug, and the tragedy of the situation is that he died peacefully rather than being hung by his heels from a lamppost.
A democratic goverment just plain was not going to come out of the Spanish Civil war. You had a choice of a right-wing dictator or a communist dictatorship. Anything else is pure fantasy.
There wouldn’t have been a civil war had the right wing not seen fascism as its savior and started one. And had the democratic government received full Western support to crush Franco at the start of the coup attempt, then there is no reason the Republic could not have survived.
It’s only once we allowed the fascists to gain a foothold that any inevitability stepped in. Like with cockroaches.
Argue the points or ignore the thread. There is no reason to make this a personal attack. (And you have been around long enough to know that Estilicon is hardly a Right-leaning flack, so there is no reason to believe that his OP is anything other than an exploration of how we judge greatness without actually trying to rehabilitate Hitler’s reputation.)
You’re confusing cause and effect. Spain had a democratically elected government. It was left-wing but not communist and showed little sign of turning communist. It was the right wing that started the civil war by trying to overthrow the government with a military coup. Franco isn’t justified in saving Spain from a danger that he himself created.
It is an interesting question of what would have happened if 11 million people hadn’t been put into ovens, but had helped in the German factories and army instead. Would Russia have been able to withstand another 2 to 5 hundred thousand German troops in the field against them? And once Russia fell would the second front ever have been able to be established?
It is an interesting question but you have to remember that those 11m people would have to be fed, clothed, armed, housed and supplied with all the essentials required to wage war.
Not to mention the medical care they’d need after suffering wounds, all of these requirements would have placed a very heavy burden on the German nation.
The Germans had difficulties enough supplying the troops they already had in the field with those essentials
Yes, but the Germans wouldn’t have been spending resources housing and transporting them to the concentration camps and then exterminating them. Plus, I assume these people would be working along with others to support the German war effort, building more planes, tanks, ships, and growing food, working in hospitals, etc.
And now an actual question. Did it make economic sense for the Germans to go the extermination route? How about they just confiscated the largest Jewish fortunes and left them alive and unharmed. I mean, maybe most Jews wouldn’t have cared, I don’t think there were that many millionaires anyways.
I would completely disagree with that . First, in those troubled times, he had to be more than mediocre to simply reach and hold power. More importantly, he revamped or created from scratch almost all institutions of modern France : justice system, schools and universities, administrative organization, essentially anything you can think of. For instance, I was just reading a thread on titles in GQ, and when checking how the same thing was done in France, not surprisingly, since it’s the case 85% of the time, the current system is based on a Napoleonic reform of land registry. And what he put it place was solid enough to survive till the present days, for the most part.
So, I certainly consider him as probably being the greatest administrator in France’s history. I’m not sure what you include in “Statesmanship” exactly, but I would also add that he managed to make himself very popular. I’m not sure what’s missing. IIRC, you mention diplomacy. In this case, he happened to be served by the best (and most corrupt) diplomat in French history, namely Talleyrand (note that though Talleyrand didn’t save Napoleon’s ass, he definitely saved his own, along with his wealth and even his job, which was definitely his main goal).
I wonder how Denmark, Austria, and France, (along with various minor German principalities), would react to your claim that Bismarck found war “unnecessary”? I wonder how Europe would have looked in 1900 if Bismarck had actually chosen to avoid war?
