I think the concept of the war reparations as they were made in the instrument of Versailles was entirely one of false punitive blame put on the German reich when the other imperial parties were at least as much to blame - a situation very different from the WWII.
The requirement to a participation in a Clean Up Fund for the wrecked lands is a different potential concept.
The punitive war reparations, that is and was the complete dead end leading to nothing but the WWII.
No. It reads right as is. Heads is Germany winning either world war. Tails is the Allies winning, which JBGUSA seems to think they didn’t do enough. At least not enough to get tired of it.
Sort of like “What didn’t make sense was making Germany pay so much it was completely impossible to do so, and pay so much it messed up the economies of the countries on the receiving end. (I.e. France was entitled to a lot of steel and coal, which ruined the market for domestic French steel and coal, and no selling it back to Germany, cause Germany didn’t have any money.)”
Making Germany pay = reparations.
The participating in a clean-up fund is not the same idea as “making germany pay.”
Bolding mine. I notice you make no further reference to Vietnam, probably a good thing. You should have some passing knowledge of Vietnam before making such absurd statements.
You mean of course aside from the fact that they had just overrun Manchuria and had physically occupied the north of Korea. The partition wasn’t intended to be permanent.
Yeah, suck it Poland and the Baltic States!:rolleyes:
Yeah, you might remember Douggy Mac thought that would be a good idea too. There was that little matter of several hundred thousand Chinese soldiers kicking his ass back south of the 38th Parallel.
These are the West’s only choices? Seriously? Oddly I haven’t heard anyone in a position of power pondering telling South Korea to hand itself over to North Korea.
I won’t bother with the rest of your colorful interpretation of history.
If the 1919 terms against Germany were too harsh to ever work then why did the much harsher 1945 terms against Germany succeed?
The reality is that the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were not overly harsh. They were less harsh than the terms put on Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire. They were less harsh than the terms put on Germany in 1945. They were less harsh than the terms Germany put on France in 1871 or Russia in 1917. They were less harsh than the terms Germany planned on imposing if they had won in 1918.
Germany was essentially the special snowflake of the diplomatic world in the twenties and thirties. It didn’t face in a especially difficult situation but it constantly complained about how nobody had ever had to experience the difficulties Germany was living under. Germans believed that everyone was being unfair to them and the result was they handed the country over to the Nazis.
what harsher terms in the WWII aftermath?
I missed the history where the West Germans financed the rebuilding of the France after the war or had the Ruhr factories dismantled…
(of course for the eastern side the Soviets, under Stalin they did impose the harsh terms but as our OP he is making the big apology for the Stalinist Policies… all it takes is the brutal decades long occupations)
What reparations did the Austria pay? There is no terms - the empire had already collapsed by De Facto results of the mid 1918 nationalist revolutions and the collapse of the state machinery. By fact although not law, the empire had ceased to exist before any Versailles peace and it would have required the Allies fighting a war of restitution to recreate it.
The Ottoman, they ceased to exist as well, and the Turkish Republic successfully fought back and rejected Versailles - the Turkish rather than the Ottoman government wanted a ethnic national state…
It’s worth pointing out that Germany imposed far, far harsher terms on Russia at Brest-Litovsk than the Allies imposed on Germany at Versailles very shortly afterward. Also, it may be that much of the popular image of the cruelty of the Versailles treaty was the result of German complaints, not historical comparison.
Here are the “heads I win tails you lose” situations:
[ol]
[li]North Korea invades South Korea, loses, but loses no territory; and[/li][li]Arabs repeatedly engaged in war, both guerrilla (now called terrorism or asymetrical war) or conventional wars, i.e. 1948, 1967 and 1973 and lose, and Israel is expected to give all the territory back with no assurance of peace.[/li][/ol]
In the case of North Korea they have, almost since the 1953 cease-fire been seeking to expand their military capability. The free world is urged to “negotiate.” The West gave money in 1994. NK did not live up to the terms of the agreement.
Israel won all of its wars. Yet it is expected to return territory. We returned Gaza and did not get peace in return. What’s up with that?
Germany was occupied after WWII.
There were trials and executions for German officials after WWII.
Germany was split up into separate countries after WWII.
There were forcible resettlements of ethnic German people after WWII.
There were far larger reparations imposed on Germany after WWII.
Along with voluntary reparations they paid Israel in the early 1950’s; not that there wasn’t controversy in Israel and among the Jews in accepting those.
And what’s your theoretical alternative? What do you know about the actual history of the Korean War?
Yes, North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950 and tried to conquer the south. Nobody’s disputing that.
Then the United States and its allies sent troops in and drove the North Koreans out of South Korea. South Korea was liberated by September 1950.
You seem to believe that we then stopped at the border and let North Korea go. But that didn’t happen. The United States did what you are arguing we should have done; we kept going past the border into North Korea with the intent of occupying all of Korea.
Then in October 1950, China entered the war. Just as we send troops in to defend South Korea, they sent troops in to defend North Korea. We were driven back to a defensive line around the middle of Korea.
We then fought against the Chinese and North Koreans (and the Soviets although they weren’t officially in the war) for over two more years. And we made no significant advances into the north (and they made no significant advances into the south). Finally in 1953, we agreed to stop fighting.
So what do you think we should have done differently? Kept on fighting along the same line into 1954 and 1955? Into the sixties and seventies?
Here’s the reality; we tried to occupy North Korea and we were unable to do it. When that happens, the best thing to do is admit you can’t have everything you want in life and end the war with what you can actually get. Only fools keep fighting a war they can’t win. And only evil men send soldiers off to die in an unwinnable war rather than admit they can’t win.
That was when Macarthur was firedd. We could have proceeded with Israel-like overwhelming strength. North Korea and China could not fight the full force of the U.S. armed forces. They didn’t have a navy or air force to speak of. In the nature of full disclosure my father was in the Navy in Korea.
We should have insisted on their being disarmed the way Japan was at the end of that war. They Tokyo and Dresden firebombing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have been object lessons.
How about formally annexing the territory, and making the people there full and equal citizens?
Gaza wasn’t “returned” in any sense, nor was there any peace agreement involved.
As in committing national suicide? Why aren’t the Jews entitled to self-determination?
You are right about the lack of an agreement. Every Jew was removed by Israel.
If one state is intolerable, and two states are intolerable, what exactly should the world being calling on Israel to do? You can’t expect other people to endorse an endless, oppressive, military occupation/creeping annexation. If the US still occupied a chunk of Germany, do you imagine that there’d be no criticism over it?
Why aren’t the Palestinians? They have to live as stateless people under occupation forever, because other people of their ethnic group went to war with Israel?
I’m also right that it wasn’t “returned”. It’s still controlled by Israel.
Well yes, there was the little thing about the Nazis not surrendering until the entire country had been fully overrun by the sets of the allied armies.
Not a result of any Treaty ending the war, a result of the actual combats itself and the actual line of the control at the cession of the combats
so not at all a comparable thing to compare to a post-hostilities treaty arrangement.
Not the German officials in general, the Nazis.
For the specific nazi war crimes, a thing very different from the WWI.
The Soviet occupation which was about the Soviets and the Stalin policy not about an allied forces treat.
Not a coherent allied policy at all and neither of those recognized the other as a real separate country…
Stalin and the Soviets actions based on their direct control and occupation of the East Block (and most of this during the actual combats phase before the full end of hte hostilities). Not the same thing as the Versailles structure at all.
No there were not far larger reparations imposed by the end of war treaty.
Decades later, for the West German case, once the West had recovered it negotiated settlements, but there was no Versailles type imposed reparations program on the immediate end of the war nor a peace treay reparations program.
There is not a logical comparison between reparations paid by a fully recovered and wealthy West Germany two and three decades after the end of the war, rebuilt in part with the monetary help of the allied powers, the Versailles reparations regime.
Ah the Amerika Uber Alles fantasy.
Of course the PRC was backed by the Soviets who also would have never accepted the American imperial fantasy and had the nuclear deterrant to back up there backing of the PRC.
Very typical posting of a “far left” person who oddly does not like the FDR or the JFK presidencies and repeats the fantastical analyses of the american far right factions that dream of the american empire and total power.
the untermenschen get to live in the every shrinking bantustans. they should be happy they are not subjected to a final resolution to the problem of being of the incorrect ethnicity.
but he thinks fire bombing and the nuking of the civilian populations are the Right and Good things.
That would have meant using the Bomb (which some generals were quite keen to do). Which would have brought the Soviets overtly in, which would have meant another general European war.