WWII

[Anomalocaris]

I hope our queen doesn't mind me offering something to think about.

I just saying the other night, if I could change one thing in history, it would be to have a Marshall Plan in 1919 instead of a rape at/Treaty of Versailles.

At the end of the first World War, the German people overthrew the Kaiser and the fledgling democracy asked for peace. With modern sensibilities, we can see the distinction between the actions of the Kaiser and the German people. A Marshall Plan at that time could have helped the German people assemble a functional democracy and wouldn't have ruined their economy with crippling war reparations. The rise of Hitler and the second world war could have been prevented and we would have had a more just and equitable peace after what might have been the first and only world war.

Actually, the German general staff saw there was no way to win the war, and perceived there could be no peace while kaiser stayed, so more are less informed the kaiser that the kaiser is kaiser no more. The kaiser took the hint and abdicated. The GermanS peoples didn't build any fledglin democracy. Wilson indicted there could be no peace unless German government was democratic, so the German general staff consented to the manufacture of an instant democracy to order. The Germans more or less believed that once they acquired a democratic form of government, accepted armistice terms, and retreat to pre-war borders, wilson's 14 points would apply go them as well as anyone else, and they would be accepted as a peer democracy without any prior guilt, and a equal partner in peace settlement negotiations. Instead peace terms were dictated to them at versailles as to a subjugated power, it stuck them with reparation, took away 1/5 of their territory, reduced their army to the size of a metropolitan police force, made them admit culpability for a war that other country started, and horror of horrors, disbanded the hallowed general staff itself! Here was the origin of the "stabbed in the back" myth.

On the other hand, the rape at Versailles is inevitable on account of the fact that it really was France that shouldered the bulk of the burden of fighting the Germans and made the largest sacrifice. The germans were absolute bastards in Belgium and occupied portions of France. They systematically burned historic libraries, dynamited French culture treasures out of spite, purposely dismentalled French factories to loot and to move to Germany, and destroyed French mines and other fixed assets as they retreated after the armistice to prevent French from using them after the war. The French wanted blood as reprisal. So let's not be to generous to the Germans with what are justifiable French deserts.