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This made my mouth gape: a recording of the Kaiser speaking in English (with a good, rather classless accent).
This terrible, foolish man is clearly utterly unrepentant for the terrible evils he caused: millions dead: the defeat of his own country; the end of the Austrian, Russian and Ottoman Empires; indirectly Communism, Fascism and Hitlerism. He sounds like a teenage boy talking about war games.
How do you like this one? A Polish Communists argued that Capitalism is an evil system of mans oppression of man. Communism he said, is the opposite. (mans oppression of man) .
ReplyDeleteThe Kaiser was hardly responsible for the First World War, rather a certain Serbian who murdered the Archduke of Austria-Hungary should be held to account. The Kaiser was certainly incompetent at best in running a war-time country, but he cannot be blamed for that most pointless of wars. As for Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism, the seeds that allowed such evils to spread were planted during the Treaty of Versailles which smashed down once proud nations and left them angry and bitter enough to turn to such foul ideologies.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous 6 April is pretty much right. Except that Communism was already slithering. Besides the extremely troublesome Versailles Treaty National Socialism was fighting slithering Communism.
ReplyDeleteThe assassination of Francis Ferdinand in no sense justified Austria invading Serbia any more than the murder of Lord Mountbatten would have justified the UK in invading the Irish Republic. Serbia did everything to appease Austria. France and Russia tried hard to avoid war which Austria and Germany wanted. The Versailles Treaty was not especially punitive - this is a silly myth of the progressives of the 1920s like Keynes and contributed to our not going to war in 1938. A wise peace settlement would have split Germany into the states as pre 1866.
ReplyDeleteTotal RUBBISH!
DeleteYou are one up on me. I'm no historian. I'm just far less ignorant than the man on the street. Did not the Versailles Treaty have anything at all to do with the hyper inflation of the 1920's ? Didn't Bolshevik Russia and even Poland have anything to do with urging a war ? You and I just to name two, know that to the victor go the spoils and that he who writes the history writes the myth. I haven't sorted it all out. I probably won't because I learned to be very cautious of the Nation's Narrative. Anyway I used to have a cat named Dicky Mountbatten. Was I the victim of a myth?
ReplyDeleteI apologies to the man on the street. I meant boy on the street or girl. I might be getting to be cynical. And if I should clarify, above, I meant among factors leading to WWII.
ReplyDelete