Comment by rusk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rusk | Hacker News Reader

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> Britain won the war..

I think the reality of this is a little more nuanced. By virtue of geography (it's an island) Britain was the last place Germany were able to overrun. This bought time for what remained of the European forces to gather and reorganise, and provided a staging point for further counter-attacks.

The fact is, that Britain has never been invaded, not in modern times anyway, and outside of bombing raids has never known the true humiliation of hearing the foreign powers' jackboot marching down the street.

Just about every other nation in Europe has, and understands the value of the peace that closer union brings about.

>.. but lost the war.

Ultimately being able to claim "they won the war" may have done the UK more harm than good because they were never incentivised to address their deep deep social issues in any kind of a constructive way.

The good that comes out of the brexit fiasco might be that this is an eventual turning point for them.

I wouldn't view it as 'this is what Germany wanted from WW2', instead 'this is how Germany should have carried out WW2'.

You can imagine that if Germany made better use of individual European countries, made some high-profile infrastructure and regulatory improvements in the countries that it occupied (as the EU does now), and dramatically toned down the anti-Pole and anti-Jew activities- it would have been a lot more successful in its aims. Heck, mass conversions to Christianity of the Jewish population would probably have been successful, and been supported by many Christians worldwide, and any staunch Jewish holdouts who refused given the opportunity to fight against the British and create and mass-migrate to Israel as a German sub-territory.

Germany could have created a new European identity, and sought new land and direct expansion of European populations into the Middle East and Africa against easier opponents, instead of against Russia.

Eventually it would have just outgrown and outlasted Britain and Russia. Britain as a democracy would have eventually rotated in a set of politicians willing to make peace.

I say all this as the descendent of a Polish Jew :-)

Interesting take, but I'd also suggest that the Germany that fought WW2 was very different from modern Germany. There was a madness there. It took the burning shame of such catastrophic failure to put the brains in charge. Again as I said above, I reckon Brexit will do the same for the UK.

Well, the UK did attempt to address a lot of social issues at the end of WW2 by electing a socialist (but passionately anti-Soviet) government - that's how we got things like the NHS.

People forget that Churchill was hated by a lot of people - my father (who was in the RAF in WW2) utterly loathed him.

And then the UK had a decade of Thatcher, who tried to kill the NHS while lying that it was safe: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/25/margaret-th...

Nuclear deterrence did more to ensure peace in Europe than the EU. It's not a choice between the EU or war.

Has there been a cold war between European nations that I was not informed about?

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