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Comment by throwaway2048 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2048

Do you think the world would be a safer and more peaceful place if nobody stopped nazi germany?

No, but it honestly probably would have been if the Central Powers had won WWI. American entry into that war was made possible the sinking of the Lusitania, which was secretly carrying war munitions. There is some evidence that the British enabled the event although this is admittedly a minoritarian view among historians (last I checked). It was undoubtedly beneficial for the Allied Powers though.

The British Empire are pretty much the "bad guys" of world history insofar as such a designation makes sense. The punitive measures they arranged after WWI were directly responsible for the rise of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany.

Yeah, life would be just peachy if half of Europe lived under the Germans or the Ottoman Empire. What? Why do people from large countries act like no one else exists? Would you like to live in a country run by someone who forces their language and culture on you?

What makes you think the Central Powers would have permanently occupied the nations it defeated when the Allied Powers did not? What makes you think Imperial Germany would have forced its language and culture on e.g. France when it would have been happy to simply install a friendly government?

WWI was not WWII. There was nothing uniquely evil about the Central Powers.

I'm not talking about territories invaded during WW1 like France or Belgium. I'm talking about new countries emerging from the collapsing empires. The people have lived there the whole time, they just didn't have a nation state of their own. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Armenia. The Kurds are still fighting to have their own country today. You get the picture. Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine emerged from the collapse of the Russian Empire.

All of these people didn't work towards independence by accident. There were good reasons to, depending on whose empire you lived in, the ruling group was given preferential treatment, or maybe the minorities would be penalized for using their own language. Higher education and government services would often be provided exclusively in the ruling nation's language.

>WWI was not WWII. There was nothing uniquely evil about the Central Powers.

The Armenian genocide sounds bad enough to me.

And of course these things happened even in the Entente empires, it's just easier to declare independence from an empire that just lost and can't do anything about it.

How did we go from 'more lenient war indemnities' and 'false flag operations are bad' to German and Ottoman occupation?

Yes. It wouldn't have been nicer probably since being populated only by ayrians would get boring, but once you are finished with genocide it would be peaceful and strong authoritarian states usually are safe.

Keyword: world

Could be safe internally, but that is utterly irrelevant to its neighbors, and the geopolitical order of a world in which the nazis weren’t crushed, the winning empires weren’t dismantled, and the US isn’t the guarantor of global trade and European security in order to combat the Soviets.

If Nazi Germany wasn't stopped we would be living in Man in the high castle world where japanese empire rule over asia, Italy over afrika and germany over all the rest with split of americas. It is potentially peaceful and safe world. Just not nice.

It’s not consistent with any of the myriad approaches to international relations either, and quite frankly, how agreeable you find a fictional world order isn’t worth discussing.

If you’re interested in geopolitics reading outside of Philip K. Dick, an accessible but satiating piece I always recommend is World Order: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821140

It’s written by a highly respected war criminal (how many fields can say that!)

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