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Comment by anakaine | Hacker News Reader

Macron came out the other day in the interview with Trymp and stated that if the assets were to be seized from Russia that this would be considered payment.

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Ah Macron,… the guy who forgets why WWII started and how reparations can turn bad, asked for…reparations.

But Americans don’t understand history?

Macron is off his rocker going down that path given the history around it.

Please tell us why WW2 started and how that is related.

After WW1, in the treaty of Versailles the German Reich, having just lost the war, was made responsible for starting it - it played a part in starting it, but was hardly fully responsible. So its successor state got a huge amount of reparations forced upon. Calling that out was a part of the appeal of the Nazis to the germans.

Now, how that is related to freezing assets from Russia I do not see. Even if interpreted as some kind of reparations, the lesson of that time was not that all reparations lead to a later war. Rather that humiliation will lead to resentment which can lead to war later. Huge and unjust reparations can be a part of that, but that's hardly the scenario we see today.

Macron is (understandably) deeply unpopular in France right now, seems like that seeps into the judgement of his actions here.

Germany was by and large responsible for starting WW1.

Some historians agree, some disagree. It's a typical question for your high school history exams. A good one as one can arrive at both answers when looking at the historic facts. In very short: The German Reich wanted that war and pushed it, but so did the other European nations.

But that's not a valid discussion topic for here.

"Germany" as we know it today did not exist before or during or even directly after WW1. You could just as easily say e.g. Poland was responsible for WW1 because most of that region was also part of the German Empire.

What's next, making Italy pay reparations for the roman empire? Making Turkey or other arab countries pay reparations for their empires?

I'm not sure what your point is because nobody is suggesting that modern Germany pay reparation for WW1. The discussion was about reparations that Germany has already paid after WW1, imposed on it by the victorious Entente. There's a long-standing historical myth that those reparations were 1) unjustified because Germany was not actually solely or primarily responsible for the war, and 2) excessive. It further goes to claim that this is a big part of why Germany went Nazi and started WW2 eventually. This was, indeed, the prevailing wisdom in the inter-war era, but Fritz Fischer poked a lot of holes in it after WW2.

At this point, while there's still no consensus as to the degree of German responsibility, most historians would weight it significantly higher than that of the Entente. The notion that reparations (and the Treaty of Versailles in general) was particularly onerous and punitive has also been largely debunked. However, the popular understanding still mostly reflects the inter-war consensus and not the later developments.

Macron wants to set a precedent of stealing assets so he could then steal citizens assets to pay for the abysmal debt he created.

If he cross the line ("freezing" foreign assets was already a big blow at property rights) I'm relocating and bankrunning whatever I have because it means property rights don't exist anymore in the country.

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