Added more original wartime material to the site. I hope everyone enjoyed the weekend -
Sincerely,
Site Manager
The War You Know
Rewrite history…
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Cuz slavery isn’t in itself evil man, haven’t you been reading all this?
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The israelites were slaves to the egyptians. In response, they were fed during the famine, they were sheltered from teh elements and were allowed to live until they were released by the Pharoh.
no they weren’t. Stop quoting the Bible until you’ve actually read enough of it.
Exodus 1:8 Then a new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt. 9 “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become much too numerous for us. 10 Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”
11 So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. 12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites 13 and worked them ruthlessly. 14 They made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their hard labor the Egyptians used them ruthlessly.
15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, 16 “When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and observe them on the delivery stool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” 17 The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. 18 Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”
19 The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.”
20 So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. 21 And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own.
22 Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: “Every boy that is born **you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.”
so yes - slavery was good here because he let the girls live and had the baby boys killed? Is that what you are trying to tell us? Please. Do you even know why the Pharoh “let them leave”? Do you know he tried to stop them?Joseph was sold as a slave in the Bible and was awarded the privelage of saving his family from death and rising to power in the local government.
This was after he was thrown into a prison after being falsly accused of sexual impropriety. Also - being a slave had nothing to do with his saving his family etc. How can you use this example to justify slavery when all it does is demonstrate God’s ability to work with anyone - “even slaves”?**
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These slaves then traded ….
traded?
Can i trade with you?
I give you a small whipping, you give me your car? -
Desertfish writes:
“World War I ended in a German victory and Germany now dominates the world (like the U.S. does in real life) and stretches from Alsasce-Loraine to the Pripet Marshes in the east. Russia never grew powerfull, communism never spread. Germany eventually became a democracy with the Kaiser and his family in a position similar to the British monarchy.”
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In a way, this is a more interesting hypothesis than the more commonly related comments on how the world would be better if say the Muslims or Communists had taken over power or the Spainish Armada didnt get wrecked by a storm before it was used to invade England.
As a preliminary matter, we should note that the actual outcome of the First World War was a near thing, a far nearer thing than was the outcome of World War II after 1941. While it is true that the United States entered the war on the allied side in 1917, thus providing vast new potential sources of men and material, it is also true that Germany had knocked Russia out of the war at about the same time. This gave the Germans access to the resources of Eastern Europe and freed their troops for deployment to the West. The German Spring Offensive of 1918 actually succeeded in rupturing the Allied line at a point where the Allies had no significant reserves. (At about this time, British Prime Minister Lloyd George was heard to remark, “We are going to lose this war.” He began to create a record which would shift the blame to others.) The British Summer Offensive of the same year similarly breached the German lines, but did a much better job of exploiting the breakthrough than the Germans had done a few months earlier. General Luddendorf panicked and demanded that the government seek an armistice. The German army did succeed in containing the Allied breakthrough, but meanwhile the German diplomats had opened tentative armistice discussions with the United States. Given U.S. President Wilson’s penchant for diplomacy by press-release, the discussions could not be broken off even though the German military situation was no longer critical. While the Germans were not militarily defeated, or even economically desperate, the government and general public saw no prospect of winning. Presented with the possibility of negotiating a settlement, their willingness to continue the conflict simply dissolved.
The Germans were defeated by exhaustion. This could as easily have happened to the Allies. When you read the diaries and reports of the French and British on the Western Front from early 1918, the writers seem to be perfectly lucid and in full command of their faculties. What the Americans noted when they started to arrive at about that time was that everyone at the front was not only dirty and malnourished, but half asleep. In addition to their other deleterious effects, the terrible trench warfare battles of that conflict were remarkably exhausting, and the capacity of the Allies to rotate out survivors diminished with the passage of time. Even with American assistance, France and Britain were societies that were slowly falling apart from lack of ordinary maintenance. Both faced food shortages from the diversion of farmers into the army and from attacks on oceanborne supplies. Had the Germans been able to exploit their breakthrough in the spring, or if the German Empire had held together long enough for Luddendorf’s planned autumn offensive to take place, its quite likely that either the French or British would have sued for peace. Had one or the other even raised the question of an armistice, the same process of internal political collapse which destroyed Germany would have overtaken both of them.
Although today it is reasonably clear that Germany fought the war with the general aim of transforming itself from a merely continental power to a true world power, the fact is that at no point did the German government know just what its peace terms would be if it won. It might have annexed Belgium and part of the industrial regions of northern France, though bringing hostile, non-German populations into the Empire might not have seemed such a good idea if the occasion actually arose. More likely, or more rationally, the Germans would have contented themselves with demilitarizing these areas. From the British, they would probably have demanded nothing but more African colonies and the unrestricted right to expand the German High Seas Fleet. In Eastern Europe, they would be more likely to have established friendly satellite countries in areas formerly belonging to the defunct empires than to have directly annexed much territory. It seems to me that the Austrian and Ottoman Empires were just as likely to have fallen apart even if the Central Powers had won. The Hungarians were practically independent before the war, after all, and the chaos caused by the eclipse of Russia would have created opportunities for them which they could exploit only without the restraint of Vienna. As for the Ottoman Empire, most of it had already fallen to British invasion or native revolt. No one would have seen much benefit in putting it back together again, not even the Turks.
Communist agitation was an important factor in the dissolution of Imperial Germany, and it would probably have been important to the collapse of France and Britain, too. One can imagine Soviets being established in Glasglow and the north of England, a new Commune in Paris. This could even have happened in New York, dominated as it was by immigrant groups who were either highly radicalized or anti-British. It is unlikely that any of these rebellions would have succeeded in establishing durable Communist regimes in the West, however. The Soviets established in Germany and Eastern Europe after the war did not last, even though the central government had dissolved. In putting down such uprisings, France might have experienced a bout of military dictatorship, not unlike the Franco era in Spain, and Britain might have become a republic. Still, although the public life of these countries would have been polarized and degraded, they would probably have remained capitalist democracies. The U.S., one suspects, would have reacted to the surrender or forced withdrawal of its European expeditionary force by beginning to adopt the attitude toward German-dominated Europe which it did later in the century toward the victorious Soviet Union. Britain, possibly with its empire in premature dissolution, would have been forced to seek a strong Atlantic alliance. As for the Soviet Union in this scenario, it is hard to imagine the Germans putting up with its existence after it had served its purpose. Doubtless some surviving Romanov could have been put on the throne of a much- diminished Russia. If no Romanov was available, Germany has never lacked for princelings willing to be sent abroad to govern improvised countries.
This leaves us with the most interesting question: what would have happened to Germany itself? Before the war, the German constitution was working less and less well. Reich chancellors were not responsible to parliament but to the Kaiser. The system could work only when the Kaiser was himself a competent executive, or when he had the sense to appoint and support a chancellor who was. The reign of Wilhelm II showed that neither of these conditions need be the case. In the twenty years preceding the war, national policy was made more and more by the army and the bureaucracy. It is unlikely that this degree of drift could have continued after a victorious war. Two things would have happened which in fact happened in the real world: the monarchy would have lost prestige to the military, and electoral politics would have fallen more and more under the influence of populist veterans groups.
We should remember that to win a great war can be almost as disruptive for a combatant country as to lose it. There was a prolonged political crisis, indeed the whiff of revolution, in victorious Britain in the 1920s. Something similar seems to be happening in the United States today after the Cold War. While it is, of course, unlikely that the Kaiser would have been overthrown, it is highly probable that there would have been some constitutional crisis which would have drastically altered the relationship between the branches of government. It would have been in the military’s interest to push for more democracy in the Reich government, since the people would have been conspicuously pro-military. The social and political roles of the old aristocracy would have declined, since the war would have brought forward so many men of humble origin. Again, this is very much what happened in real history. If Germany had won and the Allies lost, the emphasis in these developments would certainly have been different, but not the fundamental trends.
The big difference would have been that Germany would been immensely stronger and more competent by the late 1930s than it was in the history we know. That another war would have been brewed by then we may be sure. Hitler was only secondarily interested in revenge for the First World War; his primary goal had always been geopolitical expansion into Eastern Europe and western Asia. This would have given Germany the Lebensraum to become a world power. His ideas on the subject were perfectly coherent, and not original with him: they were almost truisms. There is no reason to think that the heirs of a German victory in 1918 (or 1919, or 1920) would have been less likely to pursue these objectives.
These alternative German leaders would doubtless have been reacting in part to some new coalition aligned against them. Its obvious constituents would have been Britain, the United States and Russia, assuming Britain and Russia had a sufficient degree of independence to pursue such a policy. One suspects that if the Germans pursued a policy of aggressive colonial expansion in the 1920s and 30s, they might have succeeded in alienating the Japanese, who could have provided a fourth to the coalition. Germany for its part would begun the war with complete control of continental Europe and probably effective control of north Africa and the Near East. It would also have started with a real navy, so that Britain’s position could have quickly become untenable. The coalition’s chances in such a war would not have been hopeless, but they would been desperate.
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Think about it…
What might you be doing every day now…
which may be considered wrong in 200 or 2000 years??
?Enslaving and KILLING electricity…if it is found to be a lifeform or support a lifeform of which we are currently :D unaware!?!
Abortion? Not erring on the side of future humanity…
Mother Teresa was once asked, “Will a cure for AIDS be found?”
Her response…
“It already has been. The discoverer was killed by a mother’s abortion.”?Murdering alien life? The pollution we have put in space/on the Moon/Mars and may send to other planets via space travel. We may sterilize a spacecraft, but microorganisms could be picked up during spacetravel.
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Mine would be that the attempt on Hitler’s life in 44 was succesful. The new German government unconditionaly surrenders with the Soviets NOT being in eastern eurupe and the Eurupean countries that became pawns in the cold war choose thier own destiny (as much as they can) avoiding the cold war.
Or, the US does not enter WW1. The Germans win, which means WW2 never happens.
Not that I would have wanted this to happen, but I think it would have been interesting if the German generals ran the war in ww2 instead of the half witted corpral (Hitler). I have no love for the Nazis, and thank god they lost, but I have the utmost respect for the brilliance of the german commanders of that war and I am curious if they could have pulled it off.
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@F_alk:
Slavery in and of itself is not wrong.
OMG !
My 2 cents on this one. You have to define slavery. It can be argued, very well in fact that before we broke up the monoplies in America the workers were slaves. Yes, they were paid, and tech. they could leave at any time they wanted to. But than they starve to death. I fail to see much of a difference between that and the slaves that came from Africa. Would it not have been slavery if they were paid only to have the money given back so that they can eat and have a place to live?
Lets say the slaves in America were actualy paid, and with all thier hard earned money they had the exact same life they had not being paid. It does not shock me at all that most of the slaves after the civil war stayed on at the plantations because they knew they at least had a roof over thier head. Slavery by that definition existed in the north before the civil war. Granted, you can not take a worker out and whip them. But that was not a frequent thing in the south.
Going further than that, in 100 years people may look at us now as being more or less slaves. Thier is a big difference between the really rich and the middle class now. I could see our future society thinking it shocking that it takes the average family 30 years of work to own a home. 100 years ago however we would seem rich in comparison because it is possible to own a home in your life time.
Food for thought
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Can someone lock this so she doesn’t further expand on why killing the Jews wasn’t in itself wrong or something even more absurd?
Hey man, don’t throw stones. She brings up a point, I don’t agree with a lot of it. But it is a point. I think that it is funny that ppl like you can dismiss the slavery that took place before there was an America. Africans had been doing that for centuries (at least) to each other. Why is it only evil because white ppl did it too? Africans enslaved Africans, that is a historical fact. The treatment of the slaves was different in Africa than in the US, but by definintion they were slaves - they worked for no $.
You need to put things in perspective, rather than go by what you learn in high school which is more or less spoon fed.
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Isn’t the terminology a matter of semantics?
no. slaves are property, for no reason other than power. i.e. i have a big gun, and lots of other people with guns who support me, so i decide that i want you to work for me. without pay. forever, or until i get tired of beating you when you collapse from exhaustion. indentured servitude is a way of offering your physical labor to repay a debt. unfortunately, it is all too easily perverted by greedy people.
the major difference is choice. indentured servants choose to enter into their status, for a predetermined time. slaves dont have a choice.Like I said before, what is the difference between paying someone to live a crappy lifestlyle because if they don’t they will starve, or being a slave? Another historical fact, slaves that stayed on the plantations after the civil war had a higher standard of living than the ones that left…. or the “white slaves” that worked in the factories in the North.
Work or starve hardly seems like a choice to me.
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Last point, on WW1 and the Germans.
The Germans did tech start the war. The assasination did not mean a thing to the German government. They wanted the war, there really is no argument there. The assasination was the pretext for the war. If it was not that, it would have been something else.
What most of you fail to see is that the reason the Germans started the war was because they were trying to avoid something that would have inevitably happened. Britian and France were funneling $ to Russia to build up thier military and thier infastructure… with the intent of waging an aggresive war against Germany. Germany started the war because time was not on thier side. As the railways got built in Russia, and the troop got better equipped germany lost its advantage. It was inevitable that a war would start. The longer Germany negotiated, the more advantage her enemies would have. Russia offered the allies something they didn’t have, manpower. Germany wanted to fight the war against Russia while it was still backwards ass and could not mobolize her troops.
I can not remember the exact quote, but it was something like this in reguards to how Germany viewed starting the war “yesterday would have been better, we need to act now, tommorow will be too late.”
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I think that it is funny that ppl like you can dismiss the slavery that took place before there was an America.
I have no idea where you got I was dismissing slavery didn’t exist before America but I am sure glad you put words in my mouth then spoke down on me with those words freshly placed in my mouth.
Next time you decide to harpoon someone in a thread at least know who said what, might help your cause.
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Can someone lock this so she doesn’t further expand on why killing the Jews wasn’t in itself wrong or something even more absurd?
Well, you seemed to take the HS history class perspective on slavery by comparing it to the holocaust. It does not matter to me that you know the fact that slavery existed before america. It bothers me that you hear the word “slavery” and make assumptions about it without putting it in historical context. Slavery is wrong, no doubt about it. But you need to see it for what it is, and not what is spoon fed. Comparing slavery to the holocaust is ridiculous. Was slavery bad? Yes, but you need to look at the economics of it. In many cases it was better to be a slave than one of the dirt farmers in the south.
Recieving $ at the end of a work week does not free someone from slavery if thier standard of living is lower than that of a slave. People go on and on about slavery, but the monopolies that enslaved ALL Americans goes by as a foot note in history.
I made an assumption about you, and I apolagize for that. But you made a ridiculous remark to someone who was bringing up a differing view. I don’t agree with all Jen has to say (I am by no means a hard core christian - another assumption of mine that she is), but I do think that her argument is not flame bait or trolling. Just a different point of view.
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A little more back on topic…
If the French had won the colonial wars…
Fewer Africans would be being killed now because the French don’t know how to win a real war,the Etats Unis would not have french fries, but Anglaise friese(sp.?),
a french kiss would be something else,
there would be no Statue of Liberty,
Paris, Ky and Versailles, IN would be pronounced properly,
clothing would cost more for men and be unaffordable for women,
the French language would be the language of business as well as the language of dipolmacy(picture 300,000,000 Chinese speaking French.)
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@El:
… because the French don’t know how to win a real war,
I would like to have a statement of the moderators in how far jokes on nationalities are not considered personal attacks.
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@F_alk:
@El:
… because the French don’t know how to win a real war,
I would like to have a statement of the moderators in how far jokes on nationalities are not considered personal attacks.
i admit that i get kind of irritated with statements like this and other anti-insert-nation-here jokes. Also i consider that calling members of a political party “Demon-rats” unacceptable.
I consider that these kind of absurd comments tend to reflect more on the one making them, than on the group that they are making them about, and only considerably stupid people would suggest that there is an amount of truth to them.
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i admit that i get kind of irritated with statements like this and other anti-insert-nation-here jokes. Also i consider that calling members of a political party “Demon-rats” unacceptable.
I consider that these kind of absurd comments tend to reflect more on the one making them, than on the group that they are making them about, and only considerably stupid people would suggest that there is an amount of truth to them.
how bout your referral to Bush as “dumbass”, “his idiotship”, etc.?
im not offended or anything by it, but isnt it doing the same thing that you are complaining about? double standard much… -
i admit that i get kind of irritated with statements like this and other anti-insert-nation-here jokes. Also i consider that calling members of a political party “Demon-rats” unacceptable.
I consider that these kind of absurd comments tend to reflect more on the one making them, than on the group that they are making them about, and only considerably stupid people would suggest that there is an amount of truth to them.
how bout your referral to Bush as “dumbass”, “his idiotship”, etc.?
im not offended or anything by it, but isnt it doing the same thing that you are complaining about? double standard much…fair enough.
And it’s not really my problem in a sense, as i’m not French, nor am i a democrat (nor am i a true Liberal).
I just figured that some democrats may be offended. If they are not, then fine.
As for Bush - i guess i just call them as i see them. I liked his daddy fine, but the apple hit a few branches when falling from the ol’ tree. -
fair enough.
And it’s not really my problem in a sense, as i’m not French, nor am i a democrat (nor am i a true Liberal).
I just figured that some democrats may be offended. If they are not, then fine.
As for Bush - i guess i just call them as i see them. I liked his daddy fine, but the apple hit a few branches when falling from the ol’ tree.but thats exactly my point, none of it bothers me, say what ever the f you want, just dont condemn people like jen doing it, but not yourself. i hate double standards.
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@El:
… and Versailles, IN would be pronounced properly…
According to the Kentuckians of the area, they do pronounce it properly. It’s a he said, she said situation, is it not?
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fair enough.
And it’s not really my problem in a sense, as i’m not French, nor am i a democrat (nor am i a true Liberal).
I just figured that some democrats may be offended. If they are not, then fine.
As for Bush - i guess i just call them as i see them. I liked his daddy fine, but the apple hit a few branches when falling from the ol’ tree.but thats exactly my point, none of it bothers me, say what ever the f you want, just dont condemn people like jen doing it, but not yourself. i hate double standards.
So you would equate ethnic/political slurs with criticism of a political figure then?
In that regard referring to african-Americans as F-in’ N-word-s would be the same as calling Jean Cretien (former PM of Canada) a dishonest mercenary?Obviously i disagree.
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