They did quite a few nasty things before they acted on those beliefs. :o
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They did quite a few nasty things before they acted on those beliefs. :o
But it was only when they acted on those beliefs that anyone in the outside actually did something about it, so in that sense ar81 is quite right.
These days that is slightly less so though - if you misbehave too badly in your own country that may lead to sanctions, or even military actions, depending on the global state I suppose. Serbia was punished for what it did in Kosovo, recently Libya definitely had outsiders getting involved in their internal situation.
Would it have been a particularly bad idea to attack Germany in 1936? :oQuote:
Originally Posted by Steely Glint
I think you're much more likely to face interference in your domestic affairs before World War 2 than afterwards. When Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik were killed in Syria, America and France of say 1876 would likely have considered it an act of war and used it as a justification to intervene. Likewise when those Dutch Marines were captured in Libya, the Dutch Empire would have said "Release them immediately and pay us compensation or we'll wreck your shit big time". There was no UN back then, and no cold-war balance of power to maintain and the major powers back then were perfectly happy to team up with each other to fuck up smaller nations who had irritated them in some way, even if they were mostly rivals otherwise.Quote:
Originally Posted by Flixy
Well, the balance of power certainly favored the Allies back then, but it also favored them during the battle of France and look how that turned out. The allies were ahead in terms of material, but the Germans were light years ahead in terms of doctrine. Plus, defeating Germany in 36 would have stopped the Nazis as a political and military force but it wouldn't have stopped Nazism as an idealogy nor would it have dealt the ideology of resentment and hypernationalism which lead to the nazis - would have made it worse. So arguably you'd just be saving up worse problems for later.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
Quantity has a quality all its own. I have no doubt that had the remilitarization of the Rhineland and other events in '36 led to a military confrontation that the French would have soundly beat Germany then. Now the consequences of that defeat are far more uncertain since France wasn't in a position to keep Germany down. French analysis of their comparative military strength at the time was too conservative IMO but their estimates of their inability to bear the cost of such a conflict probably wasn't.Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Glint
From what I've read, the French had a pretty good shot at beating the Germans up to '38 (even with their lack of organization and other problems). The war probably wouldn't have discredited Nazism, since there would be ambivalence regarding the aggressor, but is that that bad of a trade-off given what the Nazis ended up doing?
We might still have fascism today had it not been for WWII, the Holocaust etc
There were blackshirts in many non-fascist nations.
We had brown-shirts in Spain and Portugal. Were they any worse than other dictators? Note that history passed them by even without a loss in a war.
FFS, can this thread please not be Godwinned. :(
Mod-Nazi. :o
Did it honestly drag the thread down any lower?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
History is full of examples of smaller forces with better equipment, training and doctrine beating numerical superior forces.Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
France *could* have beaten German in 1940 - but they didn't. They had more tanks and artillery, approximate parity in bodies and were only behind in aircraft. The Germans won because they knew what they were doing and Allies didn't. Being the losers of the first World War, they learned the hard lessons it had to teach. Being the winners, the French and British did not. Their whole mindset was defensive, and it's hard to imagine that they would have been capable of planning and implementing and offensive operation in 1936. I don't know the exact state of the German armed forces back then, so maybe they were in such a state that the allied operational deficiencies would not have mattered.Quote:
I have no doubt that had the remilitarization of the Rhineland and other events in '36 led to a military confrontation that the French would have soundly beat Germany then.
If you're gonna attack the Nazis, the best time to do it is when they're invading Poland in 1939. No doubt about who the aggressor is then, and plans the Nazis had for Poland would make the nature of the Nazi Regime clearer to future generations. If they were stopped in 1936 there'd still be fuckheads today saying things like "Hitler had the right idea"Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
To be fair, even now you have those fuckheads remaining.
Very few though.
We have far, far more saying that Stalin had the right idea even though Stalin was every bit as evil as Hitler. And Communism was just as evil as Fascism but its not viewed in the same light either and has far more apologists too.
I think a main difference is what you are discussing here. First of all, I don't know anyone who said Stalin had the right idea. Everyone I talk to has him about as low as Hitler. I think Communism an sich is not as evil, the basic ideas are appealing (equality etc.), until you of course try to make it actually work. Where as the brand of Fascism Hitler professed inherently had the racism, warmongering, etc. in it, Communism itself is not really evil. Stalinism is viewed in a damn negative light, for sure.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Indeed they are but Germany wasn't in a position to field one of those forces in '36.Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Glint
They were more than capable of launching offensive operations in '40, and in '36. In '40 they looked at the balance of forces, at their own defenses, and they decided to wait. In '36 if they'd fought they would have had to take the offensive and while they wouldn't have performed nearly as well as the Germans did later France would have won because Nazi Germany was running a bluff. The following four years made a huge difference in the quantity and quality of their equipment, and in their trained manpower. That's the benefit of hindsight, we can realize that France was actually better prepared for a fight in '36 than Germany was.Quote:
France *could* have beaten German in 1940 - but they didn't. They had more tanks and artillery, approximate parity in bodies and were only behind in aircraft.
The Germans did not learn the lessons of WWI. They learned the lessons taught by interwar-period exercises, simulations, and technological gains. Warfare in WWII was not anticipatable by focusing on WWI. That was a mistake the French and British made but again it really applies more to conditions in 1940 than conditions in '36. The French particularly were fully capable of offensive action, they had perfectly competent doctrine and training in place but the German military machine they saw in 1940 made them cautious and they decided to stand on defensive advantage. They were unprepared for German speed and effectiveness of German combined-arms and armored warfare and they couldn't manage to get themselves inside its operational tempo which allowed the Germans to always be the ones pressing. When the French did act offensively they performed quite well, the Germans weren't really any more capable at resisting offensive activity at that time than the French were, but the French were unfortunately not able to manage to do this above the local level. The six weeks of the French campaign was mostly a reflection of how exactly the situation was set up in '40 and does not give us indications of how events would have played out under different conditions.Quote:
The Germans won because they knew what they were doing and Allies didn't. Being the losers of the first World War, they learned the hard lessons it had to teach. Being the winners, the French and British did not. Their whole mindset was defensive, and it's hard to imagine that they would have been capable of planning and implementing and offensive operation in 1936. I don't know the exact state of the German armed forces back then, so maybe they were in such a state that the allied operational deficiencies would not have mattered.
I'm too tired to argue, know too little about the pre-war arms build up and you're probably right. So yeah.
:cry:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...ot_sshappy.gifQuote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
I haven't even tried to find this stuff over the past few posts, it just pops up.
Quote:
September 18, 2012
As Google Fills in Blank, a German Cries Foul
By NICHOLAS KULISH
BERLIN — In an earlier, more innocent era, the shocking rumors about the past of a former first lady of Germany would have stayed put in the drawing rooms of the political elite. Nowadays, they appear unbidden on Google.
Say a schoolchild writing a homework assignment about Bettina Wulff entered her name into the search engine. “Bettina Wulff prostitute,” Google’s autocomplete function would helpfully but perhaps slanderously suggest. “Bettina Wulff escort” would pop up for good measure.
“I was stunned,” Ms. Wulff, who vehemently denied the accusations, told the weekly newsmagazine Stern, one of several publications to feature her on the cover in recent weeks. “I felt powerless and cried a lot.”
As a result, Ms. Wulff, whose husband resigned as president in February in the midst of a scandal over favors from wealthy friends, is now the leading player in a latter-day fable mixing gossip, sharp-elbowed politics and new technology. Taking an aggressive tack against the rumors, she filed a lawsuit against Google in a Hamburg court.
Her suit signals the latest effort to force the Internet giant to play the role of online referee, following close behind Google’s decision to block an inflammatory anti-Muslim video from YouTube in certain countries.
In Ms. Wulff’s case, Google has countered that it is not to blame for her troubles. “All of the queries shown in Autocomplete have been typed previously by other Google users,” Kay Oberbeck, a spokesman for the company, said in a statement that suggested it was the curiosity of the many, and not the assessment of the company, that was causing the offending terms to pop up.
Not content with litigation, Ms. Wulff has started a campaign to clear her name. Her newly published memoir became the best-selling nonfiction book in Germany this week.
The nightmare started out more like a fairy tale. Bettina Körner married Christian Wulff, then the state premier in Lower Saxony, in 2008. They left the state capital, Hanover, for big-time politics in Berlin in 2010, when Mr. Wulff was chosen for the important but largely ceremonial job of president.
Mr. Wulff was the president, but his wife, just 36 when he was elected by special assembly at the Reichstag, became the star. She was celebrated in the press for her looks and her glamour, her height and her elegance. The tabloid media never tired of repeating that she had a tattoo, as if it were a badge of hipness.
But she was followed to the presidential palace, Schloss Bellevue, by one of the most pernicious and persistent rumors in German politics: that she had worked as an escort. “My pseudonym was supposedly Lady Viktoria, and my domain was supposed to be an establishment by the name of Château Osnabrück,” Ms. Wulff wrote in her book, rebutting the rumors.
The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung has reported that the rumors date from 2006, when she first met her future husband, and that they were circulated not by the opposition but by members of his own party. “She was the glamour girl from the beginning,” said Lutz Hachmeister, director of the Institute for Media and Communication Policy in Berlin. “He was the Catholic, conservative provincial politician.”
When the rumors spread on the Internet, Ms. Wulff kept quiet while her husband dealt with revelations that he had received a questionable personal loan when he was state premier, as well as the use of a car and other favors from wealthy friends. Mr. Wulff resigned, but the gossip about his wife did not go away.
Her publicity offensive may have done a better job of selling books than extinguishing the prostitution story. A representative survey by the polling group Emnid for the newspaper Bild am Sonntag found that 81 percent of Germans had never heard the rumors before she started her campaign to stop them.
Victor Homola contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/wo...ina-wulff.html
I can sympathize in this case, it does feel a little bit like slander. There's also an awful joke waiting to be made here with the "I'm feeling lucky" feature.
And google has altered the autocomplete entries before because of google bomb like stunts. There is nothing new here. Just another combo of Dread + Germany.
In the US Google currently censors a lot of terms, such as pirate bay.
I sympathize that it may suck, but I don't see how it's really remotely related to slander. Like many tools of search engines, auto-complete is based on the searches that large numbers of people have already done. Google isn't saying the former President's wife was a prostitute; the people using Google are asking Google if she was. Google assuming a high statistical likelihood that someone searching that name also wants to search "prostitute" merely reflects everyone's search pattern.Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
This feature hasn't been totally without controversy. But it takes a misguided technical/legal as in Germany for this to become a lawsuit (albeit not the first lawsuit of it's kind. Others have happened in France and Japan).
Except they adjust it all the time. At the very least, a lawsuit should provide a clearer picture of when they change it, no?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
And have been doing it for years. They have been sued in the US to remove results to competitors and their ads when searching for certain companies, they removed Bush as the top "miserable failure". They have all kinds of words they have been forced to remove from the autocomplete, for all kinds of reasons. They will knock out companies the RIAA is having problems with in order to sweeten licensing deals, and they have been forced to remove riders like "scam" because its offensive.Quote:
Originally Posted by Flixy
Which is why I wouldn't award punitive damages, but I'd still very carefully consider an injunction to cease and desist. People would still be able to use the search terms, they just wouldn't be getting the "helpful" suggestion that what the searcher really wants to do is look into the woman's possible past as an hooker. And Dread, the fact that it's just what other people are investigating has absolutely no bearing on how it kinda looks like slander. The defense against claiming it is slander will most strongly lie on Google not having deliberate knowledge one way or the other. The fact that other people may think and say something in no way mitigates that the autocomplete most certainly is suggesting that she may have been a prostitute.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
Or, to put it another way: Google is in the position of a journalist who writes that a certain amount of people think that she's a prostitute. While not saying that this is not true.
I probably wouldn't even have time to start the stop watch until the lawsuit due to slander came rolling in against that journalist.
Or would you, Dread, like to see yourself in the headlines of the newspaper going like this: "Dread suspected of murder!" with the article itself consisting only of rumors and hearsay?
Pretty sure he has done this a few times in the political discussionsQuote:
Originally Posted by Khendraja'aro