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Split Thread The causes and legality of the declaration of WWII

Michel H said:
Actually, I didn't claim that
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I just mentioned the book "What the World Rejected: Hitler’s Peace Offers 1933–1940" by Friedrich Stieve, and I said it was interesting, but not necessarily accurate and reliable.

However, it is true that copies of Hitler's July 19, 1940 Reichstag speech were dropped from German aircraft over Britain:

(link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/10/a4081510.shtml)

This webpage has a picture of the actual leaflet.
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And here is the reply:

Sefton Delmer said:
Within an hour of Hitler having spoken I was on the air with my reply. And without a moment’s hesitation I turned his peace offer down. My colleagues at the B.B.C. had approved of what I meant to say. That was enough authority for me.

“ HERR HITLER,” I said in my smoothest and most deferential , German, “you have on occasion in the past consulted me as to the mood of the British public. So permit me to render your excellency this little service once again tonight. Let me tell you what we here in Britain think of this appeal of yours to what you are pleased to call our reason and common sense. Herr Führer and Reichskanzler, we hurl it right back at you, right in your evil smelling teeth . . .” It was not diplomatic language or very elegant. But I reckoned a little earthy vulgarity in answer to the Führer’s cant would be just the thing to shock my German listeners out of their complacency. Especially as I then followed it up with some orthodox moralising about British reason permitting no compromise with murder and aggression. I even ventured to make a prophecy. I told Hitler that though things might look quite bright for him at the moment, the tide would inevitably turn, and he, like the Kaiser before him would find that he had been `conquering himself to death’. It was a phrase I well remembered from my first-war school days in Berlin and it soon became a stock slogan of the second-war B.B.C.
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https://www.psywar.org/delmer/1005/1002
 
Michel H said:
Actually, I didn't claim that
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1) The actual original book was written by Friedrich Stieve who wrote for the wartime NAZI Ministry of Propaganda. You were informed that this book existed by , Saggy, a forum holocaust denier. Friedrich Stieve also wrote "New Germany" for the NAZI Ministry of propaganda, to recruit non-German Aryans to the Hitler Youth. Stievie died in 1966 and did not write the 2015 Amazon summary nor added the chapters to the modern reprint.

Instead, you specifically posted and quoted a holocaust denier's summary of the book and claimed it was an excerpt from the book in your post as your evidence. Here is your quote and a link to your post
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=13122475&postcount=240

Michel H said:
"An excerpt from this book:

This edition benefits from four new sections which did not appear in the original publication. These are:- The full text of Hitler’s “Appeal for Peace and Sanity” speech, made before the Reichstag on July 19, 1940, following the fall of France. In that speech, Hitler once again offered unconditional peace to Britain. This speech was printed in English and dropped by the tens of thousands from German aircraft over Britain. Although nearly half the British cabinet wanted to take up his offer, Churchill’s warmongering put an end to this final offer of peace
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So, firstly, you lied and it was not an excerpt from the book.

Secondly, you quoted and promoted the holocaust denial claim half of Churchill's war cabinet (appointed May 1940) wanted to take up an offer of peace, based .on a hour and longer speech Hitler made to the Reichstag in July 1940 yet you cannot name one cabinet member who wanted to do this. This is because it is complete crap from you and holocaust deniers.

Thirdly, the pamphlet dropped is not Hitler's speech to the Reichstag, is it? It is a reduced propaganda re-write by the NAZI ministry of propaganda.
 
catsmate said:
Then your country needs to be fixed. Abolish Belgium...
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Given Belgium's recent difficulties in forming a steady government, I've been suggesting for a while that the country should be split between France and the Netherlands. We get the French-speaking areas, Brussels, and control of the breweries and chocolate factories while they get the Flemish districts. The German-speaking part is free to do whatever they want. Sorted.
 
In case anybody is wondering, I'm so aghast at Michel H's take on history and his whitewashing of the crimes of the Nazi state - in my part of France German tourists still aren't welcome because of memories of the Occupation - that I really can't face challenging them. So I'm choosing flippancy instead.
 
malbui said:
In case anybody is wondering, I'm so aghast at Michel H's take on history and his whitewashing of the crimes of the Nazi state - in my part of France German tourists still aren't welcome because of memories of the Occupation - that I really can't face challenging them. So I'm choosing flippancy instead.
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See these posts:
Michel H said:
Hitler ... was a racist man, and made a big mistake when he invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
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Michel H said:
Germany and Japan did many wrong things during the 1930s and 1940s. Their racism, and brutal racist expansionism was unacceptable.
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Michel H said:
... But this does not mean the Axis countries were innocent at all, major and well documented crimes were committed by Germany and Japan.
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malbui said:
Given Belgium's recent difficulties in forming a steady government, I've been suggesting for a while that the country should be split between France and the Netherlands. We get the French-speaking areas, Brussels, and control of the breweries and chocolate factories while they get the Flemish districts. The German-speaking part is free to do whatever they want. Sorted.
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Yeah, thanks, sort us with ever more extreme right whackjobs, no thanks, we've got too much of those in the Netherlands as it is.
Maybe create a DC style district for the EU out of Vlaanderen?
 
*Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell."

Vachel Lindsay, "Congo"
 
Michel H said:
See these posts:
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If that was the sum total of your posts, you'd have a point.

Unfortunately the general premise of your position is that the U.S. essentially brought war upon themselves and the Germans were so threatened by international Jewery and burdened by WWI reparations that they had no choice other than to invade and conquer their neighbors.

That's where you fall flat on your ass.
 
BStrong said:
Unfortunately the general premise of your position is that the U.S. essentially brought war upon themselves and the Germans were so threatened by international Jewery and burdened by WWI reparations that they had no choice other than to invade and conquer their neighbors.
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Unfortunately the general premise of your position is that the U.S. essentially brought war upon themselves
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I believe the U.S. hit Japan too hard by imposing the oil embargo (and a similar embargo on other raw materials, plus closing the Panama canal to Japanese ships). It would have been better to raise the price of oil exports by 20% using an export tax, and to give the proceeds of such a tax to freedom fighters in China (while urging dialogue and negotiations).
Unfortunately the general premise of your position is that ... the Germans were so threatened by international Jewery and burdened by WWI reparations that they had no choice other than to invade and conquer their neighbors.
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Sorry, I never wrote such a thing. I believe, though, that the UK and France shouldn't have declared war on (and attacked) Germany in September 1939. This raised the general level of anger and violence, they (UK and France) lost the first part of the war, and several countries were occupied as a result of this decision (we also know what happened later).
They could (for example) have limited themselves to accepting a large number of Polish refugees (including Jewish ones) on their soils, in order to provide some assistance to Poland.
 
Alternatively, they should have attacked the moment the Germans were in Poland, as there was no defense.
That would have forced the German armies to turn around and the soviets would have kept marching, which would have eliminated the vile stain of the Nazis many years earlier, without the civilian casualties in countries other than Germany itself.


Because in your fantasy land poor innocent Hitler may have only attacked other countries in retaliation, but in reality he would have attacked anyway, but with a better equipped army.
 
Again, you miss the counterpoint to your argument. Instead of assigning blame to the US, UK, and to France, how about addressing what the original instigators did.

What you are doing is blaming the victim. "Well, if he didn't have money hanging out of his pocket, he wouldn't have been robbed." "She deserved what happened to her, did you see how she dressed?" "If they only knew better, they could have avoided the whole mess." "They shouldn't have resisted arrest."

How about addressing Germany's actions? How about addressing Japan's actions? How about addressing Italy's actions? How about having some common decency and acknowledge the death of civilians based on their nationality/country of origin?

I believe the U.S. hit Japan too hard by imposing the oil embargo (and a similar embargo on other raw materials, plus closing the Panama canal to Japanese ships). It would have been better to raise the price of oil exports by 20% using an export tax, and to give the proceeds of such a tax to freedom fighters in China (while urging dialogue and negotiations).
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Bet you didn't know that there were already embargoes.

A series of events led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. War between Japan and the United States had been a possibility that each nation's military forces planned for in the 1920s, though real tension did not begin until the 1931 invasion of Manchuria by Japan. Over the next decade, Japan expanded slowly into China, leading to the Second Sino-Japanese war in 1937. In 1940 Japan invaded French Indochina in an effort to embargo all imports into China, including war supplies purchased from the U.S. This move prompted the United States to embargo all oil exports, leading the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) to estimate it had less than two years of bunker oil remaining and to support the existing plans to seize oil resources in the Dutch East Indies. Planning had been underway for some time on an attack on the "Southern Resource Area" to add it to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere Japan envisioned in the Pacific.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor
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Hilite added.

So Japan invaded China in 1931. There was the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Japan invaded French Indochina in 1940. See a pattern here? And they were already planning to invade the Dutch East Indies. The embargo didn't even start .
Did you know that there was an embargo in place in 1938?

Beginning in 1938, the U.S. adopted a succession of increasingly restrictive trade restrictions with Japan. This included terminating its 1911 commercial treaty with Japan in 1939, further tightened by the Export Control Act of 1940. These efforts failed to deter Japan from continuing its war in China, or from signing the Tripartite Pact in 1940 with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, officially forming the Axis Powers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor
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Ever hear of the ABCD Line?
The ABCD line (ABCDライン, Ēbīshīdī rain) was a Japanese name for a series of embargoes against Japan by foreign nations, including America, Britain, China, and the Dutch. It was also known as the ABCD encirclement (ABCD包囲陣, Ēbīshīdī hōijin). In 1940, in an effort to discourage Japanese militarism, these nations and others stopped selling iron ore, steel and oil to Japan, denying it the raw materials needed to continue its activities in China and French Indochina. In Japan, the government and nationalists viewed these embargoes as acts of aggression; imported oil made up about 80% of domestic consumption, without which Japan's economy, let alone its military, would grind to a halt. The Japanese media, influenced by military propagandists,[1] began to refer to the embargoes as the "ABCD ("American-British-Chinese-Dutch") encirclement" or "ABCD line".

Faced with the possibility of economic collapse and forced withdrawal from its recent conquests, the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters began planning for a war with the Western powers in April 1941. This culminated in the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
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So the Japanese invaded, and instead of giving back the land in response to embargoes (which you think is the right thing to do), they attacked the United States.

Bet you didn't know there were negotiations.
The Hull note, officially the Outline of Proposed Basis for Agreement Between the United States and Japan, was the final proposal delivered to the Empire of Japan by the United States of America before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese declaration of war. The note was delivered on November 26, 1941, and is named for Secretary of State Cordell Hull. It was the culmination of a series of events leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was considered by the Japanese as an ultimatum for Japan to withdraw from China and other occupied territories, and was perceived by the Japanese Government at the time and many historians around the world as a casus belli.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_note
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How about answering my question, Michel?

SpitfireIX said:
To renew and expand upon another question I've posed, and which you've ignored, Michel, please explain why it was unreasonable for the US and Britain to have insisted on unconditional surrender when, as I mentioned, Churchill and FDR1 were well aware that Germany and Japan were capable of developing nuclear weapons, especially when Germany was clearly much farther along than the Allies in the development of cruise missiles and heavy rockets.2_______________
1A slight correction to my previous post on this subject. Although Einstein and Szilárd wrote their letter before Germany attacked Poland, FDR didn't actually receive it until October of 1939. However, he immediately recognized the danger, and ordered the military to begin studying the issue.

2I should note here that Spock's comment about putting nuclear weapons on V-2s in the classic ST:TOS episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" is incorrect. The V-2 had a payload of 1000 kg; a first-generation atomic bomb weighed about four times that. So the Germans would have had to have built a much larger rocket to carry a nuke, but obviously they would have been much better positioned to have done so than the Allies were.
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Lukraak_Sisser said:
Alternatively, they should have attacked the moment the Germans were in Poland, as there was no defense.
That would have forced the German armies to turn around and the soviets would have kept marching, which would have eliminated the vile stain of the Nazis many years earlier, without the civilian casualties in countries other than Germany itself.
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France and Britain weren't really capable of launching a major offensive into Germany in 1939, for a variety of reasons. They should have tried to do more than they did, though. Also, whether such a hypothetical offensive would have led the Soviets to violate the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is debatable.
 
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