Poll of the Day > Do you agree World War II is important because...

(+) Yeah! (+)

...the allies GENUINELY saved the world? That we must treasure and venerate the sacrifices made in the efforts of vanquishing evil and never speak ill of the effort?

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Depends on what you define as "save the world".
History is generally written by the victors.

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Eh, no - it was important because it was a culturally significant event that affected the lives of pretty much every person during, as a consequence of war, and forthcoming, as a consequence of technology.


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The allies saved Eastern Europe from genocide and slavery. They saved Western Europe from becoming a totalitarian police state. They saved East Asia from Imperial Japanese tyranny.

But we can't ignore that for years, various countries continued to appease and underestimate the genocidal maniac for their own strategic gain, instead of taking a hardline stance. We can't forget that one of the allied leaders was also one of the worst dictators history has seen. And we have to realize how lucky the world was to have two of the global superpowers led by a warmonger and a staunch antifascist who would never agree to anything but total victory.

It took years for the world to unite as a common, uncompromising front against the Axis. Their failures before that deserve the harshest of criticism.

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Solid Sonic posted...

...the allies GENUINELY saved the world? That we must treasure and venerate the sacrifices made in the efforts of vanquishing evil and never speak ill of the effort?

That's debatable but there would have been a different outcome had Stalin not gotten his hands on the nuke. Russia had spies at Los Alamos nuclear testing in New Mexico and a German physicist named Klaus Fuchs gave the Soviets the secrets. When Truman bragging at the Potsdam Conference, he did not know Stalin and the Soviets had the secrets too.

Had that not happened, there would have been no East and West Germany, no Iron Curtain, possibly no Korean or Vietnam wars but we all know that wasn't the case.

Also General Patton told his superiors that the Allies had defeated the wrong enemy (Germany) because he realized as the Red Army was marching through Germany that they were the real enemy. Patton died mysteriously from a low speed car crash in Dec 1945.

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Solid Sonic posted...

...the allies GENUINELY saved the world? That we must treasure and venerate the sacrifices made in the efforts of vanquishing evil and never speak ill of the effort?

No, because I'm opposed to that sort of mentality expressed by the bolded statement. There's certainly worse targets for it to be applied to, but I doubt even the allies in WW2 were above reproach or criticism, even if they were obviously on the right side of the war

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First and only time nuclear bomb was used which has a huge impact on global relations

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Rapes 2 million women, engaged in brutal colonization of Africa and Asia, attacked Iran a neutral nation. Yeah total heroes and saints lmfao

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WWII was WWI part 2. The treaty of versailles literally handed Hitler an angry, desperate populace and unemployed soldiers to use to take over and cement his power.

The USSR was gonna win WWII on its own. D-Day and nuking Japan were literally just races against time to stop the red army from taking ownership of absolutely everything.

you know why the world is fucked up today? Gavrilo Princip and Woodrow Wilson.

There were no good guys though, as has been said. Winners just get to call themselves that.

BUMPED2002 posted...

Also General Patton told his superiors that the Allies had defeated the wrong enemy (Germany) because he realized as the Red Army was marching through Germany that they were the real enemy. Patton died mysteriously from a low speed car crash in Dec 1945.

This.

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Raddest_Chad posted...

The treaty of versailles literally handed Hitler an angry, desperate populace and unemployed soldiers to use to take over and cement his power.

No, it did not.

Even during the Allied occupation of the Rhineland and the Ruhr, Hitler's party never managed to win more than 6.5% of the votes in federal elections. (Ruhr workers mostly stuck with the SPD, the Centre Party and the KPD.) Worse, the Nazis' share of the vote actually fell from 6.5% in May 1924 to 3% in December that year, and then crashed to a feeble 2.6% in May 1928. In other words, even when memories of German defeat and Versailles were fresher and more bitter, the Nazis still did badly at the ballot box.

Far right parties, who constantly used the Treaty as a big club with which to beat their opponents over the head, found it harder and harder to sustain electoral momentum in Germany once the Ruhr occupation came to an end. (German heads of business, by the way, criticized the Ruhr occupation on the grounds that it violated the Treaty of Versailles, and they welcomed the return to the treaty regime after the occupation ended because big industrialists foresaw profits growing again.) From 1920 to 1929, it was the centre-left Social Democratic Party that remained Germany's biggest party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_referendum,_1929

This was a referendum on whether Germany should pass a law formally renouncing the Treaty of Versailles and banning the collection of reparations. Fewer than 15% of German voters even bothered to turn out for it. Again, despite the conventional wisdom in today's school classrooms that Versailles stoked the German public so badly they rushed to vote Nazi out of spite, it seems to demonstrate instead a remarkable apathy about the Treaty as a specific issue.

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