Biggest Mistakes the Axis made iyo.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Spec
This is nice. I never thought that the Natives had a hand in the outcome of WW2. Hitler should have known this.....

Spec.

The point seems to have been made that Hitler failed because of his racism and ethnic cleansing. Well, Jackson was just as much a racist and ethnic cleanser as was Hitler, and we have a who American party who continue to hold this tryant in highest esteem. Go Figure.

[Ned]

American Napolean? I was thinking that his conquest of Florida was more akin to Caesar's conquest of Gual. Both routinely said their aggressive actions were "defensive."

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Sir Og


The opposition was not impressive indeed but the sheer scale and speed of the invasion is unprecedented. The fact that they actually managed to move across the hostile terain in a well organized and synchronized manner is the real achievment. The Germans forces in Russia for example got stranded in the mud while in Manchuria the red army was advancing through simmilary hostile terain in the middle of storm.
The Japanese commanders BTW thought that the 750k strong force that thay had was enough to stop any Russian attack and even to drive tha red army back with succesfull counteratacks.

By the time the armistace was signed Soviet forces had only managed to occupy Manchuria and had reached a point only a little south of Manchuria. That's nowhere near as much territory as western Russia.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Spec
This is nice. I never thought that the Natives had a hand in the outcome of WW2. Hitler should have known this.....

Spec.

Actually, they did. Navaho windtalkers, dude.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned
American Napolean?

He was the hero of the Creek War, New Orleans, and the Seminole Wars. He was a general who could have set himself up as dictator, and turned America into a basketcase like the rest of the Americas except Canada.

[Mr. Harley]

Ned - most of the Native Americans in the USA east of the Mississippi were not hunter-gatherers. They were small village hunter-farmers, not too different from the colonists. The major difference was domesticated animals. The Native Americans relied primarily on hunting for meat, and then farmed maize, beans, and squash for carbohydrates. That meant that they tended to support a lower population density than the Europeans.

The primary difference between them and the so-called colonists was that they did not have the same system of land ownership. Land tended to be collective, not unlike many small village communities throughout the world. The idea of individual ownership was alien to them, and that prevented the disparity in income that permitted nobility and empires in so many other parts of the world.

Their system and the system brought by the colonists, primarily based on British Common Law, along with right of conquest that let the invaders unilaterally take their land (and reset the title ownership to date zero ignoring all normal Common Law rules - I believe it's called stacking the deck), put them at a disadvantage. What was incompatible was when someone settled on land that they had hunted for centuries, and told them suddenly that they no longer had any rights to the land. If they tried to argue, they could be arrested and imprisoned - a virtual death sentence given European diseases - or killed by the virtuous landowner. Note that this "Doctrine of Conquest" is still our national policy.

Of great interest and always primary in Indian law cases that reach the Supreme Court, the first note in the opinion refers to the Doctrine of Discovery as the basis of Indian law. This fundamental ''doctrine'' of conquest in American law simply decreed at the beginning of European conquest that in the Americas title to land ''discovered,'' regardless of those Indian nations in actual possession of it for hundreds if not thousands of years, would be vested in the first European nation that claimed it.

To cavalierly assign them as being "incompatible" shows hubris that I find dangerous. They were here first, so why should they have to become compatible with the invaders. Especially when the invaders are so obviously, by their own laws, inequitably inhabiting the Native American lands. They had to create that special exception - the "Doctrine of Conquest" to justify the seizure of land that would have otherwise been considered owned by the Native Americans under British Common Law. Even when given so-called reservations, many of the so-called voluntary sales of land were highly coercive, written in a language the Native Americans did not understand, or deliberately misleading - usually all three.

Then - and this occurred from the beginning of European invasion - the Native Americans discovered that the agreements were broken unilaterally by the invaders, and that the Native Americans had no recourse. That was the true evil of what Jackson did - he destroyed any hope Native Americans had that they could coexist with the European invaders.

Understand me - Native Americans were not this innocent, pristine people sometimes portrayed by others. The reasons for ritual disfigurement of enemy bodies were particularly ugly. But it took the noble Europeans, you know, those people who had the right to determine compatibility, to raise scalping to a widespread practice.

The reason for the European incompatibility are simple - intolerance and greed. The leadership of a colony, or later on those connected with the federal government, made obscene profits off the de facto seizures - oh, excuse me forced sales - of Native Land. The sale IS forced when they have been forced off profitable land and they don't receive the food they have been promised for vacating the land. They desperately need the money - and the land they were given is marginal - you go out and look at it in Oklahoma and tell me how you can farm it reliably with no knowledge of the area and without irrigation, which of course they had no access to.

If you don't believe me - about the obscene profits made by those connected to Washington politicians - read about Bleeding Kansas. In fact the settlers essentially staged a rebellion at one of the land "auctions" to prevent speculators from forcing the prices up, cheating in this case the Native Americans of the money rightfully theirs. Also read about the largest mass hanging in US history, when on of the Sioux/Lakota speaking people's, up in Michigan, finally revolted when they thought they were going to be cheated again, and how the federal government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs institutionalized cheating of the Native Americans.

Incompatible - my a**. Shameful, and bluntly the German people have done a hell of a lot better job, IMHO, of dealing with their role, via inaction, via justified terror and not being willing to stand up and be counted, and sometimes via active support, of the Nazis. The fact that you, or any American, has the unmitigated gall to label the Native Americans as incompatible hunter-gatherers show how sadly lacking our the history we teach our children is, and how some people, instead of embracing the fact our country has done very good things, and some very terrible things, insist for whatever misguided emotional imperative they feel, that we white-wash the collective actions that, if we were writing about them in other countries, constitute a mix of ethnic cleansing and genocide, mixed with terror and appalling intolerance. Google the Sand River and Bear River massacres, and tell me just how the Native Americans could have been "compatible". The only way many European Americans wanted them compatible - "
The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Undermenschen.

[TCO]

I think when Hitler shaved his mustache, we knew it was the end.

[Ted Striker]

Lack of nuke subs in the North Atlantic spelled the doom for the Nazis.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


The Klan are still active, but not as a terror organization.

Which, again, is irrelevant.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ned


GePap, I said, did I not, that Andrew Jackson and his policies were an exception? He took action against the Indian tribes that had "civilized" and could maintain themselves peacefully side by side with Europeans. There is no doubt in my mind that Jackson, the founder of the Democrat party, was a racist through and through.

Unbelievable- first Ned excuses European conquest with the ludicrous agricultural incompatibility excuse- first time I've heard that, and it's terribly funny- and then he completely blanks out the hunting down of California's native inhabitants.

Was that Andrew Jackson's fault too?

Still, if all else fails, bring in a crack about the Democrats and really see your argument enter the Cloaca Maxima.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Ned
Since the US was critical to Germany's defeat, their policy should have been to do everything to keep America out of the war. There are numerous mistakes Germany made that brought the US into the war. Foremost among them was their alliance with Japan.

I thought that foremost among them would have been their actual declaration of war upon the U.S. when they were under no obligation to do so.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Sikander


I thought that foremost among them would have been their actual declaration of war upon the U.S. when they were under no obligation to do so.

Absolutely. An uneasy truce had persisted between the Soviet Union and Japan in Asia after all, despite the Soviet's previous military successes against them, and despite Japan being Germany's ally and the German triumphs in the early Russian campaign.

I suspect that German sinking of American merchant marine would have eventually constituted a sufficiently big enough casus belli- but it's still a 'what if?' .

[Sikander]

Had the Germans simply waited they might have presented Roosevelt with a serious political problem vis the direction of the war. They made it very easy for him to carry forward the "Germany first" strategy.

[MRT144]

only ned would turn a thread about nazis into a thread about how evil democrats are. youre such a *****made republican ned, just come clean.

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by St Leo
Next you'll tell me that Germany stole Alsace-Lorraine from France in the Franco-Prussian War.

Except that just about everyone there is French and speak French.