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Aaron,
I found this YouTube video, but unfortunately I don’t understand it. Its in German.
This is an interesting find. This video shows JFK getting awarded some military honors from Germany. He also gives a speech in which he says that an attack against Germany is an attack on the United States. My interpretation is that he wants to express that the US owns Germany. The (mis-)translation of the narrator is most revealing. According to the narrator, JFK said that “any attack on your soil is an attack against us” (German: “Jeder Angriff auf Ihr Gebiet ist ein Angriff gegen uns.”) whereas JFK actually said, “any attack on your soil is an attack upon our own”. You could also interpret JFK saying that “your liberty is our liberty” means that Germany’s concept of liberty has to be the same as the US’s or possibly even that Germany’s liberty is at the liberty of the US.
Interesting take Aaron. I never thought about it like that. Here this speech is considered one of his best. Shortly after this speech the Berlin Wall was built.
Aaron, did you catch when he said in German that he was a jelly doughnut? At least that’s what they tell us in the US.
Oops, I had it wrong. I guess JFK said it right. Plus the wall had already been built. But honestly Aaron, if it wasn’t us it would have been the Soviets.
It would not have been a world war without US meddling. They financed the UK, which directly caused the collapse of the British empire, and also supported the Soviet Union via the lend-lease act.
“ich bin ein Berliner” wasn’t it?
Yes, exactly.
Yes. In the US they claimed Berliner meant jelly doughnut in German. Maybe Aaron can clear it up.
This is a reference to Berlin, the city, of course.
Not that it matters that much, but here’s the History Channel’s take:
https://youtu.be/IxAL-M2SdAU?si=fEL9b_dpqbaq4g4j
@Arron
I agree we should have stayed out of WWII. We had no beef with Germany. Only with Japan. And Hawaii was not even a state in 1941. It would be like if Guam was attacked. The answer should have been to attack a Japanese base to teach them a lesson, but no declaration of war.
Instead we dove head first into a global conflagration.
Have you guys seen the Tucker Carlson – Darryl Cooper interview?
No I have not, but I just looked it up. What are the most interesting parts of it?
I just started so I can’t comment on the most interesting parts yet
So in the interview Darryl Cooper goes off on a lot of tangents and not deep into topics. I still find it interesting because most of the stuff is new information but I’m sure you know quite a bit of it. In any case from minute 45 he talks about Churchill. Maybe listen a bit from there and see if it interests you.
I was unfamiliar with him until now. I like the emphasis on reading and particularly reading history. He is very engaging.
But he could have gone WAY harder on Winston.
OK, a little late to this party, but still
1) dont get all conspiranoid about the meaning of Kennedys words, its much simpler than that: he is restating the common defense policy of NATO, which basically hinges on US committment.
You see, the famous article 5 of the NATO treaty is actually very ambiguous and open to interpretation as to exactly what a common defense entails. During the Cold War, the US consistently sought to signal to the USSR/Warsaw Pact that the interpretation of this article was “we will militarily step in to defend Western Europe” in case you attack. Thats why they stressed over and over again how much they identified the security of Western Europe with their own because, to be frank, it was very far from clear to many people how credible that committment was. Thats also the reason why US troops and weapons (including nuclear weapons) were physically present on european soil, as tripwires (and to a lesser extent, they still are today).
The signaling was not only for the benefit of Moscow, mind you, it was also to reassure the allies too. If your commitment to defend them is not credible, they start hedging their bets and looking for options, which includes going their own way and even making deals to stay neutral or even join the enemy. Finland transited the middle road of neutrality during the Cold War, and did so successfully.
Charles de Gaulle famously did not believe the US committment to “risk losing New York to defend Paris” (not an exact quote, I am paraphrasing), so the dropped France out of NATO for a while to develop his own nuclear weapons.
Thats also why you see countries such as Poland, Estonia or Lithuania so eager to host US troops on their soil. They claim the status of “allies”, but what they really want is protection from the US. The day the reality sinks in that NATO is a paper tiger and that the US cannot defend them, a lot of countries will suddenly rediscover the value of neutrality….
Back then, the US still had some respect for their client states in Europe. Few people remember today that the US even gave them effective control of american nuclear weapons in the 1950s, including to Germany, less than a decade after the end of WW2. Kennedy was scared of this when he found out, so he started rolling back that policy when in office. The nukes would still be based on European soil, but the US would re-centralize the controls on their use, which still is the policy today.
That speech in the video must be seen against that background, and the fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis had just happened a few months earlier. By 1963 both the US and USSR were already looking for ways to scale back their rivalry.
2) WW2 would still have happened because it was part of Hitlers plan to expand to find Lebensraum in the USSR, but the war started prematurely.
Despite myths to the contrary, it was not the UK, nor the US, nor the russian winter that destroyed the nazi war machine – it was the USSR war machine, which Hitler and his generals had severely underestimated. After a disastrous rout at the beginning of Barbarossa, the Red Army managed to bounce back and become quite effective. By late 1941, already before the snows of the winter 1941/42 made life miserable for the Wehrmacht, Hitler was being told privately by his own generals and ministers that they had miscalculated, and that the war against the USSR was not winnable. The rest of the world only really took notice of this after the debacle at Stalingrad made it clear for everyone to see, but the war was lost for Germany long before.
By the time the americans landed in Normandy, the war was mostly over, the Western Front was a sideshow to the real war taking place in the East.
3) The japanese attacked the US because Roosevelt left them no other choice. He was looking for a reason to go to war against Germany during the whole year of 1941, but Hitler would not take the bait. But Roosevelt could force Hitlers japanese allies to attack them by blocking their oil imports, which put them into an impossible position.
And yes, the US also miscalculated how much damage Japan could do to them, starting by Pearl Harbor.
I wholeheartedly agree with Yarara.
One thing I would like to add is that Hitler and the German general staff could not find an alternative to the old deadlock that troubled the Generastaff of the Reich in WW1. Before WW1, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, Schlieffen and other high ranking officials were very pessimistic of Russian mobilisation policy. War in two fronts meant that Germany could withstand a long war. Then during the war, from Falkenhayn to Hindenburg and Ludendorff could not break this encirclement. Hindenburg and Falkenhayn were able to make great advance in the East and Russia were enflamed in the revolutions, but the US jumped in, making the war even more gruelsome for Germany. It was over. Against this backdrop, Hitler could not develop a sensible strategy which sought to mitigate this problem.
I understand that Hitler was overconfident because he was victorious in France, and he might not be able to predict Japan attacking Pearl Harbor. But by this time, the war was even worse for Germany because two gigantic nations together with Britain shaked hands to smash Germany. When it comes to politics, Hitler was definitely not in the same rank as Otto von Bismarck, whose shrewd understanding of contemporary European politics helped to keep the nascent German Empire out of war.
Hitler was the one who did most damage to Germany, to the self-esteem of his peoples, and the greatest murderer during the war, preceded by Stalin and followed by Mao.
Germany honoured her alliance with Japan to declare war on the US first. This was history. The US involvement was crucial in making the evil empire of Hitler vanish from earth, forever.
I know you are an intelligent and well-read guy, you should stand up for the truth.
@CQV
Hitler and his staff were overconfident because after the disastrous performance of the Red Army during the Winter War agaisnt Finland they thought the USSR to be a paper tiger. If the Finns managed to inflict so much damage on them while being so outnumbered, surely the mighty Wehrmacht will finish them off in 3 months time. Stalins purges had decimated the Red Army officer corps too, which was thought to have negatively impacted both ability and morale.
But this ignored the fact that 1) Finland was on the defensive during the Winter War, casualties almost always disproportionately affect those on the offensive, 2) Stalin was aware, Ribbentrop-Molotov pact notwithstanding, that Hitler would come for him sooner or later, and prepared accordingly, 3) long wars tend to quickly weed out ineffective commanders, so by mere darwinian selection the Red Army was likely to get better officers rising up their ranks quickly, at which point they have a multiplier effect on material advantages.
The way you avoid a two front war is through diplomatic maneuvering before the war, as Bismarck well understood. That was the reason for the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. But WW2 is hardly a 2-front war, because the Western Front was of little military relevance until june 1944. Same with Africa, it was a sideshow.
Fun fact: Hitler would have avoided war with France and the UK if he could, he thought their aggressiveness toward him difficult to explain in light of his plans against the USSR. And he was genuinely surprised that France and the UK declared war on him in 1939, without either the USA or the USSR backing them up. He thought they would just accept and come to terms with the new reality, as they had in 1937 and 1938.
The most incredible story I have come across recently is about blacks in the US believing they can get “free money” by committing check fraud, made possible by a software error at Chase:
https://archive.ph/KTA8n
Here you can watch some fine black specimens celebrate:
https://x.com/FinanceLancelot/status/1830388903045693448
The real story may be that a software bug due to outsourcing to India led to this nonsense. Thus, the blacks shield Pajeet Kumar from criticism as they are drawing attention to themselves.
Pixar movies used to be great. The early ones do not hold up particularly well but they were certainly relevant when they were released. Nonetheless, they produced one hit after another. At some point, though, they were taken over by Disney and asked to produce one sequel after another, and with a DEI gloss. Commercial appeal was apparently optional. Well, in May they had to lay off 175 people as a consequence of this bullshit. The damage is done so we will have to see if this studio is able to recover. I think they should go under, and Disney, too, even though this likely will not happen without the US collapsing.
https://archive.ph/CHRok
How do you like the idea of paying a subscription to your computer mouse? Logitech thinks that this is what the market needs:
After the Great Flooding of Germany in 2015 a few people set up trackers for migrant crime, in particular sexual violence. Many of these were shut down. There is one by the AfD, but it is not clear if it still being updated:
https://www.afd.de/einzelfallticker/
However, the new hot topic in Germany is no longer raping doctors and engineers. Instead, knife crime has been booming. On this page you can get an overview of ongoing knifing activity, arguably the purest form of cultural enrichment as it is immediately felt:
https://messerinzidenz.de/
Guys, Bud Light sales are improving! After a drop of 17% in Q4/2023 sales in Q1/2024 only dropped by another 9%. Imagine having to write such dreck for a living:
“The company is slowly recovering from that episode; U.S. revenues were down 9% in the first quarter compared to the year before, which is actually an improvement over the 17% decline in the final quarter of last year. ”
Of course, if your sales are still declining, you are far from turning around your brand.
https://www.marketplace.org/2024/05/08/bud-light-anheuser-busch-earnings-anti-trans-boycott/
NEW YORK TIMES: “It is becoming increasingly likely that there will be no clear and immediate winner on election night and that early returns could give a false impression of who will ultimately prevail.”
“If a winner is not declared on election night, it will not necessarily point to failures in the process. More likely, it will be a result of the intense security measures required for counting mail-in ballots.”
This isn’t gaslighting. It’s our enemies openly laughing in our faces.
Also:
https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGXjjO7uW8AAk74c.jpg
This is a brazen statement. Even two or three years ago this would have been unimaginable. Chinese political scientists who study the disintegration of the United States probably have a lot to say about this.
It seems I am missing some cultural context for the “Owen 0-2” meme. I could not find a good explanation online either.
They did the exact same thing going into 2020. Those wacky conspiracy theorists thought they were laying the groundwork for a stolen election.
In the US, “0-2” is typically pronounced “Oh and two” instead of “zero and two.”
It seems I am a bit too autistic to understand this meme. Now I at least get that the joke is “Owen” -> “Oh – one”, followed by “Oh – two”. But this seems to not work at all in writing, similar to knock-knock jokes.
No worries, some jokes just don’t work for me either. “Oh and” in this context is usually slurred so it sounds like “Owen.” It’s typically used in sports contexts (“The Bears are oh and two this year”) and might just not make sense outside the US.
The election results in the German state of Brandenburg will be presented in one hour. It will certainly be another landslide victory for the AfD & BSW and a punishment for the Greens, the Left and the like.
It will also be interesting to see whether all the refugee activism of the established parties will die down again after the Brandenburg elections.
The Reds have won the election. What a joke ;=D
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article253643714/Brandenburg-SPD-hauchduenn-vor-AfD-CDU-und-BSW-kaempfen-um-Platz-3-Gruene-zittern.html
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article253612534/Brandenburg-Wahl-Aktuelle-Hochrechnung-Die-Ergebnisse-im-Ueberblick.html
The AFD has made strong gains and will probably achieve a blocking minority! Then it will finally be a thing of the past that judges, for example, can be selected according to political views, as is usual in NRW….
I read that the SPD went into retirement homes and taught the demented how to fill out their mail-in ballots correctly. On a more positive note, both the Green party and the FDP are out. The AfD had a really good result.
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article253661064/Brandenburg-Wahl-Warum-die-AfD-von-Manipulationen-bei-der-Briefwahl-spricht.html
Altenheim-Theorie. Interessant… eh… interesting.
This is hilarious!