fantasies of being the Fuhrer

War Gaming vs History

As a war gamer, you look at who lost a war and wonder how they could have won as a technical problem, regardless of how repellent their ideologies are. Same for a lot of folks who play Axis & Allies to see if there's a way for Japan or Germany to do better than they did in WWII. Short answer, if they weren't lost in nutty fantasies of cultural superiority, they might have done better by not fighting the bloody war at all. Taking a good look at the odds requires sanity which checked out long before any DoW in the German and Japanese's leadership's cases. Denying reality bones you in ANY endeavor. Any questions?

Here in the US, we have folks who dress up and fight as Confederates in Civil War reenactments. I'm a Texan with ancestors that were Confederate war heroes, but I look at them as a mixture of good, bad, and ordinary people fighting for a shitty cause. Freedom for states to continue an oligarchy dependent on slave labor? :eek::eek:. :mad::mad::mad:
Sorry. That needed to be removed with all due force and am damned glad it's in the dustbin of history. Sure, once we did that, was everything milk and honey? No.
I can't look at a Dixie flag without feeling a deep sense of shame and outrage for all the wasted lives before, during and after the American Civil War because of the benighted stubbornness, hatred, and violence growing from that poisoned tree of bigotry in Southern culture.
Our history is painful, but it informs and challenges us to be better.

This site tries to accomplish a little of both, wargaming better outcomes for those that lost (as well as less Pyrrhic victory scenarios for that won) and sorta playing with history both to inform us about the details and turning points and personalities involved, debate their importance, and maybe tell a good story along the way.

Holocaust deniers and apologists need not apply. Those facts you can't argue away. Apologists may point to the horrors perpetrated by various Communist regimes as a reason that Germany did it, but that's bollocks.
Germany chose to do evil deliberately not to respond to a threat of Communist takeover per se but to fulfill their ideological agenda.
The Soviets and others did it to enact and protect their socialist utopia, using the most ruthless and cruel methods imaginable.
Both are inexcusable bastards of the first water. History is clear on this.
 
As a war gamer, you look at who lost a war and wonder how they could have won as a technical problem, regardless of how repellent their ideologies are. Same for a lot of folks who play Axis & Allies to see if there's a way for Japan or Germany to do better than they did in WWII. Short answer, if they weren't lost in nutty fantasies of cultural superiority, they might have done better by not fighting the bloody war at all. Taking a good look at the odds requires sanity which checked out long before any DoW in the German and Japanese's leadership's cases. Denying reality bones you in ANY endeavor. Any questions?

While I find your post well argued and probably quite indicative of the motivation of most forum members and wargamers, I do take objection to your assumption that the result of war is preordained. That a cool evaluation of certain values (economic? military strength?) can instantly provide the answer to who would win a war and that leaders who defy these values are thus idiots.

If only mankind agreed with you, we wouldn't have had a couple of millenia of idiots fighting wars, right?

Unfortunately, nothing is certain in war (didn't Clausewitz say that or was it Sun Tzu?) and many events influence the end result. Hell, that's why we hang around here, because we like and accept the fact that history isn't preordained and linear. In fact, people can't even predict election results, let alone a major war. Don't mistake hindsight for preordained....The same people who claim SeaLion could never succeed are the same people who would have claimed the succesful conquest of Norway or Crete couldn't have happened either....
 
Bizarre shows of respect and disturbing admirations aside, Guy Fawkes' hypothesis just doesn't fly. People cannot be dragooned into belonging to a culture, particularly when said culture starts by eradicating their own.

Every aspiring world conqueror has tried to take this road - and failed. Burn every French book, every French flag, dynamite every French monument and make sure French kids take a pledge to Nazu Germany at gunpoint, they'll still not be Germans. The Soviets tried this. The Nazis tried this. Even the Romans tried this. And it doesn't work, mostly because as one poster above me said, people have this terrible tendency to have a mind and a conscience and cravings of their own.
 
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