Historical Ironies...

One of the causes of the Sino Soviet split in the 1960s was Mao Zedong being unhappy with Khruschev being "soft" on the west. Faster forward a decade, and it was Mao and China who turned to the West and become quasi-allies against the USSR.
 

Archibald

Banned
The SR-71 titanium. In order to build a spy plane to overfly the USSR borders, Lockheed needed large amounts of titanium... and the world supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. No problem for Lockheed: they set up a smoke screen of hollow companies to buy the titanium.
 
In the 1880s, following the infamous "trefa banquet" that shattered any hope of interdenominational cooperation amongst American Jews for a century, it became a trend for Reform Jews to dismissively refer to Orthodoxy as "kitchen Judaism" because of the latter's adherence to dietary laws.

Today, it is a common amongst the Orthodox to sneer that Reform Jews think that Judaism is just about liking bagels and lox and pastrami-on-rye.

It's not exactly symmetrical, but I think it counts as irony.
 
Not sure how historical this is exactly but Marx's last words literally were just bashing the idea of last words.
 
Wow just read some of the pages in this thread. Some stuff I had not heard about and makes you shake your head on how reality raises its head.
 
Yemen was the richest country in the Arabian Peninsula from basically the beginning of History to the discovery of oil in the region. Now it's the poorest, because Yemen is the only country in the peninsula that has no oil. But don't worry. It'll rise again when oil dries up. After all, it is also the only country with renewable sources of water.

The passenger pigeon (extinct in 1914) was the most numerous bird in North America at the beginning of the 19th century.

In the 16th century, France was a deeply divided country in which foreign nations fought their proxy wars. In the 17th century (particularly the first half), it was Germany. During that 16th and first half of the 17th century, Spain was envied for its unity and lack of internal conflict.

Spain is the only country that still uses the Cross of Burgundy and the French Fleur de Lis as symbols. At the same time.

The only non-Russian European state that captured Moscow successfully was Poland, in 1610. They held it for 2 years.

Horses evolved in (North) America.

France bought Corsica the year before Napoleon was born. His mother tongue was Italian (well, Corsican), and he was a Corsican nationalist in his youth (as much as one can talk of such thing at the time). He wrote this in a letter to exiled Corsican leader Pasquale Paoli, sent about two months before the storming of the Bastille:

As the nation was perishing I was born. Thirty thousand Frenchmen were vomited on to our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in waves of blood. Such was the odious sight which was the first to strike me.
 
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Despite Canadian constantly claiming that their fighters need two engines, the Canadian government chose the F/A-18 Hornet over the F-16 Fighting Falcon in the NFA because the Hornet had the capability to use the AIM-7 Sparrow missile.

That's funny, the original USAF F-16 carried Sparrows, and nowadays AMRAAM.
 
In 1924, the German Karl Bartenbach was hired as an expert by the Finnish Defence Ministry, to work for a state office for designing and building warships for the nascent Finnish Navy. Bartenbach was one of the most experienced German submarine officers of WWI, and he had led the German Flanders U-boat flotillas in the British Home Waters since 1915, eventually as Führer der U-boote commanding nearly 30 submarines after 1917.

The man who hired Bartenbach, and for whom Bartenbach would design submarines and armored coastal ships in the 1920s was the then commander of the Finnish Navy, Gustav von Schoultz. A former Russian Navy officer, he had been assigned as a Russian liaison to the Royal Navy, and in this capacity for example took part in the Battle of Jutland, after going on the record to exhort the British Admiralty to "engage in greater offensive undertakings".

While von Schoultz was the leader of the Finnish Navy in the twenties, he was considered by the British as one of their greatest allies in the Finnish defence community, based on his WWI-period contacts and cooperation with British officers and his brief service in the Royal Navy itself after the Russian Revolution. Von Schoultz was very supportive of building Finnish submarines (in 1926-30 as the chairman of the Finnish Navy League, the main pressure group for creating a strong navy). On the other hand, the submarines created for the Finnish fleet under the tutelage of Bartenbach would significantly advance German submarine construction in the interwar, especially the CV-707 (Saukko) that became the direct prototype of the German Type II coastal subs.

In the late 20s von Schoultz, who was of German stock and was married to a German woman, was essentially smoked out of the navy during a campaign by the German-trained "Jäger" officers aimed against soldiers in the Finnish armed forces who had been members of the Russian Army and Navy in WWI.

I guess the interwar period was quite rife with such historical ironies in the newly independent states.
 
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Andrew Jackson hated paper money and tried to abolish it. Today he appears on the twenty dollar bill.

Despite his ongoing struggle against Communist China, the current Dalai Lama is a self-described Marxist.

George Lucas survived a car crash because his seat belt failed. He was planning to become a race car driver, hit a tree and was flung from his car. Mere moments later the car he was racing against crashed into his car, crushing it.

General Henry "Hap" Arnold is considered the Father of the US Airforce. Despite being an accomplished pilot and aviation officer, he was afraid of heights and the first person to get in a plane crash.

The inventor of the fire hydrant is unknown. Why? Because the patent was lost in a fire.
 
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