Proposed Ideas in history too unrealistic to work

Surprised no one has mentioned Generalplan Ost yet. The whole scheme was a smorgasbord of utterly insane and impractical ideas, and yet it was perhaps the closest of all these to being at least partially implemented. Some features of the plan included:
  • Turning Moscow into a huge reservoir and annihilating every other major city in the Soviet Union
  • Drastically reducing Germany's population density by forcing the population out of cities and into small towns and farms
  • Linking the conquered territories together by massive trains on 3 meter gauge tracks
  • The ultimate annihilation of 100 million+ conquered Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, etc. through starvation and the deportation of millions more into Siberia
  • A "wehrbauer" culture of armed peasants living in perpetual warfare (now I know where Starship Troopers got its inspiration)
You've got a couple things mixed up (no wonder since we actually have little complete documentary evidence of generalplan ost) They could have been part of the same plan but we don't know because GPO actually didn't survive the war.
The breitspuhrbahn was hitler's pet project, intent on creating a rail equivalent in europe to britain's maritime network.
Reducing the size of german cities was a part of Feder's neue stadt. iirc regional capitals of 500k, minor cities of max 100k and the rest spread across rural areas. (of course this conflicts with things like Germania and the plans for munchen.)
The wehrbauer were inspired by roman legionary colonization practices and wanted to emulate but modernize them.
 
I'm quite surprised that no one has mentioned yet the most favorite controversial planned operation of WW2 of this forum... ;)😛
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Operation Sealion, the Nazi invasion of the UK.
 
Letting BNOs from Hong Kong move en masse to North Ireland.

Even if the Northern Irish didn't object by ASB, what's to stop the BNOs from moving over to say, London?
 
You mean training them to bark at periscopes to find submarines?;) (Yeah, which of those is the nuttier idea?)
Im reminded of the RN's anti-submarine hammers from WWI. If ever there was something so cartoonishly dumb that you would think no one would try it its putting a pair of blokes in a rowboat and giving them a hammer with which to hit submarine periscopes. And yet they did.
 

A 700 meter tall tower where you drive up to the top with a massive parking garage on top?

To be fair, buildings are sort of easy bait given that they are easy to propose, and there are plenty of even weirder political suggestions, but even by most standards it is a ridiculous idea. But then, France seems to have had a rash for such things - there was a 1930s proposal for a kilometers-tall airbase for launching aircraft with a height advantage (which was probably just a science fiction project), and thank god Corbusier's projects for Paris never were able to be put into effect.
 
Oh yeah has someone mentioned the plan to make a canal in the qatara depression by nuking it?

Or you know the mediterranean dam
 

A 700 meter tall tower where you drive up to the top with a massive parking garage on top?

To be fair, buildings are sort of easy bait given that they are easy to propose, and there are plenty of even weirder political suggestions, but even by most standards it is a ridiculous idea. But then, France seems to have had a rash for such things - there was a 1930s proposal for a kilometers-tall airbase for launching aircraft with a height advantage (which was probably just a science fiction project), and thank god Corbusier's projects for Paris never were able to be put into effect.

Le Corbusier is one of those people I'd be really tempted to delete from history, if I had a time machine.

It's like he had a personal feud going on against the very concept of beauty.
 
Le Corbusier is one of those people I'd be really tempted to delete from history, if I had a time machine.

It's like he had a personal feud going on against the very concept of beauty.

Well, yeah, he pretty much did. "The desire to decorate everything about one is a false spirit and an abominable small perversion....The religion of beautiful materials is in its final death agony".

His fascist dream was for everyone to live in identical ferroconcrete apartments, Taylorist "machines for living", with sparse metal furniture, white walls bare of artwork, and window-walls bare of drapes.
 
Well, yeah, he pretty much did. "The desire to decorate everything about one is a false spirit and an abominable small perversion....The religion of beautiful materials is in its final death agony".

His fascist dream was for everyone to live in identical ferroconcrete apartments, Taylorist "machines for living", with sparse metal furniture, white walls bare of artwork, and window-walls bare of drapes.

And he seems to have reached his goal, if posthumously - most modern cities look the same to me, and are made with the exact same materials, by like a few dozen architects. It's basically a cultural genocide of homegrown architectural styles in the name of profit.
 
In Corbu's case, it was apparently due, ultimately, to germophobia. Everything should be built on pilings because the ground is dirty and full of diseases. They should be built of ferroconcrete because wood and plaster get moldy. The furniture should be metal. No rugs or drapes or paintings because those trap dust and germs. It is disgusting and bourgeois to surround yourself with nasty germ-covered ornaments. Everything should be be sparse and antiseptic and uniform and pure.

He should've been a manager at a bleach factory.
 
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Ely Culbertson's Summary of the World Federation Plan (1943).

It called for organizing the countries of the world into something like eleven blocs, each of which would have a specifically sized military force, along with an international force which would be recruited from the minor powers.

The percentages were set up so that no country or alliance would be able to overcome the others and conquer the world.

It had lots of stretches (the provisions for Palestine seemed fit to kick off a war there), assumed a level of cooperation from the Soviet Union, and seemed unable to handle anything less than an all-out world war.

Culbertson should have gone back to writing books about bridge.
 
The Chamberlain offer in 1940 to Dublin, there’s no way it would have got through the Commons and would have set NI on fire completely screwing up both H&W and Shorts with all the knock ins for British equipment.
 
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