Your favorite reason why Britain would DoW Germany anyway if Berlin went east-first in 1914

If Germany attacked Russia, not France or Belgium, in 1914, UK would DoW Germany because:

  • 1. It thinks France and Russia are the likely winners and wants to stay on their good side

    Votes: 9 2.2%
  • 2. It thinks a defeat or setback for Russia in Poland/Balkans alone makes Germany too powerful

    Votes: 111 27.1%
  • 3. It thinks a defeat/setback for Russia now means a defeat for France later, so preempt it now

    Votes: 65 15.9%
  • 4. Getting involved in war in Europe is a great way to distract from Irish controversies

    Votes: 19 4.6%
  • 5. It wants to capture Germany’s overseas colonies for Cape-to-Cairo route

    Votes: 13 3.2%
  • 6. It wants to have an excuse to blockade German commercial competition off from markets

    Votes: 25 6.1%
  • 7. It wants to destroy the German navy, either through battle, or coerced as part of peace terms

    Votes: 42 10.2%
  • 8. Britain actually wouldn’t go to war with Germany in this case

    Votes: 126 30.7%

  • Total voters
    410

CalBear

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In the same sense that the UK was major Nazi 1600-1960.
Well, that's a week on the bench.

Would have been a 10 on the Nationalist insult score if it wasn't for the 8.7 from the East German Judge.
 
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Parliament believed, in the name of unproved paranoia fostered by an RN fearful of budget cuts, that Germany would come for France after Russia and Britain after France. So they will try to defeat Germany while they still can and it has been consistent British foreign policy for more than 200 years since the Nine Years war to fomenting and prolonging intra-European wars in the name of militaristic and ultra-jingoistic expansionism. In addition to the totally unjustified paranoia that any hypothetical "European dominant power" would have as its main priority raising its flag in London and destroying Great Britain without any clear reason for it.
FTFY

why can't people digest that Prussia was mini Nazi ?
Because they aren't and believing this is just digesting British propaganda.
 
Well, that's a week on the bench.

Would have been a 10 on the Nationalist insult score if it wasn't for the 8.7 from the East German Judge.
I think this person was trying to highlight that Prussia was just an imperialist power no different than it’s peers, in an attempt to point out the poor logic of the responding post. Like, “If X is a Nazi then Y is too. See how bad that sounds?”
At least that’s how I read it.
 
To clarify, my own opinion is that Prussia was the standard imperialist power of the 19th century, but they hadn't reached Nazi levels of evil. So, calling them Nazis is an awful exaggeration. Which does not mean either that they were pacifist pigeons. Only they did not meet the Nazi characteristics.
 

Riain

Banned
One good thing about the proto-nazi narrative is that it's motivated me to do a lot of reading. I now know a lot about the structure of the imperial German government, the mechanics of the so called silent dictatorship, German war aims and their evolution as the war progressed, the difference between war and campaign planning, the cimmand structure of the imperial German navy and a bunch of other interesting ww1 stuff.
 
Parliament knew that Germany would come for France after Russia and Britain after France. So they will try to defeat Germany while they still can and it has been consistent British foreign policy for more than 200 years since the Nine Years war to prevent a Hegemon on Mainland Europe

why can't people digest that Prussia was mini Nazi ?

So a British version of the Domino Theory?

Here's the Irish version:

 
Which even most Brits wouldn't take seriously these days.

Was Australia "Nazi" because of what happened to the Tasmanian Aborigines?
Or the US because of what happened to Native Americans when it expanded westward or Filipinos during the Philippine-American War. Imperialism was pretty horrible no matter who was perpetrating it. Still doesn’t make any of the powers who did it as cartoonishly evil as the Third Reich.
 
Which even most Brits wouldn't take seriously these days.
At least the previous poster believes this.

Was Australia "Nazi" because of what happened to the Tasmanian Aborigines?
Uhm, what? I think no one is talking about Australia.

Or the US because of what happened to Native Americans when it expanded westward or Filipinos during the Philippine-American War. Imperialism was pretty horrible no matter who was perpetrating it. Still doesn’t make any of the powers who did it as cartoonishly evil as the Third Reich.
Essentially this. One thing is imperialism and another is the cartoonishly evil exaggeration that was Hitlerian Germany. Both are horrible, but the second one is exaggeratedly more horrible than the first.
 
Britain cannot feed itself, it has to import some 50% of its food, what's more a huge portion of it has to be delivered directly to London's docks and if not some 30% of the population of London will have to be evacuated to where it can be fed. A renewed uboat campaign from bases in northern and western France will be a nightmare. Britain will not be able to defeat Germany, yet its likely that without the Western or Eastern Fronts Germany can put its effort into reversing the situation in the Middle East.

Why couldn't Britain import food, if they are still controlling the seas?

They probably would have to negotiate a peace anyways, but I doubt that would be the reason.
 
Why couldn't Britain import food, if they are still controlling the seas?

They probably would have to negotiate a peace anyways, but I doubt that would be the reason.
The idea is supposed to be that Germany will manage to impose a naval blockade that prevents the UK from importing food because it turns out that shipping companies do not like to put their ships in active war zones. Which they almost did in both world wars with their submarine campaign (Germany's problem was that unrestricted submarine warfare gave the US an excuse to intervene on the UK side).

The problem, of course, is that the UK knew that very well and based its entire campaign on it. Hell, Churchill's plan was to literally hang on until the Americans came to the rescue. In World War I the plan was to hold out until Germany's economy exploded due to the distant blockade. Which for all practical purposes translated into the UK letting Germany run at will across Europe between 1914 and 1918 while they starved the rest of the continent to "prevent Germany from feeding".
 

Riain

Banned
Why couldn't Britain import food, if they are still controlling the seas?

They probably would have to negotiate a peace anyways, but I doubt that would be the reason.

They won't be controlling the sea, the uboats will be contesting the control from newly taken bases is northern and western France. This is a different problem than the RN faced before when there were a couple of dozen coastal uboats in Flanders and the full sized boats were based in Germany. Bear in mind that the Entente gas lost the war, Britain can't get a victory so why is it prolonging the war.
 
Precisely my point. No one considers it "Nazi" because it wasn't. Nor was old Prussia.
My point was to say that to believe that Prussia was a Nazi, or mini-Nazi, as someone previously said, requires an extremely pro-British point of view AFAIK.

Mainly because Prussia was your standard 19th century imperialist power: unpleasant, to be sure; imperialist, of course. But Nazi or mini Nazi? Ridiculously exaggerated (and false).

Also, I think you've confused me with the other guy who said "the British Empire was Nazi", which is another exaggeration (and false).
 
I came across a couple of Prussian dudes on Wikipedia while doing a light scan on the liberal Kaiser Frederick III that struck me as proto Nazis. I'm sure if Nazi was a word back then, one with the weight it has today amongst responsible academics, Frederick and his wife would have called these dudes Nazis.



From the following article:


"During an effort led, between 1879 and 1881, by the völkisch historian Heinrich von Treitschke and the court chaplain, Adolf Stoecker, to dis-emancipate German Jews, the Crown Prince and Crown Princess were in opposition, Victoria writing that she saw "Treitschke and his supporters as lunatics of the most dangerous sort", and opining that Pastor Stoecker properly belonged in an insane asylum."

To me, Prussia seems like it was a heavily divided society, and even if there were those with Nazi adjacent views, Germany was not a totalitarian nation back then where politicians that tried to reform the state in a more liberal and progressive direction still had their say.
 
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I came across a couple of Prussian dudes on Wikipedia while doing a light scan on the liberal Kaiser Frederick III that struck me as proto Nazis. I'm sure if Nazi was a word back then, one with the weight it has today amongst responsible academics, Frederick and his wife would have called these dudes Nazis.



From the following article:


"During an effort led, between 1879 and 1881, by the völkisch historian Heinrich von Treitschke and the court chaplain, Adolf Stoecker, to dis-emancipate German Jews, the Crown Prince and Crown Princess were in opposition, Victoria writing that she saw "Treitschke and his supporters as lunatics of the most dangerous sort", and opining that Pastor Stoecker properly belonged in an insane asylum."

To me, Prussia seems like it was a heavily divided society, and even if there were those with Nazi adjacent views, Germany was not a totalitarian nation back then where politicians that tried to reform the state in a more liberal and progressive direction still had their say.
You could find strongly antisemitic idiots in every country of the time including France, Austria-Hungary, the UK, Germany and lets not get started on Russia which was by far the worst for the jews at the time I think.
 
Read the article about the first guy I linked. His antisemitic nature was but the garnish a top a stew including advocating the extermination of natives in Africa. It's a short, fascinating read.
 
You could find strongly antisemitic idiots in every country of the time including France, Austria-Hungary, the UK, Germany and lets not get started on Russia which was by far the worst for the jews at the time I think.
Treitschke was held in high regard by political elites of Prussia. Bernhard von Bülow, chancellor from 1900 to 1909, personally declared that he kept a copy of von Treitschke's book for "several years" on his desk.

Tirpitz had this to say in his memoirs: There were none of the great historians left, who had guided public opinion in an earlier generation, after the death of Treitschke, that glorious man, whose lectures I had attended at the University after 1876, and who had also given me private advice as I sat at his side in Josty’s, scribbling my questions on a tablet. I cannot understand why the spirit of Treitschke has disappeared from the teaching of German history.

Treitschke was quite influential. Anti-Semitic agitation soon took off at the national level after the founding of the German Empire in 1871. By 1880/81, a nation-wide petition collected more than 250,000 signatures. Amongst the signatories were many leading scientists, writers, clergymen and officers. The petition urged the government to restrict the immigration of Jews, and to exclude them from the army, the law courts, and from school instruction and university teaching.
 
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