This was billed as ‘the greatest joke you’ll never get,” but I assume all of you will get it.
Time Cop: I know you sent me back in time to kill baby Hitler, but I killed Woodrow Wilson instead.
Time Cop Chief: Who is baby Hitler?
8 comments:
Anonymous
said...
I think blaming Woodrow Wilson for the vindictiveness of the French is a stretch, unless you also give him credit for the Marshall Plan. After all, the Marshall Plan was in part an attempt to correct to mistakes made in the Treaty of Versailles.
Germany, England and France have been making war amongst themselves for centuries. For all we know, Wilson was successful in his attempt to avert something worse.
Similar critiques have been lodged against the US decision to deploy nuclear bombs in an attempt to shorten the end of WWII in the Pacific. It's good to do thought experiments, but it is also good not to take them too seriously.
Time is a three-dimensional volume. We're all simultaneously responsible for everything, and at the same time none of us are responsible for any of it.
:) One of the things I enjoyed a bit too much when I wrote the alternate-history series was having the characters (Hungarians) complaining about Wilson. And I had Poincare die early, thus reducing the damage the hyperinflation caused. Things still end close to our reality, though.
Seems to me that Wilson's performance at Versailles was quite passive-aggressive: when the other players didn't immediately fall in line with his preferences, he sulked and went home early.
It might simply be that preventing America's entry into the war would have stopped Hitler from becoming anyone, as Imperial Germany could have negotiated more even terms when all parties finally became exhausted. The fresh American Expeditionary Force created the capacity to force Germany to accept even a brutal surrender.
In any case, it's a clever thought experiment to be sketched in such few words.
Chesterton would disagree. He felt that the German arrogance had not been defeated, and they would come back for more, which they did. He thought the humiliation of the money was more likely to inflame them than an utter defeat, which we forebore, would have done. He might be the origin of the 1960's theory that World Wars I and II were actually one war, interrupted.
He wrote this in the 20's, and died in '36 before seeing himself proved right.
8 comments:
I think blaming Woodrow Wilson for the vindictiveness of the French is a stretch, unless you also give him credit for the Marshall Plan. After all, the Marshall Plan was in part an attempt to correct to mistakes made in the Treaty of Versailles.
Germany, England and France have been making war amongst themselves for centuries. For all we know, Wilson was successful in his attempt to avert something worse.
Similar critiques have been lodged against the US decision to deploy nuclear bombs in an attempt to shorten the end of WWII in the Pacific. It's good to do thought experiments, but it is also good not to take them too seriously.
Valerie
Time is a three-dimensional volume. We're all simultaneously responsible for everything, and at the same time none of us are responsible for any of it.
Eric Hines
My husband just this minute relayed that joke to me!
:) One of the things I enjoyed a bit too much when I wrote the alternate-history series was having the characters (Hungarians) complaining about Wilson. And I had Poincare die early, thus reducing the damage the hyperinflation caused. Things still end close to our reality, though.
LittleRed1
Seems to me that Wilson's performance at Versailles was quite passive-aggressive: when the other players didn't immediately fall in line with his preferences, he sulked and went home early.
It might simply be that preventing America's entry into the war would have stopped Hitler from becoming anyone, as Imperial Germany could have negotiated more even terms when all parties finally became exhausted. The fresh American Expeditionary Force created the capacity to force Germany to accept even a brutal surrender.
In any case, it's a clever thought experiment to be sketched in such few words.
Absent American money and paid-for-with-that-money-munitions, the allies probably would have lost the war in '16 or '17
ALTHOUGH, I'm not sure at the time what the government could have done to prevent the lending of money to the allies by US banks.
Chesterton would disagree. He felt that the German arrogance had not been defeated, and they would come back for more, which they did. He thought the humiliation of the money was more likely to inflame them than an utter defeat, which we forebore, would have done. He might be the origin of the 1960's theory that World Wars I and II were actually one war, interrupted.
He wrote this in the 20's, and died in '36 before seeing himself proved right.
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