Now, I'm not going to say that 'Hitler was right' or some nonsence like that. Infact, I'd argue that Hitler's defeat was actually good for mainland Europe, and that the Nazi regime was utterly monstrous and Britain had a good reason to fight Hitler. HOWEVER, I do firmly believe that if Britain did not fight Hitler in 1939, OR even made peace with Hitler in 1940, modern day Britain would be significantly more powerful and better off than if they did fight Hitler.Now, to counter some arguments>If Britain didn't stop Hitler, Hitler would have built a huge navy and possibly attacked BritainI believe this argument is a load of rubbish. Hitler was a sneak, that is true, but his interests were firmly East, and by going East, he would simply wouldn't have had the time nor the power to commit to a fight with Britain for the forseeable decades. A war against the Soviet Union was inevitable. That was his plan. Hitler had virtually nothing to gain in an extremely random and costly invasion of Britain, and everything to lose. TLDR: The evidence of Hitler wanting to conquer Britain at any point other than when they were at war is virtually nonexistent and purely propaganda.>What would have happenedGermany would have gone to war with the Soviet Union if it was given free reign. Possibly in 1940. Who is to say it would even prevail? If Germany loses, then the exact same situation in 1945 occurs, this time without a SINGLE British loss. Britain would essentially get a free victory without suffering the catastrophic economic damage that the war with germany did.>What if Germany beats the Soviet UnionThen Germany rules over an extremely ethnically divided mass of Eastern Europe. They would probably continue their invasions and remain an extremely fractured and broken society. This is why my argument is that Europe would indeed be better off with Hitler being defeated, but not Britain.
>>16893430>modern day Britain would be significantly more powerful and better off than if they did fight Hitler.howthe Empire still would have fallen, India still would have been lost, and there simply would not have been the patience for long drawn out wars against independence movements in the coloniesAs well as that, Japan still might have attacked the Euro possessions in the Far East
>>16893430>What Britain lost in our timelineThe outcome of WW2 was objectively a loss for Britain. The economy was battered under german bombs. The infrastructure was totaled. Britain's war debt had increased considerably, britain made several concessions to the United states to keep the war going, America and the Soviet Union pushed anti-colonial sentinment that contributed the fall of the British Empire, AND Britain was relegated to a bitch of the United States, a title that it enjoys to this very day. In other words, the point of maintaing the balance of power in Europe was not fulfilled. The West was controlled by the US, and the East was controlled by the USSR, with Britain now firmly a second-rate power.This is not an acceptable outcome.
>>16893439See here >>16893442I'm not saying that the British Empire wouldn't have still fallen, but it goes without saying that that fall would have been far slower, AND the economy would be significantly stronger without the sheer damage that WW2 did.
>>16893430You just need to stop coping and accept that the British people have a negligible capacity for organization, their interests never entered into the equation and they were never players in the game, they were just used as a disposable asset by another far more intelligent and organized ethnic group.
>>16893446OK but you do know that Japan still existed, right?
WW2 allowed Britain to bow out of the empire game with some self respect IMO.
>>16893527Japan would have attacked the United states first fundamentally. In other words, a war with japan would be a peace of cake.
>>16893532OP here, I can kinda agree. The war is a very important part of British legacy.
>>16893540What makes you so sure of that?Japan attacked Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Hawaii and the Philippines pretty much all at the same time.
>>16893597You misunderstand, I mean that if Japan goes to war with Britain, they would be going to war with America aswell because of the oil sanctions.
The British Empire was based on being one of the first European nations to form an early modern state, getting a head start on industrialisation in the late 18th century, and using that to divide and conquer a bunch of more numerous locals and settling their population far away. There is no scenario where it maintains itself as a first rank power in a world where the United States and Russia are contiguous, homogenous modern continental empires, especially not in a world where Germany conquers all of Europe. Britain had to choose which 20th century imperial lot to throw itself in with, and it chose the fellow Anglo liberal empire of the United States as the least worst option. If it had allied with Germany, the US would have dismantled the overseas empire anyway, and Britain in Europe would have ended up a vassal of a much larger European German empire anyway, an empire they had much less cultural affinity to. It was a meme alternative that no one serious contemplated.
>>16893430>Hitler was a sneak, that is true, but his interests were firmly EastYou cant know that thoYou literally cannot.And it's also a matter of optics and perception.Lets argue for arguments sake that Hitler only wanted to go east. The first question we need to ask outselves is what does Britain know that can reinforce this idea?What if hes lying? Lets say he isnt but what if?The people at the time were motivated by things they PERCIEVED. This means that Hitler must have done something which made Britain think otherwise, that made them question his credibility.Hitler needs credibility. He didnt have any. Not to the British. Not in 1939.So then our question becomes why didnt Hitler have any credibility? Why did Britain distrust him?What had Hitler done to make Britain not believing that he only had honest intentions, that he was a honest man, and that he could be given his own hegemony without stepping on Britain.Try to answer this question without using hindisight, what did the people at the time know and see.The first answer would be that Hitler signed treaties with Britain in good faith, then immediately broke it when he seized the Czechia.The second answer is that Hitler had repeated said he is a vanguard against communism, then immediately allied the communists to threaten Britain from intervening with his plans. The third answer was that Britain wanted a calm and sober negotiation over Danzig, to explore options to resolve the issue. They wanted Hitler to stand down from his war threats before any more talks could continue.Fourth reason was that there was a war-scare in Britain, sources telling them that Hitler had plans on Romania and Netherland to get oil and airfields against UK. There were false, fabricated, by third parties to push Britain towards a confrontartion with Germany, but the British believed them at the time, and Hitlers relentlessness towards war over further diplomacy only proved the aggrovators right.
>>16893695I never advised allying with Hitler, merely staying neutral. I fully agree that Britain would in the end be replaced by the United States as a world power, but not as quickly if they didn't suffer the destruction during WW2>>16893744I'd even go far to say that declaring war on germany was rational without hindsight. germany broke multiple treaties. HOWEVER, my entire argument takes hindsight into account.
>>16893430>Germany would have gone to war with the Soviet Union and previal.That sounds greatIt probably would have happened too.But why would Britain and France want that?Not everyone looks at the world from a Wagner lore perspective where everything needs to be a crusading Kulturkampf geopolitics.Maybe they were simply fine with the USSR as it was in the interwar period.Only Hitler saw this as an existential mission to "confront bloshevism".And again, ask yourself, why would Britain and France want Hitler to win against the USSR? Because now they are essentially at the mercy of Hitler. He has a nation so powerful it can challenge them both.Hitler said he would guarantee the British empire, maybe even send troops to aid it yes. yes he did.But what if Britain doesnt want that? What if Britain doesnt want ANYONE to guarantee their empire? What if Britain doesnt want a continental Europe that can both guarantee, and thus threaten if some diplomatic dispute goes sour.Britain and Germany had already had several diplomatic disputes which resulted in Britain backing down to German demands, and this was when Germany was still the underdog, how would they act when they no longer arent?Again, I am arguing from your perspective, lets say Hitler is 100% truthful and you are correct about everything. But Britain doesnt know that. The British at the time doesnt know this. They only know what they know. And you are telling them to simply take his word for it, despite everything that had already happened.This is your problem. You are completely devoid of any consideration for the perspective of the other party from how they percieved the unfolding events as they were living them.
>>16893678You mean... like what happened IRL?And Japan and Germany would still have been allies, too. In this scenario, how do you know that Germany wouldn't have declared war on Britain anyway to try to get Japan to invade the USSR?
>>16893785I quite literally agree with the majority you are saying. Purely within the logic of the time, going to war against a nation that broke an agreement of peace by invading Czechoslovakia (a nation that is primarily non-german as the german lands were already seized) was rational. The foreign policy of Britain was not isolationist like the UK, and allowing Germany to buldoze several countries simply wouldn't have been acceptable, but as I said before, the entire point of this thread is not saying "Britain should have done this at the time" but rather the outcome of what Britain pursued, IN HINDSIGHT was very unacceptable. I put forth the assertion that Britain would have been in a more comfortable position with a stretched-thin victorious Germany that has tens of millions of people who despise Germany in their borders, (aswell as a victorious Soviet Union) than what occured in our reality.B>>16893787If that occured, then Britain would have avoided the majority of the blitz because most of the German planes would have been in Russia. Infact, that would be the perfect situation.
>>16893779>I never advised allying with Hitler, merely staying neutralDoesn't make a difference, and is probably even worse then. Britain would be at the mercy of both the United States AND Germany, America overseas and Germany in Europe. It would have to fight an arms race with two vastly larger empires at the same time to maintain any independence.Literally all of British foreign policy since the 16th century had been to prevent a hegemonic power consolidating rule over the European continent, because that was the mortal threat to British independence.>I fully agree that Britain would in the end be replaced by the United States as a world power, but not as quickly if they didn't suffer the destruction during WW2Suez was 1956. In a world where Britain and America aren't allied that happens earlier, if anything. Britain acquiesced to American hegemony in 1922 with the Washington Naval Treaty, where America made it clear that it would bury the Royal Navy in an arms race if Britain renewed the Anglo-Japanese alliance.
>>16893818Or, quite possibly, they could then ally with the United States who would also fear an emerging Germany.
>>16893430Finally, with my third post, why is your thesis that ww2 was a disaster for Britain?It certainly wasnt good, but I wouldnt use the word disaster, unless we are speaking of all the British who lost their lives but then again you could argue this in just about any conflict.Why didnt the Russians simply let Austria crush Serbia.Why didnt the Prussians simply let Napoleon establish his Rhine confederacyWhy didnt USA simply let North Korea take South Korea.Why didnt they all just back down? Imagine all the lives they could have saved. Why dont we always not just back down?Or maybe you are arguing from the position that Britain lost their empire.Would staying out of ww2 have prevented that tho? How? What butterfly effect are we talking about here? What recourses does Britain suddenly have to stop decolonialism once it's set in motion, when neither the people there and the people in Britain wants to stopped.Britain isnt going to use all that military to gun down 50 million people. They're not that kind of country. It is true that ww2 speeded up decolonialism, that was more thanks to Japan than Germany since Japan proved to the people that they could govern themselves, hence why decolonialism in Asia happened almost immediately after ww2, while it took another 15-20 years before it kicked off in Africa. By that time European economy had largely recovered. And again, Britain would never stomach those kind of methods chuds often insinuates they should have done to prevent decolonialism. A major factor for decolonialism was the fact that socialist parties won eleections, specifically to cater to the working class of Britain and not to some foreign expense.
>>16893825So you then have the exact same history as what happened, except Britain's enemy is much stronger and so the country is much more dependent on the American alliance.
>>16893827I would argue it was a disaster because it resulted in half the continent being ruled by the United States, and the other half being ruled by Russia, as well as the vast economic and infrastructure damage that was inflicted upon Britain during the war.In other words, the balance of power was wiped out in Europe, and Britain swiftly became a second-rate power.
>>16893833Stronger than the Soviet Union? I actually quite doubt that. I believe a German victory in the east would be an immensely difficult operation (and quite unlikely) but if Germany prevailed, they would be ethnically fractured with tens of millions of people under their rule who despise them.
>>16893817Well why are you saying you agree with me, but still say that they should have let Hitler do his thing?Because we CANNOT know that even if Hitler gets what he wants, that Germany and Britain NEVER EVER wont have a fallout with each others.We CANNOT know that.And IF they ever had a fallout with each others, Britain and France are now extremely vulnerable.Lets use 2024 optics to make sense of what I am saying.Lets say Xi Jinping makes claims on North Korea, on Mongolia, on Khazakstan, on Iran, on India.This will create a massive empire.Why should USA and Japan care? Why not just let China swell to this size. It's not harming them, its not harming their immediate interests. Hell let China take South Korea and Taiwan too. Why risk war? Can you imagine the losses in such a war, maybe it's just better to stay out and let China have what they want.But you immediately understand why Japan cannot accept this, even if Xi Jinping only has honest intentions, even if a war with China is super destructive, USA and Japan would still risk it.
>>16893848We cannot know if the Soviet Union would invade Britain in 1944, we cannot know if America could invade Britain in 1941.We cannot know many things, but we can take realistic guesses based on the situation, and truth be told, do you genuingly believe Germany would have invaded Britain for the sole purpose of conquering it? Do you think so?
>>16893844>Germany wouldn't be stronger in a world where they conquer the USSROK. Even simply being able to demobilise a large chunk of the Wehrmacht and move production into the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe would have fucked Britain without American help.
>>16893839This is completely in hindsight tho.There was no incentive to suggest Russia and USA would rule Europe in 1939. Neither Germany nor Britain believed this.Had they believed that scenario, Germany would have immediately pulled out of Poland the moment Britain declared war, and Britain would immediately have cancelled their war with Germany.Like every other war, both Britain and Germany believed in victory. A rather easy victory.It wasnt what happened, but both sides believed in their own superiority at the time.And this is a common theme in most wars. Both sides believe they have the ultimate strategy, that it's going to be a quick and easy win.On paper Britain and France had the clear advantage over Germany in 1939. Germany was much weaker than Imperial Germany was in 1914, with no allies. French fortifications were stronger, the British fleet more advantage, French armament more powerful, British empire larger than 1914.And neither did Germany fear this as they too believed they could prevail. They knew it from Spain, from Poland, from Norway. They had complete fair in their cause and their ability. Hitler even had faith in destiny.But 1945 was how things turned out.
>>16893862my point is that Germany would be too busy pacifying the east to engage in a long-drawn out war against the Royal Navy. We could argue all day that "it could happen" "it might happen" but with hindsight, we know that Hitler had no interest in conquering the UK because it would be a complete waste of time and resources
>>16893867Agreed, it is completely in hindsight, which is why my argument is only in hindsight. I'll tell you this, to clear things. If I was Prime minister of the UK in 1939, I would have done the EXACT same thing that Chamberlain did. I would have declared war on Germany in 1939. It was the logical decision at the time with the information we had.
>>16893858Doesnt really matter what I believe, there could have been all kinds of geopoltiical fallouts or confrontations that could have made Britain and Germany fall out of favor with one another.Especially from France perspective since they held land Germany desired, technically so did Britain with previous German colonial possessions.The Germans were hungry for revenge in the end, they displayed that when France was defeated.And Britain percieved this to be true because we know for a fact that there was a war-scare in Britain that Hitler would take Romania and Netherlands in order to strike at Britain. Facts given to Britain pointed to this. They were false, they were fabricated, but the British politicians believed in them at the time.You also miss the point that most hegemonies simply want the status quo.USA at this very moment wants status quo. They dont want anyone to fight anybody, no wars of annexation. And neither did Britain. They want peace and quiet in continental Europe because it favors their own position.
>>16893884Alas, the status quo was not what Britain got in the end.
>>16893884I should probably change that last paragraph. USA does want people fighting wars of annexation, but only if its their allies *cough*Israel
>>16893880Because it's rational.Most people who argue otherwise, do it because they are emotionally invested in Germany getting their way.But I would argue that Germany would have done the same if the roles were reversed.Lets say Germany wins ww1.And Germany has to deal with the same prospect in 30 years later, but the roles are reversed. Germany would certainly want to protect their position, wouldnt they?
>>16893430I feel like something a lot of the times noone grasps on is that the Germans would push any attempts at appeasement to the limit and regularly broke treaties. Any trust the british had towards them was broken they captured Prague, only furthered by Operation Barbarossa and the breaking of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
>>16893903I definitely agree that the majority of those who make the argument that I do are incredibly sympathetic to the Nazi war effort. I want to make it clear I am not. I think Britain had every reason to go to war against Germany in 1939 after Germany invaded the Czech part of Czechoslovakia (a non german area, thus disproving that Hitler only wanted German lands) and then pursuing an aggressive foreign policy against Poland, and then committing acts of genocide and attempting to ethnically cleanse the entirety of eastern europe.What I'm trying to argue, is that the outcome of WW2 was not a favourable outcome for Britain, and that victory over Germany came at such a heavy cost.
I know it's tempting trying to find an angle to justify Hitlers action because you hate the world in 2024. I get it, we all want ethnostates.But try to instead imagine Germany today if Hitler simply DIDNT try to go on his crusade. That he does step down after Czechia. Maybe resolve Danzig at a different time. You dont think Germany today would have been a living breathing example of envy, an example of a model. This can be achieved without trying to find ways for Hitler to get his mongolian empire just to resolve economic problems Hitler identified but ultimately wasnt true. Hitler believed in the shrinking market, he believed in autarky. None of these work, yet that's what motivated his ambition to take Germany to the Caucasus. He didnt need that to build the worlds wealthiest state. West Germany alone become the third largest ecnomy in the world just 15 years after the war.And even if you believe in the whole marxist jewish plot of organized journalists pushing for Kelergi plan, you dont think all of these policies would have been met with much more fierce resistance from literally everybody if nationalism, racial hygene and conservative values had not been tarnished by fascist chimpout in 1940?
>>16893915Yes it did.Unironically this was a tactic Hitler used.The reason he pumped up the wehrmacht to such an extreme extent that it nearly crashed his nation, was specifcally as a deterrence against western intervention in his plans east. Hitler neither wanted nor anticipated a major war in 1939, and the size and armanent of the wehrmacht was a way of projecting to Britain and France that "if you try to stop me, i'll take you down with me".
>>16893870It's a dumb point given Germany was waging a bombing and U-boat campaign to force Britain into submission even while it had millions of men fighting the USSR in the east.
>>16893962By all accounts, the danger of British submission had passed when germany was embroiled in the East, and besides, like I said, Germany had no interest in assaulting Britain as it would be a complete waste of time and resources when they are already trying to pacify tens of millions of people.
>>16893870>with hindsight, we know that Hitler had no interest in conquering the UKWe actually dont know what Hitlers intentions would have been if his plans were fullfilled. because he never got that far.Hitlers original ambitions was not even to conquer Poland, Just make it subservient to Germany. He went from potiential ally to mortal enemy in the span of less than a year because the Poles simply told him no one time.
>>16893430Dude, I hate to tell you this, but The Empire was dying long before the war started. The problem was that Britain treated the conquered people too well; if we had ruled The Empire the same way that the Romans, the Assyrians, The Spanish (or any of the other great, failed, ancient empires) did then it might still - potentially - be 'not quite dead yet' today. But, by 1939, in the world we actually live in - Britain had a choice between being a second rate power in a German dominated world, or a second rate power in an American dominated world. Granted, being a second rate power in an American world kinda sucks; but being a second rate power in a German world would be horrific shit you wouldn't wish on a Frenchman in comparison. >tl;dr - it sucks, and civilisation has been dying for a while now, but it was the less shitty option.
>>16893430There were no good options after ww1 really. The outcome of WW2 was bad, but it was the least bad one.
