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NNadir

(35,426 posts)
Tue Apr 1, 2025, 11:33 AM Yesterday

Sound like anyone you know?

"...public statements and erratic foreign policy greatly antagonized the international community and are considered by many to have substantially contributed to the fall of..."

I'm reading a fascinating history book 1918, War and Peace about the disintegration of Germany's government at the end of the First World War, a war initiated in part because of imperialist aspirations of the "German Empire" for new territory. They had a lot of trouble trying to assemble a government that could manage the surrender to the French, British, and American allies.

(The behavior of the German army in 1914, when the war broke out, anticipated the behavior of the World War II Germans, mass executions of civilians, that sort of thing.)

As I was reading, I went to Wikipedia to learn about Friedrich Ebert, the accidental Chancellor to whom it fell to (ultimately) organize the Weimar Republic. Then I ended up on the Wikipedia page of Wilhelm II, the last German emperor which contained the excerpt above.

This is not going to end well, 111 years after the outbreak of World War I.

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