Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "TIKhistory" channel.

  1.  Meimme Wolf  Watch the video. Helping Germany control the entire continent would not have been in the UK's interest. There's also the matter of the millions of people Hitler had murdered.
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  2.  @zanneraby  It's fair to use that to criticize the countries that refused to take them, but it hardly excuses Hitler and Germany for murdering them.
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  3. Do they even allow cis men on the View?
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  4. Grant did not have the authority to address the political issues of the war. When he demanded unconditional surrender, it meant something entirely different from what we're talking about here: that the military forces - not the government behind them - he had defeated would have to surrender and become prisoners of war rather than being granted terms that would allow them to leave their hopeless position and either rejoin the enemy army or be allowed to return to their homes on parole. That practice - the offering of terms to surrounded garrisons that would allow them to return to their own side - had ended by the time of WW2. Interestingly, Lee's surrender at Appomattox - which was a surrender of his army, not an end to the war or a surrender of all Confederate forces - was NOT unconditional. Lee's soldiers were allowed to return to their homes after giving their parole not to engage in further rebellion, they were not required to take an oath of loyalty to the Union at that time, and officers were allowed to keep their sidearms and personal baggage. At that point Grant realized the war was effectively over and there was little practical threat of the soldiers rejoining the Confederate forces, so there was no point to marching them into prison camps. But those terms applied only to soldiers who were still with Lee's army at the end. Two of my great-great-grandfathers who had been captured earlier (but after the prisoner exchange system had broken down) were held for several months after the war, one at Fort Delaware and one at Libbie Prison in Richmond, which had formerly been used to house Union officer prisoners. The latter's family lived in Richmond (where I grew up) and my mother told me her grandmother had told her stories about trying to throw bread to her father through the upper story windows along with other children because the Federals were still starving the prisoners in revenge for the treatment of Union prisoners at Andersonville.
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  5.  @tancreddehauteville764  Many other wars of independence were ended that way. The Americans agreed to give up any claim to Canada in return for UK recognition of their independence, and the UK agreed to let most of Ireland become independent while retaining the six northern counties (which promptly caused a civil war in Ireland over whether to accept the treaty). The difference in the American Civil War was due to Union success on the battlefield, not the lack of political divisions on the issue of peace in the North - indeed, as late as November, 1864 the northern Democrats had an election platform based on a compromise peace with the Confederacy, and they were doing well until Sherman took Atlanta and more northerners began feeling that the war could be won in the near future.
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  6. There's one corollary to this that people rarely acknowledge, and that is that if the UK had made peace in 1940 Hitler would have been able to buy all the oil he wanted or needed on the world market - the US might have embargoed him, but countries like Venezuela would have been only too happy to do business - and probably would have won the war. In this sense the biggest strategic blunder Hitler made was not invading the USSR - that was the whole reason for the war - or even invading when he did - as you note, he couldn't put it off any longer - but going to war with the UK without having any plan whatsoever as to how he would compel the UK to make peace once he overran France. He just assumed they'd come to terms once he was sitting in Paris, the same way, and just as disastrously, as Napoleon assumed Russia would come to terms once he was sitting in Moscow. In war, it is never enough to know how you're going to beat the enemy militarily, you also have to know how you are going to turn military victories into a political one. The US made the same strategic blunder in Vietnam. Commieboos who like to talk about how the USSR beat Hitler singlehandedly always seem to leave out this absolutely critical factor: the UK blockade and how it crippled Germany's economy and military by depriving them of oil from outside Europe.
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  7. tried to negotiate peace? You mean like when Hitler pledged at Munich that if he got the Sudetenland he would respect the sovereignty of the rest of Czechoslovakia and have no more territorial demands in Europe? How'd that work out?
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  8.  @AMX8799  If I have a property dispute with my neighbor, the existence of some legitimate legal claim on my part does not justify my shooting the neighbor.
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  9. The US would never have done it with Roosevelt as president.
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  10.  @hermitoldguy6312  There was a scientific basis for gravity, just not an explanation for its existence. But it was observed and experimentally confirmed that mass attracts mass.
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  11.  @maudeeb  No, it does not. East Asians and western Europeans have the highest percentage of Neanderthal DNA, are they the same race under any racial theory?
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  12.  @maudeeb  And so do Melanesians. Are East Asians the same race as the English, or the Papuans?
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  13.  @maudeeb  You've ignored both questions. Are Manchurians and Papuans the same race? Because I'm not aware of any racial theory that would say they are.
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  14.  Kenny Shepard  Consider that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has the word Democratic in the name.
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  15.  @godscroissant1539  You're talking about the evolution of the name they used, not the actual conception of God. And it's not even the same God in the history of Judaism - at one time YHWH and El/Elohim did not refer to the same deity. When the Jews came to understand that there is only one God, their conception of that God changed radically, and can't really be compared to earlier conceptions that used the same name. They just repurposed both names to refer to the new conception.
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  16.  @suzannakoizumi8605  I do not have ANY information that would lead to the arrest or indictment of Hi11ary C1inton!
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  17. But the 𐌔 rune had become known as the sieg rune before the SS adopted it.
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  18. You ask why the Habsburg empire didn't collapse in 1848, and the answer is very simple: Russian intervention. 300,000 Russian troops intervened to crush the Hungarian revolution in 1849. It wasn't so much that the Allies caused Austria-Hungary to fall apart in 1918-19 as it was that they declined to prevent it from falling apart as they had done in 1848-49.
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  19. Apparently you don't understand Wagner. That's okay, neither did the Nazis.
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  20.  @Carl88-p5n  Only a small slice of 1939 Poland had ever belonged to Germany. And Hitler was extremely idealistic. He could act with cold calculation when called for, but his ultimate aims were ideological and even romantic. A war with both the Western Allies and the USSR (hopefully, from Hitler's point of view, not at the same time, of course) was inevitable from the day he took power, unless he was removed from power before he could start one.
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  21.  @weareeverywhere8851  It doesn't make him a socialist either. He represented a third way.
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  22.  @parlyramyar  That is nonsense. Socialism is not just collectivism, it is control of the means of production by the workers.
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  23. They beat Russia in 1917.
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  24.  @whiskey_tango_foxtrot__  But those markets were controlled by the Allies, which means they'd dry up once Italy declared war on any of the Allies.
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  25. It would have been a completely different war without the British blockade. And the tide may have turned at Stalingrad, but the war was far from over.
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  26.  @XavierY828  I guess even the darkest cloud has a silver lining.
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  27. You must be bigly into flat earth.
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  28.  @matthewbadley5063  Peripheral. Britain has always wanted to control strategic naval bases around the periphery of Europe, but its territorial ambitions on the continent have been extremely limited since the days of the Tudors.
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  29.  @matthewbadley5063  The Plantagenets had, at times, very large continental holdings, and the Tudors occasionally had thoughts of regaining at least part of that empire, although their dynastic and religious problems, as well as the relative strength and unity (at least compared to the Middle Ages) of the French monarchy, made that a pipe dream. The Tudor period is when the English monarchy transitioned to the balance of power policy that held for the next 400 years.
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  30. Being insane and following an irrational ideology are not at all the same thing, although they may sometimes produce similar practical results. But irrationality is a powerful force in the human consciousness and it will always hold an attraction for people who do not believe that post-Enlightenment rationality has not produced an ideal society. And let's face it, post-Enlightenment rationality has not produced a perfect society, far from it. I do think a case can be made that after the July 20 plot Hitler suffered a significant mental decline and had increasingly bad judgment. This doesn't excuse any of crimes before or after that event, but it did affect his ability to manage the war competently. Not that it made much difference, and if anything it was probably a blessing since he might have been able to drag the war out even longer had he not been so impaired.
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  31. Not like that, it isn't. Arguing that words mean the opposite of what everyone else says they mean because etymology will get you smacked down hard in academia. What TIK is doing, and what you are applauding, is like going into a discussion on Marxist theory and saying that someone who lives in a country mansion cannot by definition be part of the bourgeoisie because the word "bourgeoisie" derives from the word "burghers" which originally meant people living in cities.
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  32.  @Warcraft40000  I get what you're saying, but the problem is this: in the academic world you're often talking about a very specialized context, and bringing in a definition from a dictionary that is not meant for that context only creates confusion and makes meaningful discussion more difficult. I am an attorney, I've made a career in statute interpretation and annotation, and I can tell you that if you try to apply definitions from Webster's or even the OED in a legal context, or even worse if you look at the etymology of words that are used in legal jargon, you will get things very badly wrong. This is not because lawyers are trying to bamboozle the public, it's because its a very specialized and technical context that requires its own terminology to describe concepts that don't even exist outside that context, and while that terminology borrows words from everyday English and from other languages like Latin and Norman French, the meaning of those words changes when you use them in that context. This is no less true of history, economics, politics, or any other academic field. If you are involved in a discussion on economics that involves the concept of elasticity and you insist on making pedantic points about the physical properties of rubber bands or the meaning of the Greek word elastos you are only adding confusion and removing actual meaning from the discussion.
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  33. Followup question: was Stalin insane? I think to answer that we need to carefully define what we mean by "insane". I think many experts would agree that Stalin had a paranoid personality and could probably be diagnosed with a personality disorder under the DSM-4 (I haven't had a chance to look at the 5th edition yet). But a having a personality disorder isn't the same as being raving lunatic with no control over your thoughts and actions. And as a legal matter, at least in the US and UK (I know almost nothing of continental European or other laws on this), it is not a defense to a criminal prosecution.
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  34. But there wasn't a next war. The value of that cannot be overstated. The main problem with appeasing Hitler was that it didn't work - and Churchill knew it wouldn't because he alone (in the West) understood Hitler. If Hitler had been anything approaching a reasonable man, it would have been a wise policy. The Sudetenland wasn't worth 50 million dead. The mistake was in imagining that Hitler was anything approaching a reasonable man given the copiuos evidence to the contrary - all you had to do was read his book or listen to his speeches. Whereas Stalin, evil as he was, was at least rational enough that he'd abide by a compromise rather than starting a war just because he thought war was such a splendid thing.
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  35.  @johnburns4017  Whatever, little boy. What got you so butthurt about the US? American aeronautical inventions are too numerous to even begin to mention, including, of course, the airplane itself. American fire control computers for naval guns and submarine torpedoes were the most advanced in the world; the US was the only country producing 100+ octane avgas, which gave a huge performance boost to Allied fighters; the Higgins boat, often called the weapon that won the war; synthesis of penicillin on a useful scale; blood plasma transfusions; radar fire control for warships; synthetic rubber; and, of course, the atomic bomb, probably the most important development in weapons technology since the invention of stone tools. "Even the A-Bomb was worked out by the MAUD Committee then given to the USA free" I don't think you could possibly make a more ignorant statement. The theoretical science behind the a-bomb was the product of many people in many nations (although the world's first nuclear reactor was, of course, in Chicago, not London or Berlin), but the only nation that actually developed a working bomb, indeed the only nation that had anything remotely approaching the ability to refine enough uranium or synthesize enough plutonium for a bomb, was the US. You might as well say the V-2 was an American invention because of Robert Goddard.
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  36. The US was never going to sell oil to Nazi Germany as long as Roosevelt was president, and even if it did, there was no way to deliver it through the Royal Navy blockade unless the US declared war on Britain, which was absolutely never going to happen. For that matter, Hitler could have bought the oil he needed from Venezuela, which would have been happy to do business with him, but again, he had no way to get it through the UK blockade.
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  37.  @nottoday3817  The USSR fought, as it always did (and continued to do for five decades afterward), to secure control of a broad-based leftist coalition and subordinate it to Moscow. When it became clear that almost no one in the Republican coalition, even the radicals, had any interest in being subjected to a Stalinist puppet government, Stalin abandoned his support for the Republicans and left them hanging for the Falangists and their Nazi and Fascist sponsors to devour. There was no one more consistently persecuted, attacked, and betrayed by Stalin and the other Bolsheviks than other leftists who provided any alternative to Bolshevik control. Stalin's early support for the Republicans had little to do with resistance to Hitler since it was clear to anyone with a brain that, despite some ideological affinities, Franco had no more intention of becoming a Nazi puppet than the Republicans had of becoming a Stalinist one.
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  38.  @valenrn8657  The kaiser's naval expansion had more to do with the UK's entry into WW1 than Belgium did. The UK simply could not risk having its greatest rival control the other side of the English Channel whether that rival marched through Belgium or around it. Belgian neutrality was mostly a convenient excuse for intervening. This is why Kaiser Bill was so surprised that Britain would fight over "a scrap of paper" - he failed to understand that his foolish policies had given them much more than a scrap of paper to fight over.
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  39.  @porphyry17  Projects to rebuild alleged ancient empires can never lead to peace because these claims inherently conflict with each other. And VERY few people can honestly claim to be the first people who lived in the area they call home. German-speakers were not the original inhabitants of what is now Poland, and Greek and Illyrian speakers (none of the latter even exist today, btw) were not the original inhabitants of the Balkans.
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  40. What did they think Hitler was, an alien? A literal demon from Hell? No, the human race doesn't get off that easily, he was one of us. How can we possibly prevent future Hitlers from gaining power and following a similar path if we don't try to understand what it is about human beings that makes us able to do such terrible things?
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  41. He should have sent bagels instead.
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  42. Not only did no one have any idea that oil was there, the technology for offshore drilling wasn't there either.
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  43. Silly little boys don't seem to understand that a movie is not real life.
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  44.  @Swift-mr5zi  By "French aristocrats" do you mean the Normans who controlled England at that time? Because IIRC they first invaded Ireland around the 12th century.
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  45.  @koko2bware  Sure, I'm a denier- a BULLSHIT denier.
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  46.  @robertsmith4681  For ancap to "work" it needs all the people who participate in it to be Vulcans, scrupulously honest and logical. oddly enough, that's the exact same problem communism has.
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  47.  @nunceccemortiferiscultu7826  You might want to read some actual history and forget nonsense you get from YouTube. Iran and India are not and never have been inhabited by Arabs from Arabia. You might as well say black Christians in Nigeria are actually Jewish since they follow a religion that originally came from from Judea.
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  48. Is that you, Ronald Reagan? Is that me? [/Private Joker voice]
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  49.  @sirtalkalot3211  No one, not even Hitler, expected France to collapse like it did in 1940. Unlike in 1914, everyone expected a long total war, but like 1914, everybody expected their side would win.
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  50.  @Purvis-dw4qf  Who started bombing cities, though? The Germans and Japanese had been bombing civilians for years before anyone finally retaliated against them. It was a practice of war that was accepted as fair by all sides, even if it isn't today, just like unrestricted submarine warfare was practiced and considered fair by all sides, even though it hadn't been in 1917. But the British and Americans did NOT send ten million helpless civilians to death camps to be exterminated, and that has never been considered fair by anyone other than monsters. That's why it's a case of false equivalency.
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