So basically, you're telling me that we had a gigachad anti-colonialist anti-war war-hero liberal-sympathising German emperor who wanted to turn the German state into a constitutional monarchy and ally with Britain to maintain peace on the continent and counterbalance Russia and France but he got throat cancer and died a horribly painful death and instead we got his chud limp-dick son and his gay army friends (this is not a joke btw look up the Eulenburg Affair) with dreams of world domination?This has got to be some kind of bad joke.
>>18766528Yes, history is a conscious being. Epochs have their expiration dates, and the imperial era was no exception. We're living through the dying breaths of the liberal capitalist era.
>As commander of the Prussian 2nd Army in the Austro-Prussian War (1866), his timely arrival on the field at the Battle of Königgrätz (Sadowa) secured a decisive victory over the Austrian forces.>Commanding the 3rd Army, he won significant battles at Wissembourg and Wörth, and played a leading role in the Battle of Sedan, which led to the capture of French Emperor Napoleon III and the unification of Germany.
>>18766528Just flipped through the Wikipedia summary of his life and wow, it's crazy to see just how long they held off on a laryngectomy despite this growth coming back again and again with every cauterization. Benign growths shouldn't be coming back so quickly, you're just irritating the cancer if you can't take it out entirely in one goPoor guy
>>18766528Literally every German leader has wanted to ally with Britain against France and RussiaIt's just that it doesn't always work out that way
>>18766528This is such an obscure piece of German history btw that even barely any Germans know about it. I unironically don't remember learning about him in school.Shows you that for something to be historically relevant, it has to have massive impact or at the very least last a long time
>>18766537Lol you are wrong, the USA will never die, it would first nuke the entire planet and bring humanity down with it if it were to ever fall
>>18766570Britain is forever teetering between wanting to make Germany stronger so it can oppose the other continental powers (like France and Russia, but also Austria) and then getting too scared that they made Germany too strong and allying with France and Russia (and sometimes even Austria) against them.
>>18766648The USA might not but I was talking about its mode of organization and influence. Instead of liberal democratic (insofar as there's any legitimacy to that word) capitalism, there will be some sort of oligarchic billionaire feudalism. There already is a shift in relations between the USA and europe and that's most likely going to continue. I don't know what will happen but the post cold war era isn't going to survive for much longer.
>>18766648>the USA will never dieT. Literally every empire ever some time before their fall Posting this on /his/ is doubly hilarious
>>18766570>Literally every German leader has wanted to ally with Britain against France and RussiaExcept Kaiser Wilhelm II actively hindered german relations with Britain by making Germany seem like a rival in the colonial race
>>18766713Wilhelm's relations with Britain were fine prior to Victoria's death. There was an immense amount of bad blood between him and his cousin Edward
>>18766570He would actually manage it, his wife was a British princess and they had great relations with the British royalty on top of planning to actually align Germany ideologically with the Brits rather than having it be an alliance of convenience. Willy was the real cooling point in British-German relations.
Also you should note that that he would not be governing alone against the rest of the German political scene. At the time the Liberal party was still going very strong, his illness strongly contributed to their downfall. It's not hard to picture a world where he is healthy and his dad dies earlier and the liberals and socialists become the dominant forces in Germany.
Annexing Alsace-Loraine was a mistake. I'm sympathetic towards Germany's claims to the region but Bismarck was right to be skeptical about it since the annexation made a franco-german rapprochement all but impossible.
I >muh Eulenberg affairSo the charges are…a friend of his tried to be funny by wearing a skirt? And the Kaiser took a whip and started whipping him? Meanwhile Edward VII had multiple mistresses; loads of homosexuals were in the upper class of Britain to Edward’s knowledge. Edward also raised a gay son who was a complete failure, and his retarded granddaughter was shoved into an insane asylum etc. Comparatively the Kaiser was faithful to his wife, even raised his own retarded daughter, had a son who could command an an actual battlefield and not a brothel, and made gay businessmen move to Italy.
>>18767878Would never happen as long as Bismarck was around. It was Wilhelm II who got rid of the anti-socialist laws. That was about as far as the socialist would ever go in Germany short of some cataclysm war…oh wait>>18767886From the German POV, it was already impossible. The French weren’t the good guys they try to pretend to be when it comes to WW1. French school children were taught how evil the Germans were, and how France should wage war like the Napoleonic days against France. By the 1890s the French army was a dud basically. Not even Bismarck could ever predicted how weak they’d be eventually
>>18767891>the peak of Willy's military resume is "punishing" trannies by whipping them on the ass kino trvly one of the agarthan heroes of his time
>>18767898The loss of part of their national territory was gave a big boost to revanchist sentiment in France. There'd still be anti-german sentiment in France but the rabidly anti-german outlook you mention was mostly a product of what happened in the Franco-Prussian War. So even if the Franco-German enmity isn't gone it won't be as intense as it was and it certainly wouldn't be the single defining feature of European geopolitics.Also not taking Alsace-Loraine doesn't mean that Germany wouldn't get compensated elsewhere, irl the french proposed giving Germany Indochina instead of Alsace-Loraine so if Germany doesn't take Alsace-Loraine they can likely walk away with a few French colonial possessions instead.
>>18767886France only became Europe's hegemonic power because they killed 20% of Germany's population in the thirty years war.France got spared in both 1815 and 1871, despite those wars also being examples of unilateral French aggression
>>18767920You are so wrong. France started appearing strong because it centralized power. Its population peak relative to the rest of Europe was actually in the Middle Ages.
>>18767915France had been carving away territory from the HRE for centuries, and forcing the French language onto ethnic Germans. Alsace and Lorraine were just two of their more recent conquests hence why they were taken back by Germany
what do boys in skirts have to do with german colonial politics and why is that part of the discussion
>>18767920>they killed 20% of Germany's population in the thirty years war.this is only true if you blame France for the 30 years war which is obviously wrong.
>>18767931I also asked myself that question when I first read about it, reality is often stranger than fiction.
