The assassination of Franz Ferdinand

OHMSS69

@DarthDimi We feel your pain and angst. Belgium has the misfortune of lying (like Poland) on main invasion routes. The wars of Louis XIV, Napoleon, the two World Wars all left the tiny country scarred. You guys never bothered anybody. At the Vienna Congress in 1815 the heads of Europe (Britain especially) vowed to preserve Belgian neutrality. After the Germans dove in (to get at Paris quickly) Britain entered the war.

Britain had always felt that the low Countries (Belgium in particular) was a dagger pointing at the heart of England and the thought of a powerful continental power in control kept them up at night. Thus the British ready to take on France and later Germany in defense of your peaceful land.

DarthDimi

I never saw things that way. Thank you, @OHMSS69. :-)

Btw, peaceful though we may be, there's also a very dark page in our history. It's called the Belgian Congo and it stars our king Leopold II, rubber, brutality against natives, and more rubber. Nothing to be proud of. Other than that though, yes, I'd say we're peaceful enough. ;-)

(Not me though. I have my world domination plans outlined and ready to go. *stroking my white cat*)

4EverBonded

12 Hercule Poirot

(And come on over any time, Dimi; the sushi alone is worth it). :)

DarthDimi

13 Some film stars:

- Van Damme
- Hepburn
- Bauchau (Scarpine ;-))

4EverBonded

Yes! Audrey forever. One of my all time favorites; also because she seems to have been a most decent and genuinely kind person, by all accounts.

I could change my name:
4EverAudrey


14 Did anyone mention waffles yet?

DarthDimi

Audrey Hepburn was an angel. :x

I now officially nominate this thread for the most off-topic thread. ;-)

4EverBonded

I already did - hahahahahaha! ;)

Creasy47

I had to come over and see what all the fuss is about. Franz who? I love waffles! :-D

4EverBonded

Believe it or not, this is a WWI thread, how it started, etc.

But it's all currently all about Belgium at the moment, what that glorious albeit small country gave the world (good and bad). Can't think of much bad, besides the Belgian Congo ...

SaintMark

If you have read up on WWI you'll find that the Germans did some horrific stuff, war crimes, in Belgium. A lot of senseless killing because the population was not a sympathetic to the German cause as they wanted.
Belgium made a corridor around the French fortifications and they paid dearly for it by not letting the Germans and their army pass through.

Creasy47

I'm thinking this should become a revolving thread, and completely change it to something else in a few days.

4EverBonded

You mean a multiple war thread? We already have a WWII thread.

Or let's start a fun and charming Countries - Pros and Cons thread (but not getting into serious politics; lighthearted like we just talked about Belgium ...)
If you'd like to start something like that go ahead, please; I've got to run!

I'm off to teach - be back on board in about 6 hours or so ...

Creasy47

Good luck, @4EverBonded! And no, I meant that we should continuously jump to random topics and change the thread title accordingly.

DarthDimi

I was always told that the Belgians fought fiercely and suffered tremendously at the hands of the Germans in WWI, yet offered practically no resistance to the Germans in WWII which is why the invasion went pretty "peacefully" then. Our king in those days, Leopold III, signed the capitulation of Belgium almost right away, an act some have since considered a betrayal of his own countrymen. I refuse to share that opinion. I think he quickly realised that Hitler could not be stopped and certainly not by whatever defensive forces the Belgians could put together and so by signing our surrender, he avoided a lot of futile bloodshed. Still, some politicians with an agenda held it against him and effectively kept Leopold III from regaining royal control over his country after the war which is why his son Boudewijn was made king at the ridiculously young age of 21. I will say, however, that he would become one of the wisest and most beloved kings in the history of my country.

Here's a piece of trivia. I live in a cosy town where a couple of college students effectively stopped the 20th train convoy from Dossin to Auschwitz in 1943 and helped 236 Jews to get off and eventually survive. In case you want to know more about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_convoy
A memorial statue was inaugurated near the train station where I take the train to work every day. Every once in a while, when passing by it, I stop to think about that heroic effort, sadly enough a unique event in the history of Jew deportation over this particular railway track. It should have happened more often! Over 25 000 Jews (one fifth children) were deported to Auschwitz over this railway track which I make use of on a daily basis. Close to 24 000 never came back...

...

I may have been born almost forty years since the war, but the Holocaust fills my heart with an irrational hatred towards the Nazis and their gas chambers. Imperialism is one thing; Caesar conquered the world and Alexander did it too many aeons earlier. Hitler was on his way to achieving the same thing. I may not like it, but some historians claim that if Hitler had been successful on this level, the second half of the 20th Century, for better or worse, may have proven a far more stable era. But then one remembers that other thing Hitler put together, the Holocaust, a plan to simply wash away an entire people from the pages of history, as if these men, women and children never lived. And this is where my stomach turns, where my fingers make a fist, where I think of the Swastika and loath it, hate it, want to spit on it, burn those flags! An entire population was caught in a delusion which words cannot describe. For the record, I don't hold a grudge against the German population that tried to rebuild its almost destroyed country after 1945. It struggled with a feeling of guilt; many Germans had acted out of fear.

The saddest epilogue to this tale of terror, however, is that A) Fascist sympathies still exist in this world and B) the Nazis weren't the only "holocausters". Russia, China, the Middle East, ... mankind really does make it its business to destroy itself, doesn't it? Sometimes I wonder if it's perhaps a good thing that we have in the past couple of decades irreversibly polluted and over-populated the Earth. Clearly we're not meant to survive the next couple of centuries but maybe that's not too bad either. We are the worst insult to planet Earth. Let nature reclaim its territory. Look at what we've made of this place, how easily we can destroy fertile land, how easily we can engineer extermination camps. We have turned forests into deserts, made lots of harmless and innocent species extinct, fought wars over oil, built weapons that can destroy half the globe. We're not going to survive, I'm quite sure of that. And the cynical half of me believes it's for the best.

SaintMark

A lot of Belgians fled over the border to live in refugee camps in the Netherlands, they added almost 20% to the Dutch population.

The German Emperor fled to the Netherlands and lived her as a refugee until WWII, when the Nazis invaded The Netherlands they were kind of not sure what to do with Kaiser Wilhelm, but luckily for them he died pretty quick so missed the whole 2nd attempt to rule the world and this time by an Austrian corporal.

OHMSS69

@SaintMark
sorry old chap, I have to stop you here. Your comment about Germany wanting to rule the world in both wars. That is such nonsense. It was Allied propoganda and espcially in WW2 about Germany wanting to conquer the world.

There is no hard evidence that Germany wanted world conquest in either war. In WW2 Hitler only wanted to expand Germany's borders at the expense of the Slavs as had been a cornerstone in German ambitions since the time of the Teutonic Knights. He wanted to humilate France, which he accomplished in 1940. He never wanted to fight Britain, he considered the Brits to be of the same Aryan stock that Germans were. He despised the Soviet Union and this is who he wanted destroyed at all costs. He had gobbled up Poland, Czecholoslavakia. He had what he wanted by the summer of 1940 but those pesky Brits!

Learning that he was embroiled in a total global war by the end of 1941 made him drop a load in his pants. By 1943, he knew he could not win the war and the best he could hope for was a negotiated peace and maybe, just maybe he could hang on to most of his land gains.
But world conquest? Never.