Terrorist Attacks in New York

[gaelic cowboy]

Well in crooked, indirect way Irish independence owed a good deal to allied victory and the subsequent peace settlements.

The allied victory ensured the right of self-determination in European politics, which was a corner stone of that most noble treaty in the history of mankind, Versailles.

Germany, Turkey, Russia, and Britain too, could no longer use other European nations as colonies.

Another thing is it was a death blow to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy they now no longer had any sons to pass on there titles and land to even the far out cousins were blasted to bits.

This was a small economic benefit to people like my great grandfather born just after the famine they had a once in life time chance to expand there business and not just farmers but shops, pubs and hotels etc etc

Of course many of these things would have happened anyway because of the various land acts designed by the British to suck the life out of the Home Rule movement but WW1 hastened a death spiral that was in evidence anecdotally for maybe 40yrs

[Louis VI the Fat]

The OP pointed to reparations for civilian damages on US soil. Which, unlike the reparations in Europe, Germany was forced to pay. Another issue then, for all of us to question our mind:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Germany made a substantial financial profit from WWI reparations. (I'm going to repeat that another 100k thousand times before I die. Germany did not suffer crippling reparations payments.)
Popular history tragically has come to embrace the German ultra-nationalist / Nazi propaganda about outside forces seizing temprorary German weakness to exploit Germany with crippling reparations. These devilish outside forces are alternatively Jews/Democracies/Western capitalist imperialists, or, in the anglo-fascist variant, the French.
Reality is the opposite:

Germany declared itself defeated in 1918. In accordance with the fourteen points and explicit pre-armistice agreements, Germany in the armistice agreed to pay full reparations for civil damages. Despite this agreement, in the actual peace treaty of Versailles and in subsequent agreements, Germany was asked to pay a mostly token amount.

To help Germany pay for these reparations, it recieved substantial financial aid in the form of loans. These loans were greater than what Germany was expected to pay in reparations.

However, Germany barely paid any reparations at all. Of what little it paid, only one third was paid in money. The remainder was paid for largely simply in returned loot and stolen art. A mere return of property, which nonetheless the allies had grudgingly come to accept as counting towards reparations payments.
The substantial loans that Germany received, meanwhile, Germany used to prepare itself for another war. And, since 1922, to prop up Germany's new ally, with whom it sought to overthrow the peace and order of Europe: the Soviet Union.

In 1932, Germany defaulted on the loans, declared they would not be paid back. The allies woulod never receive their money back. This way, the allies had now not only borne all of the costs for WWI, they had also paid towards Germany's renewed bid for supremacy. A few months later, early 1933, the German military-industrial caste thought it had found just the right puppet who could intimidate the world not to ask for its money back. The deed had been done.
In this way, a duplicitous Germany had outwitted the victors of WWI: the allies had not only footed the bill for WWI, they had paid towards German preparation for WWII too.

That's the short version of the long version, which is still too long, so very brief:

Germany paid no reparations. Instead, Germany received money. Vast loans from America to pay for reconstruction. Duplicitously, Germany used these American loans for preparations for WWII.



Now America wants its money back:

More than 80 years ago, Germany sold tens of thousands of bonds to American investors in an effort to recover financially from World War I. Later, Adolf Hitler used some of the money raised by those bonds to build the powerful Nazi war machine that would ravage Europe during World War II.

Now, a half-dozen U.S. bondholders are turning to federal courts in an effort to force Germany to make good on its promise to repay the debts, which today could be worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. Action has been heating up in lawsuits filed in Miami, New York and Chicago, including a victory for investors last month when an appeals court rejected Germany’s attempt to dismiss their case.


If the bondholders ultimately win, their lawyers could ask judges to seize German assets in the U.S. to repay them, a tactic that has worked in other legal disputes over money owed by foreign governments.
http://lubbockonline.com/world/2010-...i-german-bonds

[KrooK]

I don't understand this discussion.
Politics is not fair, is not equal and has nothing to human rights. You are good into this game if you succed.
You may be absolutely right but if you won't succeed with your arguments - you fail.
If some people here think that Germany should pay USA for attacks, USA should pay Libya too.
Or they should pay Vietnam.
We can't demand from politicians being saints. They just have to win.

[PanzerJaeger]

The substantial loans that Germany received, meanwhile, Germany used to prepare itself for another war. And, since 1922, to prop up Germany's new ally, with whom it sought to overthrow the peace and order of Europe: the Soviet Union.

In this way, a duplicitous Germany had outwitted the victors of WWI: the allies had not only footed the bill for WWI, they had paid towards German preparation for WWII too.

I am not sure whether you wrote that or got it from somewhere else. Regardless of the sourcing, the truth seems to be a victim of some very creative rhetoric yet again in this thread.

Germany did indeed begin to rebuild its military after the war. The Weimar Republic also almost immediately made the decision to ignore the absurd limitations placed on the German military by the Versailles Treaty. I can only assume that the author has used these two facts to reach the conclusion that Germany was preparing for another war - as opposed to budgeting normal defense expenditures in line with other European nations - during the time the loans were being given. Such a premise is simply false, as the decision to initiate WW2 was made long after the loans had been given and subsequently defaulted on and by a different government. Further, the reason Germany defaulted on the loans was not out of sinister motivations but out of economic destitution, which also consequently ate up the vast majority of the American loan money, that would be for bread and not tanks. WW2 was paid for by the German economy that rebounded under Nazi rule.

So the ideas that a) Germany immediately began to plot WW2 after the loss of 1918 and b) that the US/Allies somehow paid for Germany's military buildup prior to WW2 are demonstrably false (unless you want to get into certain US and European industrialists' private support for the Nazis, which is beyond the scope of this thread).