91–100 of 107 posts
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If giving financial incentives to voters is buying voters, they're certainly not the first government that openly buys votes.
In this case it was plain and simple one off cash payments targeted at their core voter base. I don't think many governments are as blatant as that.
It's funny how Poland and Belarus are doing the same thing: https://www.belarus.by/en/government/events/belarus-material... Not sure what to make out of this
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Remember when France paid even more in 1815 and 1871 and didn't went on a genocidal rampage on their neighbors?
> Remember when France paid even more in 1815 and 1871 The reason for anything big and complicated like a war could probably occupy thousands of pages of discussion. But I'd like to jot down what I see as one major difference here between Germany's experience to close out WWI and France's and most other countries' experience in past wars. Unlike many large-scale past wars in Europe, the sequence of events in WWI wasn…
That's what the Germans wanted everyone to believe.
Now, if you compare Versailles (1918) with Brest-Litovsk, Sèvres, or even Versailles (1871) (or even the Septemberprogramm), it's far from awful for the time. Germany had to pay reparations that were in the norm for the period, and lost territories that were basically ethnically either Polish or Danish. It was still the first powerhouse of Europe, and had an intact land- and industrial base, especially in comparison to France or Belgium, where – on top of battle-caused destruction – they carefully destroyed economical infrastructure (e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44575822?seq=3#metadata_info_ta...).
> And the real poverty and unseemliness of the Weimar Republic?
If that's what you learned in your history books, think about changing them. The only thing that led to the infamous economical failure of the Weimar republic is its aversion to pay reparation (~B150$ today) in a normal manner. Instead, they printed stupid amount of money to buy foreign currency to pay reparation with. Of course, this led to a monetary crash – out of wich Germany promptly got out by simply switching to a better handled new mark[1,2,3,4]. It was a pure product of the hopeless German economic policies, that they went back to being the economic powerhouse of Europe as soon as they got their duck in a row, and the difficulties they met thereafter were the baseline for all the nations after the war[5,6].
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/economic-research/conferences...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R... [3] Wages of Destruction, Tooze [4] Confessions of the old wizard, Schacht [5] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 [6] https://slidetodoc.com/europe-between-the-wars-the-economics...
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The French indemnity was $342B in 2011 dollars, according to Wikipedia. The Versailles reparations were formally $389B in 2011 dollars, but apparently the way the treaty was structured, only $147B were actually expected to be paid. The difference was that the French paid promptly, and the Germans did not.
The Germans (if I remember my 8th grade history class correctly) printed money to be able to afford the reparations - which led to the hyperinflation and famous pictures of folks with literal wheel-barrows full of Marks going to buy basics like bread and newspaper. The inability to afford the reparations outright, and the "solution" which led to hyperinfaltion is part of the catalyst that allowed extreme resentment o…
Printing money was a domestic political decision, because the government could not agree to raise taxes (or cut social spending). Much of the seed of fascism was laid in the strength of parties who never believed in democracy in the first place (discussed in some detail by Daniel Ziblatt in _Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy_) and unchecked activity of political movements who never accepted the defeat in WW I.
The latter started right at the end of WWI, when Ludendorff and Hindenburg, the German military (and for much of 1916-1918 de facto government) leaders, refused to take responsibility for the armistice and pretended that it was the politicians who had forced it on an "undefeated army". Arguably, the German military command was treated too leniently after WW I. Hanging those two (like their counterparts were after WW II) might have saved millions of lives.
The Polish government is being pulled in a few interesting directions. For instance, as of 20 Sep, 2021: Poland must pay a daily penalty of €500,000 ($585,550) for ignoring a previous order from the European Union’s top court to cease operations at the Turow lignite mine, with its CEO slamming the fine as “bizarre”. On Monday, the EU’s Court of Justice (CJEU) confirmed it was enforcing the financial penalty against W…
Poland (and others…) warned the successive German governments since about the risks of increasing dependence on Russian gas, and… here we are.
The borders were based on rivers, no idea what you’re insinuating there.
This is a product of the currently ruling party, and the elections are coming. While Poland still should get some kind of support from Germany for the damage it caused in many aspects of life here, I don't believe that reparations are what we should and what we could get. The issue has been closed and that fact has been confirmed by Polish government most recently in 2004. The only country we should and could get reparations from is russia, as they actually made Poland to pay (by forcing it to buy subsidized coal many years ago) instead of be paid, and apparently USSR made a promise to pay the reparations.
So currently ruling party is not really about getting something for Poland in regards of WWII disaster, but it's only about winning the next elections and seemingly weaken the country once more. Please keep in mind that we have a prime time for russian trolls here and it might take some time if we could ever get rid of them from the politics. To weaken Poland means to empower russia influence here, but sadly many supporters of the ruling party don't connect the dots this way.
Disclaimer - I'm Polish. This is a product of the currently ruling party, and the elections are coming. While Poland still should get some kind of support from Germany for the damage it caused in many aspects of life here, I don't believe that reparations are what we should and what we could get. The issue has been closed and that fact has been confirmed by Polish government most recently in 2004. The only country we…
However, I seem to recall WWI reparations being levied against Germany as among the drivers for the instability of the Weimar Republic[1] that helped inform political drift of the 1930s.
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So people still trust any information? Personally I've lost mine ages ago. There is no way to discern truth from propaganda without investing an unsustainable amount of time researching. The internet ceased to be a source of truth when the people with motive realized that the populous get their information from it. It's fine for technical learning and easily proven facts, but any political information or any with sig…
I guess looking at the persons/parties spreading a certain kind of information/policies could help a bit clarify their goals and assess their trustworthiness. "Follow the money" is a classic already.
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> The last payment of the indemnity was paid in early September 1873 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_indemnity Not sure you're comparing apples with apples here.
France paid in 1871 a sum in the same ballpark than Germany should have paid in 1918. The difference was that France paid in full and in advance (so much in full that the cash influx actually caused a crash in Germany – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_indemnity#Aftermath ), whereas Germany tergiversed, delayed, and printed money like their was no tomorrow, sacrificing their econoomy on the altar of spiting their…