Unpopular opinions about history - Share your "unpopular" takes on historical events and people (Expecting highly original Hitler posts)

[Jean ValJean]

Nixon was a smart man and not an awful president (not a great one however) but his paranoia over shadowed everything else. But the whole Watergate scandal I don't think it was unique to him, but what was that he got caught and the many tapes he had.

Lessons will never be learnt from the dotcom era bubble, it still happenes but people act like it's the first time. Crypto market and social media stocks are just the latest two versions.

Trump and Brexit won for the same reason, the people were given a "fuck you" button to the establishment who had been fucking them over for so long. No shit many people fed up of it all would hit that button. It will end up happening again because the issues of why people voted for them will never be addressed.

I think the main things that did Nixon in were: 1) Taping every conversation in the Oval Office (in other words, as you said, his paranoia), and 2) Not the Watergate burglary itself, but trying to cover it up. I think if he had gotten in front of it right away, he could have spun it in a way that minimized the damage to him personally. Instead, he tried to cover it up and all of his shady dealings came to light. The more dirt they found, the more they kept digging and once the recording system was discovered, it was all over. No doubt in my mind he would have been impeached, removed from office, and faced criminal charges had he not resigned.

 

[EpicGamerMoment]

The whole idea that “Russia is a cold depressing place where nothing good ever happens” is not true for most of Russian history and it’s thanks to bolsheviks that we have this conception.

 

[Gunter Hatherer]

The USA should have stayed out of the First World war.

Fuck this guy ...

 

[ditto]

The Rosenbergs didn't nothing wrong.

Without the nuclear balance Curtis LeMay would have ended life on this earth in the 60s.

 

[Skeletonized Cow]

The Rosenbergs didn't nothing wrong.

Without the nuclear balance Curtis LeMay would have ended life on this earth in the 60s.

Without nuclear parity, we could have crushed communism openly in relatively quick order by snuffing out the USSR's industry and population in a matter of hours. Only M.A.D.-style atomic war (really only a trouble in the 1970s or so) would seriously harm the USA. Even in the Cuban missile crisis, we could have smashed the Soviets with (relatively) minimal death. There were never enough atom bombs to exterminate mankind, we're tougher to kill than the cockroach.

 

[Throng of Titans]

The world would have been way better if the Central Powers had won World War 1.

Or at the very fucking least, had the allies contained their hateboner and not totally dismantled every single Central Power into balkanized shitstates, perfectly setting the stage for the rise of Hitler, and then of course, leading to complete global pozzing following the end of WW2.

Oh, small addon, anyone complaining about the invasion of Belgium being a violation of its neutrality forgets that Britain plopped troops into Greece in violation of its neutrality.

 

[ditto]

Without nuclear parity, we could have crushed communism openly in relatively quick order by snuffing out the USSR's industry and population in a matter of hours

I think that's what would have ended up happening. The USA would have accelerated to become a far worse nazi germany.

Some of our top political and military men would survive (in some of our deeper mineshafts)
But the global outlook for humanity would have been grim.

 

[ReasonablyRetarded]

Countries that were colonies should've stayed colonies, it would've been better for the world objectively.
However, the wafflejews in the Congo caused everyone to get cold feet and they fucked everything up for everyone.

If the world powers were so insistent on disbanding the colonies, the least they could've done is not draw some arbitrary borders that caused so much ethnic conflict to erupt allowing for both ethnic and ideological militia groups to form and constantly wage war.

 

[Gunter Hatherer]

wafflejews

I disagree with you about colonialism, but this one word makes your post a winner.

Moving on ...

Provable history:
Ahem. The USSR already had the bomb because Klaus Fuchs (a physicist who worked on it at Los Alamos) was a commie spy. He served some time in the UK, then was prisoner exchanged and ended up in East Germany.

Unpopular (and unprovable) opinion:
The Rosenbergs were set up because Stalin needed a martyr.

 

[Nigger Caviar]

The native americans were morally worse than the christians that settled america. I think we did commit some atrocities. I respect native americans and I do feel bad for them to a point, but the native americans weren't innocent helpless victims. They murdered and raped white people all the time. It took hundreds of years to settle the americas and the natives put up one hell of a fight.

The fact that christian colonizers didn't wipe them the fuck out by now just shows that we weren't evil genocidal maniacs, it was normal people who were trying to find a new home in an untamed land. The average pioneer was just a normal fucking person, not some evil hateful nazi, in fact they probably had a stronger sense of justice and morality than most americans do nowadays.

 

[Cyclonus]

Hitler was a chick.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

America was already a failed experiment in the 1930s . Just so happened that every other nation with industrial and military capabilities was left in fucking ruins. Without WW2 the USA would have becomed Brazil much much sooner, instead they got free grabs for 80% of the globe's economy. Thanks a lot Germany.

The October Revolution would have failed without Germany's support of the Bolsheviks . Thanks a lot Germany.

 

[DDR Yoga]

Hitler was a chick.

In recent years, mainstream outlets have reported that Hitler was Jewish, inbred, gypsy, incestuous, gay, a heroin addict, retarded, impotent and bereft of a testicle, so he could indeed have been a woman.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

The world would have been way better if the Central Powers had won World War 1.

Or at the very fucking least, had the allies contained their hateboner and not totally dismantled every single Central Power into balkanized shitstates, perfectly setting the stage for the rise of Hitler, and then of course, leading to complete global pozzing following the end of WW2.

Oh, small addon, anyone complaining about the invasion of Belgium being a violation of its neutrality forgets that Britain plopped troops into Greece in violation of its neutrality.

I don't remember about Greece in WW1 but I did know, and sometimes make that comparison when loudly arguing with Arby's employees, about Persia in WW2.

America was already a failed experiment in the 1930s . Just so happened that every other nation with industrial and military capabilities was left in fucking ruins. Without WW2 the USA would have becomed Brazil much much sooner, instead they got free grabs for 80% of the globe's economy. Thanks a lot Germany.

Yeah, we really lost what with the inventing nukes and Internet and world's largest economy and landing on the Moon and becoming the lone superpower when the White Soviet Union collapsed.

The native americans were morally worse than the christians that settled america.

Why? The only particular arguments I ever see about Indians is that they tortured people (so did Europeans), stayed at war much of the time (so did Europeans), and sometimes ate people. Depending on the specific Indians they have some extra sins (human sacrifice Mesoamericans, women as chattel Plains Indians) and certain backwards institutions (like lack of rational legal codes). But all told a typical North American agriculturalist tribe strikes me as much more humane and, for the poor majority of society, superior to European culture.

Frankly I find bear-baiting like they did in England more morally disgusting than ritual cannibalism like the Iroquois did.

 

[Equal Rights for Androids]

The whole idea that “Russia is a cold depressing place where nothing good ever happens” is not true for most of Russian history and it’s thanks to bolsheviks that we have this conception.

In my class, we learned nothing about Russia except that the USSR was bad. We didn't learn of the genocide that Russia committed upon Ukranians. The Ukranians that were starved to death, forced to resort to cannibalism, and then executed because of cannibalism despite having literally no other choice. It doesn't talk about how Russia slaughtered tens of thousands of Polish military just because they were Polish military—not because the Polish military were actually doing anything to them.

Probably an unpopular opinion for you, but I think that US education needs to teach more about the atrocities of Russia. I was kind of pro-Russia in terms of the war until I learned that shit. Russia has always been a bad place, yet we were never taught why.

90% of Native American deaths were from violent deaths from each other before colonization. Native americans fucking hated each other. You don't have that kind of death rate (murder) in a civilized society. Torture with fire, eating babies, skinning people alive, travelling thousands of miles away just to kill an entire family, women torturing other women alive, genociding entire tribes, raping elderly women before killing them, scalping alive, mutilating victims' genitalia, cutting off their eyelids to force them to be blind staring at the sun, forcing them to starve to death, buying black slaves and putting them in worse working conditions than the whities. They had a higher rate of violent crime than even black people today. They had Mexican slaves before Americans had any slaves. You were forced to fight as a warrior for them or be slaughtered. I'd say picking cotton is a way better outcome. Fuck native americans. They were some of the worst forms of torture you could ever experience.

 

[Seafarer]

The US didn't get involved in WW1 because of the Zimmerman Note. It was because J.P. Morgan had financial ties to Britain, and didn't wanna lose his money.

The Germans gave fair warning in American newspapers regarding the Lusitania:

Ver archivo adjunto 4196240

...which was ignored. Winston Churchill, then a part of the British Admiralty, may have known that the Lusitania was going to cross paths with German U-boats.

After the war, The Washington Naval Conference strengthened Anglo-American ties while alienating Japan, eventually pushing them into the arms of the Axis Powers.

TLDR: The British are fucking evil.

Hitler was a faggot for ruining the concept of nationalism.

This guy’s channel is a real hidden gem, I also recommend his series on the “Boys on the Tracks” murders.

(Btw if someone could archive his videos for me I’d appreciate it, who knows if/when YT deletes his channel or something)

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

Countries that were colonies should've stayed colonies, it would've been better for the world objectively.
However, the wafflejews in the Congo caused everyone to get cold feet and they fucked everything up for everyone.

Blame the UK, Ghana was the first African colony to gain independence back in 1957.

I think Belgium's plan was to develop Congo and its institutions over the next few decades with final independence in 2000. To give you an idea of how fucked they were from the beginning, there were only a handful of Congolese who had a university degree at independence. Good luck running a modern state with a grade school education...

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

The War of 1812 is an extremely important and interesting war and it goes unappreciated because most people, including most historians, have no idea how to interpret it.

People generally remember it as the war that was a draw, because there was no territorial exchange. Instead, it should be understood as the second act of a two-stage American Revolution.

The British were supposed to vacate the West, but they didn't. They were still maintaining forts, still provoking Indians against us, and still treating Americans overseas like they were British subjects. The American Revolution (which I have gripes I'll share about some other time, suffice it to say the South and West get completely ignored) had theaters of fighting west of the Appalachians, vicious war to found Kentucky and battles as far west as St. Louis. By the end of it, however, the land remained mainly in the hands of Britain (de facto) and British-aligned Indians like the Creeks and Shawnees, while the Americans held their states of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio.

The War of 1812 liberated and secured what was then the Western US. West as in, west of Appalachians, but east of the Mississippi River, the land that would, in fact, come to be the core of the United States as it grew into a major power. Before 1812, the Creeks dominated the Deep South and Tecumseh dominated the Great Lakes, keeping those lands off limits from American settlement. Their destruction - at Horseshoe Bend by Jackson, at Tippecanoe by Harrison - conquered for America a vast heartland, which was only theirs on paper.

For the Indians, 1812 was the last major war where a mighty confederacy would rise up in holy war against the outsiders. Future Indian wars were generally local in scope, the Sioux against the Americans, the Apaches against the Americans, etc. Tecumseh was different in that it was the entire frontier on fire and Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had the potential, if they'd won, to create an actual order out of it. It was, basically, the point when Indian America lost.

For the United States, the War of 1812 was also the first time when the nation fought a major war under the Constitution, actually solidified into a nation. The US faced the first rumblings of secession crisis with the Hartford Convention.

In terms of interesting combat and politics, the War of 1812 was the only time naval action took place on the Great Lakes, one of few times American privateers ran amok, may be the only time (besides the Revolution proper) Americans fought with Indian allies against Europeans with Indian allies, and spanned a massive frontline from the Deep South to Canada.

In summary, Americans of the day called the war the Second American Revolution, and the description was not just propaganda or exaggeration. "The" Revolution freed the East. The War of 1812 conquered the West. Like some scholars that consider WW1 and WW2 to be the same war with an intermission (and we already consider the Napoleonic Wars a single event, though that was broken up into many small wars) these two wars go hand in hand. Viewed in that light, the War of 1812 is as important to America and as worthy of study as the Civil War.

Edit: Part of the problem is that writing often treats different Indian wars as being separate wars from 1812. It gives the impression of a bunch of disconnected events when they all tied into a much bigger picture. It would be like if everyone treated the Western, Eastern, and Pacific fronts of WW2 as separate wars.

 

[Canned Ham]

The American Colonization Society had the right idea, We should have shipped all blacks back to Africa, dumped them on the nearest beach, and headed home.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Not quite an unpopular opinion, but a bit of dislike in how the American Revolution and American Civil War are remembered. In both cases the popular memory focuses entirely on one theater (Northern/Eastern) to the exclusion of another (Southern/Western), even though the latter was arguably more important.

By public memory, I mean the battles people talk about, include in documentaries, make movies of, include in kid's textbooks, stuff like that. In the Revolution, the focus usually dwells on a theater from Virginia up through New England. And for the most part, that's right; most of the major battles and revolutionary activity were there. But the whole lead-up to Yorktown involved a series of battles in Georgia and the Carolinas, and there were also campaigns west of the Appalachians against the Indians. I was shocked when I found out the Siege of Savannah, a battle I NEVER see mentioned in Revolutionary stuff, was the second highest-killing battle of the war. I don't think Cowpens and Kings Mountain are more important than the stuff in the north, but I do think they tend to be mentioned like afterthoughts, like it just jumps straight to Yorktown.

In the Civil War, I have more of a personal axe to grind. The Eastern Theater is what everyone fixates on because it was flashy, it involved the first and last (major, consequential) battles), and it involved the big-name generals in a test of wills. But when you think about it, what actually happened in Virginia? Two armies slammed into each other for five years straight with no result besides a bunch of death, it was like a WW1 meat grinder if instead of dying in a trench line they just keep running at each other on the map.

On the other hand, the Western Theater was what actually broke the Confederacy. Shiloh, Chickamauga, Stones River, and other such battles ran up similar levels of slaughter as the east, but thy resulted in a breakthrough that split the Confederacy in two, then gutted the middle, and in the end lead to a sort of nation-level pincer movement that enabled something like Petersburg-to-Appomattox to happen.

Usually a decent documentary/book will do their diligence in talking about Vicksburg and the March to the Sea is obligatory, but often they won't have anything to say about the massive battles that lead to those. I once saw a "Greatest Battles of the Civil War" series on sale in a video store and every single battle on it was in Virginia/Maryland/was Gettysburg.

The Soviets didn't win WW2, they just received enough US funded welfare to turn their population in to a somewhat useful human wave against an exhausted German Army that was being bogged down through attrition from the destruction of their entire logistical backbone by the US and UK.

And their female fighter aces weren't an actual thing, just a psyop by the Soviets in to demoralizing the Luftwaffe as proved by the fact that the Russians never again used female pilots

Winning is winning, it was the Soviet man with the rifle, in the line of fire, that took Berlin, even if the

Interesting about the pilots. Do you remember where you heard that? I've had a (mild) interest in Soviet women pilots and snipers for a time. I know there is an aspect of physicality to flying in that you do have to pull Gs, don't know if that would be harder for a woman.