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

[Brother Wind]

As a historian my hot take will always be that history is like 99% momentum. The big events only ever slow things down or speed them up. So, going back in time and killing Hitler isn't going to stop WW2. Probably won't even let them win the war. And even if they do, the Germans just never had any real hope of perpetuating some great Thousand Year Reich. The Commies alone would always be such a fucking thorn in their side. To say nothing of the endless rebellions that every other nation would be carrying out. Because you can't really just return a people back to tyranny. Thats what set the Balkans and the Russians off in the turn of the century. And the progress they clawed up was fucking nothing compared to the West.

But, the best way to put it is theres a bit in Black Adder goes Forth that I really like where he explains that the Great War was because it was just too much trouble to not have a war. And really, that is just History in a nutshell. Human nature just finds it too much trouble to avoid doing something. And human nature always seeks to make itself more comfortable.

That might be how we got where we are now. Consoomer ridden bullshit, but I do wonder if the idea if being comfortable means we will push back against stale sludge of culture or if it means it is all we want.

Ever heard the 1812 overture?

Yeah, Russians often wrote songs about Anglo-American wars halfway across the world while they were getting invaded...

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Commies

What if the Communist Manifesto was never published?

Would communism still have happened sooner or later, or is that an example of something that isn't momentum?

 

[The Ugly One]

So, going back in time and killing Hitler isn't going to stop WW2. Probably won't even let them win the war. And even if they do, the Germans just never had any real hope of perpetuating some great Thousand Year Reich

If history acted like a predictable, linear system, historians would have a better hit rate on their predictions. But history's quite chaotic, with lots of inflection points and butterfly effects. If you go back in time and kill Hitler, there's no Lebensraum ideology. That was very uniquely him. Perhaps Germany goes to war with France to shake free of Versailles, but they're far less likely to barrel headlong into the Soviet Union and grind themselves up at Kursk and Stalingrad.

A 20th century where Germany defeats France in 1941 and calls it square looks very different than the one we had, and I don't think we can say how it would have been different.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

There are no great men or perfect men but the history of humanity is about the right people being at the right place at the right time doing the right thing for the right reasons.

 

[ChaosReignsOnSomeSaturday]

America would be a far stronger country both economically and societal had the Federal government offered to buy all slaves from Southern plantations and then done as Lincoln wanted and shipped them back to Africa.
Could have avoided the civil war, plantations would have now had capital to invest in automation, Sherman wouldn't have destroyed the entire Southern infrastructure thus setting them back about 50 years and eventually leading to further issues like the dust bowl, and we wouldn't have the current racial tensions.

 

[Briananderson1138]

The Northeastern States (New England in particular) were the actual beneficiaries of the Lower Southern system of Negro slavery. The authoritarianism required by the plantation system degraded and impaired Southern culture and society, as the infringement of liberties does everywhere. Furthermore, the limited prosperity accrued by the system was overwhelmingly destroyed by the Civil War.
Meanwhile, the Yankees made their fortunes in large part from the textile trade; who was growing the cotton that they processed?

 

[DJ Grelle]

If you go back in time and kill Hitler, there's no Lebensraum ideology. That was very uniquely him

This actually was a widespread belief in germany at the time (e.g. the Alldeutscher verband and the Prussian settlement commission).

A 20th century where Germany defeats France in 1941 and calls it square looks very different than the one we had, and I don't think we can say how it would have been different.

Would never happen since that'd mean German dominance over the continent and Britain would under no circumstance allow that. THey'd rather kamikaze their empire (as happened in our timeline) that to see any one power dominate the european continent.

To say nothing of the endless rebellions

Practically all WW2 resistance has been vastly overrated. The only ones who were effective beyond shooting an officer or two are the Poles, the Soviets and the Yugoslavs and they all rest on the same cause: their armed forces did not lay down their arms after defeat in the field but dissolved in the citizen population and continued the fight after the government surrendered (poland, yugoslavia) or the frontline swept over the area (soviets).

With time and effort, any guerrilla can be stamped out. The greatest operation of the polish home army was completely destroyed in the field. COIN ops are doable and are not certain to lead to "forever war" type of situation. These happen because the military commanders get severly limited in what they are allowed to do. With a free hand, insurrections are almost completely crushed (Herero, Mau Mau, Polish Home Army, Malaysian Emergency). On the other hand, when you get political meddling then it becomes essentially impossible to win because the military is not allowed to actually try and win (Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria). Even then, the military often manages to achieve practically all military goals but political weaknesses result in disaster later (US in vietnam).

Nazi Germany would have no issue with rounding up every Yugoslav in Serbia, putting them into camps and then patrol the area and shoot everything that is vaguely human shaped. It would result in a pretty much total destruction of the Serbian nation and economy but I doubt the nazi's wouldve cared.

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

I really just feel like that is probably what happened :[

I am no feminist and I have pretty much always been a commie hating patriotic type since I was young but I really did like her story. Thinking about what I would personally do, or feel, or how I would react if I was in complete darkness with zero feedback other than touch. It always astonished me that she was able to come to grips with her world and even THE world. It always felt a little too good to be true even if I brushed those feelings off when I was younger I always had them. I just have such a hard time believing it anymore.

Helen Keller lost her hearing and vision before she was old enough to remember, so I don’t know how she was able to accomplish so much with Anne Sullivan doing everything for her. But the narrative was written as Keller writing all the stories by herself.

I feel like the narrative of HK’s “miraculous success” paved the way for the industry of calling disabled people “inspiring” just because. Just because they blink or breathe or eat. Just because they exist while disabled.

 

[Smar Mijou]

I get annoyed with modern historian faggotry. They believe that Indians in the Americas had some kind of supercivilization until wypipo showed up. They pretend the Western Roman Empire never collapsed. They avoid “great man” theory to an autistic degree; Napoleon for example was just some guy wandering around Europe and the really valuable stuff is textile designs in Paris while this random guy was out stumbling about. They pretend that Haiti was actually functioning until America occupied it. They never have facts to base it on, it’s disturbing and concerning how much they just make shit up. I used to assume that historians of today would try to preserve as much information as possible but nope, we’re back to making the same mistakes again.

It's a bizarre phenomenon of romanticizing/elevating the oppressed/losers in a story. I don't know the motivation behind it, but I suspect it's a product of more comfortable/prosperous times and the need for manufactured outrage. Throughout history it's always been "to the victor go the spoils" or
"history is written by the victorious" more or less. But it seems to be skewing the other direction, even more so in the past 10-15 years with globohomo/woke. The Jews have been trading on the Holocaust drama for 80+ years now, to the point you can't criticize Israel in the slightest or you're an antisemitic who's literally worse than Hitler, and you see it more now with the increasing "wewuzzers" and global nigger worship even in areas where slavery/oppression was never a thing for them.

Would never happen since that'd mean German dominance over the continent and Britain would under no circumstance allow that. THey'd rather kamikaze their empire (as happened in our timeline) that to see any one power dominate the european continent.

I don't quite agree there. Both Neville Chamberlain and Edward VIII, along with a not-insignificant part of the UK population, were, if not outright German sympathizers, at least indifferent towards German dominance until their own interests and independence were threatened.

And while we're sperging about hypotheticals and "what-if's", a large number of the "genocided" Natives/Indians always cited for oppression points and white guilt weren't due to European brutality, but diseases brought by them. You can't blame germ warfare on people who had no concept of what viruses and diseases even were. Much like the lunacy of ~2020 where if you didn't triple mask and quadruple Vax, you're literally killing grandma with Covid.

 

[el bandito loco]

like a couple of other users said more eloquently than i will basically Nixon while having fucked up and not being a great president is widely misunderstood along with his whole presidency due to being overshadowed by his faults. despite 90% of people hating Nixon for doing what every other politician before and since has done but unlike them he got caught, I choose to respect his memory. specifically for the time he was talking about the bohemian grove and people from California and he described it as "the single most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine"

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Modern Alt-Right Neo-Confederates, especially Yankee ones, are fucking morons for shilling for a country that was actively trying to breed as many Blacks and spread them as far and wide as possible. The EXACT OPPOSITE of their "ethnostate."

On the other hand, modern Neo-Unionists (yes, that's a thing now, Atun Shei Films is a good example, and a lot of Antifa larpers) are equally retarded for shilling for the party that was anti-immigrant, anti-religious-minority (Catholics and Mormons), and basically fascism lite.

Idk if this is unpopular, but it’s not main stream to my knowledge.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was a crypto-Communist that brought Americans kicking and screaming into a war they didn’t want. He allowed the Japanese to attack even with intelligence of a Japanese fleet moving to Hawaii. He destroyed poor peoples homes, farms, and land in the South with the building of the dams by the Tennessee Valley Authority and flooding them out. His government jailed critics to the war and the people and actions behind it. He aligned America into what it has become today. America is more reminiscent of the Soviet Union than what America was like before FDR.

I agree that he was a crypto-Communist but trust me, if he hadn't built those TVA dams that area would be in the Stone Age to this day. That was a godsend to Southern Appalachia.

 

[InspectorJappOfficial]

Ancient Regime France was awful, too, and the French Revolutionaries were not that unreasonable. They had REGRESSIVE taxation in France. Nobility (the rich people who could afford the burden) don't pay the tax, but the poor people too. And the Church were pawns of the state and vice versa. The Revolutionaries were well justified wanting to liquidate them all, and they get played up as being these proto-socialists, but from what I've read most of them were very liberal. I think there was something seriously fucked up with them given how they preyed on each other (in contrast to America's Founding Fathers), and Louis XVI HIMSELF wasn't bad (just like Nicholas II wasn't), but the society of monarchist France wasn't one that deserved to exist.

Nationalist China is another one people lionize. They were awful. They accidentally flooded millions of their own people to death trying to stop the Japanese. Monarchist China was awful. China in damn near every iteration has been awful.

You just don't get successful revolutions unless a place is awful. The United States turned out well because it wasn't really a revolution here in the first place, it was an independence war.

Late and gay, but I largely agree. The fall of the French Ancien Regime is a very interesting study in how governments collapse. Its problems were obvious to everyone at the top: despite being the wealthiest and most populous nation in Europe, and indeed one of the wealthiest portions of the whole world, it was constantly in colossal and unmanageable debts. The government was hamstrung by legions of special privileges that had accrued to the nobles and churches over the previous millennium of feudal rule and that prevented effective tax collection from huge portions of their wealthiest and most productive citizens, lands, and industries. Meanwhile, the military ambitions of previous monarchs had burdened the state with huge war debts, and the monarchy's consistent tardiness in repaying them (due, again, to its perpetual bankruptcy) made it so that they were offered by skeptical bankers at ever-more usurious rates (in particular contrast with the British monarchy, which at the time promptly repaid its debts and so could finance its wars at very reasonable rates). So you had the paradox that much of the population groaned under a heavy tax burden at the same time as the government treasuries were worse than empty.

Louis XVI and his advisors were all perfectly well aware of this and tried manfully to fix it, but far from being a heavy-handed tyrant, he was himself so bound by custom and his need to placate his supporters in the nobility, finance, and military that he was unable to actually enact his (theoretically absolute) will. Hence the calling of the Estates-General with its attendant, historic results. Even then, the snarl of French political custom was unable to be resolved by anything except an  actual tyrannical and oppressive regime that could cut through all these laws and demands with brutal force. It was to the disadvantage of France and the world that the tyrannical regime that did this was a particularly insane and wicked one, setting the stage for the next two centuries of revolutionary madness.

Napoleon, though, deserves a lot more credit than he gets in the Anglophone world for actually righting the French ship of state and enacting all those desperately needed reforms freed of the lunacy of the philosophes. He was a military genius, but France had produced many brilliant military men over the centuries; what made Napoleon really exceptional was his actual talent for ruling, which France had not experienced much of for a very long time.

As for the Chinese Nationalists, I will just say that they provide an excellent example of just how awful Communism is. How bad was Chairman Mao's rule? So bad that it was even worse than the Kuomintang's rule - which takes a lot of doing!

 

[NoReturn]

When the Library of Alexandria burned down, a lot of books were actually out on loan, so we lost a lot more knowledge not to the fire itself, but because those remaining books were scattered to the winds as there was no longer anywhere to return them and no one to keep track of what was gone.

Also, I believe the Egyptian priest in Plato's "Timaeus"

The memorials which your own and other nations have once had of the famous actions of mankind perish in the waters at certain periods; and the rude survivors in the mountains begin again, knowing nothing of the world before the flood. But in Egypt the traditions of our own and other lands are by us registered for ever in our temples.
[...]Solon marvelled, and desired to be informed of the particulars. ‘You are welcome to hear them,’ said the priest, ‘both for your own sake and for that of the city, and above all for the sake of the goddess who is the common foundress of both our cities. Nine thousand years have elapsed since she founded yours, and eight thousand since she founded ours, as our annals record.

 

[Dufe]

Native Americans killed and enslaved each other.

 

[Saturnalia-1918]

The US should have never sold the Panama Canal. We bought and paid for that canal through ensuring Panama's independence.

Without US intervention Panama would have continued being another shitty extension of Colombia.

 

[Slap47]

What if the Communist Manifesto was never published?

Would communism still have happened sooner or later, or is that an example of something that isn't momentum?

Communism existed before the Communist Manifesto.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

The British Empire was too soft on Indians. They should have annihilated them like they did with Native Americans.

 

[Skitarii]

When the Library of Alexandria burned down, a lot of books were actually out on loan, so we lost a lot more knowledge not to the fire itself, but because those remaining books were scattered to the winds as there was no longer anywhere to return them and no one to keep track of what was gone.

Also, I believe the Egyptian priest in Plato's "Timaeus"
Ver archivo adjunto 5475775

About 10% of the contents of the Alexandrian Library were applicable to science and mathematics, the other 90% were probably manuals on how to appease Baal by having sex with children

 

[Blamo2000]

About 10% of the contents of the Alexandrian Library were applicable to science and mathematics, the other 90% were probably manuals on how to appease Baal by having sex with children

I wonder how much "reference materials" they could have had. Like how to pay your taxes, laws etc. The boring mundane stuff, that adds up for an interesting narrative in the big picture of things.

 

[NoReturn]

I wonder how much "reference materials" they could have had. Like how to pay your taxes, laws etc. The boring mundane stuff, that adds up for an interesting narrative in the big picture of things.

Like a manual for these babies: