When using hindsight, one can speculate how much different things would be if a certain historic event turned out differently. I personally think it could have been better but also just different.Better:
No Soviet Union
No Nazis
No more British empire
No more French empire
No more Russian empire
No WWII
India gets its independence sooner
Imperial Japan gets political reforms
No cold war
No gulf war
No US intervention in the Middle East
Technology advanced faster with all the bright minds saved
Just different:
Rise of extremist regimes amongst former allied powers
WWII is fought against totalitarian UK, Canada, Australia and France
The US annexes Canada
The German empire and the US temporarily occupy France and the UK
Australia is partitioned by the US and the German empire
German empire colonizes more countries
Ottomans expand further into the Middle East
Japan turns into a communist superpower
Cold War between US, Ottoman Empire, German empire and communist Japan
political reforms in the German empire/decolonization process
Prolonged cold war
Germany lands on the moon first
Germany ultimately wins the cold war
German currency becomes the most powerful currency
In regards to technology I know that both world wars contributed to the rapid advancement of technology as a result of countries wanting to outdo each other in regards to who brought the better “toys”. However we have to also acknowledge that it’s possible that those millions of people lost to the two world wars may have also been able to contribute to the advancement of technology.
Better
Worse
Just different neither better or worse
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How much different would the world be today if either WWI never happened or the central powers won?
Well, it was an idiotic war that never needed to happen. Austria seemed too aggressive in their response to the assassination. Most of the the other countries should have stayed out. There should have been an armistice early into the war... long before the USA got in... due to the impasse that the war was, bloody battle after battle to gain a mile... just to lose it again. Trench warfare of the time was futile... it just led to death. At that the core of it, England, France, Germany, Russia... they had no beef with the other countries. They were just blindly following their ally pacts of Russia supporting Bosnia, Germany supporting Austria, England supporting Belgium, France not agreeing to just stay neutral and not get involved... etc.
It was such a stupid war... Austria and Bosnia had the beef.
It is true that WWII was a direct result of how WWI ended. If the axis has won... would there have been some horrible event that would have happened the other way? Probably not but who knows.
The Russian Revolution may have not happened... who knows but the revolution seemed to be destined to happen anyway. There still may have been a communist state but they wouldn't have been a superpower like they were. WWII turned the USSR into the superpower it was and helped it turn its attention outward with conquest and expansion.
If the axis had won it seems there would never have bee a WWII and Cold War. It seems hard to imagine something as bad or worse happening if the Axis had won but you never know. Perhaps something horrible but different still would have popped up. The Cold War let to China being communist, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. If the USA and Russia aren't competing superpowers... those wars may have never taken place.
The Wild Card in this scenario is Japan. I'm not aware of WWI having anything to do with Japan's desire to rule Asia. So Japan still may have ended up attacking the Pacific like they did. Perhaps they still would have attacked the USA and Pearl Harbor. The country still would have been unified to avenge itself on Japan and all of the industrial might that was awakened by Pearl Harbor and the unity and resolve of everyone to rise against this probably still would have been awakened... they would have just been able to focus all of the military on just Japan... instead of sending the majority to Northern Africa, England and Europe to fight Germany.
It is hard to guess what would have happened with Japan in the late 1930s and early 40s.
It certainly seems logical that there would not have been a WWII or holocaust nor a Soviet threat as powerful as the world got.
Hell, the Axis powers didn't even need to win the war. Everyone just needed to agree to a truce once the standstill was obvious. By winning would Germany have attempted to put all the blame for the war on the Allies and levied crippling reparations on them the way the allies did Germany? Would the allies have been bitter and wanting payback 20 years later and to set things right the way the German's felt after the poverty forced upon them? Who knows... maybe another huge war was inevitable.
Calling a truce a year or two in seems to be a very common sense thing to do. All the leaders rejected that though. The war spread, the USA got involved and the allies put all the blame on Germany for the war and "punished" them. We ended up with what we ended up with. The world was ripe for madmen to rise to power and things were fertile for them to get the power.
I don’t really think Imperial Japan would have gone to war with the US, their jingoism of the 1930s-1940s was the result of how Imperial Japan was treated after WWI by their fellow victors. Being the only non European allied power made them be viewed as less and were given less spoils of war despite being on the winning side, which made imperial Japan bitter and after a series of political incidents in Japan including the February 26 incident, Japan was taken over by more power hungry individuals.
From everything that I’ve read regarding counterfactuals (“what if”), if The Central Powers had won, the majority of the 20th Century’s worst atrocities such as The Holocaust wouldn’t have happened. Germany would have been at the center of some kind of trade confederation much like The E. U., with defeated countries like France, and Russia paying certain penalties or tributes to Germany. However, Britain, Russia or France could have become hotbeds of fascism. France would likely be the most likely suspect as the could easily elect a dictator that sees himself as another Napoleon. That would open the possibility that France in this timeline could start WWII by invading other countries, which might start by France using the pretext of protecting French speaking populations from German aggression in countries such as Belgium, and Switzerland much like Germany did when it invaded the mostly German speaking Sudentenland in Czechoslovakia.
Imperialism probably would have lasted until the present. I dont know whether or not Germany would have taken over France completely or just accepted their surrender and made them pay reparations, id bet they would. As for the British empire, it would largely depend on the kind defeat. Defeat in France? defeat of the Royal navy?, full scale invasion of Britain? If only a defeat in France then Britain would still be allowed to sue for peace but keep its navy and empire. Defeat of the Royal navy would have meant Germany taking over the British empire. The soviet union happened during ww1. It also all depends on when Germany wins. My belief is that an axis 1914-1926 victory would look like this. • Germany rules Eastern Europe & most of russia. • Germany rules western Europe save Spain & Portugal. • Germany takes over British Isle • Germany takes over all Empires of their enemies. • Germany takes over all of africa for German empire colonisation, except north africa. • Germany becomes the only superpower and most powerful industrialised nation on earth. •Austria gains territory in Eastern Europe, the balklands and takes over Italy. • Austria is absorbed into the German empire as another German kingdom. •Spain& Portugal becomes a vassal States of Germany. • Turkey regains lost ottoman empire land in Greece, Egypt and the black sea. • The US builds and empire in the Pacific, South and Central America. Makes a deal with Germany for Canada. • Reichsmark becomes global currency. • Japan trades with the central powers for materials without interference from US and takes over China. • Germany trades indochina and Korea to the Japanese • Japan invades spainish colonies •other central powers awarded with territory • Japan defeats US in war. • US sues for peace and gives Japan all US pocessions in the Pacific. • Oil discovered in Ottoman territory. 1960 the •German Empire invades and commits mass genocide in the middle east. • Racism rife in US slavery returns. • 1970 America splits and a 2nd civil war starts between imperialists and communism. • US divided between communist south and imperialist north. With break away nationalist states and communist revolutions springing up in South and Central America. 1990 Japanese succeed in killing almost all the chinese in China. • Worldwide technological stagnation. The world only advances in 2021 to 1950s level. •Child of the kaiser marries princess Elizabeth or Margaret of Britain and their child becomes the legitimate heir of the British crown. • German the most common language in the world. • German imperial reich declared. All non-germanics kicked out or killed.
I don't see how it would have prevented the rise of the Soviet empire in Russia, and i equally don't think that continuing the Tzars would be good.
Nazis were already in existence. Hitler just put them on steroids (well, crystal meth)
I disagree that India would have gotten independence sooner. Surely a key aspect to Indian independence was that Britain - having fought for others to defeat their foreign rulers - could not intellectually now reconcile being a foreign ruler of India. That and WW1 crippled Britain ability to finance and Empire.
Actually, i would go further. I don't see the end of empires at all without WW1. WW1 drained the homeland resources and will of the people. (I mean, how can you fight for freedom of the Belgium from the Germans and then fight to keep people in Uganda repressed? It's an inconsistent ideology)
I just don't see any appetite in America to rule Canada. What are the clues for that coming to pass?
I think as you go further out in time it's really too hard to pull all the different moving parts together
I don't see what anyone gains from occupying Australia. Mineral wealth perhaps? That would make the most probable candidate to take over Aus China?
I don't see why the German economy would be the most powerful. Given geopolitics, America has location location location. So it would always become the most dominant.(That's why the UK kicked everyone else out of the US )
1.) in reality the Germans actually beat the Russians in WWI. The Russians actually had no choice but to sign a separate treaty with the German empire in order to avoid getting overrun.
2.) There was a predecessor to the Nazi party called the DAP but it only came into existence as a result of Germany’s defeat in WWI. It was composed entirely of individuals who blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in WWI.
3.) India was a British colony, if the victorious central powers imposed strict reparation policies onto the British empire, chances are that part of those reparations would have been to give up some of their colonies, which would have included India.
4.) Had Canada been forced to pay harsh reparations, the bitterness would have made Canada very bitter which would have been a fertile land for extremist ideologies to rise and take over. And if that new Canadian regime had interests that conflicted with America’s influences, then there would most certainly have been a armed conflict between the two.
5.) I say it would have been more of an occupation than an annexation if multiple countries besieged it. And China simply wouldn’t have gone red, most of the blame for China going red can be placed on imperial Japan who attacked China right before Chiang Kai shek was about to defeat Mao. This allowed Mao a second chance to regroup and ultimately win the second Chinese civil war after WWII.
6.) That would only be the case if America won that alternate Cold War scenario which would have been unlikely considering that Germany had some of the best scientists back in the day. It wasn’t until after WWII in real life when Most of the top German scientists were brought to America under “operation paper clip” and used to them to beat the Soviets in the space race. It’s a pretty educated guess to assume that in this alternate history scenario, those German scientists would have been used by Germany to win the space race which would have made them more likely to win that alternate Cold War scenario.
The problem with trying to figure out what may have transpired if certain events in history had not occurred, is that you cannot take into consideration the completely unexpected. For example, in 1985 if you had told someone - literally anyone - that within ten years the Warsaw Pact, and the USSR itself, would no longer exist, well... Let's just say you wouldn't have been believed. Who could have foreseen the 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent 'Gulf War'? The attack on New York and Washington on 11/09/2001? Sometimes the accuracy is spot on, and apparently "spooky" (ex. the 2011 film 'Contagion'), because the "prediction" is based within solid science and reality, and doesn't go off on wild tangents of pure speculation. As for World War One, we can be sure there wouldn't have been a World War Two, if only because the rise to power of the party that caused the Second World War (i. e. the NSDAP) was initially comprised of ex-soldiers who were bitter about the outcome of the first war. Absent the outbreak of World War One, there would not have been: 1. The disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. 2. The two Russian revolutions of 1917 which led to the collapse of Imperial Russia. 3. The execution of the Romanovs. 4. Approximately nine million dead. Without the Second World War, there would be no: 1. Jet aircraft. 2. Rockets. 3. Nuclear weapons. 4. A divided post-war Germany. 5. 'Cold War'. 6. National space programmes. 7. Chinese Communist Party. 8. Korean War. 9. Vietnam War. 10. McCarthyism. 11. 55 million dead. Overall, the world would have been a better place in my opinion.
It's always something interesting to speculate upon, and so many Science Fiction movies, and TV shows, have played with changing history, and including Time Travel. What you propose is an interesting idea, but your conclusions, and suppositions are totally unsupported, and how do you know that things would not be WORSE, without the First World War? Once could spend a LIFETIME, researching this, and the possible changes, and outcomes, tracing the life-lines of the individuals that did, or wouldn't have done things that MADE HISTORY. Then, there is the theory, that "Time-Lines" are "Self-Correcting" and if Time travel is possible, and you go back, and change a MAJOR event, somehow the "Living Time-LINE" self-corrects, and the end result is the same!
We would be in a world free of dreadful diseases & disorders, with far lesser population, with almost all being brilliant in some way or other. Poverty will only be seen in movies. Life on earth would be adventurous and purposeful. Human colonies would be set up in different planets. Yes, All this was possible only if Germany stayed alive. They could have boosted the whole scattered aryan races (as in india and parts of iran) and stimulated the scattered german races (almost all Europe, us), so in the end all of those murderous cruelty would finally dissolve into creating a human paradise on earth. But nothing such happend, thanks to the worlds weirdest foreign policy formulations from Germany. In fact, I seriously think Germans have inherent lapses in their emotional thinking part of brain, which neutralised all their brilliance. This is the same reason why greek and roman empires ruled, uk, usa & russia ruled, all with german manpower, but never there was a rule from germany.
For Europe, surely better. For America worse, because they filled their pockets in both world wars. In opinion of German nobility was war the father of progress. This was true in medieval and renaissance. However with WWI changed everything, because third party of this conflict made most profits while populations of directly involved parties had to pay the price.
All of those empires in Europe would have gradually collapsed, some quicker than others. Their colonies would have eventually won their independence. All of Europe would probably have followed the route of UK, either constitutional monarchy or total republic. Japan would have eventually become so aggressive and expansionist that war would happen in the Pacific anyway.
The US preferred to be more isolationist back then, and probably would not be so much on the world stage.
I don’t really think Japan would have started a war with the US.
There are actually many reasons why Japan became aggressive around the 1940s and it had to do with bitterness over how they were given less than the other victors of WWI which led to the February 21st incident which made imperial Japan more jingoistic.
Someone made a prediction around 1920 that Japan’s population growth would drive them to war by the 1940s. Their expansion would eventually lead to confrontation and war with the US. Until the end of WW2 Japan had NEVER been defeated in a war, and they kind of had that ‘samurai’ mentality of ‘honor’ and ‘never surrender’. They actually thought Americans were pussies who would flee in battle.
I think Thomas Sowell said it best regarding post-WWI:
"The first world war was said to be a war 'to make the world safe for democracy.' What it actually led to was the replacement of despotic dynasties by totalitarian dictatorships that were far worse, including more murderous."
I think things would have been very different if the central powers won versus WW1 never happened. Which one of the points you listed as "positives" and "just different" would you put in the category of "never happened" versus "If the central powers won".
Now I don't agree with everything claimed in this documentary. For example at @5:00 well the Genocide of the Jews is a big aspect of the atrocities of WW2 but I doubt that the German Empire wanted to implement Generalplan Ost which led to the death of some 15 million people on top of the Jews killed during the second world war but still, there are more nuances to the question than most people realize.
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Russia was on the decline even before WW1 so communism would still have prob happened.
Germany may not have been so pissed from Versailles treaty, but populist nationalism breeds easily. So Nazism may have prevailed- or something like it.
The US and it’s Roaring 20s decade may not have happened since we benefited greatly from a devastated Europe in 1918. Depression may have been diverted, tho.
From my understanding Germany was the power house in Europe after the defeat of Napoleon 3rd. And the other European powers wanted to bring balance. So the war was going to happen, no matter what. But what if it didn't happen? It would have happen eventually.
We would all be under German rule as before without the debts of ww1 Germany would have had the money and they would have still have been the center of the physics world allowing them to complete several dozen nuclear weapons before ww2 starts
there would still have been a Nazi party that was born of hitler's hatred of jews more than anything. It probably wouldn't have gotten as big as it did though.
The Nazi party already existed as early as 1919 under a different name, the “Deutsche ArbeiterPartie”(DAP) or German worker’s party. It only gained momentum after Hitler joined it.
Hitler scapegoated the Jews for Germany’s loss in WWI, that’s where his anti Semitic views started to develop. Had Germany won WWI, he wouldn’t have that same motivation to join the precursor to the Nazi party and he probably would have been a nobody, while the DAP would have never gained any momentum and would have eventually been disbanded.
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