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Anyone seen this thought-provoking new history of the 20th century being broadcast on Channel 4 on Mondays? Professor Ferguson puts across his argument well.

I saw the first one, taped the second (probably watch it tonight) and have ordered the book from Amazon.

I thought it exellently presented, a classic even.
Its amazing how much the world has changed since the first world war,
watching the remembrance for the battle of the Somme this week and thinking of the amount of people killed due to the technology of
machine guns and poison gas, you would think as a human race
we would have the sense to never allow genocidal warfare again.

Also serves to show how much most of us seem to take for granted as well, if anything past events have made mankind more selfish and less grateful - which really doesn't do justice to those who served the British Empire and paid the heftiest price of all ... with their lives.
Does anybody wonder what would have happened if Nazi Germany had actually won the war, just seems a niggling doubt in my mind that to the vast majority of Europeans life might actually have turned out better!!

[quote]Does anybody wonder what would have happened if Nazi Germany had actually won the war, just seems a niggling doubt in my mind that to the vast majority of Europeans life might actually have turned out better!![/quote]

Maybe if you were heterosexual, fully formed, christian, blue eyed, blonde haired, caucasian, and did as you were told!

Of course when Britain was building its Empire we treated every country that we "Educated" absolutely spiffing eh??
... Those Romans were a hell of a friendly bunch too I might add!!

Life might have turned out better if the Nazis had won? Um, I don't think so.

Robert Harris' novel Fatherland, set in the 1960's Berlin, starts with the premise that Hitler won WWII. A good read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatherland_%28novel%29

An excellent novel.

For the world to have been a better place for German victory in the second world war, you'd have to be a white supremecist. And the chances of African, Asian and Latino people being left in peace afterwards would have been rather long. Ferguson's argument is that the war (and those that came before it) was racial. Stalin's continued policies of hatred towards parts of his empire after the war seem to support that.

On a slight tangent, the persecution of minorities continued long after the death of the monsters. Until the 1980s, Soviet authorities carried out nuclear testing in areas of Kazakhstan----sometimes ordering the natives to watch the tests, sometimes waiting until the win would send the fall-out into their town. To this day, the area is contaminated and the people die of horrible cancers, suffer deformities. And the west knows little or nothing about it.

True. But on the other hand Mucho Matcho, Von & Friends would be enjoying a "pikey" free zone.