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I "have" to feel that the great sin of Germany was what it did to the Jews, Cripples and Gypsies. I do feel that the greatest sin of Germany back then was what it did to Germany and the Germans.
As for those WWI vets, you can validly suggest that they weren't all unhinged gangsters, but I will insist that more than enough of them in positions of great power were, and this includes big names like Himmler, Göring, the non-veteran Göbbles and Hitler himself, and a thousand lesser party barons who managed to escape post-war condemnation only because they lorded it over the Germans instead of bullying foreigners or minorities. Some more unhinged, some more gangster, some perhaps neither but alas the the party was top-heavy with unhinged gangsters and the top had the last word on acceptable behavior.
I'm fine with denouncing the common depiction of the Nazis as fundamentally evil, fine with admitting that they did some good, fine with any claim of there being worse things in the world than Nazis, fine with theories that posit that Fascism may have good points, but not fine with attempts to whitewash those particular Nazis as saviors of the Germany they destroyed in their mania and incompetence.
Look at their mismanagement, the purges, the wealth accumulated by party functionaries, and the ground-level stories of German peasants and tradespeople being bossed around and told to shut up and get with the program or else, and look at the total and utter catastrophe that was WW2. It takes a lot of revisionism to clear them of the blame for that. You can, if you like, completely ignore the horror stories of concentration camps and death squads or any principled objection to authoritarianism - there's still more than enough left to condemn the Nazis in general both for what they attempted and for what they ended up achieving.
And I honestly don't know enough about JFK to answer your question.
Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.
Edit: This wasn't meant to seem curt - sometime though brevity is the soul of wit. Yes, perhaps if the Junkers or some other more traditional conservative faction had risen to power rather than such a reactionary party, Germany may have done X, Y, and Z. But it seems crass to me, almost prideful, to look at the 'unhinged gangsters' who 'volunteered' to beat the Spanish communists and then got the band back together in the Rhineland, Osterreich, the Sudetenland, Danzig, etc to give the Bolsheviks a genuinely good go and say 'if only!'
Yes, they lost, but they fought! By Jesu they fought. And it's just as easy to say 'it would've been better if they hadn't' as 'it would've been worse.' Maybe the Bolsheviks would've won in Spain and then later pushed through all of Europe to the Atlantic.
It's not unlike when Barbarossa drowned on the way to the Third Crusade. Yes, it's a bit pathetic, and we can poke fun at him for drowning (because he is our ancestral hero). But he chose to go! He chose to fight! That he happened to drown when someone else might've not and (swamped the saracens) instead doesn't make him an 'unhinged gangster'
Churchill was not prime minister when England and France declared war on Germany.
It doesn't take a Churchillian titanic view of history to understand the trends and forces of the war were beyond the scope of who happened to hold office at the time. Churchill and his ultra-conservative faction had feared the rise of German naval power for half a century - unabated after the Great War - before their promise to Poland gave them the necessary excuse to smack Germany back down. And what happened to Poland after the war?
You think if the Republicans had won in Spain this would somehow have led to the Red Army conquering all of Europe Command and Conquer style?
No, but I love the throwback, you or anyone else want to fire that back up sometime for nostalgias sake?
I think the Bolsheviks very openly and actively wanted to unite the workers of the world which would have certainly included going to the Atlantic if someone hadn't stopped them
In real life, the Soviets only reached even as far as Berlin because of copious American and British assistance. Without that, they might have at best fought the Germans back to Barbarossa start-lines. On their own, they barely beat Finland. The Red Army marching all the way to the Atlantic is ridiculous. "If it wasn't for us, the communists would have taken over!" was a useful bugbear for everybody from Hitler to Mussolini to Franco but Bolshevik conquest of Europe was always a fantasy.
Okay I'm open to it - let's say you're right - doesn't that make US the bad guys?
Wrong question. Ask: Were US good or bad players of the great game?
Look at the game board. At the beginning of session, there were seven players. At the end, only two were left.
The Red player who held one sixth of the board at the start, succesfully defended himself and was able to snatch few more squares.
While the Blue player beat and outmaneuevered all others and owned or controlled everything else.
Some people who are never satisfied might bitch that Blue victory should be even more lopsided, that if Blue optimized his play to perfection he might prevent the Red from taking the few squares he gained.
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