U.S. Ship Sunk by Germans in 1917 Is Found Off English Coast
nytimes.com
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Most people are against inflicting human suffering but sometimes it’s not so black and white.
Right now we can look at Afghanistan for an example - huge humanitarian disaster going on but world powers think by giving the cold shoulder then can soften the Taliban.
There isn’t a clear cut right/wrong here imo.
Even provable facts don't really get traction and things get swept under the rug. You don't get to read that much about such a British blockade against Germany, about a Belgian genocide in Congo (or any other major European country, even for things from the past century), etc. It's not that they're not considered big deals, it's that people are usually completely unaware they even happened.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/king-leopolds-ghost-adam-ho... (published 2020)
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/king-leopolds-soliloquy-mar... (edition of 2020, written by Mark Twain in 1905)
Ask a random person to list if they heard of King Leopold, the Congo genocide, etc. and see how many have heard the names before, let alone understand what's behind. Sure there's a Wiki page with details but the magic of rewriting history is not in deleting the truth but in making it uninteresting and obscure. And that allows people the assumption that nothing like this could have ever happened.
If you don't want other countries doing something to you, it is a good idea to not do the exact same thing to them first.
Finally, I'm not even sure it was against the law at the time. Both participants seemed to regard it as legal.
The timeline all the sources I can access with a simple internet search tell me this:
- the UK blockade of Germany began in August 1914
- the UK declared the entire North Sea to be a warzone in November 1914, and expanded their contraband list to include all food
- Germany declared the areas around the UK a warzone in February 1915, which is what you're referring to
> When Britain joined the war on August 4, 1914, they did not immediately execute the entire plan to blockade all German imports. It was not until nearly four months into the war that Britain labeled the North Sea a war zone, and also began directing limited forces in the Mediterranean as well to restrict all German trade routes.
> The final shift to establishing the full blockade came on November 11, 1914, after several German light cruisers were observed attempting to lay mines off the coast of southern England. This act of aggression gave British leaders the impetus they needed to declare the full blockade without U.S. resistance because during the first four months of the war, Britain had confined itself to blocking only war materials from reaching German ports. World opinion of Germany during this time began to deteriorate because of repeated reports of brutality directed against Belgian and French civilians.
These things have a way of "tit for tat" escalating. If your opponent is doing things like executing whole villages of Belgian civilians as at louvain (August 1914), then the blockade starts to seem like a moral imperative.
As well as that - if Germany is laying mines in layers off the British coast, that is a pretty effective way of stopping merchant traffic to Britain and is sure to elicit a response in kind. If a country started laying mines off the coast of New York how do you think the US would respond?
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/899/2/the-british-b...
this isn't even my own idea, this is the same ideology that USA itself uses to justify hiroshima/nagasaki...
if USA isnt going to be responsible for actual crimes against humanity in hiroshima or vietnam with its napalm and others or with afghanistan or iraq then why are these same people trying to fault Russia for doing the same thing they did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
so america can be involved in so many regime changes for the lulz, right?
The laws of war have changed since WW2, primarily through the Geneva Conventions but there have been a number of other international treaties as well.
lol
Yes it would be much better if countries like USA has perfect track records, and hopefully they'll get better at not harming other countries, but that doesn't change the fact that they're on the right side in this situation.
You mean unprovoked Ukraine invasion vs an attack spurred by Pearl harbour (at a time of World War that Japanese where allies of Nazi Germany). Not really "the same thing".
As for Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, I can look at US military moral failures there and still condemn russia’s epic moral failure in Ukraine. Incidentally, US’s invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 was far more justified than the soviet invasion of Afghanistan previously. If soviets hadn’t waged a similar immoral expansionist war there, I’m confident there’d have been no taliban.
No, the US isn’t morally pure, but Ukraine’s blood is on russia’s hands alone.
Before that, President Roosevelt enacted a broad embargo on Japan. No more steel and no more fuel. Some say Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to act, and the timeline supports that idea.
If a person believes "my body my right" and is fired from a federal job for refusing to take an emergency use authorization shot, is that also ok because it only harms the person economically?
Japan was in no way being strangled. Before Japan's unprovoked attack, there were no US Navy ships blockading their harbors. International trade is a voluntary affair, and the US and its allies were under no legal or moral obligation to continue selling to Japan. Cutting off trade through non-violent means was not considered an act of war under the international treaties or customary norms in effect in 1941. Whether they were expected to react or not is immaterial.
I'm not sure why you're trying to derail the discussion with irrelevant questions about vaccine mandates. Those apply to individuals, not sovereign states, and are completely off topic.
Also, US relations with Japan soured pre-war in large part due to Japan’s expansion by force in the region. “Expansion in the region” here encompassing events including that known as “the rape of Nanjing.”
So, again, US isn’t bloodless, but an embargo against the perpetrators of atrocities in Asia is hardly comparable to Japan’s war of aggression launched against the US.
Well yes, a lot of Americans (and Europeans and Asians, and even Russians) value "democracy". They also value things like "freedom of expression" and "the rule of law" that aren't particularly valued by Vladimir Putin.
No, not even close. Russia's goal in Ukraine is the destruction of Ukrainian statehood and ethnicity by merging its territory into Russia and turning Ukrainian people into servant underclass in the new Russian empire. Genocide, in short. See Putin's speech on the eve of the war and his pseudohistorical essays.
Nothing the US did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan or Vietnam comes close. The US did not attempt to merge Iraq into the United States and enslave the people of Iraq.
When facing genocide, surrender is not an option. It's insane to even suggest that. Nor are Russian ambitions limited to Ukraine, concessions will only lead to escalation.
I'm just curious whether this is judging the past with modern law or not, from my cursory search, the relevant agreements are the Hague Conventions, and the Second Geneva Convention; none of which seems to have provision for the protection of 'non-military assets such as food' like that, but perhaps I'm missing it, I am just skimming/ctrl-f-ing. (Civilians/non-combatants yes, but not their supplies specifically, if non-violently blockaded, afaict.)
It's a bunch of ships hanging about on the route, saying loudly over the radio "don't come this way or we will sink you"
Blockades are enforced by firing.
The "Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law" of 1856.
The neutral flag covers enemy's goods, with the exception of contraband of war;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Declaration_concerning_...
Also it would have made the blockade more of a war crime, not less.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/world_w...
It can be seen like that but you should make clear that it assumes German single responsibility for the war, including for her Allies' actions against civilians, and also indirect consequences such as deaths caused by malnutrition.
Then you would arrive at 3.78 million deaths, worst-case
But that doesn't mean that I'm right or that you're wrong...
To the extent that one can talk about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ sides in the Great War (which is not very far, really), Germany was on the good side (unlike in the Second World War).
Even when it comes to the "war crimes" stuff in this thread - something like poison gases were straightforwardly outlawed by the Hague Convention, it was Germany that first decided to "go there" and make mass use of poison gas a feature of WWI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Conventions_of_1899_and_...
'The nation that...can still be held least responsible for the outbreak of the war is France. This is so even if we bear in mind all the revisions of historical judgments, and all the revisions of these revisions, to which we have now been treated....The French, in 1914, entered the war because they had no alternative. The Germans had attacked them. History can be very simple at times.[1]'"
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Remak
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_entry_into_World_War_I#...
Not sure any country would have accepted the terms of Germany's ultimatum to France, which included not only not starting mobilization, but also giving strong guarantees. Furthermore, if France was to bend and remain neutral, the German ambassador was instructed to add more humiliating terms in order to secure war.
The British blockade against Germany was August 1914, according to these sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany https://nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/spotl...
Can you provide a source for a pre august 1914 German declaration of a blockade on the UK?
The war wasn't over at that point, there was only an agreement to stop fighting while negociating. In fact, the German army kept sabotaging industrial sites in northern France after the armistice.
Could you name or provide a reference to one of the post armistice actions of the german army in northern france?
...And they destroyed industrial sites during their retreat.
> Could you name or provide a reference to one of the post armistice actions of the german army in northern france?
[1](https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/hauts-de-france/pas-...) [2](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnie_des_mines_de_Dourges) [3](https://www.cairn.info/revue-guerres-mondiales-et-conflits-c...)
Thanks for the links btw, it's not something I can remember seeing discussed in english before.
The blockade was arguably the main reason for Germany's capitulation.
There's no excuse for continuing the blockade after the surrender, though.
Haber claimed that mustard gas was more humane than having men rot in trenches for months while shooting one another, too, but when we justify horrors with "it's a kindness" we lose something important.
With all the technology at our disposal, why can no one build a system whereby people can read occasional articles at most websites by paying a penny or something reasonable? I can't subscribe to 100,000 different newspapers.
In the long-term, I think this is going to damage the quality of information conducting through our society, and maybe even worsen the propaganda problem that we're currently facing.
There’s coordinated campaigns when issues pop up. When the former president gets himself in trouble, I basically get an early warning when my father in law is upset about some “woke” school/mayor/etc doing something outrageous.
Disable JS on nytimes.com (i use the Ublock Origin extension for this) and it works fine.
To make the company what I pay now for a subscription, that would come out to around $6.00 an article. I'm not sure I'd press that $6.00 to read button very often.
Your scheme would broaden the total number of readers, but I'm unsure that the company would actually do well under it.
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma...