James Joyce is right in many ways.

WW1, and WW2 (Which was WW1 part 2) stemmed ultimately from British foreign policy designed to prevent any single other power from dominating the European continent, while Britain used its naval power and massive economy to basically rape the rest of the world. WW1 was nothing short of Imperial belligerence, with Germany committing no worse crimes than Britain did. It's ridiculous to single out Germany as Imperial aggressors when the Soviets (British and US allies at the time) annexed Estonia, Riga, Latvia, and as much of Finland as they could grab, and the British had aggressively conquered nearly the entire world. Nothing shows how little Britain actually cared about the fate of the Polish people like the great betrayal of the Warsaw Uprising several years later. It was all just a big chess game.

Again in the lead-up to WW2 Germany noticed just how badly it had been assraped by Britain and friends, but Hitler should have stopped with the reoccupation of the Rhineland, annexation of the Sudetenland, and anschluss of Austria. The decision to invade Poland and start WW2 basically ended European hegemony over Earth, and fascism, which ended up being terrible for everyone involved. We're left with mass market consumer capitalism which is basically destroying humanity and the planet.

Trump may be The President we deserve.

^^this is pretty accurate. The invasion of Poland was one of the primary decision points of the war that could be considered a mistake.

I would contend that it still wasn't exactly a blunder of a mistake, as the Germans wanted to capitalize on their momentary leads economically and in the arms race. If they hadn't struck at this time, the documented international aggression toward Nazi Germany would surely have escalated the situation to war at a later time which would have rendered prospects of Nazi victory even more distant, and continued servitude in internationalist debt slavery a guarantee.

It's like when you're in a 1v3 situation in a single combat type of game like CS. Musashi says to strike out at your enemies in the order they are attacking, to string them up like a line of fish and take them one at a time, to prevent them from converging upon you and triangulating your demise. You're still not likely to win that 1v3, but aggression remains the soundest strategic decision.

Oh I quite agree. Britain was a monstrous imperial entity, as was the Soviet Union and much as the United States is today. My original statement was that the invasion of Russia was a strategic mistake on the part of Germany. People seem to disagree with me, which is quite silly. That move ensured the destruction of their regime.

Waiting for the Soviets to mass and fighting a defensive war would have provided an even surer guarantee of destruction. Your entire argument hinges on the idea that Stalinist Russia would never aggress against Germany if left to harden up after the great purge, which is laughably stupid.

Germany invaded when Russia was at its weakest and working to strengthen for an invasion, with inexperienced fresh officer corps and freshly purged military leadership.

It's debatable. Nazi Germany would have been the first to create both nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, technologies which were looted from Germany or the German scientific community during and after the war.

The scientific revolution that created the core of modern chemistry, physics, and biology, and laid the foundation for modern life, largely occurred in Germany in the early 1900's. Erwin Schrodinger, Max Planck, Werner van Braun, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Robert Koch, Niels Bohr, and Hendrik Lorrentz, were all either Germanic (Dutch/German/Austrian/Danish) nationals or residents of Germany. Both Einstein and J. Oppenheimer were German but had emigrated. If you've taken science classes you've heard these names.

http://i.imgur.com/lUcjfYg.jpg

Well, you've had the boy emperor who succeeded in destabilizing an entire region of the globe to no one's benefit while simultaneously ruining the economy of richest and most powerful nation to ever exist on this planet. Then you had a president whose drone program is the most intense terrorist campaign the world has ever seen and ensured decades of blowback on your country that ordinary citizens will be baffled by. How much worse can a guy who recommends solutions that won't do anything to fix the problems America's middle class feels be?

This is true. From what I've read of Nazi economics however, they were dependent on war industry and the seizure of assets to even keep government lights on. Supposedly the regime was on a very short rope financially and had a skyrocketing national debt.

I don't claim to know enough about economics to really fact check a statement like this and separate it from the mountains of propaganda but if true, it provides a motive for the hurry. Whether they could have sustained their 1939 leads over the world is debatable, to us and perhaps to them at the time.

to be fair every angsty teenager who thinks they know everything because of shows like ancient aliens and magical mystery science on the History channel know these names too....

Operation Barbarossa was undoubtedly their best chance to defeat the Soviet Union, and they came surprisingly close (They encircled and destroyed something like 2 million Soviet soldiers in the opening part of the war).

One thing you have to consider is that it wasn't just Hitler who underestimated Stalin, it was the Allies as well. Given a bit more time, Britain and the US may have been more reluctant to side with the Soviets against Germany for balance of power reasons (which was all they really cared about).

There was also the prospect of a gradual increase in tension between the US and Great Britain, if the British Empire hadn't fallen apart during and after WW2. Interesting to think about.