Re: No Hitler: Polish-German Danzig war

"Michele" <nospammiarmel@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in
news:48b653f5$2$18160$4fafbaef@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 

> 
> "David Johnson" <trolleyfan_nospam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> ha scritto nel
> messaggio news:Xns9B07871F27135trolleyfan@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> "Michele" <nospammiarmel@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in
>> news:48b5083a$0$1072$4fafbaef@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>>> No. Mussolini waged a "pacification" in North Africa, but that isn't
>>> expansionism; the colony was already Italian. Mussolini was
>>> expansionist in _Eastern_ Africa.
>>>
>>
>> And of course *that* sort of thing dates back to the 1890s for Italy.
> 
> Well, yes. But things had changed. European land-grabs were in fa****on
> and respectable in the 1890s, no longer so in 1935, and against a LoN
> member. Most rulers other than a Mussolini would probably have
> followed the French and British in the new fa****on of economic
> penetration. 

True. But I just meant to say that this expansionist idea was hardly a 
*new* thing to Italy that Mussolini made up out of whole cloth.

Given the tendency of right-wing governments to overly promote "The Good 
Old Days," I'd actually suspect almost any right-wing leader in Italy of 
the period would at least feel an *urge* to make up for that embarrasing 
defeat in Ethiopia forty years before. A smart one wouldn't do anything 
about it...but the number of smart leaders in general* seems to be pretty 
thin, so...

David

* Well, most of them are *very* smart about getting and keeping 
power...and *rarely* smart about doing stuff with that power.

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________
 David Johnson                          home.earthlink.net/~trolleyfan

    "So many of you come time and time again to watch this final end of
everything which I think is really wonderful and then to return home to
your own eras and raise families and strive for new and better societies
and fight terrible wars for what you know is right, it gives one real
hope for the whole future of lifekind... 

....Except of course we know it hasn't got one."