I fail to see what kind of sarcasm was present in my original question - it was a totally serious interrogation, and bringing it down to its economic aspects and implications doesn't imply that I meant to lessen the legitimate drama surrounding these despicable events. Didn't mean to bring back bad memories or bad feelings, but if I am not allowed to ask this kind of questions without raising contemptuous answers like yours, History - even in its poor and amateurish state like we're practicing it over these forums - has lost its bid. I just don't feel like having someone's random answer ("happy now?") so easily and cheaply make me look like some kind of tardy clueless crypto-nazi loon over these boards, thank you. Getting to know your interlocutor btter before before trying to shoot him down in flames for bad reasons would help.
Use of the phrase “happen to have” in combination with your unnecessary use of quotation marks around “rational decisions” (you are not, like me here, taking issue with specific words and phrases, but an argument) gives an unmistakably sarcastic and belittling tone to your post. If this was not your intention I apologise for any upset caused.
The Plan Marshall had nothing to do with peace, it's not the settlement of WWII. What peace brought to Germany was a massive trial for war crimes, total military occupation and an actual division in 2.
Furthermore, the Plan Marshall was not put in place by a power that had lost more of its male population than any western nation ever had, while still having its former ennemy a lot stronger than itself ... and totally free of damage from the war !
In short, you can't honestly compare it to Versailles.
The Marshall Plan had everything to do with peace. It was part of a peace dictated not by two empires holding on to what they had against an up and coming rival, but by another up and coming rival made good. The nature of peace in 1945, is evidence that our leaders, whatever they may say in public about the inexplicable horrors of war and fascism, understood their causes only too well and were, implicitly and in part, culpable for them.
France, as well as her material losses during both wars, was capable of economic equilibrium based on industry and colonial markets and resources, which she was not about to willingly open up and share with her envious continental neighbour after either war. Britain, while more verbally sympathetic than her ally, was not voluntarily going to open up her empire to free competition either.
Enter the USA, a country with numerous developmental advantages over Germany, but in very much the same position- an economic powerhouse already saturating its vast internal market and feeling the barriers of the old empires as obstacles to her own development. The scale of the US and the supremacy of its production technique combined with the bleeding white and indebtedness of her rivals- allies and enemies alike- facilitated her emergence as hegemon of the western world in the aftermath of WW 2. Even before the second world war was over, the US was jostling with Britain, consolidating its economic interests in Saudi Arabia with military air bases (which served no purpose in the war whatsoever), in what had traditionally been Britain's imperial preserve.
The Marshall plan, part of a raft of measures attempting to undermine the causes of war, was a rare act of enlightened self interest and empathy combined with over optimism in the ability of regulation to iron out the consequences of uneven capitalist development in a nation state system.
The most important addition to the Marshall plan was the opening of world markets to German and US commodity capital while regulating the flow of national money capital other than the USD. With the industrial economies rebuilt to the same technical level as that of the USA, and institutions created to level out the minor trade imbalances envisaged, it was believed an economic equilibrium could be maintained in the US sphere of influence, making wars between the competing European nations a thing of the past.
The subtext to the Reagan era deregulation, the dismantling of these post war anti-war barriers, was a tacit acknowledgement that rivalry and war between the major and developing powers could not be regulated out of existence.
As for the Nuremburg trials, they were a curious mix of justice, victors justice and whitewash. They were part of the peace only in the legel precedents they set.
For starters, the vast majority of those responsible for mass war crimes escaped and found comfort and position in the new regime, shielded by successive German governments and the CIA. Adolf Eichmann, for example, was shielded by the CIA for fear his capture and interrogation might embarrass the US and the West Germany’s Adenauer government, revealing the collaboration of Hans Globke- Adenauer’s national security adviser, in drafting the 1935 Nuremburg laws.
In short, Nuremburg scapegoated a few top Nazis to let the vast majority off the hook.
Many of the defendants were charged with crimes that didn’t exist when they did what they did. I'm not one to get hung up on a technicality given the enormity of the crimes committed.
The most important aspects of Nuremburg were twofold. Its opening up and investigating for the benefit of society, the workings of the Nazi regime is something from which all humanity can now benefit. Secondly, it set the precedent of criminalising the plotting and execution of wars of choice, the ruling stating that it was from war that all the other evils of which the regime was charged flowed. It is by their own justice and legal precedent that today’s world leaders might one day be tried and hanged, against which the decay of today’s morality in the upper echelons of society shows in starkest relief.
