The First World War Ends On Sunday
Everybody knows that on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent across Europe with the cease fire concluding the hostilities of World War I.
But Germany has continued pay for the First World War through its obligations under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The amount was 226 billion Reichsmarks (about 96,000 tons of gold), a sum later reduced to 132 billion, which was £22 billion at the time.
This coming Sunday, Germany will make its last payment under the terms of the war reparations – fully and finally closing the books on the War to End All Wars. Most of the money goes to private individuals, pension funds and corporations holding debenture bonds so it hasn’t been helping fund the mess of the last 13 years.
If it took 90 years to pay Versailles off, how long will Brown’s debt take to clear?
Yes .. and it was France’s insistence on having its “pound of flesh” which led to the rise of Hitler and Nazism ..
As for paying off Blair & Browns debts .. one shudders to think ..
There are certain parallels … except this time round its radical Islam ..
The Der Speigel article I linked to goes much further down the rise-of-Hitler line by basically placing the blame for absolutely everything that happened afterwards at the door of Versailles.
That it started events is undoubted, but for them to use it to excuse all of the rest of the 20th Century is pushing mass denial too far.
UKs WW2 debt to the US was only paid off 3-4 years ago, that debt was of a similar magnitude to the position we, or rather your children, face today but at least then we had something to show for it.
Maybe in 100 years someone will be blogging that we’ve just paid off the last of Gordoom’s spending.
Of course money then will be very different from nowadays with no head depicted on the notes. Can’t have images of Mohammed, as we know.