The Persian Empire for one, specifically the Achaemenids who Alexander and Seleucius took a lot from and the Sassanids were emulated in so far as both the Byzantines and Arabs all took or adopted various things of theirs for their own.
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The Persian Empire for one, specifically the Achaemenids who Alexander and Seleucius took a lot from and the Sassanids were emulated in so far as both the Byzantines and Arabs all took or adopted various things of theirs for their own.
Nazi propaganda is still very prevalent regarding aspects of ww2. Autobahn, dresden, blitzkrieg tank forces, etc etc.
Only so much can be blamed on David Irving books...
Only so much can be blamed on David Irving books...
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From the vantage point of Rome around 64AD, the world's current largest religion were very much the losers.
Superficial answer: nazis started it, nazis finished it with a really impressive network, it (and other public works projects, all started by the nazis) ended unemployment.
If you actually look into the stuff, you will see that it is.. not correct.
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A valid point, I'm still amazed Christianity took over the Empire in the end but then again I don't understand the appeal of martyrdom and other stuff that made it appealing to so many etc... that and I'm a salty pagan lol.
Fascinating stuff really. Facism in general likes the 'big build' and resculpting landscapes and cities in their own image.
So the autobahn, a very good and far seeing modernist project started by the Republic government in the 20s but didn't get very far (for all sorts of reasons) before the nazis took over in 1933.
Hitler loved the idea of these things, but of course, the nazis plus long term construction project equals bugger all. Over a hundred thousand workers plus nearly three hundred thousand support staff and three years later...they'd completed a small stretch linking some areas together.
But the world speed record for cars was achieved on that road. And nazi propaganda made a huge deal whenever a small stretch opened, and of the huge world event of the speed record thing.
By 1942, they'd managed 3800km of road, out of a target of 20,000km. And because of the war, no one could drive anyway...
Basically, it was a bit of a nonentitny until way after the war (it took the west germans less than a year to repair the roads because there were so few) when a proper government could actually get on to building them.
It took till the 80s for the country to be connected properly (in the west anyway), so its hardly the first real example of a motorway, or a motorway network. The US and UK systems are older.
Bascially, nothing the casual person knows about autobahn history is true, except the nazis were 'involved'.
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Yeah, I was going to mention Christianity and a more recent example would be Marxism. But cannot think of many others. And they're hardly valid as 'losers'.
Using resources of the defeated is another thing.
More than just resources. Rome derived a lot of its later military equipment from designs of its former opponents, adopting the Gladius from the swords it faced in Hispaniola, the greaves from its Samnite opponents, and some of its helmet concepts from Gallic designs. It often incorporated the religions of its defeated enemies directly into its own pantheon. On the other hand, the stripping of Veii to turn Rome into a city of marble seems more a matter of outright looting than of "copying".
The US adopted several tactical changes from its former German opponents, as well as modifying its own helmet designs and its squad machineguns (the Vietnam era Squad Automatic Weapon was a blatant rip-off of the German MG42) to be more similar to the German equipment.
In most cases, it took at least a generation before the former opponents' stuff was adapted and adopted.
Yeah but that's not the losers writing history, that's the victors kidnapping the losers' identity
Whether they acknowledge that it belonged to the losers is a different story.
Marx himself can be described as a huge winner.
So influential on historiography that today we don't question taking the economics of a given period or circumstance into context when analysing history.
Socio-economicaly, every advanced economy has been touched by Marxism, such that with a few notable outliers, the richest countries in the world are also pretty good places to live no matter how poor you individually are. Basic social aid policy and welfare is rather intrinsic to many people's ideas of what a 'good' country even is, to the point that it's absence is decried as a violation of human rights.
In terms of financial theory, he was proven right in the inherent unstability of capitalism without some state intervention.
The only area where he's run into trouble is, perhaps, polticial and philological, in that his musings of solutions to the problems of his time were...ill thought out.
So influential on historiography that today we don't question taking the economics of a given period or circumstance into context when analysing history.
Socio-economicaly, every advanced economy has been touched by Marxism, such that with a few notable outliers, the richest countries in the world are also pretty good places to live no matter how poor you individually are. Basic social aid policy and welfare is rather intrinsic to many people's ideas of what a 'good' country even is, to the point that it's absence is decried as a violation of human rights.
In terms of financial theory, he was proven right in the inherent unstability of capitalism without some state intervention.
The only area where he's run into trouble is, perhaps, polticial and philological, in that his musings of solutions to the problems of his time were...ill thought out.
The barbarians and the fall of Rome. The Vandals hardly have good publicity and most of the other barbarian nations hardly have a better reputation. Why? The losers wrote the histories of the time. The Catholic church is a surviving Roman institution and its perceptions of the barbarian peoples has dominated our perceptions of them for the better part of 1 1/2 millennium.
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Yea.
This has been a so good one. With a lot of opinions, thank you.
Let us continue and do the smart talking.
This has been a so good one. With a lot of opinions, thank you.
Let us continue and do the smart talking.
Weren't Autobahns meant for military purposes, by allowing a fast lane for couriers / officers to take over the traffic jams? Though probaly the coal and fodder driven Wehrmacht was not the prime beneficiary of such an infrastructure...
Got a bit sidetracked back there but we seem to be on firmer ground now...
Funnily enough, this has been brought up a few times before, during and after the war.
Long and short of it was no, they were not very useful for military purposes, including emergency airfields. For various reasons, aside from the fact they weren't actually finished.
For one, there weren't that many cars in Germany, and never were until after the war (or, I suppose, when it got invaded...). And there was basically no petrol from 1940 onwards. Nobody used trucks for freight (on a large scale) until the very end of the war (the allies) and afterwards (civilian, because of the huge war surplus vehicles, and it therefore finally becoming cheaper than rail).
Almost everything the nazis ever did was a failure varying from complete *as in did not work* to 'this took years off the war' scale disasters.
But their propaganda and mythology after the war has proven resilient.
Other well known and regarded 'losers'...hmm...the byzantine empire comes to mind. In decline for around 500 years and yet stuck around in pop consciousness for a lot longer...
Yes. That included into the major Nazi-plans. However, today, the Autobahns help people a lot, to get from a place to another.
I once had a German girlfriend, when I visited her country, I was amazed by the Autobahns.
IIRC, the Nazi spent about as much on the V2-rockets as the Americans did on the atomic bomb.
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Which considering how much the manhatten program cost, is obscene.
Mind you, very beneficial to the rest of the world afterwards. Essentially was am accidental space program.
I think you're loosely defining the 'loser' tag.
After the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire it completely collapsed.
A lot of the scholars from that entity left for Italy mostly, the former lands of the Roman Empire, and were catalytical in the Renaissance period. The fact is that this isn't really common knowledge. Also, the Ottomans completely dominated everything and now every dish that comes from that region is called "Turkish" or "Ottoman", whether it was 'Byzantine', 'Greek', 'Armenian', 'Balkan', 'Persian' or whatever.
Apart from Greece under Ottoman occupation, no one else envisioned and plan a revival of the Byzantine Empire. It's the Roman Empire's ugly cousin anyway in terms of history. Only a few nerds like her
This is arguably an example of the complete opposite. Of how a victor completely overrun the losers.
The only case of Byzantine being the losers that were listened to is during the Serbian conquests and that's only because no one other than the Serbs and maybe the Bulgarians bother about that part of history. But that's also due to the Ottoman dominance in the region. No one cares about 50-100 years of brief occupation in the region during Ottomania.