What if the Christmas Truce Ended the First World War?

Поделиться
HTML-код
  • Опубликовано: 29 окт 2024

Комментарии • 107

  • @Swissswoosher
    @Swissswoosher 10 месяцев назад +40

    “You can not get much more evil than the Nazis”
    *Laughs in Japanese*

    • @goldenager59
      @goldenager59 10 месяцев назад

      Oh? _Were_ the Japanese then _much_ more evil than the Germans? It could be argued that they both were roughly equivalent in their occupancy of the bottom of the moral sinkhole. 🤨 😕

    • @ChatGPT_ChatbotTest
      @ChatGPT_ChatbotTest 9 месяцев назад +3

      Laughs in verify your clock

    • @martimsousa2601
      @martimsousa2601 8 дней назад

      ​@@ChatGPT_ChatbotTest tno reference?

  • @aaronneal6421
    @aaronneal6421 10 месяцев назад +52

    Honestly an interesting little detail that might emerge, at least in the west, is treating holidays as more sacrosanct, and people being much less willing to give them up. IE: what do you mean you want me to work on Christmas? CHRISTMAS? The holiday that ended the war en Europe? What kind of monster are you? Or you put in Easter or Ramadan or Labor Day or whatever else. Observance and respect for the observance of holidays isn't just a matter of politeness, but a sacred cultural taboo that transcends religion and crosses cultural lines.
    Also, maybe there's actually a different rout than "decolonization" or at least how we did decolonization. If peaceful resolution is more valued, and something like an idea of "shared humanity" or a "brotherhood of man" gains more popular support, ideas like "federating" some of these empires, with people in the colonies and imperial cores simply all becoming citizens all under a common, truly shared body might gain traction. These might not all work out, but I could see the idea not only seeing some success, but with the modern trend of pushes for multi-national unions or federations being a blueprint for a more peaceful future in lots of regions of the world currently plagued by conflict and unrest. Like maybe the empires don't necessarily stay "intact" completely but say all of French Africa, or all of British Africa or all of the Indian subcontinent as large federated states, who have the mechanisms to resolve potential internal conflicts in a civil manner. Or maybe some of them survive, but truly do become federated multi-cultural nations with equal citizenship under the law and freedom of movement.

  • @misatohair
    @misatohair 10 месяцев назад +32

    Austria Hungary fell due to famine and the Legislature under Renner trying to implement socialist policies which worsened the famine and corruption. The idea that they fell due to being multiethnic was just a justification that the successor states used for their existence and claims. The galicians, bosnians, and Transylvanians were extremely loyal subjects and only some in the universities had ideas of self determination i feel that loyalty to the Kaiser would keep the realm together.
    Franz Josef was a father figure to the people and if he still died in 1916 i wonder how Karl ascending would affect the empire he was loved for listening to the people and wanting to end the war, he even toured every front to see how his men were doing and how the war was going. I wonder if Karl had no war to try to end what would happen under his reign. Maybe he wouldnt still make concessions to the socialists with less of a famine and need for wartime rationing.He would probably create another crown or two and create legislatures for the south slavs and east slavs so that may quell yugoslav nationalism or increase it.
    I know it was a joke about Kaiser Wilhelm II throwing tantrums but he was the only monarch in Europe that fought for workers rights against nobility and corrupt businessmen and he was known to tour mines, farms, and the front so see how his men were fairing. Most Other monarchs did nothing of the sort fearing assassination. A lot of the negative light on Wilhelm was brought by entente propaganda. He was at times awkward and goofy but his upbringing ny his mother was very traumatic. I doubt anyone read this but i think it eould be an interesting video on what if Austria Hungary lived in this scenario Maybe. Merry early Christmas!

    • @brigantiasmemerepository6439
      @brigantiasmemerepository6439 10 месяцев назад

      Bro you cannot be serious, Austria was such an unstable mess Russia had to bail them out from Hungary in 1848, and they became a defacto puppet of Germany by the end of WW1. With ideas of self-determinism becoming more popular in Europe, no one would step in to save Austria, and they would get partitioned like otl.

  • @Nostripe361
    @Nostripe361 10 месяцев назад +100

    Honestly an interesting thing about Alternate History of WW1 is discussing if the world would be better or worse since the war and the effects from it leading to the second world war basically led to the end of the age of empires and colonization. Would we have seen it take longer for Non-Europeans to gain their freedom and what affects would this longer time take. Would the loss of the horror from seeing what the Japanese and Nazi's did slow down attempts to push more humanitarian ideals and the stopping the spread of eugenics.

    • @wegdhass5587
      @wegdhass5587 10 месяцев назад +3

      If not for WW1 then the colonial empires would have never collapsed, as they wouldn’t have had a entire world spanning war shake them to their core and set them up for failure if, you know, a second one happens?
      As a person who adores empires, I see that as an absolute win but I can also see how that might suck for the natives lol.

    • @J7Handle
      @J7Handle 10 месяцев назад

      Haha you think eugenics have been stopped? Not even close. The elites are still by and large eugenicists.

    • @hstochla
      @hstochla 10 месяцев назад

      As terrible as the 20th century was, without the wars and hardship our technology would be far worse. It is a double-edged sword.

    • @danielw.8356
      @danielw.8356 10 месяцев назад +8

      Was it better for non-Europeans? Communism spread to most of the areas in Africa and many other locations and mass genocides, rebellions, and deaths occurred. No WW1 the way it happened, means no Soviet Union, and no communist nation. Which means no cold war, no nuke, no mass genocides, no mass killings, and instead a continual goal like the French and British to make the world closer to a single idea and vision.

    • @viktorlind6614
      @viktorlind6614 10 месяцев назад +5

      Colonialism was positiv for the natives in the long run

  • @Alpha_Digamma
    @Alpha_Digamma 10 месяцев назад +10

    Hundreds of thousands of soldiers turning on their heels to kick their respective war mongering governemnts out of office? Now that would put a smile on my face.

  • @creatoruser736
    @creatoruser736 10 месяцев назад +22

    I don't think the US not being in WWI would have left them less prepared to fight Japan in some alternate war in this timeline. The US Navy didn't fight any surface battles and the conditions on the Western Front were much different than on islands in the Pacific, so it's not like they missed out on useable combat experience.

    • @ottobuchmann3646
      @ottobuchmann3646 10 месяцев назад +1

      Logistical support, artillery, squad tactics, combat experience, they would have missed out on a whole lot of experience.

    • @dr.vikyll7466
      @dr.vikyll7466 5 месяцев назад

      The commanders of WW2 really benefitted from their experience in WW1

  • @giladpellaeon1691
    @giladpellaeon1691 10 месяцев назад +4

    Sabaton even has a song about the Christmas Truce.

  • @KaiHung-wv3ul
    @KaiHung-wv3ul 5 месяцев назад +2

    I actually think decolonization will happen much later. Fighting a war against "fellow Europeans" was very different from fighting in the colonies, and just because the Europeans got more peaceful doesn't mean they got over their sense of superiority.
    In fact, I feel like this will cause renewed European attention to the colonies. As Europe's power dynamics was set back to a balanced state, they might focus even more on competition in the colonies an not on the continent itself.

  • @zhcultivator
    @zhcultivator 9 месяцев назад +2

    please make a video on what if the Bronze Age Collapse never occured

  • @danielsantiagourtado3430
    @danielsantiagourtado3430 10 месяцев назад +5

    One of my all time favorite what ifs! Thanks 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

  • @hendriktonisson2915
    @hendriktonisson2915 10 месяцев назад +4

    What if Germany in WW1 went for east first strategy, remaining passive in defence in the west? For one thing Germany not invading Belgium would probably postpone Britain's involvement in the war. If German defenses in the west started to crumble in the west they could've offered the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France in return for separate peace with France and Britain.

  • @Carl_Johnson_1992_GSF
    @Carl_Johnson_1992_GSF 10 месяцев назад +2

    I think the people of 1914 to 1919 would be dissapointed of us since they were able to have a some what peacefull Christmas

  • @aidannelson-sanger3963
    @aidannelson-sanger3963 10 месяцев назад +9

    This really is the most wholesome timeline

    • @kidfox3971
      @kidfox3971 10 месяцев назад +3

      Belgium: "B-but what about the thousands of my people who were murdered by the Germans? And our priceless historical monuments which were burned down? Aren't you going to help us-"
      Britain: "Football 😊"

  • @HebaruSan
    @HebaruSan 10 месяцев назад +1

    Delightful! Makes me wonder whether anyone has intentionally written a best-of-all-possible-worlds alt hist. Too boring?

  • @maxheiskanen7634
    @maxheiskanen7634 10 месяцев назад +1

    You should make a video about what if Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended ww1.

  • @goldenager59
    @goldenager59 10 месяцев назад +2

    I sometimes like to think that the premature invention of television by Edison or Tesla - say, around 1900 - and its almost certain subsequent use in covering the Great War live (á la Vietnam) might well have boosted the power of the Truce to take effect beyond the combat zones.
    Comments? 🧐

  • @bennpadulo
    @bennpadulo 10 месяцев назад

    Fantastic feel-good video Matt!

  • @Nobody.exe50
    @Nobody.exe50 10 месяцев назад +1

    Thngs got depressing and hopeful at the same time at the end there

  • @breadenjoyer5778
    @breadenjoyer5778 10 месяцев назад +1

    One of my favorite what ifs

  • @MrLesonfireforGod
    @MrLesonfireforGod 10 месяцев назад

    Great video sir, and I like how you have some scholarly references to support your positions. I normally watch Cody on Alternate History Hub but I am aware of several other channels such as yours. Cody never supports his positions with the works of others. I have now subscribed to you and will be back.
    I think you make some good points. A Christmas truce may have lead to a slightly more utopian west but I don't think from the perspective of Communism. It would rather have had a more Christian influence. However, as wonderful as it might be to hope a continued royalty in Germany would have prevented Hitler from rising, I think it took the guilt of the holocaust to spur on the Civil Rights movements of the 1960's. Certainly Japan would have continued its oppressive ways, both on other nations and its own people. WW2 would have been the west against them and still would have needed the atom bomb to break Japan of its militarism.
    If I may, I have a video for you and your audience on the two competing ideas of fate versus free choice. Here is a link. I would be honoured if you would watch it. ruclips.net/video/3d4FhNvNkNY/видео.html

  • @spaghettiking7312
    @spaghettiking7312 10 месяцев назад +4

    We would live in a more wholesome world today.

  • @Tytoalba777
    @Tytoalba777 10 месяцев назад +12

    I'm hesitant to believe that the Christmas Truce of 1914 could lead to an early peace. While the the propaganda of war hadn't seeped in yet so that [the other side] became _the enemy_ , the true horror of the war also had just started. I think a Christmas Truce of 1915 or 1916 (which did happen but not quite to the same scale) could have a better chance of it happening.

  • @funnycreature2331
    @funnycreature2331 10 месяцев назад +1

    Nice and nice concept.
    Though as with all alternative history as am genre, please use primsry sources to back up claims rather than secondary.
    Its nice to see a new channel with a good format. Personally id do videos on actual history rather than alt history.

    • @procyon6370
      @procyon6370 10 месяцев назад

      This isn't a new channel by any stretch of the definition.

    • @dr.vikyll7466
      @dr.vikyll7466 5 месяцев назад

      Some secondary sources are better than the primary sources they use. Because primary sources sometimes tend to do something called "lying"

  • @bg1052
    @bg1052 10 месяцев назад +1

    5:55 I'd have to heavily disagree with that. Given how much Europe resisted decolonization in our timeline after having 2 world wars that wrecked their economies and militaries on top of both world superpowers being anti-colonial, yeah, no they're not just going to let their colonies go in a timeline where that doesn't happen.

  • @warlordz5779
    @warlordz5779 10 месяцев назад

    Another alt history Channel found, let's go

  • @keiganhoyt87
    @keiganhoyt87 10 месяцев назад

    you should what would the world of man in the high castle look like in 2023 it would be very interesting

  • @mudgetheexpendable
    @mudgetheexpendable 10 месяцев назад

    The idea that this might've happened keeps me up nights....

  • @TheDanEdwards
    @TheDanEdwards 10 месяцев назад +1

    Imagine the development of nuclear weapons if there was no sustained WWI. Who would develop the A-bomb first? And would there be a proliferation of said weapons to _many_ nations by 1950. Think of the nuclear cataclysm that could occur sometime in the 1950s.

    • @goldenager59
      @goldenager59 10 месяцев назад

      It was a "squeaker", historically speaking. We found out the horrific consequences of war backed by industrial technology less than thirty years before we discovered the means to lay waste _all of civilization_ with that technology. A world that saw the Christmas Truce abort the entire war might only have set the stage for the greatest of Great Wars. Anyone left alive after could perhaps call it the World-KILLING War. ⚛️ 😵

  • @goldenager59
    @goldenager59 10 месяцев назад

    The eighth chapter of Mr. Weintraub's book is perhaps the most absorbing part, in which he covers many aspects of the world situation - political, scientific and cultural - which could have been drastically altered by a Christmas Peace. But he does miss a few choice bets.
    While he does acknowledge that, in the Xmas-Pax world*, one of the greatest losers would have been the whole of womankind (with no chance to replace men _en masse_ in the workplace, suffrage might have been delayed by decades), the colored peoples of the world would have likewise lost a precious opportunity to demonstrate their bravery on a world stage, and thus the conscience-raising of white society might have been stillborn. If Gandhi had still campaigned for India's freedom, Churchill's Britain would have had many more troops to spare in keeping sedition stifled and, therefore, had Martin Luther King Jr. still existed in this world, he might not have had a successful role model to inspire his own nonviolent protests in America, thus raising the chances of racial demonstrations' taking more violent forms. The Xmas-Pax world might have seen the USA embroiled in a second, white-vs.-black Civil War before the century was out.
    Another aspect Mr. Weintraub neglected to include was America's influential temperance movement. Had the USA never been drawn into the war - with the accompanying explosion of anti-German hysteria - the great beer-making companies founded and run by German-Americans (like Pabst, Stroh, Schlitz, Busch, and so on, already stigmatized simply for purveying alcohol) might not have been targeted as especially insidious agents of the enemy. Long-time fighters like Wayne Wheeler of the already powerful Anti-Saloon League might not have had the extra push to get the Volstead Act through Congress...and Prohibition would have therefore remained a tantalizing fantasy of the "dry" segment of the people, with consequences for America and the world utterly incalculable.
    Also, Mr. Weintraub could have listed many performing and creative artists and offbeat people whom the longer war snuffed out after 1 January 1915, like sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, or architect Antonio Sant'Elia, or poets like Julian Grenfell, Joyce Kilmer and Wilfrid Owen, or prose writers like William Hope Hodgson or H. H. "Saki" Munro, or composers like Enrique Granados or George Butterworth, or even sons of famous people such as Theodore Roosevelt's son Quentin, or Rudyard Kipling's son John, or Oscar Wilde's son Cyril (and although Weintraub does mention [p. 24] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's son, he fails to give his name, Kingsley).
    As you can see, I've devoted some time and thought to the subject! 🤓
    * "Xmas-Pax world" was my own on-the-spot invention. Repetition elsewhere may necessitate a royalty; recognition, at least, would be courteous. 😏

  • @cia5649
    @cia5649 10 месяцев назад

    austria hungary wouldnt really collapse reform yes but doubtful that the germans would allow a full collapse of the empire at worst case a reduced hungary would be free leaving the germans in a stronger position within the empire possibly galicia as well but not likely

  • @baronbrummbar8691
    @baronbrummbar8691 10 месяцев назад

    an intresting scenario
    seen a couple diffrent
    interpretation of it any i really like your
    --------
    what do you thing about the following
    What if Mario theresia and Fredric the great got maried

  • @denifnaf5874
    @denifnaf5874 10 месяцев назад

    I personaly think that hungary would be 3 times bigger than hungary today
    The trianon has no reason to happen if ww1 ends so early
    Right?
    Right!?!

  • @slibertas1996
    @slibertas1996 10 месяцев назад +2

    The truce was right. The war was wrong

  • @francescocarlini7613
    @francescocarlini7613 10 месяцев назад

    The world would not be more religious because of the Christmas Mutiny. If anything, Christmas 1914 would be remembered as the day when working class people from the great European powers came together to defy their imperialist burgeoisie overlords.
    The secularization of Christmas takes a sudden turn to the left.

  • @nuclearvacuum
    @nuclearvacuum 10 месяцев назад +1

    Did someone say 'Democratic Russia'?

    • @lesbaguette4381
      @lesbaguette4381 10 месяцев назад

      Yeah, that's the part of this that strains credulity the furthest. Russia's superpower status only came from the insanely forceful (and originally effective) industrialization and agricultural mechanization procedures put in place.
      Terrible in human life cost then, but it let them push back the Nazis later and go on to challenge the US to an (unequal) Cold War for another fifty years.
      Also, anyone who would have lead such a democratic Russia would have been rather incompetent. Unless you get the Socialist-Revolutionaries, maybe Nikolai Nekrasov (not Kerensky) in the hotseat, things aren't going to work.

  • @sharadowasdr
    @sharadowasdr 10 месяцев назад

    Too optimistic.

  • @chimera9818
    @chimera9818 10 месяцев назад

    Well Zionism and the first two Aliyah’s already happened before ww1 so Israel still might exist but would need to face the new Arab kingdom rather than British or ottoman to do so

  • @domenstrmsek5625
    @domenstrmsek5625 10 месяцев назад +1

    I have problems with Arabs getting independence becouse it heppend becouse English literally bribes sharifs against Ottomans!

  • @kidfox3971
    @kidfox3971 10 месяцев назад +1

    What if the British troops did their job and fought against the bloodthirsty invaders rather than eating chocolate and playing soccer with them? There's a reason why Belgians and French didn't participate in the Christmas Truce.

    • @NapoleonVIII
      @NapoleonVIII 10 месяцев назад +1

      The reason was that France had still the war of 1871 in memory.

  • @thunderbolt1964
    @thunderbolt1964 10 месяцев назад

    Acion Francais what is a monarchist group and not a fascist group

    • @gahelo
      @gahelo 10 месяцев назад

      It matters when

  • @GoogleGoogle-zb6bz
    @GoogleGoogle-zb6bz 10 месяцев назад

    First

  • @ivandinsmore6217
    @ivandinsmore6217 10 месяцев назад

    Two things you said in this video are incorrect.Stalin's USSR and Mao's China were much more evil than the Nazis and it was a game of Football not Saaker that happened.

    • @goldenager59
      @goldenager59 10 месяцев назад

      With respect, I submit that evil is evil, and the fact that destiny granted Stalin and Mao longer spans of time to entrench their tyrannies, while it does increase the number of evil _deeds,_ does not necessarily increase the sum total or intensity of evil itself. (Or so it could be argued, anyway.)
      And, you are right about the Europeans' playing football instead of soccer - insofar as they would themselves have thought of it that way (the other term being somewhat limited to North Americans).
      But such, at least, are my opinions only, and if you choose to disagree, then fine, if that be your preference. 🤓

  • @Berserker3624
    @Berserker3624 10 месяцев назад +2

    This one of if the most stupid thing i have ever heard when it comes to ww1