Speculative history is annoying

You've probably heard that line about how "you know, we all would be speaking German right now if Hitler would have only listened to his generals".

Well, he didn't listen to his generals. It's as simple as that, but nobody can leave the annals of history alone. There always has to be some prodding and poking and "what if" scenarios floating around that don't really amount to anything. WW2 always has the most of these incidents open for speculation of what "could have happened if..." so let us ponder this topic a bit further.

How about the famous Battle of Kursk? An abridged version of the battle plays as follows: Russians dig in for a huge defensive battle against the Germans on the Eastern front in the summer of 1943. This culminates into what is often described as the largest tank battle in history. Most people can agree on that, but from there the lines of history often become blurred. The Battle of Kursk is another time where Hitler didn't listen to his generals and wanted to withdraw some Panzer divisions to cart them off to Sicily to engage Western Allies that just landed. Heck, there is even speculation about why Hitler withdrew some of these Panzer divisions! Again this creates all sorts of opportunities to speculate about what could have happened if the Germans had stayed in the battle longer.

Some "experts" say that Germany would have won the battle (and possibly the war) had they stayed in the fight. Others say the battle was really more of a stalemate and that the Russians didn't win any kind of battle, they just suffered massive losses of troops and tanks.

Does it really matter if you think that German troops could have pulled out a victory had they stayed in the battle longer? They very well could (now I am speculating) have pulled out a victory in Stalingrad if Paulus would have gotten permission to break out before the Russians pulled a famous German pincer maneuver around them, but they didn't pull out, and that is where history stamped its bloody mark.

These battles resulted in the Germans now facing a war on two fronts all while retreating towards their Fatherland in a defensive position, rather than the offensive.

That's what really happened. Can't we just leave it at that?

This is such a broad subject and I don't really know how to tackle dismantling these nonsensical daydreams that people have. Maybe people want to re-write history to suite their own ideals or beliefs. Maybe I am just too practical and can appreciate things for what they really are, even if that happens to be some of the most gruesome and violent battles in history.

The first keystroke

This is what it must be like to have writers block, or at the very least, this may be my first case of it.

I can't count how many times in the last months that I've wanted to sit down and write endlessly about whatever topic was floating around in my head. This of course was usually at a very inconvenient time, usually when I was sitting in my veal fattening pen rotting away in front of a computer screen. I always had great quotes that I conjured up, snarky comments about political figures, insightful observations about whatever was making the world turn.

Now I'm sitting here with a beautiful sunny afternoon with some time to write and I'm sitting here writing about writing. Er, not writing actually.

The most frustration part is that I'm trying to recapture the spirit of the first blog I attempted to write a few moments ago, which had a much more organic and cheerful flow to it. As I went to post the blog my computer froze up, sending all of my words into a chasm from which they would never return. I thought I had copy and pasted everything into my head as I waited impatiently for my computer to boot back up, but such is not the case. It turned out very different than what was intended to be posted, and now I actually have somewhat of a direction even though I didn't feel like commenting about my laptop crashing.

It's a start.