[real life] Breakup of EU and 'Germanies' going their own way....

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A lot depends on how it goes in the next while. Germans were already
torqued off about paying for earlier retirement and state-funded
holidays
in Greece and having to bail out most of the rest of Europe. With France
and Greece apparently headed for 'screw you, deutschebankers!', it
becomes
unclear how the Euro can operate or how the rest of the EU will have any
sort of money to use for the so-called 'growth' budgets.

It seems to me seperate currencies and perhaps even seperate trade
policies
focusing on internal trade within countries may be on the horizon. To
some
extent, globalism has lowered the value of labour to the detriment of
labourers in the rich countries. It was fine as long as we got cheaper
stuff and had jobs, but when the jobs started to migrate, we took a
fairly
different view.

Germany isn't (unless they are insane) going to float too many more
loans
to the 'we won't pay it back anytime soon and don't honour our
commitments'
crowd.

And we all recall Germany's historical approach to resolving serious
financial disputes with France...

I don't claim to understand all the shenanigans that led to this mess,
but
I do understand that blowing off the people who have and would possibly
continue to loan you money for liquidity is something next to crazy.

It's funny how quite a few of the things Jon predicted in whimsy all
those
years back have or are coming to pass (albeit often for different
reasons
and with some variances in detail).

Just watched a program where a pile of historians debated various places
in
history where there was a turning point, the right man or woman was at
the
helm, and things could have turned out differently otherwise. It was
surprising how many they came up with from the 20th century where some
small changes could have vastly changed the geopolitics of the era with
some minor trigger.

One I thought most interesting: Sometime I think before WWII, Churchill
went to New York. He got in a traffic accident, got some awful
complications, and almost died. Imagine England without Churchill. They
might have survived, but Europe might have ended up Russian or German.

Another one is how close the Soviets came to revolting on Stalin during
his
brutal efforts to fight the Germans. It's possible if the Red Army had
screwed up in a couple of key places, the Russians could have thrown out
the Stalinists and the Germans may well have been able to stabilize
their
control of some quite wide areas after smashing the Red Army.

There are a lot of others that are smaller and hinge on less well known,
but still important as it turns out, people.

I think one of the fellow was Jeff Greenfield who wrote "Then Everything
Changed" which focused on the American political side. The other authors
contributed Canadian, British, and other perpsectives.

This is half of why alternate histories, despite being the fluff we wrap
our games in, are so interesting.

-- 
Solitudinem fecerunt, pacem appelunt
-- Publius Cornelius Tacitus (from the book Agricola, attributed to a
speech
from Calgacus)

Humans are the stupidest people I know.
-- LHI Chef