Oslo
Jim Davies at Strike the Root - in a world without governments, Hitler could never have conquered Europe. [root]
There's no doubt of it, Obama is one of the world's two best orators of the last hundred years...
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... the whole result of WWII in Europe was that the United States was dominant, everyone else was more or less ruined, and a government even more repressive than Hitler's dominated everyone East of the Elbe --for half a century. Things to its West were better than they would have been had Hitler won, but if we try to view the scene as a whole or as an average, it's more or less a wash. Those 60 or 70 million died more or less in vain. Half the population were brutally suppressed by a Red government instead of a Brown one and the other half, while certainly freer than either, have come to be subjugated by governments whose degrees of control have, by now, become Fascist in all but name. Without being too fanciful, one might even say that Hitler has enjoyed a posthumous victory.
... Let us suppose that in 1939 and 1940 Hitler's was the only government in the region--that all others were zero-government societies, all of whose populations understood what freedom means and what governments mean, and therefore repudiated the latter and declined to work for them, exactly as the situation will be here, in and after about 2027. On that premise (which of course would have been contemplated by nobody in Oslo City Hall last week), there would have been no government either to oppose Hitler or to surrender to him; the choice that Obama referenced would not have existed. If German troops had marched in any particular direction, there would have been no government force to oppose them--but then what? How would they have exploited anything they happened to want? What, from Hitler's point of view, would have been the point of sending them in the first place?
They would not have been able to take over an existing bureaucracy to control the population, for there would not have been one. Therefore, Germans would have had to supply it. Therefore, the costs of occupation would have been unacceptably high, and therefore the invasions would not have taken place...
