As usual, our Larry distorts and misrepresents. Also demonstrates
his inability to read. A few comments below:

On Apr 22, 12:19*am, " wrote:
A DEED OF SHAME

* Hmmm, so Larry would have preferred that Germany
won World War I. Interesting. -- Taylor Kingston

* *Trust Taylor Kingston to offer the argument of a
jackanapes. I wrote that if Germany had won WW1
in 1917, the world would have been saved many of the
the central horrors of the 20th century.

Thinking up horrors, and actually creating them, has long been one
of man's great skills. I think a more plausible guess is that had
Germany won WW I in some alternate universe's 1917, there would still
have been an ample supply of "central horrors" not significantly
different from those our history records.
And I say "guess" quite honestly, because that's all this "alternate
history" fantasizing is. Larry's vision of a post-WWI world free of
totalitarianism strikes me as naive. I would agee with him that such a
world might not have "Hitlerism, Stalinism, or Maoism," but it would
very likely have had evil dictators with other names.
And in that alternate universe, Larry Parr, or someone like him,
would probably be here arguing that if only the Allies had shown more
determination, and if only America had entered the war in 1917, the
world would have been spared all those evils, and would have been made
safe for democracy.

* *So *Kingston then infers that I preferred a German victory.
My preference was for an allied victory in 1915 or 1916 -- and
then the victory of either side in 1917. *Anything, in short,
to avoid the fatal year of 1918.

I would have preferred that, having won on the Western Front in
1918, the Allies had marched into Germany itself. By clearly
demonstrating to the German people, on their own soil, that they had
in fact been militarily defeated, there would have been no myth that
"the army had been betrayed" for agitators like Hitler to use
later.

* * *If you want to understand Kingston's approach
to historical thought, his response is exemplary.
Perhaps the two of us can agree on that much.

If you want to understand Larry Parr's approach to argument, keep in
mind that he will say pretty much anything, no matter how absurd, to
support Sam Sloan. He may make it sound all pretty and intellectual,
but the basic aim is to make Sloan look good, or at least less
ridiculous, no matter what the facts may be.

* * *Kingston's next attempt at an argument is to
reduce the observation that WWI resulted in
the decivilization of world politics to a silly reference
to Queen Victoria and haemophilia.

Ahem, Larry -- that statement was made by Sam Sloan, not by me.

* * * What our Kingston creature would have the
readers of this forum imagine is that the idea of WWI
as a disaster leading to the horrors of totalitarianism
is a farfetched historical construct.

See, there you go misrepresenting again, Larry. I never said any
such thing. World War I was indeed a terrible disaster, and yes, it
certainly did contribute heavily to the rise of totalitarianism. My
point here has never been to say otherwise.
My point here is that what you "would have readers of this forum
imagine," that German victory in WW I would have led somehow to a
wonderful alternate world, is just castles in the air.

It is not.

Speaking of "farfetched historical constructs," I find especially
farfetched your statement that with a German victory "Stalin would
have ended up as a zookeeper in the Central Caucasus, Trotsky a
radical editor in NYC and Lenin a fairly well-off, if frustrated,
French tutor for advantaged children in Zurich."
Since it was, in large part, the Germans who put the Bolsheviks in
power in 1917, bankrolling their movement and shipping Lenin back to
Russia, and since Lenin so blithely gave them everything they wanted
at Brest-Litovsk, I tend to think the Germans would have been quite
happy to leave him in power.

* * * And what did Kingston's hero Woodrow Wilson

Eh? You're fabricating again, Larry. I have never referred here to
Wilson as any hero of mine.