> I cant help thinking that if his father had none that it would have saved us all a whole lot of bother.

That depends entirely on when and how it occurred, doesn't it?

OTOH, I think there's ample evidence that the West allowed Germany's rise in order to take on the burgeoning thread of Soviet communism (but Hitler and Stalin, no fools they, forged the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact). So there would have been some sort of mess one way or another, anyway.

The amusing part is that there is also substantial evidence that we also founded the Soviet Union:

"A hundred years ago, this country had risen to a position of having no serious rivals in the world. Today, of course, it does, which suits the bond-holders of our four-trillion-dollar debt very well. Could that be coincidence, you think? Before you comment, let's just review a few facts: The Revolution in Russia was certainly a turning point in world history. The majority belief today is that it was a successful movement of the downtrodden people under the leadership of the communists against the tyranny of the czars. That's not what happened. The Bolshevik takeover took place in November, 1917. The Czar had abdicated in March, seven months earlier. A provisional government was established by Prince Lvov, who wanted a system modeled on ours, but his regime didn't get the backing, and he gave way to a democratic socialist named Kerensky. It was Kerensky who declared an amnesty for all the Red revolutionaries that had been exiled after the uprising in 1905 that didn't come off. A quarter of a million of them poured back into Russia. Lenin was nowhere around when the czar fell. He was a has-been in Switzerland, where he'd been for eighteen years. Trotsky was in New York, running a newspaper. The Bolsheviks simply weren't a viable political force. They didn't come back at the call of the masses to assume power from the bottom up; they were sent in to impose it from the top down -- Lenin arrived with SIX MILLION DOLLARS of German gold. Now the Germans had a reason to try to topple the Russian government - it might have gotten Russia out of the war. But who sent Trotsky from America -- and got him released when the Canadians grabbed him en route? And the whole thing gets REAL interesting when you find that the German banker who engineered Lenin's transfer was the BROTHER of one of the central figures who'd done the pushing to set up the U.S. Federal Reserve System."
"Are you saying we set up the Soviet Union?"
"We not only set it up, we poured money in to save it in the early twenties when Lenin's 'New Economic Policy' had ruined it. But it got too big and looked as if it might run out of control, and Hitler was manufactured out of a nobody to check it. Since then we've resumed the old power-balancing act and bailed it out several times with huge technology transfers and other material assistance from the West, which have included building oil and synthetic rubber plants for them, the world's biggest truck factory, several aircraft aluminum plants, and even supplying the precision grinding machines to make essential ball bearings for their strategic missles, which their industry couldn't produce! And then Americans get screwed for seventy-five billion to pay for a defense industry to counter it. You see, it conserves parity. Postwar American prosperity could have gone so far out of sight as to make it a no-contest. Now do some of our insane economic decisions over recent years start to make more sense? ... And it's owned and run by its own luxuried elite of upper management in just the same kind of way. No wonder. They're both divisions of the same company."
- James P. Hogan, 'Mirror Maze' -

Granted, it's in the context of a fiction story, but Hogan wasn't the sort of writer (at least not back then) to make that sort of stuff up. I suspect his claims would stand up to investigation and vetting.

I resist the conspiracy theory element of it, but at some point one does have to notice the Trout In The Milk and wonder about it... I qualify that information above as "possible and very suspicious if true"

You really shouldn't cite a work of fiction to support an assertion of fact. Especially since science fiction writers often have fun by bending a few facts (or by creatively interpreting them) for the sake of an interesting story.

> You really shouldn't cite a work of fiction to support an assertion of fact. Especially since science fiction writers often have fun by bending a few facts (or by creatively interpreting them) for the sake of an interesting story.

A) That depends VERY much on the author in question. Hogan was known back then for being VERY careful not to arbitrarily change known facts to match his stories.

B) I suggest you really haven't read much hard SF to make that claim. HARD SF authors (which Hogan was early on, although much less so lately) hesitate to twist facts, especially ones they don't need to to make the story work, and would generally rather shift the story as needed, or, alternately, manufacture a macguffin which allows them to do what they want within the context of Truth.

C) That was why I expressly cited the fact that these were from a work of fiction. I have every reason to believe that Hogan was telling the truth here, as the facts suggested aren't even vaguely needed for the events of the storyline. He has no reason to make them up out of whole cloth, as, if anything, they render the book as rather didactic, like RAH's Starship Troopers (not saying it's as good, mind you, but it has that same talky feel). I believe that he'd discovered this information while researching history for one of his books, and thought it should be brought to the public's attention -- But before I'd take them as gospel, I'd want to research them to be sure, and would suggest the same for anyone else.

But lacking any data to give reason to reject, I'll lay decent money down that they are either true or were believed very possibly true at the time of the book's authorship. The interpretation of them (as suggesting any conspiracy, and how widespread or how deep) is far, far more open to debate, mind you.

Goebbels? Really? Didn't he have a bunch of kids? Granted, that by itself proves nothing, if they were adopted. But I didn't think they were.

"I suggest you really haven't read much hard SF to make that claim."

Wrong. I was reading hard sf long before James Hogan sold his first story. And Hogan, by the way, has been drifting into all sorts of crackpottery.

I repeat: If you want to make assertions about historical fact that you should cite historians, not novelists.

>> "I suggest you really haven't read much hard SF to make that claim."

> Wrong. I was reading hard sf long before James Hogan sold his first story.

...and yet you quite apparently learned nothing from it about SF writers.

RAH once spent an entire evening calculating a Hohmann ellipse trajectory (by hand, back in pre-computer, pre-calculator days) just to be accurate in a throwaway line occurring in one paragraph of a novel.

That is the difference between Hard SF and Soft SF.

> And Hogan, by the way, has been drifting into all sorts of crackpottery.

Which is:
a) ad hominem
b) why I added the codicil of "Hogan wasn't the sort of writer (at least not back then)" *AS WELL AS the followup "(which Hogan was early on, although much less so lately)"

But that's not relevant, right, since you can't be bothered to actually find argument AGAINST THE ASSERTION, rather than attempting to paint the source?

> I repeat: If you want to make assertions about historical fact that you should cite historians, not novelists.

Yeaaaah, cause they're *always* reliably correct. LOL. You're a big fan of Michael Bellesiles, aren't you? Heh.

If you want to refute assertions about historical fact, I've always found presenting either clear conflicts with widely known facts or actual counter-assertions to be far more effective than ad hominem criticisms and appeals to authority. But that's just me.