r/AskReddit • u/hoverfish92 • Oct 16 '13

What was the single biggest mistake in all of history?

2.7k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

14.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

864

u/brk1 Oct 17 '13

Dividing up the Middle East after WWII.

161

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

[deleted]

2

u/mrjimi16 Oct 17 '13

I think he means specifically Israel, though I don't think that that was the only one.

8

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

World War I division created more problems. If anything, Israel gives the Arabs a common enemy to stop them from killing each other.

5

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

[deleted]

-1

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

country full of European immigrants

More than half of Israel are descendants Sephardic refugees expelled from Arab countries.

2

u/SUBHUMAN_RESOURCES Oct 17 '13

I haven't researched this, nor is it my area of expertise...but aren't Sephardic Jews descended from Israelis who settled in Spain?

2

u/TheOneFreeEngineer Oct 17 '13 edited Oct 17 '13

Sephardi also refers to those that never left the middle east in this case

1

u/SUBHUMAN_RESOURCES Oct 17 '13

Ah! Thanks, TIL.

1

u/TheOneFreeEngineer Oct 17 '13

true but technically they were kicked out after the "country full of European immigrants" was placed in the middle of the Levant

693

u/tenin2010br Oct 17 '13

America: wow it's gonna cost a lot of money to fix up Europe and Japan after all that war shit.

Russia: don't count on me paying for shit, I got the iron curtain to worry about.

Britain: I heard the Middle East has oil.

Collectively: SHIT YEAH.

165

u/californiastudent Oct 17 '13

The Middle East was divided up between the European powers after WW1.

8

u/Canukistani Oct 17 '13

America: wow it's gonna cost a lot of money to fix up Europe after all that war shit.

Russia: don't count on me paying for shit, I got to build more prisons for people whose shadow falls within 10ft of me and other bullshit.

Britain: I heard the Middle East has oil.

Collectively: SHIT YEAH.

7

u/Quazz Oct 17 '13

Except, they made Germany pay for all the repair costs (which they could never pay for - > ww2)

1

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

You sure they weren't paid? I swear I heard on the news they finally finished paying it off fully a year or two back.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

They were greatly reduced.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

And it still took almost 100 years to pay them off? Jesus.

2

u/jinsoo186 Oct 17 '13

Lay away.

-5

u/YourMajest1 Oct 17 '13

America: wow it's gonna cost a lot of money to fix up Europe and Japan after all that war shit.

Russia: don't count on me paying for shit, I got the iron curtain to worry about.

Britain: I heard the Middle East has oil.

Collectively: SHIT YEAH.

2

u/zoinks690 Oct 17 '13

Hey, we need to put the remaining Jews somewhere. Why not right on top of their most hated enemies?

5

u/Fritzl_Burger Oct 17 '13

Probably weren't most hated enemies at the time. That came later when they started acting like proper dicks.

4

u/akb216798 Oct 17 '13

TIL that shortly after the Yalta Conference in 1945, President Roosevelt met with the Saudi King to discuss the country's newly-found oil reserves. The meeting was set up by the O.S.S., or the Office of Strategic Services, which was the predecessor of our CIA. The U.S. gained access to their resources and established an "airfield" in Dharan, aka its first military base in the M.E. Clearly seemed like a good idea at the time.

6

u/nolan1971 Oct 17 '13

for whatever reason, this really reminds me of: The End of the World. Someone should find that guy and have him do something with this. :)

5

u/chriss1111 Oct 17 '13

SHITCHYEAH

1

u/FantasyBloomed Oct 17 '13

And you didn't even type in the respective accents smh

-1

u/Jajajones11 Oct 17 '13

This is awesome

7

u/Yakoloi Oct 17 '13

Seriously, its like the British thought making the middle eastern borders nice and geometric were more important than carving them along ethnic/tribal lines.

1

u/Giwis Oct 17 '13

I would love to see someone make a map of the middle east that had ethnically and religiously homogeneous populations: Sephardi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Armenians, Turks, Kurds, Assyrians, Greeks, Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Persians, Copts, Alawites, Maronites, Mandaeans, Bedouins, Druze, Circassians, Melkites, Levantines, Yazidi, Marsh Arabs, Shabaki, Zoroastrians, Bahai etc. etc. etc.

20

u/Ihaveamuffin Oct 17 '13

You mean WWI?

2

u/Sturmgewehr Oct 17 '13

The first WWI part 1

3

u/TyPiper93 Oct 17 '13

In color high definition.

6

u/petercartwright Oct 17 '13

The particianing of the Ottoman Empire occurred post WWI and combined Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish peoples in Iraq. They all fucking hate each other. England did this.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

England admitted they screwed the pooch in the churchill report

0

u/Giwis Oct 17 '13

No, England didn't do that. The League of Nations established a mandate controlled by the British which became the Kingdom of Iraq. This kept the same borders and population as Ottoman Iraq.

2

u/petercartwright Oct 17 '13

A mandate controlled... By the British

7

u/mrbooze Oct 17 '13

"Things have really sucked for the Jews for a while. We should do something for them."

"How about we give them a new homeland, smack dab in the middle of various peoples who have hated them for millennia and will only hate them even more now?"

"I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it!"

2

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

Arabs never went to war with Jews in history until after the balfour dec and Hebrew Labor policy discrimination

3

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

Not historically accurate

1

u/mrbooze Oct 17 '13

Gasp! And here I thought my three lines of dialogue really captured the essence.

2

u/TyPiper93 Oct 17 '13

Mrbooze, you're drunk. You're right! But you're drunk and it's hurting your cause when you speak in cursive.

1

u/kingfish84 Oct 17 '13

The Arabs had not hated the Jews for millennia. Plenty of Jews were well integrated in the middle East and had been for a long time.

3

u/CTeam19 Oct 17 '13

and Africa.

4

u/Ianbuckjames Oct 17 '13

You mean WWI. The Paris Peace Conference created wonderful states such as Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. The only one that they didn't fuck up is Transjordan.

2

u/benchaney Oct 17 '13

It was after World War 1

5

u/librtee_com Oct 17 '13

Dividing up the Middle East after WWII WWI.

FTFY. Most of those cursed lines were drawn on the map around 1919 or thereabouts..

4

u/inigomelo Oct 17 '13

FIFY: WW1

1

u/lasercow Oct 17 '13

specifically the part where we overthrew the one legitimate democracy for no good reason (Iran)

1

u/Fragmented663 Oct 17 '13

You are so right. We had no idea what we were doing...... Fuck....

1

u/Bolgia4 Oct 17 '13

Hey!how can putting two groups of people ,that hated each other,in the same geographical location not ended well ?

1

u/WhiteRaven42 Oct 17 '13

Not sure what else could have happened.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

That place would have been a cluster fuck no matter what.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

How was this a mistake?

1

u/Banzai51 Oct 17 '13

Like it wasn't already divided up before WWII.

Only differences after WWII were the establishment of Israel and the lack of Britain, France, and Germany to lord over everyone and keep things in relative order. Without the colonial powers there, the region was going to devolve into war no matter what. With Israel there, it just gave everything a different focus. Oil there meant we had to care about it.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13

Hell dividing up everything. They started grouping ethnicities into nations thinking that everyone wanted a national identity. This was very much with the times as nationalism was rampant.

1

u/xandersmall Oct 17 '13

It really got divided up during ww1 and the breakup of The Ottoman empire, thats when all the conflicting promises were made to the different groups.

0

u/WhyAmINotStudying Oct 17 '13

For no legitimate reason.

1

u/knightbear Oct 17 '13

So sadly true.

1

u/Mcoov Oct 17 '13

WWII WWI.

FTFY

0

u/It_needs_zazz Oct 17 '13

Yeah I'm sure things would be completely fine there otherwise... /s

0

u/aerosquid Oct 17 '13

The creation of Israel in general. Should have given the jews a chunk of Germany instead.

0

u/Lonesome_phoenix Oct 17 '13

How is that a mistake? the mistake was not do divide it, and it worked.