Amazing engineering skills. Going to need a big bike though…

Can’t find any period shots of the jacket at Thunderbird Field. I wonder why they would have adopted a woolen-bodied A-1 jacket which was already out of date when the airfield was built in 1939? The A-2 was standard USAAF issue from 1931.
Interesting the Gerry Anderson’s elder brother was stationed there during WW2…

We all know wars start over territory, minerals, oil, water, etc, and these commodities will dwindle in different parts of the world at different times in the coming decades.
The human population is exploding exponentially, and just isn’t sustainable. For example, there are more people alive in India today than there was in the entire world around 1850. A world population of 7 billion is already three times the sustainable level.
I suspect ethnic cleansing won’t go away, rather the opposite. Forget aircraft, missiles, atomic weapons – you can bet your boots that genetics will become the weapon of the future.
The superpower scientists will design weapons which only target the foe they are fighting, leaving their own side unaffected. No buildings or infrastructure damage, just millions of dead enemy cadavers to dispose of.
Find a disease that mainly affects certain races, like sickle cell anaemia as a crude example, modify it, introduce it, and then simply walk into their empty territory and begin using their mineral deposits, space, etc.
Do you really think nations like the US, China and Russia (or whatever large nations exist in the future) will be beyond using ethnic cleansing on a huge scale once the chips are really down?

Vermin? That’s exactly what the Nazis called Jews in their propaganda posters…

As for the culpability of German people, I see no reason why modern Germans should feel any guilt over what their parents/grandparents did. It’s all very well to have armchair hatred of everything Nazi today, but don’t forget that youngsters approaching military service age, and civilians too in 1930s Germany had been brainwashed and indoctrinated from their very early days, so had very little choice in the matter.
A man who very nearly became my father-in-law was a member of the SS during WW2. His parents, friends, and school teacher all encouraged him to join the Hitler Youth, and membership gave the whole family benefits.
Joining the SS later was a huge honour, and bestowed the family with the best theatre tickets, restaurant seats, and dispelled the need to queue for foodstuffs etc. It also elevated the entire family above mainstream suspicion, since they would all have been rigorously vetted for the application.
I wonder how many forum members (especially those, who like me, have had military service) if they had been growing up in Nazi Germany, would have had the moral strength to say “No, I’m not going to do that!”, and I also wonder how many actually did. I suspect that given the same circumstances, we would have been eager to join the military recruitment queues…

Ah, I’m with you now…

…I hoped that you were kidding when you seemed to be saying that the achievements of the German people under the Nazi party in any way justified, excused or mitigated the horrors inflicted on the world by those same German people under the Nazi party.

As for ‘facts’ I’ll be damned if I could tell you how the Nazis possibly could have been said to have made ‘huge advances’ in ‘law and order’ and ‘welfare programmes’ after being responsible for the Holocaust! Or perhaps you think that is evidence of ‘strong leadership’?

It is a historical fact the Nazis made ground-breaking advances in welfare (both human and animal), and law and order – but they only applied to pure Germans.
As for strong leadership, Adolph Hitler picked up a bankrupt, depressed, and humiliated nation and in a few short years forged it into a force the world had never seen before, one which took almost the rest of the entire planet to quell.
Practically the whole of Germany faithfully followed that one man right to the end, and into the abyss – I can’t think of many leaders who could have accomplished that.
Or does your definition of ‘strong leadership’ apply only to those on the winning side, or who make decisions which turn out to be ‘right’?

Bertolt Brecht had no illusions about mankind’s capacities after WW2…
“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men.
For though the world has stood up and stopped the *******,
the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

Al

Here we go yet again. Moral equivalence! One outrage cancels out the other. How in the name of balance and commonsense you can equate the events of the Holocaust with those events you mention quite simply does defy belief.
No moral equivalence intended. Murder is murder, whether it’s one person or six million – it’s just a matter of scale.

What I do believe, is that this monstrous savagery perpetrated by a nation that was believed to stand at the center of European Christian civilized society could ever live down the shame and ignominy of this act of unparalled barbarity. Alongside Stalin’s gulags and famine induced massacres of the 1920s and 30s, the sheer immensity of the destruction of human life results in our dumb, shocked incomprehension. It is impossible to forget.
To me it’s entirely comprehensible. It’s simply human nature – if one of the world’s most civilised nations can produce the Nazis, it can happen to any nation. The dark side of mankind is always there, bubbling just under the surface, only in Nazi Germany those traits and behaviours were looked on with admiration, and given government backing and encouragement.

Do you seriously think that if this once great nation of England still exists in one thousand years from now, we will not still remember our war dead on Remembrance Sunday?

By England do you mean Britain? I’m sure war dead will always be remembered, but in a thousand years WW2 will have as much relevance as Agincourt, just another battle amongst hundreds in the 3013 archives…