Well, THEY would have been odd bedfellows: Interesting but failed alliances

[Lockesdonkey]

So reading about the history of the Revisionist Zionist movement for my international-relations class (long story), I run into the most peculiar story of Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel, "Freedom Fighters of Israel,"). This bunch was so extreme, they thought Menachem Begin (whose Irgun would later conduct the [wiki]Deir Yassin massacre[/wiki]) was a dove and a wimp. Called the "Stern Gang" by the British authorities, Lehi was far-right-wing, called the Mandate an occupation, and saw their enemies not as the Arabs but the British. Their goal was the removal of the Brits, the assumption being that the Jews could handle the Arabs once the Mandatory authorities were gone (which turned out to be true).

To this end, in 1941 they sent a letter to a German official in Beirut, which being under the administration of Vichy France was crawling with Nazis. They proposed an alliance between Lehi (who are, remember, fanatical Jews) and Nazi Germany. In essence, the proposal said that the Nazis could expel as many Jews as they wanted from Europe, and then send them off to Palestine, where they would establish a Jewish state along nationalistic totalitarian lines. Yeah.

Now, Lehi died off after 1948, and the only remnant was (ironically) a left-wing Zionist faction that somehow managed to win election to the First Knesset. But the right-wing element presents an interesting question: what if the message had gotten to Hitler and he accepted? And how strange would it be to think of an Israel in which the accusation that they are Nazi racists is not merely an Arab and Communist polemic but actual reality?

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This of course is cause to think: What other odd, but potentially workable, alliances were proposed but fell through? Post interesting tidbits...

 

[innonimatu]

I thought that this story was common knowledge that there were contacts between those elements and the nazis. If they had made a similar offer in 1939... most nazis might well have accepted, the official party line was then expelling the jews, not killing them all. The nazis got their one pure greater Germany, and the zionist fanatics the population for their pure new Israel. In the end the nazis did contribute towards their end, involuntarily - without a WW2 I doubt that any european jews would have traded Europe for a war over a god-forsaken (pun intended) patch of land in the Middle East, but after WW2 the survivors who hadn't fled to America naturally fled there.
But Hitler and the other high scumbags were probably already out to murder as many jews as they could, even before 1941.

The odd thing about the right-wing, nationalistic movements in Europe is that they helped each other, and that has happened since the early rise of nationalism. The french helped the germans, the germans the austrans, the austrians those in the Bankans... Not the governments, but the individual ideologues. They spread their ideology and even recommended strategies. During the late 19th century, the era when the national myths of most central european "nations" (then all part of big empires) were fabricated, Vienna was the place where the different nationalist elites gathered and exchanged ideas. Incidentally, zionism was just one more of those.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

This of course is cause to think: What other odd, but potentially workable, alliances were proposed but fell through? Post interesting tidbits...

The Soviets approached the United States in the early 1960s about a possible joint strike against Lop Nor, the Chinese nuclear testing facility, before they could finish The Bomb. It didn't happen, though, because the US was more than content to play Beijing and Moscow off of each other.

 

[Dachs]

This of course is cause to think: What other odd, but potentially workable, alliances were proposed but fell through? Post interesting tidbits...

The fourth Antiochos, called Epiphanes, had the idea of having his cousin Eukratides seize the Euthydemid Baktrian kingdom and then uniting the two in a massive two-pronged assault upon the lands of the Pahlavan. As it happened, Eukratides did manage to gain Baktria, despite having only his personal agema of 300 men (he was able to raise a rebellion of Hellenic settlers against the Baktrian king, Demetrios, who had pursued egalitarian policies with regards to the native Baktrians and Indians of his empire), but instead plunged into India to an ultimately unsuccessful war with Menandros.

 

[yesboii]

The Soviets approached the United States in the early 1960s about a possible joint strike against Lop Nor, the Chinese nuclear testing facility, before they could finish The Bomb. It didn't happen, though, because the US was more than content to play Beijing and Moscow off of each other.

Huh?

Prior to 1960, direct Soviet military assistance had included the provision of advisors and a vast variety of equipment. Of the assistance provided, most significant to China's future strategic nuclear capability were an experimental nuclear reactor, facilities for processing uranium, a cyclotron, and some equipment for a gaseous diffusions plant. At one point the Soviet Union even agreed to supply a prototype nuclear weapon for analysis by the Chinese; this agreement was not, however, put into effect.

The United States intelligence agencies were caught off-guard by the Chinese test in 1964. Despite having photographed pre-test preparation at the Lop Nur nuclear testing site, many U.S. analysts believed that the Chinese were still months, if not years, away from having a functional nuclear weapon, in part because they erroneously assumed that the first Chinese bomb would be plutonium-fueled and that their Lanzhou diffusion enrichment facility was not yet operable (even though it had actually produced enough highly-enriched uranium for a number of bombs by that time). The U.S. analysts additionally misidentified a facility designed to produce uranium tetrafluoride as a plutonium production facility, making their estimates of Chinese plutonium production significantly off. It was only after radiochemical analysis of the fallout cloud from the Chinese test conclusively demonstrated that the bomb had been a U-235 implosion device, that these errors were re-examined in detail.

 

[RedRalph]

The Soviets approached the United States in the early 1960s about a possible joint strike against Lop Nor, the Chinese nuclear testing facility, before they could finish The Bomb. It didn't happen, though, because the US was more than content to play Beijing and Moscow off of each other.

Please give your source for that

 

[Arwon]

The tendency of 19th century peasants to side with absolutists, feudalism and reaction is rather touchingly pathetic.

 

[philippe]

The tendency of 19th century peasants to side with absolutists, feudalism and reaction is rather touchingly pathetic.

they couldn't help it. Why see them as "pathetic"?

 

[Sharwood]

The Arab Islamic Republic, a proposed union of Libya and tunisia, was pretty out there. They're pretty much the two opposite extremes in North Africa.

Another odd failed alliance was the proposal of the marriage between Richard I of England's sister to Saladin's nephew, who would then become king of a new joint Muslim-Christian nation in Israel. Fell through because Richard's sister refused to marry a Muslim. Stupid bigot, it was obviously advantageous to everyone, excepting possibly Saladin if his brother moved on him.

 

[civiijkw]

Don't forget about Charlemagne's marriage proposal to unite the Frankish and Byzantine empires.

 

[Dachs]

Don't forget about Charlemagne's marriage proposal to unite the Frankish and Byzantine empires.

That of Otto III and Zoe had much more promise and in fact nearly happened, whereas Eirene was a dead letter from the start.

 

[Arwon]

they couldn't help it. Why see them as "pathetic"?

Pathetic as in "filled with pathos", not as in "stupid and dumb".

 

[Sharwood]

While I think of it, there were also many different offers of a marriage alliance made to Queen Elizabeth I, including from several Catholic rulers, such as the kings of both France and Spain. Spain especially would have been a strange bedfellow, considering what happened between the two early in her reign, but France was a very distinct possibility during the early period of Henry IV's reign, while he was still Protestant.

 

[Tee Kay]

There was one time when the Ilkhanate (at that time the Khan hasn't converted to Islam) sent one Rabban Sauma, a Nestorian monk from China, to Catholic Europe and the Byzantine Empire to seek an alliance against the Mamluks and the Golden Horde. The monk was received by the Byzantine Emperor, English and French kings and by the Pope, and IIRC the French later sent an embassy to the Ilkhanate, but an alliance was never agreed upon.

 

[privatehudson]

I always found the mix of anarchists, liberals, republican moderates, Basque and Catalan nationalists and communists that made up the opposition to Franco during the Spanish Civil War somewhat odd, even if they did all have their own reasons for doing so.

 

[RedRalph]

the old IRA was a mixture of ultra Catholic nutcases and Marxists. but then agian, they did split

 

[Arwon]

You forgot the socialists, ph!

 

[privatehudson]

Ahhh well there's so many of them its not easy to remember all of them.

Besides what's the difference between one group of athiestic red beasts and another anyway when you get right down to it?

 

[RedRalph]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the alliance between white supremacist Nazi Germany and Japan? Too obvious?

 

[Sharwood]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the alliance between white supremacist Nazi Germany and Japan? Too obvious?

Because Nazi doctrine isn't white supremacist. Japan is actually near the top of the Nazi hierarchy, along with Tibet and Iran.