Inspired by Magnus' comment about the Arabs possibily being ruled over still by the Ottomans if not European colonialism in the region...
What are some other other examples of historical irony?
I can think of two examples offhand. European Jews would not have achieved the rebirth of Israel without the Holocaust, and Christianity would have remained just another obscure cult in pagan Rome, if not for Nero's persecution of Christians. The Roman mob deemed many of the persecutions inflicted upon the Christians overly cruel, and admired the stoic way in which many of them faced their deaths. This in turn lead to more converts.
The Moghul sacking of the Buddhist city-state of Nalanda, which effectively banished Buddhism from the land of its birth, was helped along by the Buddhist faith of the city's inhabitants which forbade violent resistance.
Lenin's grade-school headmaster was Fyodor Kerensky - the father of Alexander Kerensky who was head of the Provisional Government that Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew in 1917. The Kerenskys and the Ulyanovs (Lenin's real surname) knew one another of course when he was young.
Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the first attack wave on Pearl Harbour in 1941, three and a half yeas later happened to land his G4M1 Bomber at Hiroshima airport hours after the bomb. He is thus present at the begining and near-end of the Pacific War.
OSS aided Ho Chi Minh during WWII and Ho asked OSS man Archimedes Pratti for a copy of the US Declaration of Independence which was used by the Viet Minh to declare independence in August, 1945.
General Patrick Dyer, who led a tragic massacre of Indian protesters in Amritsar in 1919, chose to justify his actions to accompanying comrades while travelling on the Indian railway shortly after the incident. Unbeknownst to Dyer, their sleeping compartment was shared by a young Jawharlal Nehru. It is Nehru's unintentional eavesdropping on an honest Dyer on this night that first interests him in forcing the British out of the subcontinent.
Wilmer Mclean, owned property in Manassas Virginia in 1861. His home was damaged by the initial shots of the First Battle of Manassas - the first large scale eastern battle of the US Civil War - he later moved to Appommatox Courthouse VA, where Lee surrendered to Grant four years later in Mclean's front parlour.
General Norman Schwartzkopf's performance in Gulf War One was not his first experience in the Middle East. Schwartzkopf was also the son of an Army officer himself and spent some of his growing up years in Tehran, Iran where his father was US military attache. The elder Schwartzkopft helped engineer the coup that ousted Mossadeq and insured the return of the Shah in 1953.
The decision to divide Korea along the thirtieth parallel in 1945 was made by two US Army Officers, future Secretary of State Dean Rusk and future commander of US troops in Korea Philip Bonesteel. Rusk and Bonesteel considered the parallel as good a line of demarcation as any. Unfortunately they did not know that Japan had proposed the parallel as a line of division with Russia before 1905. The Soviets, in northern Korea by late August 1945, figured that the US was thus dusting off the old Japanese proposal and quickly agreed to it, setting the stage for the Korean War and fifty-plus years of division.
Richard Nixon was recorded as expressing his contempt for "fags" and "Jewboys", but his most treasured and close political relationships were with Henry Kissinger - a Jew, and J. Edgar Hoover - a homosexual.
Chiang Kai Shek served breifly as an enlisted man in the Imperial Japanese Army in the early 1900s, only to go on to fight it later in the 1930s.
The Indian National Congress was originally founded by a whit Englishman, Alan Octavian Hume.
After a failed attempt to assasinate Franz Ferdinand, archduke of the Austrian Empire, his intended murderers went their own ways disillusioned. One of them, Gavrilo Princip, went to a bar.
The failed attempt had injured some officers and Franz Ferdinand decided to pay them a visit in hospital, instead of continuing the day as was planned. Unprepared to this new plan, the driver took a wrong turn and got lost. Somewhere out of route they again met Princip, who must have been very surprised. He didn't hecitate though and shot the archduke, together with his wife Sophie.
If the Turks didn't conquer Istanbul and take over the main trade routs, Europeans wouldn't need to discover need trade routs therefore America wouldn't have been discovered.
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They dance tsifte-teli, sit on lounges, drink coffee & ouzo and eat feta, doner, dolmades, baklava, mezes, tzatziki, imam-baildi, souvlaki, moussakas etc.
If the Turks didn't conquer Istanbul and take over the main trade routs, Europeans wouldn't need to discover need trade routs therefore America wouldn't have been discovered.
