Talk:Alfred von Waldersee

message: Isn't "Graf" a title... If so - shouldn't the article be named Alfred von Waldersee? --Oldak Quill 13:26, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: There some neutrality issues here about the section dealing the Boxer Rebellion. The article denounces "Chinese barbarism" in reference to the murder of Baron Clemens von Ketteler, the German minister to China. The article does not mention Ketteler had murdered a 14-year old Chinese boy in public, which most people might consider a barbaric act. I am not saying that the Chinese were right to murder Ketteler. But let's it this way. Even today, if the Chinese ambassador to Germany would murder in public view a 14-year old German boy, and he could not be charged with murder because of diplomatic immunity, the German people would be outraged at this abuse of diplomatic immunity. That is exactly what happened in China. The Chinese were enraged that Ketteler could not be prosecuted for murder because of his diplomatic immunity, and so a Captain En Hai decided to get even by murdering Ketteler. I am not saying En Hai was justified, but one can understand why he acted the way he did. The article tells one that Ketteler's murder was an act of "Chinese barbarism", but says nothing about Ketteler murdering the 14-year old Chinese boy. This really seems to smack of racism here. When Chinese kill Germans, it is an act of "barbarism", but when Germans kill Chinese it is not. Are the lives of Germans worth more than the lives of Chinese? Furthermore, the article presents the German reaction to Ketterler's murder as a justified response to "Chinese barbarism". The bloodthirsty Hunnenrede (Hun speech) which Wilhelm II gave on 27 July 1900 to the expedition departing for China, ordering German troops to behave like Huns in China was considered so offensive even in Germany that the Auswärtige Amt released a censored version of the speech to the foreign press with more inflammatory parts cut out, only to be overruled by the Kaiser, who less mindful of his image, insisted on releasing the full text of the Hunnenrede with bloodthirsty parts calling on German troops to commit atrocities against the Chinese included to the foreign press. Kipling used parts of the Hunnenrede in his 1902 poem The Rowers, which is the origin of the term Hun as an anti-German insult. The great irony of this was the Huns were not a Germanic people, but came from Asia. Getting back to the subject at hand, all this bloodthirsty talk on the part of the Kaiser about behaving like Huns to teach the Chinese to fear Germans was not just rhetoric. Waldersee did indeed commit war crimes in China, massacring thousands of innocent people, mostly women and children, in villages around Beijing, in revenge for Ketteler's murder. The article says nothing about "German barbarism", but I think most people might consider shooting children in revenge for a murder of a diplomat that they had nothing to do with to be an act of barbarism. Of course, that might be a violation of the neutrality rules, but quoting from a book published in 1964 when racial attitudes were somewhat less enlightened about "Chinese barbarism" seems to be saying that Wilhelm II's response to the Boxer Rebellion was justified. The American commander in China, General Adna Chaffee denounced Walderee's policy of massacring people living the villages around Beijing as "inhuman", so enough of this morally relativist argument that violence by whites against Asians was considered "normal" in those days. At present, this article really seems to be saying the lives of whites matter more than Asians, and it needs to be rewritten for more neutral and less morally objectionable viewpoint.--A.S. Brown (talk) 19:13, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: "Chinese barbarism"

message: There is no mention of any children, either on Alfred's wiki-page, nor his wife's. But there was a 'Waldersee the Younger' who was a staff officer on the Eastern front in 1914. (Note from the Battle of Tannenberg wiki-page: Probably Moltke had already decided to replace both Prittwitz and his highly regarded chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Alfred von Waldersee.) Was he their son? Valetude (talk) 15:11, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Issue? 

message: According to footnote 1, should not his name be "Graf Alfred von Waldersee" rather than "Alfred Graf von Waldersee"? Karl Bildungshunger1965 (talk) 01:11, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Graf as title?