this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Never on the right side of history.
We were that one time, and we’ve been milking it ever since.
WW2, we only joined because Japan attacked. Otherwise, there were elements of the US population that were cheering for Hitler.
We also nuked two cities, for reasons much less honorable or necessary than the one we are told.
I’m super-fun at parties 😐
Any respected historian on the subject will tell you that it's way more complicated and nuanced than your average social media user is aware of. If, like Truman, you honestly believed that using atomic bombs on Japan would ultimately result in less loss of life, on a purely mathematical basis it was the only moral decision.
You'd think one would have been enough
The US has never opposed fascism - Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were colonialist rivals threatening US hegemony and influence and nothing more.
Prior to Pearl Harbour, the US funded the Japanese as the Japanese committed countless war crimes and genocide in China.
Well, that and Japan was actively murdering massive amounts of people in China.
It was a calculated strategy to stop supporting the Japanese genocide machine.
The Rape of Nanjing made international news. That turned the average US voter against Japan, but the embargo (not a blockade) started after Japan invaded French Indochina (Vietnam) in 1940.
The Embargo was just the US saying that no US owned oil would be sold to Japan.
Well that and the fact that there was a huge Irish-American population that was hostile towards the UK in ways that I think a lot of younger people and non-historians have really lost sight of because it's not really a thing anymore. The idea of taking sides with the British Empire was a very tough pill for a lot of Irish-Americans, most of whom, unlike today, still had direct connections to Ireland. The famine was no longer really in living memory, but the children of the famine survivors were definitely still alive and influential and they absolutely despised the British for understandable reasons.
History is always way more complex and nuanced than some half-baked one-liner trope on social media.
Hollywood war reenactments are a psyop.
While I agree that that it was the Soviet and Chinese people that absorbed the greatest part of the Axis' powers warmaking ability (which western historians are apt to ignore), it's not true that the Axis had already lost the war by 1941. It's accurate to say that the US joined the war at a moment when the Axis forces had hopelessly overstretched themselves.
By the winter of 1941, Barbarossa had failed. By the time the Western Front was opened in 1944, Army Group South had collapsed, Army Group North was failing, and Army Group Center was in the process of being encircled. Germany had lost, it was just a question of when. In the meantime, the entire North African campaign cost the Germans less resources than the Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive.
Friendly reminder that prior to Pearl Harbour, the US was sponsoring Japan's war crimes in China. The US made up the bulk of Japan's iron, copper, oil, steel, and wheat supply... Essentials for industrializing and waging war. Even with this massive economic power backing them, Japan had been fought to a standstill by 1940. By 1944, the Nationalists were more concerned with containing the Communists than they were with containing the Japanese.
In the case of both Germany and Japan, powerhouses at the peak of their power were ground down to a stalemate against a rapidly industrializing nation.
Was this lecture aimed at me or someone else?
definitely aimed at you, but also edifying for anyone who might think the USA was solidly on the side of good during the war. The US entered the war in 41, but they refused Stalin's repeated requests to open a second front against Germany. They went to north africa first and then italy, waiting until the German eastern front had nearly collapsed before landing in Normandy. The US was essentially racing against the red army, trying to prevent the soviet union from liberating the entirety of europe under the banner of liberation for humankind. Once the US reached Germany and peace began, the US almost immediately formed NATO and appointed Nazi war criminals into its upper ranks while putting nazi war ciminals in charge of west germany. The yankee government is bad and always has been. throughout all of its history it only has made good choices when it has been dragged kicking and screaming.
two fucking years late because they were too cozy with the nazis
4 years; the war started in 1937 with Japan's invasion of China.
Do you have any specific book recommendations on this?
That was mostly by accident. IMO America's actions in and around WW2 are better understood as the result of two expanding empires bumping into one another (America and Japan)
@davel
Only until 2006 which is when the UK finally managed to pay the US back the "lend lease" debt it racked up in WWII
Wonder how long it will take for Ukraine to pay back theirs, they're on a Lend Lease from the US right now.
You & I are the only people who seem to know this. Everyone else is busy arguing whether we can “afford” to give Ukraine “free stuff”, when in reality none of it is free, and whatever few Ukrainians are left alive after this war will be paying onerous debt for generations. They’re already auctioning off many public assets to mostly foreign buyers at fire sale prices, up to and including seaports.
Yeah it's crazy. Ukraine is a fire sale and the debt will be on the US govt books as an asset.
Makes me realise, a lot of things we read in history books that seem cut and dried, were probably not at all obvious to the people who lived at the time because their perception of facts was probably as skewed as our societies' perceptions are now.