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[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 87 points 1 year ago

Never on the right side of history.

[-] davel@lemmy.ml 64 points 1 year ago

We were that one time, and we’ve been milking it ever since.

[-] chaogomu@kbin.social 54 points 1 year ago

WW2, we only joined because Japan attacked. Otherwise, there were elements of the US population that were cheering for Hitler.

[-] davel@lemmy.ml 30 points 1 year ago

We also nuked two cities, for reasons much less honorable or necessary than the one we are told.

[-] Nacktmull@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Don´t tell that to the average US American though, they really hate hearing this truth.

[-] davel@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

I’m super-fun at parties 😐

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[-] can@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

You'd think one would have been enough

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[-] masquenox@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 year ago

The US has never opposed fascism - Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were colonialist rivals threatening US hegemony and influence and nothing more.

[-] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

People don't realize that the US used to see fascism as a sort of white utopia. It was really popular up until WW2 when they hard turned on it. Kind of like what happened with communism, actually. It was seen as a revolutionary form of democracy up until the cold war, now people only know it for all the propaganda that came out of the era. (most of which was flat out lies made up on the spot by actual nazis)

It's a lot of the reason why the modern day liberal is so staunchly both-sides when it comes to anything geopolitics.

[-] zerfuffle@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Prior to Pearl Harbour, the US funded the Japanese as the Japanese committed countless war crimes and genocide in China.

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[-] Nacktmull@lemm.ee 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In ww2 the Russians did most of he dirty work anyway. When the USA joined the war it was already clear the axis had lost.

[-] davel@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 year ago

Hollywood war reenactments are a psyop.

[-] masquenox@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 year ago

When the USA joined the war it was already clear the axis had lost.

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.

[-] zephyreks@hexbear.net 26 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] uralsolo@hexbear.net 29 points 1 year ago

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)

[-] livus@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@davel

We were that one time, and we’ve been milking it ever since.

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.

[-] davel@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] livus@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago

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.

this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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