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We also lost. The other war we're obsessed with to anything like the same degree is the Civil War, which half of us lost. This is the US's great loss of innocence; I'd rather compare it to WW1 than to anything the UK was doing at the same time.
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Jun 6, 2013 01:37
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The Falklands War was also in defense of sovereign UK territory. I can't think of anything that really compares in 20th century American history except World War II, where the attack on Pearl Harbor dominated the American public's thinking about the conflict. The Vietnam War coincided, as mentioned, with a period of political turmoil and violence in the United States. Ask people who lived through it and many thought, at the time, that the U.S. was on the brink of another civil war. Vietnam became symbolic of the war at home. Opponents of the war saw the soldiers in Vietnam as fighting the same people as the soldiers patrolling the streets in burning American cities, i.e. colonized and oppressed people who were fighting for liberation, the NLF in Vietnam, or Black Power at home. And by the war's supporters, the war was seen as fighting against an enemy abroad that was also preparing to take over America from within: international communist hoo-hah, etc. The only military event I can think of in recent memory that most Americans are proud of is killing Bin Laden. People had parties to celebrate it. (Though the First Gulf War was popular. But now overshadowed by the second ... less popular war.) BrutalistMcDonalds fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 01:48
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Granada isn't celebrated because beating the gently caress out of a tiny postage stamp country as one of the world's superpowers is not really seen as sporting. Also because Granada is a city in Spain.  Grenada: so insignificant, people hardly even remember how it's spelled.
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Jun 6, 2013 01:48
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Nenonen posted:Also because Granada is a city in Spain. FINISHING OFF THE RECONQUISTA
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Jun 6, 2013 01:50
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HEGEL SMOKE A J posted:We also lost. The other war we're obsessed with to anything like the same degree is the Civil War, which half of us lost. This is the US's great loss of innocence; I'd rather compare it to WW1 than to anything the UK was doing at the same time. It was the last conscripted war as well. I think that helps amplify the experience for the average American. It was the last war conducted by "all Americans" versus a warfighting class.
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Jun 6, 2013 01:51
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General China posted:But even given that( and ignoring Cuba )- wide spread media happened during the invasion of Greneda. That was a great American victory for American democracy and made the world a better place. The Falkland War is rather different from all of the above, given that it was a counter-invasion. I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic when you are calling Grenada 'a great American victory for American democracy and made the world a better place.' EDIT: It's fairly reasonable that Grenada should be forgotten, given its part in precedence-setting for unprovoked regime change, on false and flimsy pretenses, in violation of international law. You can trace a fairly straight line from it from straight to the Iraq war. Fangz fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 01:58
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Fangz posted:The Falkland War is rather different from all of the above, given that it was a counter-invasion. Do you mean "should not be forgotten" or what there? You're indicating that it's actually pretty significant in your last graf.
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Jun 6, 2013 02:06
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Do you mean "should not be forgotten" or what there? You're indicating that it's actually pretty significant in your last graf. It kinda should be forgotten because it 'worked', or at least the US Reaganite narrative is that it should be seen as having worked. If the supposed lesson of Grenada is that might makes right, and that you *can* go in, guns blazing and obtain 'a great American victory for American democracy', then that is really, really a lesson the world doesn't need.
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Jun 6, 2013 02:12
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Fangz posted:I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic when you are calling Grenada 'a great American victory for American democracy and made the world a better place.'  And was the invasion of Grenada used as precedence for the Iraq war? Maybe it was. I'm not sure it was. The invasion of Grenada is also often vilified as superpower Amerika toppling a leftist government, when it wasn't really that. Well, that's kinda true, especially the superpower part. But the invasion wasn't triggered until a military junta overthrew the leftist government and executed its prime minister, Maurice Bishop. Then the U.S. toppled the junta and replaced it with a multi-party parliamentary democracy, which it's been since. A poor, corrupt, Caribbean parliamentary democracy, but still a democracy instead of a dictatorship. BrutalistMcDonalds fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 02:13
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Omi-Polari posted:Well the U.S. vetoed the U.N. resolution condemning the invasion as a violation of international law so Was it truly forseeable at the time that Grenada would result in a long term parliamentary democracy and not a Vietnam style clusterfuck? Could it have transitioned to a democracy peacefully without US intervention? These seem to be unanswerable.
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Jun 6, 2013 02:19
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Omi-Polari posted:Well the U.S. vetoed the U.N. resolution condemning the invasion as a violation of international law so So democracy can count that a vote, despite elections and a bit of very hazy history on your part. Go USA!
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Jun 6, 2013 02:22
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Fangz posted:Was it truly forseeable at the time that Grenada would result in a long term parliamentary democracy and not a Vietnam style clusterfuck? Could it have transitioned to a democracy peacefully without US intervention? These seem to be unanswerable. General China posted:So democracy can count that a vote, despite elections and a bit of very hazy history on your part. Edit: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1983/10/31/justifying-grenada-pion-tuesday-october-25/ BrutalistMcDonalds fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 02:26
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Anyone reading this thread who hasn't read Blood Makes the Grass Grow Greener needs to log off immediately and read it. 
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Jun 6, 2013 02:33
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Omi-Polari posted:
The US justification for the invasion was flimsy at best. As it was, as so it shall always be. Show me the harmed medical students and tell me their tale. General China fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 02:36
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Fangz posted:Was it truly forseeable at the time that Grenada would result in a long term parliamentary democracy and not a Vietnam style clusterfuck? Could it have transitioned to a democracy peacefully without US intervention? These seem to be unanswerable. There's a bunch of reasons. To name a few, Communist China didn't border Grenada, Diem and his Buddhist-persecuting cronies weren't around to alienate the majority of the population, the CIA wasn't tacitly supporting destabilizing coups, and there wasn't an established guerrilla group ready to subvert an non-leftist government and oppose "imperialist" intervention.
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Jun 6, 2013 03:36
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Bacarruda posted:There's a bunch of reasons. To name a few, Communist China didn't border Grenada, Diem and his Buddhist-persecuting cronies weren't around to alienate the majority of the population, the CIA wasn't tacitly supporting destabilizing coups, and there wasn't an established guerrilla group ready to subvert an non-leftist government and oppose "imperialist" intervention.
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Jun 6, 2013 08:15
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Are there any good books about the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War you guys can recommend? I'm primarily interested in the Thälmann Battalion (German commies and Jews that fled Germany, some even escaped concentration camps!) and the Abraham-Lincoln Brigade (American volunteers, and the first fully integrated US military unit, they also had the first Afro-American commander of a US unit). The International Brigades are such a facinating topic, but there isn't a lot written about it for some reason.
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Jun 6, 2013 11:40
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Omi-Polari posted:Then I can't answer them. But it does show that RTP interventionism (and seen later in Libya) can work given clear, well-defined and limited objectives. Not massive ground invasions of countries on the Asian continent with 30+ million people like Iraq. I'm not opposed per se to American military intervention. I'm just going to point out here that there is nothing actually special about Asia as far as a "ground war". You aren't necessarily saying this, but the notion of fighting a land war in Asia being a kind of inherently doomed task is popular enough that I figure it needs addressing. It's Tom Friedman-level analysis.
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Jun 6, 2013 12:51
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:I'm just going to point out here that there is nothing actually special about Asia as far as a "ground war". You aren't necessarily saying this, but the notion of fighting a land war in Asia being a kind of inherently doomed task is popular enough that I figure it needs addressing. It's Tom Friedman-level analysis. Especially given that Europeans have fought plenty of wars in Asia.
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Jun 6, 2013 13:31
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Molentik posted:Are there any good books about the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War you guys can recommend? I'm primarily interested in the Thälmann Battalion (German commies and Jews that fled Germany, some even escaped concentration camps!) and the Abraham-Lincoln Brigade (American volunteers, and the first fully integrated US military unit, they also had the first Afro-American commander of a US unit). The International Brigades are such a facinating topic, but there isn't a lot written about it for some reason. I think George Orwell wrote some memoirs. Never read them myself but they've been praised highly by some friends of mine.
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Jun 6, 2013 15:00
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Yeah, Homage to Catalonia is really good.
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Jun 6, 2013 15:11
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Jeoh posted:Yeah, Homage to Catalonia is really good. It is, though Orwell wasn't in the International Brigades. He joined up with the militia of a local party due to their affiliation with a small party Orwell was a part of back home. It's well worth reading anyway just because Orwell writes really well, and if you're interested in his writing career you can see the seeds of Animal Farm and 1984 being planted in his head in Spain.
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Jun 6, 2013 15:16
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Molentik posted:Are there any good books about the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War you guys can recommend? I'm primarily interested in the Thälmann Battalion (German commies and Jews that fled Germany, some even escaped concentration camps!) and the Abraham-Lincoln Brigade (American volunteers, and the first fully integrated US military unit, they also had the first Afro-American commander of a US unit). The International Brigades are such a facinating topic, but there isn't a lot written about it for some reason. I read this many years ago and I remember it was pretty good: http://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Abrah...ncoln+battalion The International Brigades fighting for the Republicans get a lot of attention but Franco also had his fair share of adventures and fascists fighting for him. I read this a few weeks ago: http://www.amazon.com/Francos-Inter...tional+brigades The most interesting aspect of the Franco's brigades is that there were a lot of different groups that tried to volunteer but Franco mostly said thanks but no thanks because they were more trouble than they were worth. At the start he was really desperate for men but he recruited 40,000 Moroccans and that solved a lot of his manpower issues. space pope fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 18:12
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Thanks for the replies! I'll definatly check out the books in Space Pope's links, but I've already read almost all of Orwells books. In fact, Homage to Catalonia is the starting point of what is turning out to be a facination about this conflict. I was talking with a friend about the SCW and he had an interesting idea. Could it be said that, ultimatly, Hitler lost WWII in Spain? His reasoning was that sending the Condor Legion to help out Franco urged Stalin to ramp up weapons productions, especially tanks. This started the ticking clock that Hitler was racing against in preparation of Operation Barbarossa.
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Jun 6, 2013 18:22
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space pope posted:I read this many years ago and I remember it was pretty good: The really hilarious thing was how the nationalists framed the civil war as a new Reconquista while they were the ones who used a shitload of Muslim troops who committed various atrocities.
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Jun 6, 2013 18:25
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Molentik posted:I was talking with a friend about the SCW and he had an interesting idea. Could it be said that, ultimatly, Hitler lost WWII in Spain? His reasoning was that sending the Condor Legion to help out Franco urged Stalin to ramp up weapons productions, especially tanks. This started the ticking clock that Hitler was racing against in preparation of Operation Barbarossa.
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Jun 6, 2013 20:25
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The Germans had some pretty hosed up plans for Eastern Europe during World War One. In retrospect the later Generalplan Ost was not too radical of a thing for some Pan-German extremists.
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Jun 6, 2013 21:34
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Echoing what others have said about Vietnam, it's still recent enough that the vets are still alive, it coincided with massive societal upheaval, and we lost it straight up. People often bring up Korea as a war we lost, but that's untrue as South Korea was successfully defended and actually gained territory, and Iraq/Afghanistan is still too fresh to have an accurate picture of the potential future ramifications. The Civil War has its own unique place in that half lost, but half won and slavery was ended, so it's a wash culturally. For a country that fights wars so often and places such a focus on those wars and the people that fight them, Vietnam was a crushing blow to the national psyche. Rodrigo Diaz posted:I'm just going to point out here that there is nothing actually special about Asia as far as a "ground war". You aren't necessarily saying this, but the notion of fighting a land war in Asia being a kind of inherently doomed task is popular enough that I figure it needs addressing. It's Tom Friedman-level analysis. Yeah, the UN did it in Korea against the Chinese hordes, and succeeded. So much so that I think that's why the Chinese were receptive to Nixon's approach after the Sino-Soviet split, they weren't cocky enough to forget mythology is just that, mythology. They gave us a black eye, but we bloodied their nose, and neither side forgot that. Seizure Meat fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 21:53
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:The Germans had some pretty hosed up plans for Eastern Europe during World War One. In retrospect the later Generalplan Ost was not too radical of a thing for some Pan-German extremists. Yeah, this is something that people forget in all the hand-wringing about Versailles: had the Germans won they would have imposed the same sorts of terms on the Triple Alliance as they were given in the Armistice. Actually the planned German reparations demands were harsher than what they got at Versailles, at least according to Richard Evans.
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Jun 6, 2013 22:04
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:The Germans had some pretty hosed up plans for Eastern Europe during World War One. In retrospect the later Generalplan Ost was not too radical of a thing for some Pan-German extremists. A thing to be remembered is that a large part of the ethnically heterogeneous Europe was actually already owned by German states at the time the war started. And that these outliers were quite often more than often happy to switch sides and march into Russia's embrace.
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Jun 6, 2013 22:05
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Lord Tywin posted:The really hilarious thing was how the nationalists framed the civil war as a new Reconquista while they were the ones who used a shitload of Muslim troops who committed various atrocities. The atrocities weren't committed by the troops because they were Morrocan, they were planned and executed from the top down as an atempt to purge the leftists (and suspected leftists) from the body politic. Which is kind of exactly like tthe end of the reconquista.
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Jun 6, 2013 23:21
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sullat posted:The atrocities weren't committed by the troops because they were Morrocan, they were planned and executed from the top down as an atempt to purge the leftists (and suspected leftists) from the body politic.
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Jun 7, 2013 00:03
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Didn't the Republicans kill priests? That aside, what did Great Britain and France do during the Spanish Civil War?
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Jun 7, 2013 00:06
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Azran posted:Didn't the Republicans kill priests? That aside, what did Great Britain and France do during the Spanish Civil War? Policed a hilarious arms embargo and naval exclusion zone and did sweet gently caress all to help the Republicans.
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Jun 7, 2013 00:17
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Don't forget the completely ineffective non intervention committee. Italy, Germany and the USSR were all members of course did not intervene in any way! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-intervention_in_the_Spanish_Civil_War As for the killing of priests, somewhere between 6-20 percent of all the clergy in Spain died during the civil war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_%28Spain%29
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Jun 7, 2013 00:58
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space pope posted:As for the killing of priests, somewhere between 6-20 percent of all the clergy in Spain died during the civil war. It's worth mentioning--though the Church typically doesn't!--that the Spanish Church was politically reactionary and aggressively supported the fascist cause, and in fact had been supporting reactionary causes for a very long time leading up to the war. People from countries like the United States where the Catholic Church is comparatively weak and politically passive often have a hard time understanding anticlerical initiatives in places like Spain or much of Latin America, where the Church was very strong and interfered with politics constantly. This doesn't in any way justify atrocities, as nothing does, but attacks on the Church in the Spanish Civil War came from the same place as the attacks on noblemen or wealthy landlords that you see in most revolutions (not coincidentally, the Church was and is Spain's largest and wealthiest landowner). Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Jun 7, 2013 |
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Jun 7, 2013 01:21
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EvanSchenck posted:It's worth mentioning--though the Church typically doesn't!--that the Spanish Church was politically reactionary and aggressively supported the fascist cause, and in fact had been supporting reactionary causes for a very long time leading up to the war. People from countries like the United States where the Catholic Church is comparatively weak and politically passive often have a hard time understanding anticlerical initiatives in places like Spain or much of Latin America, where the Church was very strong and interfered with politics constantly. This doesn't in any way justify atrocities, as nothing does, but attacks on the Church in the Spanish Civil War came from the same place as the attacks on noblemen or wealthy landlords that you see in most revolutions (not coincidentally, the Church was and is Spain's largest and wealthiest landowner). In the post-war repression being reported by your local priest as not having attended Mass regularly enough was enough to get your dragged off to a detention camp. On the long list of horrific evils that the Catholic church is responsible for, open support for the Nationalists is amongst the most recent.
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Jun 7, 2013 10:16
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In an interview with a Dutch Interbrigades veteran he talks about priests manning machineguns during the first few months in Madrid. Could there be any truth to this, or should I take this with the usual fuckton of salt?
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Jun 7, 2013 10:23
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Molentik posted:In an interview with a Dutch Interbrigades veteran he talks about priests manning machineguns during the first few months in Madrid. Could there be any truth to this, or should I take this with the usual fuckton of salt? As always, this kind of stuff could have happened easily. That priest was a Spanish citizen after all - some people are dedicated to their nation/cause beyond their actual role in everyday life. Now, there's a huge difference between a handful of guys doing that at the beginning of the war, and full Priest Batallions. Sounds pausible at least.
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Jun 7, 2013 17:30
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Omi-Polari posted:The invasion of Grenada is also often vilified as superpower Amerika toppling a leftist government, when it wasn't really that. Well, that's kinda true, especially the superpower part. But the invasion wasn't triggered until a military junta overthrew the leftist government and executed its prime minister, Maurice Bishop. Then the U.S. toppled the junta and replaced it with a multi-party parliamentary democracy, which it's been since. A poor, corrupt, Caribbean parliamentary democracy, but still a democracy instead of a dictatorship. Plus, the invasion happened mere months after the death of Bishop i think. I'm pretty sure the U.S. didn't plan a naval encirclement and amphibious assault in two months. They probably were thinking of doing it for a long time and waiting for the right chance. Molentik posted:
I'm pretty sure Stalin didn't wantto learn anything from the SCW Azran posted:Didn't the Republicans kill priests? That aside, what did Great Britain and France do during the Spanish Civil War? The civil war was the main cause for the collapse of the Popular Front in France, since the internal discussion between internationalist socialists who wanted to defend the Republic and the more centrist, social democratic moderates who either didn't want France to be involved in another military conflict or risk having a Leftist Spain make policies that could inspire policies in France caused the alliance to break. As for the priest killing, it's really important to emphasize just how much the catholic church dominated the Iberian peninsula and was directly involved in fighting against any and all calls for progression and siding with the latitudinarians and elites to maintain the status quo. The opposition of the church to separating itself from the state, giving up the land it owned or paying taxes over it and its opposition to a civil registry and education instead of a church-based one nearly led to civil war during the Portuguese Republic. Priests were some of the first to support Monarchist incursions in the north while they were also to support dictatorships like those of Sidonio Pais, who reached power to stop a land reform. Salazar himself disliked the church because of the power it had over the Portuguese population and did his best to appease it because he knew pissing off the church would kick him out of power. The same can be seen in Franco but with much less suspicion, since Franco legitimately liked the Church. And the church in Portugal was kinda weak in comparison to its grip in Spain. While death is obviously regrettable i completely understand the massive attack on priesthood that happened after 1936, just like i understand the popular madness that happened after the fall of the dictatorships by disgruntled poors who now thought honest change could take place (hahahahaha  )
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Jun 7, 2013 21:22
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