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Emanuel Collective posted:Basically Huey Long was Ron Paul but for Social Democracy instead of libertarianism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzLMRAz5G_4 This speech by Father Coughlin was "End the Fed" seven decades before the Ron Paul Revolution. Was this an example of Coughlin starting to adopt Hitlerian oratorical style? I heard somewhere that he started doing that in the latter part of his gig.
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Oct 31, 2013 09:33
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computer parts posted:Does anyone know about the Philippines and how the US treated them after it gained possession of them after the Spanish-American War? Did the US have adverse colonial effects on the locals or did we more or less leave it in the same spot the Spanish left them (which based on Cuba I'm guessing not very well)? Dan Carlin's Hardcore History did an episode about just this topic. In a nutshell, Filipinos under Gen Emilio Aguinaldo declared their independence from Spanish colonial rule in 1898, but this was not recognized by Spain or anybody else, such that when Spain signed the Treaty of Paris to end the Spanish-American War, the Philippines was part of that which was ceded to the US. The Filipinos did not of course like this, and their resistance to the American take-over resulted in the Filipino-American War, from 1899 up until a cessation of hostilities in 1902. I don't want to get too much into the details of this particular war because I'm very biased as a Filipino myself, but concentration camps (in the Cuba/Boer War sense) were used, Filipinos were regarded as less-than-human by portions of the military resulting in atrocities, and the guerrilla nature of the war eventually soured public opinion. The long-term effect of the colonization though was I would say overall positive, not the least of which was because the McKinley administration recognized the need for eventual independence of the Philippines by as early as 1899. Reforms and policies were established to "prepare" the Philippines for self-government, and autonomy was little-by-little granted from the municipal level on up. As far as comparisons to Spanish rule, the Americans were arguably better: Large amounts of land owned by the Catholic Church was redistributed as a sort of agrarian reform, free public education was established (albeit at the cost of English-only education) and there was a civilian bicameral gov't in control. The Tydings-McDuffie Act established a Philippine Commonwealth by 1935 with the intent of granting full independence after 10 years. It was delayed by 1 year to July 4, 1946 because of World War II.
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Oct 31, 2013 15:38
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The Entire Universe posted:Allied forces in general had gotten real good at firebombing. Load the first couple waves with HE to blow roofs off and expose timbers, then follow with massive amounts of Incendiary. They'd gotten it down to a science and were pretty reliably reducing cities on autopilot by just generating a highly sustainable firestorm covering much of the city. I wrote a term paper on Dresden a very long time ago and the first hand accounts of stuff, like families being pulled apart by fire-induced winds, siblings watching parents and neighbors being bodily sucked into the maelstrom, were rather horrific. The higher end of the counts for that specific city were into six digits, but even conservative estimates of civilian deaths weren't exactly minute. The discussion shouldn't be about dropping the atomic bombs or not. It should be about whether or not the strategic bombing campaign should have been done in the first place.
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Nov 4, 2013 07:32
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Fojar38 posted:Yes. Because if they weren't then the compulsion for the Japanese to surrender wouldn't have existed. Well yeah, I agree. My point was more like if we already accept the premise that strategic bombing was the correct decision, then the atomic bombs are just an extension of that, and not nuking Hiroshima/Nagasaki doesn't really make much difference if they get firebombed anyway.
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Nov 4, 2013 10:05
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Dr. Tough posted:Yeah except the Soviets had no real way of getting their giant army from mainland Asia to Japan. The Japanese quaking in their boots over the Soviet invasion had less to do with a Soviet amphibious assault on the Home Islands and more to do with losing the last possible mediator in a negotiated peace and losing an area roughly the size of Western Europe that the Japanese were hoping to retain in said negotiated peace (and losing such real estate in mere weeks, at that)
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Nov 4, 2013 20:07
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Emanuel Collective posted:While we're tangentintally on the topic of US Troops behaving badly in foreign lands during world war 2, how about the Battle of Brisbane? Such incidents were not limited to Australia! There were also incidents in England for much the same reasons: Americans being generally bigger/more fit than Brits, higher pay for GIs making them more attractive to British women, the British looking down on American officers and enlisted men associating freely, and finally racial tensions between the way African-Americans were treated.
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Nov 6, 2013 14:30
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Protocol 5 posted:By 1945, civilian morale was already well and truly in the toilet, and only the far-gone true believers in the IJA wanted to keep it going. It's worth noting that strategic bombing never really produced the "people will be so horrified at the casualties that they will revolt against the government just to end the war" effect predicted by pre-war strategists like Giulio Douhet not only because it was an entirely untested technology/strategy, but also because Douhet was not a psychologist. At the same time, it's not true either that the mass devastation wrought by strategic bombing hardened the will of Axis civilians to resist. Civilian morale was broken, but broken in the sense that when your house is flattened by an Allied bomber, your only focus is going to be salvaging whatever you can from the wreckage and feeding your (surviving) family. Factory absenteeism might rise, but then the assembly line might provide some kind of solace from having to face your hungry kids all day. You're certainly not going to rebel when the military/secret police is around even if you had the time and strength for it, especially when they're the only ones with the guns.
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Nov 6, 2013 17:28
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Wilson tried to keep the US out of the war for as long as he could, but after the pro-Unrestricted Submarine Warfare faction of the German gov't/military won out, there was just no going back - the U-boats kept sinking ships with American citizens on them and the Germans were cutting out their own ambassador to the US as far as trying to resolve it diplomatically. They knew that unrestricted warfare would result in the US joining the war, so once they decided they were going to do it, they just let it all hang.
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Nov 20, 2013 16:09
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VitalSigns posted:I'm pretty sure the British who furnished us the telegram (because the Germans used British diplomatic cables to send their secret war incitement offer The telegram was sent via a special telegraph line set-up specifically to allow closer coordination between the Germany Foreign Office and the German Embassy in the US during Wilson's proposals for a peace summit. Zimmermann sent it through there because he figured they were heading towards war already anyway because of the U-boats, so it shouldn't matter that he was using the line for pretty much the total opposite of what it was made for. The British intercepted it because the line went from Germany, to Sweden, then through Land's End in England to make the trans-Atlantic jump.
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Nov 20, 2013 18:08
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as theirs were cut) wouldn't have given the USA Mexico's response even if they had it because they obviously wanted to make Germany look as threatening as possible to bring in America.
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icantfindaname posted:Don't the Turtledove novels involve the South having a populist revolution and instituting some sort of agrarian socialism? I don't recall the agrarian socialism part, but there was a revolt, yes. The black population went up in open revolt in the middle of the WWI analogue and formed a Marxist Congaree Socialist Republic along the Black Belt. This would later form the basis for the Southerner Hitler analogue's Mein Kampf - blaming the CSA's loss of the Great War to them.
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Dec 17, 2013 13:55
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Marlows posted:Above all else, the Philippines must not be mistaken to have a nationalist identity during this period; many hated the US occupation, but others celebrated it. The study of colonial and imperial conflicts is made difficult by false assumptions of national identity or resistance among the oppressed. Would you mind elaborating on this? Everything I've ever been taught tells me that Filipinos were seeking independence from Spain for decades (at the very least, at least a year) before the Americans ever entered the picture, and that Filipinos resisted the American occupation precisely because they had mostly thrown out the Spanish from the Philippines already but then the Treaty of Paris handed over the Philippines to the Americans anyway. Full disclosure: I myself am Filipino, so I'm genuinely curious as to how you'd describe the Philippine national identity from the outside looking in.
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Dec 23, 2013 15:52
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I'm ever mystified by how the US constitution is still so unchanged (apart from the 27 amendments, of course), but then I also recognize that the only reason other countries have more, shall I say, "modern" constitutions is because they're either much younger than the US or they went through different forms of government and so had to write them at a time when they were much more aware of contemporary issues. Are there countries that "updated" their constitutions with things like term limits or clarified antiquated/vague wordings entirely of their own accord? I'm sorry if the question is vague or rambling. I guess this is more of a general thing where I don't want to keep laughing at how much trouble the US gets in over debates regarding things that the constitution does or does not cover without recognizing first that maybe no one has really done better either.
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Mar 11, 2014 19:12
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Nenonen posted:Finland's constitution Thanks, that was kind of the answer I was looking for!
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Mar 12, 2014 07:16
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Yes, I think those are some examples I was looking for. To put a little context to my question, the Philippines has had several constitutions, but pretty much all of them were the result of conquest/upheaval/revolution: When the Philippines first declared independence from Spain in 1897, when the Philippines became a Commonwealth under the United States in 1935, when the Philippines became a puppet under Imperial Japan in 1943, a naked power-grab by right-wing dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1973, and finally the 1987 Constitution that was established after Marcos' overthrow. And so I wondered if there were any countries that updated/amended their constitutions absent of such circumstances.
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Mar 13, 2014 17:57
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Besides the reasons mentioned, the Philippines was a gateway to the Chinese markets and had significant mineral wealth. My maternal grandfather was mining engineer (mostly copper) and did pretty well for himself. No oil, though. There was also the idea that the US had to take the islands from the Spanish or else the Germans would swoop in and take it for themselves, as they were also looking to establish a colonial empire. Germany's Asiatic Squadron was hovering around Manila Bay in the days after Admiral Dewey's victory there and the two fleets nearly came to blows. It's also correct that there was a "native" revolution that sprang up in 1898. That the Americans refused to recognize it and just treated the islands as though Spain had handed it off to them was pretty much the reason for the Filipino-American War. New question: How does history remember Woodrow Wilson? I've been reading a lot of WWI literature so he comes up fairly often and the image I'm getting is that he was this really idealistic guy (even progressive?) whose lofty dreams unfortunately ran into the brick wall of reality too many times. What was he like before the war, and is generally regarded as a good or a bad president?
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Mar 14, 2014 07:44
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Some Guy TT posted:Surely there were people who saw the irony of this. Our entire origin myth is that it's antithetical to freedom for a country to be at the mercy of the arbitrary laws of a foreign power. The only possible rationalization I can come up with is that those rules only apply to white people. That's right guy who thinks we arbitrarily turn everything into a race issue- give me some kind of explanation for this cognitive dissonance that doesn't straight up boil down to brown people don't count. Yes, it was absolutely ironic. It was kind of a thing during that time for statesmen to try and reconcile the American national myth with American national interest. As for Cuba, the Teller Amendment of 1898 was a compromise to allow US troops to land in Cuba and restore order following the anti-Spanish insurgency, on the condition that the US would assist the Cubans in establishing a stable and independent government and not annex the island.
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Mar 14, 2014 08:55
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AFAIK the British government had been trying to impose/increase taxes on the American colonists for quite some time even before the Boston Tea Party. Targeted organized dissent kept causing Parliament to back down, but they kept leaving some small new tax behind because they wanted to send the message that just because they were repealing the initial tax they wanted to institute didn't mean that they were renouncing the ability to impose laws on the colonies whenever they wanted to. I guess if you want to be totally accurate it wasn't really about too high a tax on the tea itself, but it was about taxes.
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Mar 15, 2014 14:34
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Right, because it hasn't been linked yet, Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast is covering the American Revolution and he covers a lot of what's been recently asked (background of the Boston Tea Party, why not Canada, etc)
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Mar 17, 2014 19:42
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I just got to the point of the 1919: Six Months That Changed the World where it's talking about the fight in the American Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and I'm afraid I just don't understand at all. They never ratified it, they never joined the League of Nations, and tidbits of what I picked up from D&D indicates that the US is not party to a LOT of UN resolutions and treaties. What makes the US so dissimilar from the rest of the world in this particular governmental process?
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Mar 18, 2014 16:53
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Okay, I think I get it. I just thought there was a particular system (the states or something) in the US government that made it more resistant to such arrangements compared to other democracies.
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Mar 18, 2014 19:42
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caberham posted:Is there actually a "decent" US president besides Abraham Lincoln? At least someone who was relatively a decent person? From reading this thread, it really is "Finding new things to be ashamed about" Not an American so I may have some blind spots, but I thought Carter was pretty good (the economic problems not really being his fault?), as was LBJ even if only on domestic issues and FDR on social and economic issues. On an unrelated note, reading about the last years of Woodrow Wilson's life was really sad - he worked himself near to death and there was hardly any payoff. PittTheElder posted:I imagine a big part of it is also that politics is not exactly a game for nice people. Indeed, there's really only a certain kind of person who'll ever be a good politician and actually win office, which is why the image of a Cincinnatus is so revered yet so fleeting.
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Mar 19, 2014 10:55
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Granted, the world was not and still is not a nice place 
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Barudak posted:Wilson's wife was a pretty middling president too as you mention. To be honest throughout that whole section on post-stroke Wilson I was just waiting for the conspiracy theories to come out regarding some kind of shadow government.
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Mar 19, 2014 20:49
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tbp posted:Quick aside but why are people saying "year of our lord" (or abbreviated) so much lately? Are you particularly religious, ? It's exaggerating for effect: "The accounting firm I go to still uses abacuses in TYOOL 2014!"
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Apr 15, 2014 14:34
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I heard about a speech made by Strom Thurmond during the dixiecrat campaign of 1948 where he explicitly racial epithets. The clip I heard started with something like "there aren't enough soldiers in the army" or something. Can someone help me narrow this down?
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Jun 15, 2014 08:29
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I just finished Battle Cry of Freedom so I became familiar with the death of the Whig party and the birth of the Republican party, and I've also read enough D&D to be familiar with the Southern Strategy, so I'd like to get some perspective on party ideology in the intervening years. That is, FDR was a great president, but he was a pre-Southern Strategy Democrat. Same with JFK. Same with Woodrow Wilson. What gives? Book recommendations are also welcome.
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Aug 12, 2014 11:32
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Echo Chamber posted:Then you probably already know that FDR's New Deal Coalition included proto-segregationists and that's one of the reasons the New Deal didn't do that much to help black people. Economic populism had a very troubled past in general when it came to racial issues prior to the Southern Strategy. Immigrants and African Americans were easy scapegoats to rally the anger of poor whites. And you still see hints of it today from both the left and the right. Okay so I'm probably oversimplifying this, but given that Woodrow Wilson had a pretty terrible record on racial issues, what I'm getting is that the Republican-Democrat dynamic established in the 1860s persisted and really did not switch until after 1964 (or thereabouts), but the US still got "good" Democrat presidents that passed "progressive" legislation provided that such laws were unhelpful enough towards black people to pass muster with the Southern Democrats?
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Aug 12, 2014 17:27
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computer parts posted:- There were not many Democratic Presidents between 1864 and FDR (mostly because they were seen as the Party of the South); there's only really Andrew Johnson (dude that succeeded Lincoln), Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson. None of these guys were really that good wrt race. Huh, you're right, that's what was tripping me up in the first place. Thanks.
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Aug 12, 2014 17:53
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That's all very illuminating and makes me want to read up more on Wilson. My only exposure to him so far has been through WWI and his post war campaign for the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. There was a shadow of his terrible racial policies across those, but this is the first time I've read specifics
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Aug 13, 2014 05:36
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Ardennes posted:You probably should compare opinions of the times to the period themselves, there were anti-racists in the past but even Lincoln would be considered today. However, he was probably considerably less racist than the average American of the 1860s. One of the cooler parts of Battle Cry of Freedom, for me, was watching the evolution of Lincoln's opinion towards slavery. I always kind of wondered where/how that "if I could preserve the Union without removing slavery, I would" quote came about that always gets trotted out by people wanting to tear down Lincoln, but now I have context.
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Aug 16, 2014 07:06
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I've watched the documentaries on Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, and I wanted to ask what the dominant viewpoint is on Colin Powell. He wasn't Secretary of Defense, but IIRC he was a General, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during Desert Storm and became Secretary of State under Bush.
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Oct 16, 2014 10:40
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Echo Chamber posted:It actually took decades for the whole "Lincoln sort of freed the slaves, but it's complicated" story to actually become the accepted narrative again. Perhaps I've just been exposed to too much right-wing kookery via D&D, but the narratives I would get about Lincoln from that end of the spectrum were: 1. He really was this hero who freed the slaves, which was good, and that he was a Republican, which means Republicans are good and not at all racially biased against African-Americans via the transitive property. 2. He did not care at all for African-Americans and simply used the slavery issue as a cover to wage a 'war of aggression' upon the South and impose the will of a strong Federal government upon a people that simply wanted to be left alone. This is usually accomplished by taking his letter to Horace Greeley completely out of context - "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it" and completely ignoring the 'evolution of his opinion' (to coin an Obama-ism) with regards to slavery and African-American rights over the half-decade leading up to his eventual death. I've not really run into a narrative that picks up on Lincoln's pragmatism and bipartisanship, especially since any comparisons to Obama would grant that Obama is a negotiator and is willing to be bipartisanship, when the narrative that's more commonly pushed is that he's this tyrannical imperialist that simply imposes his will over the nation in naked displays of force (or is about to, any day now). Lincoln, I find, is either portrayed as someone who knew exactly what he was doing and did it as a Republican, therefore credit goes to the party, or someone who knew exactly what he was doing and wrought destruction upon the South to do it.
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Nov 2, 2014 18:06
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Disinterested posted:The thing that made MacArthur good was that he tended not to lose his head completely when things went bad, but things often went badly because of his own negligence. This makes me think Joseph Joffre.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:23
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So it's like, on the one hand if a battleship were to go down in open seas it probably would have been a total write-off, but on the other hand if a battleship actually was out there in the open seas it ostensibly would have had men at battlestations firing off their AA guns and it could maneuver to avoid bombs and torps?
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Jan 22, 2015 20:31
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A battleship moving and maneuvering at anywhere between 27 to 30+ knots still has a fair chance of avoiding dive bombers and torpedoes. Certainly more than one simply sitting pierside, which was the contrast I was originally trying to present.
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Jan 24, 2015 19:32
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sullat posted:Once the revisionists finish work on Iraq (and how it was won by Bush but lost by Obama, or whatever the story is going to be), no doubt they'll return to Vietnam and how good ol' American boys were stabbed in the back by hippies. What I've read of the period suggests that "good American boys are being stabbed in the back by hippies" was a talking point that was being pushed while Vietnam was still happening.
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Jan 26, 2015 05:21
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I wasn't following D&D yet back in 2008, so I have to ask: what was Obama's VP selection process like? Was Biden always the frontrunner? Were there any other candidates, even just speculatively?
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Feb 1, 2015 00:49
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I watched John Frankenheimer's Path to War with Michael Gambon as LBJ and was very moved, although I did feel like it tried to humanize McNamara too much. I'm currently working my way through Oliver Stone's Nixon and I also have "Our Nixon" after that. Any significant misrepresentations I should keep in mind?
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Feb 4, 2015 12:50
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