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Volcott posted:I'm an American. I was talking with someone from the United Kingdom recently, and we really couldn't understand each other's views on patriotism. I realize that my country has done some terrible things over the years, but I'm still proud to live here. As a country, we've accomplished amazing things. Proud to the point of saying "yeah it's better than abroad" is chauvinism. Like, literally the reason the word exists was napoleonic-era french soldiers mocking the blind nationalism of one of their own. The enlightenment, one of the few objectively positive cultural things out of Europe, came from aggressively cosmopolitan types who had bones to pick with their country of birth in mot cases. Also let's compare. Europe is built on layered conquests, wars and assimilation policies which ultimately make it really hard for people to give that much of a gently caress; when Italy was united, the average sicilian didn't give two shits whether they were italian or duo-sicilian and whether the king was a Savoie, a Bourbon, or a hamster wearing a tutu and most every european country barring the most homogenous end up with a periphery of varying size that gives even less of a gently caress. To contrast, the United States of America expanded mostly as the monolithic creature of a single culture, benefitting a single people, and when that's been breached in ways that might make the WASPs' cultural hold on the country, it always caused massive resentment. Countries in the Americas which still have that kind of periphery usually have tensions that go from political nightmare to downright constant separatist conflicts on the edges.
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Jan 17, 2015 14:05
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"McCarthy did nothing wrong" is a stupidly common opinion on the right.
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Jan 17, 2015 14:12
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davidb posted:What about dresden? That argument is highly questionable considering Truman's staff deliberately drew up a worst case scenario version of what was already the worst case scenario. Japanese war fatigue by the end of the war was absurdly high and Kuantung army officers that had a chance to surrender often did it because they were more terrified of what the manchu and the koreans would do to them than of what the red army would do to them. The humanitarian argument for hiroshima basically requires assuming that japan was a monolith when the empire was cracking at the seams by the end of the war. It was almost entirely a show of force to the USSR. Also Japan and Germany were great powers before the United States graced it with the seeds of capitalism in the aftermath of the world wars and in the case of Germany, before the US.
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Jan 17, 2015 18:13
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Amused to Death posted:*Cities already bombed into oblivion by fire bombing* By the time the second bomb hit the japanese government still didn't know what, exactly, had hit them in Hiroshima. Your fourth point doesn't remotely describe the Kwantung army, and the marines being fuckups has a lot to do with the island hopping campaigns. Okinawa wasn't a show of patriotism, it was a second class population being treated like second class by the IJA; had the Marines been in charge of taking Hokkaido, I wouldn't be surprised to read history books relating that the IJA higher ups decided finishing up the Ainu genocide was a better use of the troops than fighting the US once the battle was obviously lost. quote:You mean the germany which was economically poverty stricken by war reparations from ww1?
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Jan 17, 2015 18:32
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davidb posted:Are you saying japan declared surrender and we ignored them to drop the bomb anyways? The face-saving "The nukes made us do it" bullshit of the official instrument of surrender, when everything in the backrooms for the past year had hinged on the soviets not declaring war, ultimately gave a shot in the arm to the japanese far right that wouldn't exist had they finished the war a week later with the USN in Tokyo harbor and the red army pounding the Kwantung army all the way to Korea, but from a geopolitical standpoint that couldn't be allowed since acting friendly to the soviets was FDR's thing (even though he was no socialist, really) and the new administration was already gearing up for the cold war. Agnosticnixie fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 19:34
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This thread only taught me one thing: you are a complete ignoramus, and aggressively so.
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Jan 19, 2015 02:40
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Unlike America, France had people volunteering to receive their exports of democracy, vin rouge and the french way, thus making the first french republic inherently superior to any other country as a net exporter of heavily armed democrats. 
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Jan 20, 2015 21:46
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davidb posted:You lose. America = almost world peace Tacitus had something to say about Pax of the sort the great powers like.
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Jan 20, 2015 21:55
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davidb posted:No I do not realize. My understanding is that macedonians were basically greece. And greece is generally a civilization in high regard Modern greeks love to tout it very much because of their baby ego trip about Macedonia being somehow laying a claim to Alexander (which the Macedonian slavs didn't give a poo poo about until the greek nationalists started acting like children). The Macedonians were basically model barbarians who adopted greek mannerisms and culture and so were higher on the totem pole than, say, Thracians or Dacians. As far as I care, the Albanians have probably as much of a claim to the ancient macedonians as the Greeks; both are tenuous anyway.
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Jan 21, 2015 21:38
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