70 Years Since V-E Day

[dust1n]

Americastan did play a small role in WW2.
And we likely killed more Japanese & Italalistanians.
(We had more fronts than they.)

Russia was fighting on the Eastern front against Germany, then turned around and took back most of Northeast Asia from Japan.

 

[gnomon]

when America won against both the Germans and Japanese, school children could pray in school. a court house could have a picture of the ten commandments on the wall and homosexuals could not marry. a few years later as these things started to change the U S could not defeat a rag tag bunch of Viet Cong hiding in the jungle.as America began to turn away from God it seems like God turned away from America. and today ISIS overruns towns and kills innocent women and children and the US can do nothing

School children were praying in schools before WWII.

I'm going to assert right now that you have a very poor education about the state of societies not only in America or Western Europe but the world as a whole from the time of the rise of nationalism to World War II. Here is my suggestion........just stop.....

edit: Please.....just stop posting.

 

[dantech]

History teaches us that history teaches us nothing.

Mind=blown.

 

[Stevicus]

Yes. Without any qualifiers, yes. We were fighting what was without question the most terrible organization to ever exist. A set of people fully prepared to build an empire stretching from Burgundy to the Ural Mountains and from the Arctic Circle to the Alps. An Empire built on a foundation of hate, on the backs of slave-labour drawn from conquered people & social 'deviants'. They kept the Death Camps running to the last day of the war, when the entire world was literally falling in on Germany. The Nazis fully intended, were planning, on turning Europe into nothing but a mass-grave.


It is simply impossible to over-state the abject horror involved with the Holocaust & the European front of WW2, the Eastern Front in particular. And if you want to really learn to hate humanity as a concept, here's this;


The Death Camps? The actual, directed industrialized murder? That only started in 1942. The Nazis only made a concerted effort at gassing & exterminating inferiors for the last three years of the war. Until then, the idea was to ship them all off past the Urals to die on their own in Siberia. But the mechanized murder dealt out by the Gas Chambers & Einsatzgruppen only came about when it became obvious that Barbarossa was going to take longer than expected.




I suggest taking a cursory glance at the centuries preceding 1900. Two 'Big Wars' in Europe was considered a treat.

My apologies for the delay in returning to this discussion. Thanks for all your responses.


I agree with what you've written here. I was also thinking in terms of how WW2 is viewed as one of America's "defining moments," much in the same way we look at the Civil War. That doesn't mean that I'm attempting to minimize any other country's involvement in the war, although from America's point of view, it was a huge deal and brought about a complete change in how Americans view the outside world.


I also think Americans are somewhat sensitive to the charge that we entered the war "late," and some of it carries the implication that if we had joined the League of Nations and gotten involved in world affairs sooner, we might have been able to stop Hitler before he even got started. This view may have also influenced our Cold War policy of Containment, which might be seen as the opposite of Appeasement, commonly viewed as a monumental blunder.


Moreover, Hitler also became the new standard for "evil" in the world, and there was a tendency to use Hitler as a basis of comparison when viewing any dictatorial or authoritarian regime. If any government is declared to be "just like Hitler," then that becomes a legitimate casus belli in the eyes of the people.


I suppose that begs that question whether very many people have the ability to recognize if someone is "just like Hitler" before things get too far out of hand. Guys like Albert Speer and some of the Nazi generals tried to claim that they were just dedicated professionals doing their job and tried to dissociate themselves from the Nazis' atrocities.


The perception in the West is that Hitler must have been some kind of "magical being," with the ability to dupe and sucker so many millions of otherwise good people who were dazzled by his charisma and oratory. Documentaries about Hitler always seem to show a lot of footage of Hitler's speeches where he ostensibly mesmerizes crowds of thousands, working them up into a frenzy. After the war, many Germans claimed they were innocent, that "they didn't know" what Hitler was really doing or the extent of his atrocities. And it seems that the West went along with this, as the prevailing view was that it was necessary for us to rebuild our part of occupied Germany and use it as a buffer against the Soviet Bloc, which clearly angered Stalin and was a key factor in triggering the Cold War. He saw West Berlin in particular as a major thorn in his side.


Another key factor in Hitler's ideology and both World Wars had to do with the overall philosophy of nationalism and how it has been used in the world. I don't think the West or the Communist Bloc really had any clear idea as to how to handle nationalism on an ideological basis. This was especially true as the Colonial world was falling apart and there were groups for national liberation which drew upon elements of nationalism to further their cause. It seems to have led to an ideological quagmire in which most world governments seem somewhat wishy-washy on the whole thing.


Just as one example, here in the United States, the same political party which has been rabidly pushing for globalism and the world economy are also quite nationalistic and patriotic in their support of interventionism, American Exceptionalism, militarism for US interests, as well as calling for using the military on our southern border and a rising anti-immigrant and anti-foreign sentiment. There are so many contradictions within such a view, and none of it seems to imply any definitive and resolute denunciation of nationalism.

 

[Stevicus]

Well, now it's been 76 years since V-E Day. Happy V-E Day!

 

[Kooky]

@Stevicus
This was actually a really interesting thread to read, thanks for resurrecting it for posterity's sake!

 

[Jedster]

@

@Stevicus
This was actually a really interesting thread to read, thanks for resurrecting it for posterity's sake!

ditto
@Stevicus

 

[Twilight Hue]

Well, now it's been 76 years since V-E Day. Happy V-E Day!

It's a great time. Unfortunately it was obscured by the Communist party takeover in China not long after.

 

[Stevicus]

It's a great time. Unfortunately it was obscured by the Communist party takeover in China not long after.

Yeah, and Truman was criticized for that as well. At the time, the U.S. was concentrating mainly on the situation in Europe, which had been devastated in the war. We had also had diplomatic contacts with the Chinese Communists, and General Marshall was sent over to try to mediate between the Chinese Communists and the Chinese Nationalists. He came back disgusted by both sides, and it seemed there was no hope of any peaceful settlement.

It was really a shame, since the Cold War really didn't need to happen. Just because the US and USSR had different economic philosophies, it didn't mean we couldn't cooperate and work together as allies. That spirit of cooperation could have continued after the war. Unfortunately, history took a different turn.