Freedom isn't Free

[East Coast Hustle]

Vex, you are forgetting that it's in style to blame America for everything, and to say that everything we do is shitty and wrong.  Of course, America DOES have a history of some incredibly horrible shit, but to say that EVERYTHING we do is equally evil and bad - as MMIX did, by conflating WWII and Vietnam - is symptomatic of a generation raised to shout slogans instead of, you know, think (which is why she seemed to be incapable of recognizing my retraction concerning the John Brown truism).

An entire generation with loads of ideology and no brains.  Horrible, horrible.

The really funny thing is that if MMIX was right, she wouldn't have a country to be posting from.

We could have just beat the Japanese back from the Pacific and let the Soviets and Germans fight each other until Europe was (even more of) a bloody wasteland while Britain took a demographic hit on the level of, say, Poland. IMO, saving their bacon was one of the most altruistic things we ever did, as a nation.

More than anything else, the food we shipped over saved Britain, properly speaking.  There was no serious invasion threat after the Battle of Britain.

But if we hadn't gotten involved, all of continental Europe probably would have been in the Soviet sphere when the shit finally stopped flying.

What rotten bastards we are.

and if I'm not mistaken, a fair amount of the pilots fighting for Britain during the battle of Britain were American pilots.

[East Coast Hustle]

mind you, I think it was effort and lives well spent. Lone superpower or not, it's good to have friends in this world whether you;re a person or a nation, and relatively recent common culture/commitment to liberty and representative democracy is as good a bond as any I can think of. I'd like to think that if the situations were reversed, Britain would have done the same for us, no matter what trendy revisionist history some jackasses might buy into.

[Adios]

mind you, I think it was effort and lives well spent. Lone superpower or not, it's good to have friends in this world whether you;re a person or a nation, and relatively recent common culture/commitment to liberty and representative democracy is as good a bond as any I can think of. I'd like to think that if the situations were reversed, Britain would have done the same for us, no matter what trendy revisionist history some jackasses might buy into.

This is ECH slicing and dicing bullshit.

[Payne]

But but but!

Cultural Imperialism!

McDonalds! Bush! Halliburton! High School Musical, plus all the sequels and spinoffs!

Or something!

I GOT TO GET MY HATE ON! AND I HATE AMURCA!

I can do it too!

Anyway, as I see it, the major beef people have with Americans is that they "Have no sense of the history of their Foreign Policies" (line yoinked from a documentary I barely remember regarding the U.S. and the Middle East from years back). I find it funny. as. fuck. when people who themselves have no sense of the history themselves then try to use it as a stick to beat the American people. I mean shit, if you're gonna get pissy at anyone then surely it's the Government you'd want to ake it out on, but no. It's the average american who takes the fall, each and every time. I blame you man-on-main-street for all the horrible shit Nixon, Reagan and the Bush Dynasty got up to.

There is no perspective, there is no balanced opinion, and there is, ultimately, no basis in reality for the half baked and uninformed drivel that people think of as "history" when they use it as a stick to beat Americans.

Regarding the relationship between the UK and the US during and since WW2: The UK would have been doomed from the start if not for US assistance. (Actually, if you look back to the Versailles Treaty, there are a couple of American inspired articles that were not adopted that may well  have lessened the liklihood of the Nazi state rising in the way it did). This involved; food, materiel, diplomatic channels and intelligence before the US even officially entered the war.

Then there was the visible and strong support in these things and also in strategic co-ordination, international deals (Stalin would never have sat down with Winston "The Soviet State Should Have Been Strangled At Birth" Churchill alone. And ultimately it was the Soviets who won the war.) and in helping to re-build Europe economically and morally after the war.

Vietnam is in no way equivilent. It was a pissing contest in an environment where the Americans were always going to lose out. It was more PR than a Righteous and Neccessary intervention.

The american Government has often got things wrong in the past. Hell sometimes they do things right and very well, but for the wrong reasons. But ultimately, until very recently they have been trying, at least, to Do The Right Thing. Why should this in anyway be a reason to castigate them?

~~~Payne: far prefers an active American State than an isolationist one. Wants his "side" to have the bigger guns, if it comes down to it.

[Cain]

Meh, nations only care about one thing: hegemony.

In WWII, American and Soviet interests mostly aligned with a common good.  That good involved defeating the Axis powers.  However it was not done because it was good, it was done because Nazi Germany and it's allies threatened to overturn the international system, one which America was emerging in as a successor to the British (this had been pretty clear since the Washington Naval Treaty, if not earlier) and in which the Soviet Union was also increasingly powerful.  Had a leader other than Stalin had arisen in the USSR, meaning there were no military purges, had the USSR struck first in a global war and subsumed even just Eastern Europe, I am fairly sure the alliances of the second world war would have been reversed, and Hitler's holocaust been overlooked much in the same way Stalin's own atrocities suddenly became a non-problem after Hitler's invasion of the country in 1941.  Churchill's own objections to Hitler were more based in his Germanphobic sentiment than anything else (that he and Vansittart were right was a matter of luck, not perception), certainly not his methods, and there were powerful lobbies in the USA bankrolled by Nazi Germany which were very vocally anti-Communist.  Indeed, as late as 1939, many powerful politicians in the UK were still urging that the Soviet Union was the greater threat and the greater evil, and if anything the Empire should be considering going to war with them.

After the war, Europe needed to be kept strong (but not too strong) as to offset the chances of Soviet invasion or international subversion, the latter being more likely as most of the WWII partisans being rightly treated as heroes were in fact Communist party members (the various Communist Parties having been worried about Fascism since the 1920s, when mostly everyone else was still lauding it as a novel governmental approach).  That was the explicit purpose of the Marshall Plan.  Again, it was a good result, but it wasn't done with those kind of motives in mind, it was because a reconstructed and prosperous Europe would be less likely to listen to the Communist message of world revolution, whereas a Europe in ruins and still facing rationing in most places would no doubt have a greater interest.  And of course other, less beneficial methods were used alongside the Marshall Plan to dissuade Europe from turning to Communism.  I shall just say "Operation Gladio", since I don't want to discuss that in depth here and now.

Nations don't act out of altruism, ever.  Except Canada and, well, look at them.  Nations do things because it benefits them and, more usually in recent times, benefits a small subset of their population.  Britain, for example, did not acquire the bomb for self-defense purposes (aside from when McNamara was in office, it was fairly clear the USA was committed to the defense of Europe), it did it because Cabinet ministers felt they were belittled by American officials and how they treated them after the war ended, and realised if they were to continue their attempted strategy of forming a third pole seperate from both American and Soviet spheres of influence, a plan that was popular in the early days of the Cold War, before it became clear how much damage had been done to British finances and it's military capacity, then they would need a nuclear bomb in order to compete with both.  Britain later aligned with America because they had a level of cultural affinity to them they did not have with the Soviets and an alliance dating back to 1917, and could use both to influence world affairs through carefully controlling and guiding American policy.  Indeed, there was a massive network of agents still in America dating back from WWII, when Britain had carried out a propaganda campaign to try and bring the Americans into the war, and given how the war had turned out, these agents were now highly influential within the corridors of power and shaping public opinion.  If Britain had a similar kind of relationship with the Soviet Union, I have no doubt the country would have aligned with them against America.

International relations is a domain of manipulation, deceit, naked power politics, self-interest and murder, sometimes deserved but just as often not.  When a nation does something that ends up being a moral good, it is almost certainly by accident, an unintended but welcome epiphenomenal event to the main purpose of why nations ever act on the international stage at all: which is to acquire, retain and further their power relative to other nations. 

Any other explanation is crass sentimentalism, and any nation which acts contrary to this will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

[MMIX]

  Cain

[Adios]

Cain that was pretty interesting.