On Oct 7 2001, Micheal Manville wrote a very good article that I think deserves a second reading. http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=165
Interesting view. The way the article portrays the US is that it did everything it could not to risk its soldiers in battle.
I'm not sure that's what I got from the article. The main point I did get though was that this image of the US as this super-moral, super-righteous, super-noble, supremely benign force for good dating back from WWII is largely a big myth with no real basis in fact. In fact it was not even true of US involvement in WWII which is what the bulk of the article discusses. The thing that makes this myth extremely dangerous is that the American public largely buys this myth while non-Americans, especially those who have suffered from self-serving and hardly noble US policies do not. As the article says simply, "They hate us because we do not know why they hate us". I'm not trying to say the opposite which is that the US is some truly evil hegemon on the order of Nazi Germany or WWII era Japan nor does the article say that. However, US power and US policy are far less benign than most Americans realize.
Yeah. Amazing what reading and thinking for yourself can help you uncover... Nothing is as simple and happy as public school history classes and mainstream media want you to believe. Turn off your telescreen.
This is EXACTLY it. Non-Americans hate us because of the narrow perspective that Americans exudes...and we don't even know that. Every other country in the world understands they are a part of the world. Due to America's relative isolation and power, we don't know how to interact with the same worldly approach...which pisses people off.
For those who don't have the time to read the whole article, here is my very short, rewritten version of it which emphasizes the main point. [my edited version of the article] Our desire to make America's actions into moral crusades while greatly overlooking and diminishing some of the darker, self-serving and malignant aspects of US policy and our refusal to confront it--or, still worse, our insistence that these are actions of idealism and benevolence--often comes across as callous and insulting to other nations. The only thing scarier than that is the fact that a large number of Americans probably accepted it as a reasonable recounting of history, and an accurate representation of how the United States is viewed in the world. Here is America, a great many Americans maintain the illusion of a moral nation that is always disliked without reason, and hated by its enemies only because its enemies hate freedom. The arrogance necessary to make such statements, and the incomprehensible complacency required to believe them, contribute to much of the world's belief that America is often a high-handed hypocrite. "To study foreign affairs without putting ourselves in others' shoes," Paul Gagnon has noted, "is to deal in illusion, and to prepare students for a lifelong misunderstanding of our place in the world." John Powers, writing in the September 21 LA Weekly, put it more succinctly. "They hate us," he wrote, "because we don't even know why they hate us."
That is the most ridiculous garbage I think I've ever read. To say that World War II wasn't a fight against evil (the Axis powers) is perposterous. Yes, we were allied with someone (the Sovs) who were as bad or worse than the Nazis. But it had to be done lest Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini rule the world. But then I again, I consider the source of this article. From Freezerbox's mission statement: Global inequality? Let me guess, it's all our fault, eh? When your world view is that basically our nation is for the ill and that every problem can be traced backwards to us, you're going to believe WWII was not just or even a positive world event. It's like I've always said, it's easy to be a hater and when you are the top dog, of course everyone wants to knock you down to size. It's simple human nature. Redistributing our wealth (which if you read into what these folks are really saying, is from nefarious deeds) is not going to make the terrorists love us or keep France from hating us.
A perect example fo what the article is talking about. Bama...We didn't enter the war to combat evil. In fact, we didn't enter the war at all. Japan attacked us, and Germany declared war on us. The war, I'll remind you, against evil had been going on for a couple years at that point, and despite having treaties of mutual protection with Britain and France, we ignored repeated appeals from bot to get onvolved on the side of right. We wanted no part of it, and wouldn't even help supply them without getting a sweetheart deal out of it. Up to the point we entered the war, the United States was the single greatest supplier of arms to Nazi Germany, in terms of the nationality of the co-operative companies. Earlier thousands of Jews were sent to us as Hitler's Germany was trying to get rid of them in their insane pursuit of racial purity, and we turned them away, as close as Ellis Island, saying we would only accpet them if Germany paid us a hefty price for each one. Germany, as we all know, chose another route. Our reasons for staying out of "the fight of good against evil." Simply put, wasn't our affair. Roosevelt, to his credit, tried repeatedly to engage the American public, but we were nonplussed, by a large majority, and every poll showed over 3/4 didn't want to get involved. We got involved when, and only when, we were attacked. And yet, to this day, most Americans don't realize Germany declared war on us, and most Americans have conveniently forgotten that we rejected appeals to help for 2 years while the war waged. THAT is the dlusion the article is talking about...and you summarize it nicley. We got involved, in your mind, to stopevil from overtaking the world. No. We got involved to protect our own interests, and before those interests were attacked, we stayed out of it.
Whenever you make such unequivocal statements, such as the one you just delivered, you end up being wrong practically 100% of the time. (notice I said "practically." See how that works?) Doing so, you immediately lose credibility. If you care. I agree this guy is extreme but he's making a valid point. And yes there probably is some jealosy but don't flatter yourself. Most foreigners I know are EXTREMELY proud of where they are from. People don't mind rich people as long as they arn't a SNOB. We come accross as rich snobs. Rich=OK. Rich snob=bad. Maybe snob isn't the perfect word but you catch my drift. Look Bamma, we ain't perfect. We are the best country on Earth but we still have room for improvement. You can either grow or become stagnant. Which do you want?
I know that we were attacked and that we entered the war only because we had to. But the point I was making that the article was wrong to depict us as no better or different than our enemies.
Just for the sake of argument, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor was not a surprise attack. Rooselvelt issued an ultimatum to the Japanese to withdraw from all their occupied lands in China and the Pacific. This, of course, they could not do and maintain there war machine - so they attacked. Roosevelt knew this would happen, there is no rational explanation otherwise. All the "complete radio silence" stuff you read about Pearl Harbor in school is baloney. Those radio messages were tracked and decoded by U.S. authorities. However, just like the code cracking Britain was doing against Germany, the governments in control had to decide which decoded messages to act upon. You could not act on all of them - that would reveal that you cracked the code... More interesting, IMO, is that Roosevelt ignored the peace-pacts offered him by the Japanese ~1938. At that point in time it was still plausible that the peace-party in Japan could have ousted the war-hawks with American support. Roosevelt refused to communicate, even when they offered to withdraw from as much as 1/2 of occupied Manchuria. He was influenced here by communist sympathizers in his government, concerned because Japan was eagerly awaiting its chance to invade the soviet union - with a much bigger and better army. I think it also plausible that Roosevelt himself theorized what Japan was planning and refused to be friendly with the Japanese so that they were always concerned about a possible two-front war if they attacked russia... It was for our own interests, of course. Had the soviet union been attacked by both japan and germany it would have crumbled. Heck, had Germany not wasted a month brutally putting down a chezch rebelllion (delaying the russian invasion), they would have taken Moscow. Regardless, if Russia had fallen and the germans and japanese had control of the huge resource stockpiles located there, America would have been seriously threatened. So we could not just ignore the situation, even if the American public wanted nothing to do with another "European war". Just some interesting tidbits...
