*sigh*
Sorry, Nine, but I'm replying to your post.
I just wanted to pop in to remind the dear americans that you can't compare USA and Europa like you keep doing. First of all, Europa is no where near united and talking about Europa as a single entity is completely idiotic, even in modern times, since there are still European nations who do not seek membership with EU.
We compared the USA with the USSR. You can compare any two objects. Saying they're basically the same might be problematic, but there's no reason not to compare two objects that have at least one superficially similar quality. The European Union is a single object because it has a single name. Did you know that the states here still don't get along especially well? They still have strong individual governments and so on. Oh, and what about talking about North America as one unit? We've got three big fat countries, all with different degrees of socialism going on, different poverty levels, etc.--and yet we talk about it as though it were one, just because it's convenient. Language is arbitrary like that.
And hell, if you want to whinge about this, talk to Africa. I'm sure it's got a lot of things to say, such as "Africa is a continent with a lot of different not-unified-at-all countries in it, not a single big country," contrary to what many people seem to believe.
And I say, holy crap. Unfuck ourselves? You're just blaming a whole fucking continent for a few nations war lust. Care to tell me how places like Scandinavia and the Netherlands "Fucked themselves"?
I suspect you're having English difficulties. "Unfuck yourself" may mean that someone fucked you, or that you fucked yourself. The existence of the reflexive is not dependent on the manner in which one was fucked--it only means that the unfucking is being performed by an individual on themselves.
Obviously, some countries fucked themselves, some countries fucked other countries, and some countries were simply fucked under the usual rhetoric. Examples of each: Germany, Russia, Poland. As a result, Europe became collectively fucked, as those who were losing the war were fucked, and then proceeded to fuck those who were winning it. That doesn't mean that each country, as an individual, proceeded to fuck itself.
By not spending half their income on military? By not being safe across the atlantic? Would America have punched Germany like Superman punches a bankrobber had it been America sharing borders with Germany?
By being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong people, with the aftermath of a stupid war based on over-strong alliances at your heels that killed off an entire generation of young men, and with two superpowers in deep economic trouble desperate to prove themselves--one convinced that it had come to trouble only because of the unfairness of the settlement of that last war.
Would America have punched Germany? I dunno. Based on the eugenics movement of the time, I'd have thought it more likely that America would have been Germany in the given scenario. Aren't we glad that, indeed, we were on the other side of the Atlantic and we were able to help bail Europe out of the terrible shit it was in? Note that I put that modifying verb "help" in there. We obviously didn't do all the work. Russia, for example, did a hell of a lot of effort it doesn't often get credit for.
But in any case, I'm here to talk about what happened, rather than what might have happened if America had been involved in WWI on its own soil.
I'm also going to add that one of the reasons why America spends half its budget on military is because it keeps Japan demilitarized (and Germany too, IIRC). Remember how those countries have been told that they screwed up too badly last time and aren't allowed to have any sort of army anymore? Well, we're in a defense pact with them (or at least Japan--I seem to remember it being written into the Japanese constitution), which says that if they get attacked, we'll move in to protect them--and IIRC, that deal is unique, in that there aren't any other countries to do that.
There you go. The US, continuing to blow half its income on the military partially so that Japan and Germany can't go bonkers again, as they have multiple times in the past. You're welcome.
Europa is happy for your support, but it's not like we've not been through worse.
If you can name a European war that was worse than WWI or WWII (your pick based on which one you think was more atrocious), go for it.
I certainly can't.
Hitler would've lost sooner or later, with or without America and while you helped speed it up, thank you, you did not save the day with your magical superstate powers. Americas ascending to a superpower happened through the destruction that waged across Europe due to various complicated shit. Coming in last minute does not varrant a heroes welcome, it varrants a thank you.
... Weren't the Allies basically down to England or something, and Russia was under siege and starving to death, feeding its soldiers sawdust, and Poland was pretty much wiped off the map
again (but still resistant, as so many people seem to forget), France occupied under a puppet state, Spain fighting a fascist civil war, many of the Scandinavian nations "working" with Hitler because they didn't want to be invaded (for example, Finland was involved in the terrible siege of Leningrad), Japan hopping its way through China towards the other side of Russia, and so on?
I dunno, maybe I'm just wrong on the facts. But frankly, I figure that if you get another wave of help, you should give it a hero's welcome. Not a you-are-heroes forever welcome, or you are heroes no matter what you do welcome, or we-would-have-all-been-totally-screwed-without-you welcome, but a "thank you, God, because we didn't all have to become Russia and our cities were not razed to the ground, we still had our cryptographers working, we still had food." Not necessarily because of America, but
we bloody well helped.
Our young men died too, and two generations of our scientists dedicated themselves to war. We went without, and we suffered. Every spare scrap of metal went towards bullets and arms... after school, children spent their time not playing, but looking for a little something to melt down. There wasn't nylon for pantyhose, due to rationing, so all over the country women drew lines on their calves--pretend stockings. We sent over so many young men, across the Atlantic, that women were forced into their jobs, and women over here finally got the vote. We even had women doing plane testing and going into the army. We were in the middle of the greatest economic recession we'd ever seen, you know. Some third of our young men was unemployed. We sent them over to Europe to die. My grandfather was a crippled mathematician, and so embarrassed at his inability to help with the war effort that he ran off to Mexico. He was extremely sick, and thought the journey would kill him, but if you were a man it was expected that you would be working for the War in Europe. "If you're a man, then you're a soldier, and you're going overseas. If you're a woman, then you're working in the factories or in the fields for Our Boys In Europe. If you're too young for them to let you in the army legally, lie and make them take you to fight. If you're a woman, consider pretending to be a man." That was the sort of atmosphere we had.
And no, that doesn't mean I expect you to bow and to scrape, and it doesn't mean that I expect you to treat our losses as though they were as heavy as your own, and it doesn't mean that I can say we are morally pure, and it doesn't mean that we didn't come at the last minute, and it doesn't mean that we were big fat heroes by our very nature. We're a damned country, which means that we don't have any sort of real moral unity. We just have an occasional wind blow through us, which may make us a little bit better or a little bit worse for a while.
But just as I can appreciate and respect the losses, courage, and strength of your people, I do wish you would appreciate and respect ours. Even if our country is not heroic, our people were heroic. Even if we have done terrible things, we have done some good things, too--and to sweep those under the rug because of a few whackjobs over here who are too excited about them is kind of sad.
And from there on, it only got worse. I'll admit I'm ashamed that a dane helped you create that fucking horrible bomb that every state big state is humping or trying to get a hold of to hump today.
Every scientific and mathematical advancement over the years led to that bomb. You can be ashamed for the action of one countryman if you want, but he was just one man. A country is not a single hated representative... it's a collective action of millions of people, each heroic in their own way, each sinful in their own way.
There's no need to be ashamed that one man made one choice you perceive as bad. He just happened to be in a position of power, so you heard about it. We all do things whose effects we can never comprehend every single day, and simply hope that all will be well.
I'm also going to add that Nazi Germany was developing the same bomb. I'm kind of glad that America got it first and the war ended soon enough that Hitler couldn't crap all over everything, even though I'm not necessarily happy that we still have it, or that we used it.
I am a citizen of a country I love, and I am pleased to be American; but on the other hand, I love all countries, and cannot paint any people or any person as uniformly good or bad. So, if you please, you can attack the current administration, or you can attack our policies, or you can attack our past actions with your 20-20 hindsight; but do not impugn a great people for your experiences with a few over-the-top nationalists, or the actions of a few scientists that you disliked, or the fact that some historians are somewhat more patriotic than the ideal.
We did our part.
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