So how are you an anarchist libertarian?
Wrong. Allied bombing of cities in Germany and Japan killed 600.000 — 900.000 people. Far short of 70% of 50 million.
Ridicilous. One third of Europe was delivered to Stalin by the Red Army. Or was it conferences with Roosevelt and Churchill that drove the Germans out?
Actually Road to Russia is a crock of shit. Denson also misrepresents it. The book in fact contrasts Roosevelt to Churchill. Far from claiming Churchill deliberately enhanced communism, George N. Crocker buys into the story from Churchill’s less than truthful memoirs written during the Cold War to conclude that unlike Roosevelt, Churchill kept a healthy distance from Stalin throughout.
No, “Soviet Russia” did not “threaten America and the world for the next 45 years”. The Soviet Union pursued a far more conservative foreign policy than the US did and was considerably less belligerent. If anyone was threatening the globe it was the US which was the main culprit in starting the Cold War.
More cold warrior nonsense. China was not a threat.
The Soviet Union pursued a far more conservative foreign policy than the US did and was considerably less belligerent.
Read The Chief Culprit: Stalin was going to go on the offensive in WWII 2 weeks later had Hitler not attacked him.
The general outline:
Germany and Russia had a NAP (non-aggression pact, not non-aggression principle 
)
However, we all know Hitler intended to break it.
We also all know that somehow the Soviets were “terribly unprepared” and were destroyed in the first scenes of the new front.
Why, we must ask ourselves.
Suvorov analyzes the facts and shows that the reason that the Soviets got wiped was that all their army on the front line was… an attack formation. Which is extremely bad for defense. Stalin would have broken the pact 2 weeks later had he not gotten attacked. Suvorov is a defected Soviet military spy, btw.
Even if you disagree with the idea (as you will initially, I am sure), do read the book, as it offers amazing insight into the technological prowess of the Soviet Union.
Damn right I will. After picking up David Glantz, Roger Reese and Geoffrey Megargee I am going to devolve into devoting time to Vladimir Rezun. Don’t make me laugh.
So China was a threat because the US helped the Chinese against Communism?
Have you actually read Rezun’s book? I suggest you read it. If the main thesis doesn’t convince you, it still provides insight into the Soviet development at the time. And a very interesting bit on the Winter War.
So China was a threat because the US helped the Chinese against Communism?
China was a threat because the communists were winning. That is why the US gave aid to the Chinese Nationalists.
How was Communist China a threat to the United States?
I see Rezunists are as tiresome as Truthers. Stop making suggestions to me, I already told you I’m not wasting time on crap.
Why did the US help fight against the Communists, then?
Communists sought world revolution. This obviously unsettled the American middle class, which is essentially the bourgeoisie
You are bringing forth a circular argument. US fought against them, therefore that proves they were a threat.
Really, because the US never fought anyone who wasn’t a threat to it?
I’m saying we don’t have the info the leaders of the past did.
Of course, they very well might have had other purposes in mind. Do you suggest trade? Or just ego?
How am I not?
The part where you collectivize people to the extent you greet an outcome that means tens of millions of deaths. Obviously the best possible outcome would have been that which preserved the greatest number of people. Eg, the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union never even breaking out.
Oh I see. I agree with you. The McKibben quote is in the context of “If you are going to intervene in interstate affairs…” In other words, the war wasn’t prevented and is now progressing. As a libertarian, I wouldn’t want Washington to get involved. As a hypothetical utilitarian, I wonder if supporting the loser at any given moment might have created the fewest deaths. Both sides will realize exactly what you did, that if they continue the war with the mighty industrial US backing up whoever is losing at any moment, it will drag the war on forever and mean the death of tens of millions. Hence they will realize the futility of such a pyrric victory and agree to a peace settlement. Has any country ever supported the loser in such a manner?
I thought I made it clear in my bump that I have the same question, and that verified post is not anywhere sufficient in my opinion. Personally I don’t really give a shit if the OP felt he received his answer. I don’t see what relevance that has to my request.
Sure. They say “Hitler would have continued to build an army and bring more death and destruction to the world, and at some point pose a serious threat to the United States.” I thought that was pretty much commonly understood. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who wasn’t at least aware of the “common wisdom” on any subject. Especially not something as well-known as The War.
It is not relevant to your request. It is relevant to your comment how it never ceases to amaze you how filled a thread can get without anyone ever addressing the question at hand.
The OP titled his topic ‘Why didn’t the US need to get involved in WWII?’, but the opening post was longer than just the title. More than wanting to know the answer to the topic title he wanted to be clued in into the WWII revisionist arguments and have a spring board to learn more.
I wanted to be certain lest I answer something else that really isn’t on your mind. It is a good thing I did, I thought you were going to give some humanitarian interventionist argument about saving the Jews
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How was Hitler going to do anything like that when Germany was going to lose the war against the Soviet Union whether the US fought the Germans or not?
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How is this an argument in favour of any intervention post-1945? Has there been a dictator who launched a comparable attempt at conquest? So, if Saddam grabbed Khuzestan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia he would now be able to swim the Atlantic and hit Savannah beach? The scales are nowhere comparable.
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Hitler didn’t care about the US. The Nazis cared about expansion into Eastern Europe only. A nice warnning for the future from the era could draw from the failure of Czechoslovakia, Poland and the USSR to overcome mutual suspicions and antagonisms so as to present a unified block against Germany and detter an attack against them all. But of what concern were Nazi fantasies about Germanization of Eastern Europe to the US I fail to see. If anything being engaged in a project as megalomanical and uneconomical as remaking the demographics of half a continent would virtually ensure the Reich would be busy ruining itself an not be a threat.
Well, there’s that too…
(a) How do you know that?
(b) even if that were true, we’re just supposed to hope some other country jumps into war and defeats the dictator?
(c) What about those Jews? Is there no moral obligation to try and defend them against an aggressor?
What does this have to do with getting involved in WWII?
And you know this because…you were him?
How far do you apply this? If you saw a man beating a child to a pulp, you would do nothing?, as it “doesn’t concern you?”
Nazi ideology (as stated in Mein Kampf, by Nazi leaders, by Nazi documents and by their actual historical demands and actions) involves the removal and elimination of significant parts of the population of Eastern Europe and European Russia to create a Lebensraum (living space) for the Aryan master race. It states nothing regarding the Americas (US of or otherwise), other than a few strange comments from Heinrich Himmler regarding the Aryan heritage of the Sioux. It doesn’t state anything about anything other than Eastern Europe and European Russia. Furthermore, the US holds significant responsibility for creating the conditions that led to Hitler via it’s intervention in the First World War.
The “humanitarian” argument holds no water. Taken to it’s logical conclusion, would you advocate that the present day US invade Zimbabwe, Cuba, North Korea, Myanmar, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Bolivia and Uganda (to say nothing of the human rights violations committed by Canada and the EU, vis a vis Block’s analogy of France invading New York City to eliminate that polity’s rent control legislation), in spite of the colossal bloodshed and cost to both countries that would cause? The “beaten child” analogy is fallacious, as it conflates an individual person with an entire country, the exact same nonsense social democrats engage in when they pull out the “we are all part of society” bovine excrement. Assuming you believe Guantuanamo Bay to be a US human rights violation, does Britain have the right to invade the US to stop that? What boundaries are there in this logic to prevent it justifying such belligerence?
If the army weren’t collecting compulsory taxes for a collective deed, it would be alright under AnCap. And an army’s invasion of one of those countries seems to be entirely possible under AnCap (the army likely is controlled by a head, which acts as a court which declares there have been human rights violations).
Because by the time the US opened the Second Front and became a major factor in WWII in Europe German defeat was no longer in question.
When talking about an expansionist power that has no designs on your territory absolutely.
No, there are no positive obligations.
It has to do with your comment that you are interested in this because Hitler is always on the tip of everyone’s tongue when they are arguing for interventionist foreign policy. I take it to mean we are not talking about US participation in WWII in a vacuume, but more widely the usefulness of Hitler analogies for interventions post 1945.
I’ll say that the burden of proof where it comes to Hitler’s interest in the US is on you. I don’t know of any evidence of Nazi interest in the US. On the other hand there is plenty on their obsession with Eastern Europe. When you see what their internal debates centered on and which parts of the Nazi empire they kept a minimal presence and maintained an indirect rule, and where they were very hands on and were carrying out massive programmes of social engineering it becomes pretty obvious where their interests lay.
Well first of all it would be good if we recognize this argument represents a widening of the argument presented initially. Initial argument was concerned with threat to the United States only and nothing more.
Secondly, how exactly would we square an American bleeding heart for Eastern Europeans under German rule with the enemy status of the Communist USSR, Czechoslovakia and Poland after the war? How would something like this be sincere when we know that a few short years after the war United States was allied with these same Germans against Eastern Europeans and kept atomic weapons in a state of readiness to drop them on Eastern European targets?
I would say there was a strong negative, albeit indirect, impact of American participation in WWII for Eastern Europeans. Yes, by contributing to the defeat of Nazi Germany its defeat came sooner and at a lesser cost to the Soviets, the Poles etc than would have otherwise been the case. However WWII also transformed the US into a global empire that went on to needlessly confront the Eastern Bloc. A confrontation that could have resulted in annihilation beyond even what the Nazis fantasized about. Helping to remove one threat only to set up your own doesn’t sound hugely beneficial.
Didn’t property interests legitimize American intervention (disregarding the NAP violations of a compulsory army + tax system of the US)?