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Britan would not have been able to stand without us. Germany would have occupied it.
I have a friend who came here from England. He and his wife have a little boy who is a few months old. His family is Jewish as is he. If we had not fought Germany neither his child, nor him, nor his family would exist.
You left out one other difference - Europe would have been without Jews, Gypsies, Blacks, Slavs - or anyone else who didn't fit the NAZI ideal of the "perfect race". They would all be DEAD.
Of course maybe YOU'D like that way.
Hmmmmmmm
There was a BIG difference between the Allied side & the Axis side in WWII.
WWII & it's aftermath (where we REBUILT our former foes rather than simply EXPLOITING them) was America's finest moment. We've certainly done our share of things to be ashamed of - but WWII wasn't one of them. In this one case at least, we "fought the good fight" and we won - and the world is a far better place because of it.
Ken
Alright, first off, the black comment is just silly as there were vitually zero blacks in Europe at the time and those who were lived in the heart of Nazi Germany less disturbed than they were in the United States. Jesse Owens even gave a famous speech/comment about this.
Second, so those groups what have been targeted by the German government. What is your point? Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Mongolians, Koreans, Tatars, and many more were deported to Siberia to starve or freeze, be worked to death in gulags, or outright murdered by the NKVD under Stalin's government; a government which killed tens of millions more than were killed throughout Germany's entire military campaign.
World War II was a sequel to World War I, except this time, the imperialism of every nation involved was veiled under ideology. The United States had no moral superiority. Claiming that after the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is laughable.
Britan would not have been able to stand without us. Germany would have occupied it.
Relevance to the U.S.?
Quote:
I have a friend who came here from England. He and his wife have a little boy who is a few months old. His family is Jewish as is he. If we had not fought Germany neither his child, nor him, nor his family would exist.
I call that a difference.
Nonsense. How many people would be alive if the Cold War hadn't occured between the U.S. and the Soviets? How many people wouldn't have been murdered by Communists in Europe? One person, just because you know him/her, is not relevant to the equation.
There was no other compelling reason to go to war with Germany. Europe has nothing that America "needs"
if the us had'nt entered WWii,the nazis would have won and ruled all of europe even today.europe has everything we need when it comes to keeping an eye on russia,and missles aimed at russia too!
Nonsense. How many people would be alive if the Cold War hadn't occured between the U.S. and the Soviets? How many people wouldn't have been murdered by Communists in Europe? One person, just because you know him/her, is not relevant to the equation.
Cultural ties, economic ties, many things make it relevant. You think if the Germans had taken Britan that we would have be able to carry on as we always had with NO hope of a free Eruope and no access to resourses in other places they controlled?
And the life or existance of ONE person is important. It makes those numbers into real people. You can't look at history without realizing it is the history of individuals and how their lives were altered by events.
So the fact that my friend and his son and probably his parents existed at all matter. Because somewhere in the sceme of things something they did made a difference.
There is a potential alternate history which could easily have happened and certainly would have changed everything. Churchill was walking through an alley to his car one dark night during the time he was out of power. It was misty and rainy and dark and a cabbie missed hitting and killing him by a tiny bit. What if there had been no Churchill? That the cabbie hadn't had anything to distract him, that moment, that he's hadn't been preoccupied by something and noticed the dark shadow, made every difference. Who can say that ONE person's actions do not matter or are not relevant in some small way unless we see the full split of how time flows and divides as events funnel it one direction or another.
As to the cold war, if Hitler had taken all of Europe and Russia, he would have eliminated the slavs, the jews who had escaped into turkey, and so many others just to make "livingspace" for Germany. And all because of who or what they were born. Yes, the Soviets were criminals but you think it would have been any lesser if Hitler had been able to carry out his full and complete plans?
if the us had'nt entered WWii,the nazis would have won and ruled all of europe even today.europe has everything we need when it comes to keeping an eye on russia,and missles aimed at russia too!
Europe isn't our problem. We're on another continent entirely.
So the Romans were evil. So the British are evil. So the United States is evil. So almost every nation on Earth is evil. If every nation has done these things, why apply a self-righteous moral label to it and pretend the Allies had moral superiority when they were killing innocents on purpose and en masse in Dresden, in Hamburg, in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki, in Monte Cassino, and all over the globe?
There was a fundamental difference between the bombing campaign carried out by the Allied Powers during World War and German acts of barbarity such as the Holocaust. That difference is that intent of the Allies was not to murder people by the tens of thousands or exterminate entire races. The intent of the bombing campaign was to destroy the capacity of the Germans and the Japanese to wage war and to agree to an unconditional surrender with the Allied Powers.
Today, we have bombs and missiles which are extraordinarily accurate. At the time of World War II, the only way to guarantee destruction of a certain factory or industrial area was saturation bombing of a large area. Civilian casualties were inevitable collateral damage resulting of this type of action.
The key difference between what the Allies did and what the Axis powers did was that we would have stopped all bombing and stopped all killing had our enemy capitulated and that is, of course, what we ultimately did. On the other hand, the Axis Powers would have kept going until the last Jew, the last Gypsy, and probably the last Chinese had been exterminated.
Not only did we save millions from potential extermination, not only did we restore freedom to hundreds of millions of folks enslaved, but when the war was over we helped to rebuild both friend AND foe - an event nearly unprecedented in all of world history.
When you're trying to justify your position, overstating it erodes your credibility.
By the time we could stop Hitler, he had pretty well exterminated everyone that he planned to, so there weren't many left to save.
Slavery is a very different phenomenon than what Hitler did, there were no "folks enslaved", nor at risk thereof, and certainly not hundreds of millions.
When the war was over, we created a new enemy just as reprehensible as Hitler, by having allied ourselves with the USSR. Those whom we saved from Hitler, we simply turned over to Stalin, and while you can quibble over who was worse, we certainly did not help to "rebuild" the eastern bloc.
Arguably, had we just stood by and let Hitler run his course, his empire would likely have dissolved by attrition (as Stalin's did) in the hands of his corrupt and incompetent successors, and the world would be little different today than it is.
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