LTS TRN 2 wrote:You're all confused, Van.
I never suggested that we're identical to the Germans or Japanese in features or specific military plans. No, those were specific to those situations.
The SIMILARITIES are what you're having a tough time facing up to.
That's because they're not the least bit similar. We do not engage in total war. We haven't since 1945. If we ever did, there would be no war.
First, we have extended hegemony over the entire Western hemisphere by controlling governments--through coups, assassinations, and massive death-squad campaigns (often funded by U.S. officials secretly selling weapons and drugs).
Yeah, that's tantamount to what the Japanese did in China and Germany did to Poland.
Millions of starved prisoners, millions upon millions of civilians killed, death camps, systematic slaughter, genocide, crematoriums...attacking our peaceful neighbors...
...yep, Nick, spot on comparison you're making here.
Germany didn't seek to attack and raze every nation--you're exaggerating.
Besides neutral Switzerland, which was hardly neutral, they attacked every neighbor they had who didn't kneel in fealty to them.
To the west...France, Belgium, Holland and Denmark. To the east, Poland and the Czechs. Their Austian neighbors were treated as doormats. Italy was invaded. The Baltics and Balkans...pfffft. Even their signatory allies, the Soviets, were brutally attacked.
They attacked everwhere their panzers could reach.
The U.S.? Please. Hitler would've made the whole Western Hemisphere Fortress America, from pole to pole. If Hitler had the ability to annihilate his enemies with the push of a few buttons, there would be no London, Moscow or St. Petersburg. He may have spared London, simply out of his reluctant admiration for the British, but he would've vaporized all of Eastern Europe - or at least those places which didn't cave in to him.
Eventually he would've turned his eye towards America too.
We don't need to attack Canada or Mexico.
Hitler had no need to attack the Low Countries, Poland or France. There was no provocation. He did it because he
could. We have that same ability, only much more so, yet we don't do it.
And believe it or not, we can't attack Iran.
The fuck we can't. We choose not to, but if we were of a mind to we could destroy their entire country without the loss of a single American soldier. Even without using nukes we could topple their regime by the All Star break. Iran would be helpless to defend themselves against total war committed against them by the U.S.
No nation has ever had to deal with the modern U.S. military committing to total war.
We're not the Germans. We can barely sustain a bungled invasion of Afghanistan--and they don't even have an army!
We're doing whatever we want in Afghanistan. The problem is that we've had muddled plans, and we've tried to be delicate about it. If we decided to conquer Afghanistan in total, including the border region with Pakistan, we'd have it done within a month. That's simply not our goal. We're trying to excise a scurrying enemy while disturbing the locals as little as possible.
I'd hope you're at least bright enough to understand what you're seeing there. There's what
is happening, then there's what
would be happening if we were to approach any of these little conflicts the way Hitler would've approached them.
As always, your comparisons are childish handwringing with no basis in reality.
Further, we have gone far beyond the Nazis and Japanese in that we've initiated the "neo-liberal" economic agenda upon the poorer nations of the world, effectively strapping them in perpetual debt--and gaining outright control of their resources.
Lunacy. Hitler gained outright resources of the nations he conquered. He plain took the Romanian oil fields. He didn't compensate anybody for anything. He didn't conduct business, he simply stole. We do nothing of the sort. We could easily
take all the oil in the Middle East, at gunpoint. The Chinese and Russians would be the only countries that could even say boo. We could take every drop of Mexican and Venezuelan oil, and there would be nothing anyone could do about it.
If Bush or Obama were Hitler, this would all be moot.
Moreover, what are you pretending to ignore about Vietnam, for starters?
What's there to ignore? Our measured efforts there bear no resemblance to anything perpetrated by the Germans in any of the countries they attacked.
That a ten-year war against a distant nation who never attacked anyone was somehow less aggressive--or less illegal than Germany invading France? How about the utterly illegal (even within the flimsy--totally fake--construct of the Tonkin Bay rationale) attack of Cambodia--which led directly to the rise of the Khmer Rouge?
What about them? Do you think Hitler's troops would've bothered trying to differentiate between the locals and Charlie? Do you think the Japanese Imperial Army would've given a fuck about civilians being used as human shields?
To the contrary, they would've engaged in systematic rape, bespoiling the local populace with Japanese offspring; that is, assuming they didn't already kill them.
The fact is, America murdered well over a million Vietnamese, and around 300,000 Cambodians. Almost all civilians, just "collateral damage"--like the good folks in Afghanistan, etc.
The fact is, Hitler would've done a thousand times worse, in a much more brutal manner.
As for the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, what part of this are you suggesting is "treading lightly"?
The part where we're engaging in 'polite war.' We're trying to avoid killing civilians. We're trying to surgically remove the bad elements while appeasing the 'friendly' elements.
What we're
not doing is treating Baghdad, Kabul, Kandahar and Peshawar the way we treated Dresden....much less Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Tikrit was not deloused the way Iwo was, where we went in and literally killed nearly every single person who wasn't wearing our colors.
We could, but we don't.
Of course the damage we've we done to Iraq is very similar to the razing of Warsaw. The complete destruction of Fallujah is similarly identical.
Of course you're a fucking moron. There is nothing going on in Iraq that even approaches the comprehensive, systematic evil of what went on in Poland, and all across Europe.
What part of this aren't you getting?
The part where you begin to apply even a smidgen of common sense and/or a nod to reality.
Remember also that the Germans worked very hard to hide their crimes and to rationalize them to the folks back home. Just like us, Van, just like us.
Right, Nick. When all is said and done, we'll be watching PBS documentaries about six million Shiites we starved and roasted in ovens, after performing torturous experiments on them in the name of science. U.S. soliders have been engaging in widespread rape, torture, beheadings of civilians and all other manner of barbarism; yet, somehow, in the age of instant media access and the internet, we've been doing all those things and somehow getting away with them....because we're
just that evil.
You're fucking insane.
The point is not whether we resemble Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in our philosophy or grand plans.
Or in any other conceivable way, yet you keep making that point.
Rather, the point is that we are now the only marauding super power marching into foreign lands on bullshit premises and dropping thousands of tons of bombs all on them. There is no disputing it, it's a plain fact. All you've got is some weasally quibbling on..style?
Scale, practice and intent, not style.
