Gavin McInnis on Baby Boomers

[Eric the Green]

(09-07-2016, 12:09 AM)Galen Wrote:

(09-06-2016, 03:42 PM)Odin Wrote:

(09-06-2016, 03:38 AM)Galen Wrote: FDR was the idiot that got the US into that war.  The oil and scrap metal embargo virtually guaranteed that Japan would go to war with the US.  It is also clear FDR knew the Pearl Harbor attack was coming.  In that respect the Missionary Generation generation isn't much different, as long as they get what they want they really don't care about the body count, as long its not them.  Ironically, it was the Lost that were the backbone of the anti-war protests in the time just before the Second World War.

It seems ironic that the generation that produced Patton would be less inclined to get GIs killed.

Fascism was a global threat that needed to be destroyed, FDR had far more foresight than the naive Isolationist idiots you are putting up on a pedestal.

Communism wasn't?  If Adolph had not attacked the Soviet Union the then the odds were pretty good that Stalin would have attacked Germany with pretty much the same outcome.  It was Operation Barbarossa that ended up breaking Nazi Germany so the outcome would have pretty much been the same. The Japanese were too obsessed with China to be a problem for the US and in fact wouldn't have bothered to attack if not for the embargo.

The somewhat larger Soviet Empire would have eventually collapsed for the same reason that it did in the nineties.  It might have taken a bit longer but as I have pointed out before central planning is about the most certain way to kill an economy.  In this respect Nazi Germany really wasn't all that different than the Soviet Union.

I will also note that Germany had no plans to attack the US until after the Pearl Harbor attack and the US Declaration of War on Japan.

I regard the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to be about the same level evil and would have preferred to let them destroy each other.  With a bit of luck the Soviet Union would have been in even worse shape afterwords and the nasty Cold War could have been avoided which might have prevented the creation of the military-industrial complex and police state we now have.

It makes some sense, what you say Galen. The embargo probably caused the Japanese to attack the USA, and then when we declared war on Japan, Hitler declared war on the USA, which caused the USA to declare war on Germany. Perhaps Germany and Russia could have been allowed to destroy each other.

The only wrinkle in that theory, is the idea that we could just allow fascism and communism to grow in the world. I'm not sure anyone could have foreseen the possibility that Hitler and Stalin would have destroyed each other. Stalin was not going to attack Hitler's Germany. He really thought that he had made a better deal with Hitler than he got from the Allies, and he gladly took his share of the spoils. I don't know of any evidence that Stalin was planning to conquer Germany. His program was socialism in one country, and that the movement (not a nation) was going to take over the world, because workers of the world would unite!

On the other hand, Hitler had already written in his book that he intended to conquer the Soviet Union. It was his primary target all along. He was not only anti-communist, seeing it as Jewish plot, but he wanted the land and resources that European Russia offered. There's little doubt also that had Britain and the USA not helped Stalin's Soviet Union survive, that Hitler would have taken over all of European Russia and confined the Soviets to the backwaters of Siberia.

There's no doubt also that Hitler would have conquered Britain had not the USA supplied Britain with ships and weapons through lend-lease and further aid programs. There's no doubt also that Hitler said that he "hated Rossevelt" and the aid he was giving to Britain, was trying to sink US ships, and that's why he declared war after the USA declared war on Hitler's ally Japan.

And Japan's ruthless expansionism in Asia could perhaps have been allowed, but then the Japanese fascist Empire would have been too strong to ever take down, and the death and destruction Japan imposed on China and other peoples would have continued unabated. So an isolationist approach says that what was going on in Asia and Europe was none of our business. But in the long run it is unlikely that most of the developed world under the thumb of fascists would have been in our interests. Our economy would have fallen flat without trade with growing democracies, as opposed to our enemies, and there's little doubt that these empires would have attacked the USA eventually anyway, and would have prevailed--sending us back to the darkest bronze age; the kind of world that Cynic Hero wants, even if not dominated by us. So, although your isolationist, pacifist program has some arguments in favor of it, in the long run is it questionable.