freediver wrote on Apr 26
th, 2014 at 5:49am:
Quote:The reality is Australia at the time existed in a colonised and oppressed world. I fail to see what difference it makes to Australia's economic fortunes if our neighbours were occupied by Japanese instead of by French Dutch and British.
Of course. You cannot tell the difference between the freedom and democracy of the western world with the oppressive dictatorships that Japan and Germany attempted to replace it with. To you it is all just colonialism, economic hegemony and poo jokes.
Germany had plans on colonisation. It was pissed off about losing it's African colonies after WWI and planned to restart that process. If Japan had not directly taken over Australia, there is a good chance Germany would have, eventually.
Quote:The British and American empires were being threatened by emerging powers that were at that point being stifled economically by the economic and military reach of those two empires, and attacked accordingly.
You criticise the US and Britain for 'greedy clonialism', but you you make excuses for Hitler the same way you do for Muhammed.
Quote:Of course the British and Americans defended themselves from these attacks. If you want to spin this as fighting for our freeeeeedums - then thats fine by me.
The fact is, a big chunk of the world has freedom and democracy today because the UK, France and then the US genuinely valued freedom and democracy and defended it from people like the Nazis, and even exported it (yes I concede it was sporadic). Shortly after WWII, the UK voluntarily dissolved the remnants of it's empire. It simply does not make sense that it fought WWII to hold onto that empire. The US gained no empire out of it. The British and American people, and their leaders, and most of their allies had a genuinely different vision for the world to the Nazis and Japanese.
The British and Amerikans had very different visions of the world prior to, and during, WWII. The US wanted to dissolve the British Empire. Why?
Roosevelt didn’t like colonies, sure. But more importantly, the US didn’t like trade blocs. All those Asian and Middle Eastern countries were under the spell of Mother England, and while this happened, the US didn’t get its hands on the spoils, which included resources and markets.
All this changed, of course, after the Amerikan entry into the war. Once in, we became a bi-polar world with the US and Soviet Union. Britain couldn’t possibly hold onto its colonies after WWII, and there was no desire to. In Britain, the sense of self sacrifice and equality the war had mobilized was applied to peacetime. In the colonies, the Japanese resistance became a struggle for independence from Mother - but not Uncle or the Soviets.
The US hegemony after the war was a new form of empire. The Soviet Union was an old form of empire in the mould created by Peter the Great The US led through exports and trade, but most importantly, through its hugely influential network of alliances with its "friends", counterbalanced by its "Cold War" covert action against its enemies. The US did not need to occupy anything. The occupation of Japan and Berlin became a huge burden, and really, why bother?
The US simply installed friendly regimes in secret, trained their armies and armed them well - everyone from Diem in Vietnam to Nasser in Egypt to Suharto in Indonesia to Pinochet, the Contras, and various generals and dictators around the world, all of them completely undemokratic and anti-"Freedom".
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Without a doubt, the US liberated large chunks of the world in WWII. Perhaps equally importantly, it saved many from the Soviet alternative. But when Japanese and German exports started to compete - and then take over US exports in the 1970s, things turned grim. The US got desperate, and its foreign policy direction turned to how it could assert its influence on the world and its resources, particularly oil.
With the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US lost its former "Freedom" credentials. When it subsequently failed in its occupation, the world saw the US for what it now was, a caricature of its former self, the Abu Graib prison pictures the symbol of what the US had become.
The US is nice if you’re doing alright, as we are. But the US is not nice if you’re from Central America, the Middle East, or any of the other places the US has fought or stifled demokracy and "Freedom".
During the Cold War, the US had good reasons for installing corrupt, anti-communist dictators and their torture chambers. But when the wall came down and the US became number one, there was no justification for business as usual.
Clinton found his niche with the global free trade agenda, but the US electorate turned against this - the reason they voted the supposedly isolationist George Bush. After the 2000 tech stock collapse, something had to be done. After the" convenient" sept 11 attacks, the US went global again - this time, in a nakedly exploitative conquest of what just happened to be tthe world’s 2nd biggest source of oil.
A trillion dollars later, the US has lost its shirt, and its reputation. Obama has not restored it. US trade has not redeemed it. The US is in a very weak position today, as shown in Syria, and now the Ukraine. This is good, this is how it should be - if Putin doesn’t prove to be Hitler.
And if China doesn’t turn out to be Tojo.
Forum
Pages: 1
Muslims want to silence and intimidate you (Read 79848 times)
