Originally posted by NUKE
What a joke. I guess to think Germany, Japan and Russia were t puppets of the evil US and that the US caused them to become militaristic and evil......after all, they couldnt help themselves, the poor babies. It's not their fault at all, it's just America's
It's true, everything is America's fault. You take the prize, condrats
You should read a history book once in awhile. The rise of Hitler and World War II was a direct result of how the allies (US, U.K., France) and the League of Nations treated and humiliated the Germans after World War I. While the U.S. can't be the only one blamed, the US shares the blame equally with the U.K. and France.
Our economic policies in the Pacific and out attitudes about the Japanese also led to the eventual conflict with Japan. If we didn't impose an economic embargo on Japan that threatened their very existance, they probably wouldn't have had to resort to such drastic measures. But the U.S. felt threatened by the Japanese navy and the growing influence in the Pacific Japan was enjoying, especially after their victory over the Russian Grand Fleet in the Russo-Sino War of 1905. Again, we can't take sole blame but as with the case with Nazi Germany, we aren't free from guilt.
Our history is rife with such incidents. In the 1930s and later after WW2, if we had supported Ho Chi Minh's attempt at getting Vietnam's independence from France, instead of turning a blind eye and giving Vietnam back to France after the war, there probably wouldn't have been 57,000 dead US soldiers or millions of dead Vietnamese. It was our rejection of Ho Chi Minh that led him to the Communists looking for someone to support his war of independence from their colonialist masters.
A recent example would be Iran in 1979 as the Shah was falling and the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in France. The Ayatollah asked for our support of his revolution and for us to denounce the Shah and not allow him to seek refuge in the US. To show his good faith, the Ayatollah ordered the Iranian students that had captured the U.S. Embassy, to leave the compound and let everyone inside go and not to harm them. The then Sec. of State, rejected the Ayatollah's overtures, which then led to the second incident at the U.S. Embassy that resulted in U.S. hostages being held for 444 days and also made the US a prime target for Islamic militants and zealots for the next 20+ years.
While we might be the greatest country in the world, we are definitely not without fault and sometimes we do act like a bull in a china shop. It does no service to the US or anyone else to ignore the mistakes we have made, that only opens the door for us to repeat them again.
To paraphrase that French guy that said a long time ago, those of us that forget the past condemn us to repeat it in the future.
Ack-Ack