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Why do people think that the US won WW2 in Europe?

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Re: Why do people think that the US won WW2 in Europe?

#91

Post by dragonwriter »

vmception wrote: post #75
dragonwriter wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in the US don't even say that While they talk about it less now because they’ve got other more current foreign issues for both military chest-thumping and blaming liberals, conservatives used to (at least, IME between about the mid-80s and about 9/11) incessantly talk about the US having won Vietnam “militarily” before political betrayal by the “liberals”. Not endorsing any part of this view, but I certainly…

Interesting! Thats a view I have not been exposed to! Just seems that the whole Vietnam having only a communist party with state capital system would make it obvious that we lost. But maybe people dont even know why we were there…

> Just seems that the whole Vietnam having only a communist party with state capital system would make it obvious that we lost.

The alternative explanation is that we won the war, but then handed over South Vietnam anyway.

(“We won the war against the VC, but the cost of doing so and the subsequent full-scale NVA invasion led to a determination to not even try to fight the follow-on war with the NVA” is a somewhat more defensible narrative with a broadly similar shape, so there’s arguably something vaguely resembling a point underneath the nationalistic chest-thumping, though artificially dividing the war that way is still a distortion, IMO.)

Re: Why do people think that the US won WW2 in Europe?

#92

Post by Isinlor »

twelve40 wrote: post #86
Isinlor wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exact story of my grandmother and her sister when Soviets were going trough my home city in northern Poland. They were not as afraid of Germans as they were of Soviets. Soviets were animals raping, stealing and beating everything they encountered.

The Germans killed 5,000,000 people in Poland, but you are saying now the people at the time were not as afraid of them as the Soviets. Makes sense.

I'm not telling you about some people, but about very specific person with specific experiences - my grandmother. The war period did not look the same to everyone.

And yes, I'm telling you that my grandmother herself has better memories of Germans than Red Army soldiers. She was a nice blond girl who knew a bit of German and that was according to her helping her a lot with Germans. But she had to hide from front line Red Army soldiers because everyone knew that they were mass raping women.

The worst direct story about about Germans in my family is that one of my great grandfathers was forced as a recruit into Wehrmacht. Germans threatened to kill the whole family if we would not agree. He probably died somewhere on front lines, but nobody knows what exactly happened to him.

Re: Why do people think that the US won WW2 in Europe?

#94

Post by the_only_law »

vmception wrote: post #13
marcodiego wrote: post #12

In Brazil, a country heavily influenced by US culture, people will carefully explain you how the US won the Vietnam war.

People in the US don't even say that..... thats the primary one considered a loss.

I’ve heard it from a number of people. Normally phrased in “we didn’t lose, we just quit” sort of way.

Re: Why do people think that the US won WW2 in Europe?

#95

Post by phoobahr »

Normille wrote: post #71
schrijver wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US cultural hegemony is real Looking back at my childhood growing up in a small NATO country (The Netherlands), it really strikes me. I found a box of my childhood drawings at my parents place. I’d drawn soldiers and fighter jets etcetera and they mostly had US flags. Some kind of militaristic nationalism is common in many places I guess but apparently I had grown up emotionally attached to the US military. > T…

> The US cultural hegemony is real... > I’d drawn soldiers and fighter jets etcetera and they mostly had US flags... I think this is the cleverest and most insidious thing the US has managed to do. For some reason, in spite of their appalling record: only nation to use atomic weapons on civilians, practiced apartheid for decades, has been continually at war with 'someeone' since the end of WWII, brutal prison system,…

The US is a super power built on stolen land with stolen labour and stolen IP that really "came into it's own" on a tide of stolen valour post WWII.

Re: Why do people think that the US won WW2 in Europe?

#96

Post by rsj_hn »

twelve40 wrote: post #86
Isinlor wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exact story of my grandmother and her sister when Soviets were going trough my home city in northern Poland. They were not as afraid of Germans as they were of Soviets. Soviets were animals raping, stealing and beating everything they encountered.

The Germans killed 5,000,000 people in Poland, but you are saying now the people at the time were not as afraid of them as the Soviets. Makes sense.

This is a bit of a facile analysis. The germans killed out of a desire to kill -- e.g. to exterminate undesireable elements, primarily jews, gypsies, gays, jehovah's witnesses, and mentally ill, plus of course political resisters.

The Russians killed in order to terrorize the domestic populations. They terrorized everyone.

When you see public displays like the husband of a farm impaled on his front porch and all the women raped and murdered inside, that is a very public act of terrorism meant to frighten the general population and let them know that their lives had zero value to the new occupying forces. When you see that happen in every single village, in every neighborhood, it spreads terror across the entire nation. It was not violence focused at undesirable groups, it was violence focused at anyone, arbitrarily, and very publicly. E.g. 20% of Hungary's female population was raped, and many were murdered afterwards. That touches basically everyone in society, to let them know that no one is safe, and that anyone can be gotten at any time and for arbitrary reasons, and if you had 5 women in your extended family, odds are the Russians raped one of them. That is something that terrorizes the entire nation. Things like the repeated public gangrape of nuns in Poland, a very catholic country, that terrorizes a large proportion of the population, as does the execution of random ordinary villagers in gruesome spectacles.

Is it so surprising that a policy of terrorism succeeds in terrorizing the population? Do you really think it's just about numbers?

Re: Why do people think that the US won WW2 in Europe?

#97

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

BuckRogers wrote: post #88
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you were Russian you would know that it was the Soviets that defeated the Nazis and won the war. And if you were Polish you would know that the Soviets were bad for invading originally, and the English were also pretty bad through their initial inactivity. In fact if you look at the death toll by nation, one could argue that the UK barely went to war at all. The UK lost what, 400,000 people? Compared with Pola…

And they'd all be wrong. The Allies won the war. None of them did it on their own. Nor could they had they tried. The UK was going to fall. The USSR was going to fall. It took all of us to destroy the Axis.

My point is that every country teaches their own narrative to its youth, and of course it’s always only the parts of history that don’t make them look bad. English kids aren’t taught that the UK did nothing when Westerplatte was under siege. Swedish kids aren’t taught that Sweden profited and aided the Nazis by selling them natural resources. Australian kids aren’t taught much about WWII relative to Europeans as far as I can gather, as the curriculum centres around the ANZACs and Gallipoli.

I think people having pride (or indeed shame) in their own nation — whichever nation that may be — for historic military engagements is misplaced, and is really an example of exceptionalism. It’s not a small thing either; I think this sentiment significantly aided Vote Leave’s Brexit campaign. As another commenter pointed out — British people know that we won “two world wars and one World Cup”.

Re: Why do people think that the US won WW2 in Europe?

#99

Post by bryanrasmussen »

mcphage wrote: post #87
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, this makes me think hmm, I know all the answers to those questions, but I've never been asked in one of those surveys of people walking on the street when living in the U.S - but if I had been.... would I have been put on this funny TV segment?

> but if I had been.... would I have been put on this funny TV segment? Well, if you wanted to be—and plenty of people do—then there’s an easy way. All you have to do is give a really bad answer to an easy question.

Yeah, I think that "what's the religion of Israel" - "Islamic" is indistinguishable from entry level trolling, and maybe given the short pause before saying it this guy was thinking "how do I get on the news but in a defensible way I can tell my friends yeah I was trolling bro" or maybe he's really stupid.

But as a stupidity test there must be some false positives in there - so the rule is, in funny TV segments never ascribe to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by maliciousness.

on edit: of course maliciousness used for wordplay purposes, but maybe should be replaced with mischievousness which nowadays is interpreted as meaning less than malicious.

Re: Why do people think that the US won WW2 in Europe?

#100

Post by bingbong70 »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #97
BuckRogers wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they'd all be wrong. The Allies won the war. None of them did it on their own. Nor could they had they tried. The UK was going to fall. The USSR was going to fall. It took all of us to destroy the Axis.

My point is that every country teaches their own narrative to its youth, and of course it’s always only the parts of history that don’t make them look bad. English kids aren’t taught that the UK did nothing when Westerplatte was under siege. Swedish kids aren’t taught that Sweden profited and aided the Nazis by selling them natural resources. Australian kids aren’t taught much about WWII relative to Europeans as far…

...and American kids aren't taught that the US was selling oil and equipment to the Japanese so they could attack China...the cabinet cutting off these supplies while the US President was away at a secret meeting with Churchill in Alaska triggered the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Both Churchill and Roosevelt had planned to continue supplying Japan so they could destroy China, the supplies were cutoff without their knowledge.

Once promised US oil was cutoff and the secret treaty signed in 1905 by Teddy and Japan was reneged on, the Japanese needed to invade the rest of Asia (starting with Indonesia) to keep their war machine fueled, bombing Pearl Harbor ensured they could do this with less US resistance in the Pacific.

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