• TylerDurdenJunior@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    33
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    The argument for dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians I hear the most, is that it would have caused more casualties to continue the war.

    Now transfer that logic to the US

  • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    30
    ·
    1 year ago

    “Of course America was bad back then but we need to support America against Russia now because imperialism is when a country does stuff!”

      • jabrd [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        There’s nothing to indicate that the empire will not just continue on in another form following the collapse of its american iteration

        • JuneFall [none/use name]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          There’s nothing to indicate that the empire will not just continue on in another form following the collapse of its american iteration

          I am not so convinced of that. Will there be imperial actions and thus imperial cores?

          Very likely. However the hegemony that the USA could project onto the globe after WWII is a singular event for the US. The situation is very different now and while I do think that the climate catastrophe can change quite a few things the power ratio between the imperial core and the rest of the world will not be as such.

          The blocks that are relevant in economic power after the USA’s decline are the EU, Nigeria, India/Pakistan, China, maybe some South American coalition. Of those no one is uncontested in its economic resource extraction outside its borders.

          There might be a future government which changes how China operates and turns imperialist as the USA was (currently that looks unlikely), but even then it has a few more hurdles on one hand and then there is the competition in the multi polar world that restricts projecting power, too.

          Maybe I am more of a bloomer, but think contradictions do enough to fundamentally reduce the strength of empires in the next 50 years.

  • mar_k [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    1 year ago

    To a lot of Americans, the life of a single American is more important than the lives of thousands of non-westerners. The harsh reality is this goes beyond our government, a lot of everyday Americans are conditioned to see Middle Easterners as barely human.

    I mean, most Americans will tell you the War on Terror was bad, but they’ll usually just say it was “unnecessary” “because it cost U.S. troops.” Then they’ll go “9/11 never forget!” for decades to come over 3,000 dead Americans.

  • JuneFall [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    I read that the clique around Bush did aim to “pay back” stuff a thousand times, seems that they more or less managed to do that, even though the pay back was genocide against innocent people, which the USA has a tradition that reaches further back then the Vietnam War.