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Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about not furthering the goals of our military.

After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist, if soldiers like my grandfather hadn't stepped up to Hitler and Stalin and Mao and say "No, you're wrong, and we're willing to use violence to protect our way of life". Just my 2c but I definitely respect the ultimate sacrifice that my grandparents generation gave to create this quite nifty Liberty bubble that these few generations get to play in.

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They didn't step up to Stalin and Mao. Hitler was because of alliance with Britain and the Japanese attack, not because of how awful the Nazis regime was. The US for the most part didn't want to get dragged back into another European conflict. Hitler was bad, yes. But what happened in Germany was rooted in the outcome of WW1, which was rooted in all the alliances and what not proceeding it, which was rooting in yet prior conflicts. A lot of which had to do with the colonial powers fighting over how to divide up the world, or because of religious differences.

A pacifist might say Hitler, Stalin and Mao are just symptoms of the deeper problem, which is the willingness of human beings to engage in violent conflicts just because somebody tells them to.

It's amazing the degree to which people are ignorant of what you've said here and imagine the US was motivated by ideology.

The US was motivated by ideology.

Why was the US an ally of GB/France/etc and not Germany/Italy? Contrary to your belief, greed can be ideological -- striving for global free trade is an example of this.

Then why wasn't the US in the war from the beginning? Did it take 2 years to discover that Hitler was bad?

It took 2 years for a country that values personal freedoms and international free trade/security to decide that the Axis powers winning the war would be bad for both.

Also, the US formally joined the war in 1941, but were providing material support to the Allies and otherwise prepping before then.

The US was always on the allied side, through funding and supplies. The whole reason the Lusitania was sunk was because the US was sending arms to support the Allied war effort, even if it wasn't officially declared. Even if it wasn't until Pearl Harbor that the US joined the war officially, there is little doubt what side Roosevelt and much of the American people wanted to win.

> The US was always on the allied side, through funding and supplies.

Businesses in the US were serving both sides of the conflict.

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

Holy cow do I feel bad for the people that grow up with education system of your country. Look up Lend Lease.

Lend-lease was enacted March 11, 1941. IBM was cataloguing religious and other minorities for the Nazis in the 30s. [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust#cite_ref...

...the Lusitania was two decades before Hitler even came to power.

You're right. I messed up WWI vs WWII for a second there. The rest of the comment stands though that the US provides major aid to the Allied powers.

The US in the early 20th century had a very strong non-interventionist policy, at least vis-a-vis Europe (Latin America was a different story). The general standpoint was "we don't want to get involved with whatever mess is going on in Europe." Note that this strain was so strong that one Congresswoman actually refused to vote for war even after Pearl Harbor.

However, by 1940, it was very clear that the US was going to get dragged in anyways, and it would serve the US interests first to start preparing for war before it starts (note that the draft was instituted over a year before Pearl Harbor). Moreover, the US was neutral only in name: various acts passed more or less saying that the US would give aid to anybody so long as they were British or French. (Originally, it was cash-and-carry, but when Britain exhausted its cash reserves, it became Lend-Lease instead).

A correction to your otherwise correct comment: Lend-Lease was extended to the Soviets as well (and perhaps equally if not much larger than to the Franco-British military).

Lend-lease was the last of the neutrality gimmicks, and was the first one that really applied to the Soviets--mere weeks before the US entered the war proper and lend-lease became the vehicle for general military and logistical aid to all Allies.

No one knew about the death camps until basically the end of the European stage of WWII.

> No one

The intelligence services knew. The general public didn't.

Germany declared war on the US, not the other way around.

I didn't say the US did?

Well you asked why wasn't the US allied to Germany in the war. Asking that makes it sound like you weren't aware that Germany declared war on the US, because that's a pretty obvious reason for the US not to be allied to Germany.

The US was allied with the "Allies" before the US become formally involved in the war. They were already providing material aid to Britain/France before Pearl Harbor / war declared by Germany. I'm definitely not the one who is "unaware" of the key details in this discussion.

The US provided support to the side they ideologically agreed with -- it wasn't just a case of "Germany randomly declares war on the US".

The US also provided support (lend-lease) to the USSR.

> The US was motivated by ideology.

Well, certainly, the Roosevelt Administration was, but they were (prior to Pearl Harbor) also forced to maintain an outward pretense of neutrality while backing the Allies, because a large part of the rest of the US was also motivated by ideology...to either be sympathetic to the Axis Powers (one large, well-bankrolled faction) or to be opposed to intervention (another large, well-bankrolled faction, that often worked together with the preceding one against any interventionist policy.)

I'll admit I was modifying what I would have said IRL for this medium. You are absolutely right: one of the most brilliant victories of so-called "neoliberal" capitalism is how it's utterly convinced people that it represents human nature. That it's not ideological. What I meant by my comment was that "saving the world from the evil of global Fascism" was a post-hoc rationalization, not what motivated America to join the war years after it had begun.

FYI: I said I know why my grandfather fought, NOT WHY his commander in chief ordered him to fight.

That's a big difference, and one you chose not to respect.

His CiC may not have agreed, but my grandfather told me, to my face, that he fought fascism and was proud to do so.

I'd like to be clear that I know and love that the soldiers and everyone else who fought fascism did so to defeat fascism: it's very possible that I wouldn't be commenting today had your grandfather not made that decision. That's not what i meant to imply here.

EDIT: To make clear what I meant, re: your comment: the state-building narrative the US has adopted substitutes the righteous struggle of people like your grandfather in order to avoid acknowledging, among many things, the reluctance to participate in world affairs and the frankly brazen pro-Nazi stances of many in the american public and the government at the time.

Of course they did. It wasn't always open warfare nor does it have to be. The simple fact that the United States and her allies had a large capable military fixed a line on the map that held for 50 years until the Soviet block self-destructed. As for Mao, I'm pretty sure that having the US as a buddy kept Taiwan free as well as secured South Korea and provided a lot of security to Japan and the Philippines. The UK did the same for Hong Kong.

It's not correct to say that we have to attack a country/dictator in order to stand up to them.

Oh, the US didn't meet the USSR in Berlin, stop the westward movement of the Soviet advance, saving dozens of countries from communism?

My bad, I totally forgot that the Cold War never happened and that the soldiers of WW2 didn't form a hard border in Berlin that they were not friendly over.

> the US didn't meet the USSR in Berlin

As far as I know, no? The US was quite far from Berlin by the end of the war, and did not engage the USSR in battle for territorial control of Germany.

> saving dozens of countries from communism?

Surely not "dozens", but was there even one? The other Allies essentially handed Poland over to Stalin.

>> the US didn't meet the USSR in Berlin >As far as I know, no? The US was quite far from Berlin by the end of the war, and did not engage the USSR in battle for territorial control of Germany.

I believe GP was referring to a few years later, when the Berlin airlift broke the Soviet blockade of West Berlin - a clear attempt by the Soviet Union to expand their spehere of control to West Berlin and eventually West Germany as a whole.

But they did tho. At least to Stalin. Had they not, all of Europe would now be Soviet Union. This is also why Japan was nuked — to ensure compliance, and create better leverage in negotiations. Otherwise the red army could just continue as far as it wished to go and take over the rest of Europe.

I would strongly argue that the motivation for nukeing Japan was not to give the Soviets an impression but to ensure that American troops didn't have to land on hostile beaches on the Japanese mainland. The decision was mainly made to save American lives by forcing a Japanese surrender

The Emperor was weeks away from capitulating on his own, and Soviets were invading the place already. Nuking Japan was mostly to tell Stalin he can’t win. Japan capitulating sooner was a nice side effect.

There's a depressingly large number of authors who say that, but the Japanese islands have little in the way of natural resources except farmland and a good climate for growing things.

The whole reason Japan started their program of military expansion in the first place was to guarantee access to natural resource, e.g., petroleum, needed by their industry.

By 1943 Japan was facing chronic shortages of petroleum products, rubber and other essential supplies because of interdiction by the US Navy's "Silent Service" (submarine force). And that was before Japan lost most of her navy, most of her large transport ships (by 1945 Japan was reduced to using mostly small wooden transport ships) the Phillipines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa (which while in Japanese hands could be used to operate aircraft to give Japanese shipping some protection from the US Navy).

It is unlikely that Japan could have done much more than feed itself after 1945.

And yet, had all of the engineers in the US refused to participate in military work, guess who'd be running the world right now just the same? The world actually exists and the choices people make in it have real consequences. Not participating in military technology is an unbelievably childish option. If you are at all serious about the ethics of this, you have to choose to support the entity you trust the most. For me, that's the US. Feel free to make your own choices, though.

That's a fair point but it also treats life as a zero sum game that's played in a steady-state arena where the threat of Tartars over the next hill is ever present. That's a good way to prevent progress and to defend yourself perfectly against the Last War but one would think the last 30 years of terrorism would have shown us the flaw in that.

Put another way: who benefits from $Giant_New_Military_Platform like new fighter planes? They don't really keep me safe as a citizen of the US: they don't prevent terrorists and they don't threaten other thermonuclear states. Yet we spend trillions on stuff like this any justify it with bellicose rhetoric and it seems like the only people benefiting from it are people selling it.

Agree. And to that I'll add, it was an ex general and ex POTUS who coined the term (or at least etched it into history):

Military Industrial Complex

Yet most act like that "friendly reminder" never happened. The collective memory is in fact short.

Originally it was the "military-industrial-Congressional complex".

Yet we spend trillions on stuff like this any justify it with bellicose rhetoric and it seems like the only people benefiting from it are people selling it.

And the people who work at those military/government contractors. In some sense, military spending is a job-work program that transfers funds from the public coffers to citizens. That it's for useless tech means it has attributes of an entitlement. That it's called military spending and has bellicose rhetoric is part of making that entitlement palpable to citizens it wouldn't be otherwise.

Please realize that all state militaries are coevolving together and competing in an on-going global tournament for dominance at all times whether there is an official war or not, that a weakness in one area will be weaponized by a competitor (e.g. our military weakness in preventing Russian disinformation leading to a political upset), that we must continually improve, enhance, and expand our capabilities just to maintain our status quo, and that it is essential to perform well in this competitive environment just to be able to buy items from Walmart, get 15% off your car insurance, drink your Starbucks latte, and carry a placard at the local activist rally.

There are indeed warlords just over the hill, and they have names like Entropy and Resource Availability.

People immediately want to paint these truths as only products of fear.

Yes, fear is a large part of it. But it takes courage to fight against that fear and be responsible for the future of your people (whomever they are). Pretending that there is no evil in the world is cowardice.

The Tartars are over the hills. Democracy is in decline. Authoritarianism is on the mega-rise. The state of democracy is bad and looking worse, and if the Brexit/Trump trend of destroying the EU and breaking up the Atlantic Alliance bear just a bit more fruit, you may find that these "Tartars" are a lot closer to you than you once believed.

You call me blind to the future by looking at the past, but quite frankly, you appear to be repeating the mistakes of the past by not learning from them.

Democracy was not "won". Liberty for all does not exist.

These are fights that every generation must wage.

Or we will (and are currently) losing.

The EU under its unelected President and unaccountable unelected lawmakers (the EU parliament can't propose laws) with a constitution that would be thrown out anywhere else (and never put to the electorate as a whole) is doing a pretty good job of destroying itself never mind the rats deserting the sinking ship.

It's not obvious to me that democracy is in decline, or authoritarianism on the rise.

Over what time-frame? Do you have supporting data you can point me to ("In the past 10 years, more countries have switched from democratic to non-democratic government than vice versa")?

Thanks!

You’d probably be interested in the book “How democracies die” by two Harvard political scientists. They walk through the warning signs of a failing democracy and how many others have collapsed - and the answer is actually yes, there are plenty of warning signs that American democracy in particular is in trouble.

Some of the evidence they walk through: the collapse of political norms, political restraint and the rise of win at all costs brinksmanship, the delegitimization and dehumanization of political rivals, attacks against independent institutions and neutral arbiters, and much more.

Sure. https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2018/01/daily-...

Is a great place to start.

I was born and raised in Normandy, and saw the dire sacrifice a generation had to make. On my way to school, I could see the bullet holes in the walls, the tombstones of nameless soldiers, the bombs and mines we had to defuse in the fields.

What our grandfathers did was noble. What we do now is the business of war. I find it diminishing to compare what they did to what Google does now.

I completely agree with this. Trying to compare WWII to the actions of the modern military is absurd.

How can you possibly compare it with overthrowing governments in South America and the Middle East, Vietnam, Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, drone strikes on hospitals, up to 200k civilians dead in Iraq, and much more - and of coursr the deeply, deeply questionable motives of all of these.

The actions of our ancestors in WWII were borne out of necessity - those of the modern military are driven by money, greed, propaganda and political point-scoring.

>drone strikes on hospitals, up to 200k civilians dead in Iraq

You are looking at allied actions in WWII through rose colored glasses if you think that's worse.

Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Berlin, Saint-Nazair... the allies engaged in total war.

Civillians are part of the war making capability of a nation, and in WWII all sides considered them to be valid targets.

In Saint-Nazair's case it wasn't even enemy civillians. The German U-boat port was too heavily fortified, so the British wiped out the occupied French town that fed it.

I'd add Nanking, London, Warsaw, Auschwitz, Amsterdam, and Bataan to your list, and that's off the top of my head.

The British, U.S., USSR, Germans, Japanese, and Italians all practiced atrocities and mass warfare and/or genocide against civilian populations. I'm not challenging the credibility of your list, only the one-sidedness.

You made your point: war is dirty. But that was not my claim either.

If we want to defend the necessity and impact of those weapons, they should be taken in the context of modern american and NATO warfare, not in the context of WW2. Normandy 1944 was a very different conflict than Libya 2011 for instance.

That's because they were actually defending against an aggressor.

The business of war most of the time makes us the aggressors.

...the US military never clashed with Stalin's military AFAIK. Even in the Korean war, the USSR only provided supplies.

That standing up to Hitler also involved a peer partnership with the USSR's military.

The US military in fact defended Stalin's military in resettling Germans who were pushed by Nazi Germany to settle Eastern Europe - of course the initial settlement wasn't legitimate either, but somewhere between half a million and two million Germans died in the resettlement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German...

Also, as part of war reparations, millions of Germans were placed in forced labor by agreement of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_...

Before Stalin died, he believed that a conflict with the US was imminent. There was blatantly a hot war brewing between the US and the USSR along the borders of the West/East divide in Europe.

The comment's grandparent could have just as well been defending Western Europe from Stalin's USSR territorial lust. They didn't stop moving west just to be polite.

That vast military stand-off, which became the cold war, was a military conflict. The US deployed over three million soldiers to Europe in the 1950s almost entirely to stop the USSR from advancing any further.

Our industry was literally born from the Cold War, yet now everyone wants to pretend it didn't exist. The Cold War was not just rhetoric and flag-waving. Even outside of Korea/Vietnam/Afghanistan there was continual military activity and those engaged in it took it as seriously as if the world could end.

The USSR's "territorial lust" was aided and abetted by FDR and Churchill and guaranteed by their militaries. They divvied up Europe into spheres of influence at Yalta, and the US and UK were perfectly happy to gift Stalin Eastern Europe to further their own geopolitical objectives.

I'm by no means equating the three, but it's ahistorical to present the American military as an idealistic organization that exists to battle evil. Hell, Mao killed more Soviet soldiers than the USA ever did.

Honestly, would you have done things differently, if you were Churchill or FDR?

In the 20th century we had already gone through a war so terrible it was called the war to end all wars, until 20 years later when we made it look small by comparison. The deaths in WW2 accounted for 3% of the entire population of the world. And we hadn't even invented the atomic bomb until the very end.

After WW2 we were on the precipice of the next war potentially eliminating the human race. I can see why we were reluctant to jump into it all over again by "battling evil" and forcing Russia to give back the territory they took from Germany.

Their choice was entirely reasonable. War is rarely the right answer.

It's just kind of silly to portray the American military as "standing up to Stalin" because Americans are taught Stalin equals evil and America equals good and ipso facto America must have stood up to Stalin.

I think the west did a pretty good job of standing up to Stalin as much as they could without actually igniting WW3. The cold war ended without any direct conflict between belligerents after all, and the soviet union fell.

That is, if you take as a constraint that you don't actually want to start an all-out war, the post-WW2 west stood up to Stalin in probably the best way it possibly could have.

Moreover, the Red Army did the majority of the 'heavy lifting' in Europe during WW2. There are some pretty striking political cartoon from Dr. Seuss about this, depicting the US and Britain traveling in comfort to Germany, while the USSR carries all of their luggage.

Apart from the other fronts and the destruction of the German infrastructure and blockading supplies to Germany?

I don't imagine they were saints, but statistically they did the heavy lifting there.

Without UK/US, all of Europe would have been in the USSR

It's extremely glib to point out that the Nazi's lost to the Russian winter (let's be frank, Russian weather did more to the Nazi's than Russian soldiers ever could...) without recognizing that:

- Hitler's strategy that lost in Russia was completely predicated on the knowledge of the Western Front. No UK/USA, we may not have had Hitler losing in Russia.

- The USSR would have taken all of Europe had it not been for the USA liberating France and meeting the USSR in Berlin.

Easy to say Russians did the heavy lifting when the truth is that Hitler fucked it all up.

Easy to say that Russians did the work, when the truth is that the reason why France and UK aren't post-communist bloc countries is because of what Americans did.

I'm not trying to be glib. In America the Soviet contribution to killing the Nazis is almost entirely written out of mandatory education so I think it's often relevant in American-heavy discussions to point it out.

Also, I recall hearing a talk about how one of the effects of post-WW2 soviet communism on western/northern europe was the creation of lots of social welfare programs. (Sadly I'm not in a place where I can source this but I could have sworn it was a talk by Michael Parenti.) The reason I bring this up is because I think it's disingenuous to claim that if it hadn't been for Britain and the US that France would today resemble the Balkans or Ukraine. What we typically associate with "post-communist bloc" countries happened far later when the USSR fell apart. It's a big jump to say that places like Britain would have become part of then suffered under Soviet Communism.

In the past, I have actually about the historical education of several people who went to school between 1985-2009 and no one I've met has had any education of history past reconstruction covered in primary & secondary education (outside of Civil Rights-era, which is independently covered).

Even if you are one of the ~1% of APAM students it's spoken about in broad terms and hazy generalities after Teapot Dome (unless you count history of Baseball, which somehow is somewhat inexplicably regarded as a critical component of America history).

I find this interesting because many Americans broadly understand the succession of events leading up to and constituting WWII. On the other hand, the topics that are covered to death are barely recalled: The Revolutionary War? Washington fought that one. Civil War? Harper's Ferry & Manassas? 1812? "The time we fought the Canadians".

That thesis is the western government needed to show that they looked after their populations better that the WP did.

For many, the current actions of our military weigh much more heavily than good things it did half a century or more ago. Of course, each person's morality is their own, so you may feel that working in favor of the military is justified by its past actions. For others, they see working for the military as enabling bad present and future actions, and therefore see it as immoral to offer support.

Without defending the morality of the Hitler/Stalin/Mao governments (or of the US government), it's very much worth noting that scientific researched flourished in the USSR and technological research continues to flourish in China. A lot of discoveries in computer science had roughly simultaneous Soviet / US discovery (the Cook-Levin theorem is a good example). There are a huge number of technology companies in China, and all your chips come from there anyway.

So if your goal is "I should further the goals of a military because it provides room for the sort of work I enjoy" and not "I should further the goals of a military because the military does good things," it is not at all clear that backing the US military over those of the USSR and China is the right option.

It is also worth remembering that plenty of people the US killed could have had grandchildren who wanted to work in these same fields.

haha, USSR research flourished? Do you mean how the USSR crushed any research into computing because it contradicted their ideology? And "Chinese chips" are all foreign designs.

I'm sure Soviet times joke that "our microschemes are biggest!" came out of nowhere.. I wonder why all the consumer tech in USSR was so backwards if research was so flourishing :)

It seems like their we're ideological reasons at first. But you are leaving out crucial details afterwards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_...

>> create this quite nifty Liberty bubble

> worth noting that scientific researched flourished in the USSR

You seem to be talking about two totally different things. The grandparent did not talk about scientific advancement. He also wasn't talking about the USSR's military, he was specifically talking about the US's. The US, you may be surprised to discover, pursued, and continues to pursue, a political agenda quite different than that of the USSR.

> "I should further the goals of a military because it provides room for the sort of work I enjoy"

He didn't say that at all. He said specifically 'create this quite nifty Liberty bubble', which is not the same thing.

There was definitely a reference to scientific advancement: "As an engineer ... After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist ... this quite nifty Liberty bubble that these few generations get to play in."

That is why I interpreted the "quite nifty Liberty bubble" as referring to the ability to participate in technical / scientific endeavors - the "freedom I have to do this work" - not about liberty in the abstract.

('criley2, if I'm misreading you, please let me know.)

No. The West since 1950 has done FAR MORE scientific research than the USSR did. Soviet scientists did good work and were smart. But the Western Enlightenment model -- open communication, tolerance of dissenting voices, pursuit of truth and rejection of propaganda, and funding for basic science -- was a huge shining scientific success over the past century. Its success dwarfed that of other models. (Today the biggest threat to that model is propaganda - largely from wealthy oligarchs pursuing maximal wealth, both Russian oligarchs and Western oligarchs like the Koches and Murdoch.)

There's a reason to be proud of Western enlightenment values, which are closely connected to Western liberal democracy.

I don't know that the causal link between the West's scientific output and the West's enlightenment values is that clear. It's certainly correlated.

But the reason the US was able to do so much fundamental research in the 20th century is not (just) because the US culturally valued fundamental research - it's because the US was able to get popular support for taxing people and spending it on the war effort (both the World Wars and the Cold War) and decided that fundamental research was necessary for the war effort.

The politicians today who are cutting NASA's budget, talking about shutting down DoE, etc. aren't simply victims of Koch propaganda or disbelievers in the enlightenment - they just no longer have political cover for publicly funding research to the same extent that it was funded previously. Nobody believes that the US is at a technical disadvantage against the people we're currently at war against. They still have the political cover to fund the military itself, which continues to get large amounts of funding from political parties that generally want to lower taxes, but that base won't let them fund basic research as much as it did in the past.

>But the reason the US was able to do so much fundamental research in the 20th century is not (just) because the US culturally valued fundamental research - it's because the US was able to get popular support for taxing people and spending it on the war effort (both the World Wars and the Cold War) and decided that fundamental research was necessary for the war effort.

Are you implying that the USSR spent a smaller percentage of tax revenue on the war effort?

The US NIH has a $30B budget to do research on cancer and human disease. Most of that is about helping people and has zero connection to the military.

--- Edit: also, the movement to close down DoE and cut NASAs budget certainly WAS created by American oligarchs like the Koches. They have created a propaganda machine to push for tax cuts for the rich. And part of the propaganda, pushed by outlets funded or controlled by GOP billionaires, like Fox, Limbaugh, Cato(founded as Koch), Sinclair, Heritage, SPN, Cit U, Jud Watch, Bradley, Searle, etc etc. is that we need to shrink government (so we can cut taxes on the rich.)

One description of that strategy is here [1] Today’s Republican Party is the party that those activists made. Congressional Republicans who came up in the populist tax revolts of the 1970s abandoned the old party orthodoxy of balanced budgets and rebranded themselves as the tax-cutting party. They embraced the idea that deficits don’t matter as long as those deficits result from Republican tax cuts.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/opinion/republicans-tax-c...

Stalin's favorite scientist was Trofim Lysenko, to whom he gave an enormous amount of power to direct research in the USSR. And Lysenko was pretty ruthless in using that power to suppress science he didn't like, esp with regards to genetics and evolution. He set back Soviet science by decades. And Mao repeated his mistakes: Lysenko's literal bad seeds contributed to the famine of the Great Leap Forward.

> There are a huge number of technology companies in China, and all your chips come from there anyway.

The vast majority of chips produced in Asia come from Taiwan, not the RoC. That’s a big difference, given that this discussion is about the innovation of democratic vs. autocratic governments, and the Taiwanese and Chinese governments are on completely opposite sides of that spectrum.

I’m not saying that Taiwan innovates more than a China because it has a democratic government, but it’s at least worth distinguishing between the two countries.

I guess that is a standpoint that would be easy to take if all governments were flawless and co-existed in peace.

But history paints a different picture, with events like Iraq, the Kontras, NSA Dragnetting just to name a very select few.

Governments are willfully violent towards its own citizens and others for what is often not much of a reason at all.

Nobody stood up to Stalin and Mao. Cherry picking the good stuff doesn’t make the bad stuff acceptable. Carpet bombing of civilians in German cities for example - an act of zero military value.

The takeaway from WWII is not that the military is a wonderful thing but that the UN is a wonderful thing.

The only thing the UN has shown is how utterly weak it is. It's ability to force compliance is limited to those members willingness to do so. It's just another puppet of the superpowers.

Well depends those cities had large military plants Hamburg was building the scary fast U boats for example.

Btw I am lucky as my fathers house was bombed (when he wasn't in it) oh but he did live near the larges spitfire plant - which was a military target.

The Korean war was a case of the US and UN standing up to Mao's influence. The North Koreans lost ground until PRC forces started pouring in.

> The takeaway from WWII is not that the military is a wonderful thing but that the UN is a wonderful thing.

The same UN that causes Cholera outbreaks, protects rapists (as long as they wear blue helmets), and steps aside to allow massive genocides to occur on a not-irregular basis ( Rwanda, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, South Sudan for starters).

Or are you talking about the UN that funded the Oil for Food program so a bunch of super-elite rich people could get kickbacks from an evil dicatator?

Maybe it's the UN that has stood by for decades while more and more dictators and legitimately horrible people acquire and use WMDs (Libya, Syria, North Korea, and on and on)...

Seriously, how much good has the UN actually done that wasn't backedstopped by a US Super Carrier or two?

I don't think it's useful to refer to a military without also including its leaders. The military that fought against Hitler and Stalin and Mao isn't the same military that invades countries and topples governments under false pretenses.

How so? Eisenhower finished the WW2, and then went on to topple the government of Iran and restore the Shah. Plus he gave bombers and napalm to help the French keep their colonies in Indochina.

True, I did not think of that. I we'd have to go even more granular and refer to specific engagements.

I understand this perspective, but I think it oversimplifies the reality of why we (the US) go to war. I am a veteran of the war in Iraq, a conflict that could be reduced to a one-line "defend our way of life" sound bite if you are willing to ignore everything else that happened. I do not want my children to use my involvement in that conflict to remove their responsibility to make hard ethical choices.

One of the bigger issues I have with this that Google is only doing this kind of work for the US military, which for me as a non-US Googler makes me a bit uncomfortable. Because some relatives have been fighting the US military not even that long ago.

your grandfather was probably considered by leadership to be just as disposable as every other low-income male in the population at that time... he's lucky that he didn't die in the trenches. you are, too. war is power and money.

glowing historical illusions of "responsibility" and "valor" don't protect us from nuclear holocaust.

yes your freedom wouldn’t be here if we weren’t drone bombing weddings of goat farmers in yemen (the poorest people in the world). Or maybe if we weren’t setting civilians on fire in laos or cambodia or bombing pharmaceutical factories in Sudan. Where would our freedom be without that?

you already lost this game when you had to go back to ww2 for a just war.

World War II wasn't just, either. It's simply that the Allies were less evil than the Axis. The Allies literally included Stalin. The US placed an ethnic minority of its own people in concentration camps despite zero evidence that these people were going to help an enemy country. And so forth.

Sorry, but there is an enormous difference between WWII and the terrible actions of the US military since then.

You would be here. Your job would be the same. In fact, it would be hard to tell the difference. With all due respect, the 'ultimate sacrifices' might have been given, but many believe, including those that survived the horrors of war, that it was never to safeguard you, but rather a feast for those that prey on volatility.

That’s not a safe assumption. The US was awfully busy fighting the Japanese. Had they stayed out of Europe, Hitler would certainly have defeated Britain (leaving Africa unprotected) and likely had the resources spare to defeat the USSR too. From there Hitler could support the Japanese against the US and would have massive resources to do so.

Hitler’s plan really was world domination. He had plans for a rocket-powered trans-Atlantic plane to bomb New York. Not to mention that the Nazis had the V2 and even a jet fighter by the end of the war (but too few resources to build/deploy them). With more resources the Nazis may well have developed their nuclear bomb.

It's not at all certain that Hitler would have defeated Britain if the US had stayed out of Europe.

As far as I know, most historians agree that the US hastened the Allies victory over Germany but the Allies would have (eventually, probably) won anyways.

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