We were neutral, but it's always funny how many US-guys always bring up WW2. That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
What I meant was that most people who discuss WW2 with others online, mostly talk from the perspective of not having experienced the war themselves, nor did the person who they speak to, most likely.
If you go to countries that were invaded, people have been in contact with their grandparents. It's not "something that happened far away", it's "stories from family I've known".
Of course in the US it's very different. That's possibly why Elon Musk can do Nazi salutes there and nothing happens. Of course not everybody cares: many people still buy Teslas in Europe. But I think the WW2 memory is not as far as you make it sound.
What should have happened? The US has put emphasis on freedom from its inception, although in practice it still had McCarthyism which to say at least, harrased communists.
What do you mean? There are countries where one can go to jail for doing Nazi salutes. Just like in the US it is not tolerated to joke about shooting a kid at school (if you have seen the recent Snapchat story).
What should have happened, if you ask me, is that a lot more people should have boycotted Tesla and his other companies.
> in the US it is not tolerated to joke about shooting a kid at school (if you have seen the recent Snapchat story)
I have no idea what are you talking about.
That's exactly what I said to which you apparently opposed. It depends on the country. It's okay to do Nazi salutes in the US, it's not okay in Germany.
> I have no idea what are you talking about.
https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-...
This is a completely mad assessment. Haven't you noticed the massive issues with scientific, health, and social funding globally now the US taxpayer has stopped bankrolling it?
Motte: "Well when the US does something good for the world the US also benefits."
Want to ignore those patents? Unless you have nukes you're not.
Are the people helped or cured less helped or cured because the developers retained rights?
I think, once you read about each individual country and what they did before/during/after WW2, it seems like not a single country on the European continent can be considered "neutral". So maybe with this lens, Switzerland was "the most neutral" if you compare with others?
And yes, actual historical events and motivations of past actors matter.
Yes, there were multiple fully on-the-nazi side countries, Swiss were not them. That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
Yeah, even when I tried my best to, apparently the labels just fire up too much emotions. I've removed the country names completely as it's irrelevant to what I was trying to discuss.
> Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here
I didn't do anything of the like in the original text, but good try!
So I assume that if you open your borders to all fleeing citizens, that's neutral, and if you close it to all, that's neutral as well.
This is such a landmine topic, because most countries did this, including the UK and the US; see e.g. the MS St. Louis. This is why there are several "heroes of the resistance" that in modern parlance are "people smugglers", forging credentials and visas in order to help people escape.
Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Many people in the British Empire were told to fight for the mother country or even to preserve the empire (which was largely gone by the seventies, with some major territories becoming independent in the later 1940s.)
“Go save the Jews” was hardly a motivating factor for any nation in the war.
Difficult to pin something as all consuming as WW2 on "about" anything, but we can look at who fired the first shots, which was clearly the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the east and the German invasion of Poland in the West (followed shortly after by the USSR invading Poland and later Finland from the other direction.)
It is not at all a given that, had Germany stayed within her international borders, that the Holocaust would have on its own triggered WW2. After all, mass murder in the Congo Free State didn't trigger invasion of Belgium.
IDK if things have changed but generally the whole narrative in the US is presented as unwitting yankies discovering the horrors of the death camps. It's debated how much some levels of the government knew, but it certainly wasn't public knowledge in the US.
Well, that or fighting the Japanese.
Patriotism and threat seem to have been the main motivators for most people in the west.
That is 1930s pre-war Germany and Austria; and around 550k people by the most generous calculation. Yes, the world wronged them. But you cannot say death camps happened because the US didn’t hand out enough visas.
After 1939, when Germany invaded Poland (home of 3-3.5m Jews) and in 1941 the USSR (home of another 1-2m Jews) no one was being forced to leave (or live) anymore. People were being killed with bullets to the head or back, and when this started to be unbecoming/too inefficient, the German state devised an industrial approach to the killing of humans.
Perhaps that's because most of those refugees could more easily shelter in neighboring countries that they are more culturally similar to... if shelter was actually the primary thing that they were seeking.
Interesting connection, as her father was a foreign member of the Nazi party (while living in Brazil) and had lied about his Nazi affiliation in the past. When he moved back to Germany, he joined the main party.
That still counts as neutral, as does Sweden's activities. Switzerland interned allied airmen and was even bombed but stayed out of the war.
There is a wonderful quote from the Irish parliament. The Irish government wanted to be neutral, but one of the politicians asked "but who shall we be neutral against ?" (By the way, the nature of the Irish Free State's "neutrality" remains controversial to this day, and again, I could point to examples both ways.) It is hard to think of any fully neutral countries in WW2, partly due to the large empires spanning Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Maybe certain Latin American countries, except some of them joined the war at the end and/or took in Nazi refugees like Eichmann.
You can find complicity in the holocaust everywhere. The United States strictly enforced immigration quotas and turned away entire refugee ships. Legislation to address the issue and provide an exception failed in the house in 1939. Those people were returned to their deaths.
After the war, the genuine shock of what was discovered by the Army was presented to imply that nobody had any idea what was happening.
The Swiss also turned a blind eye to allied activity. The OSS and MI6 operated pretty blatantly and received some assistance from the Swiss authorities.
The Swiss cannot claim moral superiority by any means, but it’s unfair to brand them as nazi collaborators. These issues are black and white a hundred years later and thousands of miles away, not so much when you’re surrounded.
Private Swiss banks accepted money from both nazis and jews alike, thats true. Sounds neutral to me. They have anonymous numbered accounts here, practice for local citizens used long before WWII. Together the reasons why it ended up as it did.
Cut them some slack - its the last time they "won" a war.
I really hope you're referring to GW1, rather than 2. And yeah, if you weren't a Kurd who believed GW Bush, then that was a pretty effective war from the US (and global) perspective.
Only if you ignore the rise of ISIS and various militias, along with the collapse of Iraqi society (mind you, the sanctions had done a pretty good job of wrecking that before GW2 anyway).
Where is ISIS now?
>the collapse of Iraqi society
Iraq's human development index is currently higher than it's ever been. It has a fairly typical human development index for its region. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-development-index?t...
You guys will define "winning" so narrowly that if the Middle East continues to be volatile, that means the US must've lost. The type of victory that the US achieved in WW2 is an atypically high standard for "victory".
Sorry what, I wasn't aware that I was a member of you guys.
Look, the US invaded Iraq in GW2, they killed off Saddam very quickly, but taking control of the country and settling down all of the violence took well over a decade, and dealing with ISIS took much the same amount of time.
You can regard that as a victory, but it sure doesn't look like much of one to me, particularly as Saddam (for all his faults) suppressed the militias like ISIS who ended up becoming a major concern for the US.
In a world where the US had never invaded Iraq, do you think the region would look much different today?
As a non-Swiss, non-American, I can assure you you need to study both American and Swiss modern history. The Swiss were far, far too cozy with the Nazis, and the Americans have done a spectacular amount of good since WWII ended.
- Would you say that "France was far, far too cozy with the Nazis"? Half of France was occupied for most of the war, after all. And enough people were collaborating.
- Would you say that the UK was far, far too cozy with the Nazis? They considered not fighting against them in the beginning.
- Would you say that the US was far, far too cozy with the Nazis? They didn't do anything for years, until Pearl Harbour, right?
I think it's always more complicated than just blaming an entire country.
I am not an expert in modern history, but my understanding is that Switzerland was entirely surrounded. I guess they did their best to avoid getting occupied? Certainly some assholes in Switzerland profited from the war, but that's true in many (most? all?) other countries.
Vichy France? Yes, of course. It's taught to French school children as a deeply disgraceful chapter of French history, despite it being under significant pressure. The North was under military occupation, having put up a fight. Collaborationist politicians were put to death after the war.
> the [UK/US] was far, far too cozy with the Nazis?
ok bro.
So apparently you consider that Switzerland was obviously just like Vichy France? At least obviously-enough to "ok bro" me?
Switzerland let in their country (and thus saved the lives) of some Jewish people. They also hosted Allied airmen. They hosted the famous Lucy spy ring - which helped Russians incommensurably.
To me it seems the Swiss helped the Allies more than can be expected from a neutral country, not to mention they were completely surrounded by Axis powers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_during_World_War_I...