Comment by throwaway2077 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2077 | Hacker News Reader

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>The internationalist world has produced freedom, security, and prosperity at orders of magnitude beyond what humanity ever experienced before.

- wouldn't be possible without being under the wing of the US

- most of them wouldn't even exist as independent states if they didn't have a nationalist period

all that distaste for nationalism would vanish the moment some tanks had showed up on their borders.

>Nationalism has a horrible track record, creating war and poverty, and the underlying curse, hate - arbitrarily, purposefully created - often by leaders using nationalism for their own power: 'be loyal to the nation, and I am the nation, I make the decisions'. Many, including Churchill, blamed nationalism for WWII (which is why the survivors built the UN and the predecessor of the EU).

every country in both world wars was nationalist. even the USSR had toned down commie stuff for the duration of WWII - which they called "The Great Patriotic War" in defense of "motherland", by the way.

> every country in both world wars was nationalist

I think this overstates the similarity to the point of meaninglessness. It's like saying Bezos and I both have money, so we're economically the same.

The US fought for freedom of Europeans (with some interest of their own). WWII was won by a massive internationalist alliance by the Allies, in fact - and that was the difference; nationalist Germany lacked the allies to match them; they were virtually alone; conquered countries are much different than free allies.

The US was well aware of threat to them. Had Germany won and really acquired whole Europe, it would be virtually impossible for US to defend themselves after.

It was not about abstract freedom or distaste toward racism. The danger was very real.

> The US was well aware of threat to them. Had Germany won and really acquired whole Europe, it would be virtually impossible for US to defend themselves after.

> It was not about abstract freedom or distaste toward racism. The danger was very real.

There were geopolitical threats to the US. The US could have defended itself physically - protected by an ocean and an enormous economy - but the belief then was that it would have been impossible to maintain democracy and freedom in a world controlled by the Nazis.

Freedom isn't abstract, it is a very real thing that people have taken great risks, suffered, and died for over centuries, all over the world (and to great success - look at how many people are free today compared with just 50 years ago). And Nazi horrors certainly motivated Americans, far beyond 'distaste'. I'm not sure how you can say otherwise.

> The US could have defended itself physically - protected by an ocean and an enormous economy - but the belief then was that it would have been impossible to maintain democracy and freedom in a world controlled by the Nazis.

The end of that sentence is in direct opposition to the begining. It is not clear at all the US could have defended itself. And it was not clear.

> And Nazi horrors certainly motivated Americans, far beyond 'distaste'.

Most of those became known only later. The most killings, the currently notorious ones happened in the latter years of the war. At the time, Nazi was not the only dictatorship existing. Stalin himself was one of allies.

> Freedom isn't abstract, it is a very real thing that people have taken great risks, suffered, and died for over centuries, all over the world

Yes. But quite rarely for the people of other country. At the time, US was racially segregated and not exactly free for large amount of population. Soviet Union was literal bloody dictatorship, right after purges. Nazi Germany had long term plan to kill even more people then soviet union and had plan to rule the world.

But the US involvement in war cant be reduced to the "lets make France free" only.

> At the time, US was racially segregated and not exactly free for large amount of population. Soviet Union was literal bloody dictatorship, right after purges. Nazi Germany ...

We're comparing segregation in the US to the Soviets and Nazis? I made a mistake engaging here.

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