Letters to the Editor
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Huh?
It's not because you're completely mediocre at everything except military might ...
Oh, yeah, and except for all those Nobel Prizes we win in economics, medicine, science; and the consistent world-class nature of our best universities; and the consistent ground-breaking technology we create and ...
And as for the Russians in WWII, yeah, they lost a lot and contributed to the ultimate defeat of Hitler, but if the US did not open a second front in Western Europe and bomb the smithereens out of Hitler's military-production capacity, good ol' Adolf would have been able to turn the full force of his military might to the East, and he wouldn't have stopped until he got to Kamchatka.
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fighting other things, too
Ken Burns could not have picked a worst time --fightthetheocracy
This guy apparently fought the grammar teacher, too.
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@ fightthetheocracy
I'll be one of the first to watch "The War" because my parent's generation was so greatly shaped by it. My father and step father fought in the war, having come of age during the depression. And I'm a namby-pamby liberal, although I'm a little nervous about admitting it.
To have a little fun with your assertion about the right-wing, wouldn't they have argued that anybody who was as stridently anti-comminist and killed as many commies as Hitler may not have been a nice guy, but he had the guts to give the Red Menace what it needed?
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Americans on the road
First thing.
Lets get the term American correct. While in South American my friends that live there want to be refered to as Americans too.
After all they are part of America; South America.
As a north American citizen I have lived in a couple European countries and in South America. I always try to learn the language where I reside. As bad as my Spanish and Norwegian is, I still try to learn the local languages. Please do not lump me into a pot with the rest of the tourist from the USA.
I know they are fat, loud and throw money at people to get their way. I do not, and the people that I associate with do not and they too are North Americans. I have seen other tourist from Europe and other countries that are not exactly perfect either. At least a tourist is out to learn. Sure they seem dumb when they are on tour but they worked hard to make the trip there and should get some respect for at least trying to see the world.
Secondly,
All the countries that came out on the winning side of WW2
did what they could to help defeat the Nazi and the Japanese.
Maybe the Russians suffered more then anyone but the rest of Europe also suffered horrible lives durning those years. The USA, Canda and Australia suffered as well, but just happened to have large expanses of water between them and the German and Japanese armies and kept the suffering limited to the young soldiers fighting and dying overseas. Although, the families and those rationing suffered too, but nothing can compare to getting bombed on a daily basis.
We were all on the same side and held in check our jealousies and opinions about each other until the final victory. Lets stick together now and get rid of Bush and his idealogy of corperate govenments enslaving us all for the super rich.
My poor and middle class peers are in Iraq right now dying for some rich kid's right to drive his rich kid's car to his rich kid university so he can sit next to that pretty rich girl.
That is not right and we all need to fight against this. That rich kid does not care about the poor guy/gal that looks just like him in Iraq and Afganistan, he only cares about his money, his daddies money and how much more money he can rake out of the poor and working class fools. Working class heros united eat the rich feed the poor!
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An example
If I were a less knowledgeable and more judgmental person, I would have thought all Texans (and, by extension, all Americans) were complete ignorami, vis-a-vis the following true-to-life discussion I had with a couple of them in the pool while vacationing in Florida (I was only 15 then, but still remember it as if it was yesterday).
Texan 1: So, where're you girls from?
Me: Nova Scotia.
Texan 2: [laughing] What?
Me: Nova Scotia. It's a province in Canada.
Texan 2: [laughing some more] Man, I don't even know what that means.
Me: [annoyed now] You have states. We have provinces. It's the same thing.
Texan 1: Oh. We're from Texas. So how do you deal with all the snow?
Me: It's not bad. It's the same as if you lived in a state that gets snow. Like New York.
Texan 1: Yeah, but not year 'round like you guys.
Me: [disbelieving] What?
Texan 2: Like do you have to wear snowshoes if you walk to school up there?
Me: [really insulted and pissed off now because it's apparent that these two are NOT joking] No. Jesus, do you really think we have snow the whole year?
Texan 1: Oh, we're sorry. We really didn't know.
And then I actually got out of the pool, dragging my sister with me, I was so digusted by that conversation. I wish I could say that I was lying about that discussion, or that I 'fancied it up' for dramatic purposes. Alas, no. As close as I can recall, that's the conversation that happened.
Pretty sad, huh?
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Running a story about antiamericanism at Salon
Is like giving free crack to crackheads.
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@michele75
Look, you can find ignorami anywhere. My Swiss in-laws were mystified that I wasn't a cowboy. (At the time I was actually a long-haired Florida surfer-dude.) When I moved to Chicago to go to college, they worred about Al Capone's gangsters being so close by.
Yeah, that's real, too, from "sophisticated," university-educated Swiss, no less.
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ENOUGH WAR ALREADY
I was 12 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. I do not need to relive the pain so many felt. I can still see the tears on my grandmothers face when her youngest child and her sole dependent of her livelyhood was drafted. I remember my father with a wife and three children moving to a farm to prevent getting drafted and having to leave his family.
We were all patriotic and wanted to win the war but we did not want war, it was forced upon us. It was a great sacrifice for everyone. Noone could hide in the National Guard to avoid getting in the fight.
I know what happened during that time I lived through it and I do not need to relive it through a movie. For the first two years of the war I lived in fear that my father would be drafted and have to fight in this great war. Only when he became too old to be drafted did my fears subside.