America didn't enter WWII for altruistic reasons and only did so in a state of anger when the Japanese foolishly bombed the 6th fleet at Pearl Harbour. Before then America was 'helping' the European 'allies' with provisions and armaments but only in exchange for European industrial assets in America bought at basement level prices.
KSH I dont write this from some new book that Ive read or a history course. Largely it comes from my family and my personal experience being born in the dust bowl of Oklahoma and struggling with the implications of a war when we were mired in the depression and the ends of the great drought with its dust. And my father and uncles spoke of it a lot. I find your complaint about business practices strange considering that it was your people who wrote the books on such things. The current theories of economics did not originate in America. They are the product of the European Utilitarians My uncle who flew 36 missions, when he was supposed to be limited to 24, wasnt America he was family, and my father and his two brothers volunteered. The youngest brother was too young or he would have volunteered as well. This was personal. American Indians have always had the highest volunteer rate of any group in the nation for military service. During WW II we had, and have today, plenty of German and Japanese American citizens here. The elite class of Hawaii were and are still, of Japanese extraction. America could have made another choice before Pearl Harbor but the Japanese government believed we wouldnt. It wasnt just Pearl Harbor that affected FDR. Pearl Harbor was a stab in the soul of Japanese Americans by the mother country. Only the population distribution allowed America to intern Japanese Americans and not the Germans. Too many Germans and too close to the American concept of culture for them to do that. But the Japanese were still visually different and their culture was exotic enough to malign them with the yellow journalism of Americas past when they were abusing Indian people with the propaganda of manifest destiny. Pearl Harbor was the convenient excuse for FDR to wean America off of the nationwide Germanic culture and the West Coast American Japanese influence. Still, American culture was so German, across the continent, that the Germans were surprised when American Germans fought them. (Eisenhower for example.) Essentially, serious complex culture in America before the war was German and was still even in the 1960s when I went to college and studied German culture as Universal Music. English, Italian, French and Russian were subsets of real music (German Music and Art). Anything else wasnt serious. How do you think that Oklahoma, the home of Indian People, Indian Territory, would ignore all of the commercial possibilities of ancient cultures in their midst and in the middle of a financial depression, other than to consider that it lacked value when compared to the European (think German for that.) If it wasnt for America be drawn into the first World War and for the unfairness of Hitler to his own German Jewish citizens and his crazed aggression in Europe, I believe that America would not have fought him. America still asserts Blut uber alles when it comes to native people. A point so confusing that a recent Indian teenager killed his teachers and schoolmates in Minnesota claiming that he was a Nazi. The racism of the beginnings of Anthropology in America and Europe is not so far from Hitlers dictums if you bother to read the literature. Henry Ford was honored by Hitler and Hitler was not anti-corporate. America believed in German quality in the Arts (and still does) and in science. If America had been really self-interested, as you state, we would have treated Europe, after the war, the way the American North treated the American South after the Civil War or the Versailles treaty with Germany after WW I. In short, we treated Europe and Japan after the war better than we treated our own after the Civil War and after the finish of the Cold War here. The culture thing is a lot more layered and complex than anyone here or elsewhere, that Ive read, really has explored. We are still in the single monster phase or the crazed killer individual on a vegan high with cocaine. Or was that Sherlock Holmes? I get them confused. (just kidding.) America set the culture of Europe back on its feet with the Marshall Plan. Not only did we fund business but we paid for over a hundred orchestras and 81 opera companies, in Germany, as well as the contemporary music festival for Stockhausen at Darmstadt. When those same American warriors came home they refused to re-fund American culture (that had sacrificed so much during the war and the forty years of the cold war). After the 1930s American complex culture had a 98% decline as the Warriors went on a technology binge, first for the war effort and then for the cold war to the detriment of the American soul and social contract. Today American culture and jobs are paying for that stupidity as we are flooded by people from the old Soviet Empire who did not have to sacrifice their culture or education for the cold war. In the Art world today, Minimalism, a form and style uniquely American (1970s), has taken over the world of visual and musical arts but was killed on the vine here by the Cold Warriors (in the Reagan era) who became the American right wing and destroyed the Artists programs in the National Endowment to court the religious fundamentalists who considered minimalism to be homosexual. Americans paid for the cold war in diminished culture, education, health care and other public goods. The Soviet citizens who have come here dont seem to have had their competencies diminished by the cold war. They may have been oppressed by their governments but they werent ill-educated. They seem perfectly able to outcompete the exhausted and undereducated Americans. The great American Minimalist revolution of the 1970s has moved to Europe (primarily Germany and France) and America is once more culturally deprived except for leisure entertainment. The category that American economics makes for all Arts and Culture. We are still paying for that fiasco. This has severely affected my family personally and so I find these revisions to my experience, to be inaccurate. I could be more personal about that as the scabs are fresh with the demise of the National Treasures of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York City Opera. As for your view of the war, National Pride is one thing but you shouldnt piss in the hands of the people who sacrificed their own to help out. You may have ugly American businessmen in your experience but as an American Indian I have ugly Europeans in my family experience for about five hundred years. With the exception of his stupidity, the arrogance of Strauss-Kahn is not surprising, its typical European. The stereotype is not original with me. It has been written about on as many occasions here as the ugly American has been touted abroad. Perhaps the most stereotypical is Stuart Millers Painted in Blood, Understanding Europeans. Still, the American poor and middle classes were there in WW I and II and the American Anglophile Ronald Reagan supported England in the stupid venture in the Argentinean Falklands against our own history in the Monroe Doctrine. And of course you followed our G.O.P Republicans into Iraq. In my opinion we shouldnt have supported the Iron Lady in the Falklands and you shouldnt have paid fealty to Americas Bush family in Iraq either. We both have our royal idiots, with a dash of Botany Bay to spice up the soup. If it was truly about self-interest wouldnt we have treated Europe the way Churchill did the Bengalis, his Imperial partners in 1943, or the way Queen Victoria and the Arkwrights treated the Irish with their Inka potatoes, or the Americans treated us when they used us to prove their social theories? You often speak of America as if we were just stubborn English. We are larger than Europe and have over four times the population of England. We also handle diverse complex immigrant populations better than Europe which is coming apart at the seams as they are flooded with the kind of immigration we have absorbed on a regular basis since before the 19th century. If one thinks its tough with Islam in Europe, you should begin to understand our problem in the 1880s with the overwhelming numbers of Christians who ultimately just banned our faiths in a way Sharia would have never done. Be that as it may still, even today, it would be easier for me to immigrate to America (or to Tennessee or Oklahoma), from Pakistan than for me to immigrate from America to England or Canada. America is not nearly so picky (unless they are poor Indian Hispanics from South of the border). Most of the cream that we culled were either escaping from working for the German war machine (and the Nuremberg Trials) and preferred the U.S. to the Soviet Union or they were people that Europe was trying to kill before the war. People that Europe generally had a healthy disdain for only a little less than their disdain for the Romany. Even today Ive seen Europeans spit on our synagogues. Your comment about picking the cream from Europe is like me complaining about Europe hiring American singers during the Marshall Plan. Why would I complain? There were no jobs here and still arent! Once the Marshall Plan was done, you stopped and 2% are still the number with full time work in the classical performing arts. Even with that miniscule job market we still continue to hire according to competency rather than citizenship. We dont have artists, we have champions. Happily the Patriot Act could be changing all of that for the good of the American Artist and worker. As authoritarian and fascistic as the Patriot Act is, it also makes it more difficult for foreign workers to take American jobs. If America wants competent workers we will be forced to train them rather than importing them once they are already trained. It is a paradox that bin Laden may have made Americans pay more attention to the human potential we have within our own population and have stemmed the historic desire for the latest exotic foreigner over the local folks. Bin Laden didnt just murder American workers at the WTC. He made an attack on the whole system of immigration to America and may, purely by accident, have given the American education system a shot in the arm. REH From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, May 23, 2011 1:56 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION; Ray Harrell Subject: RE: [Futurework] America -- the stalling state America didn't enter WWII for altruistic reasons and only did so in a state of anger when the Japanese foolishly bombed the 6th fleet at Pearl Harbour. Before then America was 'helping' the European 'allies' with provisions and armaments but only in exchange for European industrial assets in America bought at basement level prices. KSH At 17:04 23/05/2011, you wrote: Thats a very ungrateful version of things. Perhaps my uncle should have just stayed home rather than flying 36 missions in a bomber over Germany. REH From: [email protected] [ mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> ] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Monday, May 23, 2011 4:50 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] America -- the stalling state The following is from The New Yorker of 16 May and well describes the failed state of Pakistan. The other failed states which America has tried to 'help' in more recent years are Iraq and Afghanistan. The state which America helped the most -- because it ruled it totally for a number of years -- was Japan. That's not so much a failed state as a stalled state (it stalled when America clobbered it with the Plaza 'Accord' in the 1980s) -- to which state America is highly likely to become itself unless Obama can somehow sort out its budget this summer. This is probably the last opportunity he -- or America -- will. It may even become a failed state in future years if the only really important assets it presently has -- its scientific researchers -- are recruited elsewhere (just as America recruited the cream of European science in the last century). Keith <<<< THE DOUBLE GAME Lawrence Wright It's the end of the Second World War, and the United States is deciding what to do about two immense, poor, densely populated countries in Asia. America chooses one of the countries, becoming its benefactor. Over the decades, it pours billions of dollars into that country's economy, training and equipping its military and its intelligence services. The stated goal is to create a reliable ally with strong institutions and a modern, vigorous democracy. The other country, meanwhile, is spurned because it forges alliances with America's enemies. The country not chosen was India, which 'tilted' toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Pakistan became America's protégé, firmly supporting its fight to contain Communism. The benefits that Pakistan accrued from this relationship were quickly apparent: in the nineteen-sixties, its economy was an exemplar. India, by contrast, was a byword for basket case. Fifty years then went by. What was the result of this social experiment? India has become the state that we tried to create in Pakistan. It is a rising economic star, militarily powerful and democratic, and it shares American interests. Pakistan, however, is one of the most anti-American countries in the world, and a covert sponsor of terrorism. Politically and economically, it verges on being a failed state. And, despite Pakistani avowals to the contrary, America's worst enemy, Osama bin Laden, had been hiding there for years - in strikingly comfortable circumstances - before U.S. commandos finally tracked him down and killed him, on May 2nd." >>>> Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/05/ Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/05/
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