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March 19 - April 11, 2023
Aislinn Clarke simply calls horror “the slow, dawning realization that the worst thing is true.”
Since the nineteenth century, the United States acted as an imperial power.
Some would argue earlier than that.
allowed for the building of enormous military bases
That wasn't a new feature of the Clinton administration
How to Hide an Empire,
Excellent book this one appears to be inspired by or ripping off.
We are the bad guy
An aggressive American foreign policy created flash points of conflict with the Soviet Union that provided numerous opportunities for the United States to extend its reach.
The USSR wasn't an innocent victim. They're own imperialism overpowered most of eastern Europe, parts of Asia, and fomented rebellion and civil war in countries like Greece.
is the root of one of the Trump administration’s frequent non sequiturs, a briefly touted plan to “buy Greenland.”
You're giving Trump too much credit by assuming he has studied any history.
The large land and naval empires of the past ruled oppressively but, in cases like Austria-Hungary or the Ottomans, they also held in check and even salved conflicts between the peoples within their borders for hundreds of years.
No it suppressed them. Ask the Armenians just how much of a salve the genocide against them was.
continued, transmogrifying under the Trump
What about the 8 years of the Obama administration? Drone strikes intensified under his leadership I believe. Plus he ordered the Bin Laden raid which violated Pakistani sovereignty.
bored middle-class dad in Kansas flipping between news channels featuring stories about school shootings and footage of explosions in places you couldn’t locate on a map,
Hey fucker I'm a middle aged man in Kansas and I can find Yemen and just about any other place you care to name on a map. Thanks for perpetuating the coastal stereotypes about the less populous portions of the country.
Tom Engelhardt wrote in 2015 that white Americans believe themselves the victims of various dark conspiracies by terrorists,
So all white people support Trump and are conspiracy theorists because someone I've never heard of wrote it down?
Conspiracy Nation.
Conspiracy theorists are present the world over.
some facts as Michael Parenti’s “dirty truths”
Don't know who this is or what you're refering to. Reference? Technique of dropping a name and a quote like it's a well established fact doesn't make it true.
“the greatest generation.”
No I didn't. Generations are made of people. And some of the people in that generation did bad shit while others did good shit.
For the American generations who were your grandparents or great-grandparents, the world was easier than they admit—if they were white and in a relatively stable economic situation.
This is perhaps the dumbest fucking thing you have written thus far in this book. Everyone has struggles and you have just pissed on and minimized them away. Someone in an unhappy or abusive marriage that is financially stable life is not living an easy existence. Easy is a relative term.
In many rural states, the death rate among infants, especially in marginalized groups, places the United States at thirty-second among the thirty-five wealthiest nations in infant mortality.
Reference?
households somehow subsist on under twenty-five thousand dollars a year.
Reference?
Tobe Hooper
Are Hooper and Peele and these two movies and Jaws the only horror movies you're going to reference.
During the last century, the United States has been, writes historian Joshua B. Freeman, “as dominant in the world, in its own way, as Great Britain and Rome had been at the height of their empires.”
Reference?
Cowdin seems like a caricature of a mid-century American capitalist, owning more companies than he could pay attention
Did he own them or was he just the chief executive?
By the late thirties, the screwball romantic comedy proved the most popular genre,
Didn't we already cover this?
USAF
It was still the fucking Army at this point and there was involvement of the secretary of war as well.
This allowed America to demonstrate the full power of these weapons.
It also allowed for a better comparison of the damage done.
Hiroshima the site of a major military base.
It wss the HQ of a Japanese Army. Also Japanese industry was also spread out piece meal among small shops and homes.
many Japanese the new superweapon killed.
But all the casualties from conventional bombs was better?
But should they be? What had they done? How many did we kill? Do we want to know?
So we were supposed to let the Japanese attack us and not fight back? Check out their war record for the treatment of civilians and POWs.
The U.S. government used its power to ensure that the public would not care how many we killed.
Or maybe we didn't care since they were the enemy
The film insisted that Japanese soldiers had been mentally shaped by the Bushido code to believe that “treachery, brutality, rape and torture” are justified.
Check out their war record
twenty thousand Japanese at Iwo Jima and described the horrific battle of Okinawa as
98% of them chose to fight to the death or kill themselves.
The war on the ground seemed a struggle to match, and sometimes overmatch, the Japanese atrocities against soldiers and civilians.
At least you finally acknowledge they committed atrocities.
rejected even the concept of precision bombing.
Because they tried it and it didn't work
Truman’s decision, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
This is why he made Truman blood thirsty in the prolouge so can "explain" his decision to use the bomb.
They did not want to build a military machine, having seen what government intervention in the economy could do if it set itself to projects responsive to the needs of the people.
No. They just wanted tto get back to their lives. I don't think they were champing for more civilian conservation corps projects.
intertwined with a war economy that kept the country on a war footing and in fact increased military expenditures.
So we could maintain parity with the Soviets who weren't demobilizing their forces.
By 1950, the United States footed the majority of the French bill for maintaining their control of East Asia.
Yeah we got suckered on that deal.
United States and the Soviet Union, despite the warmth of the relationship through the thirties and the alliance of the war years.
It was never a warm relationship.
This initiative brought over 1,600 Nazi scientists to the United States, cleared them of all war crimes, and set them to work developing the basis for delivery systems of nuclear weapons.
The Soviets did the same fucking thing. Except they kept POWs for a decade doing hard labor in addition to scientists. Oh and they raped and looted eastern Europe.
Stalin spent the remaining years of his life (d. 1953) watching American westerns, eating enormous meals with his flunkies, and ensuring he remained in power.
Ummm... The blockade of Berlin. Support for North Korea.
Soviet Union, a regional power
Regional power? They had ICBMs.
The television series Ancient Aliens has run for eighteen seasons on what purports to be the History Channel, despite its bizarre mix of creationism, contradictory claims, and junk science.
A statement I agree with whole heartedly.
tiny nuclear arsenal to the American mainland.
They had the same nuclear triad we did
only country ever to use an atomic device against a civilian population
Nuclear devices are really only good for using against population centers to destroy industrial capacity and break morale.
Readers learned that the bomb’s aftereffects included the rapid degeneration of stem cell tissue as the phosphorus in their bodies caused bones to glow hot with radiation. Their blood boiled with poison. Hersey reported that men had become sterile while young women simply ceased menstruating. Victims suffered intense pains from burns that had depilated skin down to cartilage.
Incomplete and terrible description of accute radiation sickness.
His work carefully, and sometimes even dryly, documented how the weaponized dust and debris, ionized with radium, that emerges out of the heart of an atomic explosion eviscerates human cells and mutates DNA.
Another piss poor hyperbolic description
a profound lack of knowledge about the diplomatic and strategic context of the attack,
And here comes the line that we forced the Japanese to attack us because of the embargo and sanctions in response to their actions in China
The catastrophic circumstances strengthened the hand of the most reactionary elements of the North Korean state.
The implication being the US's actions precipitated this.
By late 1944, Europe looked as if the no-man’s-land of the Great War metastasized across the continent, enveloped major cities, and rolled over every acre of farmland and factory district. The men who fought the war, the staff officers who took note of the effect of the unfettered violence, and the commanding generals who ordered mini apocalypses unleashed on ancient European cities all came home with a deep appreciation for the American military machine’s ability to blow the absolute hell out of any obstacle and burn alive any possible threat.
Seems to be implying the Allies shouldn't have fought the Nazis or should have done it without collateral damage.
A Southerner by birth, Wilson famously praised the deeply racist film The Birth of a Nation (1915) and remained a defender of Jim Crow segregation throughout his life.
He also reintroduced segregation into federal civil service
In 2019, in Texas alone, the United States held 14,500 people in precisely the kind of concentration camps called for in the 1910s.
Conflating illegal immigration with actions against citizens
2016, Stuart Jeffries, author of a collective biography of the Frankfurt School critics, told Vox that Trump speaks in a “stream-of-consciousness gibberish” free of “thought” and “historical memory.”
Agreed
