• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      The European World Wars only produced losers. WW1 signaled the beginning of the end of the British Empire, the escalated decline of the French Empire, and the total collapse of the Russian Empire. WW2 obliterated a century of industrial development and squandered a generation of young people on a pointless pissing contest, only to hand the continent to a pair of foreign superpowers.

      The US came out ahead in both wars primarily because they were the last to join and the only ones to escape virtually unscathed.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          We exported fascism into Europe initially. America has a long and horrible history of fascism, straight back to the colonial era. By the early 20th century, guys like Henry Ford were quite literally churning out the textbook definition of antisemitism (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and shipping it all across the Old World, to stock the furnace of racial animus and ramp the continent up into a second world war.

          Then we harvested the remnants of fascism back into our own country after German Nazism failed. The open-borders policy extended to German military and science officers was a shocking reversal relative to our naked hostility towards Jewish refugees and other European dissidents in the run up to the wars.

          We weren’t destroyed by fascism. We were its wellspring. We sent it out abroad, like the seeds of an evil dandelion, and then we reaped what we’d sown when those seeds blossomed.