Even WWII “only” claimed something like 80 million lives.
I think it would be tough for any global war to kill a billion+. Maybe a full-size nuclear exchange between superpowers.
Over 80 years you can kill a shitload of people in wars.
And as populations grow and technology improves, those numbers just get bigger.
We’re at 7.6 billion vs 2.3 billion of WW2. So assuming the same rate of deaths (which kind of assumes massive technological stagnation), you’d be pushing 300 million in a similar war. The difference between WW1 and WW2 is a factor of 5 or so. If we’re modest and say we’re only 3 times as efficient at killing people after 70+ years, you’d be pushing 1 billion pretty quick.
Add in nukes of course and you can wipe out 7.5 billion or more, but even without them I think after 2-3 more WW2-like wars you’d easily top a billion.
How many world wars are you supposing would have happened in the last 80 years without America?
One or two almost certainly. Or maybe WW2 wouldn’t have ended and the Soviets would’ve pushed on through Germany and taken all of Europe who couldn’t have stopped them.
Well, if the Soviets had conquered Europe, they wouldn’t have had to kill more than a few million people to do it, I suspect.
Let’s just say I think your what-if numbers smell pretty high, but I don’t have time to debate this in further detail.
Is the US the good guy?
Yes. Obviously.
The US has had largely unequalled military might, for a few decades now.
Every other time in human history, when a nation had that, they used it to take over other nations. The US has not done that.
Remove the US from the equation, and try to imagine what the world would look like.
Either you have another country, like the Soviets, in that position of having unparalleled military might. If the US didn’t exist to counter them, do you think that they would have just sat back and done nothing? Lol no. They would have rolled through Europe, then the rest of the world.
Or imagine that you had no country with major dominance. Then what do you get? You get shooting wars all over.
Without the US, China would have expanded their control over all of Eastern Asia.
The US has the most powerful military in the history of the human species, and didn’t use it to take over the world. The US, for the most part, just used it’s military to try and keep stability. Even the military engagements were done in order to try and preserve stability.
Every other time in human history, when a nation had that, they used it to take over other nations. The US has not done that.
Because we didn’t want either Canada or Mexico, and taking over non-adjacent nations is logistically infeasible. That’s why we used our military might to bully small nations into installing puppet governments instead.
Also, Iraq. Yeah, we gave it back once we were done despoiling it. Hooray us.
So, I think what we are getting at here is that America are the Cops.
Nobody really loves the cops, except the cops and those close to them.
They do a lot of stuff that people really don’t like, but they also step in when they are needed (and sometimes with a bit more force than necessary)
But without any cops, things would be demonstrably worse. So, we are stuck with them.
That’s frightening correct.
Also, the cops and our military have the same guns now.
Damn Jon, you just won the thread.
90 replies and nobody’s posted this yet.
Edit: Damn Gordon beat me to it.
Oh Mike Stone’s commentary on the movie is worth quoting (from wiki)
Because that’s the thing that we realized when we were making the movie. It was always the hardest thing. We wanted to deal with this emotion of being hated as an American. That was the thing that was intriguing to us, and having Gary the main character deal with that emotion. And so, him becoming ashamed to be a part of Team America and being ashamed of himself, he comes to realize that, just as he got his brother killed by gorillas—he didn’t kill his brother; he wasn’t a dick, he wasn’t an asshole—so too does America have this role in the world as a dick. Cops are dicks, you fucking hate cops, but you need 'em
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I didn’t even think of that movie when I wrote that, but totally! That is where that is from.
I just had Gary’s journey. (with considerably less puppet sex)
That was such a great movie.
Uhhhh … we did want Canada and parts of Mexico, and went to war over it in both cases. It didn’t work with Canada (War of 1812) but did with Mexico (The War with Mexico, 1846, as a result of which we got New Mexico and California.)
A lot of the “we’ve always been noble and pure and always acted from the best of motives” mindset is based less on history and more on the long-standing efforts by the designers of school curricula to not teach anyone in this country about the times we were selfish bastards, just like everybody else.
The US wasn’t the super power it is today though at those points.
The point is that after WWII, the US had the power to basically level a country, but used that power primarilly for stabilization.
Team America: World Police is frighteningly prescient (North Korea as the Big Baddy? C’mon!) and sharply satirical, in the classic sense of the word. Pretty much everything they do is a pointed jab at what they see as wrong with the USA.
Or, alternately, primarily to benefit ourselves. Which happened to (mostly) involve stabilization. Unless you’re Chile. Or Eygpt. Or Iran. Or…
We sure stabilized the living shit out of Iraq.
And yes, I should have said that we didn’t want any more of Mexico.
Also, saying that “I could have burned that building down with everyone inside it, and I didn’t,” doesn’t mean that my beating people up and stealing their lunch money is the act of a good guy.
In fact, stacking tins of gasoline next to your house and talking about how fast hundred-year-old wood burns isn’t really the act of a good guy either.
But that was in fact the goal. The GOAL in iraq, in 1991, was to prevent Iraq from taking over Kuwait. And later, to prevent Iraq from having nuclear weapons which would immensely destabilize the region.
The result was bad, but I don’t believe the goal was nefarious.
I also feel the need to point out that the Baathist regime in Iraq was absolutely monstrous.
Iraq actually serves as an example of exactly how the US is the good guy, by illustrating our restraint in application of military power.
If the US simply wanted to win the conflict, we could have done so almost trivially… we could have just leveled cities, and killed civilians indiscriminately. That’s what other military powers have done in the past. That’s what Russia did when dealing with insurgencies. The vast, vast majority of civilian death and hardship in Iraq was not caused by the US, but by the insurgent and terrorist forces that rose up in the aftermath. And while I’m willing to accept responsibility for creating that environment, the reality is that the only reason those forces were really effective at all is purely because the US actually cared about the civilian population.
The Iraq fiasco was a mess, but it wasn’t an illustration of the US being evil, not by a longshot.