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The Washington Post reports
A simple data point offered by a college commencement speaker jumped out at [non-employee Washington Post contributor Philip Bump] before being borne away on the tide of immediacy.
[...]The speaker was ABC journalist Martha Raddatz, and the point is [...]: The graduates have spent half their lives with America at war.
It's a startling idea, but an incorrect one. The percentage is almost certainly much higher than that.
Using somewhat subjective definitions of "at war"--Korea counts but Kosovo doesn't in our analysis, for example--we endeavored to figure out how much of each person's life has been spent with America at war. We used whole years for both the age and the war, so the brief Gulf War is given a full year, and World War II includes 1941. These are estimates.
The page contains a graphic that allows you to see what portion of your lifetime the USA has been formally engaged in hostilities according to your birth year.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Interesting) by zugedneb on Monday June 22 2015, @09:33PM
Was it worth it?
Did you secure the resources you wanted?
Did you liberate the ones you wanted?
Did you bring freedom to the ones who need it?
Did you get the respect you craved for?
Did you get the gratitude you deserved?
Are you confused by the hate you recieve?
and so on...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @11:31PM
That assumes any one person had any significant control to enact even a hope of choice in the matter. Given the demographic of this site's readership, the odds are extremely good that the number of people that had a choice between war or peace was zero.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @11:42PM
You benefitted by the protections you received. Fucking ingrate.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by zugedneb on Tuesday June 23 2015, @12:00AM
Well, here is the deal: it is about you, not about us. Are you fucking satisfied?
And also, the way WW2 was handled made europe politically impotent.
And made the people today think that the entire WW2 was about the jews, so we do not understand it and hence do not understand ourselves...
Now, everyone thinks that the germans did not have problems and did not have reasons to fight for their land, people think they were just trash. They had reasons, and now, nobody knows...
Personally, I am a holocaust denier, because the actual "eye witness" stories are batshit insane, and the "suffering of jews" is to similar to the "suffering of Christ" making me think that this is all just a sort of really-human religious mass hysteria...
You should not have butted in, and wasted american life for this.
Neither the communists and the nazis were that bad, and a lot of hardship of the cold war was because US intervention. What was coming for us was our fault. We should have dealt with it, and thus gain the wisdom that should have come...
Now we are just owned by corporates and jews.
We have no honor.
Thanks...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 0, Disagree) by zugedneb on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:03AM
Yeah, thanks again...
Lemme tell you what, I have talked to "eye witnesses" myself.
Old poeple telling me, for every problem the country had, the local population took the burden, got impoverished, while at the same time, jewish businesses opened up. Yeah... All the gold and paintings the jews claim the nazis "stole" from them, they did dig it up themselves and painted themselves, yes?
With every problem in a country, the jews tried to get more hold of the government, and the trade...
They did whatever they could to keep the locals defunct in their own country.
Also, as the story goes, some native trade families converted to judaism, to have access to the jewish network, leaving the burden on others, to fight the church and the aristocrats...
The nazis were a breath of fresh air. They were about to clean up the parasites and the traitors.
Fucking thank you USA for your intervention...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:52AM
I can empathize with your frustration over people's ignorance. Germany had legitimate greviances against much of Europe, especially France. There isn't one American in a thousand that understands that, and there probably aren't very many more Euros who understand that.
But, denying the holocaust? You lose me with that, Pal. I can forgive or pardon the average German for all of that, because Fritz Average had no more knowledge or power over the "Final Solution" than I have over my government's actions. It was the Nazi Party that was responsible for the "Final Solution", the party's officers, not the general population.
You are aware that Adolph was judged by many of his contemporaries to be insane? The charismatic crazy man who attracted a lot of other charismatic crazies to his cause, did some very crazy things.
The world is better off without him, and without his party. Anyone who argues that is probably filled with hatred, and I'm not going to waste time arguing with him.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dry on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:56AM
What saddens me about the whole holocaust thing is that now it is only about the Jews. Their were well over a million Roma killed and they never got a homeland and are still treated like shit in parts of E Europe and not much better anywhere else. Then of course there were the others, homosexuals, the crippled including in the mind, and so on.
(Score: 3, Informative) by AnonTechie on Tuesday June 23 2015, @07:55AM
What about the 20 Million Russians who died in World War II ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union [wikipedia.org]
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:56PM
I honestly have NOT forgotten the Russians. Russia has just recently completed their Memorial Day observances, complete with the parades in Red Square. I "observed" a lot of that on Russian Times. The commentary posted to the articles was often embarrassing - US people posted a lot of hateful crap, and some Euros did as well. For my part, I posted little, and what I posted was respectful.
As bad as my kinfolk had it during WW2 (mostly in the Pacific, fighting Japanese) it doesn't hold a candle to ten divisions sweeping across the homeland, and placing the capital under seige.
And, of course, the Chinese didn't have it any better.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:16PM
Jews constituted about half of the victims, using one definition. Using the broadest definition, many more non-Jewish victims died in the Holocaust. It is a human tragedy, but due to the political and PR efforts of Jews in the United States it has come to be regarded as a solely Jewish event. Political Science professor Norman Finkelstein [amazon.com] has written several well-documented books on how the Holocaust has been used to gain money and power.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:37PM
This is a good point that I suspect will get lost because of the second part of your post. The Germans did have problems. Severe ones. They were starving, broke, humiliated. Their country was in chaos, all of it the result of a world war that they were no more culpable for than had been the British, French, Russians, or Americans. They are a cultured, intelligent, vigorous people who knew they did not deserve what they got. The process through which they became Nazi Germany is a complex one that is very, very important for any democracy to understand because it can and is happening to many other democracies now.
I only began to understand that larger context when I saw "Triumph of the Will" on Netflix, because I never got the German side of the tale, having grown up in America where the historical narrative is entirely dominated by self-interested parties. I didn't even get the German side of the story when I lived in Germany, because the people there are so cowed by the manufactured "reality" of how it all went down. But when you hear what the Nazis had to say for themselves, it all suddenly becomes a lot more complicated, a lot less cartoonish and one dimensional. They had a plan. They wanted to make Germany strong again. They wanted to conquer the evil forces they perceived as having unjustly destroyed and humiliated them. They were serious and determined about it.
That's something that we can all see in ourselves, and see ourselves getting behind as a national plan in our own countries. It is something not a few of us nations are getting behind now as we speak. It is very easy to cross the line from that reasonable and in many ways laudable national project into repression, attrocity, and catastrophe. That's the ominous lesson in it: we can all become, and some are becoming, Nazis.
So the whole historical narrative of the Nazis as cartoon cutout bad guys is false and dangerous. They were as human as we are. Repeating the manufactured caricature of them is a business and a scam and utterly, despicably, self-serving.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @11:51PM
You're lucky to be here. If it wasn't for the US to keep your ass from getting ethnic cleansed out of existence, and all that other horrific stuff you europeans do to each other when someone isn't making you play nice with others.
(Score: 2) by zugedneb on Tuesday June 23 2015, @12:24AM
I think, the peace, and the coming peace is no thanks to any nation, it is simply thanks to the technological and medical advancements.
Despite some issues inspiring a "gloomy mood", life is becoming pretty comfotable, and hence, the general population is not so keen on war.
But, we are the same people as we were before, and without the comfort, the cleansing would have been cyclic and inevitable.
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday June 22 2015, @11:55PM
Calm down, Vlad. We're pretty pissed at our government too.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:13AM
Millions of innocents have died, many times more have been forced to live in poverty and under oppressive rule as a result of US aggression-- but the rich have become fabulously richer. The former doesn't matter to the classes that initiate wars, only the latter, so 100% success.