Mitch McConnell: We Cannot Repeat the Mistakes of the 1930s

14 points by vwoolf 1 year ago | 23 comments
  • wumeow 1 year ago
    > Some vocal corners of the American right are trying to resurrect the discredited brand of prewar isolationism and deny the basic value of the alliance system that has kept the postwar peace.

    By “some on the right “ you mean your presidential candidate and most of your party.

    • rayiner 1 year ago
      Not to mention most liberals until five minutes ago. If you had told me twenty years ago that supposed democrats were agreeing with Mitch McConnell and acting out Team America World Police, I wouldn’t have believed you. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372588/.
      • dctoedt 1 year ago
        > Not to mention most liberals until five minutes ago.

        Some fringe leftists are isolationists, to be sure. Liberals? No.

        • rayiner 1 year ago
          The mainstream liberal position back when I was a Democrat is that America’s policing of the world was a bad thing. The movie “Team America: World Police” reflected the sentiment of Jon Stewart watching younger Democrats. Stanning for NATO and “our allies” was for evil neocons like Bush and Cheney.
    • vwoolf 1 year ago
      https://archive.ph/Xgf9R
      • hi-v-rocknroll 1 year ago
        Perhaps he's hoping for something extra from the defense contractor lobby or that America should return to policies neocolonial Monroe Doctrine with CIA coups, but this time claim Africa, and get ourself involved in more wars.

        Going neocon agro W-style won't improve America's geopolitical status. Maybe he's having trouble coming to terms with China rivaling America's economic power and military projection that vaguely resembles what America did, albeit more flagrantly aggressively.

        • chaorace 1 year ago
          Fun fact: Mitch McConnell was born in 1942
          • 1 year ago
            • mmaniac 1 year ago
              Peace? What are you, some kind of Nazi?
              • rayiner 1 year ago
                This is fallacious neocon reasoning. Countries are always looking to expand their borders, for many reasons. Few of them are Nazi Germany. What Russia is doing now is much closer to what Bismarck did in unifying Germany or Garibaldi did in unifying Italy. Or what Iraq tried to do with Kuwait.

                Would it have been justified for Europe to intervene militarily when the US wrested California and Texas from Mexico? Maybe or maybe not, but it certainly wasn’t the first step in the US taking over the world.

                • FuckButtons 1 year ago
                  No, it’s nothing like German or Italian unification. That’s ahistorical nonsense.

                  In both of those cases there had been decades of nation wide, protests, insurrections and guerilla movements in favor of creating a sovereign nation to prevent domination by foreign powers, Austria in the case of Italy and France in the wake of napoleon for the minor German states.

                  In Ukraine there has been a decades of nation wide protests insurrections and guerrilla movements in favor of creating a sovereign Ukrainian nation so that they will no longer be dominated by Russia.

                  Putin is not garibaldi, he is not unifying a people who have shown they want to be part of some wider national project, he is an imperialist.

                  • rayiner 1 year ago
                    You think Germans and Italians all wanted to be part of a single nation? Bismarck and Garibaldi marched with armies. So did the U.S. You think Mexicans wanted to be part of the U.S.?

                    Putin obviously has expansionist aims. But regional expansionism is widespread, and rarely something countries on the other side of the world need to be involved with. Kuwait certainly didn’t want to be part of Iraq, but that wasn’t any of our business either. Same for South Korea and south Vietnam.

                  • mpalmer 1 year ago
                    As long as we're talking about fallacious rhetoric, you set the bar at a country having to "be" Nazi Germany, instead of just having similar expansionist goals.

                    You avoid mentioning NATO and the reasons Putin views it as a threat, probably because it would undercut your claim that there are no worthwhile parallels to WWII here.

                    • rayiner 1 year ago
                      My point is that “Nazi germany” is a small subset of “expansionism” and the latter is widespread and mostly none of our business. Borders shift. It’s not America’s job to police whatever borders happened to exist at some arbitrary point in time all over the world.
                      • mpalmer 1 year ago
                        > [expansionism] is widespread and mostly none of our business.

                        I know you understand how alliances work, so I'm really fascinated that thus far you appear to be studiously avoiding mention of the most consequential alliance in history, one which happens to have significant bearing on US involvement in the war in Ukraine.