@Setanta,
Quote:When you refer to the Japanese as Japs, i don't have to read minds, you make it plain. People in 1941 called the Chinese Chinks, do you think that's OK? People in 1941 call black people n*ggers, is that OK with you? Racist creep.
I have little doubt that you like to think of yourself as a sober, reflective, objective, critical thinker. But the nature of your illogical and emotional outbursts betrays you, I'm afraid.
Quote:Your "knowledge" of history is on a par with your cultural sensitivity. Isolationism doesn't make people either cowards or militarily incompetent, you idiot. People in 1941 called the Japanese "Japs" because they were racist idiots--like you
If you want to talk about racism in 1941, then you should learn some history yourself. One historian after another after another will tell you that the Japanese considered themselves to be vastly superior, racially and culturally, to Americans in every way. It was THAT hubris that gave them the audacity to attack America.
They knew they could not compete with the USA in any prolonged war. They knew that, materially, it was a lost cause--they simply couldn't compete on that plane. But, they thought their will and warrior spirit would carry them over what they considered to be the spoiled, effete, pacifist cultural mongrels in America. As John Dower noted, in Japanese dogma:
Quote:all Westerners were assumed to be selfish and egoistic, and incapable of mobilizing for a long fight in a distant place. All the “Western” values which Japanese ideologues and militarists had been condemning since the 1930s, after all, were attacked because they were said to sap the nation’s strength and collective will. It was assumed that the United States war effort would be undercut by any number of debilitating forces endemic to contemporary America’s isolationist sentiment, labor agitation, racial strife, political factionalism, capitalistic or “plutocratic” profiteering, and so on
Japanese illusions about “American decadence and effeteness and their failure to appreciate [America’s] self-confidence and absolutist view of war rooted in the liberal tradition,” observes Richard Betts, “facilitated the miscalculation that Washington would make the cost-benefit calculations Tokyo hoped: accept limited war and sue for peace after severe initial setbacks and the establishment of a Japanese perimeter in the Pacific that would be costly to crack.”
Your grandiose sense of self-importance and your view of yourself as virtually omniscient leads you down some blind alleys.
