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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7400770" data-attributes="member: 4937">At this point, you are just making yourself look bad, especially since you are engaged in erratic uncontrolled blue on blue fire.   But fine, if you want to get into a who knows more about WWII than the other one debate, I'm game.  Almost all great wars are fought over ideology, and WWII is no different.  First, as you would well know, WW2 was not a single war.  It was a series of colonial wars that merged together over time as the great powers of the day were drawn into it.   There were five major participants and many minor participants and not every participant was even fighting the same war.   Of the major participants,  Germany had colonial and imperial ambitions in Europe, but really over the entire world.  Part of that was the chip on the shoulder Germany had from its late unification compared to England or France, and the fact that it's central position in Europe meant that it didn't have easy ocean access to the rest of the world.  Part of that was the crushing of Germany's imperial ambitions in WWI.  Italy was a mid-sized participant and also got late to the colonial party again because of its late unification compared to England and France.  Japan on the other side of the world had its own colonial ambitions, because it had a chip on its shoulder owing to discovering that the barbarians it had dismissed, had outpaced it technologically beyond its ability to imagine while it was in isolation and its own identity as one of if not the great nation of the world was in serious jeopardy.  And meanwhile, Russia acting as the Soviet Empire, was engaged in a slightly novel ideologically driven colonial and imperial expansion.That ideological novelty was however central to how WWII would play out.  The five great powers could be and were aligned in two manners.  Those that saw the word 'nation' primarily in its classical definition as what we would now call an ethnic group.   In the minds of Germany and Japan there was fundamentally no difference between the nation the political entity and the nation the ethnic identity.   Furthermore, it was inconceivable to them that nations could be arranged in really any other way.   To them, the powers of Russia, Great Britain, and most especially the truly bizarre United States were mongrel nations made of an unhappy blend of many other lesser nations.   To varying degrees, Russia, Great Britain and the United States on the other hand had adopted a view of the world that a political entity could transcend the traditional idea of nation, and that a nation could be united not be shared ethnic identity but primarily by a shared ideology to create a sort of super-nation.  While the notion of empire, multiple nations united under one sovereign was very old, these three nations had really taken it further than that.   Of the three, the United States was the least like any empire that had gone before, and the most willing to transcend racial identity completely provided you accepted the basic cultural values that the United States was founded on it.Ultimately, both sides saw the other side as an existential threat.  These super-empires would eventually in their minds gobble up all the worlds land, homogenize it underneath their cultural identity and eventually destroy any traditional national identity in their way.   To leaders in Germany and Japan this result was unthinkable, and it required them conquering a vast area to secure the resources they felt they need to protect their ethnic identity from cultural and racial pollution and relegation to second class status.  And in the minds of the leaders of Germany and Japan, the fact that they had ethnic and racial purity, and ethnic and racial supremacy meant that they could overcome the racially inferior mongrel nations that would oppose them.   At that level, WW2 was fundamentally testing whether racially diverse nations united by a common ideology could successfully oppose nations organized by more traditional means.   Hitler, on the basis of his ideological views, actually completely dismissed the potential economic, technological might of the USA despite the fact that it was actually the largest single homogenous culture the world had ever seen to that point, simply because in his mind moral resolve and unity of purpose could not possibly stem from an ethnically diverse people - a people that in his mind couldn't really be called a nation at all.None of this has really anything to do with your fever imaginings except that as a matter of actual fact, the USA had been settled by diverse European immigrants many of whom did not like each other and held prejudices against each other back in the old country and had by that time fought a great war to settle the question for itself whether a nation so composed and found could long endure, and whether people so diverse could be a single nation.  None of this has anything at all to do with my opinions regarding the modern immigration debate which are probably closer to yours than you imagine, much as just at the moment I'm guessing we have very very different reasons behind those opinions.  But some people you can't actually get to open their eyes and avoid running into a brick wall no matter how much you warn them.  Leaving all that aside, I'll just come out and say it because it seems likely we are going to get locked down now.  It seemed pretty obvious to me that this thread was to some extent conceived as a protest of the very things you are here protesting.   Only the OP is a lot more diplomatic, charitable, and thoughtful than you are here presenting yourself.   To me it seemed like a cannon blast against the very ideology that annoys you, because it was an attempt to make the trouble makers live up to their own rules, something that I've repeatedly stated that they cannot in fact do because their rules as hypocritical and self-contradictory and they cannot themselves outline them because they are subjective, and I will say again racist.   This seemed to be the premise behind the OPs challenge in the title of the thread.</blockquote>

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