Conservapedia talk:World History Lecture Twelve

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Glad to know the Americans won D-Day without any help and that Paton won the war....Can't this idiot be stopped calling himself a teacher? Mick McT 16:46, 27 August 2008 (EDT)

Bitch Patton want to liberate ALL OF EUROPE, Oly to be held back by the government! nevermind that there was an agreement that beyond a certain point was soviet land anyways!--il'Dictator Mikalosa (talk) 23:06, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

my favorite line[edit]

is where WW2 was the most important effecting war. None of those OTHER wars back in the day like the Greece-persian wars, any of the mongol, any of the roman wars, the roman civil... the 100 years, the first ww (which set the stage for WW2), any OTHER ancient/med/early modern/modern war. Nope, WW2 was the most important for world events.--Mikalosa (talk) 22:18, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Minor point regarding codes[edit]

You write: "In theory, any code can be broken".

That is not true. A code based on a one time pad can be mathematically proven to be unbreakable. MDB (talk) 14:12, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

My apologies; that's my crude lack of knowledge on code-breaking rearing its head. I'll amend accordingly. Thanks! Ironclad (talk) 14:56, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

On the atomic bomb[edit]

I like your take on the atomic bomb, and it's pretty much identical to the one I've long held myself. I called it a "tragic necessity" -- it was a horrible thing to do, but the alternatives were ever worse. MDB (talk) 13:08, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Right. I'm not defending Truman's decision. Merely acknowledging that it was a ghastly set of options to choose from. Ironclad (talk) 15:22, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Alan Turing[edit]

Err, your line is 'Turing's contribution cannot be understated' - surely that should be 'cannot be overstated' ? (good work though, very thorough :) Worm (talk) 13:46, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

1898[edit]

I know this is minor, but you said the Spanish-American War was in 1896 when it was actually in 1898. Supyloco (talk) 04:22, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Stuff about the A-Bomb[edit]

The vast majority that is written here about the a-bomb is excellent, nay, stellar. However despite it sounding plausible there isn't really a lot of evidence to back the idea that racism played any part in the decision to drop the bomb on them, we would have been perfectly willing to drop the bomb on the Germans, after all we did to their cities exactly what we did to the Japanese cities with no exceptions-- we burnt them to smithereens with incendiary bombs. Despite the racist anti-Japanese propaganda we promoted in the war when it came to dealing out war crimes our treatment of the Germans and the Japanese was as far as I can remember, rather evenhanded, discounting the bomb. We flattened every single major city in Germany and Japan (with few exceptions in both countries, well sort of, sometimes non-strategic cities were targeted with only light bombing). By the time we had tested the bomb the Germans had already surrendered. Using a bomb on them late in the war would have been rather pointless since they were pretty much doomed by 1944 and dropping the bomb in Germany really would have been a useless gesture with the sole and very obvious aim of intimidating the Soviets. It is worth noting that I have indeed read Truman biography and in it he is described as being given the choice between an extremely bloody invasion and using the bomb and indeed the choice was presented to him in a very stark way as the author stated, he was told he could end the war by taking two hundred thousand lives instantly or millions in a long drawn out conflict. I read it a while ago but if I recall correctly according to the biographer neither he nor most of his advisers nor most of the Military took the idea that Japanese were going to surrender (without them being first directly invaded or nuked) seriously. Alsto003 (talk) 01:51, 17 January 2015 (UTC) Alex

Questions about internment[edit]

There were a couple non-racist reasons why German and Italian Americans weren't interred or even given a hard time. Germans in particular have a very long history in this country, though until the first world war they didn't assimilate all that easily. German Americans came to this country at all points in its history starting in the colonial period; a huge number of German Republicans came over in the middle of the 19th century (after the failed revolutions of 1848), around the same time as the Irish, so many had been in the country for a while when the war started. Aside from it being impossible to inter a fifth or even a tenth of of the population the Germans were considered "relatively" loyal, largely because they had been extremely aggressively assimilated during the short time in which we were in the first world war (for example in 1919 Nebraska passed a law banning the instruction of children in any other language but English in public settings (and also in private settings as well), it was targeted towards Germans (the status of Native Americans in US law was and still is bizarre but their language rights at the time were already restricted in tribal schools, though not elsewhere, as a matter of federal policy) and it was challenged in court by German descended teacher Robert T. Meyer, and in 1923 the Supreme Court ruled the entire law unconstitutional in the decision Meyer v. Nebraska on the grounds that it violated the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment) and since most of the people who had immigrated from Germany since the 1930s were recent immigrants who were escaping the Nazis it made little sense to accuse them of anything. The Italians were never considered much of a threat simply because Italy's participation in the war was not only comically inept but also deeply unpopular among a sizable number of Italians, a fact that was known to many Italian Americans. The last and by far the most important fact you have to remember when considering why the US didn't intern Germans and Italians is that German and Italian Americans were and still are far more numerous in this country than Japanese Americans, the combined number of people in this country who are of Italian or German descent is around 67 million (about fifty million German and 17 million Italian Americans) or a fifth of the current population of the United States. By my knowledge the proportion was similar when the war started and simply put, it would have completely impossible and insanely counterproductive to inter a fifth or a sixth of the population (and depopulating vast stretches of the Midwest while doing so) during wartime. Alsto003 (talk) 04:26, 17 January 2015 (UTC) Alex

Historical Error about the Winter War[edit]

Finland and Germany only became allies after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Alsto003 (talk) 18:17, 6 May 2015 (UTC) Alex