Don’t believe the Jimmy Carter revisionists

JNS ^ | 26 Mar 2023 | Jonathan Tobin

[South Dakota]

Carter’s greatest mistake.
Building a truck assembly factory for the Russian’s...which they used to invade Afghanistan

[Zhang Fei]

[Re8, how Truman avoided war crimes is beyond me. Nuking 2 large Japanese cities and murderng over 100,000 civilians in an instance is beyond pale. I know the japs attached without warning and millions died in the conflagration, but ro nuke 2 cities is beyond reproach.]

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There are many reasons to criticize Truman, but the use of nukes on Japan is actually his saving grace. All over the empire, Japanese forces were already starving the natives by taking food from them at gunpoint. Every day Japanese defeat was delayed, deaths by starvation crept higher. In Japanese-occupied Vietnam alone, estimates of death by starvation range from 1,000 to 5,000 a day in 1945.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_famine_of_1945

Anti-nuke activists tend to oversell the atomic bombings as some unique atrocity. Fact conventional attacks on German cities killed more civilians than attacks on Japan in total. And conventional attacks on Japan killed more civilians than the A-bombs. In a single day’s work, 100,000 residents of Tokyo were incinerated, under FDR, who also approved the bombings the caused the majority of WW2 deaths in German and Japanese cities.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945)

Fact is the Japanese and the Germans bombed cities to the limits of their ability. Allied reciprocity under FDR and Truman was just their acknowledgement that under total war conditions, where civilian inputs fed an industrialized war machine that turned the flower of Allied youth into ground meat, enemy cities had to be denuded of their civilian populations. That this assumption was implicit rather than overt speaks well of American mores - that even a necessary course of action is shrouded in taboo.

[Segovia]

Gee, wonder where that old saw, “war is hell” came from? Some people want to make wars so pleasant that we always want to be involved in one.

[Segovia]

Agree 10000%! That SoB is the guy that destroyed the Republic that our Founders bequeathed us!

[euram]

You’ve posted the same oddball response before. Maybe it’s time to get some new material.

[Nifster]

Yeah because the Iran debacle and twenty percent rates on home loans was just so friggin great

[Nifster]

Jim meh made Bill Clinton possible

I give her m no credit

[Nifster]

That’s awesome

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Just this one thing: during his presidency, five nations entered the Soviet communist sphere.

[Robert A Cook PE]

I’ve never read that side of the argument (the argument that advocates for NOT supporting Chinese Nationalists, which argues FOR “supporting Chinese Communist interests” ).

But.

The presence of specific individuals supporting the Communist Chinese very high in the US State Dept and the White House between 1942 and 1956-58 is very evident in the results.

[cowboyusa]

The North and South would have fought Civil War, after Civil War. See Henry Turteldove

[cowboyusa]

Carter was bad, but to be fair, a lot of problems Were not his fault. LBJ and Nixon were far worse. Nixon should have been Impeached for taking us off the Gold Standard.

[cowboyusa]

If Jackson had been President the War would have been over in 3 months, and all it's leaders hung. Lincoln deserves blame for all his terrible General Decisions.

[FLT-bird]

The North and South would have fought Civil War, after Civil War. See Henry Turteldove

Like the US and Canada have?

[cowboyusa]

Different countries. The Wars would have been over the West. The 1st Civil War itself WAS over the West.

[FLT-bird]

Different countries. The Wars would have been over the West. The 1st Civil War itself WAS over the West.

The US and Canada had western territory that did not have a boundary and about which they had overlapping claims. They managed to resolve it peacefully. When the Southern states seceded, they made no claim to the Western territory of the US. There is simply no reason why they could not or would not have managed to live peacefully just as Canada and the US largely did. I reject Turtledove's little fantasies.

[Paal Gulli]

Carter taught the Muhammadans that they could influence US foreign policy by putting a small group of American captives on TV and threatening to do them harm.

Do not underestimate how much the lesson of the Iranian Hostage Crisis influences the actions of Islamo-Terrorists to this day.

[cowboyusa]

The Confederacy wanted the West to expand Slavery into the territories. Republicans wanted to ban Slavery from the Territories. More free States in the Territories put the South into a permanent minority position. That is what the War was about.

[cowboyusa]

Also, It was the WESTERN Union Armies that brought the War to an end.

[FLT-bird]

The Confederacy wanted the West to expand Slavery into the territories. Republicans wanted to ban Slavery from the Territories. More free States in the Territories put the South into a permanent minority position. That is what the War was about.

The Confederacy was perfectly happy to go its separate way without ever claiming the western territories of the US. The only reason the Southern states (not the Confederacy) wanted to expand in the West was they needed votes in the Senate to keep the Northern states from ramming through economic legislation that was very harmful to the Southern states. Once they were out, once they had left, they no longer needed votes in the Senate. Thus they were perfectly fine with simply leaving and letting the Northern states keep all the Western territory.