QUOTE(flash @ Wed 25th June 2008, 10:42am)
Look, the figures are easy to quote:
The US loaned $4.33bn (£2.2bn) to Britain in 1945, while Canada loaned US$1.19 bn (£607m) in 1946, at a rate of 2% annual interest.
Upon the final payments, the UK will have paid back a total of $7.5bn (£3.8bn) to the US and US$2 bn (£1bn) to Canada.
But the point is that no repayments should have been demanded of the UK for its efforts to fight the Nazis. Certainly the US had no 'need' for the money, and it is typical of the 'war is a business' attitude to see this as somehow just tidy housekeeping.
More appropriate would have been for the Allies to calculate the total costs incurred in the war, and spread them equitably. 'Equity' would have resulted in a massive transfer of wealth away from the US towards Russia and China.
Aggressive and insulting language aside, the US was a late entrant into the war, was learly motivated by calculations of self-interest, obtained global hegemony from the 'ashes' of European folly and created in the post-war period institutions to serve US not dispassionate ends.
Rude boys! Go and look up the texts of the agreements imposed on the allies! These are not egalitarain treaties, these are surrender documents. If you think the post-war consensus was so admirable, try being some of the dead peiople...
We'll discuss dead people later on.
I believe I’ve already answered the question of assistance from the US to the UK in WW II. Overall, the UK got net free assistance from the US, period. However you count it, what UK got in free money from the “Marshall Plan†more than made up for that last bit of lend-lease which they had to pay for, due to the fact that it was made in late 1945 after VE when the European war was already over. You may ask: wouldn’t it have been simpler accounting to simply erase debts from the one with the other, instead of continuing to keep the both on the books? For example where are people doing keeping an IRA retirement account large enough to pay off your mortgage, when you could (in theory) just transfer the one to the other to zero it all out? Well, for various financial reasons (some of the them the same as you and corporations have to keep loan they could in theory pay off immediately) they didn’t. Different groups of people originated and spent the money in each country, and Lend-lease and the ERP were different political acts. And there were economic incentives to keep that low interest loan on the books which I’ve already explained.
Your ad hoc theory that if you ally yourself with somebody in a war, that you should become responsible for paying all their war debts, is a novel one, but not universally accepted. The metaphor is whether or not you become responsible for the debts and children that somebody accumulates before you meet and marry them. In the real world, all such situations are matters of negociation and case-by-case. The basic answer is: you run your life that way if you like. However (just to keep the US out of the discussion) when the USSR declared war on Japan in August of 1945, do you think they thereby agreed to help China with all the war debts it had incurred from fighting Japanese incursions since 1931? Forget it.
Massive transfer of aid from the US to China and the USSR would have been fairest, you say? The US did provide a lot of aid to both countries during the war. The results are known perhaps more in the case of the USSR. For an well-written look at what happened in China I recommend Tuchman’s
Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 (Tuchman can tell a story, so she’s accurate history without being dry history). The basic problem in China is that a lot of military was less interested in fighting the Japanese, no matter what the Japanese were doing to the country, than they were in saving themselves for the internecine struggle between factions (Nationalists and Communists, as it turned out) that they knew would follow the victory over the Japanese by the US. The Chinese were quite happy to let the US shoulder the burden of fighting Japan. So the US is supposed to help groups which are interested in not fighting a common enemy, but instead each other? Mostly that giant Chinese army was nowhere to be found in WW II. Strangely, it turned up just 5 years later, being used against the US in Korea. I suppose you think that wouldn’t have happened had we sent Mao some money? Perhaps at the expense of the Nationalists, who actually WERE doing some fighting against Japan?
In the USSR, the post-war result of all the US aid is better known. The USSR took the goods, then used them to turn the Eastern Bloc into puppet states in contravention to their earlier promises (and yes, they were puppet states—it was not a symmetrical situation between East and West in Europe from 1945-89. You might ask Durova about this, LOL). For all their war damage, the USSR had enough materiel to continue beligerence against Berlin (never in their history did the USSR have a problem in choosing between guns and butter.) In such circumstances, the US was not about to further help arm a nation which was clearly using the money to build up forces opposing the US in Europe. Had the USSR behaved differently and kept the promises they’d made at Teheran and Potsdam, I think things would have been very different.
Your long list of deaths attributed to the US meddling in foreign affairs:
Sampling of Deaths From US Military Interventions & Propping Up Corrupt Dictators (using the most conservative estimates) is droll. I see, for example, a figure of 4 million for Korea, which easily exceeds the entire death toll from the Korean war. This is “US military intervention� That would be news to the U.N., which ran the campaign. All the deaths are the fault of the US, and not those of the aggressors? And the “corrupt dictators†in Korea would be those people ruling South Korea now, one supposes, and not the shining democracy which holds sway in North Korea, eh?
And so long as we’re making a list and complaining about dictators, why didn’t Stalin and Mao qualify as “corrupt dictators� Is it because you’re advocating that after WWII we should have been “propping them up†by sending them more cash, but didn’t? Suppose we had?
If numbers of deaths are what wind your clock, remember that US meddling was in the context of the cold war, and the ideological struggle between Communism and the West, in which most of the deaths were on the other side. Remember “Communismâ€? In the West, nobody was really quite sure what it was, and that wasn’t entirely our fault, since nobody else was either (Karl Marx who became Spokesman for Socialist reform in his lifetime, complained also in his own lifetime that he himself “was no Marxistâ€). But whatever the collectivist doctrine was in practice, and how it was interpreted variously (like Jimbo’s five pillars) in the USSR and China, there was one thing that was clear to the West: it killed people wherever it was applied. Stalin killed more people with a shot to the back of the head (something like 10 million) than the Nazis killed with gas (and the Nazis did kill all they are given credit for—it’s not that the “Nazi holocaust†isn’t real and as bad as advertised, it’s that the Soviet and Chinese holocausts were worse, and not as well advertised). The Nazis got the most bad press. Yet the Soviets killed another 10 million or so by starvation during farm collectivization. While the Chinese were doing this, it may have been as many as 40 million. Whatever it was, it certainly holds the record.
In the West, you mostly read about this mass die-off from Communist political ideology in the last half the 20th century, in the Reader’s Digest, reprinting articles from conservative sources. I read them growing up. The Left just didn’t talk about it, and when it did, was busy minimizing it, denying it, explaining why some of it was necessary, or else why some minor dislocations were due to the failure of the West to send more money to the USSR and China (while all the time these countries always seemed to find money to build up nuclear missile arsenals). The conservative idea was that that collectivized farming was to blame, and that starvation would stop in Communist countries, when people were allowed to grow their own produce. The Left laughed like hell at this, and called it (at best) “simplistic.†The Left always calls the Right “simplistic,†even when it is dead-on. The idea being that whatever else the Right has, it certainly isn’t the
intelligentsia.
Well, by now the books of the dead are opened. The USSR collapsed in 1991 from finally buying that last gun with the money that should have bought that last bit of butter, and the Chinese have abandoned collectivized farming and magically found they could feed themselves. Not only was the Right right about this, but it was right for the right reasons. This has never stopped the Left from complaining that the Right was using the death toll from Communism, which the Right complained loudly about, as a mere cynical smokescreen to justify US hegemony. To which I respond that it was obviously a poor smokescreen, if the Left either denied it or didn’t care about it at the time, at all (which they did not, I can tell you personally). But then, you’d expect the Right’s propaganda-tricks to be really dumb, yes? Who knew that this
one stopped-clock-being-occasionally-correct thing, would stick?
So yes, the US did many things in the Cold War period that were the lesser of two evils. We refused to sign biowarfare pacts while the Soviets wouldn’t. And it was the Soviets who made METRIC TONS of smallpox virus, not the US (we made other bioweapons, but nothing nearly that irresponsible). Yes, the US refused for many years to reneg on using tactical atomic weaponry to defend Western Europe, but with a 4000 mile supply line, there wasn’t much else it could do. Again, not a symmetrical situation. Throughout the cold war, the USSR’s paranoia was never justified, and neither was their military spending. If the West hadn’t attacked them in the late 1940’s when we had atomic weapons and they didn’t, when their industry was in ruins and ours wasn’t, then why be afraid of us? The aggression of the USSR from 1945-88 nearly spent
both East and West halves of the world into bankruptcy, and is a major reason for the decline of the US as an economic power, after 1975. You’re welcome.
Now, the US has major problems, but they are of more recent vintage, since justification for them has disappeared after the cold war. If you want to level some fairer criticism at the US and its allies (those allies being fewer each day), it will be post-cold war crticism. It won’t have anything to do with how the US (successfully) opposed global Communist expansion from 1945-89. Rather it will have to do with the US failure to recognize that since the Cold war was over after that, that it had better then rethink what it was about. But Eisenhower was right in 1960 about the military-industrial complex, and the US has basically been unable to do that, having been at “war†so long that it has forgotten how to do anything else but wage war (my posterchild for this failure to get out of old ruts, is making the former Warsaw Pact states into NATO partners (!) in this century. That’s an Alice-in-Wonderland sign of total hardening of the brain arteries in people who just cannot stop doing what they’re used to doing). But I would put that down as a < 17 year-old problem for the senile West, not a 60 year-old one. It isn’t that we didn’t fight the Good Fight; we did. It’s just that we won, and then forgot how to go home. Some of us are trying to help, but bringing up old pre-1990 issues that really are not germane, doesn’t help. You should generally be grateful for what the US and its allies did between 1942 and 1990. Without it, one of those 10’s of millions of starving people, victims of totally irrational economic thinking, might have been you.
Milton
(no, but I'll start a new post if you're still interested...)
I kid you not! The UK got $30 billion US dollars worth of stuff, with no actual obligation to pay for any of it (which, save for a tiny bit discussed below, they never did).
You're going much against the facts of history. 
but writing is a disease. I presume you're ignoring most of said posts, instead of feeling you need to read them like letters from your mother in law? 
but I don't think it's too personal to tell out-of-school. Get our your guitar and pick: