Quote:
Originally Posted by redsocialist
(Post 1597293)
Here's a nice video that compiles most (It's in 2 parts)
If you don't think its true and this is "anti-american propaganda" then look up each event yourself
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I'm already familiar with many of those events, and that video is about as warped and biased as it can get. Since you obviously know nothing I'll explain it to you.
He jumps from event to event and blames them all on "Americans", starting with the Spanish invasion of South and Cental America, which had nothing to do with British "Americans". Those "Americans" didn't even exist for another 300 years.
He then jumps all the way to 1846, and the Mexican-American war. Santa Ana couldn't get anybody to live in Texas, so he farmed it out to Steven Austin and his slave-trading followers. Bad? Yes, but nothing to do with what he describes in the video. By 1832 the population of Texas was mostly "Anglos", and they decided they wanted to become an independent state. Santa Ana, said "No", and they went to war. In 1836 they won their independence, and that was that. In 1845, with Sam Houston as president, they decided to petition the US for statehood. That was too much for Santa Ana, and he told the US that if the congress granted statehood to Texas it would mean war with Mexico.
The British and French warned us not to do it, because at that time Mexico had the finest Napoleonic army on the planet. We did it anyway, and I won't go into all the reasons why we won, but we did. We took Texas, and California to boot. The US congress wanted to take all of Mexico, and the Mexican congress actually thought that was a good idea, but President Polk said "No, not gonna happen."
Bottom line: The United States didn't start that war, Santa Ana did, and what the guys says in the video is an outright perversion of the actual events.
The Philippines: It can be argued that we started the war with Spain, but even that is debatable. Spain owned the Philipines and Cuba, and we took them both. And guess what? We granted them independence. Both were friendly to America through the majority of the 20th Century.
A lot of the things he refers to after that are true, and we have made the mistake many times of supporting a dictator because he suited somebody's agenda. We are indeed indirectly responsible for the atrocities commited by those people, and in some cases directly responsible. That said, at least we have a system that allows us to question the activities of our own government, which is more than any Soviet or Arabic state can say.
The Soviet Union under Stalin killed more people in the World War Two years than the United States has killed in our entire history. That's what August meant by "bloodthirsty".
