You’re the one trotting out a simplistic black and white vision as if anything about any part of history is or can ever be explained in such terms. History is always much more complicated than our ideological biases would like.
There’s zero context in your comment. It’s just as biased as the meme is. You’re blithely glossing over the much larger historical context of WW2 and why the US was there in the first place, and you’re eliding the rather obvious fact that a sizable majority of Koreans were opposed to the attempted communist takeover in the first place.
The salient fact about the 2nd half of the 20th century, that is routinely ignored by Lemmy’s tankies, is that the men guiding US foreign policy had survived the largest war in human history and were absolutely and legitimately terrified that there would be another even worse war in the very near future if they didn’t do everything they could to prevent the kind of runaway imperialism seen in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Furthermore, these men knew for a fact --as even Lemmy’s tankies will admit-- that communism by design and by doctrine can only come to its final stage in a globally hegemonic system. If you honestly believed, as they clearly did, that fighting a war in Korea --which after all had been liberated from Imperial Japan by the US-- was part of a much larger strategy to contain communism and thereby prevent a 3rd world war, you would feel yourself morally obliged to do it.
We can argue about whether or not they were correct in their beliefs, but we can’t simply condemn them as evil imperialists. That’s just stupid reductionist bullshit. Reality is always much more complicated than simple black and white “my team good, your team bad.”
Just a slight correction; something like 60 percent of modern Israelis are Mizrahi, meaning they are from the Middle East and have no European ancestry or connection to Europe. Ethnically they are very similar to the Palestinians and if you put them together in a mixed group, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell them apart based on appearance alone.
There’s also no reason to think that Mizrahi Jews aren’t largely descended from the ancient Jewish population since wherever they’ve lived in the Middle East, they’ve never been fully integrated and have always been pretty insular. Most scholars think that the same is true to a lesser extent of Ashkenazi Jews as well, though obviously they have a lot more European ancestry.
Dang! Bill Westlake no less! Me and Bill Westlake fist-fought each other in junior high school and again shortly after we’d both graduated from highschool in our shitty northern California ag-town.
We hated each other back then, but I feel nothing but brotherly feels for him now, 30 years later.
I hope you are thriving Bill Westlake. I hope you have done well in life and I feel no animosity toward you whatsoever.
I once got a temporary ban from one of the larger subreddits for calling someone a nincompoop. It was considered “abusive” language. At least that’s what the mods said. I suspect it was more to do with me having an unpopular opinion though obviously I can’t prove it.
Some ridiculous percentage of all currently publishing novelists in the US have an MFA in literature or creative writing or something similar. If this makes you feel a little suspicious about how the publishing industry actually works, it should. It’s very much a closed ecosystem that’s all about recycling the tried and true and that is highly risk averse in terms of straying from the norm. This is why it’s almost impossible for “regular” people to get a novel published unless they self-publish.
I know a pair of brothers named James and Timothy and Jimothy is of course their collective name. Always has been. How could it not be?Also Jimmy and Timmy.