The post that was quoted here has been removedBritian is awesome!
Britian fought against Hilter when victory was far from certain and Hitler was pleading for a truce.
America also fought, at great cost, but with America joining the fight, victory was only a matter of time. As Americans, we tend to feel proud of our contribution, but we almost cannot imagine the anxiety the British must have felt throughout 1940 and 1941 and yet they didn't back down.
Who knows? If Britain had sat out between 1939 and the end of 1941, perhaps it would have been too late for the allies to win even with America.
Not trying to bash America at all, but just thought I'd give props to GB.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/realclearpolitics/20070105/cm_rcp/breaking_the_hold_of_hegemonis
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This is not a speculative question either. The current situation is a carbon copy of that facing the U.S. in the spring of 1975, when this country ran out on our Southeast Asian allies in general, and South Vietnam in particular. In mid-April 1975 (I believe the date was the 15th, but I'm not absolutely certain) Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times' Cambodia correspondent, published an op-ed giving a seasoned reporter's view as to what would happen in the region now that the U.S. was out. Simply put, a blanket of peace not witnessed since Eden would descend across Southeast Asia. With the U.S. gone, all hostilities and violence would cease. The locals, peaceful folk all, would pick up the threads of their lives and, unmolested by arrogant Yankees, would create a society that would act as a shining example to the world at large, Americans in particular.
This is hegemonist doctrine in almost chemically pure form. The U.S. as a demon among nations, violence and depravity the sole results of its policies. The only such actor on the world stage, with all other nations serving as victims, with no course open to them beyond reacting to American provocations. With the U.S. removed from the equation, the world will then immediately right itself and roll on with not a single problem, conundrum, or challenge - at least not that any American need pay attention to. This was the doctrine as it stood in 1975, and if Nancy Pelosi's recent remark that, "If we leave Iraq, then the insurgents will leave Iraq, the terrorists will leave Iraq," is any indication, it has not changed in a single particular in the thirty years since.
So much for the hegemonist vision. As for the real world... Even as Schanberg's words appeared, the Khmer Rouge, in the service of a vision we will never be able to grasp, were emptying out the Cambodian capitol of Phnom Penh. What followed was one of the worst massacres of the 20th century, exceeded in sheer inhumanity only by the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. Within three years, something on the order of one to three million people ("over one million" as Schanberg's paper helpfully puts it) had been murdered. The Khmer Rouge were enemies of technology, and most of those who didn't starve were beaten to death with bamboo staves. When the last victims in an area were dispatched and all that was left were the cadres, they turned on each other, far past the point where they were capable of understanding anything else. It was atrocity carried to its ultimate degree, an event with the stench of damnation about it. The world has hurried on with scarcely a glance back. (To my knowledge, Schanberg has never repudiated his statement of April 1975. This too is typical of hegemonist doctrine, which is in many ways a postmodern construct: if you don't acknowledge your errors, then they never happened.)
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The Vietnamese ordeal was not as deadly. It was also slower in unfolding. Several years passed before the appearance of the Boat People, common Vietnamese who had grown so desperate as to entrust themselves to makeshift rafts and boats on the South China Sea in an effort to get anywhere - Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia - beyond the reach of the Party. We have no idea how many fled, and how many died on the high seas of thirst, starvation, in storms, slaughtered by pirates, drowned when their rickety craft disintegrated around them. The UN, and the world at large, ignored them, in the same fashion as we see today concerning Darfur. Since they were fleeing communism, the Boat People were not legitimate victims, in the same sense that the Christians of Sudan deserve nothing in the way of sympathy either.
And that was only the beginning. The latter part of the 1970s developed into a global Walpurgisnacht in which low-lying fruit of the international system were knocked off by Soviet-funded Marxists one after the other. Ethiopia, Nicaragua, the twin Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique (and very nearly the mother country itself, with incalculable consequences for Europe, but for the actions of Ramalho Eanes, one of the unsung heroes of the Cold War), Grenada, Afghanistan - it was the most successful decade for the communists since the late 1940s. And with their fall, these small states were plunged into chaos, starvation, and endless warfare. As with the Boat People, the final toll is unknown. As with the Boat People, the world showed no concern whatsoever.
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