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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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Asklemmy
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Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven't all nuked each other (yet)
They've been trying to play the long game
The cultural victory, if you will.
Pretty sure Japan wouldn't agree with that last point....
No, it is genuinely a good point. The fact that its use so far has been entirely limited to the two that ended WW2 was certainly not a given. Some US military leaders wanted to use nuclear weapons in Korea.
The Korean War was so soon after WW2 that the strong taboo against the use of nuclear weapons hadn't yet taken hold, and the USSR had a miniscule stockpile, so the US could genuinely have done it with limited risk to themselves. The fact that they didn't use them is a really important turning point that helped build in the taboo against their use that has so far held to this day.
They killed Lincoln but they couldn't kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman's Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.
Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois's "The Souls of Black Folk". What he describes is, at it's heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.
That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.
Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.
Wait, when you say Republicans, do you mean the organisation that Americans currently call the Grand Old Party, the GOP, the modern Republican Party? If so, I find it ironic that the party standing for freedom has evolved into the party that shields and encourages racists and criminals.
The American parties in the American civil war that share the names with the current parties are largely ideologically inverted at this point.
That died with the Hayes Administration.
Hitler learned about Eugenics from America. We were forcibly sterilizing people for being "inferior" which you can imagine who that meant. America built their own concentration camps for Japanese citizens and our forced labor in our current prison system is just tge more pletable version of labor camps.
The American civil war was about slavery, but tge north was not full of abolitionist people like you might assume. Tge rich in the North and South were against ending slavery, but their hands were forced by the larger population. The only reason we have not had nukes go off is only because they are old and not maintained well. We've dropped a few nukes on accident that just didn't go off. At least two of those were over America.
Kinda terrible examples tho…
Sure “Hitler lost”. Cause he killed himself and stuff. But the Nazis won. The US saved most officers and gave them jobs in NATO and the nascent west German government. Then used them to hunt and undermine communists all over the world. The Nazis themselves kinda won. The Cold War was basically a Nazi war, which they won.
The south “lost”. But after they lost the US became the most racially segregated country in the world and became the chief inspiration to the Nazis.
Then the US literally bombed Japan TWICE for no fucking reason other than spooking Stalin.
You have 3 wrong examples, that actually show we are living in the timeline where the Empire won.
Ok dude