During his appearance on The Tonight Show, Fred said something that is rather stunningly and obviously untrue:
Our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples … than all the other countries put together.
There’s nothing terribly edifying in this kind of claim of national nobility-through-high body counts, but you have to wonder what the man could possibly have been thinking that would cause him to say this. Even leaving aside WWI, where the claims to fighting for liberty are a bit more strained (and where all other belligerents lost far more people than America), this claim is demonstrably false. It requires either an amazing ignorance about the past or contempt for American allies in WWII.
Britain and France entered WWII at least officially to safeguard the independence of Poland, which I think gives them some right to claim that they suffered their losses for the sake of the “liberty” of other peoples. In 1940 alone in a war fought on behalf of Poland, the French lost 90,000 KIA, and the British lost over 68,000. The British, Commonwealth and Free French soldiers who died during the war were certainly fighting at least in part for “the liberty and freedom of other peoples,” and the number of their fatalities and casualities was necessarily higher than that of the United States. Our casualties were on the order of 600,000 killed and wounded, while British and Commonwealth casualties (not including India’s 100,000) were approximately 915,000, which does not include civilian deaths in Britain and France. If we were to judge these losses according to the size of the populations of the different countries, the disparity would be even greater. Given how much smaller its population was, Britain’s losses were proportionally over three times as great as ours.
None of this is to minimise the sacrifices that Americans have made. But leave it to some showboating politician to take something noble and admirable and distort it as part of his talking points, insulting the war dead of our best allies in the process. This claim of Thompson’s is just the sort of nationalist mythologising that we could stand to have much less of nowadays. It doesn’t speak well for the management of foreign relations in any future Thompson Administration that the man has no idea how much the rest of the Allied nations sacrificed in WWII.
P.S. It might also be noted that Americans, like all other nations, did not enter the wars of the 20th century primarily because they were interested in fighting for the “liberty and freedom of other peoples.” Those justifications followed once the country was already involved. In the process of fighting for our own national interests, we also happened to be defending the cause of the “liberty and freedom of other peoples,” but had we not been provoked and had our government not already been so eager to intervene America would not have done much in the way of fighting on behalf of others’ freedom. The reasons given for our involvement in the world wars were those of self-defense and retaliation, just as other nations were technically fulfilling their treaty obligations to allied states or fighting in self-defense as well.
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September 7th, 2007 at 11:42 am
Koz
I did a doubletake on that one as well. Clearly the point is that US suffered for the sake of other nations, whereas the French, British etc. were fighting for their own independence. It’s a debateable point, but one that has at least some justification.
The UK bravely fought on behalf of Poland to be sure, but also because they knew very well that Hitler was coming after them. Germany already got their lebensraum and appeasement when WWI victors acquiesced in the annexation of the Sudetenland. When that wasn’t enough and Hitler took Poland too that game was up. OTOH, it was very plausible that as far away as we were that Hitler (or Japan) could not be a threat to us, and a substantial part of America thought exactly that.
September 7th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Daniel Larison
I have no problem at all with the claim that Americans have sacrificed for other nations. Clearly, our nation has done this and still does so. This perfectly legitimate point gets lost in the exaggeration. Britain and France ended up fighting for their own independence, but that isn’t how they got into the war. If Britain had been more concerned to guard its independence, it would have stayed out of the war and rearmed for several years before entering the fray. Britain also had its traditional concern to prevent a hegemon from ruling most or all of Europe, but this concern is expressed through their habit of backing the cause of smaller nations against their neighbours.
September 11th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
solidos
I think Koz’s point is valid. Britain and France clearly saw a mortal threat in German hegemony in Europe, and intervened at the last possible moment. Had they allowed Germany to keep Poland, they would have faced a fierce rival for global domination a few years down the road.
But contrary to what Fred claims there is no reason to believe that the U.S. sacrificed their soldiers for other people’s freedom during WW II. A more down do earth explanation is the government wanted to keep and extend their influence in Europe and around the Pacific. Has any calculation ever been better rewarded, literally?