Comment by pjmlp
Comment by pjmlp 3 days ago
The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
Comment by pjmlp 3 days ago
The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
As an Australian, I have the suspicion that the decline of industry in the last couple of decades has done a lot of damage to that capability.
We've lost oil refineries, steelworks, consumer car manufacturing, and we lack much shipbuilding and aerospace. We have a lot of mines, which curse us with success: it's not economically efficient to smelt ore when you could be digging up even more of it instead.
Reminds me of how I used to play Risk (which I now consider to be one of the worst designed games in a similar fashion to Monopoly) when I'd sit in Australia and just keep building troops until other players weaken themselves with fighting. Of course it helps that there's just a single position to defend Australia and as it's the smallest continent, people usually aim to attack elsewhere.
Have they re-balanced the continental rewards etc? IIRC North America had three borders, but was worth a lot more.
However, I have no desire to play Risk again as the dice mechanic is infuriating and it's almost the opposite of a euro-game i.e. Players can get eliminated a long time before the end of the game and the game length can be arbitrarily long. Also, if a player falls too far behind the other players, it's very unlikely that they can turn things around (excepting the infuriating dice mechanic which can let a single soldier defeat hordes of invaders).
Actually, Alaska and the West Coast were attacked during the war — but only relatively lightly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleutian_Islands_campaign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Ellwood
That last one, in which a Japanese sub bombarded Santa Barbara, played a role in the later Japanese internment by escalating fears of an invasion.
When was Pearl Harbor attacked by Japan?
Now, when did Hawai'i become a state?
And when and by whom was their king deposed?
> Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
Uh, which country again was it?
(Edit: -4, really? Damn, people are salty about actually knowing history versus going against the US public school system's propaganda that "We (royal) were attacked". In reality, the occupier forces, the US military, were attacked, having deposed the government at the behest of Sanford Dole, of pineapple infamy.
But the simple bumper sticker slogan "Remember Pearl Harbor", short circuits and somehow gets people to ignore history at the behest of ruthless hegemonic expansion and irrational patriotism.)
Your arguments are irrelevant at best and whataboutism at worst because the Japanese were specifically attacking the US Navy as they saw it as a threat to their own expansion plans - which were far worse than anything the US did, even compared to the worst parts of Native American policies (which were very, very bad). The Japanese saw Hawaii as a US territory to attack. Whether or how Hawaii became a US territory is a complete non sequitur in the context of World War 2.
There's nobody outside of hardcore Japanese nationalists that see any of their actions as countering US expansionism.
An occupied territory, sure. The Japanese only attacked the occupiers (USA). They didn't go after any of the native peoples' cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Kingdom
In 1887, King Kalākaua was forced to accept a new constitution after a coup d'état by the Honolulu Rifles, a volunteer military unit recruited from American settlers. Queen Liliʻuokalani, who succeeded Kalākaua in 1891, tried to abrogate the new constitution. She was subsequently overthrown in a 1893 coup engineered by the Committee of Safety (run by Sanford Dole), a group of Hawaiian subjects who were mostly of American descent, and supported by the U.S. military. The Committee of Safety dissolved the kingdom and established the Republic of Hawaii, intending for the U.S. to annex the islands, which it did on July 7, 1898, via the Newlands Resolution. Hawaii became part of the U.S. as the Territory of Hawaii until it became a U.S. state in 1959.
On geopolitical scale, you either need to have big guns or big friends. No one has any true right to any land. If you don't have the foresight to recognize that, you probably don't have a place in the future.
This isn't even something only cold imperialist superpowers adopt. Hawaii itself was populated with warring chiefdoms that were killing each other and taking land for centuries before a bigger fish showed up. Small fish happily eating smaller fish but then are upset when they get eaten...
Let me guess you also don’t think the Japanese killed, hurt, raped or did anything else bad to a single Filipino, right? Because they never hurt any one except the occupiers…
> Uh, which country again was it?
Hawai'i became a territory of the United States on April 30, 1900. It had been US territory for 40 years. One can point to the US doing bad things to make that the state of affairs, but it was decidedly US territory for a long time at that point. It seems you need to learn history, or you're just being willfully obtuse about things.
So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers.
I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.