Chain of Thoughts

So this guy talked trash about a bunch of conservative blogs, one of which was Michelle Malkin, an immensely popular conservative blogger. She was defended by this conservative legal blog.

This is going somewhere. It led me to look around on Malkin’s blog, and I came accross these T-Shirts for sale. Some of them are funny. I particularly like this one (which is as ironic as Che or Lenin on a mass produced t-shirt). But this one illustrates a particular historical attitude that I loathe. If we consult the pie chart of casualties of WWII, a four year old would immediately notice something. Hmm…maybe, just maybe, and I know this sounds crazy, we didn’t play the biggest role in World War II (the crowd gasps). I mean, I’m no professor of history, but that pie chart is kind of convincing…

Even if we don’t state the obvious, and we leave the evil empire out of it, and look at Britain’s losses the ignorance of that shirt is apparent. Britain lost 495,700 people, 90,000 of which were civilians. One must also take into account the material destruction suffered from bombings. Now, Britain, I think, is a lot smaller than the US, so that means a much higher proportion of the population lost their lives.

So when you go over there and say “we saved your ass,” it is an embarrassing display of historical ignorance.

If for some reason you do have the urge to think that we personally won WWII, just remember that 80% of German losses in WWII were at the hands of the Soviets, and the ratio of German soliders on the eastern front compared to the western front was 12:1. For every American soldier who died, 19 Soviet soldiers and 49 Soviet Civilians died. This isn’t to say that 400,000 isn’t a huge number of casualties for a country to sustain, its to say that we must put that into perspective before making a “We saved your ass” style comment, or even worse, actually wear a shirt like that.

And don’t forget that the French “saved our ass” at one time.