don’t write him off as stupid. this isn’t a person trying to be correct and failing. this is a person trying very hard to establish a world in which the truth is irrelevant, and instead from moment to moment the truth is whatever they need it to be in order to justify their positions and actions.
I’d love to see Puerto Rico to become a state, just because I think it’d be cool, but I wouldn’t blame them one bit for looking at the asshats on the mainland and wanting to get away. Either way, their current status shouldn’t continue.
I think a successful completion of a deep national and international history course together hard exams should become a prerequisite for any political office in the US.
This is the woke mob trying to repaint history. The settlers arrived and invited the native Americans to dinner and the native Americans taught the settlers about “maize” (which means corn) and then the settlers asked they would move to the very cool reservations where they could have the casinos and the native Americans were like “yeah bruh.”
It is not new. Many countries do not teach the full extent of their dangerous past(cough Britain cough). A very specific example I remember is when a group of white folks overthrew the local government(a party called Fusionists) in the town of Wilmington, North Carolina. For a very long time, information about it was kept under wraps and to this day, people on the wrong side of history have had places named after them in their honor.
I would assume so. Because Brits, in all seriousness, are possibly responsible for more border conflicts than any(looks at the Flashpoint that is India Pakistan border).
No, there are very many places that actually don’t. I grew up in GA, native American history wasn’t taught past the pilgrims meeting and inventing Thanksgiving, nothing about the Mexican-American war, maybe a cursory mention of Japanese internment.
But it was mostly the revolutionary war, WWI and WWII from the perspective that the US became and is the benevolent world force it claims to be.
Civil wars are, by definition, a nation fighting itself.
It was always the position of the Union that the Confederacy were rebelling citizens, and that fact was the legal basis of the Emancipation Proclamation, later decisions regarding the very concept of a secession without an act of Congress, and quite a few court courses for treason and sedition.
Technically couldn’t it be argued that the confederacy were the ones that were the real USA? Even the constitution agreed with them that some people are worth less than others.
If you need to change the constitution to have your side be right, you’re on the right side of history, but you’re not the same country. You’re the new guys who took the country by force from the previous guys, because you didn’t like how they did things. It’s a good thing you did, but let’s not pretend like they were the traitors - the winners of the war were the traitors.
I just think it’s okay to be a traitor if you’re betraying a shitty cause, and by acting like it’s not okay, we’re just enforcing the “snitches get stitches” and “loyalty instead of morals” mentality. Which I get why you would want to do as a country, because you’re trying to keep the power and not raise future traitors to your questionable policies. But I don’t get why you’d want to do this as a human, who will be at one point in time responsible for making a similar decision. You’re just making it worse for future you if you’ll ever need to be labeled as a traitor for, eg: fighting to remove gerrymandering.
couldn’t it be argued the Confederacy was the real USA?
No, though they did try to argue it and they lost
If you need to change the constitution
They did it by following the Constitution’s rules for change. The Confederacy tried to subvert the Constitution because they were losing. You don’t get to cherry pick which parts of the constitution matter and ignore the other parts. The Confederacy saw the writing on the wall that the US was going to follow the procedure outlined by law to become a free country, and they decided that the law, the constitution and the entire united states could go fuck itself. There is no world in which the Confederacy is good, decent or sympathetic. They committed treason so that they could continue to kidnap, rape and murder an entire class of people and no amount of “well if you look at it another way” will change or excuse that.
The US did offer to buy the territories, Mexico said no, then the US invaded and took them. During the peace process after the war, the US then paid less than half of the initial offer for the territories that it was never going to give back.
Later, the US bought a sliver of land on the border for a slightly inflated price, but that was its own thing.
But you can't really call an armed invasion, and then a pittance paid out in damages, to be "Buying them all".
The United States could have just taken all of Mexico, but it didn’t. It paid for the land. The population of the western states was made up of Americans anyhow, less than a thousand Mexican citizens lived in those areas at the time.
It was okay to launch a war of conquest because the Mexican government was weak?
All because a bunch of American slave owners invaded Texas and started a war of "independence".
But there's more to the story. Mostly Santa Anna. He became a national hero for beating back attempts at conquest by both Spain and France. He became president and then sparked a multi-front civil war by centralizing power in his own hands...
A bit rich, considering you refuse to acknowledge the simple fact that the Mexican-American war was one of open conquest.
The entire justification for the war was Mexico refusing to sell the land that the US wanted, so James K. Polk sent 80 soldiers into Mexican territory, then launched a war when Mexico easily overwhelmed them.
The war went badly for Mexico, because it was still recovering from a civil war, the Texas revolution, multiple invasions attempts by Spain and France, and their own war of independence against Spain.
The US actually took Mexico City, but decided not to just take the entire country because they didn't want to get into a long, drawn out occupation that would have sapped resources and manpower.
The Spanish had learned that Mexico is impossible to hold through force. A lesson the French would learn under Napoleón III.
The US at the time was smart enough to not even try.
The United States never wanted Mexico. Thus it bought the parts of Mexico that it’s citizens were already moving to. It could have just taken it through conquest but it didn’t.
Mexico fired first, they invaded the United States territory after slaughtering hundreds at the Alamo. They didn’t expect the United States to respond and certainly didn’t expect the border dispute to lead to the complete defeat of the Mexican military. What they didn’t know is the vast innovations developed at West Point that crushed all opposition, mostly through military engineering innovation.
While Mexico was completely defeated and President Pierce took advantage of the situation, it was the actions of Mexico that led to their defeat. They invited war and lost. The United States had every right to take territory but it decided to make it a legal transaction of land instead and led to peaceful diplomacy going forth.
The acquisition of the west thus doesn’t fall under conquest but a legal land transaction between governments. Same as the Louisiana Purchase, the Oregon Treaty, and the Alaska Purchase.
You mean the slavers who moved to Mexico and then fomented a rebellion?
Because that's what the Alamo was. It was slave owners moving to Mexico and then rising up in rebellion against the Mexican government when Mexico said, hey, slavery is illegal. Mexico outlawed slavery almost immediately after winning their independence from Spain.
Most importantly, Texas was not a part of the US until a decade after the slavers were defeated at the Alamo.
You have such a twisted view of history that I can only assume you were taught in either Florida or Texas.
The US then annexed Texas, and then Polk sent a diplomatic mission offering to buy more land. Mexico said no, so Polk Started a war and took the land anyway.
After the Mexican-American war, the US paid out a pittance in damages, but one of the terms of the peace treaty forced on Mexico was the revocation of all territorial rights of Texas, California, and everything in between.
A later administration then bought a small sliver of the border along New Mexico and parts of Arizona for an elevated price. Partially to smooth tensions with Mexico over the blatant war of conquest that was the Mexican-American war.
The US took most of the land from Mexico that was worth taking. There’s little viable agricultural land south of Texas. Also, it put a lot of land in between Mexico and New Orleans, which is an incredibly important international port. With that secured, no foreign army would be able to threaten that port without major logistics challenges, much less fighting through the US Army and every local citizen with a gun.
The US grabbed what it wanted and let Mexico keep the scraps.
That is looking at it from today, not from how it was viewed then. The main reason Mexico was fine with selling was the massive desert that separated the two areas and the extremely violent native population that inhabited the region. That reason didn’t become peaceful until the 1920s.
Spain was loosing influence in the Philippines at that time so to cut their loses they offered the Philippines to the US. They even fought a mock battle where Spain “lost”.
Yes, but that land would not have been “sold” if they hadn’t lost the war. The war was fought to conquer land, and the payment was for war “reparations”.
The U.S. agreed to pay $15 million for the physical damage of the war and assumed $3.25 million of debt already owed by the Mexican government to U.S. citizens
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