Here I was thinking it was "World War II" not "America saves the world II".

> freeing Asia from Imperial Japan

Yeah Russia had NOTHING to do with that one (except for pushing them out of china, and being as pivotal as the US bombing of Japan in it's ultimate surrender).

> freeing Eastern Europe from communism

Because communist are evil and all that other crap US propaganda teaches us.

> It played a huge role in reconstructing Europe after WWII and I guess the same is true of Japan.

Well yeah, it played a huge role in destroying them as well...

Any more cherry picking you'd like to ad to that list? Invented freedom perhaps?

The USSR defeated the Kwantung Army in Khalkin Gol in like 1939 and then sat on their ass with regard to Japan until August 1945.

Certainly the declaration of war came as a shock to Japan, but Japan would have been much better prepared for war with the USSR had the U.S. not been pushing the Empire back to the Home Islands for the 3.5 years preceding that!

What you're saying here is like saying that Italy had anything to do with defeating France just because they managed to declare war and get some troops across the mountains into France before France finally capitulated to Germany.

> Here I was thinking it was "World War II" not "America saves the world II".

America had a huge role in this, not as significant as Americans like to think, but huge nonetheless.

> Yeah Russia had NOTHING to do with that one

Russia declared war on Japan one week before the war was over.

> Because communist are evil and all that other crap US propaganda teaches us.

No need to build a strawman. Just ask yourself whether you would have preferred to live in Western Europe or a Soviet satellite.

> Well yeah, it played a huge role in destroying them as well...

Err .. what?

That slavery in Russia was abolished 50 years before the US even existed - and even then that was only indentured servant-type slaves, as mass-agricultural slaves were banned 50 years before that?

I don't agree that Russia is less oppressive than the US, but you are cherry-picking your moments in history.

EDIT: forgot to mention the modern-day economy of benefitting greatly from illegal alien workers while ostracising them. And the immense incarceration rate, which is almost 50% higher than Russia's (which is also really high)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6178285

One wonders why you cherry-picked then, instead of presenting a more balanced view.

American contributions were certainly significant, but it's not the same magnitude. Without American involvement, the Nazis still lose. Without Soviet involvement, we're all speaking German.

Not even the Nazis were uniquely evil.

(For instance, I have been in Romania a bit and have heard/read the stories about how they were broken, after the WW. They had it easier even under the Nazis a few years earlier.)

But you knew all that.

Edit: My point was that if the Soviets really had won the war themselves, as mikeash wrote, we in West Europe would have lost -- more or less as badly as if the Nazis had won.

In any case, the point would be better made to say that the US prevented a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, not that the US defeated the Nazis.

Which doesn't mean they played a bigger role in it that URSS.

EDIT: >> However I am grateful I am from a country that fell under US influnce than one that fell under USSR influence.

As a Western European, I can relate. I am just pointing that picking WW2 intervention is not the best way to crown US over URSS.

> As a Western European, I can relate. I am just pointing that picking WW2 intervention is not the best way to crown US over URSS.

It's not the intervention per se, but the spirit of the intervention, what its aims were and what it led to. Those of the US were far superior to those of the USSR from my point of view.

With my limited knowledge in history, I can't objectively compare the spirit/motivations of USA/URSS intervention.

Also, being raised in Western europe, I may be prejudicied, because of the "winners write history" stuff.

That doesn't invalidate the possibility that the winners might have actually been in the right though. It just means you cann't use the fact that a nation won to implicate that the nation was therefore morally right.

But, I think that historical lens you are looking back through time to the War of Independence with might have a little smudge on it obscuring that whole deal with the negroes and the injuns...