Lies in education [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[breamoreboy at gmail.com]

On Thursday, October 5, 2017 at 4:22:26 AM UTC+1, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Oct 2017 01:21 pm, Stefan Ram wrote:
> 
> >>- Germany was the aggressor in World War 2;
> >>- well, Germany and Japan;
> >>- *surely* it must be Germany, Italy and Japan;
> > 
> >   This listing style reminds me of of a listing style used in
> >   »Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names«:
> 
> Yes.
> 
> For the record:
> 
> The USSR and Germany invaded Poland simultaneously, and the two countries
> divided Poland between them. Churchill himself wrote about having difficulty
> convincing people to care, since Poland had earlier invaded Czechoslovakia
> (opportunistically while the Germans were seizing the Sudetenland) and many
> people in England thought that Poland deserved their fate. Likewise the USSR
> had invaded Finland.

Germany had all ready grabbed Austria and pretty much all of Czechoslovakia.  The USSR invaded Poland 16 days after Germany did.  You've missed out Rumania and Hungary grabbing bits of central Europe while they had a chance.

> 
> The UK invaded and occupied neutral Iceland in 1940, handing over control to
> the USA in 1941. Despite signing an agreement in 1948 to leave within 6
> months, US military forces actually did not finally leave Iceland, and return
> full sovereignty to the Icelander government, until 2006.

The Icelandic government quite happily worked with the UK government as their ruler, the King of Denmark, was preoccupied with the state of affairs at home.  The USA has a habit of hanging around but they disliked European colonialists.  Pot, kettle, black?

> 
> In the East, while Japan did take the first overtly military action against
> the US, the US had (in some sense) first engaged in hostile behaviour against
> Japan by unilaterally imposing, and enforcing, sanctions on Japan.
> 
> (I make no comment on whether such sanctions were justified or not, only that
> they can be seen as a form of aggressive economic warfare.)

Japan had been in control of Korea since 1905, had been involved in China from 1931 and been in all out war with the Chinese from 1937.  As the USA had a strong relationship with China it does not surprise me that they took such action.

> -- 
> Steve
> “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
> enough, things got worse.

--
Kindest regards.
Mark Lawrence.