Good thing America dropped several million tons of bombs on them!

The US dropped more than a ton of bombs for each citizen of Laos.

> I've never heard of a trust territory. What is that?

The United Nations realized after two world wars fought largely over attempts at empire and colonial possession, the most important thing to do to ensure no World War III happened was to name and shame colonial imperialists.

It was not successful at decolonizing as the victors of WWII (Russia, France, Great Britain, and the US) continue their colonizing to this day.

But what it was remarkably successful at doing was to change the conversation from "why don't we take more land from people already living there and claim it and them as our own" to "what gives a nation the right to take land from people already living there and claim the land and the people living there as their own?". (Crimea asks a question here. As does Hawaii. And the Falklands.etc etc)

The second question was simply never asked before the United Nation's resolution demanding self-government for all of the world. It was fought about, but never challenged on an intellectual level. The modern intellectual history of France is a conversation about that topic, when the post-modernism started to think about what the hell France was doing in Africa and Asia, because the UN made a point about colonialism, sovereignty, and self-determination. Not much difference between what Germany did to France during WWII, and what France had been doing to a bunch of places around the world before WWII for a couple hundred years.

(To put a slightly finer point on how the winners write the story, German, Japanese, and Italian colonial possessions became UN Trust Territories, while British, French, and US colonial possessions did not immediately get recognized as illegitimately taken colonial possessions. But the conversation that maybe that's just exactly what they were certainly came to be from that. And of course let us not forget that Nauru was a colony of a colony. And was obliterated by rapacious extractive colonialism)

The Indian Army had 2.5 million soldiers fighting in the Burma campaign alone.

The fantasy that the slap fight over colonial island possessions that the American Empire and the Imperial Japan were engaging in was somehow a large part of the overall War in the Pacific is bizarre.

Millions and millions of people from all over the world were fighting there. The US fought Japan over some islands, and carpet-bombed a civilian population, and lobbed Atomic bombs at civilian targets.

America should revel in its actual area of competence: manufacturing and extraction of natural resources in its geographically privileged location. (Of course, it has given up on manufacturing because paying attention to narrative fantasy matters more than protecting national interests apparently.)

Instead it creates this weird narrative about fighting for freedom, that people of the Pacific, under the thumb of competing empires sees as utterly bizarre. The US committed genocide of everyone over 10 years old in the Philippines simply to deny them sovereignty, because the US and Japan were fighting for Empire and control.

The US invaded a sovereign ally in Hawaii, for Empire and control.

And even after WWII was over, the US spent the next 30 years fighting for Empire throughout Asia. The end goal was not peace, or freedom. It was Empire and control.

The rest of the world must not be awake yet.

No one except an American who has never been outside the American narrative bubble thinks America won or ended the war. Not Australians, not Chinese, not anyone in mainland Europe, and certainly not any Russians. Did America help? Of course. Did they win the war? No.

America's ascent as an economic power came largely because America lost so few young men, and suffered no economic damage whatsoever during the war.

It was weird seeing Americans react to countries that finally had rebuilt their economies and populations from the destruction of WWII overtake America in productivity and innovation in the latter half of the twentieth century. Because Americans had this fantasy that the only country not devastated by WWII somehow had some special power or spirit instead of lucky geographical happenstance.

> if we're using "ring of fire" as a metaphor for an inflamed asshole

Why'd you drag Elon Musk into this conversation?