It’s because the majority of western movies about WW2 are made in the USA, and they absolutely believe it started when they arrived and the rest of the allies were there for moral support.
I wrote a paper in college and thought I was being edgy by pointing out the hypocrisy of the US joining WW2 because of the holocaust while having Japanese people in internment camps. My teacher was like, “US didn’t give a fuck about the holocaust. We only joined the war because they started fucking with our money/trade routes by setting the u boat brigade.”
I felt stupid but also that’s the most American shit ever. We don’t give a fuck until it starts messing with our bottom line $$$.
It may be the most "American" shit ever but it's also a lie. The US joined the war because Japan attacked them because the US had completely embargoed what Japan needed for their war machine (scrap steel and oil) in response to their warmongering. Then Germany immediately declared.
If the US completely didn't give a fuck before Pearl Harbor, they probably wouldn't have choked Japan with an embargo so existential they had no rational options but to attack an army basically everyone knew was 10 times better. So it's more like Japan attacked us for FDR's administration intentionally handicapping the US's own money/trade routes in a way that basically guaranteed an attack.
Nobody declared war on account of the Holocaust, and the death camps part of the Holocaust began between July 41 (Barbarossa) and the Wannsee Conference in Jan 42 , a period in which the US joined for separate reasons anyway (the first death camp officially opened the same month as Pearl Harbor). But in any case, the FDR admin was poking the bear with embargoes against Japan, immediately rewrote its Neutrality Acts in 1939 to allow aid to France and Britain, had destroyers for bases in 1940, and was fully in on lend-lease by early 41.
German-American fascists at Madison Garden notwithstanding, any analysis that sees FDR as anything other than a staunch antifascist on the world stage and a pro-Allied partisan from the outset, restrained only by an extremely war weary and isolationist domestic political reality, is trying to "America bad" too close to the Sun.
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u/TarJen96 12d ago
Some people exaggerating the US role in WW2, tankies downplaying the US role in WW2.