The only reason they left them in place was due to the Cold War. After the airlift, sticking to the “other” side took become more important than ensuring justice was done. The same thing happened in Japan.
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I’d say Reagan too. With Reagan came the evangelicals and all their horseshit and I suspect that was around the time the militias appeared too.
Maybe the militias were around longer than that, but the first I ever heard of them was a very small column in Time Magazine around 1984 with a picture of a child in camo at a training camp, aiming an assault rifle.
Reagan the former movie star. That was when truth and reality started to get fuzzy.
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But you really do have to go back to Nixon, though, as many of the key figures in all Republican administrations since got their start back then. He also employed the southern strategy, which made coded racism a major means of peeling off the white working class from the Democratic party.
It’s like each new republican administration added a new level of horribleness to the coalition.
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Would risking a collapse of the government have been better? In retrospect we can see that by luck, the cold war or however you want to explain it, Germany managed to combine economic growth and suppressing nazi ideology very well.
There was the Morgenthau plan, but I think it’s for the best that it wasn’t implemented, even if it meant that a bunch of people got away with their crimes. It’s not as if the allies planned on punishing the people responsible for their own strategic bombing that killed milllions of civilians either or Soviet war crimes on the ground.
What was extra disgusting in Japan was that the Americans picked low level scape goats to execute while protectng their superiors who had the real responsibility because those were seen to be essential.
It’s irrelevant, as that’s not why they did it. 
Plus, how much more collapsed can you get in the wake of world war 2.
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The US always appeared like an older, stronger brother – now it feels like this brother started using meth.
Actually, the brother has been using meth for decades; only now the signs are apparent. Hair falling out, teeth rotting, premature aging, etc.
As for when it started, I blame LBJ.
Back in '67, we were in peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Nixon came along & told the NV: “Hey, don’t waste your time with them. I will give you a better deal when I’m president.”
Sound familiar?
The talks promptly broke down, LBJ declined to run, etc.
LBJ should have SCREAMED about Nixon’s obvious treason. Instead, he stayed silent, and we got Nixon.
No Nixon, no Reagan. No Reagan, no Bush(es).
Of course, back then the RWNJ coalition was there, and managed to get the likes of Goldwater on the ballot, so who knows if they would have remained a group of relatively ineffectual background players.
There are cases to be made that the Meth Habit started even earlier; Joe McCarthy, for example… or the creation of the CIA (and other 3 letter agencies)… and we might not be in this situation if Reconstruction had been allowed to fully occur, as others have mentioned.
I don’t disagree that this experiment has been flawed from the beginning.
Looks like a reboot is in progress.
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So, when it’s Republican machinations, it’s STILL the fault of the Democartic party? Really?
He was going to lose. Whatever he was, he was not dumb. The democratic party was split, and the anti-war faction blamed LBJ for escalating, which was 100% an accurate assessment. Maybe he should not have escalated in the first place and maybe we wouldn’t have gotten Nixon, but another 4 years of LBJ.
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But, it IS why they did it, to avoid collapse. We (the US) left a shit ton of Nazi bureaucrats and functionaries in power because to remove them all would have likely resulted in extreme difficulty in maintaining order. It was already a herculean task to try and provide food/medicine/shelter to millions of Germans in the wake of the war, and that task would have been made nearly impossible without at least some form of civil administration to work with. Thus, a lot of bad stuff got overlooked and a lot of bad people went about their business.
Of course that decision wasn’t wholly altruistic (even if it altruism wasn’t completely absent, either), we wanted Germany to serve as the bulwark against Soviet occupation, and we definitely didn’t want to allow for power vacuums for Communists to take power (same as in the rest of Western Europe, especially France). Avoiding total collapse was necessary, and to avoid total collapse, some form of administrative state had to be in place.
A lot! Germany was a bombed to hell, but it still had a lot of infrastructure that was either working or could be made to work in relatively short order. If that infrastructure wasn’t working, millions more would have died from disease and starvation. The moral argument as to whether the cost of that full collapse would have been justified if we’d actually brought every Nazi to justice is another question, of course.
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Well, right or not as to the historical fact re Germany, we saw how the other strategy played out when Iraq was de-Baathified. It did not go well. Tends to support the need to keep some of the old regime around even if it is distasteful, but also recognising they serve a purpose (and maybe some were ‘in name only’ as the alternative was personally worse).
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You are right… but from their point of view, if they were going to have another war in eastern Europe, who better to have help command than someone who already planned it once?
The Soviets ALSO were “directly responsible for the deliberate and unjustified slaughter of millions of civilians.” and presumably would be again.
The threat of another war was real at one point. I think their deal with the devil was a pragmatic one. YMMV.
I specified a Democrat. I said nothing about the Democratic Party.
Even so, the DP seldom seems to call out those machinations, or do anything about it if they do…
other than maybe write a Strongly-Worded Letter to the culprit(s).
Frankly, I am surprised they found the spine to impeach Lord Dampnut. They still allowed the Republicans to run roughshod during the hearings, what with their brainless blatherings and grandstanding. Nadler & Schiff should have had kill-switches on their mikes when they started up with that noise. And the witnesses who refused to appear should have been dragged in there wearing chains, just like you or I would have been if we refused a supoena.
Maybe he should not have escalated in the first place and maybe we wouldn’t have gotten Nixon, but another 4 years of LBJ.
My point was, if LBJ had called Nixon out on his treason, we wouldn’t have had Nixon in the first place. Perhaps LBJ would have chosen not to run, anyway, since your point about his unpopularity is very true.
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