Haiti's history is a series of hard kicks in the teeth with little respite.
Without thinking TOO much about it, Haiti gets my vote too.
The fact that those bastards are still kicking is incredibly inspiring, to be honest. Centuries of getting their shit kicked in over and over and they're still standing. I wish I could have half that kind of strength
Oof, but those aren't self-inflicted though, compared to Poland's Ls.
I suppose, but it does change the framing of the question and how we assess "Ls". Certainly, Haiti's Ls say less bad things about the Haitian people than Poland's Ls say about Poland.
Of all the major countries? Probably Italy. Idk why France gets the surrender stereotype when Italy's military history has been more of a joke. From my region? Honduras, easily. They love trying to usurp us as the top dog of Central America and get put in their place every time.
Yeah I mean France was pretty much the strongest army in all of Europe for like 1,000 years.
Lingua Franca was based on northern Italian languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
It's because of their decision to not participate in the Iraq War. The joke existed beforehand, but it got massively amplified by that.
Idk why France gets the surrender stereotype
because americans get their knowledge of history from cartoons, and everything yankees say is projection
Imagine how Americans would react if America had gone through what France did in WWI and likewise prevailed, only to be the butt of endless surrender jokes
Say what you want, but I'd gladly have Italians in my army.
spoiler
More specifically, in the field kitchens. :AyyyyyOC:
They're all just gonna defect once you tell them they gotta use normal cheese that isn't produced artisanaly in a single province of Sicily by one of 3 dairies approved by decree to produce it since generations past.
I remember watching a break down of different country's military MREs and some of the european ones looked really good. I think the french got little sachets of wine and the italians had real cheese and meat.
WW2 was a pretty brutal defeat and after that they lost several colonial holdings and had the US take over for them in Vietnam, which probably to some extent fuels American superiority complexes, then their refusal to go along with the Iraq invasion sparked a coordinated cultural attack on France in the US, freedom fries, mass wine spillings, etc etc.
i mean can you really blame the italians?
they were fighting for Italy
im half joking because the italian partisans were far more effective because they were not fighting for "Italy"
Imo L's aren't just bad things happening to you, I don't wanna get too technical, but like I wouldn't say that posting about your mom being in the hospital counts as posting an L.
Call me a lib, but I gotta put Russia up there. Imperial Russia had some major L's with WWI and the Russo-Japanese war, and its position of being considered a great power despite being poor and underdeveloped set it up for a lot of L's. And I hate to say it, but the USSR was not without it's L's. Defeating the white army was a big W, and so was saving the world from fascism, but the US stealing the thunder for the latter is kinda an L. Being remembered as "losing" the space race despite making a ton of progress and getting lots firsts that only nerds remember or care about? Same kinda L. Sino-Soviet split? Major L. And the collapse of the USSR, leading the pure, unrestrained capitalism running rampant and destroying the country is one of the biggest L's ever recorded. And they somehow managed to get puppeted by their major geopolitical rival while still being regarded as a villain and not being allowed into their club. Oof.
As for the country with the most W's, I gotta go with Vietnam. They were nobodies and got shit on by tons of big players, France, Japan, the US, China, even their own neighbors in Cambodia. Vietnam has done a truly incredible amount of winning - they had to. And at one point during the pandemic they were sending humanitarian aid to the US, which is just BDE for sure.
No way. There's two major socialist powers in the whole world, and one of them looks at the other and goes, "Ew no, I'll find someone else to hang with, like maybe that guy you hate, I mean yeah I hate him too, but like if the alternative is you, then maybe I can look past his flaws." It's basically an NTR plot, incredible L for the USSR regardless of who was in the wrong.
China was correct ideologically in rejecting the denunciation of Stalin for one thing, and it's part of the reason the PRC still exists and USSR doesn't. Also, their foreign policy was at times shitty during the split but not nearly to the extent of the black and white picture you claim. They supported a lot of AES and anti-colonial movments in Africa and elsewhere while Mao was still alive, sometimes spending much more than the USSR in doing so, since they were competing with the USSR for prestige and the role of leader of global communism. You can read about a lot of the details of that in Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell.
I don't think it's that simple, but either way, being in the right doesn't mean it's not an L.
The PRC has lasted longer than the Soviet Union, but this is somehow an L.
If you consider the collapse of The Empire as a series of Ls rather than one big L then England is in the top five for sure. Imagine going from the world's premiere superpower to one of America's vassal states over the course of a generation, it's no wonder why Bri*ts are the way they are.
Russia's history has been one tragedy to the next, though I'm not sure if I would say that Russians were in a worse state than, say, Haitians.
On this note, I highly recommend Adam Curtis's Trauma Zone—it's an excellent documentary cobbled together from old BBC footage about the depressing state of Russia from 1985–1999
doesn't it have to be China? higher the highs the lower the lows. A century of humiliation visited on a small country would be one thing (and poland or lithuania would qualify for that), but the very largest and most populous country is a much more tragic affair.. to say nothing of the other great calamities china has experienced
That puts India in the running as well. The region was quite rich in the 1700s
To further your point, Europe was actually a backwater compared to the vastly more prosperous civilizations of China and India right up until Capitalism happened in England. The reason Spain was burning through slaves mining silver in the Americas is so they could trade it to China for their much better and cheaper goods.
England evolving the right conditions for Capitalist social relations to take hold in the countryside is a world-historical freak accident that was anything but inevitable. Is it an L for everyone else that it just happened to go right for them?
Easy: Marshall Islands. I don't think there's a country with more than 3.
If we count entire history, hard to beat India/the subcontinent tbh. Just one invader after another plundering the fertile plains for ~3000 yrs
