From my understanding, the premise of revolutionary defeatism involves supporting the defeat of your own bourgeois government. I am an American. I am perfectly fine with that when it comes to things like US military actions in the Middle East. However, there has been one enemy the United States has had that is definitely quite different, Nazi Germany. It's pretty much universally believed among the left that Nazi Germany was bad and should never be supported (and that's for a GOOD reason).
But how does revolutionary defeatism square in with something like that?
If we stsayed out of it the soviets would have taken Germany when it ran out of meth. And probably London.
Our subsequent creation of nato, and colonization of Japan did far more harm than any good we did in europe
yea this is the key point really. arguably if the USA had been plagued by rampant saboteurs and work stoppages at home, the Soviets take Europe and accept Japan's surrender and the partitions of Korea and Vietnam don't happen
EDIT: thinking about it more I wanted to acknowledge that you have to consider that nobody really knew that the nazis would lose at the time, and that's a very consequential thing to misjudge even if it looks like they are losing.
in support of this I am going to include this pasta about the pacific theater
As much as the erasure of the Soviet involvement in WW2, and more importantly, them being the primary reason the fascists were defeated is terrible, China's equivalent is so much worse. The primary reason Japan was able to be defeated when they were, and possibly at all, and the primary driving force of their defeat, was absolutely China.
Japan sustained losses and casualties totalling 1.5 million in China and at the end of the war, China accepted the surrender of 1.28 million Japanese soldiers.
By comparison, the allied American, British, and Canadian forces killed, wounded and captured a total of 1.25 million of the Japanese forces. Which would mean 70% of Japanese forces were killed and captured by China. While the other allies combined only eliminated 30%. (WW2 database) (China daily) (Wikipedia)
The Soviets were the sword that decapitated the Nazis, (and to an extent the Japanese) while the China was the shield that held back/trapped the Japanese. 35,000,000+ Chinese and Soviets died holding back/crushing the fascist hordes. We owe everything to their sacrifices.
source
The second Sino-Japanese War is probably one of the fronts it seems like most Westerners don't know about. While we erase the actual Soviet Involvement in the war, we still seem to know about battle such as Stalingrad and the fact they took Berlin. Most westerners don't even know about the Chinese theater and battles such as Shanghai.
They call it the Pacific theater to ignore the land war, in American classrooms it’s “island-hopping, nukes, and we won!”
and the nazi machine would have killed a lot more Jews and other groups they hated in the extra time they had
yeah that has to be factored in as well. the Wannsee Conference wasn't until 1942, but even a delay of a few months is a staggering human toll
It's 50-50. Yes, but look at how many lives have been lost because we created the Atlantic power block. I dunno if one can be longtermist about this kinda thing. There is no way to do a counterfactual. We simply wouldn't be looking at unchecked species endings global warming if the US wasn't there to claim sole super power status after the war.
the US didn't have to create nato or do containment doctrine, etc and while you could surely anticipate the capitalists doing some cold war shit i don't think it's reasonable to expect any specifics or the full extent of the terror, especially before Truman.