we're as far apart as you make it sound. First of all, I didn't: "You're blaming the gawdawful flu on Anglo-American policy? And the Armenian genocide?"

The UK-US naval blocade of the European continent from 1914 to July, 1919 killed approximately 5 million Europeans, including Turks, not including the deaths from the influenza pandemic nor the Turkish Armenian massacre of 1915.

In case it's not clear from the above, the flu pandemic was an intercontinental catastrophy that killed somewhere around 21 million people in the US alone in 1918-9. It is harder to separate those deaths in Germany from those caused by the famine because malnutrition frequently serves as a backdrop while opportunistic diseases pick off those who have been weakened by hunger; nevertheless, the public health officials of the time have made that distinction. The Armenian genocide, of course, was the outcome of the state policy of the Young Turks ruling the Ottoman Empire in the WWI era. "You're also letting Nazi supporters off damned easy by saying that Hitler was the only voice advocating restoring Germany to pre-war status that we destroyed." Let us say, the only practical choice. Even in the election of 1932 against Hindenburg, Hindenburg was more concerned with transferring blame for the loss of the war onto others ("dochstoss") than with challenging the post-war international regime. If you know of any other prominant and influential (Austro-)German politicians publicly and unashamedly advocating directly for the nullification of the Versailles Treaty at that time, I have overlooked it; I welcome correction on that point. By the way, Hitler came in second in that election. It was Hindenburg who elevated him to power as a political appointment. "Look at the stats on unemployment in New York alone and tell me that Germany was so devasted . . ." This is an expression of first-world incomprehension of the extremity of the condition that warfare can reduce people to, something the European immigrants to the US continent have never experienced directly at home. Unemployment is not the same as general famine. For a grim description of the condition Germany was in in 1919 after 5 years of English, and then Anglo-American blockade, more like that of the Biafran famine in the Nigerian civil war or the Bangledeshi famine of 1971 during the war of Bangladeshi independence than New York in the Great Depression, we can turn to page 164 of Herbert Hoover's The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson. (By the way, Hoover, who we can see was obviously touched by the misery he witnessed, is letting Wilson off easy here; Wilson was the primary architect of the tightening of the blockade after the armistice. Banglesh had another major famine in 1942-3 as a direct result of English colonial economics under the direct hand of Churchill. WWI UK PM David Lloyd George, who presided over the "hunger blockade," later became an enthusiastic advocate for Hitler; excepting Churchill, the UK ruling class didn't turn against Hitler until he took himself out of their plans for the encirclement of the Soviet Union with the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939.) "And to say what the Nazis did is a mirror to what was inflicted on them?" No. What I said was that the latitude Germans gave the NS regime was a reflection of the scars inflicted on the people of Germany during the hunger blocade and kept raw by the aggressive postwar regime and occupation of Germany. And yes, the policies of the NS German government are the responsibility of -- the NS German government. BTW, the US itself approached insurrection in several local events such as the San Francisco waterfront strikes and the auto strikes in Detroit. FDR kept an authoritarian lid on these while himself surviving at least one coup attempt. Remember that Hitler ultimately made it to power as part of a government power play, not by a vote of the people. The Nazi share of Reichstag deputies was actually diminished in the last election prior to Hitler's appointment by Hindenberg. "to give the Nazis and their allies a pass because we did bad stuff is ludicrous." I don't think I did. I'm just saying that our mainstream conformist historians and journalists have a tendency to shade the picture a little bit, consciously or otherwise, for reasons they may not even understand. On the other hand, to give our own leaders a free pass for massive aerial bombings killing millions of civilians in North Korea or Laos, indirect involvement in atrocities such as the genocide in East Timor, and much much more than most people realize over the course of the last 70 years because the Nazis did bad stuff is equally ludicrous but a lot easier to get away with. "And tell me that American-Anglo history has been "scrubbed" when we have Zinn's "People's History" readily available? No." The presence of literature by dissident intellectuals does not negate the effect of a coherent narrative in the mainstream media and in state-sanctioned teaching materials. Per Wiki, Zinn's book has sold 2 million copies since 1980, a span of 36 years. Time and Newsweek combine to deliver something like 5 million copies each week. I dare say there is little in either of them to resemble the content of People's History. Comparing even relatively popular books like Zinn's to the reach of the MSM, concentrated in, by now, about five major corporations reaching over 90% of US readers and viewers, I think it is fair to say that Zinn's ideas are the property of a thin sliver of the American public, and that, for the vast majority, our history and the reflections of it in conformist media are fairly well "scrubbed." "Saying that Anglo-American policy is part of the story is defensible. Saying it is all of the story is not." That's what I think I did:

Anglo-American critiques of history, economics and politics have a tendency to be scrubbed of the role of state coercion, brutality and mass murder in shaping the modern world in those cases where the US or the UK is involved.

I merely point out that each national world-view has its own filter; for instance, if you go to France, I bet it is difficult to find anything in print blaming Mitterand for the Greenpeace vessel bombing of 1986. This is part of ours. By the way, I think the US and the UK should be thought of as more influential and, to some extent, more culpable than the rest of the world's countries for the state of the global economy. There are many things that go into this, but among them is the "exorbitant privilege" conferred on a national currency by global reserve status. If we look at the world in the early 1860s, about 60% of global transactions were taking place using the English Pound Sterling. This privileged position pertained until the effects of WWI debts to the US effected a transition to the US Dollar as the global reserve currency, enshrined in the Bretton Woods agreements from July 1944. Much global intrigue (see Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard) is rooted in the question of control over the global financial system; by this measure, the only global hegemonic powers since the US Civil War era have been the UK and the US.

Kudos to your grand-dad.