> Listen, a paradigm shift didn't occur after ww2... I am listening, but what I am hearing are demands that I must accept your teacher's dogma as the absolute

> Listen, a paradigm shift didn't occur after ww2... I am listening, but what I am hearing are demands that I must accept your teacher's dogma as the absolute truth, some highly tendentious claims misrepresenting the pre-war state, and an inconsistent application of the concept of a paradigm shift. > ...If it had, it would be germany and japan ruling the world. That would, indeed, have been one outcome that could be called transformational, but the actual outcome was transformational in its own right. Notably, you have been silent on the arguments I have presented for that point of view. > I don't know how else to explain the same thing to you. You could try to offer some fact-based arguments for the cold-war nuclear standoff and a demilitarized Japan, now part of the Western alliance, being the status quo ante. Furthermore, in your insistence that only a complete overthrow of the world order (as measured in a single-sentence summary) would count a a paradigm shift here, you are being inconsistent. The Treaty of Westphalia produced no immediate paradigm shift in Africa or Asia, and the fall of Constantinople was similarly a regional event. > An abusive husband controls his wife until she fights back and he doesn't. That analogy simply does not work for the pre-war relationship between Germany and the USSR. Your view of that relationship seems to align more with Mein Kampf than to reliable sources. > Some nations are worried that germany's growing dependence on russia today is a geopolitical security risk. Maybe so, but it is a situation Germany chose to put itself in after the cold war, and is of no relevance here: Germany's current dependence does not establish the existence of a dependency, let alone control by the USSR, prior to WW2. > Just because Japan wanted to free itself of US control doesn't mean the US didn't control it beforehand. And just because you have said that, it does not mean that the US was exercising control over Japan in the run-up to WW2. In your previous post, you reached back to the Treaty of Portsmouth in search of evidence that could be bent in support of your claim, completely ignoring how things had changed by the thirties. One could indeed argue that the war in the Pacific was started by the US imposing sanctions on Japan -- after well over a decade of non-intervention -- and the immediate consequences of that action showed clearly just how little control the US had over Japan at that point. > What? ... >Yes, I saw that documentary too. What's your point? ... >And? I saw that documentary too. What's your point? The point is that they all refute the line of argument you presented in your previous post, and you have offered nothing here to alter that. My point is that your arguments for the US, UK and USSR controlling the Axis prior to WW2 do not hold up to basic scrutiny. And, just for the record, my knowledge of the relevant history does not come from a single documentary. Your attempt to imply otherwise, together with your faux-rhetorical-question style of responses here, just underscores how poorly you are doing in coming up with factual arguments. >This is getting ridiculous. Here, I think, we can finally find agreement.