tejek, Perhaps you should read a bit of history, yourself. It was a Puritanic religious group that had the first intentions of controlling the Hawaiian Islands, and revert the happy islanders to a very severe Christian doctrine.(I am a Christian, but not a fanatical one). The offspring of those missionaries became quite wealthy on the backs of the people,(Dole being a prime example) and those families caused the Islands to become a territory of the U.S. The citizens of the Territory of Hawaii voted to become a bona fide state of the union.
Puerto Rico, and Cuba, which you forgot to mention, were acquired after the Spanish American War, and also included the Phillipines. I am not sure, but I think Guam, and Wake Island, were also in that package. Any of the other islands we took in the Pacific, were liberated from the Japanese invaders, and we were welcomed by the inhabitants. If you want to speak of acquiring territory in war, you must add the areas that are now the states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, and Nevada, taken from the Mexican nation. And as always, I must protest the rape, and murder, of tens of thousands of the aboriginal human natives of North, and South America, known as the Indians.
None of that smacks of Imperialism. Especially considering that at the end of WW2, we could have taken control of the entire world, and chose to rebuild the defeated nations with our own money instead. That is hardly an example of Imperialism.
The only way to undo some expansion of one nation, over another, is to revert to the cave man days, and they even fought over women, and better caves for themselves. |
