I'm a little loath to prolong the geopolitical history argument - as it is, at most, tangential to the discussion at hand - but I have to jump in here...
Originally Posted by
Iron Duck
• The USSR under Stalin was increasingly powerful and self-proclaimedly expansionist;
Incorrect. See :
Socialism in One Country - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It was Trotsky who continued to push for global revolution. Stalin, if anything, backed off from that position - in real terms he was something of a Slavic nationalist who used the proto-totalitarian system in place in the USSR at the time for his own ends.
I don't think there was a strategist in the world who believed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact would last once Hitler had achieved his ambitions in Western Europe, and so it came to be. I think both Hitler and Stalin themselves were well aware that the pact served only to buy a few years to resolve the struggles they were involved in at the present time, and that conflict was at some point inevitable - I'd go so far as to say that the only likely difference of opinion between Hitler and Stalin was who the victor would be when Nazi Germany inevitably attempted to expand eastwards.
I'd say that Roosevelt was remarkably prescient when it came to some things - he correctly ascertained that as long as the contemporary "Imperial" powers continued to squabble over resources, the result would be endless conflict, interspersed with short periods of fragile peace. The difference of opinion lies within whether Roosevelt the idealist genuinely believed he could achieve the end result of a United Nations organisation co-operating to resolve disputes between sovereign states, or whether he privately accepted that the Imperial powers should give way to US dominance over world politics once the war was over. The wild card turned out to be a vengeful Stalin sweeping across Eastern Europe to defeat Nazi Germany from the East and effectively demanding political dominance over the region as reparation, and so with Roosevelt dead and the more bullish Truman taking his place, what the world ended up with was the same "Great Game" - squabbles over resources and minor conflicts (prevented from escalating by the ever-present threat of nuclear global annihilation) - but with the major players being the USSR and the US as opposed to the old Imperial powers.
Ironically, it was the political descendents of the more conservative isolationists in the US that ended up using military power to promote US corporate interests in the last decades of the 20th Century.
Many, many of the consequences of the USA's entry into WW2 were beneficial to the world in general and the US population and its leadership deserves our gratitude for that, not least for the US lives expended in the process.
Now that I can agree with. However one of the things that bothered me so much about the way mainstream Western media presented the events of the Second World War in the latter half of the 20th century was the way that the efforts of the USSR on the Eastern Front were barely mentioned, except in the kind of in-depth books and documentaries that only those who were truly interested in the details would bother with.
In terms of aviation history there's a whole mountain of things to delve through to explain the postwar rivalries between Western countries and the US and UK in particular, stemming from a postwar treaty that dictated that civil aircraft would be primarily sourced from the US (which in 1945 found itself with a shedload of C-47s that were surplus to civil requirements), and for how long that treaty should be adhered to (an argument that rumbled on for decades). That's possibly for another time though, and belongs firmly in AH&N.
So, in an attempt to steer back on track, what we have to accept in this case is that the legal systems in Continental Europe work differently from the UK/US model. One of the first things my history teacher told us when we moved into modern history was that the legal systems on the Continent tended to work with a presumption of guilt, with the onus on the defendant to prove their innocence - which is in opposition to the UK/US model where the presumption is "innocent until proven guilty". This is the fundamental difference in approach from which all others are derived, along with characteristics peculiar to the state concerned - note that despite the Marshall Plan, the US did not demand that the French and (then) West German legal systems be redefined along Anglo/US lines.
Our cousin in Arizona posits that there are indisputable facts that could be pressed into an argument for negligence on the part of Air France. Nevertheless, all the evidence points to the fact that despite the missing spacer, the allegedly dubious weight calculations and the tailwind, Concorde F-BTSC would have made a successful takeoff with ample options for later fault correction had the tyre not been destroyed by the debris from the preceding DC-10, causing a failure of the fuel tank. The debris lay in F-BTSC's path because it was made of the incorrect material and shoddily fitted, and as such, the operator of the DC-10 and the mechanic concerned are considered primarily liable, with a smaller - though considerable - degree of liability placed at the door of EADS for not being strict enough in applying preventative measures in terms of fuel tank failure as the result of a tyre burst. Neither Continental's, nor EADS's lawyers were able to prove that their clients were not culpable with the evidence at hand.
That's the lie of the land at present, with Continental and EADS sharing corporate responsibility for the disaster. To me that in itself shreds any attempt to paint the result as "the French protecting their own" (paraphrased).