Name: 10 WORST Decisions America Ever Made
Uploaded: 2025-02-08T10:56:39.000Z
Duration: 15 min 14 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

副詞型分詞構句

After falling for 43 seconds, the time and barometric triggers started the firing mechanism.

A uranium bullet fired down a barrel into a uranium target.

Together, they started a nuclear chain reaction.

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at the worst choices ever made by the U.S. government.

These decisions either caused untold suffering or came back to haunt America down the road.

He thought making concessions to Southerners was what was necessary to preserve the Union.

Fight communism and secure resources by any means necessary.

What followed was a spree of short-sighted, covert operations.

The military action culminated months of secret planning by British and American intelligence agencies as part of a plot to overthrow the Iranian government.

By toppling a democratically elected leader, the CIA planted the seeds of regional instability that persist today.

Even allies weren't safe, as seen in Italy and Australia, where they funneled funds and propaganda to sway elections.

Worse, the agency helped install dictators like Mobutu Sese Siku in the Congo and Suharto in Indonesia, both notorious for human rights abuses.

After replacing Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, Suharto started to rule with an iron fist.

In Latin America, the CIA's Operation Condor saw leftists assassinated and propped up brutal right-wing dictators, responsible for countless disappearances and deaths.

These short-sighted interventions inflicted untold suffering and permanently damaged America's global reputation.

Amongst the victims here, Argentines, Uruguayans, Bolivians, Chileans and Cubans.

This was the center for Plan Condor in Argentina.

In the roaring 20s, the US embraced laissez-faire economics, a philosophy best described in English as hands-off.

When the sky is the limit to prosperity, it is also a long way down.

The government let the private sector take the wheel with little to no oversight.

Presidents Harding and Coolidge embraced this philosophy, leading to rampant abuse and speculation and an unregulated stock market.

It all came crashing down on Black Tuesday with the 1929 crash.

The collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 was only the most visible sign of a massive economic crisis.

A crisis that spread quickly from Wall Street to Main Street.

Banks, operating with little oversight, extended excessive credit, creating a debt bubble that exploded.

As the economy spiraled, President Hoover clung to his belief in limited government action.

He resisted direct federal relief and relied on voluntary private measures.

Putting in a strong protectionist law, which is then going to trigger retaliatory measures from other countries, has the effect of putting not just the American economy but the entire Western world's economy into a nosedive.

His refusal to provide direct aid to struggling Americans exacerbated the Great Depression, spreading it like a contagion to every corner of the nation.

The Iraq War The Iraq War started with lies and ended in catastrophe.

The Bush administration, led by neoconservative hawks, insisted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Neocons promised Iraqis would greet us as liberators.

Instead, America dragged its allies into a brutal and unjustified occupation.

It was fueled by arrogance and a complete misunderstanding of Iraq's sectarian landscape.

It was intervention on a dramatic scale, and while it destroyed Saddam's Baathist state, the struggle to define a new Iraq continues.

The administration's reckless decision to disband Saddam's Baathist government left thousands of armed, trained, and angry former soldiers unemployed.

Many later joined insurgent groups, fueling the chaos that eventually birthed ISIS.

The war, which cost over $1 trillion, shattered America's global credibility and left Iraq in ruins.

At first, more than 70% of Americans supported it, but that waned as the mission became mired in controversy, eventually falling to just 32%.

Interfering with and Ending Reconstruction The Reconstruction Amendments, considered to be a second Bill of Rights, had the potential to reshape America into a country that better reflected its promise of equality.

In his first speech after the Union victory, Lincoln alluded to the enormous challenges Reconstruction would bring.

He even suggested that some black men in the South might get the vote.

Instead, a series of failures sabotaged it.

Andrew Johnson, a Southern sympathizer, let ex-Confederates regain power in the South.

Johnson wanted the post-war South treated leniently.

As for the fate of freed slaves, he wanted that left up to the states.

President Grant, who did make some strides in protecting black rights, fell victim to corruption and a lack of focus.

The South saw violent white backlash under his watch in the 1876 election.

That vote ended in a corrupt bargain between Rutherford B.

When he entered office, he pulled federal troops from the South.

The deal secured his presidency, dooming black Southerners to a century of segregation, voter suppression, and racial terror.

They felt the North was a vicious aggressor committed to a perversion, which was black equality.

This sense of a grievance and sense of injustice only grew.

That this was something that was not to be accepted.

After Pearl Harbor, America's fear turned into paranoia, fueled by racism.

That paranoia fueled one of the most shameful mass civil rights violations in American history.

Motivated by vocal outcries from politicians and military officials, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, empowering the U.S.

Army to designate areas from which any or all persons may be excluded.

In 1942, the U.S. government forcibly relocated over 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps under FDR's Executive Order 9066.

These people, most American citizens, were imprisoned without trial for no reason other than their ancestry. 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, within four months, were put into barracks.

Families lost their homes, businesses, and dignity.

The Supreme Court upheld this racist policy in Korematsu v.

United States, claiming it was a, quote, military necessity.

Meanwhile, actual Nazi spies operated within the country with impunity, completely undetected.

Even after the war, Japanese Americans received little compensation for their suffering.

It would take over 40 years before President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, paying reparations to each victim of internment.

Korematsu wasn't officially overturned until 2018.

It was a decades-long wound on America's psyche.

Sold to the public as a necessary stand against communism, the war was built on deception.

When President Kennedy first sent Americans to Vietnam in 1961, he did so with the conviction that America was the natural leader of the free world.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident, for example, was exaggerated to spread a lust for revenge.

The military insisted victory was just around the corner.

Another lie exposed by the Pentagon papers.

The New York Times has started publication of a series of reports based on a top-secret Pentagon study of the Vietnam War.

The central fact so far revealed is that there was a massive deception of the American public for starting the bombing of North Vietnam.

Meanwhile, troops, often young draftees, were dropped into a brutal conflict where they both endured and committed atrocities.

As body bags piled up, public support collapsed.

Unlike their fathers, soldiers returning home weren't welcomed as heroes.

From PTSD-ridden veterans to a deep and abiding public skepticism of government.

In the aftermath of Reconstruction, the U.S.

Supreme Court made a series of decisions that entrenched racial segregation for decades.

White Southerners are resistant of the idea of living in an egalitarian society in which African Americans might operate as equal partners.

The Civil Rights Cases of 1883 struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, ruling that the 13th and 14th Amendments could not outlaw discrimination by private citizens.

This was cemented a few years later in Plessy v.

Ferguson, where SCOTUS upheld racial segregation under the guise of, quote, separate but equal.

字幕列表影片播放

10 WORST Decisions America Ever Made

entire

compromise

embrace

crisis