{"id":389,"date":"2018-08-04T15:57:35","date_gmt":"2018-08-04T22:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=389"},"modified":"2025-07-20T13:21:37","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T20:21:37","slug":"too-much-wwii-2005","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/too-much-wwii-2005\/","title":{"rendered":"Too Much WWII (2005)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I grew up in the backwash of World War II in the midst of the Cold War \u2014 and I did not question those conflicts. After the Cold War ended, I became an \u201cisolationist,\u201d at least as regards milit<\/span>ary adventures. That put me against most of the Right (and I was already against the Left). As I listened to the Right\u2019s arguments, I kept hearing World War II, over and over again. On May 18, 2005, sixty years to the month from the victory in Europe, my column in the <\/span><\/i>Seattle Times<\/span> criticized America\u2019s cultural fixation on World War II.<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 In his 1974 book<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>The Russians<\/i>, Hedrick Smith wrote that in the Soviet Union it felt as if World War II were only yesterday. Russians seemed to be constantly reliving the Great Patriotic War.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There was a human reason for that, but there was also a political reason. Telling the story served the purposes of the state \u2014 and the V-E celebrations in Moscow last week showed that it still does.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Here, too. I grew up in the 1960s, watching \u201cCombat\u201d and \u201cRat Patrol\u201d on TV, and\u00a0The Great Escape\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0The Longest Day\u00a0<\/i>at the movies. American culture was saturated in World War II, and still is, considering that the war ended 60 years ago. We honor our octogenarians with movies like\u00a0Saving Private Ryan\u00a0<\/i>and the HBO series\u00a0Band of Brothers<\/i>.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019m a fan of many of these stories. But they do have a political content. They elevate war, and a particular war. Following Studs Terkel\u2019s 1984 oral history, we have come to call the world\u2019s most-lethal conflict \u201cThe Good War.\u201d We have taken several lessons from it for application to future wars.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The first is that some political leaders and movements, like Hitler and his National Socialists, are so evil that to try to understand them or deal with them is futile and morally contemptible. Essentially, every time we hear the term \u201cappeasement\u201d \u2014 Rush Limbaugh said yesterday morning that Europe is \u201cappeasing Iran\u201d \u2014 we connect to this.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Second is the idea that the United States has responsibility to eradicate such evil, even when it does not directly threaten us.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Third is belief that the need to do this, and our intention to promote democracy afterward, justifies our means.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0You could see an echo of this in President Bush\u2019s use of the term \u201caxis of evil\u201d and in his statement that Osama bin Laden had attacked us because he hated America for who we are (rather than anything our government had done). You could see it in the campaign that ran in the fall and winter of 2002 to personify Saddam Hussein as Hitler. You could see it in the photos of a leering Pfc. Lynndie England holding an Arab man on a dog leash. This is what people do when they think of their opponents as cast out.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0This is not unique to Bush and the Republicans. Clinton also did it. In order to punish Saddam, he\u00a0<\/span>kept Iraq under an embargo that raised the death rate among Iraqi children. He ordered a 79-day bombing campaign against Serbia, a country that never attacked us and posed no threat to us. Serbia\u2019s ruler, Slobodan Milosevic, was the subject of a Saddam-like propaganda campaign in the American press, including a cover photo on\u00a0Newsweek\u00a0<\/i>with the cover line, \u201cThe Face of Evil.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Had we not won World War II and been saturated in its historical and moral lore in the decades since, would we be doing this? I doubt it.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0You can see the Germans\u2019 view of the war in such movies as\u00a0Downfall<\/i>,\u00a0Stalingrad\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Das Boot<\/i>. All end in futility and disaster. It should be no surprise that Germany did not join our enterprise in Iraq. When the French refused, we mocked them as \u201ccheese-eating surrender monkeys.\u201d Nobody mocked the Germans. They had earned the right to stay out.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Maybe the Germans have a better view of war, a more accurate one, than we. Maybe the men who knew the machine guns and mustard gas of World War I had a better view of war than the glorifiers of World War II. The view from the Great War is expressed in\u00a0All Quiet on the Western Front<\/i>, another book by a German.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We forget World War I. It has vanished from our culture as thoroughly as George Washington. The Vietnam War, another bad investment, may fade, or be memorialized in the manner of\u00a0We Were Soldiers<\/i>. The Cold War with the Soviet Union \u2014 an empire run by totalitarians we learned to deal with \u2014 also fades. World War II endures.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0By all means, let\u2019s thank those of the \u201cgreatest generation\u201d who were sent, usually as conscripts, to fight in a war in which perhaps 50 million were killed. But it is a mistake to distill too much inspiration from it. When we do that, we may be more like Hedrick Smith\u2019s \u201cRussians\u201d than we care to think.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a9 2005 The Seattle Times<\/em><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Of the many responses to this, my favorite was by a reader who wrote, \u201cThe exaggerated view we now get of Hitler makes us susceptible to the idea that we will know evil when we see it. Actually, though, evil is led by steps into a society by leaders who are irrational and who peddle fear, preach security and religious solutions, who bid people to turn away from using their intellects and embrace the \u2018truths\u2019 they find in their animal emotions and in their \u2018common sense.\u2019 \u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I grew up in the backwash of World War II in the midst of the Cold War \u2014 and I did not question those conflicts. After the Cold War ended, I became an \u201cisolationist,\u201d at least as regards military adventures. That put me against most of the Right (and I was already […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-389","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1497,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/389\/revisions\/1497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}