Comment by lenerdenator
3 days ago
It hurts to see the generation that won WWII pass, not the least bit because we seem to have forgotten the lessons from their struggle.
3 days ago
It hurts to see the generation that won WWII pass, not the least bit because we seem to have forgotten the lessons from their struggle.
In their prime, they too forgot the lessons of their own ancestors struggle.
One of the films in the Why We Fight series opens by following a handful of very old men attending the 1941 Independence Day, or perhaps it was Memorial day, parade in Washington DC. The narrater later informs the viewer that these men are veterans of the Civil War.
Indeed, it is very easy to forget the struggle when one has sacrificed nothing to achieve it.
At least WWII, unlike those preceding it, has a vast well of literature to draw those lessons from. The trouble, however, is not just getting younger people to sit, read and analyze it, but also to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, with all the propaganda and misinformation to be had these days about the events of WWII, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and so many other things that would make this list exceptionally long.
Books, are not the same as having lived it, of course. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it best in The Gulag Archipelago.
“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'
Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”
Ha, maybe I should read (in translation) some Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I recognised his name having never seen it in print but only heard it repeatedly in that episode of Game Changer where it's a loop and the same questions are asked repeatedly.
There's an audiobook these days too, but the short clip I listened to was pretty rough because the narrator (Frederick Davidson's) voice is very pinched and nasal, with the audio quality sounding like it was recorded in a tin can. I'm on the hunt for a better copy to add to my library, but yes, I think a re-read at this time sounds pretty good.
> all the propaganda and misinformation to be had these days about the events of WWII, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and so many other things
I'm curious as to what sort of propaganda or misinformation you're referring to. I'm in Europe and I haven't seen much of it, but maybe it's different in the US.
Sadly go look at the "masculine" channels targeting young men on YouTube (Tate and his compatriots). There's a LOT of holocaust denial, rewriting of Hitler as misunderstood etc. We're both lucky to not be exposed to it regularly, but unfortunately in my work it's a thing I have to be aware of.
Worse, an entire generation of young men especially are being told that WWII wasn't what it really was. You see the results of this in the US but also eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary, across Europe where right wing parties are on the rise substantially supported by these young men.
There are several downvoted comments from butthurt Nazis in this thread.
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it's not different in the US, there is not a market of misinformation about WWII here. There is the the anti-war left alleging that that the allies committed war crimes and their opponents rejecting those arguments, but it's easy to find what happened in Dresden, Holocaust, etc, the disagreement is on interpretation.
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