| Friday, January 21, 2005 |
16:16 - What a difference half a century makes
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050121
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Aha! So this is the new angle: World War II as the Paragon of All Honorable Wars!
Of course. Obviously. Everybody knows nothing bad ever was done by American soldiers during WWII. The Nazis were just as lawless as the Islamists; they weren't a modern society that had been hijacked by extremists that kept their people blind to their leaders' atrocities or anything. But we can rest assured that the Americans tiptoed around sleeping families of field mice on their way to taking out main battle tanks, killed no Nazi without being fired upon first, and certainly never resorted to such barbarities as depriving prisoners of sleep or telling them they were ugly and their Führer dressed them funny.
Or could it be, maybe, that back then we understood that war was a bad, dirty, ugly thing, that required many sacrifices of conscience on both sides—and that restraint, while a thing we strive for on the battlefield, is a luxury we sometimes cannot afford? Maybe the reason why we're able to think of WWII as the peak of American honorability is that the media of the time whitewashed it—a concept so horrifying to today's media that they've committed to doing the exact opposite?
Surely neither is ideal.... because fifty years hence, either is going to give us a pretty darned twisted view back over our shoulders.
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Brian Tiemann
