![]() She cites the memoir of a Marine recounting how Americans’ antipathy towards the Nazis could not be compared to their “burning hatred” for the Japanese. ![]() The United States did not enter the war until after the attack on Pearl Harbor – and even then, says Samet, contemporary observers noted “a general indifference among Americans that the world was on fire.” The war in the Pacific was “started with revenge and complicated by bitter racism,” she writes. “Why We Fight”, a series of propaganda films Frank Capra made between 19, makes no mention of the Nazis’ systematic attempt to exterminate the Jews, even though the US government has learned of the final solution. The extreme depravity of the Nazis would in retrospect sanctify the âinglorious workâ of the Allied effort, but Samet points out that even after the United States entered the war, the liberation of the Jews was never a priority. Such children may have fought valiantly, writes Samet, “but their motivations were hardly high, their experience less than ennobling.” âWe were still children,â he writes, âand, like all children, fascinated by murder. Samet quotes a memoir by Shakespeare scholar Alvin Kernan, who joined the Navy in 1941 in order to escape dire economic conditions in rural Wyoming. Not that Ambrose’s heroes necessarily recognized themselves in his beatific portraits. Samet, whose new book is “Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness”. But she maintains that it has been a national fantasy to assume that “necessary” must mean the same as “good”.Įlizabeth D. Yes, she said at the outset, American involvement in the war was necessary. Like the cadets she teaches at West Point, civilians would do well to see WWII as something other than a rousing story of American goodness defeating Nazi evil. His book is therefore a merciless work of demystification – and there is something hopeful and even inspiring about it. As the “last American military action on which there is anything like a positive consensus”, World War II is “the good war that served as a prologue to three quarters of a century of unhappy people.” ![]() The casual treatment of WWII did real damage, she says, distorting our understanding of the past and therefore shaping how we approach the future. What Samet calls our “era of tin-eared tweets” may make it harder to distinguish between soaring eloquence and fragile grandiloquence, but “the Most sentences will not bear the weight of careful reading, âshe writes.Īnd âclose reading,â as Samet provocatively (and persuasively) argues, can in fact be a matter of life and death. She vividly lists the jumble of speech platitudes – “‘Great Crusade’ (Eisenhower), ‘Freedom’s Altar’ (a Civil War song), ‘devoted to history’ (Lincoln bastard), ‘new frontiers’ (Kennedy hijacked), ‘heat of battle,’ the fires of hell ‘,’ Nazi fury ‘,’ awesome power ‘,’ breathtaking scale ‘,’ cherished alliance ‘,’ eternal gratitude ‘(clichés) and’ the tough ‘(ad-lib). But Samet, an English teacher at West Point who has written on teaching war literature in the past, refuses to grade on a curve. Some listeners were so surprised by the solemnity of Trump’s words that they enthusiastically greeted him as proof that he was wearing the mantle of a man of ‘Worthy State. delivered in Normandy on the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Samet’s insightful new book on the vaporous mythology that enveloped the historical reality of WWII, she reminds us of President Trump’s 2019 speech. It's about nostalgia too - and hope for the future.Towards the end of âLooking for the Good War,â Elizabeth D. But this pilgrimage to McDonald's is more than a crosstown trek. Holovatenko and his friends have come from the other side of the city, across the Dnipro River. "It's a nice gift from McDonald's," says Yaroslav Holovatenko, as he clutches a Big and Tasty - a quarter-pounder - in a cold and rainy park in Pozniaky, an outer neighborhood of the capital Kyiv near all three of the reopened McDonald's. Regular citizens and high government officials alike flocked to snap selfies with their Big Macs and devour meals they haven't been able to enjoy in months. Three locations reopened on Tuesday, welcoming war-weary Ukrainians back beneath the warm glow of the golden arches. 24, the day Russia invaded, citing the safety of employees. The American fast food chain temporarily closed its more than 100 Ukrainian locations on Feb. ![]() KYIV, Ukraine - McDonald's has reopened in Ukraine, after seven months of war. Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images Three locations in Kyiv reopened for the first time since Russia's invasion on Feb. ![]() Customers and delivery couriers line up at a newly reopened McDonald's in Kyiv on Tuesday. ![]()
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