The Nationalist Myth, War and "Vintage"

[John in Covina]

As for low culture itself, it has a way of turning itself into high culture as soon as everyone who enjoyed it when it was new is dead.

This is a lot like food - everything that was peasant food and inexpensive cuts becomes gormet and priced out of the reach of us minions.

 

[AmateisGal]

Hollywood spewed forth propaganda during the war with the John Wayne movies and all that just as much as any other media entity, if not more so. I believe Roosevelt specifically told the industry it was their duty to produce such films.

I don't think that the generation watching those movies really thought that was what war was like - the newsreels (and when they started showing the dead bodies in LIFE magazine) showed them otherwise. Lizzie is right - we don't give that generation enough credit, IMO. We mostly look at the lens of the war through popular culture - movies, magazine ads, comic books, propaganda posters, radio broadcasts, etc., etc. The people that lived through the war knew it was propaganda - and we need to remember that.

 

[sheeplady]

Agreed. War is a dirty, filthy, obscene job. But sometimes there's just no other alternative.

As for the rest of it, it's all well and good to sit in the 21st Century with all our Media-Savvy-Ironic-Detachment and all the rest of that smug beard-stroking and say that the people of the Era were all naively marching along, unwitting victims of their own blind patriotism, but the reality was *nothing*like*that.*

America from 1938 to 1941 was as divided as any nation has ever been on the question of war. There were Americans who wanted to immediately wade into it and mop up Hitler, there were others who were convinced that Europe deserved exactly what it was getting and that Europeans should be left to stew in their own juices, and there were still others who had no problem with Hitler at all and thought "it's too bad we didn't have a man like that here." Anyone who thinks all that divisiveness vanished at Pearl Harbor is very much mistaken.

There were plenty of Americans who didn't want to go to war even when the war was a fait accompli. In any city somebody knew somebody a man could go to get an eardrum punctured -- an easy way to a 4F card. There was always somebody who could help a man "beat the physical" or could tell you who you had to talk to get that deferment. In every town there was somebody who had black-market meat to sell or counterfeit ration stamps, and in every town somebody was buying them. Everybody knew somebody who was working the angles -- bribing somebody in the OPA office to get a new set of tires or a C card or a third pair of shoes. Patriotism was fine for these people as long as it didn't interfere with one's personal needs of the moment.

How many people did this sort of thing? We have no way of knowing. How many people didn't skirt the law, but griped and complained about the sacrifices they were expected to make? Many, and most people who were there at the time will tell you so frankly. They made a lot of these homefront sacrifices not because of idealism but because those sacrifices were mandated by law.

Why don't people make those same sacrifices today? *Because there's no law requiring them to do so.*

My own grandfather would have never served in the "dirty ****ing war" if he hadn't been drafted, so I am well aware of the fact that all sorts of people had all sorts of opinions. My grandfather only went because he was thought he could get something out of it. And he did; he's successfully been cheating the VA for years and saying the hell with other veterans, he deserves his. (I kid you not, but that's a nice analysis of the man and his motivations.)

As far as my statement, I was talking about people I admire. Some people I admire from the time period were GIs, some were on the home front, and some were pacifists. Not everybody is a hero, far from it. Very few people are actually heroes, but I've known a few. I don't see why people have to think that because someone finds someone heroic, that means automatically that they think everyone is just by their existence in that time period. Most of us are familiar with multiple people from that generation (who here isn't?) and they are all over the map as far as admiration- from negative to positive.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

The way I look at it is.....
Anyone who volunteers..or was drafted into military service..during wartime or not is a hero. Simply because they ultimately made the decision to serve. For along with that comes the chance that they very well may be positioned to lay down their life at any time. I stood beside and trained many whom I admired...and always will.
HD

 

[filfoster]

And even today, almost a lifetime later, it's the biggest single event in the history of the world.

Yes. And we grew up as children of the people who left home for years to fight it. How could that not shape who we are and our interest in the era of our parents and grandparents?

Of course, now we have GaGa to shape our era.

Hoosier Daddy says it for me, too.

 

[Undertow]

I don't think that the generation watching those movies really thought that was what war was like - the newsreels (and when they started showing the dead bodies in LIFE magazine) showed them otherwise. Lizzie is right - we don't give that generation enough credit, IMO. We mostly look at the lens of the war through popular culture - movies, magazine ads, comic books, propaganda posters, radio broadcasts, etc., etc. The people that lived through the war knew it was propaganda - and we need to remember that.

I don't think that the WWII generation was ignorant to the facts, but I wonder if they accepted the demonization of the German and Italian people. We certainly allowed our government to shift Japanese Americans around into camps, or relocate them to different areas of the country. I'm sure many folks at least figured on these moves as "necessary" for national security.

I think people were fairly savvy to the war being violent and horrible, but how many boys and men do you suppose signed up willingly because they wanted to do their part? We saw underage boys trying to join as well as actors and other high profile celebrities. It was pumped in cartoons and movies, too. Certainly, there were those who knew better, who knew that war was hell and who didn't for a second buy in to all the business about glory. But could the same thing be said for the entire nation?

And aren't we guilty of that today with the way our government and news outlets demonize countries like Iran and Syria?

 

[LizzieMaine]

German-Americans and Italian-Americans were also interned. It's not a story as widely known as the camps for Japanese-Americans, but camps for Germans and Italians did exist. About 11,000 German-Americans and about 300 Italian-Americans in the California exclusion zone were confined until the end of the war.

As far as why people enlisted -- men *and women* -- the most common reason was likely that they realized a dirty job had to be done. What was happening in Europe and in Asia was like having cockroaches in your kitchen. You can ignore them, and they'll eventually overrun the whole house. Or you can do what you have to do to get rid of them -- it's a dirty, ugly job, but it has to be done. And that's how most people in the Era viewed it. Most Americans were much less naive about the whole business than they were in 1917, and the generation that fought World War 2 had grown up hearing just how bogus all the flag-waving and "Over There" singing and all that sort of stuff had turned out to be. They were much more honest about the whole business -- just get over there, do what had to be done, and get the hell back home in one piece. And as it turned out, the propaganda wasn't as bad as the reality: no atrocity propaganda could equal what actually happened in the Nazi concentration camps, or to millions of Chinese civilians under Japanese domination.

Patton said it best. "War isn't about dying for your country. It's about making sure the other SOB dies for *his* country."

And I'll add one more thought. There seems to be a real need for us today to believe that the civilian populations of Germany and Japan were as much victims as were the civilian populations of the countries Germany and Japan laid waste. If that were, in fact, true would the Nazis or the Japanese militarists ever have attained power in the first place?

 

[sheeplady]

And I'll add one more thought. There seems to be a real need for us today to believe that the civilian populations of Germany and Japan were as much victims as were the civilian populations of the countries Germany and Japan laid waste. If that were, in fact, true would the Nazis or the Japanese militarists ever have attained power in the first place?

Well, I would certainly call those who died, survived, or hid from the holocaust/ concentration camps of German heritage to be as much victims as those victims in the countries Germany and Japan laid to waste. It's not an insignificant portion of the population, although the Jewish population was smaller in western Europe than in eastern Europe. (Although Jews were only one group of victims, they were the most targeted in terms of the concentration camps.)

 

[LizzieMaine]

Let's just say that if every German who claimed after the war to be anti-Nazi and who claimed to have tried to rescue Jews was telling the truth, the Nazis would never have come to power in the first place. Sure, some were truly opponents of the regime -- but I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of the German public was actively resisting, or even passively. It's about as likely as the idea that every single citizen of France who survived the war was a member of the Resistance and never, never, never EVER was a collaborateur.

 

[Edward]

Then, as throughout human history, I should expect the vast majority of folks simply kept their heads down in the hope they'd get out alive.

 

[LizzieMaine]

No doubt that was the case, at least by the last months of the war. But we shouldn't forget that during the flood-tide years of the Nazi regime, it enjoyed broad-based popular support, probably peaking around the time of the Anschluss. The Nazis got nearly fifty percent of the popular vote in the 1933 elections -- while not a majority, they were by far the most popular of the fourteen political parties on the ballot.

My point being, one can't absolve the average Hans Deutscher from responsibility for what happened during the Nazi era -- because the movement couldn't have risen to power without his support. To acknowledge that reality isn't a matter of "giving way to wartime hate propaganda," it's simply recognizing the reality of what happened. I make no apology for taking this view, nor do I rationalize it. The German people of 1933-45 sowed the wind, and reaped the whirlwind.

Of course, on May 9th 1945 every surviving German was a firm and committed anti-Nazi, but that's only human nature, isn't it?

 

[Flicka]

Anti-democracy wasn't just confined to Germany, or Italy. Lots of people supported the idea of a Communist "People's dictatorship", admired Mussolini (Churchill did to some extent in the '20s) or supported local anti-democratic movements – in Britain, Sweden, the US... During the inter-war years there was a global debate on whether democracy had failed altogether. Denying that is just silly. And if serving and being prepared to lay down your life for your country automatically makes people heroes, then there are quite a lot of Nazi heroes...

I think the horror of the camps when it was revealed to its full extent was just too horrible to accept - I mean, even the leading Nazis who obviously had known, were struck almost dumb by the footage at the Nuremburg trials. It took until the '60s before the war could even be reasonably discussed in Germany. But then, the children of people with Nazi sympathies and their children have been pretty open about their affiliations. I can readily admit that my grandmother's father was very admiring of Nazi Germany in the 30s. He even wrote articles for the local newspaper about it, but I'm sure he conveniently had forgotten that in 1946.

To return to the original topic, I think nationalism, or chauvinism or whatever you want to call it, has been taboo in Sweden for generations. We were never a flag-waving, national anthem-singing people. To be honest, we find that disgusting, not to mention embarrassing. I think that's one way in which we simply do not understand the US. The fact that we haven't been at war for 200 years probably is probably a contributing factor, but also the fact that we abhor any sort of display of emotions, and nationalism is an emotion.

 

[filfoster]

Is this pernicious 'nationalism' at the root of soccer hooliganism?

 

[Baron Kurtz]

No, that's tribalism. Football hooliganism started in the crowds of club matches, and spread to the national stage. It was never so bad or pronounced in national football games as it was/is in club football.

 

[Aerojoe]

Rise of nazi party in Germany is an ultra-complex subject. There was the Versailles treaty after WWI, the disastrous Weimar republic, a hyperinflation that caused hunger, the rise of both, violent communist and violent far right factions, an infamous secret society and many other causes that cornered regular people. Right now it is happening something similar in Greece. It is in an early stage yet but you know the saying; those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Regarding middle class joining army, it is the same in everywhere. It is not about social classes; it is about knowledge. The more educated you are and the more global vision you have, the more aware you are that in the army, you'll probably become nothing but cannon fodder.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Anti-democracy wasn't just confined to Germany, or Italy. Lots of people supported the idea of a Communist "People's dictatorship", admired Mussolini (Churchill did to some extent in the '20s) or supported local anti-democratic movements – in Britain, Sweden, the US... During the inter-war years there was a global debate on whether democracy had failed altogether. Denying that is just silly. And if serving and being prepared to lay down your life for your country automatically makes people heroes, then there are quite a lot of Nazi heroes...

Sad to say, I don't think freedom and democracy are necessarily a natural human impulse "that beats in the hearts of all peoples" because the history of the last 100 years or so is full of examples of tyrants who were toppled in one revolution or another only to be replaced by yet another despot, very often one who was freely and popularly elected -- at least initially.

 

[Undertow]

Let's just say that if every German who claimed after the war to be anti-Nazi and who claimed to have tried to rescue Jews was telling the truth, the Nazis would never have come to power in the first place. Sure, some were truly opponents of the regime -- but I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of the German public was actively resisting, or even passively. It's about as likely as the idea that every single citizen of France who survived the war was a member of the Resistance and never, never, never EVER was a collaborateur.

[I'm honestly doing my best to skirt partisan politics, which I know are banned here and which I'm frankly not interested in discussing at all, but which can muddle a theoretical and historical discussion. So please forgive me...]

And here's where the present day has me wondering.

We have locations like Guantanomo Bay as well as secret torture camps/prisons set up in countries across eastern Europe including Poland. Our government, under both parties, has admitted to and defended the kidnapping, indefinite imprisonment, and torturing of thousands of men within the last decade for such vague charges as "aiding terrorists", many of these men often having only filled some menial position like cook, or driver. We've allowed for the creation of a national surveillance system which seems to increase in its effectiveness each day. We're teetering on the brink of a conflict in Syria and a war in Iran...

...and yet we keep voting in the same two parties. We don't seem to be stopping any of this madness. And in fact, many of us seem to support this drum beating because we believe, as the pundits and politicians and newspapers tell us, it's for our own good...

...so isn't that very much like 1930's Germany? Or 1910's Turkey? Or 1990's Yugoslavia? Or 1910's Russia? Or 1980's El Salvador?

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think this is part of the reason why so many people insist on viewing the Nazi regime as an aberration, as some sort of Colossus of Inhuman Evil that sprang from the minds of demonized men -- not a political regime that was the product of people as ordinary as we are. If the Nazis were inhuman, then it couldn't happen again. If they were *just like us*, people who loved their families and went for walks after supper and worried about the roof leaking and complained when their sciatica acted up -- it could happen anytime.

 

[Fletch]

It gobsmacked civilization in part because to many people, Germany was civilization - science, philosophy, technology, industry, the arts. In the 19th and the early 20th century Germans were leaders in all these fields.

Of course, at the same time, they were perhaps the most militaristic world power since the Spartans. Authoritarianism pervaded daily life, leaving the average German citizen with little say in his destiny - and little desire for any. And along with the army, the industrial class controlled everything - even the sovereigns.

The end result, of course, was a highly advanced nation whose civilization was basically handmaiden to the values of command, control, and force. So much so that even after that nation was disarmed and pauperized, the brutality machine was able to rebuilt itself from nothing in only a decade - bigger and worse than ever.

 

[1961MJS]

I think this is part of the reason why so many people insist on viewing the Nazi regime as an aberration, as some sort of Colossus of Inhuman Evil that sprang from the minds of demonized men -- not a political regime that was the product of people as ordinary as we are. If the Nazis were inhuman, then it couldn't happen again. If they were *just like us*, people who loved their families and went for walks after supper and worried about the roof leaking and complained when their sciatica acted up -- it could happen anytime.

Yep, one of the books on the Holocaust said that many German towns like to have the concentration camps because it provided jobs. Not sure I could live like that, but then it's tough to buck city fathers...

Later