VDH on the recent blathering about WWII and the related revisionist tilt to all the discussions.
His closing lines summarize it all quite appropriately:
His closing lines summarize it all quite appropriately:
If there were any justice in the world, we would have the ability to transport our most severe critics across time and space to plop them down on Omaha Beach or put them in an overloaded B-29 taking off from Tinian, with the crew on amphetamines to keep awake for their 15-hour mission over Tokyo.I think his overall discussion is quite proper considering the recent discussions related to the US failures of WWII.
But alas, we cannot. Instead, the beneficiaries of those who sacrificed now ankle-bite their dead betters. Even more strangely, they have somehow convinced us that in their politically-correct hindsight, they could have done much better in World War II.
Yet from every indication of their own behavior over the last 30 years, we suspect that the generation who came of age in the 1960s would have not just have done far worse but failed entirely.
2 comments:
On the one hand, it's VDH, who am I to disagree. On the other, I get bloody sick of this "greatest generation" crap. I'm glad that a lot of the baby boomers love their mommies and daddies, but that doesn't make them uber-menschen. They rose up and did what was needed. I don't think that spirit is gone from the current generation. I just don't think anything as big & ugly as Hitler has reared it's ugly head.
I don't agree with you on the spirit of the present generation to be able to fight a large conflict like WWII. I see far too much of the Vietnam syndrome floating around. Far too many people will question why we should get involved or our reasons for getting involved. Then there will be the "body bag" quotes like we heard about Afghanistan. I just look at the amount of hand wringing and outright venom that has been thrown around about Iraq, and how it must be our fault somehow, to give the present generation much credit. Note also that these are the Vietnam era generation in politics now, and that has a lot to do with it IMHO.
Also, the Vietnam draft dodging, which in many cases is now seen as somehow OK, didn't occur at any scale in WWII. I wouldn't be confident to say the same thing if a draft were put in place today. Even if we were the ones attacked.
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