https://www.economist.com/united-states/...0-years-on

The key takeaway for me from this article were the bits: 

Quote:That does not denote shame, however. Notwithstanding Americans’ dewy-eyed view of their forces, public knowledge of their victories and defeats is similarly thin. American schools do not teach much military history and democracies do not mobilise people through a militaristic view of the past.
....

In the soul-searching that followed the American retreat, notes Max Hastings, a British historian, it is possible to see a familiar debate about the kind of superpower America should be. Deaf to the entreaties of allies, MacArthur refused to accept the limits to American power that his incompetence had helped display. He wanted to nuke the Chinese. Truman resisted and, after MacArthur sneakily appealed to his Republican backers in Congress, sacked the revered general. It may have cost him a second term. It also set a gold standard for civil-military relations that has since prevailed.

As a person raised in different culture I see how telling of history by distorting it to glamorize past glories or conquests, and wrap moral failings under the rug can help produce generations of citizenry with questionable moral stature and intellectual dishonesty.

I didn't have a very favorable view of Truman after watching Oliver Stone's documentary on Netflix, History of America but I've a new found admiration for him for his judgement.

If the citizenry were morally or intellectually deficient, there wouldn't be any need to do so in the first place. You don't have to hide what you don't find shameful and the difficulty of confronting any challenging fact is no challenge for those incapable of considering it in the first place.

At any rate, as the article notes, we just don't spend much time with military history at all. That void is just as easily filled with anti-american propaganda as it is with cold war jingoism - as oliver stones many attempts at history very conveniently demonstrate. I'd go so far as to say that the cultural pulse of the us is much more a product of that sort of revisionism than the cold war jingoism it was initially created to push back against. To the point where, today, both the anti-western and western-chauvinist demographics share propagandistic setups, differing largely in what they consider to be a shameful or challenging fact. A simplistic example would be in both sides agreeing that the slaughter of a village took place - but disagreeing as to whether it was a good, bad, or justifiable act. What we might call the other side, the rah rah rah side, has been just as successfully misinformed about us military history, and by the same set of asserted facts, as their opposition. They believe the same weird things about us forces and armed conflict.

( I remember having a convo with someone once who wondered what truman would have done, then, if he were told the state of play today with respect to the us and china and events of the subsequent years between. He made a good point, that it was more for a sleight over power and authority than anything else - the man was fine with bombing the dogshit out of people, and would only later try to rehabilitate his image in that respect.)

We serve the country. The unfortunate side effects are many.

(December 14, 2020 at 12:17 pm)Apollo Wrote: I didn't have a very favorable view of Truman after watching Oliver Stone's documentary on Netflix, History of America but I've a new found admiration for him for his judgement.

Imho Truman cant be given enough praise for resisting to "push the button".

On one hand you had living Legend MacArthur telling him to use nukes, on the other hand Truman already had used them. I am not american so i cant comment on how much the american notion of being "invincible/unconquered" added to this pressure to win the war by the seemingly only way to do so. Imho it would have been easier for Truman to switch to nuclear warfare than not.

(December 14, 2020 at 12:17 pm)Apollo Wrote: I didn't have a very favorable view of Truman after watching Oliver Stone's documentary on Netflix, History of America but I've a new found admiration for him for his judgement.

Stone is an asshole.

(December 14, 2020 at 1:14 pm)Deesse23 Wrote:

(December 14, 2020 at 12:17 pm)Apollo Wrote: I didn't have a very favorable view of Truman after watching Oliver Stone's documentary on Netflix, History of America but I've a new found admiration for him for his judgement.

Imho Truman cant be given enough praise for resisting to "push the button".

On one hand you had living Legend MacArthur telling him to use nukes, on the other hand Truman already had used them. I am not american so i cant comment on how much the american notion of being "invincible/unconquered" added to this pressure to win the war by the seemingly only way to do so. Imho it would have been easier for Truman to switch to nuclear warfare than not.

What's wrong with Truman using nukes to end WWII?

Truman believed that the cold war and americas future would be won or lost in europe, that's why he didn't sign off on bombing asia. It wasn't restraint, it was politics and, in the full light of history, a mistake on it's own grounds (even if it was a pleasant miscalculation).

(December 14, 2020 at 1:27 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Truman believed that the cold war and americas future would be won or lost in europe, that's why he didn't sign off on bombing asia.  It wasn't restraint, it was politics and, in the full light of history, a mistake on it's own grounds (even if it was a pleasant miscalculation).

Eh?

As in nuking the shit out of it - obviously he didn't have a problem bombing folks.

---

We could approach it from an entirely different angle, and mention that all of asia had been routinely underestimated at the time (part of what infuriated japan and sent it spiraling into ww2). The west believed that real conflict and real loss or gain would come from and happen in the western world.

Ah, got it.