(December 14, 2020 at 12:45 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: 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.)
I think compared to other places American populist narrative has been "American exceptionalism" OR "leader of the free world" etc, rooted in its commitment to democracy and capitalism. Post 9/11 however it has toned down as call to scale down presence globally has caught some steam (mostly among some liberals). Also Reagan republicans who were mostly the flag bearer of this narrative are overshadowed by Trump at present.
But democracy and capitalism are still better slogans than any slogans based on a magic book.
