Everyone in a position of any influence wanted it to stop. But only on favorable terms. The team pulling ahead wasn’t going to stop until the other side was completely and utterly defanged for the long term. And the team falling behind had no rational motivation to quit under those circumstances when a miraculous recovery in fortune was still just barely imaginably possible. Add in some irrational leaders surrounded by yes-men and you get what we got.
Your points about the much narrower field of view of the masses is 100% spot on. But even with all the modern newsgathering, how many Americans understand ISIS’s or Assad’s POV? Note I said “understand”, which is not a synonym for “sympathize / empathize with”. It means “comprehend clearly”.
Well, it’s clear that even WITH the 24/7 news cycle and availability of 1,200 different viewpoints of the whole situation that people are going to end up believing what they want to believe.
And if that happens to be that Kubrick filmed the moon landings, there ain’t much you or I are going to be able to do to persuade them otherwise. You and I might look at some of this stuff and say What? People actually STILL believe that vaccines cause autism? I thought we put that baby to bed years ago . . . but no.
I was just watching a doc yesterday that was saying how WWII was actually just an extension of WWI. No doubt about that. But, is it truly, Never Again?
Not by half. Not if half the population still believes the myths and lies and ancestral grievances that some like to carry through every millennium, perpetuating the cycle of hate and mistrust and casual prejudices, never to let wither and die with a sparkly new generation that hasn’t known the hatred that propelled their parents and ancestors.
Nope. Someone, somewhere, will see to it that all this hate and violence will not end, because, you know, when it comes down to it, those bastards killed my grandfather, right? So we have to kill them.
While I was a the train museum in Sacramento last summer I ran into an old guy (well, my wife started talking to him) who turned out to be a navigator who was flying missions over Normandy the night of. Talking to him, hearing stories was pretty cool.
The 70th anniversary of the end of WWII is a huge deal in Russia. Victory Day is celebrated every year in Russia on May 9th, and this year the celebrations are particularly huge. Among the many commemorations, one of the TV channels has been presenting a very moving project, in which people read actual letters written by Soviet soldiers (many of whom never made it home). For Russians, the war still conjures up historical memories of a time of devastating loss and pride in victory. Conservative estimates suggest that the Soviet Union lost 27 million citizens in the war, some sources put the casualty count much higher.
My father-in-law is in his 90s. He fought in the Soviet army from Stalingrad to Berlin. He is a hero in my eyes. And it is very poignant to think that this may be the last big celebration of Victory Day that he will ever witness.
Interesting historical quirk; the western Allies celebrate VE-Day on May 8th, while the Russians do it on May 9th. Why? The document was signed before midnight on May 8th in Berlin, but it was already May 9th in Russia.
These guys, despite HUGE obstacles put in their way, among them bungling by their own inept leaders in exile, basically went on a suicide mission to rid the world of the Butcher of Bohemia, Reinhard Heydrich.
They overrode their own local commanders’ orders not to carry out the assassination by asserting that they had been given orders from the very top, they were soldiers, and they would carry the orders out no matter what.
Then, despite knowing what the Nazis had done in reprisal, they holed up in a church and fought to the death, killing several elite SS soldiers and basically keeping themselves alive in spite of one of their traitor friend’s entreaties to surrender, for many hours, during which the SS commanders, extremely embarrassed that their very public battle was going down and not being concluded despite the presence of 700 SS troops, flooded the basement the commandoes were in and forced them all to shoot themselves.