The Cultural Impact And Legacy Of World War Two

xps

Lord Haw-Haw was an exemplary Irish volunteer who might not have been mentioned at school :p

400k combat deaths for US feels like an astronomical number when abstracted from what other countrese experienced...and it's also worth pointing out that this was more (according to that video) than the UK.

I didn’t forget Pearl Harbor, but it’s not exactly the same as what the Soviet Union went through in terms of violence being visited upon the civilian population.

I’m not saying we didn’t get our hair mussed

I was surprised to learn recently that the majority of US combat deaths were in the European theater...I had always assumed the Pacific was "worse."

stand corrected and realize i'm being glib but it's just the vibe i dread lol

obv something like d-day is an actual nightmare

the russian sieges, tho-- the marching and raping back and forth across the civilian pops of eastern europe-- the camps and systematic massacres-- the millions dead-- hardly untrue to say that (non-native) (non-black) america has never experienced anything like that

xps

there is a decentish book called Savage Continent which gives accounts of the lawlessness and genocide occurring in "peace-time" mainland Europe including deadly pograms in Poland, mass genocide of the Ustache in Serbia, British backed genocide in Greece, the partisans all getting liquidated by Uncle Joe. It's no Band of Brothers!

yeah. it’s not diminishing the US experience of the war to note that the Eastern front was a world historical grand guginol. arguably the worst “thing” that ever happened.

A whole lotta Grand Guignol though

dec 7 means literally nothing to most mainlanders

erick erickson won't eat asian food that day

well that's certainly not how we observe it here

The Japanese shelled the west coast of the U.S.

tbf, in the context of WWII, this one brief, hit-and-run attack amounted to less than nothing

something like half of the civilian dead at PH were japanese-american; what an asshole obv

(again tho that's half of a v low number)

just in case dlh was referring to my post (an outside chance, but there you go), I was referring to a negligible Japanese attack in 1942, not Pearl Harbor.

nah "erik erickson"'s

agree that post-pearl-harbor attacks on u.s. territory amount to curiosities

otm my point was basically that WW2 for Americans (who weren’t actually in the war) is a distant event but for soviets and frankly almost everyone in Europe it must have been a waking nightmare for half a dozen years, or at least it was til you got numb to it all.

The Japanese shells destroyed a derrick and a pump house, while the Ellwood Pier and a catwalk suffered minor damage. After 20 minutes, the gunners ceased fire and the submarine sailed away.

^^^an event used to justify subsequent Japanese-American internment (one horrific atrocity visited upon American citizens in this country during the war).

And as for WWI...

agree that post-pearl-harbor attacks on u.s. territory amount to curiosities

― difficult listening hour

anybody want to compare and contrast with, say, the doolittle raid?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration

this motherfucker makes D Day look like a bit of the old horseplay on the beaches eh what?

Yeah. Destroying like 3 german armies within a week is pretty mind blowing... and indeed the scale of operations on the eastern front (from Barbarossa till the end) make DDay pretty... tiny... (with less than 5.000 allied deaths over the whole DDay).

Yeah it seems like D-Day and landing in France was more geared toward beating the Russians to Berlin and taking as much territory as possible before they did since once they were there, they might not be leaving any time soon.

When you consider all the main battles in the west (DDay, Market Garden, Bulge, Monte Cassino...), they're all so small compared to the monstruous eastern front !

was surprised to see TM at the D Day commemorations as had forgotten she was still technically the prime minister.

she's just maintaining what is left of her cultural impact and legacy ... next to nothing.jpeg

Get the hell out of here with your crap about Merkel being in Normandy. She should be. Not only have the Germans done more than any country to look their past in the face, she stands for all the kids they were drafting by '44 and sent to slaughter.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) June 6, 2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration

this motherfucker makes D Day look like a bit of the old horseplay on the beaches eh what?

― calzino

to be fair, when you achieve something like the soviets did with bagration you don't need to care who acknowledges your victory. america has never particularly felt a need to teach the battle of the philippine sea in history classes.

makes D Day look like a bit of the old horseplay on the beaches eh what?

I don't mean to in any way minimize the achievements or sacrifices of the USSR, which were ENORMOUS and under-appreciated in the modern west, but one should also consider that the USA supplied one hell of a lot of war material to the European & Russian theaters and agreed to "go slow" in the Pacific in terms of all-out commitment in order to prioritize the German defeat over Japan's defeat, and while the US and Britain were fighting the war in Asia, the Pacific, North Africa, Italy and the Mediterranean, the USSR threw everything they had into their one huge theater along the "Russian front".

It's weird how our leaders in the contemporary US were the people who helped the Nazis kill more American GIs than most German soldiers, like the Bush and Koch families.

We're a fucking weird country, right?

'what red army?' asks mike pence

Pence drawing a similarity between D-Day anniversary and Democrats advocating "socialism."

"It was freedom, not socialism" that won two World Wars, Pence says.

"America will never be a socialist country."

— Julian Routh (@julianrouth) June 6, 2019

This concept of "socialism" here is trapped in 19th century Prussia. Led by pied pipers like Chapo Trap House, DSA, Cortez, and New Yorker/CIA families.

It's a really funky framework game here. If any American could figure it out, they'd probably get threatened with murder and go on the run and disappear from any activity in politics except vague drunken shitposts on the internet.

yeah Aimless, US Lend/Lease scheme was essential to the survival of the Soviet Union, although they did well to move a lot of their military industry deeper east after the invasion it wouldn't have been enough to maintain such a huge front. But my simple analysis is that doing someone a solid by lending them some gear during a desperate struggle against dogged invaders can be costly but not as costly as profusely bleeding your own citizens. At this end listening to stupid pols talking like D-Day was that pivotal moment that turned the tide.. and never before has such a great sacrifice.. blah blah blah is just so annoying as fuck. I don't like agreeing with Putin .. but a stopped clock etc..

Would like to note that Stalin was profusely bleeding the Soviet Union's citizens long before there was a desperate struggle for national survival.

I didn't know that at all.. wow learn something new every day from you!

That seems to be a fairly personal response.

sorry if it sounded personal.. but ffs!

Look, obviously Mike Pence's historiography of WWII is nonsense, but rejecting one national myth doesn't require embracing the opposing national myth. Russian nationalist mythology is just as stupid as American nationalist mythology as far as I'm concerned. Certainly I'm impressed by Zhukov's generalship, but just because Stalin's meat-grinder was eventually effective doesn't make it any more valorous than Petain's.

It does occur to me that "total war" is the one kind of war where you actually do win by killing more of them (percentage wise) than they do of you.

I'm not being moralistic about Soso's reign of terror here, am coldly talking about raw numbers of whom did the most damage to the nazi regime's ability to wage war, just bringing the moralising to how much blood was shed per unit destroyed for the long suffering Soviets and how their annoyance at the western d-day hyperbole is pretty legit.

the bolsheviks had reason to exaggerate the extent of it but I think it's fair to say that like the tsar before them they were in a desperate struggle for survival & control long before the third reich arrived

I don't think it's about "embracing the opposing national myth" at all! The conclusion to draw from the idea that WWII was won by the Soviets wouldn't be "turns out Stalin was a good guy", it would be "turns out feel good narratives about freedom always triumphing are bullshit and the conflict was actually just as much or more about two despotic maniacs going to battle at the cost of an incredible amount of human lives". Doesn't really help fly anyone's jingoistic flag.

Soviet Union definitely did more to defeat the Nazis than any other country who signed a pact with them

I don't think it's about "embracing the opposing national myth" at all! The conclusion to draw from the idea that WWII was won by the Soviets wouldn't be "turns out Stalin was a good guy", it would be "turns out feel good narratives about freedom always triumphing are bullshit and the conflict was actually just as much or more about two despotic maniacs going to battle at the cost of an incredible amount of human lives". Doesn't really help fly anyone's jingoistic flag.

― Daniel_Rf

Is that the conclusion Putin's drawing from the Soviet victory? (I genuinely don't know, I don't follow these things). I think it's very easy to glamorize the Soviet victory, to make it into a national myth (which can just as easily benefit the successor state). You can talk up the decisive role of maskirovka in Operation Bagration. You can talk about the determined resistance displayed by the "Hero City" of Stalingrad. You can - and this is the stuff Calzino is implying that is bothering me - try to make it into a game of numbers, to say that D-day was a sunday stroll in the park, that the Battle of Britain was a tea party. I find those sorts of comparisons trivializing to the actual suffering people went through on the Western front. Acknowleding the mind-boggling disaster that was the Eastern Front doesn't require one to put down the actions of people on the Western Front in comparison.

..(trivializing to the actual suffering people went through on the Western front.)

lol, there is no cure for what you have!

I mean it takes a bit of work to turn criticising the pitiful ahistorical guff that comes out of Western leaders mouths - and the media - about WW2 - Into me trivilaising the dead of any non-Eastern military theatres by saying they suffered less and did less damage to the Wehrmacht.

bump to keep “I hate to agree with Putin” calzino from having the last word

I also thought this was a good thread:

Russia really does deserve far more credit, thanks, and appreciation for its WWII sacrifices than it currently receives in the West. But quite frankly it will never get such respect if it ties its military exploits to the Great Patriotic War narrative.

— 101 144 141 155 040 105 154 153 165 163 (@Aelkus) June 6, 2019

Another American windbag who seems to think you can't criticise bullshit national narratives without becoming tethered to other bullshit ones.

The usual disingenuous bollocks about Molotov/Ribbtrop like it makes a difference to how much their citizens paid in blood ...tell your twitter man the Soviet Union didn't have a hitler-pact referendum you know!

Trying to remember if any other Allied nations signed pacts with Hitler

so much suffering in the double/triple occupied zones as well, and not just the soldiers - the poor citizens and from ss and nkvd. But I'm guessing at this point I'm a tankie so I just ignore any funny business from Soso!