Law Humor

Discuss: The Greatest Generation was the sixties generation

By Pseudoanonymous

Think about it: Civil rights–really, a second (this time successful) reconstruction. Ending the Vietnam War. Second-wave feminism. Gay liberation. When you come right down to it, The Future.

I’d been thinking along these lines before running into this piece by Chris Hayes (via a commenter on Making Light), who goes at the question from a whole ‘nother angle:

The WWII that emerges from accounts of the late ’90s is one scrubbed clean of its moral complexity. There is no mention of American big business financing the build-up of the Nazi war machine, no America First campaign determined not to shed American blood for European Jews, no firebombing of civilians in Dresden. The war was difficult, yes, and bloody, but pure and just: a battle, not to put too fine a point on it, between good and evil.

In the hands of the men who would come to dominate American military policy in the Bush administration, this Manichean framework was a useful template to apply indiscriminately to any and all of the military confrontations they had long sought. To the neocons and some breakaway lefties, al-Qaeda members are “Islamofascists,” 21st century heirs to the murderous ideologies of Nazism, fascism and totalitarianism. It is always Munich 1938, every dictator is a “tyrant,” and anyone opposed to a state of perpetual war is guilty of “appeasement.”

It’s worth reading in full.

Full post as published by Arkansawyer on June 07, 2009 (boomark / email).