The Cultural Impact And Legacy Of World War Two

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!

their annoyance at the western d-day hyperbole is pretty legit

as far as I can tell, nobody is really debating this point with you; you seem more broadly upset that American and U.K. politicians keep talking about D-Day on the anniversary of D-Day. I don’t know what to tell you there buddy.

I just like a moan and find it fucking insufferable!

I'm remembering some doc I watched recently and some captured allied solder was saying: as we were getting liberated from the camps those Red Army folks that managed to survive against the odds were getting shipped off to Eastern gulags.

10 years (post Iraq) of Help For heroes type shit at football matches has turned me into a raving Tankie!

On this day remember that Operation Bagration, on the Eastern Front, starting 23 June 1944 was very much larger than D-Day and Normandy, and so were casualties. In UK and US we forget that victory came in May 1945, not June 1944, in Berlin, not Normandy.

— David Edgerton (@DEHEdgerton) June 5, 2019

joking, obv. I like this guy on British WW2 era history and he's otm here.

The other problem with Pence's comment: no sector of the American economy so closely resembles the socialist (or Soviet) as much as the military industrial complex, to this day. During WWII, the US effectively became a command economy, with the War Production Board becoming our version of Gosplan.

I think the saddest lasting cultural impact of WW2, at least at this moment in history, is that baby boomers think they won it.

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, June 4, 2019 8:41 AM (one week ago)

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2019/06/today-s-75-year-olds-didn-t-fight-war-so-why-do-we-think-they-did

right on schedule

“WW2 was hell” say thousand yard stare dads born in 1946

these old UK bastards that weren't even a thought till after the Nuremberg trials might have experienced some austerity and rationing as children. But they still grew up in a relatively stable era in terms of the security of the NHS and the shiny new welfare state that hadn't been PFI'ed out of shape yet. I'd wager anyone growing up poor in the 70's had it maybe slightly better and without national service in their formative years, but much tougher afterwards - especially than these old bastards with property portfolios and substantial savings. aka the most selfish and deluded bunch of wankers generation.

I was born in 1954 and I will gladly tell you that "WWII was hell". So was WWI, for that matter. I won't pretend I fought in them. I even caught a break and missed being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. I lead a charmed life.

My old mum, who was 5 or 6 when war broke out, used to tell me how much fun she'd had - kids being kids. Running about wild, getting the old gas mask on and spending the night at the bottom of the garden in the back court in the pathetically inadequate bomb shelter, cheering Uncle Joe Stalin in the newsreels at the pictures etc.

... I meant to leave out the word 'garden' there, she's didn't have a garden, of course, the very thought!

i guess this is a fair place to ask it: what are the non-shitty documentaries about WW2? i thought about watching the world at war a while back but doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere.

it's on You Tube innit?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b4g4ZZNC1E

d'oh! yeah, should've looked there -- thanks! i assume that's one of the best ones? still seems to be highly regarded.

Have you seen the late 90's bbc series The Nazis A Warning From History? It's more about the holocaust and not the theaters of war and all that. but it is very powerful and the brahms requiem music in the title is appropriate. And someone who dobbed a gay neighbour to the gestapo get's ruthlessly shamed 40 years later.

yeah my mum also always said she enjoyed the war, she was 4 when it began

Unforgettable image courtesy the magisterial World at War. British soldier on the weather in Burma: "It was the only place I know, you'd open up a tin of corned beef, you could pour it out like liquid." Mmmm, gimme dat cawm beef smoothie! Kids these days are too damn picky...

— Ian Penman (@pawboy2) May 12, 2019

my favourite bit of World at War is always when it sets up the topic of the next ep, and sir larry's reading of the final line "Nemesis would come… from the SEA!"

i've posted this before, but I was working in a bookstore when the brokaw GREATEST GENERATION book was huge and we sold a lotta copies to people 21 and younger intending it for their parents. I guess the idea could have been that they figured their parents, as the kids of said generation, might dig it, but idk. Was that the final nail in the boomers' imagining themselves as rebels against the crusty old establishment generation that spawned them?

So...the erasure of Russia and the Eastern front from American accounts of the war is the source of no great mystery...it's obviously a relic of the Cold War and just general jingoism...however, I'd be curious if at any point this was a planned or systematic thing. Were textbooks edited, etc? Was there an actual propaganda campaign to claim the US "won the war against fascism" more or less on its own (with, of course, the help of the plucky British, whose ass we proverbially saved)?