![]() Samet unapologetically skewers anyone whom she feels has played a role in promoting a distorted, sentimental view of World War II. (Oddly, there is no index, an omission that detracts from the book’s use as a reference source.) She avoids the nuts and bolts of statecraft, strategic decision-making, operations and the like. The book ends with an annotated bibliographical discussion of relevant films and books. Five sizable chapters follow, each of which eviscerates some aspect of America’s triumphalist World War II-based popular culture in favor of the seamy, unappealing underside of distorted propaganda, moral dilemmas, misogyny, wanton misbehavior, Jim Crow racism and veterans’ postwar struggles. ![]() As such, to make her case, she focuses her argument on the cultural milieu of novels, movies and, occasionally, works of history: “Myths grant life and take it away, give birth to nations and tear them apart,” she reflects in a thoughtful prologue. Samet is a literary critic, not a military historian. Its tendency to sanitize the war’s ugliness has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of war itself, and thus a strong propensity to solve problems through violence - almost in a conscious imitation of what ostensibly worked so well in World War II. Samet contends that our cultural mythology about World War II matters a great deal, as it fosters a misbegotten sense of American exceptionalism that remains problematic in the 21st century. These misapprehensions, in turn, have played a key role in numerous military missteps from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Moreover, she argues that American misinterpretations of World War II have contributed to dysfunctional postwar domestic, foreign and military policies. Adams and Paul Fussell, Samet, a professor of English at the United States Military Academy, wields a relentless literary sledgehammer against the gauzy “good war” myths that have long prevailed in American popular culture. Samet, author of “Looking for the Good War” - have pushed back against the mainstream narrative.Ĭarrying on in the iconoclastic tradition of revisionist historians such as Michael C. But, perhaps inevitably and understandably, some - like Elizabeth D. This notion contains much truth, enough to endure all these decades later, and appeals to our tendency to fixate on the positive aspects of this seminal conflict. Most Americans embrace a feel-good image of World War II, one in which the United States and its “Greatest Generation” fought a global war for human freedom that destroyed three indisputably evil totalitarian regimes and paved the way for the establishment of a better world. “ Looking for the Good War”: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happinessīy Elizabeth D. Book Review: 'Looking For the Good War' by Elizabeth D.
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