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496 points danso | 8 comments | | HN request time: 0.639s | source | bottom
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lenerdenator ◴[] No.43547026[source]
It hurts to see the generation that won WWII pass, not the least bit because we seem to have forgotten the lessons from their struggle.
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0xEF ◴[] No.43549611[source]
Indeed, it is very easy to forget the struggle when one has sacrificed nothing to achieve it.

At least WWII, unlike those preceding it, has a vast well of literature to draw those lessons from. The trouble, however, is not just getting younger people to sit, read and analyze it, but also to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, with all the propaganda and misinformation to be had these days about the events of WWII, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and so many other things that would make this list exceptionally long.

Books, are not the same as having lived it, of course. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it best in The Gulag Archipelago.

“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”

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1. Tainnor ◴[] No.43550947[source]
> all the propaganda and misinformation to be had these days about the events of WWII, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and so many other things

I'm curious as to what sort of propaganda or misinformation you're referring to. I'm in Europe and I haven't seen much of it, but maybe it's different in the US.

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2. rjsw ◴[] No.43551444[source]
There are several downvoted comments from butthurt Nazis in this thread.
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3. philipkglass ◴[] No.43552036[source]
Those comments appear to be from reincarnations of the same user. There are a few serial trolls who spew out terrible comments on HN and register new alts when their latest comments/accounts get killed.
4. fsckboy ◴[] No.43553380[source]
it's not different in the US, there is not a market of misinformation about WWII here. There is the the anti-war left alleging that that the allies committed war crimes and their opponents rejecting those arguments, but it's easy to find what happened in Dresden, Holocaust, etc, the disagreement is on interpretation.
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5. Tainnor ◴[] No.43553896[source]
The allies most definitely committed war crimes - the Red Army was pretty brutal in Eastern Europe, for example, for literally no reason. As for the Americans, there is certainly ongoing debate as to whether the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were really necessary.
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6. tialaramex ◴[] No.43555464{3}[source]
Fire-bombing a city full of civilians is probably also a war crime. Tokyo was not a giant aeroplane factory, it was full of Japanese citizens who we would consider innocents, "Grave of the Fireflies" is about that period† - the children literally starving to death isn't an exaggeration for the sake of making a sad movie - that's the reality of what we did to win.

Not to mention the US literally rounded up citizens who had Japanese ancestors and sent them to concentration camps. They apologised, decades later, but note these aren't enemy civilians who happen to be in the wrong place, they're your own citizens who merely look similar to the enemy.

Because the Americans sent babies to these camps for the crime of having ancestors born in Japan there will be a decade or so of people who have memories (albeit fuzzy ones) of this actually fucking happening to them after the people who fought WWII are dead.

† Grave of the Fireflies is set in Kobe, which was also fire bombed.

[Edited to specify that Grave is in Kobe]

7. cguess ◴[] No.43557450[source]
Sadly go look at the "masculine" channels targeting young men on YouTube (Tate and his compatriots). There's a LOT of holocaust denial, rewriting of Hitler as misunderstood etc. We're both lucky to not be exposed to it regularly, but unfortunately in my work it's a thing I have to be aware of.

Worse, an entire generation of young men especially are being told that WWII wasn't what it really was. You see the results of this in the US but also eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary, across Europe where right wing parties are on the rise substantially supported by these young men.

8. cguess ◴[] No.43557467[source]
Yea, it's not really the left that's the big proponents of this (maybe a few very fringe people). It's the ones literally given Nazi salutes at political rallies.