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At the end of the "search for a good war", Elizabeth D. Samet's keen new book tells the myth of the tulle shrouded in the historical reality of World War II, reminding us of the then President Trump in 2019 A speech delivered in Normandy, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the landing in Normandy. Some listeners were surprised by the seriousness of Trump's words, and they eagerly welcomed it as evidence that he put on the cloak of a dignified politician. However, Samet, an English professor at West Point Military Academy, had previously written an article on teaching war literature, but refused to score according to the curve.

She briskly enumerated the clichés in the speech-"'The Great Crusader' (Eisenhower),'The Altar of Freedom' (a Civil War song),'Dedicated to History' (Despicable Lincoln),'New Frontier' ( The misappropriated Kennedy), the'inspiring war','the fire of hell','the fury of the Nazis,' the'formidable power','the breathtaking scale', the'precious alliance', the'immortal gratitude' ( Cliches) and'tough guys' (improvisations)." Summit calls us "The Iron Age of Twitter," which makes it harder to distinguish between high-volume speeches and fragile rhetoric, but "most sentences can't stand careful attention Read," she wrote.

And "read carefully", as Summit argues provocatively (and convincingly), may actually be a matter of life and death. She said that the rhetoric of World War II caused real harm, distorted our understanding of the past, and thus affected the way we treat the future. As "the last US military action to reach a positive consensus," World War II was "a belligerent, which opened the curtain for a three-quarter-century battle."

Therefore, her book is a work of mercilessly uncovering the mystery-there are some hopeful and even inspiring things in it. Like the cadets she taught at West Point Military Academy, civilians had better regard World War II as something other than the wonderful story of American goodness over Nazi evil. Yes, she admitted that it is necessary for the United States to participate in the war. But she insisted that the assumption that "necessary" must mean the same as "good" is a national fantasy.

She said that among the most gullible criminals, there are characters like Stephen Ambrose and Steven Spielberg, who came together for the HBO miniseries of Ambrose’s "Brothers". This is right. An ode to American power and original intentions. Ambrose may be an academically trained historian, but he seems to be proud of being a saint biographer. "I was 10 years old when the war ended," he once recalled. "I think the returning veterans are giants who saved the world from barbarism. I still think so. I am still a hero admirer."

It is not that the heroes of Ambrose will recognize themselves in his portrait of happiness. Samet cited the memoirs of Shakespearean scholar Alvin Kernan, who joined the Navy in 1941 to escape the severe economic situation in rural Wyoming. "We are still children," he wrote, "and like all children, fascinated by killing." Sammy wrote that such children may fight bravely, "but their motives are not noble, and their experience is not noble."

The extreme depravity of the Nazis would make the "disgraceful work" of the Allies sacred in retrospect, but Summit pointed out that even after the United States entered the war, the liberation of the Jews was never a priority. "Why We Fight", a series of propaganda films produced by Frank Capra between 1942 and 1945 did not mention the Nazis’ systematic attempts to exterminate the Jews, even though the US government knew it as early as the summer "Final Solution" 1942.

The United States entered the war after the Pearl Harbor incident - even so, Summit said, contemporary observers still commented that "the United States is generally indifferent to the fact that the world is on fire." She wrote that the Pacific War “begins with revenge and is complicated by intense racism”. She quoted the memoirs of the Marine Corps and described how the American aversion to the Nazis cannot be compared with their "strong hatred" of Japan. "Japanese people are regarded as inhuman and disgusting things," the reporter Erniper wrote, "just like some people think of cockroaches or mice." Looking back at the records of that era, Samet put this inhumanity This contrasts with the portrayal of European fascists, who are often described as "gangsters."

Despite the rapid rise of the "belligerent" myth, at some point after World War II, a more complex picture still exists-its traces continue to this day, even though the "open, contradictory, and reflective memory model" has been Sammy The feature road was largely covered up. She seems to have seen every noir film featuring a disillusioned veteran, and he struggled to adapt to the post-war American system. But she also showed how Hollywood quickly overwhelmed culture with its "habitual optimism." For example, the 1947 movie "The Hucksters" started with a veteran who returned to the advertising industry, but found himself disgusted by it; the eternal happy ending was not because he rejected the industry, but because he was determined to "sell good things. People should own things and sell them in a dignified and tasteful way."

The fall of Saigon in 1975 may temporarily hinder American exceptionalism and the invincible pillar, but the end of the Cold War and the beginning of Operation Desert Storm restored some of the American confidence. However, while this self-confidence can feel good, it can also be fatal, Samet writes, contributing to the "harmful American sentimentality" that "short-circuits reason."

She ends with a chapter about the myth of the old lost cause of the Civil War, which we have turned it into a "a kind of theme park", full of symbolism and nostalgia, ignoring the expansionist warfare that this myth later enabled. The country’s imperialist ambitions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were promoted as a nationalist project, which eventually united the North and the South against foreign enemies.

But Summit may be too insistent that the truth of the civil war has been irretrievably lost by the illusion. She said the myth was “very resistant to all subsequent attempts to undo it, despite the removal of some statues and the renaming of some buildings.” In my opinion, this seems to downplay what happened in the past few years. An understatement. Demolition of some statues may not be equivalent to a comprehensive revision of historical memory, but writing them off as irrelevant details is another abstraction, in which the edges of Summit's nuanced arguments are cleaner than they need to be. As she herself said, "War is a fierce struggle, not an objective lesson."