no, I had been seeing it all my life. And I had a concept of what I thought it meant. And then one day someone on here used it, and I read it as "naturally," and then said "wait... OH SHIT!"
I can no longer explain what I thought it meant. it was a pre-natch concept, to be sure.
wait...OH SHIT!
I get it now.
...What draws me to war history is how it culturally affects peoples and places and how it (re)shapes what comes after...I started looking for Eastern Front accounts after becoming a little tired of always seeing the American side of the story, and realizing there was this whole other aspect of the conflict, this whole people who basically got the roughest deal in the affair...
You might look into what happened to Japanese culture after Hiroshima. I'm sure V-Adore could tell you quite a bit about this, but there's a real connection between the way Japanese animation/sci-fi developed and the a-bomb. Pedro wrote a paper on this way back in the dark ages when we were undergrads, but his bibliography isn't accessible at the moment. Pedro says that what it boils down to is, "if you got a place where giant earthquakes and then atomic bombs basically kill the hell out of everybody, you get some weird cartoons. And Godzilla."
History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.
Anyway, a couple of years ago, during the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings, I started spotting comments here and there on the lines of the invasion of Normandy's main purpose actually being to secure Europe from getting completely snatched by Stalin... rather than freeing it from the evil Nazis and whatnot. Is that a valid historical interpretation nowadays?
AFAIK. There are, of course, historians that would argue both ways. It's kind of like the argument that the American Civil War wasn't actually about freeing the slaves, but was more about federalism vs. anti-federalism. As a rule, historians must beware of oversimplification, and saying that [action] was about [cause] without qualification often veers dangerously close to that precipice.
I tend towards revisionism so I sympathize with the cynics here, but when you talk about motives for an historical action, particularly when it is a government and not an individual committing that action, the "reason" or "purpose" tends to be a blend of all possible motivations for that particular choice. So, when given the choice, my answer is generally that it was probably a little of both.
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Topic: World War 2 history (Read 4769 times)