why are straight white guys so obsessed with world war 2
like i’ll talk about my interest in history and i’ll have guys be like “yeah i’m a history buff too i love world war 1 and 2″ like cool i was talking about ancient history. like the conversation was literally about ancient egypt.
my fave thing is replying “oh, cool. i just can’t get into it. i like everyday life and religion and art. personally, i find war boring.” and let me tell you it’s a journey to watch them try and understand that killing thousands of people indiscriminately doesn’t hold my attention.
#oh right bc the history behind one of history’s biggest genocides is… boring???#and it’s not one of the most important things to study#so that a. we can do everything we can to make sure it never happens again#and b. in memory of those MILLIONS of ppl (mostly jewish ppl) who were murdered while the world looked on?#this smacks of either incredible us-centrism or anti-semitism#i find other periods of history very interesting and important too but holy fuck#wwii isn’t fucking dunkirk #it’s mostly anne frank #how dare you call that /boring/
reblogging for this excellent drag in the tags
See, I’m not much of a historian. I love history, but I don’t always understand it, and a couplea weeks after Charlottesville happened in America I asked my dad how Nazism could possibly be on the rise again, after a lifetime of learning from my teachers that what transpired during WW2 was one of the worst crimes against humanity in recent history. (They were never subtle about it. We got all the photos from the concentration camps, all the statistics laid out for us, footage of the piles of shoes recovered from Auschwitz, everything.) (And bearing in mind that my grandfather and mother were/are Jewish -)
“It’s the 70 year cycle,” he said. “People forget after 70 years and then it all goes around again.”
So I suppose there’s that. On the other hand, a neo-nazi and Holocaust denier just had 20,000 people vote for him in Illinois this very day, so go figure, I guess there’s a lot of forgetting going on.
I’m not sure what this post is suggesting exactly – straight white guys shouldn’t be interested in the world wars? Or that they’re interested in it in the wrong way, guns and tanks instead of people and shoes? I get the latter thing, I do, but on the other hand those are the exact people we need to get interested in this stuff, how the wars started and how to ensure they never happen again. There are a lot of people in power right now who are absolutely delighted that World War 1 and 2 and all their horrors and racisms might soon be considered boring, because man won’t it be easier then to whip people (especially straight white guys) up into patriotic fervour, point at another group and say “they’re the enemy, go kill them.” Over here the defining symbol of World War I is a poppy, but over the years it’s been slowly warped into a subtle symbol of Islamophobia, and it will probably only get worse.
We need better education and we need so much of it and we need it right now.
I’m not entirely sure what I’m saying here but I suspect it’s “the fact that people went out and killed thousands of people actually not very indiscriminately but with carefully thought out and prejudiced purpose, that needs to hold your attention.” Not specifically in regards to straight white guys, necessarily, but holy hell it does.