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Notes -
I’m wondering to what extent the German Wehrmacht is, or at least was present in British and American cultural memory as a worthy enemy in battle, unlike the Japanese and the Italians, in a similar way how, I suppose, Confederates were seen as worthy enemies in the Northern US after the Civil War, unlike the various Indian tribes. It’d largely explain why the so-called myths of the clean Wehrmacht and the Lost Cause of the South came to be.
Obviously as a Brit I'm consuming the fictionalised version of the American frontier from a long distance, but in the Cowboys and Indians mythos I grew up with Indians were always Worthy Opponents in the TVTropes sense. I assume this idea dates back to the golden age of the Western as a movie genre because that is where the tropes come from.
Yeah, there was a brief "lone ranger and Tonto" period where the mythology was sanitized, which was used to launder support for AIM and other Indian terrorist groups in the 60s-80s.
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