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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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The consensus narrative about the Holocaust might genuinely be the last support pillar holding up America's triumphalist narrative built from the end of WWII. Everything else about the rah-rah story that America used to justify its superpower status has been picked apart by a combination of history nerds and leftists with axes to grind, turning the idea of American Exceptionalism into a sham.

Is it? My impression was that winning the Cold War was actually played up more these days. After all, the "Soviets only won because of lend-lease" narrative never really caught on, giving the Soviets at least a roughly equal share at the table of WWII winners in the public mind, thus not on its own really painting America as exceptional.

Japan in WWII is also another example that doesn't fit your "tripwire" architecture, to my knowledge, as they'd already been a colonial power that had been snatching up other parts of Asia for decades beforehand (Korea, Manchuria, Qingdao, etc.).

Well, yeah, the architecture doesn't work for those countries; it's not clear to me if the problem of the emergence of a potential WWII-Japan-like power in that area was in fact solved for that region, but maybe the victorious powers didn't consider it that concerning for some reason or another (perhaps they thought that the conditions for Japan's rise were more unique, or they were happy that the semi-permanent US occupation force plus denuclearisation were enough, or they figured that ultimately China is inevitably going to dominate the region and they can't do anything about it even if they wanted).

After all, the "Soviets only won because of lend-lease" narrative never really caught on, giving the Soviets at least a roughly equal share at the table of WWII winners in the public mind, thus not on its own really painting America as exceptional.

I actually just had to explain to my boomer dad the other day that the USSR was on our side in WW2. I'm honestly not sure how much credit they get in the view of the general public.

I've heard similar sentiments from the US before, so maybe it's different there compared to Europe (where, in the recent years, the "US did more" narrative has been winning out, but it's still not "Russia did little compared to it" outside of boo-lights discussions inspired by more recent events). In what country do you consider the maintenance of America's "triumphalist narrative" to be important? I find it hard to imagine that Americans would stop thinking of America as exceptional just because WWII receded into boring ancient history, whereas I do still think that in Europe its reputation never was exclusively dependent on it.

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