Growing up, I was led to believe that America's victory in WW2 was one of our nation's finest moments. I was reared on things like Schindler's List, the Diary of Anne Frank and Saving Private Ryan. The picture of the "kissing sailor" was seared into my mind as the proud reminder of how love and freedom defeated the tyranny and grotesqueness of Nazism and fascism. After all, my grandfather was a WW2 Veteran who was on a U-Boat and so I had a lineage of the noble and just Allied Powers.
Here is what I was led to believe for basically all of my life.
It's only in the past few years or so that I've been able to undo this programming. If I didn't hate the American Dream of "liberal democracy" before, I downright despise it and find it evil now.
Here is what I was led to believe for basically all of my life.
- That FDR was one of the greatest presidents ever and that's why he got elected to 4 terms. Winston Churchill was a no-nonsense badass and while Stalin may have been rough around the edges, he didn't become a "bad guy" until after the war and he was still less evil than Hitler.
- I That Hitler was the worst human being who ever lived and we can know with a certainty that he's in hell (even if we don't believe that anybody else is in hell) and that he got off to killing Jews and conducting cruel medical experiments on them. And he killed SIX MILLION Jews. I repeat: SIX MILLION!
- That it was unambiguous that Hitler and Mussolini were worse than the most comically evil villains like Hannibal Lector.
- That the Holocaust was the worst atrocity ever committed because the Jews were just peacefully minding their own business when out of nowhere they were sent to Death Camps where they were gassed, raped and systemically executed day in and day out. For absolutely no reason at all other than the fact that Hitler wanted a pure Aryan master race.
- That the Nazis were the worst collection of racist, sexist, anti-semitic and homophobic monsters ever.
- That the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while regrettable, were necessary because of an imminent Japanese threat. And that Japan started it because of Pearl Harbor so the bad acts basically canceled each other out.
- That the internment of the Japanese-Americans, while cruel, was still infinitely more merciful than the concentration camps and wasn't really that big of a deal.
- That the Lienz-Cossacks basically had it coming because they were racists who allied themselves with the Nazis.
- That America had no choice to step in and save the day or else we would all be speaking German because Hitler was a supervillain who wanted to take over the entire world.
- The disasterous conditions of the Weimar Republic.
- Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik revolution
- The proposal of the Morgantheu Plan
- The execution of tens of millions of Christians by the Bolsheviks
- That the Japanese were on the brink of collapse and surrender prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- That the number of "6 million Jews" was likely a miscount and could very well be .05% of that figure. And even within that figure, some of the deaths were caused by Allied bombardment.
- That there were no gas chambers as the architecture of the supposed chambers would not have been able to prevent poisonous gas from leaking out.
- That FDR forcibly imprisoned over 100,000 Japanese-American citizens without due process and nearly 2,000 of them died due largely to poor living conditions.
- The NYTimes promoting "Germany Must Perish" by Theodore Kaufman who called for the forced sterilization and genocide of the German population.
- The forced repatriations of millions of POWs and how tens of thousands of them were summarily executed.
It's only in the past few years or so that I've been able to undo this programming. If I didn't hate the American Dream of "liberal democracy" before, I downright despise it and find it evil now.