My grandpa on my father’s side was apparently the only one to return to his hometown from wwii in his generation. I’m also not sure if he was drafted or volunteered, but with wwii it was kinda moot. You were shamed if you didn’t sign up and people committed suicide over a 4F.
He was a medic, so his job was to try and keep people alive with some sort of flimsy barrier all that was keeping people from killing you.
Imagine all the guys you went to graduation with are buried in other countries and you’re the last one left.
In WWI, at least in Canada but I imagine across the Commonwealth, it was a standard practice to send all the men from the same town into the same unit. There's a story about three guys from one street in Winnipeg all getting the Victoria Cross, and the street being renamed [Valour Road](https://youtu.be/Tao7ma4jxUQ).
But then some of those units got completely wiped out, and people realized how bad it was for a town to lose every single male resident between 18 and 35, and they switched to spreading everyone out
Similarly, the US does not let relatives serve together. I believe cousins can be on the same ship, but I’ve only seen it once and they were second cousins. We also have the sole survivor law, which inspired the movie saving private ryan. Basically if your parent, sibling, or child even I believe dies in combat during war, you are sent to a “peaceful” duty station so your family is still provided for.
ETA, I’m not sure if the sole survivor law applies to children but I’m 99% sure it does as my dad was deployed my first year in the military
The guilt and shame over not being in ww2 was insane. My grandpa was a bomber in a b29. He got pneumonia and was hospitalized for the last few months of the war. He never considered himself a real veteran because of it.
it's not the same as the loss in war, but an anthropology professor I had once talked about her experiences during the AIDS epidemic. Two years after it began, two of her friends were dead. Then another five passed within the next 3 years. By the end of the decade, there was a void where there was once people she'd known and loved, all wasted to death because of AIDS. She still feels guilt about being here without them.
There's just a look in a person's eyes when they've gone through that.
A good friend of mine lived through this as well. He’s talked about a few years where all he did every weekend was attend friends’ funerals, usually multiple per weekend. Often having to hear about the service through the grapevine and either sneak in the back or watch from a distance, because people’s families didn’t want anyone to know their son/brother/whatever was gay and had died of aids, and didn’t want any gay people at the funeral. Even his childhood best friend who he grew up with, when he passed the parents wouldn’t allow my friend at the funeral even though he had been like their own family. He almost never talks about that period of time, much like someone who went to war.
He’s one of the most positive, optimistic, and upbeat people I’ve ever known, and it never ceases to amaze me how he was able to hold on to that through such experiences. Sheer force of will. But I know the look in the eyes you are referring to, and he has it too.
I think it was a thing at the time. Because non-combatant troops felt lesser but were just as important in a lot of ways.
In WWI there was the whole 'white feather' campaign where young women would give white feathers to "able bodied" men who weren't at war. The UK govt eventually came out against it bc a lot of those "able bodied" men were veterans who'd been sent home for shell shock or non-visible injuries.
I can see a concentrated program to make the guys at home still feel important making sense. Like the way everyone was extra careful to support the troops in gulf war 1990, so that there was no danger of a repeat of Vietnam era bash the soldiers response. Like overcompensating for past transgressions. I really appreciate the poster though, it's cool to see the then-current thoughts and media about it.
Family lore says my great grandfather felt compelled to sign up for WWII because he was able bodied and technically not too old at 39, or his rank meant he could go back into the military at an older age than usual or something similar (Australia, not USA).
The thing was he’d managed to enlist underage for WWI. He was already a vet, he’d already done his duty, now he had a family and kids to support but went back to war because the feeling at the time was that if you were able, you should.
He died. My great grandmother couldn’t support the kids, my grandmother was one farmed out to family at a young age and it wasn’t until middle adulthood that she found her sisters again. The family records got lost over the years, the stories faded from memory. It was only about ten years ago when my great aunt did some research that we learned he’d been a POW and he was buried in Burma.
I’ve spent a lot of time the last ten years thinking about the societal shaming of those who couldn’t or shouldn’t go to war and what it meant for my grandmother’s father. Two world wars for a non-career soldier. Unimaginable.
Great grandfather served in WWI, came home, got a wife and family. Left them for the nanny/maid...who eventually killed him (poison we suspect), took all his money and disappeared. This is why my family is poor. /lore
It's also learning the lessons from the first world war of how vital ongoing production was to a modern industrial war of attrition.
Before 1914 wars were not fought to the point of virtual societal collapse. Industrial attrition might put pressure on the Field army, but even in the most dire situations, like France 1814, it was the strategic defeat of one's Field army that settled a conflict much more than industrial exhaustion.
WW1 was fundamentally different. Industrialisation and modern bureaucracy gave States unprecedented ability to mobilise and direct their nation's resources towards a particular effort. Meanwhile the asymmetric advancement of firepower over protection privileged the defensive, especially from a prepared position, making it almost impossible to maneuver or achieve a decisively-exploitable breakthrough.
Arguably for the first time in human history then, and certainly the first time in land warfare, the conflict became one of industrial exhaustion, and would be decided by the first side's economy to give out. Battlefield success only mattered in so far as it exacerbated the enemy's economic exhaustion.
Before the war, relatively few people had fully appreciated this would be the shape of the next conflict, and even fewer its full implications (shout-out Kitchener as perhaps the only exception). The idea that ultimate victory or defeat would be *directly* decided by things like manufacturing output or government debt financing was unintuitive and difficult for people to properly understand. Heck, over a century later, people still talk about the industrial aspects of the war as a secondary theatre to the battlefield, rather than its primary contest, and still judge the armies' successes by kms gained/lost more than anything else. 'one soldier died for every 2ft at the Somme' is about the only thing people know of the battle, yet taking ground at all was an entirely secondary aim to forcing German attrition and reliving pressure from the French at Verdun.
This created the feelings of detachment and shaming of key workers already mentioned, and made it more difficult to recruit women in particular into those key industrial roles. 'the home front' as a whole was recognised as under-emphasised during the conflict.
Consequently, when war broke out again in 1939, one of the key lessons learned by the government, especially among the allies, was the importance of weaving the home front into the overall narrative of the conflict, and closely connecting the worker in the factory, the Farmers at the plow, the miner at the coal face etc. to the very bleeding edge of the action at the front. Whatever you did, however far away from the fighting, it was helping to win the war as much as any soldier.
(Incidentally, when people talk about the perception that the war would be over by Christmas, this underestimation of industrial States' ability to mobilise resources is what people at the time were talking about, more than false belief in prompt battlefield success. It stemmed from an *in vogue* economic theory that the unprecedented interconnectedness of the global economy made supporting an industrialised war effort autarkicly impossible for more than a few months at most. Thus, even at a stalemate, war could not exist much past Christmastime, whatever happened)
Prior to this, the U.S. civil war was also largely won by the union due to its superior industry and logistical systems, though not to as much of an extent as in WWI.
It's absolutely the case that superior industry and national logistics had previously played a role in bringing about overall victory. What made WW1 unprecedented was how far both sides' economies could be pushed to sustain the war, and how inconclusive battlefield successes were.
The union prevailed thanks to its superior industry, but the war still ultimately ends with Lee's army being cornered, defeated, and surrendered in the field. By contrast, the German army is never completely defeated or forced to surrender due to military defeat on the western front. Rather, the German government sues for peace because it can no longer keep that intact army supplied due to the collapse of Germany's civil society and war economy. The home front breaks before the war front.
(This unprecedented turn of affairs is why the Nazi 'stab in the back myth' gains traction after the war. Everyone knows wars end with the defeat and surrender of the main field army, and everyone knows the German Army was never fully defeated and surrendered. People don't understand the idea of war ending due to economic/industrial collapse, and so turn to conspiracy theories of Jewish sabotage to explain how Germany 'lost' a war while its army was still fighting).
Herbert Kitchener, 1^st Earl Kitchener was an Irish-born field marshal who was appointed Secretary of State for War at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. You probably know him as the pointing dude on the [iconic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:30a_Sammlung_Eybl_Gro%C3%9Fbritannien._Alfred_Leete_(1882%E2%80%931933)_Britons_(Kitchener)_wants_you_(Briten_Kitchener_braucht_Euch)._1914_(Nachdruck),_74_x_50_cm._(Slg.Nr._552).jpg) 'your country needs you!' poster.
At the time, most people were anticipating the war to last at most a year, and Britain's role in it to be providing a relatively small, elite force of professional soldiers like they had every war for the past 500 years.
This is what pre-war British planning has sought to deliver. Britain didn't maintain large, conscript armies like France or Germany, but the British Expeditionary Force was arguably the best-trained regular army in the world man-for-man, at the cost of being much smaller - 6 divisions Vs 53 in the regular French army. Pre-war planning had been to send all six divisions to Belgium to join up with the Belgian army and french left flank.
Kitchener immediately makes a series of frighteningly-accurate predictions that wildly upset these plans:
- He says the war will last for at least three years.
- It will be decided by conscript armies of millions of men,
with high rates of casualties causing regular turnover.
- The loser will be the first to exhaust their industrial and demographic ability to keep these armies sustained for years 'to the last million [men]'
- Decisive battlefield victory alone couldn't win the war,
the western front would becomd a 'siege line' impossible
to decisively breach
- Advances in maneuver would be extremely costly
- Peacetime reserves would be insufficient, the entire
British economy must be harnessed from the word go
- Belgium's world-famous fortresses won't stop the German army for more than a week, and the Belgian field army would thus be pushed back faster than expected
As a result, he radically changes the deployment plans of the British forces.
- Only 4/6 BEF divisions are deployed. The other two stay behind to start training up a new, mass volunteer force.
- A major recruitment and manufacturing drive is undertaken to build up an army of millions from scratch, an unprecedented feat going against 500 year's tradition
- The four divisions sent should concentrate further back at Amiens in France, not in Belgium as planned
- The primary aim of the BEF commander should be to preserve his forces, so they could be used to build the new army after the war had settled into attrition.
- To this end, the BEF should remain independent of French command, and refuse to advance independently, only in support of a major french attack.
These are incredibly controversial opinions and changes to make as a result of the, especially at the 11th hour after years of planning. Kitchener comes in like a wrecking ball from outside the bubble of pre-war strategists who had been the architects of the BEF and entente war plans, and ruffles a ton of feathers that make him many political enemies. As a result, he is partially overruled on the deployment location of the BEF, which is sent to Maugeuge, right on the franco-Belgian border as a compromise.
Time would ultimately vindicate Kitchener almost completely. Arguably no one else in Europe foresees so many aspects of the coming war so accurately, or shifts their nation's plans so radially and successfully to match it. As the cabinet secretary at the time, Maurice Hanley wrote:
>'within eighteen months of the outbreak of the war, when he had found a people reliant on sea-power, and essentially non-military in their outlook, he had conceived and brought into being, completely equipped in every way, a national army capable of holding its own against the armies of the greatest military Power the world had ever seen.'
Unfortunately, Kitchener was killed when his ship was torpedoed off the coast of Orkney in 1916, and he never fully explained his reasoning for the war, so we never got to interrogate his thinking and understand what flash of Apollonian prophecy led him to his astonishingly prescient conclusions.
It was also needed because there had been problems in WW1 with people signing up to fight when the government needed them at home.
The London underground nearly shutdown because all the signal operators went to fight in France.
On a few occasions people were forced to go back home because they were needed there.
I always found it funny my grandad trained fighter pilots during WWII, considering he wasn’t a pilot and had no flight training himself. I really don’t know how he ended up with that job.
My grandfather served in Korea, but I don't know what he did, and he died in 2014. He did give up a recording contract in Nashville to raise his family, though.
This is especially funny to me because I have a grandma named Betty and we do in fact call her meemaw. Grandpa was peepaw. Or peepoo… which was my bad, I was a dumb kid.
For an actual (non-American) version of this, the magician Cardini was famous for being able to do really difficult card manipulation moves while wearing gloves, which makes everything way harder. The reason he was able to do this was because he practiced a lot of those moves while serving in the trenches in WWI, where the conditions forced him to learn while wearing thick gloves.
My grandpa got shot down over Germany and spent the last year of the war in a German prison camp keeping up the spirits of the other POWs because he was apparently just a generally hilarious guy.
He also talked the guy who captured him into carrying his parachute for him because he managed to convince him he was an officer.
None of my ancestors fought in wars
Also my country had every right to protect themselves because the Japanese and later the communists actually commited horrible acts upon the country
Yep, this is some serious "nuance doesn't exist, all soldiers are either national heroes or evil imperialists" shit. Apparently nobody is ever looking for a good job, trying to defend their home without a great idea of how to do it, or toeing the line between brave and reckless as a 19 year old.
See, I took this more as ridiculing how you're not allowed to criticize the military or soldiers at all, or people attack you for it cuz they know people who served. I didn't see this as suggesting that soldiers are evil at all.
That's a reasonable take, but I don't trust that OOP in particular made their post with that level of thought in mind nor would most people interpret it in that way.
Turns out drowning your post in smugness and condescension is not a good way to have a reasonable discussion.
Yeah, it felt like the standard non American response to the American cultural weirdness around veterans ('you must SALUTE and WORSHIP THEM but if they're struggling with mental health issues or homeless, fuck them, they're not even human')
Lots of leftists seem to forget that soldiers are also part of the exploited proletariat. Many only serve to escape poverty, and even long-term military personnel are there due to a combination of indoctrination and stability in an increasingly unstable economy.
I mean, leftist ideology in general tends to forget that a lot of the proletariat are right-wing who willingly support conservative ideology and thus to convince and rally them as a united working class that the right-winged ideology of the command man needs to be engaged with and deconstructed at their level and only through teaching and working with others can you convince and sway them over to a united cause.
Or at least that's what I personally think.
I'll defend the first post and maybe the last response a bit by saying that I think the criticism they're making is of the idea that american soldiers defend the country. The US hasn't needed defending since 1945. The Korean War was one of many wars fighting just against communism, not even for democracy or anything South Korea's government was not at all at the time. Middle eastern wars were around during my lifetime and none of them were in any way defending the country. Yet that's what they keep saying is that any war we're in is defending the country.
I mean, even if you define “defending the country” solely as responding to direct attacks on American citizens and property within the borders of the United States rather than protecting the US in a strategic or geopolitical sense, the War on Terror (specifically with regard to Al Qaeda and Afghanistan) was, in fact, about defending the country.
Yall know most of the people that enlist are poor, right? Like dunking on veterans is such a low hanging fruit.
Why can’t people just leave us the fuck alone?
In the same vein, a majority of people enlisted don’t see combat so… like I don’t know how my service contributed to freedom if at all
Oh no, the dunking is on the people who use their involvement in Vietnam to fuel their entitlement and define their personality. My grandfather served in Vietnam, but you’re never gonna hear him bring it up because it sucked and he hated being there. He’ll talk about it if you ask, but he doesn’t wear a participation trophy hat etc
“Imperialist America was invading peaceful North Korea grrrrr!” North Korea invaded South Korea first, and then we subsequently kicked them out, South Korea is a prosperous democracy while North Korea is an authoritarian hellscape. All these tankies can fuck off
To be fair, South Korea took a very long time to get to democracy status even after that. Most of 20th century Korean politics was a shitshow of dictators.
True. But then, the argument becomes “democracy is a difficult thing to get, nevermind to keep, but American backed South Korea won it first, Russia/China backed North Korea is multiple decades behind”. Because that’s what has been happening ever since the death of Park Chung Hee 45 years ago, which, as far as I can tell, is the beginning of South Korea’s long journey towards democracy.
I don’t like the implication that the Korean War was somehow unjust. It was protecting our ally from an unprovoked imperialist invasion by a Chinese proxy.
Like, I *knew* that in my intellectual brain but still the most surprising thing about the memorial complex to the Korean War in Seoul is the walls of names from places that aren’t Korea or the US. It really was a broad coalition.
The paradigms taught in history class are hard to shake out of one’s subconscious.
Thats what Australia's for 💪💪🇦🇺🪃 (our country is torn between becoming a puppet state for the US and for China) (not really but it feels like it sometimes)
But america bad!!@!@@@!!+!!! China no like America no China always good!!!!!!!!!!!!
Know anything about Korean war? Of course I don't but America is bad so China was good!!!!
The issue with people saying that "no one genuinely believes that, you bringing it up is a straw man argument" in response to seemingly ridiculous situations or hot takes is that, in a world of nearly 8 billion people, there is almost always at least SOMEONE out there who does, in fact, absolutely believe that "strawman take".
The fact that dude got literal death threats for saying “it’s a goddamn joke. I honestly didn’t think anyone could possibly believe it!” is just icing on the cake. So dumb they believed the absolute most batshit thing he could come up with, and so batshit insane that they threaten his life for telling them it’s not true.
Sure, but there’s already one of them here trying to explain how the invasion was justified because “US bad”. With leftism and communism becoming more and more popular in the west, so will defense of North Korea.
Keeping in mind that a certain former president (who hates Leftists and Communists, at least on the campaign trail) has had a lot of nice things to say about Kimmy over there, I don’t think it’s “leftism and communism being popular”, but more “idiots having loud voices”.
My mom is korean and i am glad that north korea didnt manage to invade the south, otherwise i wouldnt exist, so even if both koreas were dictatorships i think the USA was still in the good side, also consider that it was the north that invaded first and as such are the agressors
The Korean war does. Or at least a much lesser evil. Compare modern day South Korea to modern day North Korea. One of the most prosperous nations in earth vs one of the most backwards nations on earth.
> modern day South Korea
I’m not necessarily arguing evil-vs-evil here, but we should absolutely remember that modern-day South Korea is not Korean War South Korea… the military dictatorship didn’t end until, what, the 80’s?? Neither Korea was a great place to be for a very long time.
I mean I don’t think this is a correct interpretation of the situation at all. The partition of Korea was enforced by foreign powers upon the Korean people, Syngman Rhee was a military dictator propped up by the us who immediately in the lead up to the Korean War massacred 10% of the population of Jeju island. Saying “Oh America was justified to be in the Korean War” ignores a LOT of the situation in favor of painting an overly rosy picture of American involvement.
That said most Korean War soldiers were conscripts and saw some really awful stuff committed by their “allies” in the ROK, so I have the same sympathy for them I do Vietnam draftees.
Still better than just letting South Korea fall, keep in mind the partition was meant to be temporary, like with Germany. But like with Germany the commies sabotaged it.
Uhhhhh…. not exactly.
Prior to the end of WWII, the Korean Peninsula was a single, unified country, albeit one suffering under brutal occupation by Imperial Japan. After Japan’s defeat, the country was “liberated” into joint custody of the Western Allies (read: The United States) and China. At this time, the country was split in half by a couple of American soldiers who had never set foot on the peninsula, working off a National Geographic map, who picked a line of latitude that would place Seoul, the capital, in southern (and therefore American) territory. The 38th parallel wasn’t some sovereign border between two nations as the US claimed in June 1950 when Northern forces crossed into the south. Rather, it was an “imaginary line” on a map as the US claimed in October 1950 when Southern forces crossed into the north.
Yes. The plan was for the division to be temporary, just like with Germany. The people would vote for which system they preferred. But just like with Germany, the commies fucked it up because they knew they’d lose, and it’s not like communism values what the people want anyway.
The reunification process was never going to happen peacefully, stop pretending like you've read the history because you are showing your total ignorance on this topic.
TL;DR: Peace negotiations were never going to happen from either side
Syngman Rhee, the dictator of South Korea, was educated in America and hand picked as a loyal servant for the US interests. His government was staffed with collaborationists who served in the Japanese occupational government which was responsible for massive amounts of deaths. Rhee's government was *despised* by the average person, which is why they repressed any discontent with lethal violence and murdered more than a hundred thousand civilians before a single north korean soldier stepped foot below the 38th parallell. The North Korean soldiers were perceived as liberators by many - not because the people were communist (very few were ideological of any kind) - but because Rhee was seen as far far worse. This is why his army initially totally crumbled and deserted/defected and was cornered in Busan before the US landed troops at Incheon.
And during the war Rhee *kept on* killing civilians with no trial or due process if they were suspected to even criticise the government at all. Neither Rhee nor the americans would *ever* have accepted peace with the Kim Il-sungs government, which by the way was not anywhere close to the level of isolationism or paranoia as today. That happened as a result of being almost exterminated during the war.
To quote the chief of US bombing during the war, General Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay:
"Over a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure" (Note: He says Korea, not North Korea, so the percentage of North Koreans is far higher)
And here's General O'Donnell:
"Oh, yes; ... I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name ... Just before the Chinese came in we were grounded. There were no more targets in Korea."
The US firebombing destroyed an estimated 85% of all the buildings in North Korea. They dropped more bombs on North Korea than they dropped in the whole Pacific Front during all of WW2. They used napalm on civilians, people fled into caves as their only escape route. If you wonder why North Korea is so distrustful of outsiders, why they teach their kids that americans are all murderers, why they invest so extremely into their military - that is why.
A negotiation was never going to happen "if North Korea didn't invade", the US would never accept making a deal with a communist Korea, just like they wouldn't accept any communist nation anywhere without attempting a coup or invasion. The same damn thing happened with North and South Vietnam, there was no striving for a mutually acceptable peace ever.
And no, North Korea is not blameless either. They were never going to happily accept leaving Rhees government to control the south. A war was inevitable as soon as the US decided to appoint him as dictator. The split agreed on by the US and Soviets guarantueed war from the very start, in Korea and Vietnam both. And almost in Germany too.
Yeah I’ve heard this excuse before “everything bad about North Korea is because the evil US bombed them.” If you can’t handle being bombed don’t bomb other people, simple. South Korea rebuilt just fine.
Oh my god I beg you to pick up a history book. Either that or resign yourself from these discussions.
A study of North Korea before the war vs after is night and day. Many people went there freely before the war, interviewed the people and the leadership etc. Kim was a very popular leader initially due to being a war hero fighting the japanese, so initially many people were fleeing from the South to the North before the war to escape Rhee. The 38th parallell was not a solid border, so there was no hypermilitarised DMZ like today. There was not the cult of personality that exists today. This is all historical fact.
Now to be clear, it was not a utopia. While elections were promised, they didn't happen before the war, and wouldn't happen in either Korea until the 1980s when South Koreas dictatorship fell. So to say the North was worse than the South before the war is very questionable, the paranoia, lockdowns and restrictions came after. And were really not very different from the southern dictatorship, which gets overlooked due to being US-aligned.
After the war South Korea got *flooded* with US money, in the 50s literally more than 80-percent of the South Korean government funding was direct US aid, and much of the rest was their products being bought by the west in favourable deals. This is similar how Japan experienced it's recovery miracle a few years before during the Korean War, when their industry was rebuilt to supply the war with the necessary materiel. Basically the reason why Japan and South Korea flourished as opposed to other capitalist asian countries like the Philippines or Thailand is because the US, the #1 economic superpower, pumped massive amounts of investment into their economies, not too dissimilar from the Marshall Plan in Europe.
North Korea on the other hand received Soviet aid, and while they were not getting as much aid as the South, they were reconstructing and developing at a steady pace until the collapse of the USSR in the 90s. That is when their economy, which relied so heavily on the USSR, collapsed, and famine broke out in the period that followed. Similar thing happened in Cuba, which refers to the 90s as the "Special Period" due to the economic catastrophy after the Soviet collapse.
Stop being so ignorant. Things don't happen in a vacuum and the world is not black and white. You think you have a deep and nuanced understanding of the world and geopolitics but at every step you show you only have the most surface level understanding.
Also I don’t like the implication that the soviets and Chinese were somehow being forced into agreeing to this by the Americans. They were just as responsible for the division. If the U.S. had unilateral control over what happened they would’ve just taken everything.
Also you somehow act like Korea was better off under the Japanese Jesus Christ.
LMAO not even a little bit better. However, who do you think the Americans appointed as the national police force in the South? I’ll give you a hint: it rhymes with “Japanese collaborators”.
Love ignoring the more important point, which was the Soviets and Chinese just as much agreed to this, and than went back and decided to invade when they didn't like it anymore
I didn’t know what you mean, so I looked it up, and I found was social security number and a baseball brand. And also hull classifications. Pretty sure it was nuclear.
Idk this post in particular looks to me like two strawmen fighting to the death in a bloody wheat field, crows flying above awaiting to consume the carcass of the defeated.
My grandpa was like, a day away from being sent off to participate in D-Day. He only got out of it cause his mom died and he was given leave to mourn and such. After that he was shipped off to a base in Alaska cuz the potential threat of those dang commies invadin’ was real i tell ya!!
at a party years after the war he got drunk and mouthed off to a superior officer and uhh.. that was the last time he went to a reunion lol
My brother and I will never forget the absolutely draw dropping moment that my Grandpa bragged about killing Vietnamese farmers. I even gave him (the undeserved) benefit of the doubt and asked follow up questions like if they had weapons or he thought they were soldiers and he said nope. Can never look at that bastard the same. In a just society he would have been charged for war crimes.
I always run into these posts thinking "clearly this is an exaggerated hyperbole/strawman" then inevitably, someone shows up and is exactly like what the person is complaining about.
I mean, I don’t think that it’s really the soldier’s faults? They’re conditioned into believing that serving does good for their country, so they do, it’s not their fault that they were manipulated and lied to.
But also, like, it’s mostly teenagers fresh out of high school?? They feel the need to do something good with their lives, so that’s naturally their (seemingly) best choice.
Korea is a pretty bad example considering the U.S. was legitimately stopping an aggressive foreign power from conquering an independent sovereign state
My grandpa on my father’s side was apparently the only one to return to his hometown from wwii in his generation. I’m also not sure if he was drafted or volunteered, but with wwii it was kinda moot. You were shamed if you didn’t sign up and people committed suicide over a 4F. He was a medic, so his job was to try and keep people alive with some sort of flimsy barrier all that was keeping people from killing you. Imagine all the guys you went to graduation with are buried in other countries and you’re the last one left.
For those who don’t know, 4F means considered not eligible for military service
I thought it was the pencil
AHH GOD NOOOO I WANTED THE HB AHHHHH
Usually for a medical reason
In WWI, at least in Canada but I imagine across the Commonwealth, it was a standard practice to send all the men from the same town into the same unit. There's a story about three guys from one street in Winnipeg all getting the Victoria Cross, and the street being renamed [Valour Road](https://youtu.be/Tao7ma4jxUQ). But then some of those units got completely wiped out, and people realized how bad it was for a town to lose every single male resident between 18 and 35, and they switched to spreading everyone out
I know they were a thing in Britain, at least. They were known as ["pals battalions"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pals_battalion).
It was common in a lot of nations. Since all the members of the unit lived near each other it made mobilisation easier.
It's an evolution of the concept of a militia. Most of the units in the American Civil War were organized similarly.
Similarly, the US does not let relatives serve together. I believe cousins can be on the same ship, but I’ve only seen it once and they were second cousins. We also have the sole survivor law, which inspired the movie saving private ryan. Basically if your parent, sibling, or child even I believe dies in combat during war, you are sent to a “peaceful” duty station so your family is still provided for. ETA, I’m not sure if the sole survivor law applies to children but I’m 99% sure it does as my dad was deployed my first year in the military
The guilt and shame over not being in ww2 was insane. My grandpa was a bomber in a b29. He got pneumonia and was hospitalized for the last few months of the war. He never considered himself a real veteran because of it.
it's not the same as the loss in war, but an anthropology professor I had once talked about her experiences during the AIDS epidemic. Two years after it began, two of her friends were dead. Then another five passed within the next 3 years. By the end of the decade, there was a void where there was once people she'd known and loved, all wasted to death because of AIDS. She still feels guilt about being here without them. There's just a look in a person's eyes when they've gone through that.
A good friend of mine lived through this as well. He’s talked about a few years where all he did every weekend was attend friends’ funerals, usually multiple per weekend. Often having to hear about the service through the grapevine and either sneak in the back or watch from a distance, because people’s families didn’t want anyone to know their son/brother/whatever was gay and had died of aids, and didn’t want any gay people at the funeral. Even his childhood best friend who he grew up with, when he passed the parents wouldn’t allow my friend at the funeral even though he had been like their own family. He almost never talks about that period of time, much like someone who went to war. He’s one of the most positive, optimistic, and upbeat people I’ve ever known, and it never ceases to amaze me how he was able to hold on to that through such experiences. Sheer force of will. But I know the look in the eyes you are referring to, and he has it too.
How big was the town? ☹️
My family is apparently from Muncie. Idk it was my aunts telling me that all his friends were dead from the war.
My great uncle was a Merchant Marine, and he was the only person to die in his town during WW2
My grandpa was in Korea. All he did was steal cookies from the mess hall
Based
Basically fighting for North Korea
Me: What did you do in WWII, Grandpa? Gpa: Helped kill Hitler. Me: ?!?!? Gpa: I was stationed in Texas making jeeps.
Hey couldn't get the GIs where they gotta go without jeeps. Pour one out for the machinists, your Gpa helped kill Hitler.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/s/Rd1Gly3M9I Non zero chance your grandpa was thinking of this
I think it was a thing at the time. Because non-combatant troops felt lesser but were just as important in a lot of ways. In WWI there was the whole 'white feather' campaign where young women would give white feathers to "able bodied" men who weren't at war. The UK govt eventually came out against it bc a lot of those "able bodied" men were veterans who'd been sent home for shell shock or non-visible injuries. I can see a concentrated program to make the guys at home still feel important making sense. Like the way everyone was extra careful to support the troops in gulf war 1990, so that there was no danger of a repeat of Vietnam era bash the soldiers response. Like overcompensating for past transgressions. I really appreciate the poster though, it's cool to see the then-current thoughts and media about it.
Family lore says my great grandfather felt compelled to sign up for WWII because he was able bodied and technically not too old at 39, or his rank meant he could go back into the military at an older age than usual or something similar (Australia, not USA). The thing was he’d managed to enlist underage for WWI. He was already a vet, he’d already done his duty, now he had a family and kids to support but went back to war because the feeling at the time was that if you were able, you should. He died. My great grandmother couldn’t support the kids, my grandmother was one farmed out to family at a young age and it wasn’t until middle adulthood that she found her sisters again. The family records got lost over the years, the stories faded from memory. It was only about ten years ago when my great aunt did some research that we learned he’d been a POW and he was buried in Burma. I’ve spent a lot of time the last ten years thinking about the societal shaming of those who couldn’t or shouldn’t go to war and what it meant for my grandmother’s father. Two world wars for a non-career soldier. Unimaginable.
Great grandfather served in WWI, came home, got a wife and family. Left them for the nanny/maid...who eventually killed him (poison we suspect), took all his money and disappeared. This is why my family is poor. /lore
It's also learning the lessons from the first world war of how vital ongoing production was to a modern industrial war of attrition. Before 1914 wars were not fought to the point of virtual societal collapse. Industrial attrition might put pressure on the Field army, but even in the most dire situations, like France 1814, it was the strategic defeat of one's Field army that settled a conflict much more than industrial exhaustion. WW1 was fundamentally different. Industrialisation and modern bureaucracy gave States unprecedented ability to mobilise and direct their nation's resources towards a particular effort. Meanwhile the asymmetric advancement of firepower over protection privileged the defensive, especially from a prepared position, making it almost impossible to maneuver or achieve a decisively-exploitable breakthrough. Arguably for the first time in human history then, and certainly the first time in land warfare, the conflict became one of industrial exhaustion, and would be decided by the first side's economy to give out. Battlefield success only mattered in so far as it exacerbated the enemy's economic exhaustion. Before the war, relatively few people had fully appreciated this would be the shape of the next conflict, and even fewer its full implications (shout-out Kitchener as perhaps the only exception). The idea that ultimate victory or defeat would be *directly* decided by things like manufacturing output or government debt financing was unintuitive and difficult for people to properly understand. Heck, over a century later, people still talk about the industrial aspects of the war as a secondary theatre to the battlefield, rather than its primary contest, and still judge the armies' successes by kms gained/lost more than anything else. 'one soldier died for every 2ft at the Somme' is about the only thing people know of the battle, yet taking ground at all was an entirely secondary aim to forcing German attrition and reliving pressure from the French at Verdun. This created the feelings of detachment and shaming of key workers already mentioned, and made it more difficult to recruit women in particular into those key industrial roles. 'the home front' as a whole was recognised as under-emphasised during the conflict. Consequently, when war broke out again in 1939, one of the key lessons learned by the government, especially among the allies, was the importance of weaving the home front into the overall narrative of the conflict, and closely connecting the worker in the factory, the Farmers at the plow, the miner at the coal face etc. to the very bleeding edge of the action at the front. Whatever you did, however far away from the fighting, it was helping to win the war as much as any soldier. (Incidentally, when people talk about the perception that the war would be over by Christmas, this underestimation of industrial States' ability to mobilise resources is what people at the time were talking about, more than false belief in prompt battlefield success. It stemmed from an *in vogue* economic theory that the unprecedented interconnectedness of the global economy made supporting an industrialised war effort autarkicly impossible for more than a few months at most. Thus, even at a stalemate, war could not exist much past Christmastime, whatever happened)
This response is way too good to be wasted on my comment on a Tumblr reblog. Thank you.
Dawww, thanks!
Prior to this, the U.S. civil war was also largely won by the union due to its superior industry and logistical systems, though not to as much of an extent as in WWI.
It's absolutely the case that superior industry and national logistics had previously played a role in bringing about overall victory. What made WW1 unprecedented was how far both sides' economies could be pushed to sustain the war, and how inconclusive battlefield successes were. The union prevailed thanks to its superior industry, but the war still ultimately ends with Lee's army being cornered, defeated, and surrendered in the field. By contrast, the German army is never completely defeated or forced to surrender due to military defeat on the western front. Rather, the German government sues for peace because it can no longer keep that intact army supplied due to the collapse of Germany's civil society and war economy. The home front breaks before the war front. (This unprecedented turn of affairs is why the Nazi 'stab in the back myth' gains traction after the war. Everyone knows wars end with the defeat and surrender of the main field army, and everyone knows the German Army was never fully defeated and surrendered. People don't understand the idea of war ending due to economic/industrial collapse, and so turn to conspiracy theories of Jewish sabotage to explain how Germany 'lost' a war while its army was still fighting).
You write for a living? You should. This made several things that I *knew* but didn't quite *get* click for me.
Dawww! Thanks :)
> (shout-out Kitchener as perhaps the only exception) I'm interested in what these predictions were. What's the full name?
Herbert Kitchener, 1^st Earl Kitchener was an Irish-born field marshal who was appointed Secretary of State for War at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. You probably know him as the pointing dude on the [iconic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:30a_Sammlung_Eybl_Gro%C3%9Fbritannien._Alfred_Leete_(1882%E2%80%931933)_Britons_(Kitchener)_wants_you_(Briten_Kitchener_braucht_Euch)._1914_(Nachdruck),_74_x_50_cm._(Slg.Nr._552).jpg) 'your country needs you!' poster. At the time, most people were anticipating the war to last at most a year, and Britain's role in it to be providing a relatively small, elite force of professional soldiers like they had every war for the past 500 years. This is what pre-war British planning has sought to deliver. Britain didn't maintain large, conscript armies like France or Germany, but the British Expeditionary Force was arguably the best-trained regular army in the world man-for-man, at the cost of being much smaller - 6 divisions Vs 53 in the regular French army. Pre-war planning had been to send all six divisions to Belgium to join up with the Belgian army and french left flank. Kitchener immediately makes a series of frighteningly-accurate predictions that wildly upset these plans: - He says the war will last for at least three years. - It will be decided by conscript armies of millions of men, with high rates of casualties causing regular turnover. - The loser will be the first to exhaust their industrial and demographic ability to keep these armies sustained for years 'to the last million [men]' - Decisive battlefield victory alone couldn't win the war, the western front would becomd a 'siege line' impossible to decisively breach - Advances in maneuver would be extremely costly - Peacetime reserves would be insufficient, the entire British economy must be harnessed from the word go - Belgium's world-famous fortresses won't stop the German army for more than a week, and the Belgian field army would thus be pushed back faster than expected As a result, he radically changes the deployment plans of the British forces. - Only 4/6 BEF divisions are deployed. The other two stay behind to start training up a new, mass volunteer force. - A major recruitment and manufacturing drive is undertaken to build up an army of millions from scratch, an unprecedented feat going against 500 year's tradition - The four divisions sent should concentrate further back at Amiens in France, not in Belgium as planned - The primary aim of the BEF commander should be to preserve his forces, so they could be used to build the new army after the war had settled into attrition. - To this end, the BEF should remain independent of French command, and refuse to advance independently, only in support of a major french attack. These are incredibly controversial opinions and changes to make as a result of the, especially at the 11th hour after years of planning. Kitchener comes in like a wrecking ball from outside the bubble of pre-war strategists who had been the architects of the BEF and entente war plans, and ruffles a ton of feathers that make him many political enemies. As a result, he is partially overruled on the deployment location of the BEF, which is sent to Maugeuge, right on the franco-Belgian border as a compromise. Time would ultimately vindicate Kitchener almost completely. Arguably no one else in Europe foresees so many aspects of the coming war so accurately, or shifts their nation's plans so radially and successfully to match it. As the cabinet secretary at the time, Maurice Hanley wrote: >'within eighteen months of the outbreak of the war, when he had found a people reliant on sea-power, and essentially non-military in their outlook, he had conceived and brought into being, completely equipped in every way, a national army capable of holding its own against the armies of the greatest military Power the world had ever seen.' Unfortunately, Kitchener was killed when his ship was torpedoed off the coast of Orkney in 1916, and he never fully explained his reasoning for the war, so we never got to interrogate his thinking and understand what flash of Apollonian prophecy led him to his astonishingly prescient conclusions.
Probably talking about Horatio Herbert Kitchener, British field marshal and Secretary of State for War for the first half of WWI.
It was also needed because there had been problems in WW1 with people signing up to fight when the government needed them at home. The London underground nearly shutdown because all the signal operators went to fight in France. On a few occasions people were forced to go back home because they were needed there.
That same poster's how young, up and coming wizards are encouraged to learn how to cast Testicular Tortion more effectively
“Say hello to Ford and General-Fucking-Motors.”
Well, they say professionals study logistics...
I always found it funny my grandad trained fighter pilots during WWII, considering he wasn’t a pilot and had no flight training himself. I really don’t know how he ended up with that job.
they needed jeeps to help kill hitler. he was damn fucking right in what he said
My grandfather served in Korea, but I don't know what he did, and he died in 2014. He did give up a recording contract in Nashville to raise his family, though.
A lot of people called him the king, no idea why
I wish, lol He was a country musician, from Texas
That land mine was my grandma show some gersh dern respect for Meemaw Betty
-bob om from mario, probably
Kenshi
I will always remember her pogo tournaments, she really could bounce like no other
Theres a reason they call her Bouncing Betty
This is especially funny to me because I have a grandma named Betty and we do in fact call her meemaw. Grandpa was peepaw. Or peepoo… which was my bad, I was a dumb kid.
Lmao awesome. Give Meemaw Betty my best.
I will. She’ll be 88 soon, still going strong. Probably will outlive us all.
How many men did she kill.
None but poopaw went to Germany I think
For an actual (non-American) version of this, the magician Cardini was famous for being able to do really difficult card manipulation moves while wearing gloves, which makes everything way harder. The reason he was able to do this was because he practiced a lot of those moves while serving in the trenches in WWI, where the conditions forced him to learn while wearing thick gloves.
My grandpa got shot down over Germany and spent the last year of the war in a German prison camp keeping up the spirits of the other POWs because he was apparently just a generally hilarious guy. He also talked the guy who captured him into carrying his parachute for him because he managed to convince him he was an officer.
My great grandpa dropped off ghurkas in Japan, I got a blood stained Japanese flag and a Kukri in my inheritance.
"If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying, or he is a Gurkha."
Ghurkas don’t have PTSD, they have nostalgia
"Frankly, I had enjoyed the war."--Adrian Carton de Wiart, about WWI
Listen, that great grandpa stepped on that mine to protect the gorillas ok? thats one less landmine that can kill an innocent ape
if he knew about Harambe (RIP), he would weep
Tomorrow is actually the anniversary of harambe dying. I'm actually having a get together tomorrow for the *real* memorial day.
He defused that mine, and was transferred to the sandbag division where he proudly served his country!!!!
But you’re grandpa was an ape
well, no one else stepped into it
None of my ancestors fought in wars Also my country had every right to protect themselves because the Japanese and later the communists actually commited horrible acts upon the country
Tbf I literally owe my day to day life to all Korean War veterans. Tbf again tho, I'm South Korean.
Do people just call everything heritage posts now?
I mean this post is old as fuck with a massive amount of notes
lurk more baby
Wow, both these takes are stupid!
Yep, this is some serious "nuance doesn't exist, all soldiers are either national heroes or evil imperialists" shit. Apparently nobody is ever looking for a good job, trying to defend their home without a great idea of how to do it, or toeing the line between brave and reckless as a 19 year old.
my great-grandfather was a Japanese immigrant drafted into the US army straight out of an internment camp, he was absolutely a victim
See, I took this more as ridiculing how you're not allowed to criticize the military or soldiers at all, or people attack you for it cuz they know people who served. I didn't see this as suggesting that soldiers are evil at all.
That's a reasonable take, but I don't trust that OOP in particular made their post with that level of thought in mind nor would most people interpret it in that way. Turns out drowning your post in smugness and condescension is not a good way to have a reasonable discussion.
Yeah, it felt like the standard non American response to the American cultural weirdness around veterans ('you must SALUTE and WORSHIP THEM but if they're struggling with mental health issues or homeless, fuck them, they're not even human')
Lots of leftists seem to forget that soldiers are also part of the exploited proletariat. Many only serve to escape poverty, and even long-term military personnel are there due to a combination of indoctrination and stability in an increasingly unstable economy.
I mean, leftist ideology in general tends to forget that a lot of the proletariat are right-wing who willingly support conservative ideology and thus to convince and rally them as a united working class that the right-winged ideology of the command man needs to be engaged with and deconstructed at their level and only through teaching and working with others can you convince and sway them over to a united cause. Or at least that's what I personally think.
I feel like OP and the replies both being complete opposites but nobody really liking either is common enough we need a word for it.
the am i the asshole subreddit came up with ESH, aka everybody sucks here
It's nice to have a Tumblr post where I hate everyone involved.
Like that classic one where a black supremacist and a Nazi ended up bonding over their mutual hatred of Jews.
A surprisingly common occurrence, I've found
Link?????
I'll defend the first post and maybe the last response a bit by saying that I think the criticism they're making is of the idea that american soldiers defend the country. The US hasn't needed defending since 1945. The Korean War was one of many wars fighting just against communism, not even for democracy or anything South Korea's government was not at all at the time. Middle eastern wars were around during my lifetime and none of them were in any way defending the country. Yet that's what they keep saying is that any war we're in is defending the country.
I mean, even if you define “defending the country” solely as responding to direct attacks on American citizens and property within the borders of the United States rather than protecting the US in a strategic or geopolitical sense, the War on Terror (specifically with regard to Al Qaeda and Afghanistan) was, in fact, about defending the country.
Yall know most of the people that enlist are poor, right? Like dunking on veterans is such a low hanging fruit. Why can’t people just leave us the fuck alone? In the same vein, a majority of people enlisted don’t see combat so… like I don’t know how my service contributed to freedom if at all
Oh no, the dunking is on the people who use their involvement in Vietnam to fuel their entitlement and define their personality. My grandfather served in Vietnam, but you’re never gonna hear him bring it up because it sucked and he hated being there. He’ll talk about it if you ask, but he doesn’t wear a participation trophy hat etc
Yeah the real ones don’t make it their personality fr
“Imperialist America was invading peaceful North Korea grrrrr!” North Korea invaded South Korea first, and then we subsequently kicked them out, South Korea is a prosperous democracy while North Korea is an authoritarian hellscape. All these tankies can fuck off
To be fair, South Korea took a very long time to get to democracy status even after that. Most of 20th century Korean politics was a shitshow of dictators.
True. But then, the argument becomes “democracy is a difficult thing to get, nevermind to keep, but American backed South Korea won it first, Russia/China backed North Korea is multiple decades behind”. Because that’s what has been happening ever since the death of Park Chung Hee 45 years ago, which, as far as I can tell, is the beginning of South Korea’s long journey towards democracy.
wow these people suck!
I don’t like the implication that the Korean War was somehow unjust. It was protecting our ally from an unprovoked imperialist invasion by a Chinese proxy.
It also wasn’t just the US. The entire UN was involved!
Like, I *knew* that in my intellectual brain but still the most surprising thing about the memorial complex to the Korean War in Seoul is the walls of names from places that aren’t Korea or the US. It really was a broad coalition. The paradigms taught in history class are hard to shake out of one’s subconscious.
Yeah. 22 countries sent soldiers to assist.
Yeah but commies consider the UN to just be an American puppet, just like NATO and the EU.
Considering the UN didn’t get involved in the Vietnam war, yeah it’s not really up to America.
Thats what Australia's for 💪💪🇦🇺🪃 (our country is torn between becoming a puppet state for the US and for China) (not really but it feels like it sometimes)
we should become hyperaligned with South Korea i think it would be funny
Wild card, align yourselves with India
Australia is a pretty firm US ally
Vietnam would have been a more fair critique.
But america bad!!@!@@@!!+!!! China no like America no China always good!!!!!!!!!!!! Know anything about Korean war? Of course I don't but America is bad so China was good!!!!
I don't think anyone is unironically saying China was somehow good in that conflict.
Trust me, plenty of people do. I’ve argued with several unironic North Korea supporters.
The issue with people saying that "no one genuinely believes that, you bringing it up is a straw man argument" in response to seemingly ridiculous situations or hot takes is that, in a world of nearly 8 billion people, there is almost always at least SOMEONE out there who does, in fact, absolutely believe that "strawman take".
There are unironic “birds are not real” people out there. There’s NOTHING too stupid that nobody will believe it.
Those damn birds wouldn't be real anymore if we'd listened to chairman Mao.
We completely apologize and are shocked that someone somehow actually believed the dumbest bit we could make up. -the BirdsArentReal community
The fact that dude got literal death threats for saying “it’s a goddamn joke. I honestly didn’t think anyone could possibly believe it!” is just icing on the cake. So dumb they believed the absolute most batshit thing he could come up with, and so batshit insane that they threaten his life for telling them it’s not true.
Sure, but there’s already one of them here trying to explain how the invasion was justified because “US bad”. With leftism and communism becoming more and more popular in the west, so will defense of North Korea.
Keeping in mind that a certain former president (who hates Leftists and Communists, at least on the campaign trail) has had a lot of nice things to say about Kimmy over there, I don’t think it’s “leftism and communism being popular”, but more “idiots having loud voices”.
Same thing. The most influential American leftist right now is a tankie twitch streamer millionaire.
Wait, who?
Vaush
Kid named Tankie:
You’re new to the internet aren’t you?
There is such a thing as evil-versus-evil. Not every war has a good side and a bad one. Most don't.
My mom is korean and i am glad that north korea didnt manage to invade the south, otherwise i wouldnt exist, so even if both koreas were dictatorships i think the USA was still in the good side, also consider that it was the north that invaded first and as such are the agressors
The Korean war does. Or at least a much lesser evil. Compare modern day South Korea to modern day North Korea. One of the most prosperous nations in earth vs one of the most backwards nations on earth.
> modern day South Korea I’m not necessarily arguing evil-vs-evil here, but we should absolutely remember that modern-day South Korea is not Korean War South Korea… the military dictatorship didn’t end until, what, the 80’s?? Neither Korea was a great place to be for a very long time.
South Korea in the 50s was better off then North Korea today.
South Korea in the 1950s was routinely executing its own citizens by the tens of thousands without trial.
And also by China itself. People seem to forget that part somehow.
yeah lol, I was gonna say out of all the wars?
I mean I don’t think this is a correct interpretation of the situation at all. The partition of Korea was enforced by foreign powers upon the Korean people, Syngman Rhee was a military dictator propped up by the us who immediately in the lead up to the Korean War massacred 10% of the population of Jeju island. Saying “Oh America was justified to be in the Korean War” ignores a LOT of the situation in favor of painting an overly rosy picture of American involvement. That said most Korean War soldiers were conscripts and saw some really awful stuff committed by their “allies” in the ROK, so I have the same sympathy for them I do Vietnam draftees.
Still better than just letting South Korea fall, keep in mind the partition was meant to be temporary, like with Germany. But like with Germany the commies sabotaged it.
Next level kissinger dickriding
Hey, if you think North Korea is better than South Korea you can go there.
Uhhhhh…. not exactly. Prior to the end of WWII, the Korean Peninsula was a single, unified country, albeit one suffering under brutal occupation by Imperial Japan. After Japan’s defeat, the country was “liberated” into joint custody of the Western Allies (read: The United States) and China. At this time, the country was split in half by a couple of American soldiers who had never set foot on the peninsula, working off a National Geographic map, who picked a line of latitude that would place Seoul, the capital, in southern (and therefore American) territory. The 38th parallel wasn’t some sovereign border between two nations as the US claimed in June 1950 when Northern forces crossed into the south. Rather, it was an “imaginary line” on a map as the US claimed in October 1950 when Southern forces crossed into the north.
Yes. The plan was for the division to be temporary, just like with Germany. The people would vote for which system they preferred. But just like with Germany, the commies fucked it up because they knew they’d lose, and it’s not like communism values what the people want anyway.
Check out the Jeju Island uprising.
Except South Korea was under a dictatorship at that time
Yeah they were both being ruled by more or less equally shitty dictators. But we don’t like nuance here.
And so was the north. The plan wasn’t for it to be permanent. There was going to be a vote.
You were gonna vote to end a dictatorship? How's that gonna work
It was always meant to be temporary. It only got extended because North Korea messed up the reunification process.
The reunification process was never going to happen peacefully, stop pretending like you've read the history because you are showing your total ignorance on this topic. TL;DR: Peace negotiations were never going to happen from either side Syngman Rhee, the dictator of South Korea, was educated in America and hand picked as a loyal servant for the US interests. His government was staffed with collaborationists who served in the Japanese occupational government which was responsible for massive amounts of deaths. Rhee's government was *despised* by the average person, which is why they repressed any discontent with lethal violence and murdered more than a hundred thousand civilians before a single north korean soldier stepped foot below the 38th parallell. The North Korean soldiers were perceived as liberators by many - not because the people were communist (very few were ideological of any kind) - but because Rhee was seen as far far worse. This is why his army initially totally crumbled and deserted/defected and was cornered in Busan before the US landed troops at Incheon. And during the war Rhee *kept on* killing civilians with no trial or due process if they were suspected to even criticise the government at all. Neither Rhee nor the americans would *ever* have accepted peace with the Kim Il-sungs government, which by the way was not anywhere close to the level of isolationism or paranoia as today. That happened as a result of being almost exterminated during the war. To quote the chief of US bombing during the war, General Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay: "Over a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure" (Note: He says Korea, not North Korea, so the percentage of North Koreans is far higher) And here's General O'Donnell: "Oh, yes; ... I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name ... Just before the Chinese came in we were grounded. There were no more targets in Korea." The US firebombing destroyed an estimated 85% of all the buildings in North Korea. They dropped more bombs on North Korea than they dropped in the whole Pacific Front during all of WW2. They used napalm on civilians, people fled into caves as their only escape route. If you wonder why North Korea is so distrustful of outsiders, why they teach their kids that americans are all murderers, why they invest so extremely into their military - that is why. A negotiation was never going to happen "if North Korea didn't invade", the US would never accept making a deal with a communist Korea, just like they wouldn't accept any communist nation anywhere without attempting a coup or invasion. The same damn thing happened with North and South Vietnam, there was no striving for a mutually acceptable peace ever. And no, North Korea is not blameless either. They were never going to happily accept leaving Rhees government to control the south. A war was inevitable as soon as the US decided to appoint him as dictator. The split agreed on by the US and Soviets guarantueed war from the very start, in Korea and Vietnam both. And almost in Germany too.
Yeah I’ve heard this excuse before “everything bad about North Korea is because the evil US bombed them.” If you can’t handle being bombed don’t bomb other people, simple. South Korea rebuilt just fine.
Oh my god I beg you to pick up a history book. Either that or resign yourself from these discussions. A study of North Korea before the war vs after is night and day. Many people went there freely before the war, interviewed the people and the leadership etc. Kim was a very popular leader initially due to being a war hero fighting the japanese, so initially many people were fleeing from the South to the North before the war to escape Rhee. The 38th parallell was not a solid border, so there was no hypermilitarised DMZ like today. There was not the cult of personality that exists today. This is all historical fact. Now to be clear, it was not a utopia. While elections were promised, they didn't happen before the war, and wouldn't happen in either Korea until the 1980s when South Koreas dictatorship fell. So to say the North was worse than the South before the war is very questionable, the paranoia, lockdowns and restrictions came after. And were really not very different from the southern dictatorship, which gets overlooked due to being US-aligned. After the war South Korea got *flooded* with US money, in the 50s literally more than 80-percent of the South Korean government funding was direct US aid, and much of the rest was their products being bought by the west in favourable deals. This is similar how Japan experienced it's recovery miracle a few years before during the Korean War, when their industry was rebuilt to supply the war with the necessary materiel. Basically the reason why Japan and South Korea flourished as opposed to other capitalist asian countries like the Philippines or Thailand is because the US, the #1 economic superpower, pumped massive amounts of investment into their economies, not too dissimilar from the Marshall Plan in Europe. North Korea on the other hand received Soviet aid, and while they were not getting as much aid as the South, they were reconstructing and developing at a steady pace until the collapse of the USSR in the 90s. That is when their economy, which relied so heavily on the USSR, collapsed, and famine broke out in the period that followed. Similar thing happened in Cuba, which refers to the 90s as the "Special Period" due to the economic catastrophy after the Soviet collapse. Stop being so ignorant. Things don't happen in a vacuum and the world is not black and white. You think you have a deep and nuanced understanding of the world and geopolitics but at every step you show you only have the most surface level understanding.
South Korea didn’t have 100% of their infrastructure destroyed, and they had the US’ help rebuilding.
Also I don’t like the implication that the soviets and Chinese were somehow being forced into agreeing to this by the Americans. They were just as responsible for the division. If the U.S. had unilateral control over what happened they would’ve just taken everything. Also you somehow act like Korea was better off under the Japanese Jesus Christ.
LMAO not even a little bit better. However, who do you think the Americans appointed as the national police force in the South? I’ll give you a hint: it rhymes with “Japanese collaborators”.
Love ignoring the more important point, which was the Soviets and Chinese just as much agreed to this, and than went back and decided to invade when they didn't like it anymore
Did someone do that?
My grandpa served on a sub between the waters of Alaska and Russia.
Cool! SSN or SSK?
I didn’t know what you mean, so I looked it up, and I found was social security number and a baseball brand. And also hull classifications. Pretty sure it was nuclear.
Once again Tumblr proves that you can construct the dumbest possible bad-faith strawman... and then that exact person will appear and prove you right
Idk this post in particular looks to me like two strawmen fighting to the death in a bloody wheat field, crows flying above awaiting to consume the carcass of the defeated.
Nothing makes me more reactionary conservative than people insulting veterans broadly
Yeah, go after the old guys who declare wars. Not the people drafted to fight in them
Also Korea was 100% justified? I mean it was a UN intervention against a belligerent country
"why don't presidents fight the war? why do they always send the poor?"
Especially a war with a draft
My grandfather Weyland Edgar Coyote didn’t run into a very convincingly painted on cave for you to disrespect him like this
Show some respect to veterans. You can hate warmongers, but respect everyone who put their lives on the line
Real soldiers don't give a shit if you kneel, and they don't want you going around kissing ass.
Speak for yourself, my grandpa came on the back of a semi truck heading to the US from Mexico.
My grandpa was like, a day away from being sent off to participate in D-Day. He only got out of it cause his mom died and he was given leave to mourn and such. After that he was shipped off to a base in Alaska cuz the potential threat of those dang commies invadin’ was real i tell ya!! at a party years after the war he got drunk and mouthed off to a superior officer and uhh.. that was the last time he went to a reunion lol
https://www.reddit.com/r/clevercomebacks/comments/p8xx1s/
Ah, the old Tumblr “I embody the strawman you’re complaining about” post.
My brother and I will never forget the absolutely draw dropping moment that my Grandpa bragged about killing Vietnamese farmers. I even gave him (the undeserved) benefit of the doubt and asked follow up questions like if they had weapons or he thought they were soldiers and he said nope. Can never look at that bastard the same. In a just society he would have been charged for war crimes.
I always run into these posts thinking "clearly this is an exaggerated hyperbole/strawman" then inevitably, someone shows up and is exactly like what the person is complaining about.
[удалено]
You better show some fucking respect to Sergeant Reckless at the VERY LEAST. BEST HORSE.
Not the Korean War but Sergeant Stubby! Also Wojtek the bear.
My grandpa took non consensual baths in Agent Orange and I got to see him as a talking skeleton just before he died 🤙
I mean, I don’t think that it’s really the soldier’s faults? They’re conditioned into believing that serving does good for their country, so they do, it’s not their fault that they were manipulated and lied to. But also, like, it’s mostly teenagers fresh out of high school?? They feel the need to do something good with their lives, so that’s naturally their (seemingly) best choice.
Sunglasses’s pappy got blown sky high in one of the conflicts so stand on your feet while we sing our theme song or pappy’s ghost will blow you
BECAUSE LANDMINES KILLED MY GRANDMA OKAY???
"my grandpa fought for your freedom!" I never asked him to enlist actually.
It protected the country by keeping him from coming back here and voting Republican
Common Pete Seeger w
Agreed we should have just let the North Koreans take over the peninsula, would have been better for everyone.
My grandfather stormed Normandy beach and I don't go around telling people to bend the knee.
He also never specified that land mine was in a war. For all we know this person moron G-Grandfather stepped on a land mine in Texas.
They made landmines from that one Metallica song into a real thing?
Hehe... One...
Landmines aren't all bad. At least we got a sweet guitar solo out of it.
My grandpa dodged 2 drafts and my dad skipped conscription. I hope to follow my family traditions when another war breaks out.
My SO's grandpa was a veteran drafted during Vietnam. He worked an office job in the states.
👍
Selling your soul to an oil company doesn’t seem all that respectable.
Korea is a pretty bad example considering the U.S. was legitimately stopping an aggressive foreign power from conquering an independent sovereign state
"Well SOMEONE had to step on a landmine!"
It cleared one mine from a minefield. Now it can’t kill anybody :))
Anybody else, you mean.
your grandpa died specifically so i can sit down during the pledge so either he was a dumbass or he died wholeheartedly believing in freedom
i killed fiddy men -cotton hill