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The Washington Post reports
A simple data point offered by a college commencement speaker jumped out at [non-employee Washington Post contributor Philip Bump] before being borne away on the tide of immediacy.
[...]The speaker was ABC journalist Martha Raddatz, and the point is [...]: The graduates have spent half their lives with America at war.
It's a startling idea, but an incorrect one. The percentage is almost certainly much higher than that.
Using somewhat subjective definitions of "at war"--Korea counts but Kosovo doesn't in our analysis, for example--we endeavored to figure out how much of each person's life has been spent with America at war. We used whole years for both the age and the war, so the brief Gulf War is given a full year, and World War II includes 1941. These are estimates.
The page contains a graphic that allows you to see what portion of your lifetime the USA has been formally engaged in hostilities according to your birth year.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:37PM
This is a good point that I suspect will get lost because of the second part of your post. The Germans did have problems. Severe ones. They were starving, broke, humiliated. Their country was in chaos, all of it the result of a world war that they were no more culpable for than had been the British, French, Russians, or Americans. They are a cultured, intelligent, vigorous people who knew they did not deserve what they got. The process through which they became Nazi Germany is a complex one that is very, very important for any democracy to understand because it can and is happening to many other democracies now.
I only began to understand that larger context when I saw "Triumph of the Will" on Netflix, because I never got the German side of the tale, having grown up in America where the historical narrative is entirely dominated by self-interested parties. I didn't even get the German side of the story when I lived in Germany, because the people there are so cowed by the manufactured "reality" of how it all went down. But when you hear what the Nazis had to say for themselves, it all suddenly becomes a lot more complicated, a lot less cartoonish and one dimensional. They had a plan. They wanted to make Germany strong again. They wanted to conquer the evil forces they perceived as having unjustly destroyed and humiliated them. They were serious and determined about it.
That's something that we can all see in ourselves, and see ourselves getting behind as a national plan in our own countries. It is something not a few of us nations are getting behind now as we speak. It is very easy to cross the line from that reasonable and in many ways laudable national project into repression, attrocity, and catastrophe. That's the ominous lesson in it: we can all become, and some are becoming, Nazis.
So the whole historical narrative of the Nazis as cartoon cutout bad guys is false and dangerous. They were as human as we are. Repeating the manufactured caricature of them is a business and a scam and utterly, despicably, self-serving.
Washington DC delenda est.