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Do Jeeps not count? (Obviously not)

That is an absolutely crazy fucking number. Holy shit. Any books you like in particular for US industrial history during the war?

Half every cartoon made between ‘41 and ‘45 referenced the war effort somehow. Heck, that’s why Popeye changed outfits to USN whites.

genuinely the greatest deterrent to actual for real WWIII is that not a single one of the “great powers” as currently constituted has the political will to demand world war-level sacrifices from its populations. the power of Borger Exponsive holds global cataclysm at bay

We went from spending 1.4% of gdp on defense in 1940 to 41% of gdp by 1945

A semi-related and less serious side note: part of the reason why first printings of comics like Actions Comics #1 and Captain America #1 are valuable in the millions is because so many comic books in the 40s were recycled to help support the war effort due to paper shortages.

Meanwhile George W. Bush told us to go out & shop. If not for COVID I'd think his was perversely the *more* traumatizing response

WWI and WWII left marks that few people still living can even begin to grasp.

Do you know where that stat comes from? It seems super low. At the Tacoma Car Museum they have a couple of cars built during WWII and talk about the different modifications caused by war production. It’s a pretty rad car museum so maybe they just got lucky.

at a mall

you are going to see news anchors look at the camera with that "i am currently acquiring ptsd" face and that was the reaction of a significant fraction of all adults. people who were children but old enough to remember remember this more because they were cueing off of adults

There are some really intricate "dashboard" real-time broadcasts which feature everything from ATC recordings to commercial breaks, and they're the sort of effort at historical documentation that we could use more of. Few events are ever truly captured in-context. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx8_...

9/11 attacks in realtime (dashboard) 7:46am-12:00pmYouTube video by Christian Kollerwww.youtube.com

I lived abroad in a moderately remote African village for the Peace Corps during 9-11. I’m very convinced that everyone in America repeatedly watching the towers fall fundamentally damaged everyone.

I think if someone who is younger really wants to understand this is to go back and watch the first season of 24. Then realize that iphones werent around yet and people were acting like 24 was real

I think there's something to that. I didn't get to watch it over and over because the broadcast antenna fell together with the tower and anyway we didn't have a TV at home. So I only saw it the one time, live, and didn't seem to really get PTSD or anything.

Shout out to Baudrillard.

Also the internet as we know it did not exist. We had AOL and IRC but the first social networks were just beginning to emerge in larval form.

Like 90% of the country was mentally preparing themselves for a global war, and Bush told them to support the country by shopping. But half the country (Bush's re-election coalition) stayed obsessed with it wayyyyyy after life went on in NYC and DC, believing we were at "war" with "Radical Islam"

Twentieth century was something else

I would imagine most people on this site (including myself) don't have firsthand experience with war, and the post-9/11 period just isn't the same. Life basically continued on as it did pre-9/11 for the vast majority of the populace—having to take your shoes off at TSA isn't the same as being bombed

To quote Mira of Kyiv, we are Unbombed

You need to touch grass real, real bad.

But you start off during that end of history period and suddenly WTF…

People do not understand the scale of WW2 compared to anything since. It's frustrating.

I'm not sure "level of societal trauma" really works this way

They don’t. What an invidious and ridiculous way to put it. Read the introduction to Richard Beck’s HOMELAND to attempt to seek an actual answer to what older people rue when they remember the years before 9/11.

i mean ya, ig im overfitting on the idea that it isn't a societal trauma at all vs the idea that it's just a smaller scale than WW2, in part because a lot of social dysfunction does seem downstream of the gwot in ways that are pretty bad, even if it's not WW2 scale

> The last time we had a war at home, more Americans died than have in any war before or since This is only if you count both sides. If you only count people actually fighting for the US, it's second.

Right, and that never happened in GWOT, and thus could never be measured. Instead the scale someone perceived was whatever tragedy they were willing to believe GWOT prevented. Or, if they didn't like it, how bad things would have to actually be to justify cultural/legal changes.

Dude, you built a giant strawman of what elder millenials believe, and are acting perplexed that people are coming after you for it.

About as many Americans died at Antietam as the entire war in Afghanistan.

What made the GWOT different was that 9/11 touched American elites where they lived, unlike WW2 where the CONUS was never credibly threatened. Same as the reaction to the Mario bro.

*died in battle The American civil war has more military fatalities than all other American wars combined (including WWII) The Second World War has more American military COMBAT fatalities than all other American wars combined (including the ACW)

Sometimes I wonder if we are fundamentally broken as a people because we lost more people to COVID than any war we have been in and everyone (generically) just looks the other way

The amount of airtime taken up by the GWOT in either the news or the popular games and movies and TV shows meant that for seven or eight years it was omnipresent and if you objected to the idea of an invasion, you were basically Taliban. Something can mess up a cohort w/out being as bad as a war.

Try no burritos at all because the beans, cheese, and meat are all overseas and the lettuce is contaminated by Russian poison drones

And it did! Problem is the survivorship bias because tons DIDNT live through it

Society was not "too good" in the 90s. We were already running mostly on consumer debt. It seemed good in some places because working people were buying up consumer goods on credit.

It took the Great Recession to finally dislodge it.

I lived through the 90s and he's correct. It was a societal trauma but it was NOTHING like the scale a war at home is.

Every now and again the topic of air travel will come up in one of my classes (I rlteach undergrads); when I explain what it was like pre-9/11 it blows their minds every bit as much as explaining Life Before Cell Phones does.

All things considered, it's probably for the best that we as a society think the GWOT was unprecedentedly awful and worth avoiding a repeat of.

Yeah, I also vote this

yeah this guy is just doing self-congratulatory 'i am the real war understander' stuff, it's really tiresome and nerdy

Tens of millions of Christian Fascists in East Bumfuck, Flyover spent a decade *convinced* that al-qaeda terror cells had infiltrated their no horse town and rhey were going to wake up to a red dawn style parachute invasion any daym