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To: Smokin' Joe
Smokin' Joe wrote: But look at the difference between "war weary" in WWII and now! WHile it is little consolation for those who have lost loved ones, there were five times the number of Allied casualties on D-Day (one day!) that we have had in the entire Iraq war. Maybe we should remember 9/11/01! Some people seem to have forgotten. As for the general population, this is no hardship, our lives have not been as greatly changed. Prices of some things are up, but we have no rationing now (unlike WWII). A fraction of the people are directly involved in the prosecution of the war, with a small fraction of the number of soldiers serving. We have not quit making new models of automobiles for the public, (check the model years, there were 1941 models, and 1946/7 models, but there were not many 1942,3,4,or 1945 model cars. Everything was about the war effort, from rationing to scrap drives. (BUY WAR BONDS!) Even books were printed with special typesets and cheaper paper as part of the war effort. Most people nowadays do not even personally know a soldier involved in the fighting in Iraq. If we are "war weary", then we are truly just a faded shadow of the generation which grew up during the Great Depression.

On the other hand, radio, the movies and print media were constantly delivering a flag-waving, pro-war effort message.

There was a concentrated campaign to keep the civilian morale up, something that is largely non-existant today.

And while rationing created hardships, it also gave the people on the home front the sense that they were in the war along with the GIs.

49 posted on 09/11/2005 11:41:18 PM PDT by quidnunc (Omnis Gaul delenda est)
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To: quidnunc
On the other hand, radio, the movies and print media were constantly delivering a flag-waving, pro-war effort message.

There was a concentrated campaign to keep the civilian morale up, something that is largely non-existant today.

And while rationing created hardships, it also gave the people on the home front the sense that they were in the war along with the GIs.

All very good points.

So, I guess the question is one of when it became acceptable, if not fashionable for our media to be against the war effort?

Certainly, this had happened, for the most part by 1968, but did this begin during Korea?

Was this the New Left's backlash to the McCarthy Era--the hearings of the Committee to investigate un-American activites?

Many of those so-called "witch hunts" have actually been vindicated over time.

Or is it just that the MSM, print, and others have become so saturated with Socialists?

Perhaps the bottom line is that this may be the reason for the slide on the MSM's viewership, and the decline in print media as well as folks leave those media behind in the quest for the other side of the story.

50 posted on 09/12/2005 12:04:46 AM PDT by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly.)
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