Looking for the Good War

American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

By: Elizabeth D. Samet

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren

In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans - all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States' "exceptional" history and destiny.

Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile GI turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation - attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II.

©2021 Elizabeth D. Samet (P)2021 Tantor

mistitlef

This book is much more about the reflection of the mythology of American history including war in the cultural dynamic of today in books, movies, Presidential speeches, TV shows and the like than it is about the the mythology itself and how it came to be and the influence it now has on American politics and attitudes. Too bad. We are drowning in these myths making reasonable discussion and disagreement very difficult.

Every Hawkish Person Should Listen to This Book

This is a wonderful listen if you want to understand how we sell the myth of warfare and hide the true gruesomeness of war from the eyes of "a grateful nation". When I listened to this I also found an article that Dr. Samet wrote in American Scholar Magazine, her thoughts about the current conflicts and this book make me proud to think that our military cadets are being exposed to scholars who make them think about the consequences of war, and how the post war narrative may not always prepare future generations for the wars to come. This book is a must listen for all serious students of the impact of warfare on the American culture, and a must for the war hawks out there.

Interesting revisionist discussion of WWII, society and memory

A sweeping survey of the experience and attitudes of contemporary Americans about WWII. Fluid and highly informed discussion of attitudes about the was through the lens of America’s sense of itself as shaped by previous wars, specifically the Civil War. Not a military history.

WARS TRUTH

Elizabeth Samet's "Looking for the Good War" tells a hard truth about war. As a professor at West Point, it seems incongruous for Samet to write this book. On the other hand, who would better understand a career for future military officers than a West Point' professor? The command structure of the military requires soldiers do what they are ordered to do. In that doing, they may lose their minds, their lives, or their physical health. Samet raises the hard truth of every war, i.e., a soldier's duty is to follow orders and when necessary, kill or be killed.

Truth of war becomes distorted by memory, and human bias that is memorialized by the visual arts and literature. The support for Samet's view of war is in art and media representations of its history. From Picasso's Guernica that illustrates the real horror of war to movies like Sands of Iwo Jima, war's reality is distorted. Art and literature tell different truths. Samet is arguing no war is a good war because war is inherently bad for the mental and physical existence of human life. She argues narratives of America's Civil War are prime examples of the distortion of truth about a "...Good War..." in the same sense as Brokaw's WWII narrative. Samet coldly notes America's idealization of rebel opposition to union and civil rights falls into the same category as the idealization of America's role in WWII. Just as America did not save the world for democracy in WWII, America's Civil War did not erase institutional racism. Racism hardened after America's civil war and continues to this day.

As seen in Ukraine, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Sudan--wars continue to roil the world. War is only a destroyer, not a builder of society. Samet implies the truth of war will continue to be distorted by both victors and losers who tell the tale.

Essential reading for military officers and political decision makers.

This is an excellent and well researched piece of historical importance. It contains insights seldom heard or seen in other publications, and yet essential to decision making in the future. I would hope that this book would be required reading at all US service academies and for senior diplomats and political leaders.
Richard J. Burke
Madison, Connecticut and Marco Island, Florida

Skip it

I was looking forward to a strategic view of a discussion of the negative benefits of hero worship. This was mostly a diatribe of what felt like random historical pop culture facts about how bad the United States really is. Forgetting that no society is completely homogenous and that you will always find valid reasons for dissenters and empathetic reasons to do better. It was hard to finish, and did not feel like I truly learned anything when I finished.