by DAVID SWANSON
In 2015, Alice Sabatini was an 18-year-old contestant in the Miss Italia contest in Italy. She was asked what epoch of the past she would have liked to live in. She replied: WWII. Her explanation was that her text books go on and on about it, so she’d like to actually see it, and she wouldn’t have to fight in it, because only men did that. This led to a great deal of mockery. Did she want to be bombed or starved or sent to a concentration camp? What was she, stupid? Somebody photoshopped her into a picture with Mussolini and Hitler. Somebody made an image of a sunbather viewing troops rushing onto a beach.[i]
But could an 18-year-old in 2015 be expected to know that most of the victims of WWII were civilians — men and women and children alike? Who would have told her that? Certainly not her text books. Most definitely not the endless saturation of her culture with WWII-themed entertainment. What answer did anyone think such a contestant would be more likely to give to the question she’d been asked, than WWII? In U.S. culture as well, which heavily influences Italian, a top focus for drama and tragedy and comedy and heroism and historical fiction is WWII. Pick 100 average viewers of Netflix or Amazon and I’m convinced a large percentage of them would give the same answer as Alice Sabatini, who, by the way, was declared the winner of the competition, fit to represent all of Italy or whatever it is Miss Italia does.
WWII is often called “the good war,” and sometimes this is thought of as principally or originally a contrast between WWII, the good war, and WWI, the bad war. However, it was not popular to call WWII “the good war” during or immediately after it happened, when the comparison with WWI would have been easiest. Various factors may have contributed to the growth in popularity of that phrase over the decades, including increased understanding of the Holocaust (and misunderstanding of the war’s relationship to it),[ii] plus, of course, the fact that the United States, unlike all the other major participants, wasn’t itself bombed or invaded (but that’s also true for dozens of other U.S. wars). I think a major factor was actually the War on Vietnam. As that war became less and less popular, and as opinions were deeply divided by a generation gap, by a division between those who had lived through WWII and those who had not, many sought to distinguish WWII from the war on Vietnam. Using the word “good,” rather than “justified,” or “necessary,” was probably made easier by distance in time from WWII, and by WWII propaganda, most of which had been created (and is still being created) after the conclusion of WWII. Because opposing all wars is considered radical and vaguely treasonous, critics of the war on Vietnam could refer to WWII as “the good war” and establish their balanced seriousness and objectivity. It was in 1970 that just war theorist Michael Walzer wrote his paper, “World War II: Why Was This War Different?” seeking to defend the idea of a just war against the unpopularity of the war on Vietnam. I offer a rebuttal to that paper in Chapter 17 of Leaving World War II Behind. We saw a similar phenomenon in the years 2002 to 2010 or so, with countless critics of the war on Iraq emphasizing their support for the war on Afghanistan and distorting the facts to improve the image of that newer “good war.” I’m not sure many, if anyone, would have called Afghanistan a good war without the war on Iraq or called WWII a good war without the war on Vietnam.
In July 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump — in arguing that U.S. military bases named for Confederates should not have their names changed — proclaimed that these bases had been part of “beautiful world wars.” “We won two world wars,” he said, “two world wars, beautiful world wars that were vicious and horrible.”[iii] Where did Trump get the idea that the world wars were beautiful, and that their beauty consisted of viciousness and horribleness? Probably the same place Alice Sabatini did: Hollywood. It was the film Saving Private Ryan that led Mickey Z in 1999 to write his book, There Is No Good War: The Myths of World War II, originally with the title Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of the “Good War.”
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