A tweet like this is such an amazing artifact of online brain poisoning. Like you’re an online neoliberal, and you’re just getting madder and madder at all these leftists you hate always offhandedly mentioning how awful WW1 is, and you wanna be contrarian to anything they think, because they lie and exaggerate stuff all the time.
And at some point you become convinced that like war is actually enjoyable for the soldiers fighting it.
No the worst thing is it’s right, the postwar favor and patronage of (left-leaning) cliques like the Bloomsbury Group substantially is why we think of the war through the eyes of say Wilfred “Dulce et Decorum Est” Owen and not all the ra-ra patriots that got their battlefront poems run in newspapers at the time.
I can’t imagine that the majority feeling among veterans of any war ever fought in human history was “had a good time”.
Even in the most justifiable wars where ra-ra patriotism is in order, the actual experience of the soldiers is not enjoyable.
Like, if you’re just making the relatively minor critique that our historical memory of WW1 seems to focus especially heavily on the horrors of the battlefield compared to like WW2 or the Civil War, and that this is in part due to the influence of anti-war intellectuals, I suppose that might be right.
But A) that seems understandable even for non-nefarious reasons: there’s literally nothing else to talk about, the war was totally pointless and no one really knows what the fuck anyone was actually fighting about, so there’s no real moral invigoration to any of the stories. And the Western Front was also at a huge stalemate for almost the entirety of the war, so again there’s not much to even talk about besides the abject horror of the battles themselves, because the whole war was just “they fought inconclusive battle after inconclusive battle for four straight years, neither side making any progress whatsoever until the very end.” And B) even if your critique is true, this tweet is obviously not lol.
I live in a city where everything was named after the Union because they were so psyched that the Civil War happened (the one that proved those rich planters couldn’t use slavery to take over a country meant for Free White Labor!)
