My French-side grandparents lived through the occupation, first under the Italians, then in more brutal circumstances under the Germans, and shared their horror stories with me. Saunders rocks! My interest in war history is based largely on my firm belief that war is the dumbest fucking activity ever conceived by human beings and an insatiable need to understand how those involved coped or failed to cope with the ultimate absurdity.
As Anne Applebaum noted in an opinion piece in The Atlantic , tensions are now rising in Europe and all around the world because Americans were pissed off about the price of eggs. Though it may seem ironically nostalgic today, the United States emphatically resisted the s trend toward fascism and took a hard turn in the opposite direction. Like all presidents, FDR had his flaws and made several remarkably bad decisions, but his greatest achievement was to build a collective sense of optimism that Americans could meet the many challenges they faced.
Though the United States in the s and s still had a long way to go to achieve racial harmony and recognize women as equals, the citizenry came together to fight the twin plagues of the Great Depression and World War II except for a few crackpots like Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin.
Too many American politicians see bipartisanship as treason; compromise has become a dirty word. At this point, leaders capable of bridging the divide and facilitating unity have yet to emerge. The country that forged the United Nations is now one of the greatest threats to world peace and stability. E Pluribus Unum : out of many, one. In keeping with my intent to examine the wartime experience, I eliminated most of the songs that have nothing to do with the war except for a few that I found weirdly relevant.
Some songs appear twice in the compilation, performed by different artists, so I chose my favorite of the two. Most WWII compilations seem to have been assembled by people who believed the Americans won the war single-handedly, but this collection contains some important contributions from the British.
