Here is a Vet of WW2 who seems to understand what it is about. Since it comes from a "Greatest Generation" Vet maybe it will make more of an impression on everyone. I now have more hope for (the interventionalist) and others after reading this.
Violence Legit in Self-Defense –
Not Otherwise
by Tom White
I don’t actually remember exactly what I was doing when I first heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, but I know I was living in Arlington, Massachusetts, I was a sophomore at Harvard (Class of ’44), and I was 18 years old.
I was also sublimely apolitical. I had graduated in 1940 from a government high school in Arlington, and I learned in a hurry in my freshman year at Harvard that I had not gotten an education that put me anywhere within range of the average kid from a prep school, so I spent my first year trying to catch up, following the very kind hints handed out by the “section men” in my first-year history and some other courses.
These section men, graduate students doing the professors’ grunt work, were usually public school graduates like myself, underpaid bright guys from some place like Brooklyn. I remember one in particular, an intensely brilliant man, who said he had only recently given up being a communist because he realized every worker in America wanted to move up to foreman. He later became a professor of history at an Eastern college and wrote some distinguished books.
These younger scholars knew from recent personal experience what the biggest holes were in my kind of earlier schooling: not enough history, no philosophy, very inadequate foreign language skills (despite high school Latin and French courses), a pretty poor showing on written English, and of course zero sophistication about anything. They were gentle and encouraging, which was not true of some professors.
So I studied a lot, and I continued to ignore politics and world affairs. I did not join in or even watch the college peace marches that went on in 1940 or get involved in the communist-versus-whatever rallies I was vaguely aware were going on. My attention was on trying to make sure a small scholarship I had was renewed for the next year. Without it I could not continue in college at all.
I do remember being solicited by the Harvard German Club (called by a name I forget that had verein at the end). I attended one showing by the club of an English-language film making much of Deutsche Jugend and Die Natur. It had a musical score with marvelous harmonica music, an impression I’ve never forgotten. That was all the politics I remember from my first two years.
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