Crash Course
From the Good War to the Forever War
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- US$41.99
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- US$41.99
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Growing up during the Second World War, H. Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America’s victory would lead to a new era of world peace. Like most Americans, he was soon led to believe in a world-wide Communist conspiracy that menaced the United States, forcing the nation into a disastrous war in Korea. But once he joined the U.S. Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, what he learned was eye-opening. He saw that even as the U.S. preached about peace and freedom, it was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe.
Now, after fifty years as a renowned cultural historian, Franklin offers a set of hard-learned lessons about modern American history. Crash Course is essential reading for anyone who wonders how America ended up where it is today: with a deeply divided and disillusioned populace, led by a dysfunctional government, and mired in unwinnable wars. It also finds startling parallels between America’s foreign military exploits and the equally brutal tactics used on the home front to crush organized labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements.
More than just a memoir or a history book, Crash Course gives readers a unique firsthand look at the building of the American empire and the damage it has wrought. Shocking and gripping as any thriller, it exposes the endless deception of the American public, and reveals from inside how and why many millions of Americans have been struggling for decades against our own government in a fight for peace and justice.
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Franklin (War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination), a cultural historian, veteran, and antiwar activist, serves up a combination memoir and revisionist history of American war culture during the "more than half a century been involved in struggles to stop the wars being waged by our nation or to keep it from starting new ones." He begins with a characteristic analysis of military rhetoric: despite the widespread belief that dropping atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 was an evil necessary to prevent the need for a bloody invasion, he says, in fact "it was clear to Truman and his advisers that there would be no need for an American invasion" because an impending Soviet attack on Japanese forces would effectively end the war. Instead, the bombs were deployed as a show of overwhelming force to intimidate the Soviets as WWII morphed into the Cold War. He continues in this vein, challenging the cultural myths surrounding Vietnam and the Gulf Wars. The concurrent memoir threads chart Franklin's experiences growing up in New York City and serving in the military starting in 1956; disillusionment with the military's actions spawned his campus antiwar activism. This thought-provoking book will be of interest to readers seeking to understand America's 20th-century history and its ongoing war culture.
