Blog # 7

Chapter 21 is full of tons of information so I am going to do my best to analyze the different aspects of it.

                Something interesting that I found in this chapter is that it discusses both World Wars, but I will mostly be focusing my attention to World War 2 and things that occurred during that time frame.  The first thing I found interesting is that World War 2 actually began in Asia with conflict arising between Japan and China.  But in American history this is not how they teach young impressionable minds.  The American version of World War 2 puts that starting point of this World War with the attacks on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  Now while one could easily argue that conflict had been going on between Japan and China for Centuries so in the minds of historians this isn’t something new, why do Americans find it so necessary to say that they were the ones to officially declare War after Pearl Harbor?  And can you really call that a true declaration of war when Roosevelt was the one declaring war when constitutionally the only person/people with the authority to formally declare war in the United States is Congress.  But I will move on from this little debate onto other things I found interesting in this chapter. 

                Strayer spends a good amount of time talking about how other countries treated minorities and different groups of people terribly during times of war, but he never once mentions what happened in the United States following Pearl Harbor.  Strayer talks about the Holocaust and internment camps and how people of lesser race were put into camps, killed, or deported, but he never mentions something similar happening stateside.  In the United States in the state of pure shock and horror that followed immediately after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, people of Japanese descent who were thought to still have direct ties to Japan were locked up in our own personal version of Internment Camps and forced to live in deplorable conditions while their fate was left up to the government.  While we didn’t complete a genocidal killing of these Japanese people we did strip them of their humanity and force them into conditions equal to that of what the Jews experienced.  But Strayer never mentions this at all and I am not quite sure why he completely left this out.  My guess would be that he didn’t want to disrupt the theme he was building of the United States being an Ultimate Global Force that essentially could do no wrong at this point.  He even completely brushed over the horrific long lasting effects of the Atomic Bombs we released in Japan and how we killed thousands of innocent people.  He merely just focused on the fact that it was the clear ending to the War leaving the United States on top as the clear victor.

                I definitely feel a close connection to this chapter as my Grandfather was a part of this War.  He was there and arrived with the troops on D Day in France, and even saw the atrocities of the Holocaust first hand.  In this chapter they talk about the key difference between World War 1 and 2 being that the first was “trench warfare” while the second was all about quick, efficient, and massive killings.  They used bigger weapons, fighter planes, nuclear weapons, and larger scale attacks.  Knowing all this I still can’t believe that my Grandfather not only survived this but survived the entire war without an injury.