Does the Civil War occupy the same cultural associations for Amerifats that the First World War does for Europeans...

Does the Civil War occupy the same cultural associations for Amerifats that the First World War does for Europeans, or did it just whet the burgers' appetites?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/Hqkn-RckJvA
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bunker_Hill
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_New_Orleans
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Yorktown
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Looks like the sequel might finally be brewing... urban free trade elites vs rural religious hicks... meanwhile, every sane person trying to stay out of the crossfire

There was certainly an indelible "before/after" effect on both continents, associated with each war. The Civil War is fairly misty in living second-third hand memory by now, though, and the warfare itself wasn't (let me try to find the words) so execrably god-damn evil as that of the Great War was. I think that most Veeky Forums users will understand what I really mean by that even if they nit-pick details.

>the same cultural associations

such as?

The Civil War is half a century older, so you're going to have a completely different conception thanks to memory (which impacts present culture as OP implies) and technology

I'm sure there were similar associations in the 1960s, when muh civil rights and muh states rights collided in the South

The discrepancy in geography and armaments, not to mention a large and functional government in the way, make this very unlikely. But hey there's a cultural civil war in full swing.

>so execrably god-damn evil as that of the Great War was
hehe...memes
Looks like someone took the cultural conception of WW1 as reality again.

nice thread jackass

lmao are you implying WWI was not, at its time, the most industrialized and physical destructive conflict in history?

just look at casualty/death stats
'evil' might not be the right word, but the Great War was very brutal in its own right

also the most steampunk conflict

that being said, I guess you have those associations with WWI/Civil War both being 'modern' conflicts with high death tolls and lots of disease/destruction that heavily impacted a large area for years after

>such as?
Not OP, but speaking as a european the first world war get a reputation as a completely pointless clusterfuck of violence, death and tragedy.

I'm implying that your view of the war is inextricably linked to the cultural conception of WW1 as this especially heinous and pitiless squalid struggle in the mud because that's how the war is represented in media. It's like a perverse romanticism that WW1 was a uniquely horrible & grotesque conflict in a way that elevates its suffering above all others.

Ok, well I can't say the Civil War has the same (speaking as a Canadian who lived in the US [midwest])

There was a 'point', i.e. a clear narrative with reasons to fight and an outcome that solved the problem. Slavery vs. states right debate notwithstanding because it was a mix of both, which most can acknowledge.

The violence, death, and tragedy tend to get overlooked due to the distance in time. Hundreds of thousands of people died.
Meanwhile there's tons of fucking re-enactments of that war

I guess there's an advantage to not sparking another major war and being more of an internal conflict

>pic related is veterans of the Civil War, from each side, shaking hands

Of course, culture heavily shapes our understanding since we were not alive at the time

I get that what happened on the Western Front is way over-represented (Lawrence of Arabia being the only big exception), but let's not pretend that WWI was a cakewalk for anybody.
The stalemate in the Alps/Isonzo River, Gallipoli, Austria's sad attempt to invade and defeat Serbia, were all concentrated and high-casualty/high-tech despite the lack of trenches or gas-masks

>lmao are you implying WWI was not, at its time, the most industrialized and physical destructive conflict in history?

The Taiping rebellion has it beat the fuck out. It isn't nearly as famous though, probably because China just doesn't have the impact in the rest of the world's cultural mosiac as Europe does.

Just looking at two large battles, Third Battle of Nanking and Somme WW1 looks worse.
The total deaths look pretty similar unless you take the top estimates for Taiping Rebellion which seems overestimated.

youtu.be/Hqkn-RckJvA

This episode of the Twilight Zone explains American attitudes towards the war better than I could.

Apologies for the crappy quality, if you have Netflix or something watch it there.

Da fuck? The lowest estimate I'm aware of puts the death toll at around 20 million, which narrowly beats out WW1's 18 million. Even the ones that don't get to ridiculous levels are often in the 30 million range. You had close to 15 years of war that touched almost every corner of China. It was huge; and let's not forget, that most of the death toll weren't in battles, it was armies rampaging around and smashing all of the agricultural infrastructure that supported those huge Chinese populations.

>been searching for episodes of the twilight zone for fucking ages
>end up downloading tons of shitty comics and wallpapers
>the thing was on youtube the whole time
>it's in shit quality
I'm in a rollercoaster of annoyance and you justmade a dip, cheers user.

Just pay the eight bucks a month for Netflix like everyone else and watch it in HD.

For some reason it's not on the british netflix, just checked, and i haven't found a vpn to get around it.
Man i fucking hate the bullshit regional restrictions netflix has.

CBS offers a free one week trial of their gay-ass subscription service if you want to watch it straight from the source.

>it used to be free to watch until somebody decided to monetize

cheers user

Besides that fact that Americans tend to have a shorter attention span than most. One reason that the Civil war doesn't "occupy the same cultural associations" is that it was a civil war not a pissing contest between old enemies and secondly Americans are much more gentlemanly and fair to their enemies than other nations. The south got off relatively easy once the war was over whereas the Europeans couldn't wait to royally fuck over the losers in their little war. The north helped rebuild the south and only had them under military rule for a few short years before letting them govern themselves again. We even gave the confederate officers and soldiers their right to vote back. Europe in contrast demanded unreasonable reparations, instituted humiliating control over the triple entente, and in general were pretty dickish which ended up causing more trouble than it solved.

>or did it just whet the burgers' appetites?

America was founded on war. Interestingly enough we owe much of our military philosophy to the revolutionary war.

We may not be the bravest or the best but if there is one thing we are good at it is defending shit. We haven't been able to do so in a good long while because most of our wars these days involve invading things but when it comes to defense we are only limited by the amount of bullets we have. Which coincidentally is also why we like hording bullets and weapons.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bunker_Hill

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_New_Orleans

Also siege and bombing. We do love us a good siege and bombing every now and then.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Yorktown

Pretty traumatizing for the Union in general. 600,000 people died, a centuries-old social order in the south was completely uprooted, and the government became significantly more federalized.

You appear to be making the elementary projection/mistake of assuming that the author of these two posts , is/are one and the same person. In point of fact, the two posts were written by two different people (I wrote the former post).

To your point in this post (assuming that you are the same person as , which is not absolutely necessary but the two posts certainly argue in the same direction, just as "our" two posts argue in the other direction), I get what you're trying to do. It is what historians are trained to do, to get away from the Mickey Mouse/"popular" version of things as known today, in this case, "the idea that WWI was a uniquely horrible and grotesque conflict", an "especially heinous and pitiless squalid struggle in the mud".

Except, in this reflexive "reject the popular view in favor of a subtler analysis" historiography (a safe general strategy), it yet sometimes happens that it gets away from truth. Because sometimes, the popular version actually is true, and this is that much easier to establish when the events in question are only a century old. Specifically, the two phrases above, derided by you, /are actually the case/. Read Eye Deep In Hell, which expressly treats of the warfare side of things.