why are straight white guys so obsessed with world war 2
like i’ll talk about my interest in history and i’ll have guys be like “yeah i’m a history buff too i love world war 1 and 2″ like cool i was talking about ancient history. like the conversation was literally about ancient egypt.
my fave thing is replying “oh, cool. i just can’t get into it. i like everyday life and religion and art. personally, i find war boring.” and let me tell you it’s a journey to watch them try and understand that killing thousands of people indiscriminately doesn’t hold my attention.
yup it’s always the “oh you’re just not into history” and the response of “yes i am im just into ancient history” and you’re ready to throw 38 greek myths at them just to shut them up about the kinds of bombers the britsh were using in the second world war
except like. they really dont give a single fuck about wwi/ii. they care about the weapons and machinery. do they care about the events and the people? do they care about why wars were actually important? in my experience, very, very rarely.
I think that gets to heart of it: they’re not history buffs in any real sense. What they are is war fanboys. They collect and curate technical information about wars just like any other fanboy collects and curates technical information about the subject of their fandom. It’s basically not real to them; knowing what exact metal the buttons of SS uniforms were made of is of no greater significance to them than knowing the exact height of the captain’s chair on the starship Enterprise – it’s just another shiny technical fact for their collection.
Can we just let the poor hypothetical men enjoy old airplanes without calling them fake fans please? Different people are interested in different things. This is not and never has been news, and it is no reason to go around scorning anybody.
ThanK YOU.
Because my little sister sees posts like this all the time and it hurts. She freaking loves WWII. She likes learning about the airplanes and the uniforms (oh my goodness can she ramble for eternity about uniforms LOVE U SIS) and she likes curating these little technical facts.
I personally like the sociological aspect of history. Let me ramble about Roman ideals and how they affect the stories they chose to represent their culture. And hell YEAH teach me about daily lives and persons.
But my cousin, also a girl, likes doing the same for the Revolutionary War as my sister, talking about formations and battle strategies and all the millions of details about nursing and the grotesque surgery processes. My grandma can tell you any little detail you want to know about various airplanes much like my sis, but add a billion train factoids. And do NOT get her started on cowboys, how the Wild West worked, or weatern geography unless you want to hear a lot of info on cows and saddled and buttes.
So no. OP is wrong. Knowing facts isn’t a boy thing. Only enjoying ancient history isn’t deeper and more fascinating. Let people enjoy things.
I tend to like recent history better because we know more facts about it, and more about personalities of individual people, which I find fascinating. Also WW2 was a huge event which shaped modern history as we know it. So was ww1, but I like the epic clash of good and evil (you can’t get more evil than Nazis).
Also my grandparents lived through it and Grandpa was “in” World War 2
Amen, preach it Amerraka!
My brothers are war history buffs because they like tanks and because each of those wars have influenced present day. Its basically them examining a domino effect of events and connecting them to present day issues.
@prokopetz usually has a lot of good stuff to say but man was that a bad take.
Plus the whole WWII era is pretty much rife with WTF Moments. I mean where you gonna get, a guy who wanted to stick it to the foljs who had been the technical overlords of his country 20 years earlier that he went to fight in another country’s army because his country made peace with them but the new army was still at war with them, a guy willingly going into a literal hell to let people know what was going on, a few people so aidacious that their biographies sometimes had to be edited to not sound beyond credulity, or a an Officer with his POWs a resistance member of another country, a handful of men, and one tank positioned to block the entrance to where they made their stand vs people merely days before were on the same side.
(Lauri Tourni the soldier of three armies, Wiltold “Prisoner 4859” Polecki, Audie Murphy/Jack Churchill, and the entirety of the Battle of Schloss Itter respectively)
WWII’s the only era in which you have an undeniable, objective evil that we fought against, and it’s pretty important to study how that evil came about so that it doesn’t come again.
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