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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

The intensity of activity and change from 1939 to 1945 is astonishing to me. Heck, for the USA, the support of the Soviet Union and Britain via Lend Lease was amazing enough, but then the Pacific theater demanded a humongous amount of hardware too. A total war production economy is an awe-inspiring thing to consider.

And on top of all that, these people fought an information war at home! What was different then, that allowed people to dedicate themselves so utterly to the cause? If a similar situation happened today, would we rise to meet it?

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> And on top of all that, these people fought an information war at home! What was different then, that allowed people to dedicate themselves so utterly to the cause?

A unified national identity, an American ethnicity in the non-euphemistic sense. People will dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to fighting for their neighbours, for people like them. Nowadays America's self-conception is more like those colonial states where dozens of unrelated tribes got mashed together inside arbitrary borders.

Given the abhorrent racism within the country at that time, can we really say there was an unified national identity?

This is just a guess, but at that time, white Americans were by far the majority, and held all the power, whereas today, they're on the verge of becoming a minority. However, there is no absolute majority coming: there's lots of different ethnic groups, with European whites and Latinos probably being the two largest, with Blacks after that, but many other various groups too. So people don't really feel related to each other any more, I'd say: they're all just people with roots from around the world, who happen to live there for various reasons.

In response to the sister comment about Blacks and Native Americans feeling more American, my guess is that, though they were victims of the abhorrent racism of the time, they also believed in the dream of America and had huge hope that this issue would be resolved, at least for their children or grandchildren. Overall, I feel like Americans don't really have much hope for future generations any more.

My impression from e.g. interviews at the time is that black and native americans felt, if anything, a lot more strongly "american" at that time than now, and fought as valiantly as anyone. Ironically despite the huge amount of objective progress against racism, culturally the country feels more divided now than ever before.

According to A Century of the Self current Western society is engineered for something like WWII never to happen again.

In philosophy post-structuralism followed. It does hinder a single narrative from dominating but it also hinders people from finding meaning in work.

Hopefully mankind's next philosophy does not include war.

Could you explain more about how society is engineered to not let WWII happen?

You can find A Century of the Self online for streaming. It's long but it gets to the point quickly.

Well, we thought we had that. Then came Putin, who wants to go back to the 19th century.

> What was different then

After Pearl Harbor many people considered a land invasion of the continental USA to be a real possibility. Nothing like an existential threat as a motivator.

Everyone just takes the lack of conscription for granted now too.

A possible land invasion and there was a good chance you would get drafted anyway.

WW1 was also not that long ago that your father or uncle fought in.

All these aspects are rather unrelatable now.

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