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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

If you graduated in 2007, your classmates were born around 1985. Their parents were mostly born in the mid 50s to the mid 60s and came to political consciousness either during the Vietnam War or immediately thereafter. No war since has been even close to as unpopular or frankly as salient. It’s the passing out of cultural relevance of that war that you are noticing.

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> No war since has been even close to as unpopular or frankly as salient.

Iraq.

Spoiler alert, a bunch of the current ones are going to be seen similarly too.

Also keep in mind when making comparisons that the Vietnam war was not unpopular with Americans at the beginning, and many people justified it all throughout, using language that will be similar to observers of later wars.

> Iraq

Not in same ballpark. There’s no Iraq generation the way there’s a Vietnam one.

> Spoiler alert, a bunch of the current ones are going to be seen similarly too.

No they won’t. The lack of a draft and mass domestic casualties dramatically changes the picture. Especially on the saliency axis.

Correct that there was no Iraq generation because there was no draft and numbers were way smaller. Vietnam had over half a million troops at the height of that war. Iraq had under 170k.

But the war was still deeply unpopular. There is a reason America did the extraordinary - to that point - and elect its first black president.

The economic toll will be greater with these wars than Vietnam.

There is an Iraq group but we’re just a much smaller group

I’m not trying to erase anyone’s individual experience, but it isn’t a generational defining event broadly across the U.S. population.

Me, an Iraq combat veteran had a different experience of that period than an investment baker of similar age

That was not true for WWII and to a lesser extent Vietnam due to the draft

The distinction is draft vs “all volunteer” wars

The biggest protest in world history was in response to the invasion of Iraq. It’s reasonable to call it unpopular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_Iraq_War_prot...

Sure, but it's not reasonable to call it as unpopular domestically as the Vietnam War, which had more than 12 times the casualties, spread over a group that on the whole was unwilling to fight and had to be drafted into the conflict, thereby spreading the pain of lost loved ones throughout society rather than concentrating it heavily into the poorer and less politically powerful social and economic classes. As unpopular as the Iraq war was, the American people's distaste didn't really do much to end it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

That’s reasonable. In the context of the larger discussion here a post up thread’s implication that a graduate in 2007 would be anti-war because of Vietnam is kind of dubious. Public opinion of the war shifted quite a lot in the four years after “Mission Accomplished” and Freedom Fries.

> No they won’t. The lack of a draft and mass domestic casualties dramatically changes the picture

American centrism strikes again.

Plenty of us of the same generation living in countries that didn't fight in Vietnam (with no such draft or casualties) share such ethical views.

Don't make this an American argument.

I think this person might just be seeing Vietnam in a retrospective lens and has not seen the pro vietnam war propaganda from the 1960s which was immensely popular.

I wasn't alive either but I've seen it after the fact. Also the kind of people who thought the Kent State massacre was the right thing to do. The political radicals of that era "won" many culture wars but they were a minority, and the influential, pro-war, pro-establishment people sounded exactly like the ones who were in favor of the Iraq War and who think what's going on in Iran right now makes sense.

There is a reason, for example, that John Fogerty of CCR [of the song "Fortunate Son"] wrote the mid 2000s song "It's like Deja Vu All Over Again" to describe the Iraq war. It's because the war propaganda was all the same, just with a rotating cast.

> There’s no Iraq generation the way there’s a Vietnam one.

And if autonomous weapons become the norm, _there will never be_.

Imagine a future where people just don't question wars on their ethical basis, since it happens far away and "no one is hurt".

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