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Karen Christensen's avatar

I meant to include this, from https://karenchristensen.substack.com/p/the-stories-we-really-need-now:

And here is Bill McNeill, no paywall (but of course I’ll be glad to have you subscribe to this publication). The extract below sets out an important point about the power of myth:

Myths, moreover, are based on faith more than on fact. Their truth is usually proven only by the action they provoke. In 1940, for example, when Hitler had defeated France, the British public continued to support war against Germany partly because they "knew" from schoolbook history that in European wars their country lost all the early battles and always won the last. This faith, together with a strong sense of the general righteousness of their cause, and fear of what defeat would bring, made it possible for them to persist in waging war until myth became fact once more in 1945.

Clearly, without British actions in 1940, World War II would have followed a far different course. Russian and American resources might never have coalesced with Britain's to create the victorious Grand Alliance of 1945. Germany, in short, might have won. Yet no merely rational calculation of relative strengths and military capabilities in June 1940 would have supported the proposition that Great Britain could expect to defeat Hitler. Action, irrational in the short run, proved rational in the longer run. Myth is what bridged the gap, remaking the reality of June 1940 into the reality of May 1945.

And an admirer of WHM's book Never Surrender: Winston Churchill and Britain's Decision to Fight Nazi Germany in the Fateful Summer of 1940

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Never-Surrender/John-Kelly/9781476727981 by John Kelly.

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Richard C. Kagan's avatar

Langston Hughes' description of his train trip into the eastern Soviet Union (I wonder as I wander--title) provides a point of view and an experience we do not often read/see. I loved it,)

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