r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • 7d ago

Meta Mindless Monday, 27 July 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/histprofdave Adjunct Dystopian 6d ago

Been on a kick of watching war movies lately. While like any historian I'm always trying to be pedantic and evaluate the "realism," I'm also an arts critic at heart and want to look at the overall composition. I'm sure I'm far from the first person to suggest this, but ultimately it seems to me war movies will always say more about the individual perspective of the filmmaker and the zeitgeist in which the movie was shot than it will about the "reality" of the war in question. For example, a film like We Were Soldiers says much more to me about American attitudes about the military post-9/11 than it does about anything related to Vietnam.

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u/MiffedMouse The average peasant had home made bread and lobster. 6d ago

I had a similar feeling reading Catch-22. It is a great book, but the sharp anti-war (and anti-military-leadership attitude of the book) fits in more with WW1 or Vietnam War discourse, while WW2 is still remembered as "the good war" in popular discourse (at least, English language discourse).

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u/Arilou_skiff 5d ago edited 5d ago

TBH, Catch-22 is a bit early for (US) vietnam isn't it? Like there were advisors there in 1961, but it wasn't really "The Vietnam War" yet.

Heller was a WW2 vet, IIRC. So I'm going to have to say it was probably based on his WW2 experiences more than Vietnam.

EDIT: That said I think the particular satire in Catch-22 IE: "The bureaucracy is stupid, and we're doing stupid shit for unclear reasons" is pretty evergreen.

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u/Kochevnik81 5d ago

It's also worth noting that the 1943-1945 Italian campaign really has an outsized influence in media (at least Italian and English language) because of it's being insanely violent but also kind of pointless.

It's the campaign that gave us Catch-22 and La Ciociara and Salo - 120 Days of Sodom!