Haunted by the lessons of 'the good war': Post-Cold War contestation of World War II narratives

International audienceWhen it comes to questions of memory and identity, the underlying arguments are fundamentally social and political. This chapter focuses on two instances when US policy was significantly influenced by the memory of World War II. The fact that key voices in the government alternatively pushed back against and reinforced the mainstream, glorified view of the conflict that was solidifying in the American mind, reveals multiple layers in the war’s memorialization. In the early 1990s, Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney tried to reframe the post-World War II moment to protect defence budgets and military preparedness by offering a sceptical view that challenged the total victory narrative. A decade later, the Bush administration sought to bolster support for the impending Iraq War by using parallels to the righteous World War II and the ghost of appeasement. Meanwhile, historians and anti-war commentators tried to straighten the record by nuancing the picture of World War II enshrined in America’s memory. Studying conflicting depictions of ‘the good war’, and the limits of challenging an identity-defining memory, reveals the multi-layered political use of historical analogies