@MLClark Reading it now ... An aside about the Yalta photo ...
FDR had only two months left to live. I've always been astounded by how he summoned the strength and courage to fly halfway around the world in a small airplane during the middle of a war.
I saw that plane on display years ago at the USAF museum in Dayton. It had an elevator lift to accommodate his disability.
He was so vulnerable, in more ways than one.
Onto the article ...
@MLClark Re someone having to take the blame for the faux pas ...
Wernher von Braun had a practice that, if someone at Huntsville screwed up, the person wasn't fired. It was viewed as a teachable moment, an opportunity to keep someone in whom time and money had been invested.
I wish our politics worked that way.
@MLClark Regarding memorials to causes of dubious morality ...
You may know there's been a big fuss about the "woke" movement to take down Confederate statues in the U.S. South. The pro-statue people say the monuments represent their heritage. The truth is that most of those statues were erected in the early 20th Century by the Klan and that ilk to whitewash slavery as a states' rights movement.
I still see vehicles here in Trumper Central with Confederate flags on them. 🤮
@MLClark Last thought ... After apartheid fell in South Africa, the new government created a truth and reconciliation commission. I always thought there was something of the notion of "Forgive, but never forget."
Granted, some circumstances are unforgiveable -- e.g. gassing the Jews -- but the intricacies of war are so complex that seeking vengeance after so long seems less important than enlightenment.
@MLClark "Western histories of World War II are so Eurocentric that we routinely forget how many other major moral contests were more pressingly on other nations’ minds."
Yep, agree 100%. Probably because Nazis make such convenient villains in storytelling.
The same can be said of WW1. We always hear about the trench warfare, but almost never about what was going on in Africa. The colonial powers were trying to seize each others' territories at the expense of the indigenous peoples.