Introduction and Rasmus

What the Introduction says a lot is that World War Two was the best thing that could have happened for the American people, that it changed America for the better. I have to wonder about this. I know that my knowledge of the Cold War and Vietnam are limited, but they were results of this war. I feel like there has to have been a better outcome than that. World War Two was a war similar to the first World War in that it was fought for the sake of preserving world peace. But after we ruined the lives of Japanese Americans and saw the horrible things Nazis did to Jews, we repeated the same mistakes and ruined thousands of innocent American lives during the McCarthy era. And, the peace wasn't kept because we obviously continued fighting after that and again today. So, perhaps the war was good for the nation economically, but morally America was no better off.

With Rasmus, there was a scene he described which really caught my attention. The scene I'm talking about is when Rasmus was in a basement with a Russian soldier, and the Russian was strangling a German soldier, saying that the German had killed his friend. What caught my attention is that Rasmus had the morals to tell the Russian not to kill the German. He said that even after he knew that what the Russian had said was true, he still didn't want the German to die. It amazes me that with all of the propaganda and everything pushing his belief that every German was evil, he still was able to recognize that he was looking at another human being strangled and that he didn't want to let that happen, enemy or not.