World War II re-emerged in US popular culture in the mid-1980s to address a crisis of national identity. The end of the Cold War removed the external antagonist that had unified the nation, leading to internal conflicts and a sense of fragmentation. World War II, particularly a sanitized and heroic version, was used to restore a strong sense of national identity and belonging, fitting the neoliberal nationalist agenda.
The Enola Gay controversy in the mid-1990s was a significant event where the Smithsonian's planned exhibit on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was canceled due to conservative pressure. The controversy highlighted the struggle over how to remember World War II. The exhibit's cancellation and the subsequent sanitized version demonstrated how a particular version of World War II was being promoted to align with a nationalist agenda.
The World War II Memorial was built between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial by changing and then re-enacting a law that prohibited building in that area. This placement signifies the central role of World War II in the national identity, making it the nodal point that sutures together the nation's historical narrative and identity.
Saving Private Ryan contributes to the reimagining of World War II by teaching the art of personal abstraction, a form of citizenship that discounts particularities of self to belong to the collective 'we' of the nation. The film's portrayal of the male body in pain serves to discount other forms of injury and turn attention away from systemic asymmetries of power, aligning with a neoliberal sensibility.
The author finds the reimagining of World War II concerning because it turns the war into a simplified, understood event that can be deployed as a manual for action today, rather than a complex event that still has lessons to be learned. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum differs by challenging the exemplarity of the U.S. during World War II, presenting moments where the U.S. was complicit in the tragedy, and engaging visitors in critical reflection rather than a controlled narrative.
Understanding the reimagining of World War II in the 1990s helps us see the roots of today's political climate, characterized by post-truth and the remaking of the state's infrastructure. The discourse that emerged then, expropriated from the left and used by the right, is being reconfigured for a new moment, highlighting the continuity and evolution of these political strategies.
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Barbara Biesecker about her book titled Reinventing World War II, Popular Memory and the Rise of the Ethno-Nationalist State, published by Penn State University Press in 2024, which helps us understand a very
interesting sort of historical rhetorical phenomenon of how World War II has been remembered in the United States because although it's a
big part of all sorts of popular and political culture now, as discussed and demonstrated in this book, that has not in fact been the case consistently since 1945. In fact, World War II sort of re-emerges in US popular culture at a particular moment, in particular ways. And that is interesting. That is significant for us to talk about. So Barbara, thank you so much for being here to have this discussion. Oh, thank you, Miranda. I'm really delighted to be here. So
I'm very pleased to have you. Could you introduce yourself a little bit to start us off and tell us why you decided to write this book? Sure. The former a little bit more clear than that than the latter. After spending several years, a good number of years studying literature and literary theory,
I changed my course of study and went to the University of Pittsburgh to work on an advanced degree in rhetorical studies and rhetorical studies in a communication studies department.
which is to say then the focus is on Aristotle's rhetoric rather than Aristotle's poetics. So pretty big shift. And my first academic job after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh was at the University of Iowa. And I taught undergraduate and graduate courses there until I joined the University of Georgia faculty in 2008.
And really throughout my career, I've explored the role of rhetoric and social change by working at the intersections of rhetorical theory and criticism and 20th century continental theory and philosophy, including Marxism, psychoanalysis and feminist interventions therein. Now, I'm not...
I thought about this question. I'm not really sure when I decided to write Reinventing World War II. I can distinctly recall touring the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, actually with my nephew at the time, who was quite young, and being wildly dissatisfied and really pretty disturbed by it.
And I also distinctly recall seeing Saving Private Ryan, and I was actually living in Iowa at the time, and of course the Ryans brothers are an Iowa phenomenon. But I recall seeing Private Ryan in Iowa and feeling utterly uninspired by it, despite all the praise it was receiving in the popular press. So,
At this time, also, of course, the culture and history wars of the 20th century were just absolutely raging. There were all sorts of moral panics targeting women, particularly feminists.
Queers and pedophiles, and some of us might remember the daycare crisis where all of our children were under assault that were in daycare. And there was also a crisis of immigration that was intimately linked to national identity, or according to Newt Gingrich then, it proclaimed demise thereof.
And of course, then there was also NAFTA. So I suspect it was when I actually saw the ground broken between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. I happened to go on a research trip at that time and I got to see it in process. When I saw the ground broken there, that I knew that a really significant and blatantly conservative and reactionary shift
in the symbolic or national imaginary was in the works. And to be frank, it,
frightened the heck out of me. And I wanted to try to understand what was going on. And that's the best I can do. No, that definitely, I think, brings up already a whole bunch of themes that we're going to discuss further in our conversation. And definitely having read the book makes a lot of sense as a starting point. I wonder if you can tell us a bit more about kind of as you went from those
multiple starting points, you know, putting those together. Obviously, there's then a lot of thinking and research that goes into a final product of a book. So can you tell us a bit about that process of from that moment into the specific questions and interventions you want to make in this book? What are those and how did you develop? Oh, boy. I guess what I mean, this book was a labor of love
For over many years, I started the project when I was at the University of Iowa toward the end of my tenure at the University of Iowa. And then I took a job at the University of Georgia, which included my serving as department chair there.
of this new department for six years and editing the quarterly journal of speech and so there was this break and so it extends over a long period of time and um in some ways i mean the questions that emerge in the book were delivered by you know the the
culture and the history, the discourse at the time. So as one tries to make sense in a particular conjuncture, one is assisted, no doubt, in significant ways by certain figures and lessons and so forth. But I think
especially in rhetoric, what one has to do, as I put it at one point, I think in the Holocaust Memorial chapter is you have to be open to finding what's actually being delivered by the culture rather than presupposing what is to be received. So I don't know if that's responsive, but yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah, no, that makes sense. What about sort of the interventions or contributions you were aiming to make with this, right? Given you've told us a bit about sort of what you wanted to make sense of in your own head, what were you or are you hoping this book contributes, especially on the sort of theoretical rhetorical level, to what other people are thinking? Oh, I think one of the major interventions in the book is an insistence on
the importance of what is called popular memory. When this project started, memory studies was in full swings. And so there was public memory, there was personal memory, memory studies, cultural memory, et cetera. And this book wants to...
explicitly on the role, which is very rhetorical, right, of the, you know, in terms of the, how what we call, you know, common sense of the people, of popular memory. And so the reading of popular memory that I offer, I think, is
in the introduction to the book of Foucault's statement on popular memory and its relationship to the people's dynamism, and using that as a thread to move through the entire book, I think is one important theoretical intervention I'm making. I also now am able to see the book
as laying the kind of groundwork or prehistory, actually, for understanding what is going on today in the public and political culture with respect to, for example, the conservative movement and post-truth.
So it's important, both a political, practical intervention, as well as a theoretical intervention or supplement.
No, that's helpful. And we're definitely going to get to the links to today. But of course, before that, there are some other things to set all that up to kind of make sense of where we're at now. One of them is still on the theoretical side, but I think is worth bringing into our discussion here, your approach and understanding of the archive. Can you tell us about that? Sure, I'd be happy to. This is where, I mean, in some ways, the influence of
of Jacques Derrida on my work can be felt most. My archive is weird, right? So it's transcripts of the Smithsonian hearings on the Enola Gay exhibit. It's a World War II memorial. It's Satan Private Ryan, The Greatest Generation, the Women in Military Services for America Memorial, newscasts, presidential speeches,
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial, the D-Day Museum, the Prize for Peace, I mean, all these different discourses and texts sort of emerging as a kind of assemblage and matrix of popular reasoning, a way to make sense out of the world. For me, as Derrida teaches, deconstruction is the decision-making
to read the sign as a trace. And that is how I regard the archive. It's a collection, so to speak,
of traces that can function then as what I call with him a site of inscription. And so what I'm very interested in as a rhetorical critic, interested in questions like power and authority and so forth is, you know, what sorts of politics or of governing or what modes of governing are
can be authorized by the archive, even if the archive, because it is a series of traces, not signs, what it can authorize, even though we cannot authenticate. And so the use of the archive, the use of the past in order to craft something
a particular kind of present. All right, this is very helpful to understand. And the listing as well of the different sorts of things you look at is useful too, to kind of finish off our, I suppose, foundational section of our conversation, laying out the things that the book covers. Before we get into any of those instances of archive in more detail, though, I think we have to start with a little bit of a
Not even filling in the gap, explaining why there was a gap, I guess, because, of course, it has been filled in, as we'll investigate. So first, we have to understand why was there a gap or problem with American self-conception at the end of the 20th century that then we'll talk about kind of why World War II was the thing that filled it. But what was the problem that World War II became the solution to? You put it so well, actually. You put it so well.
World War II or a certain version, I should say, of World War II
became an answer to a problematization, which is to say, right, what will hold America together? Ostensibly, America was in crisis, right? We didn't know who we were, right? And so, all right, it was declared, right, time and time again, right, that, that, that
America was breaking apart, that it had no identity of or from many one. What was the one? So this was the era of, this was when the discourse of multiculturalism, diversity, and identity politics was almost at its height. Right.
And so the conservatives were very, very concerned. Well, what's going to hold America in quote, the idea of America as an imagined identity, right? Imagined community together. Now, I follow the work of American studies scholar Donald Peace. I think he's just great.
who argues that the crisis of American identity that begins in the 80s, basically, is an effect, he argues, of the demise of the Cold War state fantasy. And as far as it goes, I think he's just absolutely spot on and correct that
With the end of tensions or the antagonism between the U.S. and then Soviet empire, right, we lose the, in quote, excuse structure that kept the American citizenry looking outward, right?
right, at an external antagonist. And when that falls apart, because...
the Cold War is declared over, that the citizenry, he argues, begins to then look in and begins to discover the kind of discrepancies or violations of its own democratic principles by the government. So he argues that the crisis is,
of national identity is a consequence of a demise in the Cold War state fantasy. We can do what needs to be done in order to save the world from them, basically. I want to argue that a supplement needs to be made that the crisis of confidence in the state that Peace talks about
was exacerbated by post-Fordism, or what people now call neoliberalism, and that the neoliberal reformation of government and of governing, which began in earnest with Reagan and continued with Clinton, most significant, the NAFTA agreement, right? That this reform
This economic and cultural crisis is what World War II, a certain version of World War II, is ushered in to redress.
Does that make it clear at all?
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Yeah, I think that helps us understand kind of the timing of it and sort of why, you know, what some of the different incentives were that drove this idea of kind of bringing this back in and also sort of hinting at kind of what kind, you know, when we talk about memories of World War II, as you said, it's a particular kind of memory of World War II, which I think we'll probably start to get into by going into some of the examples you investigate in the book.
So the first one I'd love you to tell us a bit more about is the one you start the book with, the Enola Gay controversy. And from your answer earlier in our conversation is one of the things that got you started thinking about this in the first place. So why? What was happening around this sort of museum exhibit, this discussion that stuck in your mind so much that was a good entry point into understanding this?
what is happening here around World War II coming back into the public consciousness in a particular way? - Yeah. Well, no, according to most people and most liberal academic treatments
the Enola Gay controversy, which was a huge controversy. I mean, it saturated, this is what we called the history wars and culture wars. It saturated the news media. Academics spoke about it with impressive frequency, et cetera. And it was generally regarded as an
case of censorship that the greatest cultural institution in the United States, which is to say the Smithsonian organization, right, and all of this, that they had caved to conservative pressure in canceling the original planned exhibit of the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nagasaki, um, um, Tibbets flying the plane and, and, uh, and bombing in, in quote, ending World War II. The exhibit that Heyman had, um, had, had, um,
had planned and executed was canceled, and this other exhibit went in its place. And most liberal academics regarded it as a case, textbook case of censorship. And they argued that what the crux of the matter was on both sides was, do we or do we not show
images, photographs, images below the mushroom clouds because they're
The Veterans Affairs, Veterans Association's folks said, look, that's going to create anti-American sentiment. The people at the Smithsonian putting the exhibit together said, without those kinds of images, we cannot counter the rhetorical impact of the technological sublime of the Enola Gay. So...
I asked the question, what makes us so sure that those images per se will make a difference that will cause sentiment to move one way or the other? And what I point out is that, in fact, the kind of images that were censored during the Enola Gay controversy, in fact, reappear in extenuated form
in a documentary film called The Price for Peace, which not only is the opening film front and front piece for the D-Day Museum exhibit, but also was then
aired on national TV on Memorial Day to celebrate Memorial Day. And those exact images that had caused one exhibit to be shut down and another put in its place, actually, they don't object to them at all. They don't produce anti-American sentiment. They're part of the patriotic pro-American message. And so I ask, what happens if
What is the conditional possibility for those images at one point to cause such conflict and at another point to not be a problem at all?
So I don't look at it as a question of censorship or an issue of case of censorship, but I ask, what was produced such that those images no longer trouble our national self-image? And I then look into these and argue that, well, what gets produced is a new truth teller for the 21st century image.
And it's a complicated process, but a truth teller who has really expropriated the discourse of the left and of identity politics, the discourse of or rhetoric of painful experience in order to secure privilege and prestige. I hope that gets to your question.
Yeah, and I think it in fact relates to another one of the examples I wanted to ask you about, because obviously Enola Gay is a key part of the World War II sort of memory being told in this way. But we also see roughly around the same time the World War II monument in D.C. being built. And you investigate not just its building, but where and when it was built. Is this the same sort of kind of ingredients coming in, the idea of sort of personal experience being related to politics?
power and prestige? Or are we looking at something different if we turn to examining the monument? You know, Miranda, the World War II monument, now it's there. And that was just absolutely extraordinary, right? So as I note in the book, there was a law. It was legally not possible to build anything between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
When they decided that they wanted to build a World War II memorial, they literally changed the law. They suspended the law so that they could break ground between those two things, build the World War II memorial, and then they changed the law back again so that nothing else could be built.
And so with respect to the World War II Memorial, what I'm arguing is pretty simply is that what this demonstrates is that
the institution of World War II as the national nodal point, as the event that sutures together the nation, that's at the very center of what the nation is and who we are. And it's, of course, wrapped up in all that other discourse and so forth. So it's really crazy to think about it.
Yeah, that definitely puts a different complexion on that monument to realize just how many things got changed in order to make it, if that makes sense. And then if you think about the, if I may, if you think about the rhetoric of space and place, etc., once you insert the World War II memorial in there, it then changes.
changes the visitor's relationship, let's say, to the Korean memorial or to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, et cetera, because they become peripheral suddenly. So it's this really visual, material performance of the reconfiguration of the national imaginary. Right.
Yeah, no, definitely the relation to the other two is a key part of this. So I'm glad you added that in.
Of course, though, it's not just this national imaginary is not just being reimagined for those who physically can get to D.C. to see things like the Inona Gay exhibit or the World War II monument. There's also popular media that goes all over the country, right? Saving Private Ryan was an incredibly popular film. And this one of all the examples of the book, to me, kind of most went through that point you made earlier around not just World War II, but a
a very particular version of World War II and obviously embeds it hugely into the imagination, given how prevalent the film was. So can you tell us a bit more about kind of what this particular conception and emphasis of World War II is that we see through Saving Private Ryan and, of course, other media that kind of makes the same sort of point?
Sure. I think the most important thing is it's a re... So at this time, the most powerful kinds of claims in the political public sphere are claims made publicly.
by and through identity politics. So it's a politics of injury, right? So women, civil rights, queer people, et cetera, right? You make claims on the state through the discourse of injury, right? This is the most powerful discourse that is at work at that time. What
These, the Saving Private Ryan, The Greatest Generation, et cetera, are really a pretty flagrant frontal assault on identity politics. And what I argue is that the films and the, the, the,
popular books like Tom Brokaw's, et cetera, that what they do is they are teaching the art of personal abstraction that is requisite to national belonging.
In other words, it's an imaginative act of discounting the particularities of self
in order to belong to or be in a member of the we of we the people. So I've argued that these films and books, etc., are actually pedagogies of citizenship, how to be an American citizenship. What does it mean to be a good citizen?
that these are pedagogies of citizenship that are uniquely suited to the late neoliberal and ultimately ethno-national state. Because, of course, the ideal citizen is a very old image, right? Which is the, in quote, disembodied, derationated,
male citizen subject. And how do potentially, quote unquote, good American citizens who don't fit into that ideal, how do they get brought into that story through things like saving private rides?
Well, I'll, if you don't mind, I mean, I'll use, I'll use, well, I mean, in Sending Private Ryan, the key there is the, is the figure, the rhetorical figure of the
male body in pain. Okay? So, what's his name? I can't, sorry, I can't remember the, that plays Ryan in the movie. The guy that plays...
Okay. He is on Sally Jessie Raphael, which was a news talk show at the time, right? And he says, oh, all these people are complaining about their traumas and how hard they had it was they were children growing up, et cetera. He says, try taking a beach, right? Right.
The way in which that figure becomes a way to discount any other form of injury. So I guess I just better pull myself up by my bootstraps and do the best I can. So it turns us away. This practice turns our attention away.
from or induces us to turn a blind eye to historical and systemic or structural asymmetries of power, of resources, of opportunities, etc. And in that sense, it's thoroughly in sync with a neoliberal sensibility. Mm-hmm.
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This is also sort of all these pieces together are in some ways, I suppose, coming together in a bunch of different threads, right? There's this idea of kind of pain and sacrifice being something that is sort of embedded throughout. We're seeing this in a few different instances. But when we think about World War II sort of after this change with all these things in the popular culture, there's often the idea that kind of World War II America was like the
the shining moment, right? The instance of, quote, the democratic spirit made flesh in America, right? That this was like the pinnacle of all the things. Can you tell us a bit about sort of how and why that idea of World War II was created in this moment? I'm sorry, can you try me again what the question is?
The idea that World War II was the shining beacon of America that I think we still have today is that's the sort of assumption. That doesn't come out of nowhere either. Where does that sort of putting World War II as the shiny thing, where does that come from?
Where does it come? I mean, what we have, I mean, if you visit the World War II Memorial, right, World War II Memorial on the National Mall is the first memorial to break with the norm of honoring only those who served.
In the different theaters of war, and in fact, the memorial is singular in so far as it honors also everyone on the home front who contributed to the war effort.
So if that's how you symbolically, rhetorically, you craft this as when we were one, we were all together, we shared the same goals, we shared the same values, we weren't divisive, we weren't self-interested, we were all working together toward this great thing, this goal. And that's how we, in quote, saved the world.
This was democracy in, right, it's apex, it's, right. So, and that gets, that is, that image is exploited, right?
to silence critique to to um uh dismiss um um complaint to right so i'm not sure exactly what you mean but where did it come from it was rhetorically right being remade right um
As an image, I mean, if we think of, for example, of the film before World War II was shut down immediately post-war, right? A film like Patton, right, was about the trauma of World War II. No trauma here. I mean, it was, it's a moment of unity, of purpose, and of people, right?
And you mentioned earlier, and you talk about in the book, how concerning you find this. Can you tell us about that? Well, what I worry about, I think one of the main points of the book, and I should have said this earlier, I suppose, is that one of my major objections is that I would like
to see World War II as something about which we still have more to learn. Instead of turning it into something that we completely understand and that in fact can be deployed as a manual for
how to act today. I think it's something that we still need to, how could that have happened? How did we, how did we get there? So
Instead of a code of prudential conduct, we treat it as an event to be explored further and understood. So that's one of my primary concerns. And actually, I argue that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is perhaps the exception,
to this treatment of World War II. And I argue that the Holocaust Memorial Museum actually engages the patron to its exhibits to engage in what others have called effective history, rather than being done with it, controlling it.
Yeah, I lost my place a little bit, but... No, can you tell us a bit more about that? How does the Holocaust Memorial Museum counter this idea? I mean, what is it doing or not doing that makes it different from some of the other examples we've discussed? The Holocaust Memorial Museum, there are moments in the Holocaust Memorial Museum that challenge the exemplarity of the U.S. during World War II.
that question the, in quote, goodness, rightness of the United States during World War II. So I identify these moments in the exhibit as,
during which, and where they're not given any explanation, there's no rationalization provided, et cetera, where, for example, the U.S. turned a boat away that had, I believe, if I'm recalling correctly, 900 Jews was turned away, many of whom then were lost,
or even sent back to the concentration camps. So rather than being regarded as, in quote, the savior of World War II, the United States is seen as, at moments, complicitous with the tragedy of
unspeakable tragedy that was the Holocaust and World War II. Yeah, that's definitely different from some of these other messages we've been talking about. Given that all these things are still very much kind of in evidence, we're not talking about something that only happened in the 90s and then stopped. How does understanding this history, for example, you know, of how the World War II monument came to be, right? How does knowing those sorts of things better help us make sense of today? Well...
Actually, right now I'm working on extending it without knowing it. Without knowing that's what I was doing when I was working on reinventing World War II. I realize now, looking back, that I was actually writing the prehistory of our present, of our political present, which is characterized by post-truth.
This is, I would argue, post-truth in its earliest phases, right? So,
It helps us understand the present because the present is emerging out of this discursive frame. Now, I don't argue, I don't want to say for a moment that I think they're exactly the same. But, for example, right now I'm doing research on Project 2025.
which is a remaking of the infrastructure of the state, not just an ideological remaking, but an actual material remaking of the state. And I'm particularly concerned with the, um, with the, uh,
effective, really, erasure of the separation of church and state that's already taking place in the courts. And I'm focusing on the rhetoric and politics of the religious right, including but not restricted to the evangelical Christians in this country. But this post-truth is a reiteration, which is to say a repetition with a difference,
of this discourse that was expropriated from the left and used by the right in order to promote a particular image of
America of the country. And I think we're in, we're seeing that being remade, reconfigured ever so slightly for a new moment. So I think it's absolutely crucial, actually, more than I knew when I was writing it. Well, I mean, that's, I suppose, a silver lining, I guess, of having figured out this research and your next project as well. Do you want to tell us what that is?
That's kind of what it is. I'm trying to figure out the connection between...
well, post-truth as a mutation in this political regime of truth that I wrote about in Reinventing World War II. I think post-truth is a mutation of that. And what exactly is its relationship to other efforts in the political public sphere? And so...
So that's what I'm working on and I'm doing, trying to come up with some answers by working through the, what is now infamously known as Project 2025. Well, I think that will make, uh,
perhaps even more interest in the book we've mainly been discussing for people to read while you investigate that. Titled again, Reinventing World War II, Popular Memory and the Rise of the Ethno-Nationalist State, published by Penn State University Press in 2024. So anyone who's interested in reading more about
kind of what happened with any of these particular instances, but also, as Barbara, you've been explaining to us, what it helps us understand about today can obviously go read the book. So thank you again for being with us, Barbara, to tell us about it on the podcast. And thank you, Miranda, so much for your interest in the book and for taking the time to read it. I really am deeply moved by that.