You Get to be Protected, You Get to be Protected, You All Get to be Protected!
- Lauren B
- 0
- on Sep 08, 2022
This week I really enjoyed reading and annotating the Ken Burns articles. The articles were so interconnected through their main points even though going in I didn’t expect them to be that intertwined aside from their historical content. It surprised me, I remember learning about World War Two over the years in school but this correlation between the topics never came up. News and censorship were centered around fear and protection of the public. The government wanted so desperately to protect and shield the public from the atrocities of the war and yet the public was scared to death anyway. Regardless of the censorship people would still seek out any piece of information they could, which would either assuage or heighten their fears. Letters and diaries were mainly focused on the idea of hope but with this underlying message to protect those you care about. The letters that soldiers received acted as motivation for them, reminding them what exactly they were fighting for. Yet at the same time, the soldiers didn’t want their loved ones to know all the gruesome and horrible things that were happening to them. Lastly, propaganda is based on the idea of portraying a certain narrative to the public, similar to censorship in the way it either twisted or hid information. Choosing to paint the war in a way that would make people think it wasn’t as bad as they would enlist. All three categories have this shared theme of protection from fear, which makes sense as during the war the government likely would’ve done anything to prevent widespread panic throughout the nation as fear is highly contagious and quick to consume a nation. This overarching connection acts as further historical context as well as gives the reader a deeper understanding on how seemingly random things can be connected. It ultimately demonstrates the lengths to which people cared about others and how in times of crisis unconsciously different groups can band together under a unified purpose to protect the common people against fear.
