You're welcome Neil.

Welcome Neil. This is hell and in the past the future meant progress.

The future ain't what it used to be.

This is hell and in the past the future meant progress which was hoped to lead to better

and more enjoyable lives for well all of us.

It meant peace and prosperity hopefully in our time. But the problem is as

our guest today explains, we're still stuck in the past, not just any past, a past that is

a myth, a past that is a myth, a past that is grounded in a narrative about the Second World War that is both highly selective and greatly exaggerated.

An insistence that World War II was a good war, despite it being a massively

destructive and devastating war, killing anywhere between 35 and 60 million people, and I don't

even think that includes the holocaust a war that

ended with fire bombings and the dropping of the first two atomic bombs so

how can something that was so awful be celebrated. And what impact does that celebration have on US foreign policy?

Up to this very day, we will find out in a few when we speak with Elizabeth D. Samet, the author of America Amnesia and the violent pursuit of happiness.

She is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant and

the Height Prize in the Humanities, and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support

the research and writing of the name of this book again

looking for the good war American Amnesia and the violent pursuit of happiness.

I don't know how that title fell off that script there.

She also is a professor of English at West Point.

She's also the author of No Man's Land, preparing for war and peace in post-9-11 America. Soldiers' Heart, reading literature

through peace and war at West Point, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for current interest and was named one of the 100

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