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Talk:Forgotten war

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I've heard and seen this term used to apply to many conflicts. Used as a pronoun it typically refers to the Korean War/Conflict, and sometimes by historians of the First World War to refer to their pet subject that is often over-looked by many other historians (over-shadowed by its 'sequel' perhaps). But I've also heard it being used as a general descriptive term for many different conflicts.

A History Channel documentary on the War of 1812 calls it "a forgotten war". Googling "forgotten war" brings up lots and lots of sites on Korea, but upon closer inspection also brings up a whole bunch of other topics. These include:

  • The Spanish-American War
  • The Mexican-American War
  • Lebanon’s Civil War
  • America's war with the Pirates of the Barbary Coast

Doing an identical search on Amazon reveals similar results: lots of books on Korea, but peppered with a surprising variety of books about other "forgotten wars". Some of these include:

  • The Alaskan Front during WW2.
  • Revolution and Liberation conflicts in SE Asia
  • Britain's 19th Century Colonial Campaigns
  • The War of 1812 again (several items, sometimes called Our Forgotten War)
  • Burma
  • Conflict in DR of the Congo
  • The Eastern Front of WW2 Between Stalin and Hitler
  • Russia in Chechnya
  • The current war in Afghanistan (used by both the BBC and Keith Olbermann in reference to its having been over-shadowed by media coverage of Iraq)
  • Even the Iraq War (in a recent, 2006, op-ed article)

Googling "forgotten war" and adding "-Korea" still yields over 100,000 results.

This is all plenty of justification, at least for me, that this disambiguation page should be fleshed out into a full article. I added some basic stuff to illustrate that this is not just an alias of Korea, but also a common pet name of many other conflicts, as well as a descriptive term/phrase/moniker in its own right. However, I think there is enough to warrant making this into a full article with greater depth, breadth, and considerable historiographic inquiry. Any one want to compile and organize this into an article?

I also would motion that someone immediately alter the redirect for "THE Forgotten War" to point to this disambiguation page, or else place a standard disambiguation tag to the Korea article. Thelastemperor 19:58, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

_____ Earliest newspaper references I could find to Korea as "forgotten" date to late 1951, during the conflict. Might be a record for forgetting--just 18 mos after war began. Also found references to Italian campaigns of WWII as "forgotten war" so obviously "war" is a pretty flexible expression in newspaper talk. 22:51, 10 August 2014 (UTC)rkh — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.194.155.47 (talk)