Chickenboy
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ORIGINAL: warspite1
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ORIGINAL: witpqs
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ORIGINAL: Revthought
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ORIGINAL: witpqs
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ORIGINAL: Revthought
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ORIGINAL: witpqs
I agree that Saving Private Ryan did *not* glorify the killing of prisoners. They simply showed it. Using that character to kill a prisoner at the end did not show that his moral objection was misplaced, it showed the moral journey that many people make in such circumstances.
And it showed those things without glorification or condemnation so you had to see it and consider it for yourself.
Maybe, but what was actually communicated to me was not that, and apparently was not that to some of the others who were in the theatre with me way back in 1999.
In any case, I'm a man who is an enigma. I do not believe any gods, but I sure as hell believe in enlightenment narratives. As such, my internal moral barometer is, partially at least, aligned to Stonewall Jackson--even in war there comes a time when killing another human being becomes "simply murder."
And for me, killing someone who has surrendered, or in the process of surrender, regardless of their nationality, regardless of what they are fighting for, regardless of what they've done, and regardless of how they would treat you if your positions were reversed, is simply murder.
All that said, I do understand. One of the many reasons war is so terrible is that it sometimes turns good people into murderers. That's a bit of the real story of war that always deserves a telling.
You are saying you want every depiction salted with moral commentary. I think it is useful and necessary to have many depictions to which that is not done.
I also went to the theater when SPR debuted and I did not see justification. I saw "Here is reality. Understand it. figure out how to deal with it." And that helps people to think about how to make a better world.
Obviously, your mileage varies.
Every depiction does come with moral commentary. Like ideology it attaches itself everywhere. And my version of moral commentary is just depicting something the way it actually is.
So, like in Band of Brothers or Letters From Iwo Jima, there are Americans killing POWs. In both cases time was spent to show those POWs as human beings who had a lot in common with the Americans who were killing them.
In Band of Brothers, which was longer form, great care was taken to show that:
1. The person who murdered the POWs made the decision based on the psychological trauma of war, not because a guy promised to surrender and showed back up in a German uniform fighting Americans again, and not just because the prisoners he killed had fought Americans;
2. The person who murdered the POWs was traumatized by his decision to do so;
3. Others who served with the person were traumatized by the act; and
4. Ultimately, the person who killed the POWs is painstakingly redeemed
At no point in that story arc was the complexity of war or the moral situation left out. The moral commentary, such that it exists, is present only in as much as the series shows some of the reality that is the killing of POWs.
Really I think the context changes how a film maker should tell such stories. For instance, with an American film, for an American audience telling the story of American soldiers in the Second World War, it is much more difficult for that audience to empathize with the German or Japanese POW.
I will say this, I think if you were to make a film of the Malmedy massacre where the German soldiers were portrayed in a similar way, and the killing of Allied POWs was even vaguely justified in the film narrative, you would have many, many people upset. And rightly so I think.
In any case, I do not think we necessarily disagree. I think, if anything, I am merely painting with a finer brush.
No, I think we do disagree. I think it is useful to have such incidents shown without adding those things. I am not saying always refrain from adding those things. But definitely requiring that they always be included is not helpful. If we always do the thinking for other people they will neither learn to think nor be practiced at it.
warspite1
Indeed. We don't always need to show that the person taking such action is traumatised by it.
Indeed showing that all participants are traumatised can be misleading and another example of airbrushing history. It's like saying "hey guys we did this too, but unlike the Germans we were really sorry".
Going back to the example of SS troops in Normandy. How many troops would have felt they had done something bad? Human nature being what it is, I suspect there would be a range of emotions from individual to individual. But given La Paradis, Wormhoudt and other incidents, I would not necessarily think badly of a soldier who didn't feel like crying because he had just ended the life of a piece of SS scum.
My uncle was early 20's by 1944 (he joined up at the time of Munich). He had only recently been married and with a baby daughter that he had hardly seen. He witnessed a Lt in his battalion get decapitated by a shell.
I can't begin to understand - much less be critical of - his thinking during that battle. Did he personally kill any Germans? Sadly I never got to speak to him adult to adult - although I don't know if he would have told me anyway. He never appeared troubled by what happened (although who knows what goes on inside someone's head) but does that make him bad, does that make him a murderer - or an accomplice to murder? No I don't think it does, not for a minute.
He was there to do a job - a job he never asked to do (but when his country was in danger he didn't hesitate to enlist). He was just a normal guy from London, from a close-knit family, brought up in poverty our generation can't comprehend. Having been wounded twice during the war, he came through it minus a leg (courtesy of a landmine near Hamburg). He had a steady job after the war and rose through the ranks to become middle-ranking management, he got married during the war and ultimately had two children. He made the London Evening Standard front page when he was mugged (shows how times have changed - mugging is an everyday occurance) by some low life. Although the brief case he carried had nothing of value in it - and he was fighting with a false leg attached - he refused to let his attacker take the brief case out of principal!
Yep, an ordinary, law-abiding family man who did his duty. What happened at Hill 112 does not make any difference to me.
People that think they know what soldiers *should* feel or *do* feel after having been through grinding, personal, visceral combat should be encouraged to listen to or read Karl Marlantes' excellent book What it is like to go to War.
Written from the perspective of a Rhodes scholar who enlisted and served as a Marine officer in Vietnam, it is a gripping rendition of what one experiences on the front line. He goes into extraordinary introspective detail on the different feelings one experiences before, during and after combat.
Bloodthirst? Yes. Regrettably-on occasion. Dehumanizing rage? Yes. Fear? Yes-frequently. Fatigue, nausea, anger, deception, pride, sadness, euphoria? Yes to all, in measure. Lawyerly predisposition to prejudge what men do to other men in the midst of combat? Never. And this includes killing of wounded enemy soldiers and the rationale for same.
I'm prone to accepting his version of well-described events. Your mileage may vary, but I'm comfortable in the constructed narrative that I've heard from many, many combatants about their mindset during the fighting. I don't recall any of them parsing through the scholarly or lawyerly details of what constitutes an 'attempt to surrender' and the instantaneous assumption of invulnerability that you suggest such an erstwhile attempt at surrender constitutes. Not that it's not not possible, I guess, it's just that it-in real life-doesn't happen.
On the contrary, I've heard many soldiers talk about the fact that the act of surrender was sometimes (frequently?) dangerous in and of itself. That they stood as good a chance of being shot by the enemy as they did being killed 'friendly' fire (or in the case of the Russians-the bloody-minded Komissar at the back of the pack) often dissuaded them from the notion. But I haven't heard a rendition from a soldier that expected ideal treatment after having just finished shooting some of his now captors.
Your (and others') overbroad mischaracterization of combat as being synonymous with cold-blooded murder doesn't wash either. As I said before-there are many moral, ethical, legal, historical, religious and societal differences between the two. They are not the same any more than self-defense is murder. Marlantes' book goes into the differences nicely-it's recommended for this discussion too.
With all that being said, I think there is a remarkable statistic about WWII POWs. The safest place for a German male born between the year of 1900 and 1930 was in either a British or an American POW camp. Safer than remaining in service in their own country. Safer than fighting on the Eastern front. Safer than civilian life in Germany. For British or Americans in German POW camps, the survival rate was pretty high (~95% IIRC) as well. This speaks about the remarkable civility shown MOST OF THE TIME on the Western front. Both sides wanted to demonstrate their humanity to the other in this somewhat surreal juxtaposition to both the Eastern front and the War in the Pacific, where utmost savagery was a rule rather than an exception.
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