War

There's a time for war and time for not war.  War should be the last resort.  But.....there is purpose for war some times.  I'm neither in love with war nor am totally against it.  It's just simply a horrible necessity sometimes.

The generation that fought both world wars should not be diminished in stature for what they went through to defeat German and at the same time coming out of the greatest depression in our country's history and I guess I have a problem with a graphic that tries to diminish that.

 
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knapplc said:
How does this graphic diminish the generation that fought in the World Wars?
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I took it that way when it claimed we were in love with WWII and acted like we shouldn't admire that generation as much as we do.  Granted, I didn't read the entire thing because I got bored with it.

 
I didn't read the entire thing, either. That's half a novel.

I took the part about being infatuated with the World Wars as not disrespecting those who fought, or the (necessary) reasons they fought, but more of a dig at our infantile reverence for war based on a mythical interpretation of those wars. 

Kind of an adult version of how I was when I was a kid, and the main toys I played with were Green Army Men. I'd set up intricate battles in the dirt in the yard, spend all day long fighting, making machine gun & explosion sounds, blowing stuff up. Good kid stuff. 

Then I got older and it became real that people who get shot, die.  Usually in great agony. So the tremendously unrealistic play I did with my Green Army Men was placed aside.

What I got from cruising through that graphic is, politicians and career upper-brass military, in conjunction with our military/industrial complex, have exploited our reverence for those wars and the people who fought in them for their own purposes. 

Maybe I read it wrong, but that's where I thought it was going.  But again - I didn't read it all.  Too long.

 
Hey, I loved those green army men and my "Guns of Navarone" play mountain.  

It's a very complicated subject.  As a population, we have to be extremely careful how we proceed with any war while still honoring and respecting the people who we have sent to war in the past.  We have seen the ugly side of both situations.  

I thought the more important part of my original post was actually the first paragraph where I was disagreeing with the idea that war is good for "absolutely nothing".

 
The kids down the street had the Guns of Navaronne set. I was SO jealous. They would hardly ever let us play with it.

The best toy I ever got was a 10-ton pile of fill dirt my dad had hauled in. He didn't get it spread around the yard for more than a year, and that was an army man mountain, Matchbox cars hill, dirt-bike jump hill, king of the mountain hill... all kinds of stuff.  When he did all the shovel work and wore it down to nothing I moped, so he got another truckload just so I could play on it. I think that thing sat there for a couple of years before we grew out of playing on it.

 
knapplc said:
The kids down the street had the Guns of Navaronne set. I was SO jealous. They would hardly ever let us play with it.

The best toy I ever got was a 10-ton pile of fill dirt my dad had hauled in. He didn't get it spread around the yard for more than a year, and that was an army man mountain, Matchbox cars hill, dirt-bike jump hill, king of the mountain hill... all kinds of stuff.  When he did all the shovel work and wore it down to nothing I moped, so he got another truckload just so I could play on it. I think that thing sat there for a couple of years before we grew out of playing on it.
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Ahhhh....fond memories.

My area like that was my sand box that was around a very large tree in the back yard.  It was probably 15' x 15' with a big tree in the middle.  I could build roads and rivers and lakes (with help from the garden hose). Heck, at one point, my friends and I even took old wood and built a fort/club house in that spot.

 
Comfortably Numb said:
Ha! I saw the thread title and came here to post exactly what you did in your first sentence.
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;)

I was wondering if that'd be too silly, but then I thought it fit perfectly with the theme, being a Vietnam era protest song. One of the things this really made me think about is how depiction of war has changed over the years. A lot of grungey, pretty gloomy commentary that grew out of the Vietnam era to become part of our cultural firmament. I think there's a fair amount of this in contemporary literature/film too; a response to Iraq and the War on Terror. Then the valorizing stuff that seemed to dominate in between. I grew up on that, so I hadn't ever thought of it has a product of a particular time period. Astute observation.

And I mean, I actually really agree that the war against the Nazis is among the most obviously worthy things to valorize. Let's definitely not forget that Nazis are bad. OTOH, there's a way to depict it all, cleansed of any complexity, that serves the men who bang the gavel and gravely intone, "Soldiers gave you the freedoms we let the ungrateful louts abuse"...the eager warmongers who paint themselves as heirs to that generation and their traditions.

I grew up a lot more disdainful of pacifism than I am now. It wasn't just the 90s, it was the patriotic fervor of the 9/11 era and oh, man, was I so on board the invade Iraq train. I share knapp's sentiments now. You say it so well. So this is an examination I think is really valuable for us, culturally. It shouldn't be interpreted as something that diminishes anybody. The greatest honor we can do to the generation that gave their all to defeat the Nazis is to understand that war is a truly horrible thing, not to cast new Nazis (Iraq? Iran? North Korea?) for new generations of American heroes to die eradicating. 

 
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Let's not pretend that war wasn't viewed as a valiant endeavor before WW1 and WW2.  You look at how war has been depicted literally throughout world history.  But, you can even look at how it has been depicted in our own history.  We have always honored wars like the Revolutionary war.  Men signed up voluntarily to fight the Civil War and then the Indian Wars and they were honored when they came back home with memorials or statues put up in their honor.  Kids were taught to respect those men and women involved in those conflicts from the beginning of our country.

Now, what has changed is the amount of media involved in it.  Obviously, there wasn't much during the Revolutionary War.  However, the large number of memorials and statues just from both sides of the Civil War around out country is a testament that these views of honoring and, to a certain extent, glorifying what these people did goes way back.  Now days, we have the internet, music, movies, TV shows, sporting events, 24 hour news networks...etc.

This is nothing new.  It's just that we have more ways people are bombarded with it now.

 
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Oh, I would certainly agree that glorifying war and then wielding that to sordid ends was not a Bush invention. I think the contrast is specifically about how we actually came away from WW2, how we came away from Vietnam...and how, after some time had passed, the old demon reared its head again. History is a bit of a constant, cyclical struggle to tamp down our ugliest impulses.

 
You're both right. We've honored war/warriors and hero-worshiped them for millennia.  And that's fine - it represents an ideal, a perfection that we should all strive to.  It's like setting a goal. And there's nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing at all wrong (and quite a bit right) with honoring those who serve our country.  We should. And we could probably all do more.

The danger, as zoogs points out, is that manipulators (politicians & people trying to make a buck) exploit that respect for their own gains, either using the heroes and our natural reverence for those who protect us to serve their own ends.  That's bad, and should be called out. 

 
I agree our service members should be treated with the utmost respect and I think more needs to be done to provide better mental and physical care, wheb they return home . The PTSD, homelessness, and suicide rates of our vets are way too high.

My biggest beef though is with the wars we fight and the motivations behind them . I think We’ve gone from using our great military for defense of the country against direct threats , to being in way too many other countries business, and engaging in endless unwinnable  conflicts  . We are never going to know the true reason for our military presence in almost every country on earth (800 bases?) but it think many times we are told were fighting terrorism , and helping people when the real reasons ( at least partially )  are behind that smoke screen  . 

I think oil interests , military strongholds , money,  power, imperialism  etc are probably closer to the true motivators , and those are the wrong reasons to get our brave soldiers killed, and maimed . I also don’t think killing people in other countries, especially ones who didn’t ask us to be there  , will breed great love for us, and in some cases we create more terrorists than we eliminate . 

I think War, and US military presence should be used much more sparingly. Substituting negotiations ,  and diplomacy could  save many lives and billions of dollars that are needed here at home . 

 
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