Please! No More Fucking Stories About the Glory of War

[mallorys_camera]

At chezsci's suggestion, I’ve been watching Babylon Berlin. Quite unlike anything I’ve seen before. Exceptionally well done.

I heard a story on NPR yesterday that threw me into a blind fury.

Two men who were boys together in some small town in Texas and who met up again many years later on the battlefields of Vietnam.

You were supposed to get misty-eyed as you listened to the story. The horrors of war! But also the gallantry, the bravery, the heightened experiential of war where you feel most alive –

Nature bred humans to be predators.

And I do hate humans a small but significant portion of the time.

Comments

[smokingboot]

I am indifferent to them quite a bit of the time.

One of the things that freaks me out the most about England, specifically, as opposed to the UK, is the fetishisation of war. After the first world war, the crosses that dot all our villages were marks of respect and sorrow, because every community lost people, then the second world war came, and I have not met one veteran who ever boasted about it. Ah, but their children... Well the stories have got more and more grand,and the reflected glory more and more pathetic.

[mallorys_camera]

Yah, I could see that in England. A country whose early history is so marked by invasions that it went a bit power-mad after the 17th century when innocent indigenes made themselves available for subjugation.

I've spent a bit of time biking through England, and I do remember those war memorials.

[smokingboot]

Those memorials are so forlorn... and there was a humility about them; every single village had sent its children out to die, whole families wiped out forever. There was a pathos and no nonsense about the glory of war, too many had lost too much.

Then came WWII, and it had a little more sense of WinningTM, though I never heard that from anyone who had ever been there; only those who came after, imagining themselves as heroes, their minds replaying it as they wanted it to be, over and over again. It is no surprise to me that this rise of the endlessly war-invoking xenophobes comes now, when most of our veterans of those wars are silent.

[mallorys_camera]

The WWII hagiography has only been a big deal here for the last 20 years or so.

Over here, men my age -- Boomers! -- were so appalled by the prospect of being drafted to fight in Vietnam that they staged a generational revolt. That combined with Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address about the looming threat posed by the military-industrial complex inoculated us.

In the last 20 years or so, that changed. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's the rise of the proxy war model. You can be bloodthirsty without ever exposing yourself to real threat!

The whole thing sucks. Pseudo-speciation. Fights over resource allocation. Ugh.

The boys throw stones at frogs for fun.
But the frogs die in earnest.