LRC’s alterna-Memorial Day

• The prettification of war.
• A list of anti-war films. Vonnegut related a conversation he had had with a friend on a troopship coming back from Europe. Vonnegut asked his friend: “What did you learn from all of this?,” to which the other man replied: “Never to believe your own government.” I’ve seen and recommend The Deer Hunter (Slav Orthodox from upstate Pennsylvania), Shenandoah, Wag the Dog (why Clinton bombed Belgrade on Easter, the catalyst for Lew Rockwell starting his site), Breaker Morant, Full Metal Jacket (not a simplistic pacifistic film: Kubrick said everything serious that R. Lee Ermey’s sergeant, ‘the real thing’, says is true), Das Boot (apolitical) and Born on the Fourth of July. Also: never saw the film but the book helped form me when I read it 26 years ago: The Quiet American.
• The big one. As you can guess from much of my style I like the Greatest Generation very much. (Just yesterday at breakfast, on this box I was listening to Benny Goodman.) That said, as some readers don’t like, I’m a revisionist (and anti-FDR). The America Firsters were right; imperial Japan was bad but no threat to American sovereignty (doing business with them would have been like relations with Red China today) and let the Nazis and Communists destroy each other rather than sending boys from New York and Wisconsin to die in Europe, then handing half of Europe to a state worse than the Nazis (it killed more people). I’ve known American (including one Slav tough guy who later cried because he helped load the planes that bombed Dresden) and British veterans (actually defending their home and not just in a propaganda sense, a noble cause... my late rector was a Royal Navy rating stationed in the Mediterranean)... and a Russian and a Ukrainian who fought for the Germans against the USSR (likewise defending their home against something evil).
• The best way I know of to support military families is to bring all the troops home from all of the 150+ countries they are in and never send them again to fight any foreign wars. This will also save us billions and billions of dollars, stop us from creating more terrorists, and stop us from needlessly killing any more foreigners.

Labels: England, film, history, peace, politics, Russia