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Post by caucasoididiot on Nov 13, 2011 17:19:47 GMT -5
In thinking about why there aren't that many docs about the current war, I think some of what has been shot is probably classified. That's just how the military works. Eventually stuff will come out, but as long as we have troops in Afganistan or Iraq, you probably won't see a lot. At least not from US sources. There's probably some of that, especially with regard to operational matters, but the woman who made Where Soldiers Come From said she had no trouble arranging to get embedded with the guys she was covering (trailer below, really wish I'd caught that). Now, things like the special ops, drone strikes and such are a different story I'm sure. I wonder if it may be because of the general ambivalence about these wars and their interminable, low-grade infection nature. WW2 saw the nation pretty solidly behind the war (even if some hard-core Republicans thought of it as FDR's fault) and everyone was somehow touched by it, even if only by rationing. Aside from the terror alert color codes (which I wasn't here for, not sure how seriously they were taken) the same hasn't been true this time. Thus, perhaps, people can ignore it, and film-makers who try to do otherwise have to worry about either taking a stand that someone's bound to object to or being seen as taking so little a stand as to be irrelevant.
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Post by Crowfan on Nov 13, 2011 17:30:30 GMT -5
I have been watching VietNam in HD which I had taped off of the History Channel. One of the soldiers who tells his story said his father(who served in WW2), didn't want his son to go fight in VietNam. The son said, but you did, to which the father replied, "We were fighting people who were burning other people in ovens"....I think that's why most people were behind the war effort in WW2. It was pretty clear what kind of people the Nazis were.
II wish I'd seen the movie of the trailer you posted. It looks great.
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Post by caucasoididiot on Nov 13, 2011 17:42:48 GMT -5
Yeah, but in a way that's ex post facto. The Allies were being very silent about Nazi genocide during the war for various reasons, but Pearl Harbor angered everyone. Interestingly, FDR was actually not able to get Congress to declare war on Germany even after that. Hitler saved his bacon by declaring war on the US.
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Post by Crowfan on Nov 13, 2011 17:49:27 GMT -5
The Allies may have been quiet about the atrocities, but there were newspaper reports about them. And of course before the war Kristallnacht and other incidents of Nazi violence were reported. The History Channel did a documentary on it, I'll see if I can find a link or the title. It was really a fascinating program.
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Post by caucasoididiot on Nov 13, 2011 17:59:59 GMT -5
Yeah, Nazi anti-semitism was no secret, nor brown-shirt street violence and the like. But when you look at the polling from that time, few Americans felt the US should get involved. Note how carefully FDR treaded in ratcheting up his support for Great Britain.
Even once in, the main reasons behind staying silent on the genocide seems to have been tw-fold. WW1 had seen a lot of atrocity claims, most of which turned out later to have been at least overblown. The Allies knew about the Final Solution from the Ultra decrypts, but not being able to release those, feared that people wouldn't believe even the Nazis were doing something so heinous. Conversely, there was a fear that if they were believed, it would further strengthen the pressure for a cross-channel invasion before they felt they were sufficiently built up for it.
To their credit, though, they did use the bombers to try and disrupt the trains servicing the death camps. An irony, given the postwar ambivalence about the morality of the bomber campaigns.
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Post by Crowfan on Nov 13, 2011 18:04:18 GMT -5
Yeah, that's true. FDR had to be careful with the aid he gave to Britain before we got involved. But Hitler did FDR a huge favor by declaring war on us, so that we could move against the Germans. It's a fascinating period of history. I know that there were lots of people in this country that wanted us to remain isolationists and stay out of European affairs. And that's also true about the atrocity issue. it's mind boggling what the Nazis did, and even today there are those who say the Holocaust never happened. That's probably a topic for another thread though.
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Post by caucasoididiot on Nov 13, 2011 18:09:00 GMT -5
Yeah, we're treading on OB territory here. I know what you mean on Holocaust denial, too. It's disturbing to be doing web searches on something from that era and have stuff like that pop up.
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Post by Crowfan on Nov 13, 2011 18:10:24 GMT -5
I agree with you, totally. It bothers me too.
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Post by caucasoididiot on Dec 20, 2011 23:22:03 GMT -5
In the Wake of HMS Sheffield was a 1986 BBC documentary on some naval aspects of the Falklands War, specifically some fairly detailed analyses of Argentine air attacks against the Royal Navy both with Exocet anti-ship missiles and iron bombs. I remembered it as having been very informative and was pleased to find it again. Can that really have been almost thirty years ago? The topic is a fascinating one, even if it might be what Arthur C, Clarke once called "technological pornography" (which always reminds me of the Leonard Cohen lyric, "I'm blinded by the beauty of our weapons"). Heh heh . . . my Argentine student was saying recently that if anyone but Margaret Thatcher had been in power in Britain they'd have found a way to share those islands. I'm dubious, but didn't argue. I love the one Argentine pilot here saying, "That'll show those Gringos" while describing his run on HMS Broadsword. part 1part 2part 3part 4part 5part 6
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donmac
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Post by donmac on Jan 22, 2012 14:00:22 GMT -5
A lot of good recommendation here already, so I'll add to it a recommendation for a 2003 documentary feature film called The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. It's a film by Errol Morris and is based on interviews with (the now late) Robert McNamara which cover his experiences in the WWII bombing campaign of Japan, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War, and then his views on war in general. This documentary is so well-done that it turned my personal opinion of McNamara completely around. Trailer for "The Fog of War"It's available on DVD with some good extras, but someone also put it split up into parts on YouTube as well (although, unfortunately, with a squashed look that the original film doesn't have): Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5Part 6Part 7Part 8Part 9Part 10Part 11-
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donmac
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Post by donmac on Jan 22, 2012 14:22:04 GMT -5
And, on the Vietnam War alone, Bill Moyers had an excellent 2009 program based almost entirely on the White House recordings of conversations by Lyndon B. Johnson about the Vietnam War. While The Fog of War shows that it was LBJ, not McNamara, who decided to escalate the Vietnam War, the conversations in this program show that Johnson wrestled with those decisions and seems to ultimately have caved in to people pushing for the escalation and their claims that just X number thousands of more troops would solve the problem. LBJ's Path To War: Part 1Part 2Timeline of the conversations in the program-
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Post by caucasoididiot on May 28, 2012 8:21:13 GMT -5
Seems appropriate to bump this thread for Memorial Day, especially to add a link to The World at War's final episode, "Remember." The series had used numerous participant interviews but had been structured as a chronological narrative of the war, with the participants describing particular events within it. This final segment focussed more on the war's legacy, both broadly and individually. Definitely of a sombre mood, it opens with Olivier narrating over current (1973) footage of the ruins of the French town of Ouradour-sur-Glane: Down this road, on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came.
Nobody lives here now.
They stayed only a few hours.
When they had gone, a community which had lived for a thousand years . . . was dead.part1part 2Hmm . . . parts 3 & 4 are blocked. Oh well.
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Post by Crowfan on May 28, 2012 14:49:40 GMT -5
That's a great series.
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Post by TheNewMads on May 28, 2012 17:58:42 GMT -5
'tis indeed, though i've been slacking in my effort to watch the whole series on netflix. i think i got about three disks in and then fell off the wagon. i need to get back on that. on the other hand, i just watched the ken burns documentary "The War," about WWII, and was a bit let down. he does a great job personalizing the war by picking four small american towns and focusing on the war experience through the inhabitants of those towns, but beyond the personal narrative stuff, which was great, it was surprisingly conventional. there's the typical overemphasis on the american role in the war and deemphasizing the contribution of the allies, there's the overemphasis on combat soldiers and the doc mostly ignores everyone else who contributed to the war; no "victory garden" stories here. (the studs terkel book "The Good War" would have been a great influence on Burns here but he didn't avail himself of it, apparently.) also, the more cynical readings of the war are totally ignored here. this is pretty rah-rah stuff; the idea that FDR might have manuevered us into Pearl Harbor in order to get us into the war is never taken on, if even to try and debunk it. the idea that the A-bomb was dropped solely to spare us a conventional invasion of japan is assumed to be completely accurate. the (to my mind pretty convincing) argument that a part of truman's motivation to bomb japan was as a bit of realpolitik meant to intimidate the russians, that idea is totally ignored. and to me one of the most fascinating ideas about world war ii to me, that even though it was a "just war" it polluted the national soul even of the allied countries, is totally ignored. when you think about it, world war II cost england her empire, and at the same time forced america into a position at odds with her founding. (the founders never wanted us to be an empire, or to involve ourselves overly with foreign affairs, i've been led to believe, but all this, from the CIA to operation paperclip to our questionable role as "world's policeman" can all be traced to world war II.) i guess my opinion on the subject is that war always diminishes a nation, even "just" war. would have loved to see the ken burns documentary hit on that at least momentarily. but it's pretty straight-ahead stuff. something interesting to notice is how much of the pacific war stuff in "The War" totally reiterates stuff that appears in the great HBO miniseries "The Pacific" (talking about how if you slid down a hill you'd have pockets full of maggots by the time you got to the bottom, etc.). One appears to have ripped off the other rather shamelessly, but i can't be bothered to go to IMDB or look at my own DVD shelf right now and find out which came first.
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Post by TheNewMads on May 28, 2012 18:01:53 GMT -5
Seems appropriate to bump this thread for Memorial Day, especially to add a link to The World at War's final episode, "Remember." The series had used numerous participant interviews but had been structured as a chronological narrative of the war, with the participants describing particular events within it. This final segment focussed more on the war's legacy, both broadly and individually. Definitely of a sombre mood, it opens with Olivier narrating over current (1973) footage of the ruins of the French town of Ouradour-sur-Glane: Down this road, on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came.
Nobody lives here now.
They stayed only a few hours.
When they had gone, a community which had lived for a thousand years . . . was dead.part1part 2Hmm . . . parts 3 & 4 are blocked. Oh well. i haven't seen the last ep, but i believe the first ep also starts with contemporaneous shots of that village so it's a bit of a clever bookend. quite a series, that.
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