I like war movies. It’s disgusting, I know. However, watching myself over the years of my life and my reactions to war movies change has been interesting.
A long time ago, I thought war movies were just plain cool. Then they were a disgusting adoration of the worst Humanity has to offer, aggrandizing nations behaving like gangsters and so on. Then they became amazing tales of Humans under heavy stress, or working toward great unified efforts, examples of the possible, and even the best that Humans can be. Then the mistakes in war movies began to intrigue me, then the craft of such movies, then…
Et cetera.
What I want to offer here is just one, fairly simple thought.
If you are pro-war, pro-glory of war, believe utterly in the necessity of war, then every war movie ever made is a recruiting poster for war: sign me up!
If you are anti-war, see the senselessness of the killing, the lost lives, the lost dreams, wasted resources, damage to the environment, damage to entire societies and so on, then every war movie ever made is an anti-war movie.
They are the same movies. What’s different? The viewpoint of the person watching it.
This isn’t a case of one person is right and the other is wrong. Both are right. (Both are also wrong, to whatever extent they assume their interpretation is the one-and-only.) They saw what they saw and they reacted to it as they reacted to it, and that’s all you can say.
What other things, maybe even real life things, might this apply to?
This, perhaps, illustrates the problem with Democracy.
Or is it the Strength of Democracy? I forget…