I just finished watching Pearl Harbor. Yes, it’s a dumb story [you’d think they could’ve spent as much on the writers as they did on special effects]. BUT, while it is a rah-rah America- can-whoop-anyone’s-butt kind of movie, it struck me as incedibly anti-war, too. Though perhaps not as vividly as many well-written war movies, this flick shows the futility of nations that (ab)use innocent young lives to promote their own political agendas. Just as the young Japanese pilot who bombs Pearl prays for help in his mission as he gazes on a picture of his wife, so do Doolittle’s men as they head for Tokyo. There’s no sense that the day-to-day battles have anything to do with the larger disagreements of the nations. Rather, they are a ceaseless round of individual suffering and misery.
IMO, there’s no reason for the young and innocent to sacrifice themselves for the abstraction, or ‘imagined community,’ of the nation-state. The loss of life on either side hurts us all. It’s a no-win game for everyone.
One website that tells more info about Doolittle’s raid also explains that the Chinese people who harbored and helped the American pilots may have, themselves, been biggest losers: “In May 1942, the Japanese army launched operation Sei-Go, with the dual aims of securing Chinese airfields from which raids could be launched against the Home Islands, and punishing villages which might have sheltered Doolittle’s airmen after the Raid. Exact figures are impossible to come by, but tens of thousands – perhaps as many as 250,000 – Chinese civilians were murdered in the Chekiang and Kiangsu provinces.”
2 comments
Dear Friend:
I agree with your comments on war. When I was registering for the last year of the Vietnam war draft, I was often asked about the second world war. We were not in that struggle as a good war. We did nothing about Spain, and all the concentration camps that were liberated, were not liberated as a goal of the war, but just because they were on the road the we were on… The US and Britain new about the death camps, and could have bombed the rail lines stopping the trains taking Gypsies and Jews and others to their deaths… they didn’t.
The time to stop wars are before they start. The present war in Iraq has gone through so many changes of reason, that most people forget that it was a preemptive attack for a reason that turned out to be based in lies.
Oh well, I join CA in welcoming you to the blogisphere and your investigations of Quakerism,
Lorcan Otway
15th Street Meeting NYC
(Plain in the city on CA’s links.)
I _so_ agree that the real reasons for war are so muddled, esp in the recent conflict, that one can’t justify the loss of life that results. So many people believe that our involvement in WW2 was justified because we stopped Hitler. But that’s just the way the war has been remembered–at the time that was not the main goal. It’s like the way that the Civil War is remembered as a battle to “free the slaves.” While that was an important outsome of the CW, that was hardly the main motivation for the fighting!!