Tonight I watched Part Three of "Generation War", and thereby finished up the series. Read my review from two nights ago for a synopsis. Other than that, I can only recommend it to all viewers, with the highest possible marks that I would give to any production, film or television. This show, though unrelenting and brutal, was as great as it gets. I was surprised though, in Googling "Generation War" after finishing it up this evening, to see that it created quite a bit of controversy in Europe, where it was shown on tv beginning in 2013. Apparently, the ratings were huge, and while there was a consensus among critics on the high quality of the production, there were also divergent views on it's historical accuracy. Most of the controversy came out of Poland, where war historians and even the government objected to the way the Polish Resistance was portrayed as anti-Semitic. There were also other objections to the way the main characters - the five young German friends, two of whom were brothers who became soldiers in the Wehrmacht - were depicted in a sympathetic light. In the story, all five are caught up in the war in different ways, each of their situations horrible. Critics of the show, from what I read, did not like the portrayal of any Germans as victims.
I was not there (obviously), and can only judge by my own engrossment in the mini-series and my reading on the subject over the years, but in all fairness it seems clear to me that, while the Nazis were evil personified (as I have expressed many times), there were also certainly young soldiers and even Generals of the regular (non-Nazi) German Army, who - though they may have believed in the war at the beginning - came around through combat experience, and the horrors that they witnessed by the hands of their own countrymen (the SS), to silently object to what they were participating in, even though there was little to no chance to escape from that participation.
This is what "Generation War" shows, the plight of normal, fun loving young people, two of them soldiers indeed, but not ideologues, who became caught up in the gears of an organised and overpowering machinery. It chewed them up and spit them out, and the movie shows this in graphic detail. I personally do not feel that ordinary soldiers could be held to blame for what the Nazis perpetrated, and forced those soldiers to do. Now conversely, this is also not to say that there were not a lot of sadistic or brainwashed German soldiers in the regular army ranks. In fact, the movie shows this too. So I don't fully understand the criticism, though again, I am obviously not from Poland or Russia, nor was I alive at the time.
But the larger point, in the movie and in real life, is that war, in combination with fascism, or communism, or "USA! USA! USA!" sloganeering, can bring out sadistic tendencies in the personalities of people who "follow a leader".
People who never think for themselves. And again, this is what "Generation War" demonstrates, and now that I consider it, the very title of the show conveys this herd mentality : "Generation War".
A whole generation of a country - a country with a rich history, advanced in science and culture, a producer of geniuses of philosophy (Goethe) and music (Bach, Beethoven) - could be overtaken by the raging of a militarist dictator, and mostly fall in line with his ravings.
A whole generation convinced of Hitler's war.
But as the movie shows, there were some who weren't convinced, or who started out convinced and then became not only disillusioned but completely alienated and depersonalised.
So that's my take on it, my American take, from a guy who wasn't even born then, but who has studied the subject and read a lot about it. My two cents worth.
I am a person who thinks that we need to have a new type of revolution in the world, and that is a revolution of study. Rather than continue to fight one philosophy with another, like say "Communism against Capitalism", or "Nazism against Communism", or "Nationalism against Globalism", I would say that we need to take a step back and study these social and economic ways of life and try to understand why they were brought to bear on human beings in the first place.
I always use the example of the American Indians to demonstrate my point, of a multi-cultural society (multi-cultural because of many tribes), who lived simply, without complex philosophies about economics or political systems.
They lived as human beings, rather than as gigantic societies following overwhelming systems.
Now, the Indians were not perfect, and they lived in ways that were primitive compared to ours. They had warlike and brutal elements in their tribes, and some tribes had ruthless leaders. That much is human nature and happens throughout history in any type of society, advanced or primitive. There will always be sociopaths and megalomaniacs, and actually, these are the people we need to be on the lookout for, because they are the ones who seek power for the sake of having power over others, and for self-aggrandizement.
In using the Indians as an example, though, I use them not because they were "perfect humans", or some fantasy ideal society from the past. The past was rough going, and we are blessed beyond measure to have electricity and refrigeration, and medicine and solid buildings.
The reason I use the Indians as my example, is because they trusted.
They trusted in the Great Spirit, their God. They trusted in Nature to provide for them, through God. They generally did not try to dominate, or set up philosophical "systems" about "economics" that would, over time, only benefit those who were in charge of the systems.
I go out to Santa Susana to hike, and while I am grateful to live in modern times, and know that, as a modern person I would have a very hard time adapting to the conditions of an Indian life, I still can sense the peace they must have felt, not knowing the strain of the "systematic" thinking of the Europeans, the people from outside, who were far more advanced in their technology and comforts, but who also could not seem to live in peace with each other.
This is my example, the American Indians, who, though primitive, lived for thousands of years in relative peace with one another, and I contrast them with the Europeans, who were the forefathers of the white Americans, who advanced the world to amazing degrees with their technology, to the point that we went to the Moon, but who also created philosophical "systems" based on various types of "reasoning" and "logic", that wound up contrasting and competing with other people's philosophies, which then out of egocentric drives in their most privileged citizens led ultimately to the rise of things like Wall Street Capitalism and Superpowers, and the situation we find ourselves in today, with an entitled Cretin as our President, who taunts another cretin in communist Asia, at our expense.
This is the price of philosophical Systems, as I see it.
And I think it is finally more sane to take a step backwards, and to look to societies that lasted for millennia, and take some hints from them, and then adapt our technologies to fit the landscape.
To let nature rule, and God, and to dispense with ego, and sociopaths, and Systems.
It may be a pipe dream on my part for now, but this way of life is gonna come, one day.
See you in church in the morning. :):)
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