My vet’s dad was a famous photographer. During World War II he served in an Army photographic unit. They were one of the first into one of the German prison camps. Their commanding officer, a famous movie director, told them “Shoot all the film you have. If you don’t no one will ever believe us.”
My dad’s officemate, another attorney, was a tank commander during World War II and his unit, too, was one of the first into the prison camps. Twenty years later he still turned pale and went silent when asked what he had seen. He couldn’t bring himself to speak of it.
Those and many other similar reasons are why I think that the present tendency simply to hide the unpleasant for fear it will offend somebody is so ill-conceived. IndieWire reports:
Youtube hovers in paradox: It’s a platform for expression that vacillates on the kinds of expression it wants to support. Even when the site makes constructive changes in the content it promotes or prohibits, the outcomes raise questions about censorship and curation. On Wednesday YouTube revealed extensive new policies around hate speech in a move to “reduce more hateful and supremacist content from YouTube,†as the company announced in a blog post.
The policy also meant the removal of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda epic “Triumph of the Will,†which left the site hours after YouTube announced its new standards. After all, “Triumph of the Will†falls under the rubric of “videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory,†as YouTube explains one prohibited category. The movie is also regarded as one with major historical value, raising essential questions about the nature of the film medium. Does it belong in the same category as Lunikoff, a German Neo-Nazi band whose channel also got the boot?
People today, particularly young people, need to be offended. They need to be upset. They need to be outraged. They haven’t seen the horrors, they probably haven’t seen the crude number tattoos on people’s arms, and they probably haven’t seen the expressions on the faces of those who had seen.
And people are forgetting. Quite a bit of the forgetfulness is self-serving. The Germans have forgotten. The Arabs have forgotten. The Iranians have forgotten.
It will become easier to forget with every passing year.
They’ve forgotten to the point that many of them want to recreate the death camps for their political enemies.
This is not just a young people thing. After Nam it was decided that we wouldn’t show war pictures in our media again. Instead we got see a lot of nifty bombing photos, or we see carefully selected film of our guys on patrol. We never see dead soldiers and rarely dead civilians. Its almost as though no one sheds blood anymore in our wars. Couple that with a volunteer military and a tiny fraction of our population serving and it makes it easy to send our troops off to war since we never see them die. We just lionize them and talk about how much we support them, then send them to die someplace far off for reasons our leaders cannot clearly articulate.
Steve
Err… Black hawk down? Apocalypse Now? American Sniper? Plenty of other examples.
There have been numerous movies about the tolls of war since Vietnam.
And, of course, Saving Private Ryan.
I think Steve meant actual war scenes, and I think he’s right.
Summertime, in 1950s Boston, there were lots of those blue tattoos on display.