"Gernot Hassenpflug" wrote in message
...

As I have never served in the military (and I say that proudly, with
similar respect given to those that did) I took the opportunity to
educate myself a little (being half-Austrian) by watching joint
German-Russian and German-British-US documentaries of the last part of
the war (on German soil) in the West, and the Russian campaign up
until the end of the war. When I was growing up a lot of that was
still unknown before Perestroika. It was enlightening, horrifying and
downright frightening, but at the same time immensely gratifying to
see action footage (only the US cameramen were unable to show their
own dead, still I weak point of the US nowadays I consider, a
manipulation of public opinion just as bad as that of the Nazis) and
honest interviews with participants. Especially interesting was how
ex-soldiers and civilians on all sides (but particularly German and
Russian from the Eastern Front) could look at their past and
categorically state that what they did was criminal in today's view,
but at the time was considered either morally correct (based on their
indoctrination) or necessary (such as the measures taken to prevent
civilians fleeing cities, or soldiers retreating instead of holding
their lines to the death).

I don't know why I never saw this footage before, certainly having P2P
helps a lot, but in my country of birth (South Africa) we did not have
access to anything like this direct education when I was growing up. I
remember my mother taking me to see "Platoon" when I was about 14 or
so, to encourage me to get an idea of what war meant - certainly she
had first-hand experience of the civilian side of it, born near Vienna
in that fatal year of 1933, living through the war and having
classmates killed by strafing attacks, and then subsisting until 1955
under the Russian occupation.

What all this boils down to is, a) there is for me no reason to
categorically denounce as evil people who do evil deeds during
wartime, b) the war waged by Western powers today, including friendly
fire incidents, is no worse than that of the past, c) people forget
through not having a tradition of remembrance. For those that cannot
get personal transmission from their relatives, I recommend spending
time looking at film reels and documentaries. Preaching to the
converted here, I suspect. But I say this as someone who for a long
time had an overriding interest in things naval and aeronautical, and
had almost no contact with the ground side of things, or the human
dimensions of conflict.

You would seem to expect people to be rational, to show detachment and to use
perspective! Heaven forefend!
--
Andrew Chaplin
SIT MIHI GLADIUS SICUT SANCTO MARTINO
(If you're going to e-mail me, you'll have to get "yourfinger." out.)