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Showing Original Post only (View all)Peter Jackson's Cartoon War Sanitized images like these are war pornography. That they are no longe [View all]
Peter Jacksons Cartoon War
Sanitized images like these are war pornography. That they are no longer jerky and grainy and have been colorized in 3D merely gives old war porn a modern sheen.
by
Chris Hedges
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"It is fortunate all the participants in the war are dead," writes Hedges of the new film, They Shall Not Grow Old. "They would find the film another example of the monstrous lie that denied their reality, ignored or minimized their suffering and never held the militarists, careerists, profiteers and imbeciles who prosecuted the war accountable." (Photo: They Shall Not Grow Old/Warner Bros.)
When director-producer Peter Jacksons World War I film, They Shall Not Grow Old, which miraculously transforms grainy, choppy black-and-white archival footage from the war into a modern 3D color extravaganza, begins, he bombards us with the clichés used to ennoble war. Veterans, over background music, say things like I wouldnt have missed it, I would go through it all over again because I enjoyed the service life and It made me a man. It must have taken some effort after the war to find the tiny minority of veterans willing to utter this rubbish. Military life is a form of servitude, prolonged exposure to combat leaves you broken, scarred for life by trauma and often so numb you have difficulty connecting with others, and the last thing war does is make you a man.
Far more common was the experience of the actor Wilfrid Lawson, who was wounded in the war and as a result had a metal plate in his skull. He drank heavily to dull the incessant pain. In his memoirs Inside Memory, Timothy Findley, who acted with him, recalled that Lawson always went to bed sodden and all night long he would be dragged from one nightmare to anotheroften yellingmore often screamingvery often struggling physically to free himself of impeding bedclothes and threatening shapes in the shadows. He would pound the walls, shouting Help! Help! Help! The noise, my dearand the people.
David Lloyd George, wartime prime minister of Britain, in his memoirs used language like this to describe the conflict:
nexhaustible vanity that will never admit a mistake
individuals who would rather the million perish than that they as leaders should owneven to themselvesthat they were blunderers
the notoriety attained by a narrow and stubborn egotism, unsurpassed among the records of disaster wrought by human complacency
a bad scheme badly handled
impossible orders issued by Generals who had no idea what the execution of their commands really meant
this insane enterprise
this muddy and muddle-headed venture.
The British Imperial War Museum, which was behind the Jackson film, had no interest in portraying the dark reality of war. War may be savage, brutal and hard, but it is also, according to the myth, ennobling, heroic and selfless. You can believe this drivel only if you have never been in combat, which is what allows Jackson to modernize a cartoon version of war.
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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/11/peter-jacksons-cartoon-war