Smithsonian 02/08: Monumental Mission
February 18, 2008 by sagefever · 3 Comments
One of my favorite WW2 movies is The Train, with Burt Lancaster and Jeanne Moreau from 1964. The private art loot of a Nazi Col. being moved out of
France on trains and the citizens who stop it from happening~ more for the hate of the Nazi’s than the love of art and antiquities. As always, the true story is so much better.Harry Ettlinger sat shivering in the back of a truck bound from France to the Battle of the Bulge. A sergeant ran to the truck and said, “The following three guys get off the truck and come with me”. His name called, he got off and felt very lucky, and it was his 19th birthday. The Army needed interpreters for the Nuremburg trials and Ettlinger spoke like a native. He was, one of the lucky German Jews who escaped with his parents in 1938, just before Kristallnacht or the Night of the Broken Glass, that night that made the Jews future clear under Hitler. His Nuremburg mission evaporated, without explanation, and he found himself assigned to the “Monuments Men”.
Real War /Faux War
October 3, 2007 by demon princess · 1 Comment
Like most Americans, I suspect, I’ve been riveted by the PBS 7-part series on WWII, told from the ground up (by the real people who experienced it) , and with benefit of newly unearthed contemporaneous video footage (some in color) & stills. It’s been nothing short of astounding, in my opinion.
I fervently hope that Bush & Cheney have been watching, too, since neither of them seem have personally experienced war, & seem not to understand the first thing about the reality of it.
As I’ve often said in my blog, it’s painfully obvious to me that Bush’s glorious & never-ending, overhyped war on Terror, that he so likes to compare favorably to World Wars I & II, in rhetoric anyway (”they hate us for our freedoms!”) is, in actuality, a tempest in a teapot compared to those conflicts, and anybody who’s been watching the series is sure to get that point, too.
George’s bungled war on Iraq, & Cheney’s upcoming strikes on Iran are less about people “hating us for our freedoms” than hating us for manipulating & overthrowing their governments with impugnity & trying to control their resources for our benefit. There’s nothing very heroic in that.
Are Bush & Cheney watching? I seriously doubt it. But if they were, they’d perhaps learn something from history, such as:
1. War is hell, & takes an abominable toll on those forced to fight it. It’s not a matter to be declared lightly on bogus & trumped-up “evidence” .
2. Germany’s concentration camps & gas chambers were filled with not only with the ethnically demonized but homosexuals as well. Here in America, we allowed hysteria & fear to get the best of us when we put innocent American cititizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps.
Today, Republicans openly demonize non-hetereosexual lifestyles with federal marriage amendments & state governments argue over whether to “grant” basic human rights to gays. Torture gulags here & abroad have been revived, & indefinite detention without charges, & no hope of ever being freed, awaits any loose Muslim man Americans opt to treat with suspicion rather than tolerance.
3. Everything old is new again–but this time, with a difference. This time it’s a cynical stunt engineered for extreme partisan ends to provide a justification for suspension of civil liberties at home & the demonization of those who stand between us & “our” oil.
Submitted, that if we had leaders who truly understood the causes & costs of war, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.
http://www.pbs.org/thewar/about_making_the_war.htm
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