Witness - by Mr. Fish Films about war, shorn of the bone crushing fear, the putrid stench of the corpses, the deafening noise of explosions, the constant exhaustion and the nervous anxiety that comes with trying to understand what is happening in the terrifying chaos, are pale and inadequate reflections of the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter. And these are the good films, of which there are only a few.
I'm experiencing cognitive dissonance as our pre-eminent antiwar voice recommends a war movie that only shows atrocities committed by the Russian side while ignoring the atrocities known to have been committed by the Ukrainian side. This war will only end when the west stops sending weapons to Ukraine. But the continued highlighting of Russian atrocities in the western media will only make it more difficult for western leaders to stop arming Ukraine and enter meaningful security negotiations with Russia.
Thank you for your summary of this important film. However, I don't think I could bear to watch it. I have been reading Ian Morris's book "Why the West Rules for Now." His excursions into human history are filled with so much unspeakable brutality that I can't help but wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong with the human brain.
Only "war movie" that ever seemed without bias to me was actually the post–nuclear war movie, "On the Beach" because, without any finger-pointing, it blamed the collective stupidity of humanity for the outcome of wide-scale death and devastation, in that instance, human extinction.
War is a form of insanity with no good guys. No matter how hard people like Mr. Hedges try to get that point across it will always fall on a large portion of deaf ears. e.g. reporting one side is propoganda. [No understanding that the reporter has to survive]
“Stories I wrote for The New York Times documenting Bosnian Serb atrocities were used as evidence in the International Court in the Hague to prosecute war criminals.”
And stories that reported the false flag mass murder of Bosnian Muslims by Alija Izetbegovic, a Bosnian Muslim leader were never to be reported or come to light in western media.
The Bosnian Serbs were successfully prosecuted for crimes against humanity based on corpses and 2nd hand testimony, because there was no first-hand documentation. No pictures, only multiple selective witness testimony, which is either a low bar for International Criminal Court prosecutorial standards or an orchestrated effort to push a preferred narrative.
I refer anyone interested in the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and the subsequent NATO bombing of Bosnian Serbs to Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton by Diana Johnstone.
Before the invasion, People's Republics in Donbas, mostly Russians under civil war and genocidal policies had chosen Russia as opposed to the attackers from Kiev (8 years of attacks), and today Mariuopol is practically rebuilt with many new schools, hospitals and a contented population with real jobs that were not possible with the gross hostilities against them with over 18thousand dead over 8 years. Hundreds of youtube videos for a reality check about Maruipol and Crimea as well.
Not to be contrarian, because I do understand the point, but there are great war films if you go back before war was purely a corporate endeavor.
The difference is that when war is treated as satire, (Strangelove, Mash), it ceases to shock but it makes us think. So do ‘Paths of Glory’, ‘The Grand Illusion’, and ‘Apocalypse Now’.
I believe in the power of Art. But we won’t be seeing either sort of film so long as the Pentagon demands script approval at the expense of material assistance. Saving Private Ryan, is the result.
All wars are crimes against humanity. In our cursed days, the heads of state of the US, Russia, and Ukraine are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and likewise all their co-conspirators hiding in corrupt judiciaries, in corrupt legislatures, and especially the salivating ghouls managing their death cult military corporations that have monetized and commodified human corpses into their filthy lucre, reeking of the blood slaughter their hellish flesh grinding profits have produced. They have cursed themselves. They have written their names into the Cosmic Annals of Infamy.
Given all these comments, when is protest for Peace going to become so massive around the White House and relentlessly so present that Biden becomes sufficiently hounded into submitting to a peace deal? Or are the commentators here against the ugly mayhem just in it for the discussion? To blow off steam?what tips people out of their inertia to act? Purposefully and with discipline?
Some of the most graphic anti war book/movies are "Johnny Got His Gun" "Catch 22" "The Naked and the Dead" "All is quiet on the Western Front" "Storm of Steel". Hypocrisy oozes from and between the pages. The best book about the beginning's of the Military's Industrial Complex is "The Merchants of Death" about WW1 war profiteers that gave wealth to the Power Elite that controls the US to this day. It should be a documentary. One snippet describes how the German bomb makers sued the British government for patent law violation because they reversed engineered German fuses. The Germans won the case! That in a nut shell describes the Machiavellian Corporate use of power and influence.
Apparently John Mearsheimer and Norman Finkelstein - whom I greatly admire -have said they support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is unfortunate because, while they are correct in acknowledging the enormous role of U.S.A. in antagonizing Russia into invading, it still amounts to an armchair general mentality common in academia. In war one side can be more vicious and brutal towards civilians, say - but, with rare exceptions, the madness of war is a contagion that no soldier or many civilians are inoculated against. The bifurcation of a conflict into good vs. bad { an American favourite } only appears coherent from a safe distance. The WWII film Come And See does an excellent job of conveying the effects of this contagion, as it infects a young Belarusian man/boy and the viewer watches it takes it's course; eventually turning him into a haggard old man. But Come And See also presents all of the German invaders as phantasmagoric monsters - which, no doubt many were. But, as history has shown, some of them were actually decent people swept up in the historical moment - Carl Ludwig "Luz" Long is one example. War "makes the good better and the bad worse."
Your comments are insightful. It seems we, those at home, spared from the ravages of war, lack the imagination to understand the horror of war. As often as we’re told, we still fail to comprehend. Too many are eager to wave the flag and many, too young, to truly understand are ready to sign away their souls to “defend freedom” and other lies perpetrated by a government corrupted by the economics of war and the greed of arms dealers.
Not being one who prays, I yet pray for the day there are no war movies, as there are no more wars!
I'm experiencing cognitive dissonance as our pre-eminent antiwar voice recommends a war movie that only shows atrocities committed by the Russian side while ignoring the atrocities known to have been committed by the Ukrainian side. This war will only end when the west stops sending weapons to Ukraine. But the continued highlighting of Russian atrocities in the western media will only make it more difficult for western leaders to stop arming Ukraine and enter meaningful security negotiations with Russia.
But if the film reports only one side, isn't it propaganda in the service of war?
Thank you for your summary of this important film. However, I don't think I could bear to watch it. I have been reading Ian Morris's book "Why the West Rules for Now." His excursions into human history are filled with so much unspeakable brutality that I can't help but wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong with the human brain.
This reminded me of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “War Photographer.”
War Photographer
Carol Ann Duffy
In his dark room he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.
He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands, which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.
Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.
A hundred agonies in black and white
from which his editor will pick out five or six
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns his living and they do not care.
Only "war movie" that ever seemed without bias to me was actually the post–nuclear war movie, "On the Beach" because, without any finger-pointing, it blamed the collective stupidity of humanity for the outcome of wide-scale death and devastation, in that instance, human extinction.
War is a form of insanity with no good guys. No matter how hard people like Mr. Hedges try to get that point across it will always fall on a large portion of deaf ears. e.g. reporting one side is propoganda. [No understanding that the reporter has to survive]
“Stories I wrote for The New York Times documenting Bosnian Serb atrocities were used as evidence in the International Court in the Hague to prosecute war criminals.”
And stories that reported the false flag mass murder of Bosnian Muslims by Alija Izetbegovic, a Bosnian Muslim leader were never to be reported or come to light in western media.
The Bosnian Serbs were successfully prosecuted for crimes against humanity based on corpses and 2nd hand testimony, because there was no first-hand documentation. No pictures, only multiple selective witness testimony, which is either a low bar for International Criminal Court prosecutorial standards or an orchestrated effort to push a preferred narrative.
I refer anyone interested in the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and the subsequent NATO bombing of Bosnian Serbs to Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton by Diana Johnstone.
Before the invasion, People's Republics in Donbas, mostly Russians under civil war and genocidal policies had chosen Russia as opposed to the attackers from Kiev (8 years of attacks), and today Mariuopol is practically rebuilt with many new schools, hospitals and a contented population with real jobs that were not possible with the gross hostilities against them with over 18thousand dead over 8 years. Hundreds of youtube videos for a reality check about Maruipol and Crimea as well.
Not to be contrarian, because I do understand the point, but there are great war films if you go back before war was purely a corporate endeavor.
The difference is that when war is treated as satire, (Strangelove, Mash), it ceases to shock but it makes us think. So do ‘Paths of Glory’, ‘The Grand Illusion’, and ‘Apocalypse Now’.
I believe in the power of Art. But we won’t be seeing either sort of film so long as the Pentagon demands script approval at the expense of material assistance. Saving Private Ryan, is the result.
All wars are crimes against humanity. In our cursed days, the heads of state of the US, Russia, and Ukraine are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and likewise all their co-conspirators hiding in corrupt judiciaries, in corrupt legislatures, and especially the salivating ghouls managing their death cult military corporations that have monetized and commodified human corpses into their filthy lucre, reeking of the blood slaughter their hellish flesh grinding profits have produced. They have cursed themselves. They have written their names into the Cosmic Annals of Infamy.
Incredible writing as always Chris.
Given all these comments, when is protest for Peace going to become so massive around the White House and relentlessly so present that Biden becomes sufficiently hounded into submitting to a peace deal? Or are the commentators here against the ugly mayhem just in it for the discussion? To blow off steam?what tips people out of their inertia to act? Purposefully and with discipline?
Some of the most graphic anti war book/movies are "Johnny Got His Gun" "Catch 22" "The Naked and the Dead" "All is quiet on the Western Front" "Storm of Steel". Hypocrisy oozes from and between the pages. The best book about the beginning's of the Military's Industrial Complex is "The Merchants of Death" about WW1 war profiteers that gave wealth to the Power Elite that controls the US to this day. It should be a documentary. One snippet describes how the German bomb makers sued the British government for patent law violation because they reversed engineered German fuses. The Germans won the case! That in a nut shell describes the Machiavellian Corporate use of power and influence.
Apparently John Mearsheimer and Norman Finkelstein - whom I greatly admire -have said they support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is unfortunate because, while they are correct in acknowledging the enormous role of U.S.A. in antagonizing Russia into invading, it still amounts to an armchair general mentality common in academia. In war one side can be more vicious and brutal towards civilians, say - but, with rare exceptions, the madness of war is a contagion that no soldier or many civilians are inoculated against. The bifurcation of a conflict into good vs. bad { an American favourite } only appears coherent from a safe distance. The WWII film Come And See does an excellent job of conveying the effects of this contagion, as it infects a young Belarusian man/boy and the viewer watches it takes it's course; eventually turning him into a haggard old man. But Come And See also presents all of the German invaders as phantasmagoric monsters - which, no doubt many were. But, as history has shown, some of them were actually decent people swept up in the historical moment - Carl Ludwig "Luz" Long is one example. War "makes the good better and the bad worse."
Your comments are insightful. It seems we, those at home, spared from the ravages of war, lack the imagination to understand the horror of war. As often as we’re told, we still fail to comprehend. Too many are eager to wave the flag and many, too young, to truly understand are ready to sign away their souls to “defend freedom” and other lies perpetrated by a government corrupted by the economics of war and the greed of arms dealers.
Not being one who prays, I yet pray for the day there are no war movies, as there are no more wars!
Thanks, Chris. I know how hard it was for you to revisit your war correspondent memories.