War is one of those really odd things where on one hand, you have people dying in horrible ways, but on the other hand, you generate amazing stories like this one. There are tons of books, movies, and documentaries on war stories from the big wars like WWII & people become hobbyists about it. Once in awhile, it does bother me...both of my grandpas fought in WWII & I wonder what they'd think about movies like Dunkirk:
Is there a time limit before we can glorify a war? If the bad guys are really bad guys, can we speed up that time limit for things like record-breaking sniper shots or dropping the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever?
I wonder what the people who fought in WWI would think about us playing video games of their sacrifices. OTOH, most of my buddies who are in the military & have lived and fought in the desert love playing shooter games that replicate the experience...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pY3hlQEOc0
Thanks for the thoughtful post.
There's not a time limit before it's 'right' to make a war entertainment - there's a time limit before we make the mistake of doing so, because we've forgotten the reality of it and are tempted by the 'excitement' and the 'stories' and such.
You don't have to wonder what the actual military people think - the generals of WWII told us that the glorifying of war they saw was wrong, and it was nothing but horror. Eisenhower represented their views well:
“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.”
Before WWI, there was a romanticism of war broadly, that helped lead the world into that 'great war'. Teddy Roosevelt exemplifed the view:
“I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one”
"“All the great masterful races have been fighting races,” he claimed. To fellow Anglo-Saxons, he said, “It is wholly impossible to avoid conflicts with the weaker races,” and added, “The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages.”
He urged Anglo-Saxon men to embrace war as a form of “spiritual renewal” that would prevent “race suicide” and stimulate “a clear instinct for racial selfishness.”"
This led to the horrors of WWI, which led civilization to refuse to repeat the horror - oh, wait. There's a reason it got renamed 'WWI'.
After Vietnam, the US was opposed to the mistakes that had been made. But the time of the George W. Bush presidency, the country was ready to largely embrace the administration's view that the lessons of Vietnam were a problem, not a solution, and we were ready for war again.
As a civilization we have a choice - to embrace war and its evil and horror by sanitizing it, by praising it, by being entertained by it - or to recognize it for what it is - mass murder at best a necessary evil and that viewing it as any better is enabling and causing evil.
That the term 'war porn' exists for this problem - that war has a seductiveness that helps history repeat itself.
Chris Hedges wrote a book about how society has a sort of mass craziness about war, the sociological effects, titled "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" - using his own experience as a war reporter who had become addicted to war for some of the book.
He talks about the appeal, and the effects, the shame and amnesia that follows.
The time factor you mentioned is not a legitimate sterilizing of war - it's a menace. And it's up to us to pick which view we want for civilization - and whether to embrace or oppose the 'entertainment' view of war that helps it happen again and again instead of the horror.
War doesn't actually become 'better' after a while. That's just people forgetting the truth and getting ready to repeat the mistake civilization has rarely been able to avoid of more war.
Valuing human life is a choice, an educational issue.
Without it, we can embrace genocide, slavery, and other wrongs. They don't seem 'wrong' necessarily. And we're pretty good at not valuing it for others, when we're wanting the thrill of winning a war.
The only right way to view an episode such as this sniper is at best as a tragic one, and that laughing, cheering, the 'sport' aspect of the difficulty of the shot is that loss of human values.
The people who are entertained are not the ones mourning the loss of life, and asking the important questions, why is there that war, and how can we prevent more killing, what are the underlying causes - viewing it as a horror rather than like a tv show providing entertainment.
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