Yes a19,
You and DS were right "on the mark"
re: <<Daniel Schorr commented that he was more worried about what Guantanamo was doing to us rather than to the detainees.
I think WWII accomplished some good things and then created some more bad things.>>
I don't know if you have read much of Paul Fussell's stuff, but he is the one "right on the mark" IMO, for he has been there and done that as you have.. And he started out as no bleeding heart liberal...
Just an example from an interview with David Gergen:
PAUL FUSSELL: What opened my eyes? Well, it took a long time actually because it didn’t happen all at once. But began opening my eyes was discovering that what I’d thought was a kind of fun setup of people marching in formation and wearing nice uniforms, nice patches on their shoulders and so on, gold bars, cross rifles, was an operation of mass murder closer to the criminalities known in New York and Chicago than anything noble. I should have known that already if I’d read enough, but I hadn’t. And it took me a little while to get over that. But I think the moment that really jolted me worse was waking up one morning after we had relieved another unit on the front line in Alsace. This was in November, 1944, and I hadn’t seen anything in the darkness when we arrived, but when dawn came, I noticed that we were lying in the midst of an immense field of dead German adolescent boys very much my age, very much people like me. And they’d been shot in various places. There were grenade fragments that hit them in various places. As I looked at those, I began to realize, God, this is what I’m doing here; I’m supposed to kill people like that, and, indeed, I can’t survive unless I do so, while they’re doing the same thing to me. And this is a "no win" situation, a classic. The only thing that’s going to help is for the war to end, but I knew it wouldn’t end because we had insisted upon unconditional surrender. It wouldn’t end either until we got to Berlin or the Soviets got to Berlin, and found that the latter was the way it ended. And that’s when I began to catch on about what war was and how we were really expendable, and that when we fell, other people would fill our ranks, and they would go on that way and go on that way and so on. And the people who were going to suffer were not the soldiers at all because once you’re killed, you’re out of it. You’re in oblivion, as their families on both sides, the German and American
pbs.org
I have read quite a few of his essays on war to nudity and he nails it pretty close on everything... You might want to "Google" him if you are interested....
Have a Great Holiday Weekend..
m |
