One Utah

Documentarian Ken Burns has been making the rounds, giving variations of the same interview to promote his new 14-hour WW II documentary, The War that begins tomorrow night. To be honest, I’m not sure I’ll watch the whole thing because Burn’s previous war chronicle The Civil War was so depressing. Truth about war is not good for your mental health, as the veterans interviewed in “The War” will no doubt explain.

However, I think Burns deserves credit for trying to make Americans face the truth. In particular, he has an answer for those who try to dishonestly compare WW II and Iraq. One of the first things said in the documentary: there are no good wars, but sometimes there are necessary wars. Viewers can draw their own conclusions. Here’s what Burns said on Keith Olbermann’s show on Thursday night:

BURNS: We are not interested in celebrity generals and politicians, or strategy and tactics, or armaments and weaponry, or all things Nazi. We’re interested in what so-called ordinary human beings did. And so we just listened for them… How did you feel? What was it like to be in battle?

Because, as we know from Iraq, as we know from the Peloponnesian Wars, the experience of war is essentially the same; I was scared, I was bored, I was hot, I was cold. My officers didn’t know what they were doing. I didn’t get the right equipment. I saw bad things. I did bad things. I lost good friends. That’s been the same since the beginning of human history and it will be, I’m sorry to say, the same until human beings are no more…

We now have a separate military class that suffers its losses apart and alone from the rest of us. There wasn’t a family on any street in any town in America during the Second World War that wasn’t actively involved in this effort. We knew what was going on and we understood a fundamental truth, that in shared sacrifice, we were going to make ourselves richer, not just spiritually and communally richer, but financially, materially richer.

Today we’re all independent free agents. We were asked nothing at 9/11, except to go shopping. And so we have squandered the opportunity to participate in this. We say this is a huge struggle for the very survival of our civilization, and yet nobody’s asked to do anything here. We are six years out from the 9/11 attacks. We could be free of a dependency on foreign oil. We could have solved an infrastructure problem. Our bridges would be standing. Our levees would still hold….

OLBERMANN: We are asked to shut up and agree now, and one of the things—when we’re asked to do that, the Second World War is invariably invoked, in terms of censorship, and there was no negative reporting. Straighten us out about this, as I know you do in the series.

BURNS: Well, you know, it does come back to us that there was censorship and there was a lot of censorship. Guys weren’t allowed to reflect their position in their letters. They couldn’t keep diaries or journals. In the beginning, the news was carefully censored. We didn’t know until after the war the exact toll at Pearl Harbor, the thing that started it.

But along the way, we began to understand that a Democratic people had to know what was going on. They had to know the sacrifices their young men were making, and why we at home were making those sacrifices. And so we began in ‘43 to show pictures of American dead. We began to show later on that same year motion picture footage, graphic motion picture footage, in a film created by the United States government, to tell its people what its young men were going through, and the idea that it would increase enlistment didn’t happen. But it sure brought people to buy a lot more war bonds.

We saw caskets coming back. Today, in order to find out a sense of what the real cost of war is, you sort of feel like a pornographer on the Internet. You have to search out these desperate sites, because we do not have a media in this country that is willing to say this is what it looks like.

The video is on the MSNBC website– click on “The greatest generation.”

This entry was posted Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 9:35 am and is filed under 4th Estate (Media), 9/11, Iraq, Keith Olbermann, National Politics, This Blog, War. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.