thanks jim. i knew i didn't want to watch it and now i know why. germany may have faced up to some of its demons of that war, and japan is struggling, and so far doesn't look to be as successful as germany, to face its demons. meanwhile we are contemplating another preemptive war.
I did watch Burns's Civil War which is why I did not watch this documentary. I saw Burns on the Daily Show the other day, and he seems utterly unchanged from the days of his Civil War excesses. He seems a singularly weird, self-congratulatory, egotistical man.
Thanks for writing this review, jim. Everything else I read was praise-worthy, and I thought I might have missed something. I had already seen the endless battlefield dead in the Civil War, heard the sonorous voiceover, and the practiced monotone of importance, that was enough for me.
We don't care for his retrospectives here, either.
Maybe I was more forgiving of this media extravaganza because one of the spotlighted by Burns was Sacramento. Since I live near Sacto it was interesting to see photos from the 40s.
I agree completely with your take about how superficially the dropping of the atomic bomb (twice!) on civilians was represented.
I also enjoyed the music.
My guess is you never served in the service nor have you traveled the world. My father was 21 when he went to the war and he survived. your take belittles the sacrifices that allow you to write your opinion today. Zen? I doubt you have the slightest concept of Zen. Your criticism of the statistics on probable dead if an invasion occurred? Where are yours? In fact tell me about your life of service to enjoy the benefits of this country. You bemoan and criticize Burns Americanism...why? In fact what credentials, qualifications or anything else do you have to even address an historic event of this magnitude? Burns did his research and if his perspective is slanted so be it. What have you done?
P ....
Patrick, my criticism in a nutshell is that Burns trivializes both WWII and human devastation it caused, in his project to glorify that war. As one of his veterans put it, there are no good wars, but some wars are necessary wars. Burns doesn't believe this, and makes a living glorifying armed conflict. His WWII mythmaking (which seems to be part of the greatest generation nonsense--people who believe that there is actually such a thing as a "generation" great or small make themselves, for whatever reason, the unfortunate inhabitants of a conceptual universe greatly at odds with reality itself) lends itself to a project both far greater and far worse than his own, namely the ongoing right-wing effort to establish a corporate police state hiding behind a phony smoke-and-mirrors "America" cooked up with equal parts ancestor worship and terror-mongering.
And, btw, I greatly respect our ancestors, but they were no different from you and me, except they were not living in a time when the leaders of our country were actively trying to destroy the constitution. In that respect, at least, they were more fortunate than we are.
WRT the dropping of the atomic bomb on civilian populations, it is as I mentioned quite easy to come up with horrific numbers of hypothetical dead to justify a horrific but lesser number of non-hypothetical dead, whose deaths are imagined to have prevented the larger hypothetical number of deaths from occurring. Anyone can extract such a number from the cleft in his buttocks and hold it up like a clove of garlic to drive off imaginary vampires, against those of us who uphold civilization and decency.
Such numbers, given both their origin and statistical and historical unsoundness, stink.
"Our guys are heroes. The Japs are fanatics."
If the cavalry won, it was a victory.
If the Indians won, it was a massacre.
Some things never change, do they?
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