Why We Fight

[Webb]

If you haven't seen these there is something seriously wrong with your country's educational system.

[url=http://www.metafilter.com/119978/Use-the-enemys-own-films-to-expose-their-enslaving-ends-Let-our-boys-hear-the-Nazis-and-the-Japs-shout-their-own-claims-of-masterrace-crudand-our-fighting-men-will-know-why-they-are-in-uniform]Use the enemy's own films to expose their enslaving ends. Let our boys hear the Nazis and the Japs shout their own claims of master-race crud

[wifesaysno]

There is something wrong with our education system...especially the whole college thing (far to expensive).

There are a lot of students that get excited when a history class gets to war because (and I quote) "war is cool!"....yep....but they cant name even the YEAR WW2 started or even the major belligerents. In short, they know very very little of any of the historical wars. The thing is, curriculums today do not leave enough time to discuss these world altering wars. They leave enough time to cover Martin Luther King Jr for a week...but covering a war that started the Cold War, killed 60million+, devastated several countries, hosted multiple genocides, was a clash of political ideals, advanced technology faster than anyother single event, and turned the US into a super power....nope, WW2 is no where near as important. Heck history classes talk about the hippies more than all of the major historical conflicts together!

Hopefully that does not happen to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars...if it does, there will be hell to pay!

[Bass]

Every fight is about:
Menings and/or belief!

[expat]

Ironic that we have to harp back to films that are 60 years old. Between the UK and the USA we could choose from;

1945-1946 War in Vietnam
1945-1949

[Webb]

2003-2011 Present Persian Gulf war Mk2

The Iraq war ended last December.

Since the only goal of the war was to kill Saddam Hussein there was no reason to continue it for more than five years after his death.

[ftldave]

Over the weekend my son and I watched the original version of the movie Red Dawn, about a Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan invasion of the United States, a Cold War version of World War 3. One of most memorable scenes to me is when a downed Air Force pilot is explaining to young resistance fighters what might have caused the war to begin.

Darryl Bates: What started it?
Col. Andy Tanner: I don't know. Two toughest kids on the block, I guess. Sooner or later, they're gonna fight.
Jed Eckert: That simple, is it?
Col. Andy Tanner: Or maybe somebody just forgot what it was like.

[Hagar]

[quote]Ironic that we have to harp back to films that are 60 years old. Between the UK and the USA we could choose from;

1945-1946 War in Vietnam
1945-1949

[Webb]

Military action should not be mistaken for war.  The United States has declared war only 5 times in its history.

War of 1812
Mexican-American War
Spanish-American War
World War I
World War II

[wifesaysno]

[quote]Military action should not be mistaken for war.

[Webb]

The Korean War was a civil war.

The United States wasn't officially a party.  It send military forces under the United Nations back when people thought the UN could actually do something and it wasn't openly hostile to western democracies.

This of course has no relation to a series of films produced between 1942-1945.

[expat]

[quote]Military action should not be mistaken for war.

[Webb]

War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.

People die in wars.

[wifesaysno]

War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.

People die in wars.

Sad truth. Other sad truth, war is not leaving human society anytime soon. Which is why I support further weapons development. By having high precision bomb delivery for example, we went from HUNDREDS of bombers in WW2 to area bomb a city just to take out a factory to ONE fighter dropping ONE bomb to take out just that building. Obviously it should not come to dropping that bomb, but going from dropping thousands of 500lb dumb bombs to dropping ONE 1,000lb JDAM I would say that is a worthy improvement.

[Webb]

Why didn't I just put this in Movies and Entertainment?

Classic series from the director of "It's A Wonderful Life" examines America's reluctant entry into World War II.

[C]

You forgot Korea 1950 - 1953.

Worth adding the events in the former Yugoslavian states between 1991 and 2000. Under the auspices of NATO, that was very close to being much bigger by the time they got to Kosovo (and bombed the backside off Mr Milosevic and his Serbian forces). The Chinese got a nose bashing too. Entirely accidentally too.

(As the wonderful American fighter pilot band sing:

But the bombing of the embassy in Moscow broke the ice,
Now that was just an accident and it happened only twice

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to guess what inspired those lines. Even if it did only happen once.)