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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 18 Oct 2008 01:25 am |
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Why does the Second World War continue to fascinate so many people (including, of course, myself)?
There are many parts to the answer to this, which will vary greatly from person to person, of course:
* It was an extremely complex and protracted conflict.
* It involved most of the civilised world, and affected all of it.
* It was frightening (often terrifying).
* The bad guys nearly won.
* It was exhilarating: for most of those who participated in it directly it was the most exciting thing which had ever happened to them.
* It changed the world as nothing which had happened before it except perhaps the last Ice Age had done; and so on and so forth.
Yes, yes, but why is the Second World War so much more fascinating than more recent conflicts such as, for example, the Vietnam War, or the Six Day War?
I believe the answer is that the Second World War continues to fascinate (unlike the First World War, for example, which is a crashing bore, just as it probably was at the time) primarily because this is the most remote major event in human history where the protagonists are recognisably like us. We could be there.
Think about it.
Before the Second World War, men wore funny hats - always - when they appeared in public. Winter or summer. Rain or shine. Quite soon after the War, they stopped doing this, and started to look like us (the poor sods).
Before the War, (most) women wore (most of the time) stuffy, upholstered, drab clothes. Some wore veils. Some wore gloves. (I can remember my mother wearing both.) Quite soon after the War, women began to dress much as they do now.
Before the War, people believed in the strangest things:
* the superiority of men (in everything except giving birth to and raising children and other minor domestic matters)
* the certainty of an afterlife
* the unimportance of the views, feelings and welfare of children (for many years I had nightmares arising from the films which my mother was permitted to take me to every week because, as a child under the age of six, I was reckoned to be too unsophisticated to absorb any messages from the silver screen, and was therefore exempt from censorship restrictions: watch a truly frightening film like John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk [1939] today in a darkened cinema and you, too, will be scared witless)
And so on and so forth.
After the War, these grotesque beliefs began to fade or be obliterated. (Although many remain, albeit in a diluted form. There are still intelligent people who believe in God, untroubled by the fact that (a) no two people give remotely similar accounts of this divine personage and (b) no evidence of his/her/its existence has yet emerged after several millenia of devout worship. As for superstition, on the first page of the new, glossy magazine which the Dominion-Post now inflicts on me each weekend are - wait for it - horoscopes...)
Them, not us:
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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Posted: 18 Oct 2008 02:11 am |
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What I'm saying, then, is that the Second World War marks a watershed.
Before the War you will find them: the people of history. Sometimes they say something which we recognise as reflecting feelings, aspirations and needs which we can relate to. Most of the time, however, they appear to inhabit an impossibly remote world. They are gone, like the Aztecs and the Romans, and we are here.
After the War, there is us. We dress more informally, and much more colourfully. We don't stand for God Save the Queen when we go to the movies, and nor are we asked to do so. We are much, much less certain (absolutist, if you will) about what we believe. We are more tolerant of differing beliefs in others, and differing lifestyles, although we still have a long way to go.
And lest it be thought that I am suggesting that we are in any fundamental way superior to those who have gone before us I would note that Jane Austen was plainly more truly civilised than anyone alive today - and she died over 190 years ago. Were Jane Austen alive today to write about that latter day Mrs Elton, Helen Clark!
But I digress. The point about the Second World War, and the second amazing fact about it as far as I'm concerned, is that it was fought by people who are plainly like us. When my mother had to wait for over a year to find out whether my father - a captive of the Afrika Korps - was still alive, her suffering was like mine or yours would have been. But the suffering of people in the Depression, or any one of the many miseries before it, was like the suffering of those who live in poverty in India or Africa today: undoubtedly real, but unutterably strange.
Surfers Paradise in the 1950s: us not them.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 21 Oct 2008 02:55 am |
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I read something this morning that expressed much better than I have been able to do the point I have been trying to make about this watershed marked by the Second World War, on one side of which lies them, so very different from us.
It was an article from the New York Times of 6 October, relating to an exhibition in New York of some of the so-called "Dead Sea Scrolls" - which aren't scrolls at all, apparently, but you can read the rest of the article here if you wish:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/arts/design/07scrol.html?_r=1&ref=design&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
Anyway, here's an excerpt from the article:
... Those discoveries are easier to comprehend than the scrolls and, in appearance, are more sensational, offering rare artifacts preserved in the desert’s time capsule: the base of a leather sandal that could still be worn, a fragment of cloth with an indigo decoration and, from near Qumran, a woman’s hairnet. Go, finally, because there is something rarely felt in exhibitions, and which the critic Walter Benjamin argued was heading toward extinction. In the 1930s he suggested that art objects were now so easily reproduced that they were being stripped of their “aura.” Aura, he suggested, is connected with uniqueness, but it also involves a sense of distance. An object possessing aura stands at a distance from us, no matter how near we get to it ...
This is what I mean about our ancestors before the War, and it is what makes their adventures and their exploits so strange-seeming. As you travel back into the past your time machine suddenly swoops upwards and away - away from familiar faces, and familiar objects. You are now in the world of the past, where they do things very differently ...
Them, not us:
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