War is absolute shit, a crude and primitive method of conflict resolution, which seems more typical of other times, but which continues to devastate regions of the world, even the borders of Europe. Told from geopolitics or from the point of view of leaders, through arrows and maps, a war conflict can be an aseptic and cerebral event, like a game of Risk. It gains its insane character when it is seen at street level and in the trenches, where blood is spilled and bodies are broken, when the stories of those thousands or millions who, as civilians or as soldiers, were involved in the massacre are known. , in one position or another, on one side or another, victims or executioners, almost always in an absurd way or in defense of other people’s interests.
The Serie World War II: from the front (Netflix) uses real and colored images, compiled in dozens of the most important archives, and edited to achieve the most dramatic and spectacular effect, to focus on one of the greatest war disasters in History. It is not common to see a product of this ambition that puts war so close to the skin and the ground: here the policies of Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt or Stalin do not matter as much as the minuscule adventures of the soldiers who were involved in the war here and there, of the civilians and victims who suffered it.
The series has precisely been criticized for its spectacular nature: there is a strange beauty, for example, in the images of the Pacific War, between Japan and the United States, the blue of the sky and the sea, the gray of the destroyers and aircraft carriers. , the contrast with the bright orange of the explosions, which can give the observation of battles even a relaxing effect. Another scenario, more aesthetically brutal, is the one dominated by the brownish and sad tones of the war in the heart of Europe or by the aridity of Rommel’s campaign in North Africa. Color makes the Second World War not seem like a black and white event from another world: many of us children thought that the world of yesterday was physically a gray scale, that our grandparents fought without even being able to see the colors of things. Color makes these images closer.
Among the voiceovers are those of members of all armies, such as that American Jewish soldier who liberates a Nazi concentration camp and ends up marrying one of the liberated women, who he finds in deplorable conditions following years of suffering. Like those Russian soldiers who enter Berlin, or the British who flee from the beach at Dunkirk, or the Japanese kamikaze who survives his mission and is captured. The victims of famine and extermination, or that young German who survives the bombings of Hamburg. It might be you and me.
These Allied bombings of 131 German cities, such as Hamburg and Dresden, recall the famous book by WG Sebald On the natural history of destruction which tells how the civilians of those cities were cooked or charred in their own houses and streets, where the temperatures found on the surface of the sun were reached. 600,000 civilians killed and more than seven million homes destroyed. The events remained shrouded in silence, they did not cause the appropriate indignation because they were German victims and considered, therefore, guilty in some way for the rise of Hitler. Who can claim the role of victim?
Sebald narrates the joy with which the young British bombing crews approached the task, connecting live to the radio, as if they were going on an adventure rather than committing a massacre. In the Netflix series, one of them, now elderly, remembers, this time with regret, how he was entrusted with the mission of bombing and annihilating a refugee area where there were 60,000 civilians. And he had to do it, because he had no choice but to obey. The same banality of evil that Hannah Arendt observed in the figure of the concentration camp official Adolf Eichmann.
There was also joy in the crew of the Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and it reminded me of another war joy: that of the recruits and volunteers who rode the trains on their way to the trenches of the First World War. They thought they were heading for a short and heroic feat, imbued with the fierce war-mongering nationalism of the time, but they were heading for the slow and horrendous slaughterhouse of the trenches in the heart of Europe, where millions would agonize in the most undignified way. And without really knowing why.
In these two great wars the technology of death reached its maximum splendor: tanks, airplanes, submarines, aircraft carriers, horrendous chemical weapons such as mustard gas, the atomic bomb itself or the scientific and rational method to exterminate millions of people in the most efficient way in the Nazi camps. The success of thought was the debacle of humanity. That is why theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer considered that the Enlightenment and modernity had failed. In effect, the triple reason-progress-well-being had been diverted to lead to destruction and suffering. Science had gone astray, forced by eternal human aggressiveness and the desire for domination. Poetry would be impossible following Auschwitz.
Now the wars are close, in Ukraine or in Gaza where the State that brought together the people that were exterminated in the middle of the 20th century provokes its own massacre, in a fenced, blocked, devastated territory, where there is no respect for the lives of civilians. and a mountain of thousands of murdered children is built while thousands of other Palestinian citizens agonize and die buried alive under the rubble. The world, as during the run-up to the Second World War, prefers to look the other way: before that war there were also international demonstrations and insistent calls for a boycott in defense of the Jews persecuted by Hitler, as is now done in defense of the Palestinian civilians. It was ignored.
After the great wars, strategies were developed to avoid repeating the horror: the creation of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the concept of genocide as an international crime or international courts. Also from what is now the European Union. And even from the State of Israel, which, short-sightedly, trying to restore some victims, condemned others. Now, pacifist positions are once once more seen as an exercise in naivety in the face of stubborn human violence and a geopolitical reality that is said to be inevitable. The generations that suffered the wars of the 20th century have disappeared and the new generations run the risk of forgetting the sovereign shit that is war, no matter how much they have repeated it to us. It is worth remembering this, even if it is watching colored documentaries on Netflix.