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Opinion | What Are the Stakes of ‘Civil War,’ Really? (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz

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Nothing depicted in the film — torture, summary executions and mass murder — is novel. It is part of our actual past. It has happened in many places around the world. It is happening right now in many places around the world. What makes the film striking, and I think effective, is that it shows us a vision of this violence in something like the contemporary United States.

...

More than anything else, “Civil War” is plugged into this almost libidinal desire. It shows people, on both sides of the conflict, relishing the opportunity to kill — taking pleasure in the chance to wipe their enemies from the earth. In depicting this, “Civil War” is asking its American viewers to take a long, hard look at what it means to want to bring harm to their fellow citizens.

By setting the details of the conflict aside to focus on the experience of violence, “Civil War” is a film that asks a single, simple question of its audience: Is this what you really want?

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[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I was watching TV during the early days of the Ukraine war, showing rockets slamming into an apartment building and blowing big fiery chunks out of it to fall down in fragments through the air. I was watching this in the company of somebody who was familiar with that exact neighborhood and had traveled there.

To say she was upset by it is an understatement.

Second story: In the late late days of World War 2, everyone in Germany knew it was lost. They were trying to negotiate with the oncoming armies, trying to spare villages and bridges and infrastructure from destruction, keep everybody fed and safe, just make as soft a landing as they could since the operation was going to go inevitably down in flames regardless. Some hard-line Nazi local administrators out in the country were adamant that they had to resist to the last man, they could make no quarter with the oncoming army even if that meant they had to fight them with like 2-3 pistols and nothing else, they needed to destroy their bridges and crops and to hell with what it meant for the future. And so on.

When the army actually arrived, almost invariably, those exact same officials fled in the night, leaving the townspeople alone and without either organized defense or a representative who could negotiate with the incoming army for safety.

I feel like with a few Patriot-Front exceptions, that's exactly how it's going to be with all the oldish white men who post on Facebook about how they can't wait for a civil war to be able to kill Democrats. Once there's no turning back from the unfolding horror, it's all of a sudden going to be a crisis that they're in a moderate level of danger, and they're going to start demanding that special exceptions to what's going on be made for them.