Yesterday I had the time and the opportunity to watch the famous Hollywood movie Fury, where Brad Pitt performs the character of a tank commander along the western side of the European war during second world war. The movie is clearly and undoubtedly nothing more that an american propaganda movie, completely unlinked with the reality. Despite the fact that the american tanks were technologically much inferior compared with their German counterparts, the personnel on the German side were, bravely and militarily speaking, much more well trained and more efficient on their tactics and ferocity on combat. During the last scene of this movie we can see Brad Pitt as tank commander shooting the very well prepared and well trained Waffen SS soldiers, where they are shot very easily and almost idiotically. According to to this movie, despite the low armour thickness of the american tanks, the heroes leading those tanks could make the difference.
History actually demonstrates that the opposite is true. The German defending forces were outnumbered by large ratios, but still they were able, due to technological superiority and better prepared and braver personnel cause severe casualties on the enemy forces. The Allies won the war through numbers, and today, that is perfectly clear. Michael Wittmann for instance, a German tank commander, was credited with the destruction of 138 enemy tanks during the second world war. Not only he had technological superiority with his Tiger, considered by many the best tank in warfare at the time due to its armour and fire power, but Wittmann was also a superb tactician and a ferocious attacker. These numbers have not at all comparisons on the Allies' side. All the history of the second world war by the German side, is actually made of heroism, greater bravery and technological superiority, having the third Reich being defeated by the huge sacrifice and greater number superiority of the Red Army.
Michael Wittmann is accounted to have destroyed 138 enemy tanks and also 132 anti-tank guns. In the air on the other side, the biggest ace of all times, Erich Hartmann, pilot of the German air-force, is accounted for having destroyed 352 enemy aircrafts. In a large list clearly dominated by Germans, the first american appears almost at its end having destroyed 38 enemy aircrafts, mainly in the Pacific war. We still have to take into account the great damage the German submarines provoked on enemy forces, considering the German naval task force were incredible inferior in numbers, being the camouflage of submarines the most optimal and efficient option.
I'm not at all defender of Nazi Germany, nor as pacifist have I any kind of veneration towards the German army, though I must stress out that american movies regarding the second world war are not better than the Nazi or the Stalinist propagandist counterparts of the time, in the sense that they impose on the masses and on the public opinion a total distorted and untruthful notion of reality. I despised the movie Fury neither because it has violence or because it's a blockbuster, but simply because the message it broadcasts, as in the great majority of the american movies, is simply totally incorrect and false. But what Hollywood actually is but the Ministry of Propaganda of USA.
A glance that way is instructive. "Films," Heinrich Goebbels opined, constitute a "scientific means of influencing the masses," of molding attitudes, and he cautioned, "a government must not neglect them." Movies were central to the Nazi regime's domestic propaganda blitz. Under Nazi rule, some 1,300 movies were approved or commissioned by the Reich. Robert Hertzstein, a former consultant to the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, notes in The War that Hitler Won that Goebbel's ministry salted popular films with repetitious words and symbols that stirred the emotions of the German populace: "heroism," "sacrifice," "mass murder," "hatred for Germany." (in Robert Edwin Herzstein, The War that Hitler Won: Goebbels and the Nazi Media Campaign, New York: Paragon, 1987, p. 272.) A half century later, Black Hawk Down -- with its profuse "heroism," "sacrifice," "mass murder," "hatred for America" -- swept the next bellicose right-wing "homeland." The parallels were glaring.
ResponderEliminarAnd obnoxious. Brendon Sexton, speaking at an anti-war forum held at Columbia University, recalled that in preparation for his role, he and a fellow actor flew to Georgia for `Ranger Orientation Training' at Fort Benning in Columbus. From Atlanta, they shuttled to the training site and "on our flight there were a bunch of guys with Marine haircuts speaking Spanish. It took us a few moments to realize these guys were `students' of the School of the Americas, the U.S. Army's own terrorist training camp in Latin America." This experience "put things into perspective: warlords, dictators and terrorists are normally okay with the U.S., as long as they do the bidding of U.S. corporate interests." ("What's wrong with Black Hawk Down? -- Black Hawk Down Actor Brendan Sexton on what really happened in Somalia," Z-Magazine Web Site, http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm)
in: Collateral Brain Damage