World War II // Current TV

Six Milion Jews - 1915-1938

This video documents 10 news articles mentioning the Six Million Jews figure fully... more

maasanova
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A pocket guide to Iran (1943)

“A pocket guide to Iran” was a booklet published by U.S. War Department in... more

sepia346
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4 months ago
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A Soldier’s Heart: Let There Be Light

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the invisible wound that scars war veterans, and some individuals are so afflicted that they die physically or psychologically from this traumatic wound through suicide, homicide or incurable psychosis. In 2012, this disorder is recognized and understood in ways it never was before, making it more possible for traumatized men and women to get the help they need. However, war-related PTSD certainly isn’t new, and when the 20th century and its technological might ushered in massively brutal, worldwide conflicts that buried forever idea of a “gentleman’s war,” it also drastically increased the psychological pressures on combat troops. Motion pictures have been used to document the many aspects of war. Over the years, the United States government has commissioned a number of documentaries that look at soldiers returning from theaters of war, as they attempt to reintegrate into the society they left behind.

Perhaps the most famous documentary about returning soldiers is the 1946 film “Let There Be Light” by the acclaimed filmmaker John Huston, who considered the film to be one of his best movies. However, its fame derives mainly from being kept hidden for 35 years after it was made, by a War Department uncomfortable with the notion that there is any lasting downside to war for the returning veteran. The War Department was so uneasy about this documentary that it had the film remade as “Shades of Gray,” a propaganda docudrama based on “Let There Be Light,” which not only eliminated African-American soldiers from the cast, but also suggested that only soldiers who were disturbed before they went to war broke down upon their return.

Film history isn’t the only context in which to appreciate Huston’s hour-long documentary, his third and final film for the Army Signal Corps. “Let There Be Light” is also one of the earliest commercial depictions of psychotherapy, in this case the military’s use of it to treat what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The U.S. military now offers a wide array of pre- and post-battle therapies to help soldiers recover from traumatic experiences. In contrast, “Let There Be Light’s” gruff doctors, who inject sodium amytal and conduct religious group therapy sessions, look prehistoric by comparison.

Nevertheless, “Let There Be Light,” like its routinely under-appreciated 1946 fictional counterpart, “The Best Years of Our Lives,” remains essential viewing. Each of the films conveys a sense of compassion toward soldiers; the soldiers presented in these films don’t ask to be called heroes, they only want normalcy. Today’s returning soldiers surely feel the same, and yet their experiences on the battlefield are increasingly abnormal, even unknown, to most people they encounter upon returning.

Seven months after the War Department forcibly prevented “Let There Be Light” from premiering at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, a disabled Army veteran named Harold Russell became the only man to win two Oscars for the same performance. Russell received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and an Honorary Award for Nonprofessional aActing for his role as a returned soldier in “The Best Years of Our Lives.” William Wyler’s 168-minute drama concerns the homecomings of three soldiers, and it was showered with awards throughout the winter and spring of 1947, including a Best Picture Oscar and multiple Golden Globes and New York Film Critics Circle citations.

“The Best Years of Our Lives” and “Let There Be Light” aren’t cynical or judgmental of American society, but are quietly brave and emotionally devastating. “Let There Be Light” attempts to shield us with its presentation of hospital interiors that are clean, orderly and positively overstaffed. Nonetheless, the men and their stories are unforgettable. You finish watching the film feeling emotionally drained and deeply grateful that they won’t have to fight again.

This piece includes a number of photographs and the full version of both films.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/a-soldiers-heart-let-there-be-light/Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the invisible wound that scars war veterans,... more

disembedded
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WW2 Games

Very specialized niche for people who like games in the "war" genre,... more

smith1302
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Never forget these Heros

68 Years ago today June, 6th 1944 D-Day

Radical_Centrist
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12 months ago
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America's World War II "Songbird" Turns 90 Today

Kitty Kallen, America's "Songbird" from the World War II era turns 90... more

thedirtman
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12 months ago
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Germans during the Second World (44 Pics)

Germans during the Second World (44 Pics)... more

neham
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February 9, 1945 - The Great Leap Eastward.

With big Allied advances come big Axis prisoners.

Gordonskene
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Les Visibles - The Big Ticket Item

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozemL3Oq21w

http://www.archive.org/details/LesVisibles-TheBigTicketItem

Heretic Productions presents "How Can so Many People be so Incredibly Blind? (The Big Ticket Item)

Download mp3 of this essay on politics and free speech

http://www.archive.org/download/LesVisibles-TheBigTicketItem/LesVisiblesBigTicketItem..mp3

You ask yourself, just how twisted, indifferent and malevolent can some people get before the universe begins to construct an international gallows franchise everywhere there needs to be one. Each day we see unknown wannabees and the usual suspects, vying and competing to see which of them can be registered and remembered as one of the greatest assholes of our time.

You’ve got Olympics scale competitors, like Janet Nazipolitano and Skull Chertoff. Even their own criminal associates have passed an inflexible law that these two are not allowed to breed. Of course, if you know more about them, you would realize that restriction is unnecessary. There are all kinds of rich people like Jane Harman, Jay Rockefeller, John Kerry, John McCain and others who weren’t satisfied to just spend their spouses or parent’s money and live high on the cannibal hog. They needed, through some terrible compulsion, to also be able to fuck with the lives of others for personal amusement. Why else would you go into public service if you already possessed the payoff for which people go into public service?

Of course there is the vanity of public exposure and personal importance and when you look and act like the serial killer version of Lyle Lovett or a poor man’s Hannibal Lector in Depends, then I guess Nature is telling you, you gotta do what you were designed to do, badly, or worse. There are a few who go into it just for the celebration of pure evil, like Joe Lieberman or Chuckie Schumer but they got those Satan does vaudeville genes.

Sometimes, I sit back and ask myself; where are and who are the good guys? Maybe Ron Paul is a good guy, maybe. We are damn well going to see whether he is now or not because he is in the catbird seat for where his caterwauling has led him. I guess I’d like him better if he didn’t sound like a perpetual member of the Vienna Boy’s Choir, which leads me to Dennis Kucinich, as a logical progression, I think. I begin to think the testosterone shortage is ubiquitous until I get a load of Jessie Ventura. He could be the real deal if he doesn’t turn into a TV personality to the extent he forgets what he came here for.

Alex Jones is not a good guy and neither is Noam Chomsky. I used to think that Chicago prosecutor might be good guy but apparently not. Back in the day, I thought Bill Clinton was a good guy, just to show you what a Holden Caulfield sort of callow youth I was. When he got chummy with George, (Hail Satan!), Bush Senior, I got the message. I mostly think Jimmy Carter is a good guy but everyone stops short of telling it like it is and most of you who read here and at the other fine emporiums of what’s actually going on, know what it’s all short of. I’m not obliquely referring to Kucinich here so, don’t think that. Get it? Never mind, cue Randy Newman.

Contwww.youtube.com/watch?v=ozemL3Oq21w... more

maasanova
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US army chief: Won't let Holocaust happen again

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey visited Sunday the Yad Vashem... more

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Two Buffalo Soldiers Tell Their Stories

Los Angeles Times... . Buffalo Soldiers tell their stories Two Buffalo... more

EthicalVegan
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December 15, 1941 - America's First Week Of War.

Yet another in the daily infusion of historic newscasts.

Gordonskene
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December 14, 1939 - Sea Battles And Christmas In Berlin.

Another week in history - this one from 1939.

Gordonskene
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1 year ago
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Paths of Hate: The Destructive Fury of War

“Paths of Hate” is an animated ten-minute short film directed by Damian... more

disembedded
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Mercy And Sorrow Place Third In MusicDish*China MV Competition

The video "1945" by China-based band Mercy And Sorrow directs our attention... more

MusicDishTV
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Veteran’s Day: May the Stories of Those Who Served Live On

As I write this two American flags hang on my wall. Both are folded into militarily... more

omnipotentpoobah
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1 year ago
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The Antiwar Comic: How Many Times?

Will we ever treat the veterans right?

TonyDiGerolamo
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October 28, 1941 - Inching Closer To World War.

Another day loaded with anxiety.

Gordonskene
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The Hiroshima Photographs: Ground Zero 1945

“Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945” is a new exhibition of once-classified images of atomic destruction at Hiroshima presently on display at New York City’s International Center of Photography. The collection of photographs both repels and fascinates the viewer, with its powerfully ugly portraits of an unpeopled and obliterated city. The photographs were originally part of a governmental analysis of the atomic bomb’s effect on concrete, wood and steel, and this catalog of devastation was meant to be seen only by postwar architects and engineers tasked with erecting the “bombproof” cities of the future.

The Hiroshima photos have a strange and contorted history. In the mid-1990s, the owner of a diner in Watertown, Massachusetts, was walking his dog when he spotted a beat-up suitcase sitting in a pile of trash. It turned out that the photographs inside had once belonged to Robert L. Corsbie, an engineer and expert on the effects of the bomb. Just how those photos wound up in his possession remains unclear. Corsbie belonged to a cadre of ordnance experts, engineers, photographers and draftsmen who were sent by President Truman to analyze the nuclear devastation.

The Hiroshima photographs are fundamentally different from the more familiar World War II pictures of European cities, such as Cologne, where the stones of the cathedral rise from the debris, and blown-out buildings loom like hollow-eyed zombies. Those ruins have a perverse but palpable grandeur, a gothic desolation that is missing from the scenes of Japan’s ravaged emptiness. In hauntingly stark contrast to the images of European destruction, the Hiroshima photographs are eerily mute. There are no people, only twisted metal, blistered walls and miles of rubble. Except for a few skeletal structures poking out of flattened wreckage, the city simply vanished. Hiroshima didn’t look like a bombed city; it looked instead as though a monstrous steamroller had passed over it and just squashed it out of existence. The Japanese city centers, constructed mostly of wood, simply went up in smoke when bombed.

Wary of the conquered people’s anger and grief, the US government imposed strict censorship in September 1945, confiscating pictures and ordering that no image be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility. It was not until 1952 that “Life Magazine” published a handful of photographs taken in the first days after the attack. Even now, such images are rarely displayed. That is why this cache of photographs is so important. Once part of a classified archive, then buried in a basement, thrown away and resurrected, it counteracts the universal tendency to aestheticise violence. There is nothing awe-inspiring here, or even poignant, just plain devastating facts.

This piece includes a number of photographs from the exhibition, a photo-gallery, a documentary short film and the acclaimed Japanese animated film, “Grave of the Fireflies.”

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/the-hiroshima-photographs-ground-zero-1945/“Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945” is a new exhibition of once-classified... more

disembedded
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Two fantastic videos honoring our World War II vets and deceased from Iraq and Afghanistan

Please take a couple of minutes to view two videos I have posted on my blog. One is a... more

BillCorcoran
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1 year ago
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