Tuesday, April 15, 2008

war novels

Looking at other novels published about world war 2, The thin red line, the bridge over the river kawi, good Shepard, from here to eternity- you find a lack of both female writing and female perceptive. Authors wants to write about heroes, and the easiest to portray this is though soldiers.


SF is important because it inverts the male authorship, but also because it highlights the role of families. I believe that it is easier to handle war when all you think about is battle. But when you start thinking about families, children etc, war becomes human.



Howard Zinn gave a speech in 2004 about World War 2



: "World War II is not simply and purely a 'good war.' It was accompanied by too many atrocities on our side--too many bombings of civilian populations. There were too many betrayals of the principles for which the war was supposed to have been fought.
"Yes, World War II had a strong moral aspect to it--the defeat of fascism. But I deeply resent the way the so-called good war has been used to cast its glow over all the immoral wars we have fought in the past fifty years: in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan. I certainly don't want our government to use the triumphal excitement surrounding World War II to cover up the horrors now taking place in Iraq. : The Progressive


Does the American public like SF because of its sappy war time theme? In the book, Germans are really so bad, people can still go to spas, they can still have a loving relationship and the kindness of the human spirit perseveres . Does SF glorify World War 2 though its treatment of war? Is the novel helping making war.. permissible?




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