Hi, sorry it took me so long to answer you. I haven't seen Band of Brothers. I probably will see it eventually, but it doesn't appeal to me as much as some other stories set in the period because it focuses on Americans. And in the US, there's a tendency to talk about the Second World War as though the US won the whole war single-handedly, and as though this were due entirely to the almost-superhuman personal and patriotic virtues of that generation of American men. I am so averse to these tropes that I tend to avoid US-made or US-focused stories about the war. I've heard that Band of Brothers is much better than that, but I've been burned by things like The Great Escape, the supposed classic that distorts a true and powerful story for the sake of showing that Americans Are Awesome, Especially Steve McQueen.
Black Hawk Down, Generation Kill, and other stories set during recent/ongoing wars are a bit of an issue for me too, because I have strong political feelings about (read: against) these wars. The Second World War is different for me, because as awful as it was, the moral issues in terms of aggression vs. self-defense and so on are fairly clear-cut. And the First World War was long enough ago that, while it's practically the definition of an unnecessary and unjustifiable war, I can just think of it as an awful tragedy. So I choose to mostly limit my viewing/reading to stories about those wars.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-11-19 05:55 pm (UTC)Black Hawk Down, Generation Kill, and other stories set during recent/ongoing wars are a bit of an issue for me too, because I have strong political feelings about (read: against) these wars. The Second World War is different for me, because as awful as it was, the moral issues in terms of aggression vs. self-defense and so on are fairly clear-cut. And the First World War was long enough ago that, while it's practically the definition of an unnecessary and unjustifiable war, I can just think of it as an awful tragedy. So I choose to mostly limit my viewing/reading to stories about those wars.