Wednesday, June 08, 2016

Overcorrection...

Look, I know that The Little Golden Book of World War Two is incorrect when it teaches kids that the war started when Pearl Harbor got bombed and then the US saved everybody from Hitler with 1911s and Sherman tanks.

And I know that Hollywood has performed some amazingly ahistorical gaffes in the past with movies like U-571 that basically write the British out of the story and fabricate tales of American war-winning out of whole cloth.

But to leap from that into this quote is pure knee-jerk-ism...
"But despite "Band of Brothers," despite "Saving Private Ryan," despite those 11 photographs taken by Robert Capa in the swell on that morning of June 6 1944, D-Day was not a predominantly American effort. Rather, it was an Allied effort with, if anything, Britain taking the lead."
Band of Brothers was a story specifically about Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The reason the British are not portrayed in Band of Brothers is because...sit down, this is going to come as a shock...American Army units tend to be made up of Americans, while British people are usually in British army units.

I blame Star Trek for this bizarre inclusionism. I realize that there were Vulcans and Russians and Klingons and Scotsmen and African-Americans on the bridge of the Enterprise, and that's great! Maybe that's how it is in the 23rd Century. But there were darn few Japanese-Americans on the bridge of CV-6 at the Battle of Midway, and when some future war movie throws some in there because inclusionism, it's just going to be awkward. "No, Billy, your great granddad wasn't on the Enterprise at Midway; he was in a concentration camp in the desert. No, an American concentration camp."
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