Salon: "1917" has one major flaw - it's irresponsibly nationalistic

Holy shite

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Yet as I watched it, I felt very uneasy — not for aesthetic reasons, but for moral ones. “1917,” as its title indicates for the historically well-informed, is a World War I picture. Any film set during that conflict has a responsibility to account for the horrors of nationalism, much as a film that takes place during the Civil War must deal with slavery, and one that occurs during World War II must acknowledge fascism.

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quote:

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Since all of the major parties in World War I were nationalist, a movie like "1917" must acknowledge the inherent ambiguity of the conflict. Even if we are only being told a microcosmic story about two soldiers trying to survive a dangerous mission, we should still understand the larger tapestry in which those characters are mere threads. To do otherwise is to make war seem impersonal, like a natural disaster or a plague, rather than as an affliction caused by human beings — and for which people should be held accountable.

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if you want to see how the postmodern, "nuanced" rhetoric works, read that paragraph above

you cannot tell a story. you must present the totality of issues and ideas surrounding that point in history, tearing down the positive ideals of any sort of Western values. you replace those ideas with ambiguous conflict and resolutions (both to make the postmodernist feel intelligent/superior and to allow subjective interpretation attacking Western values)

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There is much moral accountability to go around in World War I. As historian Lawrence Rosenthal wrote, the Great Powers that started World War I did so because of “. . . a new and aggressive nationalism, different from its predecessors, [that] engaged the fierce us-them group emotions – loyalty inwards, aggression outwards – that characterise human relations at simpler sociological levels, like the family or the tribe.” It was this uniquely aggressive form of nationalism that drove Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip – who self-identified as a Yugoslav nationalist – to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914, thereby starting World War I.

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look at how warped his ideology has become with promoting these ideas. he's defending imperialism and subjugation of native people while attacking the "nationalist" response (trying to fight for the freedom of those subjugated natives). seriously what the frick?

oh yeah, and

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It was a similar breed of nationalism that forged the numerous European alliances of the time and allowed major world leaders, with the full might of the global empires that they commanded, to decide that they were both obligated to fight each other . . . and would profit, geopolitically and financially, from doing so.

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nothing says "nationalism" like "forged alliances" with other nations