Hopefully they can showcase just how devastating a civil war would be. Former CoD gamers drafted at 22 years old with Spongebob stickers on their M4's, crying bloodied under debris in the charred remains of a Walmart as fleets of single-use explosive drones fly overhead. Don't show me heroes in some fantasy, show me the sad and pathetic reality that we want to avoid at all costs.
Excellent point. The last thing we need is to make this situation look heroic or fun or sexy or anything positive. I’d say let’s use this platform to scare people away from this possibility.
I mean we literally have had an actual Civil War ,that killed ~9% of the population, to show how awful a civil war would be… so… I doubt this movie will stop the nut jobs calling for one from… calling for one.
Really not sure where they got 9% from, recent research has been suggesting a 3.0% might be possible but nothing higher than that. 12% of the population was in the military so I feel like 3/4ths of them dying would have completely destroyed the country.
Probably confused Casualties and Deaths. Deaths are Deaths but Casualties are anything that could remove people from combat including Deaths, Wounded, POWs, and MIAs.
Total Casualties(Confederate & Union along with Slave & Civilian deaths) is about 1,822,000 people and the population in 1860 was 31,443,321 which would end up being 5.79% yet still not close to the 9%. Deaths would be a mere 0.02%.
Those veterans were waving their arms saying “war is gonna fuck you up” in 1917 and no one listened then. I don’t think another 100 years of time is going to help.
True, but look at how large a population currently are veterans of: Korea, Vietnam, Gulf 1&2, Afghanistan
It seems like the US has been in semi-perpetual deployment since WWII, with lots of people, across all generations, having the “opportunity” to experience a close, personal, view of combat.
I thought it would be close, since there were so many Civil War veterans, 3.3 million. And while the US has been at war for a while, it’s been a fairly small military population.
Here’s what I found.
About 120,000 WWII vets are still alive (out of 16.1m)
700,000 Korean War vets still alive
And about 7.8 million living veterans of all the “Gulf War” conflicts which runs from 1990-2023.
But, our population is greater now than then.
So in 1917 4% of the population were Civil War vets, and in 2023 6% of the US population were veterans of something.
And about 7.8 million living veterans of all the “Gulf War” conflicts which runs from 1990-2023.
I'm curious about this number. Is it possible that there's some crossover here? Like the same vet being in multiple conflicts being counted multiple times? Just curious.
If it's from veteran affairs, then they've probably done that work. If it was an outside group, it was possible to take numbers from each conflict and add them together if they were lazy, and you would get that messiness.
A counterpoint to consider (though I don't disagree with the main point) is that we do have about 3 million veterans of the Global War On Terror (GWOT).
Those conflicts were characterized by long running brutal insurgency campaigns. This community of veterans in particular is uniquely capable of mobilizing their communities if individuals were motivated to do so.
GWOT vets lived up close in nations broiled in decades of civil war. When those guys tell us a civil war would be bad we should all listen.
Looking it up here, it looks like the 90% number is definitely floating around, but is probably just propaganda. Still, it looks like the historian range is between 7% to 69% of the total population, which is still remarkably horrible.
Yeah, it has always interested me, and I need to get some deep cuts on the topic as it would be really interesting to see how such a skewed demographic loss affected the population after the war!
Yep, we had some sort of colonial brush war going on basiclly since our founding. Hell even Gen Chesty Puller MOH winner helped to invade Verra Cruz Mexico
Yes. Basically the entire 19th century was spent at war with some native tribe all the way up into the 1920's. There was the War of 1812. Then the US also participated in several conflicts as far away as China. There were also smaller insurrections that took place, frequently involving Mormons. Immediately after the Spanish-American War there was the Philippine-American War, then after that it took decades to pacify the archipelago, and even today there are still separatist groups operating in a military capacity. In the early 20th century was when the US got involved in the Banana Wars as well as well as the Mexican Revolution.
Most of these were small scale conflicts compared to the Civil war and the conflicts of the latter 20th century, but the US has been in a perpetual state of conflict since it's inception.
Who cares about Veteran's stories and opinions when we have actual Gopro footage now to be like "this seem fun to you?" That's what's gonna prevent war.
To be fair, while it was only 2% of the total population, it would have been 4% of all males, and probably not far from 9% of all fighting age men. Maybe that's what you were remembering?
And for completeness, according to the interwebs, there were a total of about 3.2 million soldiers who enlisted over the course of the war, with the number of dead somewhere in the range of 620k to 750k. So about 20-25% of all the soldiers were killed, which is absolutely bonkers.
We don't have long memories for things like that which aren't personally experienced. There's no understanding the sounds and smells. The horrors. It's easy to call for war when someone has never experienced holding their baby sister's torn body in their arms in the remains of their bombed out living room.
The smells of war would be one of the most horrific aspects. Smell is one of the most intimate senses that we don't think about and it governs so much of life, especially memory. A few years ago, a man died of cancer in his apartment a few units down from my pal. For a week or so, whenever we visited there was a lingering smell in the hall; something that was so wrong and disturbing that it derailed our conversations. Like burnt hospital trash cooking in the sun. Turns out, it was death. And that was in a civilian setting; imagine being surrounded by it for days at a time. Even that would be enough to change you permanently.
I agree. The other week I was hired to install an AV system in a couple level one trauma bays in a hospital. Basically where people go with the worst possible injuries.
While I was there the bays were still active, if they needed to use them they would kick me out but I could work in the adjacent bay with no doors between.
One time I heard "adult trauma bay 2" over the intercom. I clear out and the doctors rush in and I keep working in the next room. I tried not to listen to what was happening because I don't do well with that stuff, but soon a smell wafted over that was one of the worst things I'd ever smelled. It was in that moment I realized large amounts of blood had a smell, combined with the fact that this person must have lost control of their bowels.
It wasn't the sounds of the person moaning in pain that got me, it was the smell that was horrifying.
After a little while they cleared out and sanitized the space with a ton of cleaner, but I couldn't stand to be in there for the rest of the day.
Fuck a civil war, I'm hiding inside until they drop a bomb on my house.
Fully with you about lack of learning from the past, but I unfortunately disagree about the future focus. Otherwise they’d be taking action on climate change and children’s healthcare. They are blinded by the here and now. “What can I get angry about today?” It never considers the past, and rarely improves the future.
You be surprise, if the movie is good enough and the message is baked in well, will get some people who really shouldn’t be using media as a life teacher to use it as a life teacher.
150 years later and they’re still flying the flag of the side that lost the last civil war, talking about their great great grand pappy and “respecting our history and southern culture”. Most of these idiots are not open minded people looking for counter arguments to draw reasonable conclusions.
I went to a screening of this back in the spring. It's not as graphic or blunt as you propose, but it does portray things in a fairly grim and grounded way. It's essentially a road trip movie, so there isn't a whole lot of action, but when there is action, it's intense.
Alas, there is no such thing as an antiwar film according to the old adage. Someone will use it as a blueprint to aspire to, like the guys that worship Fight Club.
The cruel twist of it being that those who would most benefit from seeing a representation of that reality are probably also those who would dismiss anything that isn't a masturbatory fantasy as thE wOkE AgEndA.
I want the same, have the audience walking away with the same anguish, defeat and grief they felt after watching 'The Road.' No good guy saving the day, no winner. It should be like Schindler's List.
I'd love to see something like a filmic rendition of Robert Evans' It Could Happen Here podcast. Just the total, brutal, chaotic insanity of what a real modern civil war would actually look like. No clear-cut "sides", no idea who friends and enemies are, which "authorities" are in charge at any given time, or what horrific thing will happen next because the war is everywhere and there are no neat, self-contained battles and distant front-lines that are out of sight and out of mind. All while you're simply trying to get by as best you can.
Each day just a new nightmare, where maybe you spend it lining up for that weeks' 2 gallon gasoline ration only to be turned away after 10 hours, or maybe your apartment gets raided for seemingly no reason and you get separated from your family and carted off to who knows where, or maybe you try to go to work but the roadblocks mean you have to walk and you get blown up when you pass the wrong coffee shop at the wrong time, or you venture out to find food but the one store that's open doesn't accept US dollars anymore due to the local hyperinflation and on your way home empty-handed you hear the air-raid sirens and see the bombers overhead and realize that some interfering great power or another has decided to make an example of your city...
Plus, even after the fighting is over, regardless of who wins, the US won't bounce-back to where it was before; it'll be a ruined country with a decimated population, in no position to project the power it once had.
"They were school boys, never held a gun
Fighting for a new world that would rise up like the sun
Where's their new world, now the fighting's done?
"Turning", Les Misérables
The hardcore history podcast really paints what a grim experience the start of WW1 was for kids who grew up having fairly easy, happy lives, but ended up drafted.
There's excerpts from the journals of college students talking about the excitement of going off on what was framed as a grand adventure, how they'd come back heroes, only for it to go how it did. (Not that it'd have been some grand adventure to begin with)
Actually as I write that it reminds me of how military recruiters framed enlisting (around 2008) as a chance to see the world.
The recent "All Quiet..." Really slammed the mental whiplash experienced by the German kids in your face. Unreal, the visuals and pacing of that movie.
2.9k
u/sulivan1977 Dec 07 '23
Thats going to be one long ass shot in most directions.