WWII in HD

I've been watching some of the new series "World War II in High Definition." It's beautifully done. Not the pictures, the videos, or the fact that war is beautiful, because it isn't, but the respect with which the creators of the program have dealt with the subject. It shows what happened to the soldiers, it takes no pride in victories, urges no revenge for loses. War is not glorified, but it is not condemned. It is seen as a sad necessity that sometimes occurs. I know many people that believe war is wrong, under any circumstance, but I find it hard to believe that those people will not fight for their lives if the situation happens to them. It's a terrible thing, to fight and kill a fellow human, but backing down from the threat of war is a form of slavery, and it makes everything worse in the long run; it is harder to put things to right later. After WWI, Europe lost an entire generation of men, no one wanted to fight anymore, and they, the countries of Europe, let Hitler do whatever he wanted. Appeasement is what they called it. Their inaction nearly sold the world into slavery under the Nazi Regime. This is what is called "The Indifference of Good Men." Being a good man, a good person, is meaningless if you allow the commiter of atrocities to continue.

There was a video clip of Nazis hanging Serbians in a small town. Some Serbians had fired on the German camp in the night, and in the morning 39 men were picked to be hanged. The men stood there, on their little steps, calmly waiting for the noose to be put round their necks; business men, farmers... men from Serbia, rich and poor alike. It looked ridiculous. Like a movie with bad actors. The men being hung were not afraid, the Nazis didn't look happy, or sad; merely indifferent. The clip showed all of them hanging, together, dead. They looked like birds hung after slaughter, except they weren't birds, they were men who had lived but a few minutes before. One soldier pulled on the men's legs as they hung, to make sure the noose was tight enough to cut off all air from the Serbians' lungs. I waited for them to get down, for the director to say, "cut, reshoot" to make it look more real, less absurd. It never happened, they hung there still; human chickens. No tears came to my eyes as I saw this, no anger, no incredulous laughter; I only watched, thinking the picture was wrong, absurd, ridiculous, like seeing a turtle balanced on a fencepost, swimming in the air. The turtle would never get up there without human hands, and he would never get down; his life is no longer his own.