Been spending my weekend watching Victory At Sea. Its a very long World War II documentary colored in Black and White. I think it was filmed in the 50's. I haven't been able to work on the Cherudim Gundam again because of the weather.
As a young kid I grew up enamored about warfare and wanting to be a soldier. Heck, the model kits I built were mostly warplanes. Of course reality set in as I grew up that you couldn't earn much if you were a soldier.
Growing up, you get brainwashed into thinking that wars are always between good and evil and that war is a glorious thing. It was only after watching Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan that my outlook on wars had changed. The first 20 minutes of gore in that movie had me flinching in my seat at the movie house. I usually do that in a horror move, except that wasn't horror, that was a realistic re-enactment of how brutal war really is.
That movie left me with an open mind and researching further (thanks to the internet), I've realized that most modern day wars are caused by the hunger for more resources. Usually its either land or energy. Some country's economies could even grind to a halt if they aren't participating in a war. That's because a sector of their economy is devoted to building weapons for wars. Sad really.
Watching World War II documentaries makes me remember my Dad. He grew up during the war and during times we talked and the topic touched on World War II, he would always recount on how hard life was then because of the occupation by the Japanese. I remember him telling me that their meals consisted of only salted rice and that he would never forget the experience of hearing an entire family being murdered by the Japanese army. A few years later, when I was in Japan, I heard one Japanese company executive relating on how hard life was after the war and that the only thing he couldn't forget about life during that time was the feeling of always being hungry because there was nothing to eat.
My family lived a miraculous life during World War II. Thanks to our Faith in God we didn't suffer as much. One story that I can't ever forget was how two of my uncles were the only survivors of a bomb shelter that got hit. My great-grandfather of course perished in that shelter but we celebrate how the two had come out unscathed. Then of course the story above of my father never forgetting the family being murdered, it was through God's Grace that they weren't discovered by the Japanese when they were murdering families along their path.
But I don't blame the Japanese for the hard times my father endured. Its the greed and ambition of leaders that lead nations to bear arms in order to fight against another country that should be blamed for all of this. Fueled by the media propaganda that brainwashes a nation into thinking that their cause of invading another country is just.
