It's all about the guy next to you

The constant refrain you hear in many contemporary war movies. But has this always been the case? What about those who were fighting for their homes and the Confederacy? Was that struggle more than about their own survival and the survival of their brothers-in-arms? Perhaps it is easier to believe that soldiers fighting in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq think this way because we don't see the purpose behind [some of] these wars. And indeed if there is no purpose that we can relate to, if it's not for our homes and those close to us and there is no clear threat or danger to them, then doesn't it become a question of trying to make it home alive, or enhancing the survivability of your comrades? For in this way, our comrades then become that which is closest to us and whom we seek to protect from death and harm. (And thus the necessity for the powers that be to create a "threat" to one's homeland in order to justify the wars they want.)

From City Journal:

Andrew Klavan
The Lost Art of War
Hollywood’s anti-American war films don’t measure up to the glories of its patriotic era.

Antinationalism has a long pedigree in Western art and thought, so to track its development in Hollywood war movies, we now have to double back, before Vietnam and World II, to even earlier films.

Through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with nationalism at its height in Europe, Western artists routinely depicted war as purifying and ennobling. With World War I, that idea became increasingly insupportable. A generation of young men had been wiped out for reasons that remain murky even today, slaughtered in their millions by a technology that seemed to eliminate any trace of martial sublimity.

The dominant artistic reaction was a rejection of nationalist sacrifice. It was best summed up by Wilfred Owen’s famous poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which sneers at “the old lie” that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. Between the world wars, Hollywood took up that antinationalist theme in one of its earliest talkies, 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The film won an Oscar for best picture and remains an extraordinary movie to this day. In this story of German soldiers in the trenches, based on Erich Maria Remarque’s fine novel, every father figure who fills young men with dreams of “some desperate glory,” to use Owen’s phrase, is a blustering fool, a militaristic buffoon, or a secret coward. The war is nothing but senseless death.

Key to this depiction is one scene that remains a staple of the war-movie genre: battle-weary soldiers sitting together and discussing the greater mission. These scenes almost invariably ring false—statements by the artists intruding on the art—but they’re telling nonetheless.

“How do they start a war?” one soldier asks in All Quiet.

“One country offends another,” a second says.

“Oh, well, if that’s it, I shouldn’t be here at all. I don’t feel offended.”

Here, the concerns of the individual—and, by extension, the concerns of the People—are different from, and even antithetical to, the concerns of the nation. In the wake of this devastating conflict, that pretty much became the left-wing line. Nationalism had caused the war; therefore cosmopolitanism, and a stateless commitment to the People, would end war altogether.

The trouble with cosmopolitanism, as George Orwell pointed out, is that no one is willing to fight and die for it. When warlike racial nationalism resurged in the thirties, only an answering “atavistic emotion of patriotism,” as Orwell wrote, could embolden people to stand against it.

Though European intellectuals and their left-wing American acolytes are loath to admit it, the U.S. had already provided an excellent new rationale for that emotion. Our Founding redefined nationhood along social-contract lines that Europeans can still only theorize about. Our love of nation at its best was ethical, not ethnic. Our patriotism was loyalty not to race, or even to tradition, but to ideals of individual liberty and republican self-governance.

Here the typical neo-con line: America is a proposition nation, and Americans are willing to die for such an abstraction. No longer do they need to die for something concrete--sustaining the American proposition is sufficient in itself.

But many World War II films emphasize what America stands for. The ceaseless Hollywood roll calls of Spinellis, O’Haras, Dombrowskis, and Steins highlight the e pluribus unum of it all: an ethnically diverse nation unified by democratic ideals....

Most people love their homeland, but these movies understood that, for Americans, the democratic ethos constituted the substance of that land.

Is this generalization about World War II movies accurate? If it is, do those movies realistically portray the motivations of the American men who fought in that war? Was it really about protecting American democracy? We would undoubtedly see it in the propaganda of that time. But with the wars after World War II the cry to protect freedom and democracy became more universalized, as it was tied to the Cold War and the threat of the Soviet juggernaut. Looking back on it now, it seems difficult to believe that the actual enemies in the proxy wars that the U.S. fought represented any genuine danger to the "American way of life."

Should we praise those who show true courage in the face of death? It seems that our response would be an unquestionable yes. But shouldn't the cause for which men sacrifice themselves also be factored into our evaluation of their bravery, or of such films at least?

So what then of depictions of courage in wars that we would not agree with? Can we admire the bravery and obedience of the men who fought in those wars, while being critical of the war and of the leaders who are responsible for them? Or should we expect something more from the citizenry of a "republic"? How much discernment can we expect from the citizens of a large nation-state, where access to information is restricted (even if it claims to be a "free society")?