--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The 14 hour Ken Burn's documentary on World War II > debuted this week on PBS. Since 14 hours is quite > a bit to invest I have been archiving it to watch > when I have time. I just completed episode one and > was struck with something that isn't really covered: > World War II was about going after three tyrants: > Hitler, Mussolini and General Tojo who were out to > establish empires. What's left out: how did they > get there in the first place? They didn't get their > on their own. Who backed them? Who were the > industrialists and bankers who backed them and why? > The answer so far wasn't in the first episode so it > will be interesting to see if it is at all in the > remaining ones.
Unlikely, since exploring the history and geopolitics of the war was never the focus of this documentary. Rather, in the words of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick: "We chose to explore the impact of the war on the lives of people living in four American towns -- Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota. "Our film is...an attempt to describe, through... eyewitness testimony, what the war was actually like for those who served on the front lines, in the places where the killing and the dying took place, and equally what it was like for their loved ones back home....We have tried to illuminate the intimate, human dimensions of a global catastrophe that took the lives of between 50 and 60 million people....to see the universal in the particular, to understand how the whole country got caught up in the war; how...people were permanently transformed; how those who remained at home worked and worried and grieved in the face of the struggle; and in the end, how innocent young men who had been turned into professional killers eventually learned to live in a world without war." http://www.pbs.org/thewar/about_letter_from_producers.htm In fact the impression I got was that > the war was more a failed exercise in trying to > reduce the world's population dramatically. And there > is a section on how they got people in the US to buy > bonds to finance the war but no answer as to who made > all the money off the weapons sales. That should be > part of the story too. Then it would be a very different documentary with a whole different purpose and approach. > And isn't it interesting at a time when there is much > saber rattling over Iran such a documentary should come > out? No. They started working on it six years ago.
