Movies

We subscribed to NetFlix a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, I still get their popups while browsing. I am kind of disappointed at that (“Check this box if you have already subscribed, so that we can stop bugging you”), but it’s been a very effective service at getting movies to us. But I’ve had to learn to watch ’em at my own pace, and not as soon as they arrive so that I can send ’em back to get more.
Before I visited Tokyo, I saw Grave of the Fireflies; right now I’m watching Fog of War. The two movies show, among other things, two sides of the same event: the firebombing of Tokyo. In Fireflies, the story of the innocent, whose nation had ambitions of empire; in Fog, halting those ambitions by the most efficient means available, at the expense, to a great degree, of the innocent.
McNamara, on the subject of whether it was a fair decision to firebomb: “LeMay [the American general] said, if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right! He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” Should we, instead, have chosen a greater loss of our own lives, to reduce the casualties of our enemy? McNamara implies that we should have, and that he would have preferred it. But we rarely choose that.
Later, he asks, in the context of Vietnam, “What is morally appropriate in a wartime environment? Let me give you an example …”
I found both movies open and honest beyond the events that they depict. If you feel insufficiently urgent to be active in the salvation of humanity, I recommend them; if you are already pretty busy, then by all means keep on moving!