Different Perspectives

Since I did not go anywhere over the holidays, I have had some time to watch some movies, mostly on Neflix Instant. I especially liked the two foreign movies which incidentally provided two very different perspectives on World War II.

One is a Japanese movie “Kabei – Our Mother”, based on the memoir of Teruyo Nogami about how her mother raised her and her sister during the height of nationalistic frenzy in Japan when their scholar father was imprisoned for his radical antiwar position. While Japan was the aggressive country in World War II, this Japanese family was ultimately a family of victims as they did not believe in the war.

The other one is a German film “Nowhere in Africa”, based on the autobiographical novel of Stefanie Zweig about her and her Jewish parents escaping from Germany in 1938 to live in Africa for the next 9 years. Clearly, they were the lucky ones, as they did not go to concentration camp as their other relatives who stayed did. Nonetheless, it was also hard for them, being far away in a foreign land without any of the luxuries they were used to before andwithout knowing what would happen to their loved ones left behind. Surely they were victims of the war, although they stayed far away from the war.

All these different perspectives on essentially the same event – World War II – have made me realize that really there is never any justification for war, unless someone has declared war first to take away your happiness, freedom and life, in which case there is no choice. Unfortunately, this position does give the evil side an upper hand, as perhaps was the case with Adolf Hitler. However, had he been attacked first, he might have commanded even more fanatical support from the German people at that time.

I have always been a believer in education, in that more education and more enlightenment might lead people to see different perspectives and therefore prevent tragedies like World War II to happen. But that in itself is clearly not sufficient. When people are desperate, angry or fearful, they lose their reasoning power and look for emotional outlets. And those who were evil enough to prey on people’s negative emotions will almost always succeed, to varying degrees, despite how much history has taught us.

Now that is not a positive note to end the year, so stay tuned – I will need to write an upbeat one to finish 2010!