Your points are valid and well put down.Alan_A wrote:Thanks to all for the many good points and clarifications in this thread - but of course, I'd expect nothing less from an A2A discussion...
A few points of my own...
About political correctness - I understand what Scott, Dudley and others have said about the distinction between discussing political correctness and discussing politics. I still think there's sort of a glitch here - not intentional, more a bug in the programming. Here's why. A lot of the time, when people talk about political correctness, it's to complain about it. "There's too much political correctness." "We should be able to say X or Y or Z." "People need to be less sensitive and have more of a sense of humor." Now, there's merit in all of that - anything can be carried to extremes. And in this particular thread, the objection (Scott's) is a bit different - he's suggesting that Nazis be called Nazis, which is hard to disagree with. What concerns me, though is that in the more normal "get over it" conversation, the rules create a sort of double bind. Anti-political correctness person gets to say, "get over it." But if the person being addressed wants to disagree, he or she is going to have explain why getting over it isn't an option. And that explanation is likely to involve politics or race or gender or something like that - which as of now are on the wrong side of the forum guidelines. So in effect, anti-political correctness person has a sort of sanctioned first-strike capability, while offended person is formally limited in what he or she can say. Seems like an unfair balance, is all. Maybe a tweak to the rules is called for?
Now, back to Dunkirk... I have to say, speaking personally, as a Jewish person and as someone who's spent a lot of time with WWII history, I don't think the film treated the Germans lightly at all. Part of the reason for the disagreement on this is that - as Nolan says in the Time interview I linked to above - the film really is experimental, and a big part of the experiment is his deciding not to have any kind of conventional narrative or backstory. What he wanted was a visceral, present-tense, you-are-there experience. As a result there wasn't really a good opportunity for anybody to say, "Those damn Nazis!" or anything along those lines. Instead, the storytelling was almost purely visual. And on that score, I think the Germans were registered as pretty horrific. There was the bombing attack on the clearly-marked hospital ship. There were bombing runs against ships offshore jammed with refugees. And there were the Stukas. Maybe it's given my background, but I always have a visceral, aversive reaction to Stukas. William Gibson, in his novel Pattern Recognition, noted (in an observation about design and culture) that the Stuka could only ever have been a Nazi airplane. So there's another visual. Putting all those images together, I had no trouble figuring out who the enemy was or how to react to them.
The nature of Nolan's experiment is such that not everybody is going to get the point. And people are going to object to the experiment itself - there's no reason you have to think that it's a good idea to tell the story that way. So I have no problem with any disagreements.
Re: other points - I agree completely that the relationship among the Nazis, the Wehrmacht and the German people is complicated and not at all clear-cut - though not as simple as "only the SS were Nazis" either.
Sorry to have gone on at length about this - I mostly try to avoid this kind of conversation these days, and actually haven't been around flightsim sites much at all the past few months. But I did want to register a couple of points. It may be that my reactions are a bit exaggerated - on another site at the moment I'm trying to deal with the presence of an actual and seemingly unrepentant alt-right person, so maybe things spill over. Thanks again and best to all.
DH