What makes our civilized world remember war?

Jordyn 2022-03-21 09:03:00

Hand-painted posters and low-frame-rate video footage are displayed on the screen at a slow pace like a moving picture. The silent video needs to be explained with the help of dubbing, so that the audience can understand what kind of picture is recorded in the image that was recorded a hundred years ago. The standard black-and-white documentary-like twenty minutes at the beginning of the film made me feel solemn but boring. I was cultivated under the nourishment of colorful images and realistic sound effects since I was a child. What's more, what unfolded in front of me was a distant war of which I had no experience at all.

But after more than 20 minutes, when the image was enlarged, the tones of the image scattered from the two ends of the color spectrum, and I heard the crunching sound of the soldiers stepping on the ground when the soldiers marched in the formation, my heart was One trembling: The war is alive.

In the past 100 years, the development of science and technology has brought the decency of the civilized world to a new historical height. I can sit on the soft sofa and experience with my eyes the unknown things that the trench soldiers experienced a hundred years ago. But that decency also had the downside that it made war, the savage creation of civilization, so clear that it disgusted me. Recalling the sworn faces of the politicians who created the First World War when they wielded the big stick of national rights and fairness and justice to drive countless young people into inhuman hell, the faith in civilization in my heart was deeply stinged, and I could not for a long time. Let go.

What makes our civilized world remember war? For over 100 years, staggering statistics and textual discourses have done this. Today, images better convince us of the inhumanity and cruelty of war. Thanks to this civilization's creation, it helps us to look back on our mistakes and crimes as we move into the future. But in addition to technology, in the extension of images, there are more contents that we need to remember with our hearts. After all, what we should do is not to give time to civilization, but to give time to civilization.

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They Shall Not Grow Old quotes

  • Soldier: [waving at camera] Hi, mum.

  • Soldier: You don't look, you see. You don't hear, you listen. You taste the top of your mouth. Your nose is filled with fumes and death. But the veneer of civilization has dropped away.