And who are the judges? What conclusions did cinema draw from the two world wars

Sergey Mitroshin

Society is complex, but also simple, like two pennies. Possessing a supersensory ability to respond to stimuli, it is able to predict the future without even realizing that it predicts its own future.

Is it easy to be Nostradamus?

For example, Soviet mothers have always known that if boys are born en masse, it will lead to new battles. And if children stop being born at all, then this means that the "winners" have lost faith in tomorrow. If the townsfolk take money out of the banks, then expect the economy to start going through difficult times, despite the victorious reports of economists. If people are massively looking for where it is better and where to hide deeper from the authorities, it means that something is not right with this government. In other words, if you want to be Nostradamus, be him. Just stand on the border and fix the direction of the flows. What goes there, what goes from there.

One of the markers is cinema. It is probably not worth wasting your time proving why it has become fashionable for some time to talk about a world war. And not only about the last one, but about the penultimate one. Why was the public interested? With the last war, everything is more or less clear. Evil is defined, retribution is natural. But with the war "-1" - not so much. It is clear that from there a lot of it will go into the WW2 war, but why millions killed each other in the "-1" war is still a mystery. The farther, the sharper it is before us. This is the mystery of mass social insanity, which, apparently, is not the last on this planet yet. As it turned out recently, something can always start somewhere and flare up even in societies with iPhones and LCD TVs.

Cinema, as you know, was noted on this topic with powerful message-pictures - “1917” and “All Quiet on the Western Front”, 2022. Moreover, “All Quiet on the Western Front” has already been said by the title itself and by the fact that it is according to Remarque.

Two central thoughts. First, the western front did not move forward, destroying the resources of civilization like a natural disaster, like the one that killed the dinosaurs. And the second - about the senseless attack that the German general staged in the last 15 minutes of the war before the negotiated surrender, having managed to kill the main character. Doesn't this tell you how often people find themselves in the hands of heroic generals who are in the warmth of their residences.

However, I'm not very happy with the reveal of the hero's evolution. Or rather, the lack of such an evolution, which prevents the above-mentioned picture by Edward Berger from becoming a full-sounding anti-war message. Why did an intelligent boy fully comply with the "rules of war" and allow himself to be killed? Was he programmed for this? Patriotism, service to the state, duty to comrades? They were killed, so I should be killed too?

In WW2, at least there will be a leader ideology. And here what? What do we need to eliminate to prevent this from happening?

Winner's Mystery

I wrote above that there are fewer mysteries in WW2 than in "-1". Or rather, it seemed so for the last 60 years. However, ticked like a planted bomb, the "mystery of the winner." Forces of too different size and quality have come to an end. And it turned out that the recently re-released in good quality film "Nuremberg" (Nurenberg, USA-Canada, 2000, dir. Yves Simoneau) said a lot at the beginning of the main political transformation of post-Soviet Russia - from Yeltsin's Russia to Putin's Russia.

Namely, about the question: do the victors judge the vanquished only because they won, or because they are right, and the vanquished are criminals?

By the way, in the USSR for a long time they did not hesitate to adhere to the first version. Today's "we can repeat" comes from here, we will repeat because we can.

But as can be understood from Yves Simoneau's painting of the year 2000, the task of Western justice, on the contrary, was precisely to show that the trial of the German Nazis had legal grounds, and not the arbitrariness of the winner. The plaintiff is not the winners, the plaintiff is Civilization itself. The task of the Soviet justice as one of the participants in the process is elementary revenge and nothing more.

Well, well, not revenge, perhaps I had too much, - "justified retribution." And, to be honest, it was not so often in the USSR that they later referred to Nuremberg - this “toy” of our political opponents in the future. The Nuremberg trials are, after all, the so-called legalism, which never existed in the USSR. The priority of law over so-called justice. And in our country, as you know, justice always prevails over the law.

Only in 2014, the Russian justice in Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation decided to give the Nuremberg trials the status of "legal sanctity". Moreover, it was completely impossible to say that the Russians understood everything so well about Nuremberg in 1946 and that, if they had been woken up at night, they could have rattled off extracts from the main documents.

The legislative prohibition of denying the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal in Russia, first of all, plunged into a fog some of the circumstances of the outbreak of the war in relation to one of the "winners" and, in particular, the tragedy of the Katyn massacre.

Another important question raised by the Nurenberg film is: what is considered a crime in a war that is, in and of itself, a great crime? But where is the soldier to go, like the same Paul from the "Western Front Without Change"? He was ordered. He couldn't refuse. Why is he a criminal then?

On this issue, the Nuremberg Tribunal and the film about it spoke clearly and clearly, and nothing better has yet been invented: as soon as you commit an attack by crossing the border, you clearly violate a number of international obligations and commit a crime - both generals and perpetrators.

Three comrades expose the conspiracy

Until now, the theme of the results of WW2 and the Nuremberg Trials has been dominated by victorious motives and “never again”. But art demanded new fights. From the 1966 Qwilleran Memorandum to the farcical Iron Sky 2012, conspiracies and their revelations filled the screens of the world. They were united by the fact that each time the Western heroes easily defeated the Nazis. The latest powerful "blow" to fascism is the film "Amsterdam", 2022 from the reputable director David O. Russell. Three comrades (again, a reference to Remarque?), very naturalistically crippled by WW2, expose an anti-American fascist conspiracy.

Is it that simple? But where are such heroes today, why are they not exposing anything and opposing anything today? We have the right to ask this of art.

And perhaps "Amsterdam" is not even a comic, but a replica of skepticism that offends us. Just think, the movie takes place on the eve of WW2, which is going to happen anyway. Christian Bale's character's eye won't grow back. The honest general played by De Niro got his fifteen minutes of fame, but will still be forgotten the very next day. Is it possible to assume that the anti-war message does not reach the addressee because everyone is celebrating virtual victories, but will soon go to the real front?