- Hey, it's Rowan
and today I'm gonna be talking
about war and representation
and the ideas that we have
around heroics and bravery and patriotism.
This has quite obviously
been prompted by Donald Trump's tweets,
but it's also been prompted by a longer conversation
that I have been having recently
around the representation of war
and how war is presented to us as a population.
Donald Trump's tweets, I think,
was something that a lot of people
felt a little bit weird about
because obviously they want trans people
to have exactly the same rights as everybody else,
but they also fundamentally disagree with the idea of war
or of the way that war is currently conducted.
It felt weird for a lot of people to come out and say,
"Trans people should absolutely be able
"to go and die for their country like anyone else."
Because although that is advocating
for equality of treatment,
the idea of war itself is something
that they fundamentally disagree with.
I wrote some tweets about this
in which I said you can both one, despise the military,
and two, understand this is just one of many policies,
tweets, and ideas that are part of something much wider.
Even within these tweets,
Trump is using fears around healthcare
to increase fear around and towards trans people.
In a climate of fear and of unemployment and job security,
he can casually announce that he can and will
ban certain groups from whole careers.
Banning trans people from the military
is not a step in the same direction
as dismantling or reducing the military in general.
Because here's the thing,
even if you think that war
is the greatest thing in the world,
there are still well-documented issues
with the way in which militaries in the US
and in the UK and elsewhere in the West are run.
So the prevalence of sexual assault within the army,
the prevalence of PTSD,
the treatment of service people
after they leave the military
and the exploitation of working class and low income people,
to name just a few.
These things are often things we don't talk about
because we have this strange, powerful, idealised view
of the military.
The language and the meaning of the words around war
has become more than just those words.
It's got this symbolism and this power behind it of heroes,
of patriots.
This brand of heroics often feels
like it's owned by straight cis white men
because it's also often linked
to what it is to be the ultimate American
or the ultimate Brit.
Looking at the representation of war in media,
and we have discussed at length
how the representation of something
affects how the general population feels about it,
I saw the film Hacksaw Ridge recently.
This is a film about a man
who was a pacifist through and through.
He wouldn't even touch a gun.
And yet the finale scene of that film
is not him pulling hundreds of soldiers
out of no man's land into safety,
it is afterwards when they wait until he's finished praying
before they go out and massacre the enemy.
Even in a film about pacifism,
there is the need to make heroics be this one thing
and that thing is either killing
or being killed for your country.
There's a real pushback against diversity
in the portrayal of war,
especially if it's a historic betrayal
because people know that there were various people
at various times in the history
who were not allowed to serve in the military
in the same way as straight white cis men were.
People of colour, women, trans people,
people of different sexual orientations,
it's something that people know about historically
and therefore can pinpoint and say,
"This is not historically accurate."
While at the same time ignoring the contributions
that those people have made.
Because there's this idealised view of historical war
being the thing that made your country what it is today,
the idea that it's straight white cis men
who made your country what it is today.
That's something that goes beyond war,
that's something that goes into every facet of culture
and life and politics and society
that we are here where are today
because of a certain subset of people.
This is something with Hacksaw Ridge, with Dunkirk,
that has been increasingly frustrating to me.
Either war movies are about war
and they're about all of it,
and in which case shouldn't war movies as a genre
be welcoming films about the experiences
of a diverse range of people
and their experiences of war?
Or they're just about pandering to a subset of men
who are portrayed on screen
who truly believe that killing people
or being killed yourself
is the most important thing
that you can do for your country.
The thing is with Dunkirk, for example,
people are saying that it's about historical accuracy
and that people looking for diversity in the movie
are asking for too much.
But Nolan puts diversity into the movie,
he just puts it in the background.
There are black soldiers on that beach
that we see in frame.
There are multiple women who are in those ships that go down
and yet we don't see their journeys.
It's a deliberate choice
as to whose story is being told on that beach.
Because historical accuracy is an opportunity for diversity,
not an argument against it.
When Trump announced on Twitter
that he didn't want trans people in the military in the US,
a lot of people thought that that made sense
because their preconceived ideas
about who and what trans people are
and their ideas about what it is to be a hero and a patriot
and an American were completely different.
Here's the thing.
Whether you are pro-war or pacifist or something in between,
war movies are not going anywhere,
but they have the opportunity to broaden this conversation,
the opportunity to have things
like a biopic of Kristin Beck,
a trans woman who spent 20 years in the Navy
and received a Purple Heart, amongst many other awards.
Or a film about Edith Cavell,
a British nurse who treated every single soldier
no matter what the side and was killed for it.
Make a film about the soldiers
who were part of the Commonwealth
who literally made up millions of soldiers
in the world wars.
Look at the political and the social implications
of having people fight for an empire that ruled them.
Or make a film about the career war poets like Wilfred Owen
or Siegfried Sassoon who brought back the reality of war
to a Britain who still thought about it
as a pure and patriotic thing.
I know that there are a lot of people
who say that films are just a bit of fun
and that they don't matter,
but as I talked about in my mental health and horror video,
people's attitudes towards people who are different
who they maybe haven't met in real life
overwhelmingly come from media portrayals,
including fictional ones.
I think that we can help and support our trans family
on this one very specific issue
while also simultaneously
looking at the wider social structure
which is causing this to happen in the first place
and for people to think that it's no big deal.
I think you can be angry and worried about it
while still simultaneously
wanting no one to serve in the military.
I hope that that was interesting, useful, thought-provoking,
I don't know.
If you have any thoughts about anything
that I talked about in the video
please leave them in the comments below.
Until I see you next time, bye.