"How sweet and honourable it is to die for one's country"
I rewatched Band of Brothers not long ago. Pretty much a perfect series. And then I watched some clips on youtube of some of the best parts.
Ever since then, I've been getting served a lot of "hero" content on youtube, and it strikes me how much people are desperate to show being a soldier as a really noble and heroic profession.
I understand in the context of WW2 that it was a necessity and people were just doing what they had to do. But this attitude extends to basically every military conflict since then. Like it's a very simple "you're a good guy, you're going to fight the bad guys, the mission is to protect freedom" message, every time. But that's not most wars or most battles.
Military recruitment ads are the creepiest thing I've ever seen. They literally mimmick hollywood movies and make joining the military seem like this epic CoD campaign where you're just off to kill bad guys and do cool shit.
Even Rambo, a movie that was originally just about how much war can fuck a person up mentally, ended up bastardising the character in every subsequent movie as the perfect noble unkillable soldier.
The older I get the more cynical I become of stuff like this. It's like there's a giant machine and its entire purpose is to make war seem like a good idea.