Charley's War
April 10th, 2003 by HenI happened to be googling for comics I used to read when I was a child, Transformers UK, Chromobots, Battle Action Force… I started looking because I’d just seen the terrible Buckaroo Banzai and got it confused with Rocket Raccoon. Anyway, I found this wonderful site about the subliminal Charley’s War series that used to be in Battle. Battle was a comic made up of many shorter stories, 4 pages or so a month per story.
Battle was a pro-war comic but Charley’s War was a superbly researched series set in WWI and all about the utter stupidity of that war. I hadn’t realised how well it was written, to me at my young age it was just the best story there, with Charley, a character who was easy to relate to.
The other great story was Johnny Red, a story about an english fighter pilot flying sturmoviks with the Russians on the eastern front in WWII. Both stories were also found in the Eagle comic and had a long history to them. Johnny Red was a bit Biggles, but also showed a side of the war which wasn’t very popular in other media, ie) the eastern front.
On slightly more up to date terms…. I hear a lot of people in the United States at the moment being quite anti the French, and to a certain extent the Germans and the Russians. There’s no understanding of how the nations can be so anti-war. Well, it seems quite simple to me.
Look at the number of dead in WWI and WWII. In terms of deaths, the UK and the US were not hit nearly as hard as the French were in WWI, or the Germans and Russians in both of the wars. Throw in the French retreat from west africa and indochina, and the utter hell Russia has lived through this century, with Stalin’s genocides. It’s hard to imagine why they might be tired of aggressive warmongering. If not for the political situation the UK have had since Thatcher’s revival, I think the British would have joined suit.
April 11th, 2003 at 12:34 am
You don’t think that the French and Russian governments were against war for financial reasons ? Both of them were owed large sums of money, and their oil industries had payed deposits for agreements on large numbers of exploration/production/maintenance contracts with the Iraqi government, despite the sanctions being in place.
The German government more or less got elected on an anti american stance so its no surprise they were so happy to leap onto the band wagon.
Given French behaviour over Ivory Coast (just sent their troops in, no UN mandate required for them it seems), and Russian actions in Chechnya any claim that their behaviour is somehow morally inspired through deeper suffering is pretty flimsy. All IMHO, of course.
April 12th, 2003 at 4:13 am
I was thinking more the general populace view rather than the leaders. Of course, in every country the opinion of ‘the people’ is merely what the media tell them, but the anti-french/german/russian stuff is more nation-aimed than against a particular government.
On Chechnya, that’s more like the US civil war than an invasion of another country. While I think invading other countries is contrary to post-world-war feeling, stopping your own country from breaking up seems to still be a positively viewed thing.
The same thing seems to exist with the Ivory Coast situation. The imperialising nations are seen as still having to provide aid to their ex-colonies. Looking at it more, this seemed an interesting article on it: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jan2003/ivor-j07.shtml
April 14th, 2003 at 1:48 am
What happened to the stuff I posted last night ??
Is there some kind of quality filter ?
April 14th, 2003 at 2:55 am
My 2 cents as they say…
I think it has more to do with anti americanism to be honest. I mean that a lot of the anti-war comments are to a large degree anti-american and so the Americans get defensive which is hardly surprising.
Some countries as a whole are more anti-american than others, Spain is an example actually. Not sure why or where it comes from but does happen. When trying to discuss the war it keeps going back to Americans do this and that, when they interveen because they do and when they don’t because they don’t care. I have heard things like the attack on the world trade centre was staged by the american government so they’d have an excuse to attack Iraq and I guess when people come up with that kind of thing it must be pretty infuriating.
The French position in this whole thing has been quite unreasonable in my opinion and I think that after thinking they could hold the UN for ransom, with the threat to veto pretty much any resolution with a dead line in it, being tossed aside must have annoyed them, both the government and the people in France.
The worst part is probably the hypocrisy, the pretence that is peace and the well being of the Iraqi people they care about, which coming from countries like China (no comments) Russia (look at Chechenia) France (Ivory coast and the nuclear testing ignoring the whole world’s oposition) and Germany (together with France the country most benefited from the oil-for-food and hence sancions program) seems a bit odd…
April 15th, 2003 at 12:16 am
Hope you are not saying you were censored, “he” would never do that
April 18th, 2003 at 9:15 am
Wouldn’t know how to censor it
Possibly you broke the ‘too much quality for this blog’ filter.
May 12th, 2003 at 6:03 am
Hi Henri,
Living in Germany as I do I am in the uneviable position of being able to give an “insiders” view of the German stance regarding the “Coalition” invading Iraq.
When the real threat of war in the Gulf came to the fore, Gerhard Schr椥r was right in the middle of a pretty boring and colourless Election Campaign. He had no issue with which to boost his chances of reelection other than his apparent sensible handling of the flooding earlier that year. Suddenly he was given a golden egg by the Americans with their plans for Iraq. He cynically jumped on the anti-war bandwagon ensuring that he would garner a large portion of the populist vote.
The cynical and hypocritical part of this was that he was actually sending troops in the guise of “civilan consultants” to Kuwait with Fox APC’s equipped for dealing with chemical and biological agents. Not only that but there is a good chance that German Special Forces were deployed to guard them. AWACS crews were also eventually dispatched to Turkey to bolster that NATO allies defences against an Iraqi Air Force that was in no state to be used at all, obviously the AWACS were there to help out coordinating the air assets to be deployed over Iraq.
This strong anti-war stance, the utter political incompetence of his main opposition and the inability of the Germans to spot a lie when it is screamingly obvious what it is, ensured that Mr Schr椥r and his merry men got elected on a turn out of much less than 50% of the voting population.
Seeing as Mr Schr椥r is a bungling incompetent who is monumentally successful at not holding a firm political position on anything and whose concept of economic reform is “tax everything” I doubt that immediate economic concerns were of no interest to him and certainly not the reason he made such an issue of the war.
BTW, this Freedom Fries rubbish is backfiring terribly over in mainland Europe, renaming everything with French in it to Freedom makes the Americans look totally childish, not only that but now people Freedom Kiss and speak Freedom the last one being rather ironic don’t you think