This was a great movie and I think will always be a great movie in the fiction category. http://www.thailandbytrain.com/RiverKwai.html#history
Its about British Officer POW's refusing to do hard labor for the Japanese but then they decide to accept to build a train bridge over the River Kwai. Meanwhile one man escapes and brings back British soldiers to blow up the bridge. Well what ensued was indeed madness.
The whistling marching song really kept the mens' morale up in the movie .
It is supposed to take Place in Thailand after the surrender of Singapore, in WW2.
Japanese soldiers left a lasting impression on Singaporeans as suicide fighters.
They would fight till death and never surrender. Any one who had encounters with them was left eternally marked by fear.
After the war, the Japanese wives and Mothers found out the truth about how their husbands and Fathers behaved during the war. They could not believe the dishonorable stories that were told by many women, from different countries, forced to become comfort women for their men and the atrocities they committed. Most of the ugly truth was kept away from their ears.
War is hell and it really doesn't matter which side you are on.
We send out innocence and it comes back broken,hard and changed forever.
No man needs to see what these men are forced to look at every day, for what can become a lifetime.
Life without pity or remorse or fear.
Men, cut off from their feelings, to do ............a job.
Broken men,some of whom are mere babies themselves, who feel lucky to come home at all.
We keep on trecking fighting for our children, our nation and for the love of mankind.
So what are the other countries fighting for? Imperialism? This is what they charge other countries with and yet, given a chance, do the same thing.
Do they see a cure for poverty and hunger, as death?
Has the meaning for the word POWER changed?
Today, it seems the word means keeping fear and hate alive not only in foreign lands but in your own people.
Power to destroy, to benefit the economy, so it can spend to rebuild, providing jobs
or maybe not rebuild if the damage done is too great.
It seems insane to flaunt power, to cure poverty and hunger, by slaying millions of innocent people, when the power they should be undertaking, is to curb growing populations through birth control.
With science today, it makes me shudder what other ways are being sought to do this?
and where?
And so we whistle and keep on trecking..........and pray.
9 comments:
I've always loved that film but I love it even more now I've actually travelled on the very railway that the men depicted in the film built. It is a very poignant journey, as you may imagine, and I was in tears more than once I can tell you.
Oh wow! You should write a blog on this.
Excellent!
Thanks Mama Zen
Thanks for giving us much to think about. I agree with you about the movie -- it was an excellent movie. And that song is wonderful.
Thanks George
When I see that it is a war movie, I never watch. It gets too much on my nerves !
Because of one fool so many people died in WW II and my playground was in ruins, for kids it was fun, for the grown ups less. My mother went mad each time we had a thunderstorm because it made her think of the bombs falling down. It's only when I was an adult and learned more about what had happened I started to understand her.
Gattina - I think the war affected everyone. My parents also always feared uniforms and especially german shepherd dogs.
When I got one and trained him, I gave him to my parents and they looked at that dog with great respect.With my Moms alzheimers, I was able also to go back in time with her as she remembered and when through the whole thing backwards in time.. The war is important to know and to tell about, so people remember.
I did write about it here
http://akelamalu.blogspot.com/2007/05/thailand.html
if you're interested. :)
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