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Machine gun as a stick

Teaching War
Regissør: Adela Komrzy
(Tsjekkia)

This timely warning against the remilitarization of societies and teachings in Europe was recorded as a result of Russia's annexation of Crimea.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Teaching War opens with a simple but profound quote from an American sociologist whose "Thomas theorem" became a standard term in that 20. century sociology: "If people define situations as real, they have real consequences."

When the film opens in the gym at a school – with the kids lumped together on benches while a couple of big, uniformed men wiggle around a cannon to demonstrate an "eight-pound cannonball" – it's clear where this definition of reality leads us.

For anyone who grew up in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union before the fall of the Berlin Wall, military training at school (CDP) will be a familiar memory. A Russian girlfriend once boasted how she could "pick an AK47 apart and put it back together in under a minute" – blindly. I never tested her on this, but found no reason to doubt her skills.

Demonstration of strength. Adela Komrzy's film is a welcome and timely warning of the insidious remilitarization of education and society in Europe as the post-Cold War optimism fades. The notions of a wonderful new world united through capitalist consumption dissolve as a result of the new friction (and alleged conspiracy) between the superpowers and the recurrent Russian threat the West is experiencing.

Komrzy's film is a timely remedy for this kind of simplistic and dangerous thinking.

If the opening image gives the impression of child's play, the sequence that follows leaves the viewer in no doubt as to how the Czech Republic's civil defense program for schools views reality. A group of heavily armed men enter the gymnasium and point their automatic weapons at the children while the teacher asks them what they know about NATO. It is uncomfortable to watch, especially for those of us who grew up in the post-war era with parents and relatives who had served in World War II. As a child I remember my father refusing to buy us kids toy guns and when we made our own he forbade us to point them at anyone. It was a wise warning, which many young people in, for example, the United States have experienced in deadly encounters with the police – a warning well worth listening to.

Teaching War is taken up immediately after Russia's confiscation of the Crimean peninsula and the outbreak of the civil war in Ukraine's eastern Russian-speaking provinces. NATO tried to demonstrate power by sending armed brigades across Central Europe to the Baltic States. Chauvinistic political and medial statements – from NATO countries as well as Russia – hail it throughout the film.

Love your gun. Films from the Russian Ministry of Defense extol the strength of the country's military power and glorify the sacrifices of the generation that fought what is still called "The Great Patriotic War". Children in Red Army uniforms talk about "Germans" and "fascists" in the same breath. And from Trump rallies with hordes of girls in stars-and-stripes skirts singing about his fabulous defense of American values, we know this is a global problem. In a time of centennial
marks of war and revolution (and post-war declarations of independence, which the Czechs will mark next year), Komrzy's film echoes what the British poet Wilfred Own expressed about World War I: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." "It's dying to die for their homeland."

Around the schools, civil defense classes and other expressions of militarization are being created, which reintroduced training camps for aspirants, a legally questionable anti-NATO private defense unit and a veteran association for border guards. Teaching War intends polemic against this by allowing the director to talk to the participants themselves:

"When students see a soldier in uniform with a weapon and mask – for them this is something big… It is sufficient for him to stand there, and he has the kids' full attention."

"He knows exactly how to use a weapon, and what's more: Soldiers are warm people," as one official puts it. We understand what he means by soldiers being "warm people" when a uniformed soldier rejects definitions of weapons as "something that kills". He tells the kids that he wants them to stop being afraid of or hating guns. "In itself, a gun is just a piece of metal," he says. It's all part of a kind of desensitization program, which in the US is led by the gun lobby under the slogan "Guns don't kill people, it's people who kill people." Officials justify the CDP as a patriotic program and insist that it falls under "safety education" and therefore does not need parental approval. In a country that has not forgotten how it was left to its own fate by the Western powers in 1938 (the film also includes footage of a military reconstruction of the Nazi invasion), nor the humiliation of 1968, when Moscow decided to put an end to liberalization under " Prague Spring', all this seems very reasonable.

“Young people have forgotten how to act in an armed conflict. They are no longer able to assess danger, that's the problem. "

The Grim Reaper. Certain viewers can still be thought to be more in agreement with Samuel Johnson that patriotism is the last refuge of the thug. And thugs get away with it in this film: During a meeting of a government commission on reintroducing military ("security") training in schools as well as a national defense association, an expert remarked: "Do you know why so many lives have been lost in Syria? Why so many have died in Ukraine? Because over the past 20 years, young people have forgotten how to behave in an armed conflict. They are no longer able to assess danger, that is the problem.” Okay. It has nothing to do with Bashar al-Assad's murderous regime, Vladimir Putin's support or NATO's behavior. Tell this to the victims of gas attacks and massive bombing of Syrian cities. Komrzy's film is a timely antidote to that kind of simplistic and dangerous thinking, perhaps best summed up by a young boy in military training gear who says he'd like to go to war, casually adding: “Mum's brother was a soldier. Until he died in Afghanistan.” It is precisely this kind of attitude that was commented on by a protester dressed as the man with the scythe at an arms fair in Brno, when she said: "Thank you for making our job easier."

Nick Holdsworth
Nick Holdsworth
Holdsworth is a writer, journalist and filmmaker.

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