Hollywonk does make films that show atrocities, but they can balance the bad acts of the good guys by first showing really horrible violence on the part of the bad guys. I remember seeing "Saving Private Ryan" (under protest) many years ago in the theater. After the initial landing seen, Spielberg shows U.S. soldiers taking over a German machine gun nest. The Germans throw up their hands in surrender, and the U.S. soldiers gun them down. I made an audible gasp, but no one else seemed to see a problem. Maybe it really happened that way, and maybe I would have pulled the trigger too -- don't know, I've never been in combat. Try reading something written from the German prospective, and you will see that not all Germans were Nazis (at least my relatives weren't) (the same way not all U.S. soldiers are Republicans or Democrats), most Germans were farmers or shopkeepers and wanted to be doing other more productive things than marching on France, and many were drafted into the German army and would rather have been home with their families. But as long as people will settle for the "Cliff Notes" version of history put out by Hollywonk rather than analyzing the history for themselves, the propaganda machine will continue to be fed.

I don't particualrly like the new meme that these movies are failing because Americans don't like to see America criticised. I think most of us are very comfortable with honest self-criticism. What we don't like is crappy movies, and we don't like intellectually lazy, dishonest preaching in our crappy movies.

In context, the Private Ryan scenes were ok because we had just seen the horror that these soldiers went through to get to that machine-gun nest. They acted out of terror and rage and we can understand that. The recent crop of movies are overly simplistic, America is mischaracterized, our opponents are mischaracterized, and the movies aren't interesting.

Just as the typical liberal thinks he doesn't have to be informed because his opinions are correct anyway, these writers and producers think they don't have to make a quality product because their message is correct anyway. Make a good movie and we will watch it, even if it is critical of America.

I thought the killing of the surrendering Germans in Saving Private Ryan was refreshingly realistic. Handing yourself over to the tender mercies of people you've been trying to kill is a dangerous thing.

Incedentally, my grandfather's brother Vic was one of the liberators of Dachau. When I was a boy he told me about killing the SS guards. He talked quietly about it, matter of factly. At first I was shocked but then I felt something else...pride. What they did that day reflected a moral understanding of the nature of justice, something sadly lacking today.

On April 29, 1945 the American troops who liberated Dachau lined up a large number of German guards against the outer wall of the concentration camp and mowed them down with .30 caliber Model 1919 Browning heavy machine guns. Judging from photographs of the event (http://www.humanitas-international.org/archive/dachau-liberation/)
a large number of the 560 camp personnel captured by the US troops were killed in this manner, although official US reports state that only 15 captured guards were killed, all of them by liberated prisoners and not by US soldiers.

Whatever the case, whether it was 15 SS men who were killed or 560, Justice was, in some small measure, served.