The Jingo Channel

The Jingo Channel

Why is the History Channel Resurrecting Wartime Propaganda?

- by 'tamerlane'

I must confess to a life-long obsession with fighter planes. As a kid, I'd lay in my bedroom, staring at my ceiling--which I'd painted azure with white clouds--and imagine the hordes of model aircraft, hung from sewing thread, engaged in battle.

So when I recently found the History Channel's Dogfights series on Netflix, you can appreciate my boyish glee. An entire series dedicated to my passion for the machines and tactics of air combat! Let me say that the CGI on Dogfights is stunning. Sometimes you'd swear it was actual footage. The action is exhilarating, the episodes evenly paced. Technical data is briefly but accurately glossed. Interviews with the actual pilots lend vibrancy and poignancy to the accounts. I should love this series, but I'm beginning to hate it.

The problem is the editorial.

For motives that elude me, the History Channel feels the need to inject the angry, jingoist sentiments of wartime propaganda. The viewer is constantly reminded that we, the 'Good Guys' (USA, UK, Israel), are morally and technologically superior, not to mention braver and more clever, than the 'Bad Guys' (Germany, Japan, North Vietnam, Egypt.) Enemy aircraft and pilots are called "Nazi" or "Communist", loaded terminology largely abandoned by modern historians. We'd never hear of "Democrat" Mustangs or "Likkud" Mirages.

I am an ecumenical fighter plane junkie. I get goose bumps equally from contemplating the Russian MiG-29, the American Corsair or the German Albatross. I'm fascinated by the exploits of pilots of all eras and countries. I've personally talked shop with both a WWII US carrier pilot and a Luftwaffe veteran. Dogfights only gives us the Good Guys, Americans mostly. One episode, "The First Jet Ace" was really about the first American to reach five victories in a jet over Korea. The Germans had at least 23 jet aces in WWII. The famous Red Baron, with 80 kills in WWI? Neither hide nor hair of him. Hans-Joachim Marseille, who shot down 17 RAF fighters in one day over North Africa? Or Erich Hartmann, with 352 victories on the Eastern Front? I bet you never even heard of those two.

An odd thing--the Good Guys never get shot down in this show. Based on the astounding success of the USAF depicted on Dogfights, it's easy to see how we won the Korean and Vietnam wars. I'm well into Season Two, and my count so far is a total of three, including two British downed in 1917 by a lone Fokker, before the other eight Brits "got revenge."

That's the most disturbing aspect of the series--the narration is peppered with phrases like "avenge," "out for blood" and "payback time." Make no mistake, a good fighter pilot must exhibit audacity, aggressiveness, and yes, a "killer instinct." Getting shot at also tends to make one angry. Yet the former pilots express open admiration and empathy for their foes. From the first air duels of 1914, fighter pilots have embraced their opponents as fellow members of a chivalric warrior caste. Often staring each other right in the eye, the humanity of the enemy is never easily forgotten by the fighter pilot. One Israeli ace interviewed lamented over the Jordanian he'd fatally shot shot down: "with his skill and courage, he deserved to have ejected safely." If the pilots themselves can take an objective view of their mortal combat, why does the History Channel need to cast these bygone battles as an ongoing struggle between Good and Evil?

Like fish, the stench of jingoism lingers. Only gradually over the past quarter century have most historians eliminated partisan bias in their works. In doing so, one can still catch a lot of FLAK for a perceived lack of patriotism. In 1980, the prolific military author, Kenneth Macksey, published Invasion, a fictional account of a successful 1940 German conquest of England. Some wondered whether the retired British army major and combat veteran was a Nazi sympathizer. Others felt Macksey had impunged the legend of Churchill's wisdom.

As recently as 1999, eminent Oxford economic historian, Niall Ferguson, was vilified for suggesting in his The Pity of War that much of the blame for WWI lay at Britain’s feet. Ferguson's compelling argument, that war in 1914 was far from inevitable, but that England's ill-advised, secret military pact with France precipitated hostilities, was attacked not on scholarly grounds, but for its temerity to question the myths of Versailles.

si vis pacem, para bellum. We need Top Gun School to study the dogfights of the past. We need experts like Macksey to figure out when we did well, as opposed to when we just got lucky. We also need scholars like Ferguson to dispel old myths, to analyze policies & decisions that dragged reluctant nations into war. But we all need to remember that when we kill the enemy, we're killing another person.

The History Channel is doing the opposite. It's perpetuating the myths of our righteousness and our invincibility. It's glorifying killing, demonizing the enemy, and stoking hatred & revenge. It's making us crave war.

(c) 2009, by 'tamerlane' All rights reserved.