Politics turns out to be the only bulwark or defense against the craziness of war. When politics die, the conscience of the republic dies along with it.
In addition to miseducating them on the forms of heroism, movies such as Saving Private Ryan puts forth the message that the intellectual cannot be trusted and that his concern for the laws of war means he is weak and cowardly and that only the TRUE soldier can win the war.
To reinforce the cult of the soldier is to reinforce the same set of oppositional culture war cliches that undergird our current political discourse. You're either with the war or against the troops.
It was the centrists and liberals who produced the WWII nostalgia. Absent from those nostalgic WWII memories that were created to cure the "Vietnam syndrome," are the moral horrors of combat that come with war.
The WWII that emerges from the late 90's is one scrubbed clean of its moral complexity. Example, there is no mention of American big business financing the build-up of the Nazi war machine.
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