Matt Yglesias:Captain America And Total War

[RandySF]

Something I rather enjoyed about watching Captain America on Sunday afternoon is that for a war movie (which is what it is, more than a comic book movie), it offered an unusually comprehensive view of mobilization for total war. You get the soldiers, of course, whose willingness to risk their lives for their country and their fellow troops is crucial. But the movie also makes clear that the notion that “wars are fought with weapons but won by men” is little more than a motivational slogan. One of the main things that soldiers do is try to prevent the Nazis from developing war-winning super-weapons. Meanwhile, the Allies are working on super-weapons of their own. You see in the film that in order to fight and win a war, you need to be able to finance a war. And this is a multi-dimensional process. On the one hand you have patriotic exhortations to lend money to the government at sub-market rates. On the other hand, even as fighting men volunteer to risk their lives, scientists Howard Stark and Abraham Erskine are doing their own wartime service rather than focusing their energies on finding erectile dysfunction treatments.


http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/25/278116/captain-america-and-total-war/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+matthewyglesias+%28Matthew+Yglesias%29