Dunkirk: Healing Sick Minds

Roman historian Titus Livius (Livy) would love the new World War II movie, Dunkirk, because Livy believed: “the study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind.”

Livy was not the only prominent Roman thinker to value historical studies. Marcus Tullius Cicero—one of Rome’s finest orators—concurred: “To not know what happened before one was born is to live as a child.” And America’s founding father James Madison agreed with the Romans, warning: "A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people."

History textbooks in American classrooms are becoming so politically correct that some states are formally inviting parents to challenge the texts. On June 26, Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed HB 989 Instructional Materials Bill, empowering parents to challenge classroom materials that include revisionist (i.e. inaccurate) accounts of U.S. and world history.

The good news? British-American film director Christopher Nolan (famous for his Batman movies) has reinvigorated Americans with a zeal for historical accuracy.

Nolan’s new blockbuster hit, Dunkirk, serves history, straight-up. There are no rocks in this drink. No training wheels on this bike. “Intense” is not an intense-enough word to describe Dunkirk. It’s simply a tidal wave of truth.

Operation Dynamo

Dunkirk is like one huge wave that crashes in on you for 106 minutes. You want to cry, choke, run. And then, it’s over. 106 minutes felt like 16—and you immediately want to watch it again.

The story follows Allied soldiers—many of them 18- and 19-year-old boys—who are hopelessly isolated on the beaches of Dunkirk in the spring of 1940. The soldiers’ challenge, according to Nolan: “It really was a question of… [could they miraculously escape] before having to either surrender or be annihilated by the Germans? That was the choice: surrender or annihilation.”

Nolan’s film is a hit with the general public but he has many critics in the media who are upset that the soldiers in his film are mostly male and white.

Feminist commentators like Marie Claire’s Mehera Bonner are fuming that Nolan dared to tell the story of Dunkirk in a factual way. She wrote: “Dunkirk felt like an excuse for men to celebrate maleness… If Nolan’s entire purpose is breaking the established war movie mold and doing something different—why not make a movie about women in World War II?”

First, Ms. Bonner, this is a free country and you may certainly make such a movie yourself. Second, it was men who fought on the front lines in World War II. But the real question is: why make such a puerile comment? A movie does not detract from women merely because it features men.

Truth is not demeaning to women. Re-writing history is demeaning because it minimizes the value of women—like my grandmother who served in World War II as a nurse while dating a Marine who would eventually become my grandfather. She fought a different battle on the Homefront while also enduring the heartache of missing her beloved and not knowing—sometimes for weeks—whether he might be injured, or even dead. But she never called herself a soldier.

In Dunkirk, Nolan also made the supposedly controversial decision to portray good men as good. Moreover, Nolan encourages us to admire moral courage rather than to see it—as many modern directors would—as weakness or naiveté. In Dunkirk, there’s no Frank Underwood; no anti-hero who is glamorized for clawing his way to raw power. Instead, we see many men of all ages making real sacrifices; risking all they have to help others and protect their country.

We don’t see—but we know—there were many women making sacrifices too. Women whose husbands, sons and brothers took their small recreational and fishing boats (around 700 boats in total) out over the treacherous English Channel waters—and braved bombs falling from the sky—to save roughly 338,000 troops in a mission called Operation Dynamo.

In a closing scene where a fleet of small boats cruises in to rescue the soldiers, we see one woman standing on one boat, alongside an all-male crew. Her shoulders are thrown back and her head is high. The only thing moving about this brave, statuesque soul is her long, dark skirt—beating in the wind. You get the sense that she is a single or recently married woman with no children yet under her care; a woman who risked her life to offer troops first aid and comfort. Earlier in the film, we see another woman on a larger boat—a professional nurse in uniform—offering soldiers toast and tea.

It’s apparently hard for liberals to watch a movie like Dunkirk because it tells the truth about men and women—that they are different and that these differences allow society to flourish even amid the chaos of war. The story of Operation Dynamo, told factually, shows that when ordinary men and women with strong moral compasses do that thing at which they are respectively better (fighting vs. nourishing) miracles can happen.

Few words are uttered in this movie. The characters’ actions speak for them. You walk away from Dunkirk motivated to be noble and courageous. And that is the power of telling truthful history.

I would classify the Dunkirk-haters into three categories. There is simply the anti-war crowd, and they see this as patronizing war or it’s associated violence. The second crowd are the type that generally want some romance piece out of any epic story (War and Peace, or Doctor Zhivago for example). The third group are the precise-history crowd (A Bridge Too Far is a good example of this group), who want every single detail and name to be absolutely precise.

For the bare essentials individual who really doesn’t remember much about this topic in school or college...Dunkirk is a reminder of three essentials of life.

1. If you say something is impossible...then you ought to go and put every ounce of strength into proving the statement is false.

2. If you’d lined up various nationalities on the Earth and just said we need civilians to haul up tomorrow...manning sailboats and pleasure-boats....to face down some Nazis and rescue some guys in uniform, then there’s only two groups on the face of the Earth who’d do something this crazy (Americans and Brits).

3. Finally, there are absolutely consequences in life. Without that rescue, the Nazis likely come to England within six months...invade....taking the isle. That one screw-up, and the dynamics of rescue...set about the consequences in five years of Berlin being surrounded and defeated. Consequences matter.

The corruption of history is a primary focus of the left, and to some degree it is an effectively evil technique; comparable to sociopathic indoctrination.

That is, a psychopath is “naturally wired” in their brain to dehumanize others, be it natural or induced by brain injury. But a sociopath is taught as a child to be sociopathic: to dehumanize others, imagine them insensitive to pain, soulless, and especially insignificant and unimportant. And importantly, to disregard any information that does not conform to their twisted belief system.

But to be trained as a sociopath, or trained to *stop* being a sociopath, a person must be taught early, or have that teaching reversed. By the time they become an adult, with a mature brain, they may be “set in stone” with their beliefs.

And thus the left is keen on controlling education, to subvert the family belief system in favor of socialist leftism. The Nazis did this with the children under their control, and to this day, some of the surviving Hitler Youth still admire and support that ideology, albeit discreetly.

The biggest take from this goes to the story of “healing the sick mind”, in that while non-sociopathic adults may learn from and enjoy the movie Dunkirk; it is especially important that children see it as well.

Because a little truth can dispel a lot of propaganda.

First, I have not seen the movie, however as a historian specializing in WW2, I will state that, in the view of the individual soldiers at Dunkirk, it appeared that Churchill, the Prime Minister was withholding support.

However, much of the support provided by the RAF was at high altitude where they were intercepting the Luftwaffe and lessening its bombing and strafing of the soldiers. Also, there was the decision by Churchill and the Royal Navy to withhold sending its battleships and cruisers into the narrow English Channel because of their being vulnerable to the Luftwaffe.

A common question of the soldiers was “Where is the RAF?”

The answer is that they took on the German air force at longer distances from the beach. They kept the Germans out of the beach area successfully but were out far enough that the soldiers could not see them.

British air losses: 106 aircraft
German air losses 156 aircraft

The few German aircraft to make it past the Spitfires were taken out above or very near the beach.

I would pay to see another movie that would be about the ground battles. And another about the air battles.

This movie is so inspiring. Certain death or incarceration turned into a miracle of salvation.

"...Marie Claire’s Mehera Bonner are fuming that Nolan dared to tell the story of Dunkirk in a factual way. She wrote: “Dunkirk felt like an excuse for men to celebrate maleness..."

People like this need to be subjugated, disempowered, and then forced to make a man a sandwich.

I have come to believe extremist female empowerment is a weapon against civilization.

There is no need for it, and it harms women as much as it harms men.

The “feminist” critic of this film, Mehera Bonner, is not only juvenile but also either ignorant or dishonest. As “senior entertainment editor” for her PC media website, she should know very well that many movies, especially during WWII, were made celebrating women's contributions on the home front.

The one that 1st comes to mind is “Mrs Miniver.” But coming from a reality based generation that could actually win wars, it also show her husband as one of the British civilians who took his pleasure craft to Dunkirk for the evacuation.

PC do-gooders and hairy legged feminists:

Truth and fact be damned! The portrayal of men at war is not FEMINIZED and sanitized enough! We must have hairy-legged, Bam-Bam (Flintstones) legged women warriors present at where they never were!
Justice can only be served by altering history to suit our narrow and self-centered needs.

The film is superb! Bravo to Nolan, his team and the so many thousands of men who fought and perished. May God and country never distort their contributions to our freedoms, Feminists be damned...

The smallest boat to take part in the evacuation was a fifteen foot fishing boat which is now in a museum, well cared for.

Of the civilian boats which took part about 400 to 500 are still operating as of 2015.

12 boats in the movie, many of them used in close ups, fly a flag with a white background, a red cross with the coat arms of Dunkirk at in the center of the cross. The flag is only to be flown by those boats which participated in the evacuation.
This is a wonderful movie. Just flat out good. Go see it.

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