But the assumption in praise of *Private Ryan* seems to be that for people to learn what war is "really like" will have a political impact. I think this is nonsense, for a number of reasons.
Item. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the political position of that organization.
Item. The willingness to go to war (as illustrated in all the wars since 1945) of men and women who have already experienced in their own lives the full horror of war.
Point: In any case such political impact if it existed would, presumably, be against war as such. Caudwell's essay on Pacifism remains almost definitive on *that* kind of politics. The main impact the Vietnan War had on students in the 1970s (or at least those in my classes) was to make them condemn the violence in the *Iliad*. (This was true even of those Black students from Chicago who came from neighborhoods rife with police violence: all too many of them placed the blame not on the perpetrators of the violence but on "Violence" as such.
Finally, there is a magnificent passage in one of Kenneth Burke's books in which he comments on Archibald Macleish's defense of or attack on pacifist propaganda (I read this a very long time ago, and really can't remember Macleish's position). Anyhow Burke imagines a young man and his fiance standing before a poster which portrays war in all its terror and obscenity, and saying to her, "That's what war is like. I must join the Army to defend my country." Burke quite seriously argued that the best psychological preparation for war was pacifist propaganda of any kind.
If Burke is right, then *Private Ryan* is part of the psychological preparation for the next Vietnam War just as *All Quiet on the Western Front* (book and movie) was part of the run-down to WW 2.
And in any case it ought to be obvious (certainly to Marxists) that there is *never* a direct connection between the content of a (good, bad, or indifferent) work of art and its political impact.
Carrol