>If you watch any of the disaster movies, it is intriguing how they always show
>masses running frantically away from what cannot be escaped (such as a
>half-mile high tidal wave a few blocks behind them). Then a few isolated
>individuals are shown awaiting it with teary courage (usually holding
>someone's
>hand). They rarely show collective courage in the face of the inevitable. And
>yet in actuality there are innumerable examples of the latter -- the Warsaw
>Ghetto being one. And the Red Army was not that far off. It might have ended
>differently.
The Red Army had not been that far off for all the 63 bloody days it took the Germans to crush the uprising. They apparently set up camp on the other side of the Vistula - perhaps waiting for the Germans to do to Polish nationalists what they themselves would otherwise be ordered later to do. I have to go along with this dark view, as an attack in September, when a large chunk of German might was busy in the ghetto, would have been a good time to cross the river. That being the case, the uprising was doomed from the off, and those survivors who were to die at Stuthoff and Auschwitz had always been doomed ...
As for collective courage; there's a difference between the sudden - that moment when panic can take us - and the gradual - when resolve has time to take hold through shared experience and communication (which produce or enhance the collective identity without which a collective anything seems but a pipedream - Lenin often talked about this, albeit never, to my knowledge, in theoretical detail - and Trotsky, trying to put as much of a shine on the fact that revolutionary Russia had so small a proletariat, also implied that this was a social psychological plus).
Military training, for instance, seems much more about fashioning that sort of identity than it is about making each individual the optimal 'killing machine'.
Every famous bit of battle oratory in Australian war history seems to appeal pretty directly to two such levels (the battle unit - where the identity is based on shared experience and personal connection; say, no higher than the level of battalion - and, of course, the national unit - it's never the allied cause, always 'let's show 'em what Australians can do', sorta stuff). During the First World War (when the idea of 'Australia' was but fifteen years old), a particularly effective unit in the Australian army had been the 47th Battalion of the Second Division. They were the Tasmanians and Queenslanders at a time when there weren't very many people in those states. When the unit was decimated at Pozieres (I think it was) in 1916, the battalion was wound up and the survivors spread around other battalions. Apparently these individuals suffered terrible morale loss (I got this off two of 'em back in the seventies), and the general staff resolved not to do that sort of thing again.
Cheers, Rob.