Jesus, alright. I’m not gonna engage this much further, because I know that way madness lies, but I’ll just debunk a few points here.

1) I’m Swedish, so technically, Basilone didn’t fight for my freedom. As a matter of fact, Sweden didn’t do much by way of freedom fighting on account of being scared pantsless of Germany and remaining technically neutral. But sure, if you want to talk world peace, and had the Japanese been allowed to expand their empire, etc., then sure, he fought for my freedom, fine.

2) I’m going to say something now that may potentially anger a lot of people, but here we go: the Second World War was the last war where all of the Allied forces got to feel like they were doing shit right for once, and none more than that paragon of moral superiority that is the US. I respect the soldiers involved, I do, but the victors write history and I’m going to take the myth and legend of these guys with a pinch of salt. I’m sure John Basilone was a great guy, but when you’ve reached the point where they’ve made a movie out of you, the hero worship has reached boiling point.

I am watching the tv-show. I really like it, I like all of the guys involved, in fact, I’m considering trying to get my hands on Leckie’s and Sledge’s books to get the full picture, because this is the sort of stuff I’m interested in. But — and here’s the rub — what I’m watching right now isn’t real. It’s been polished to a shine by scriptwriters and producers, and sure, it’s based on real content, but this isn’t anywhere close to the full picture. This is hero worship made film, if anything, and I am compartmentalizing. The real Marines walked out of there with scars I could never begin to imagine and I mean no disrespect to them at all. That doesn’t mean, however, that when their experience has been made film, I can’t mock the shit out of everything on screen. When I speak of John Basilone, I don’t mean the real deal, I mean the guy on screen as portrayed by Jon Seda. It’s likely I won’t ever be speaking of the actual guy as an actual person because I’m so young and it is so far removed from me that the war ceases to be reality.

And furthermore, the Second World War was 70 fucking years ago. Isn’t it about time we spent less time glorifying the last time the US got to feel stalwart and bickering about whether Basilone was a Real Hero and spent more time actually solving the heaps of massive shit we’re in now?