It is just another war movie, with Brad Pitt as a sergeant commanding four Sherman tanks – more vulnerable than the superb Panzers – in the final push to cross and conquer Germany in 1945. It is, however, a surprisingly human story of the devastation of Hitler’s Reich, Land and Volk defended in demolished towns and cities by a decimated army and by children, girls and boys in cut-down uniforms (like my own as a 12-year old Army cadet just a few years later), and of the horror of World War 2 as lived by five men in a tank.
The Pitt tank ends up as the sole survivor of the original four, facing a battalion of 300 S.S. troops, accompanied by their officers in half-tracks. Their tank disabled, our valiant, outnumbered heroes decide to hold fast and to make a final stand against the Last of the German Mohicans. The confrontation ends up as hand-to-hand combat, with Pitt manning the machine-gun atop his tank until he is felled by an S.S. sharp-shooter and blown to bits inside the tank by a stick hand grenade called a Potato Masher.
In World War 2, believers on both sides were, at the beginning, totally convinced that God was on their side. Hitler’s officers, except for the inner circle of Hess, Goebbels and Göring, at the end realized how wrong they had been in following the folly of the Führer. The conflict, if not “war” in which we are involved today, is different. Islamic terrorists want to punish and destroy citizens of any nation that disrespects their Prophet and resists their imposition of Charia law and a worldwide Caliphate . Their victims are not only military combatants in war zones and militant opponents in the media but innocent, peaceful people become not so much collateral damage as the chosen targets of their blind terrorism. This kind of war is even more vicious than the World Wars of the 20th century. Daesh and Al Qaeda honor their “heroes”, kamikaze martyrs, and actively recruit fervent young idealists seduced by their polished propaganda and the promise of perpetual glory on earth and the most sensual of pleasures in Heaven.
War movies like “Fury” belong to History. Today our TV screens are full of sound … and fury, of blood and mangled bodies, of explosions in hotels and cinemas and music halls and editorial offices and sporting stadiums and skyscrapers. But while the terrorists acclaim their heroes, we mourn the victims of their blindfaithblindfolly. Our own heroes will be the brave men and women who resist the terror, those who come up with effective ways of protecting us against it, and above all those who, by exposing the religious madness which motivates it, get the terrorists to recognize that God is not, and never was, on their side.
DELENDA – RIDENDA – RELIGIO