Heidi at The Beat posted about the new blogging crew over at Blog@Newsarama and she made the analogy that they were like the characters in the movie The Dirty Dozen, the 1960’s World War Two movie staring Lee Marvin. In the movie, Lee Marvin is an Army officer that takes a bunch of condemned soldiers off death row and turns them into commandos to take part in a deadly suicide mission behind enemy lines that nobody else wants to do. The movie always struck me as being kind of goofy because I think history shows that the Allies in World War Two didn’t seem to care an awful lot about risking the lives of it’s soldiers.
Watch the first hour of Saving Private Ryan to see what I mean.
Heidi made the The Dirty Dozen comparison because like the condemned soldiers in the movie, the new Blog@Newsarama crew have been, in her words, “made sport of by the Nazis soon after landing in Brittany“.
In her analogy, the Nazis were other bloggers weighing in on the new Blog@Newsarama team. If you guessed that someone claimed to take great offense to this Nazi comparison you would be correct. If you guessed that it was the people actually being compared to the Nazis in The Dirty Dozen, you would be wrong.
Two of the people from Blog@Newsarama commented on Heidi’s post.
Lucas Siegel wrote:
The only other thing I’d like to put here is that, honestly, a killed-in-action metaphor in relation to myself is, well, offensive. You may or may not have read in our introduction post or in the comments section of the blog in question that I served in the Army for six years. I’ve served overseas, in a warzone, and seen people actually get killed-in-action. I assure you, it’s not something to be used as a joke under any circumstance. Thanks.
So let me get this straight. Getting killed in action in a war zone is not something to joke about or to make reference to lightly, but it’s OK to bring it up to score points in a silly Internet discussion? The Dirty Dozen was not real. There was no actually commando unit in World War Two comprised of death row inmates. Heidi made a comparison to a movie of fiction.
Lucas Siegel wasn’t the only Blog@Newsarama blogger to claim to take offense. Sarah Jaffe quickly chimed in.
She wrote:
Gee, thanks. I love not even being slagged off properly and compared to victims of Nazis since my family actually was killed by Nazis. Wow, classy.
Once again, they were movie Nazis. They were not real Nazis. They were actors playing roles in a movie.
I don’t really understand how people become so easily offended. The moral indignation some choose to display when they are exposed to something they claim to be offended by always seems so fake to me. I just don’t get it.
Schooly
/ December 14, 2008Rick, I take offense that you claim the Dirty Dozen wasn’t real. I CRIED REAL TEARS WHEN FRANKO WAS SHOT IN THE BACK, YOU BASTARD!
Rick
/ December 14, 2008@Schooly: I see your offense and I raise you one healthy dose of rightness indignation!