A Civil War after Years of Foreign Occupation: Sound Familiar?

Rating: 9/10 (11 June 2008)

When I was watching this film, I couldn't help but think of the way the Irish treated each other during the Civil War in the early twentieth century. It reminded me as well about the tensions and mistreatments of our own American Civil War soldiers just a mere sixty years before the events in this film take place. What can we learn of war, but to be soldiers, not ever knowing peace? A future so gleam, it seemed as though the Irish Civil War would never end once it began. It was the Protestants against the Catholics, the British supporters against those who were severely oppressed by the British. It was what some had seen as the war to reunite the Irish people as a whole, but none the less, it did the opposite.
In the current American invasion of Iraq, almost every day anymore, we see mistreatment in warfare to soldiers, ones of our own, and those of the enemy. In warfare, there are rules to engagement, and there is to be no mistreatment of soldiers of any side, even in an occupied country. But just as it is today, the past was just as cruel. The British soldiers in the film were merely beating the Irish into submission, making them see things their way, almost like American forces in Iraq are doing now.
Another reason that warfare is not pleasant is to those who suffer watching others profiteer from the violence. Sometimes from security issues, for example, the Blackwater incident in Iraq in 2006, where security personnel were receiving kickbacks on safety contracts, which left American soldiers unsafe. War profiteering is not at all new, and every American President has gained some notoriety from his war campaigns. The current war in Iraq for example, the Halliburton Company is profiteering, which was formerly headed up as CEO by current United States Vice President, Dick Cheney.
In the film, the rebel soldiers were doing business with a shady character that financed the war, but at the same time, evicted women and their children. These groups of rebels were highly ridiculed for their actions, as they maybe should have been. But at the same time, I can see their side of the story as well. This man was powerful, and had the money to finance the war they were hoping would turn their country in the right direction. It was a plain ethical dilemma, but if not made, could have resulted in the end of their uprising.
There is one other ethical dilemma that causes concern for me, and that is the fact that the soldiers had to dispose of their own. It was awful, tying one of them to a post and shooting him for keeping information needed to keep the war going. And another one of their own was shot along with a corrupt boss for being sympathetic to the enemy. If it were me, and I was the one to make the call, I know it would be hard for me to do, as it was for the main characters in the film.