How do you hide a war from your loved one?

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2019/09/12/how-do-you-hide-a-war-from-your-loved-one-lie-about-everything-including-the-bombs.html

by breitling • 7 years ago

51 21 7 years ago

thestar.com

DoreenMichele• 7 years ago

At least part of this is about a real world example of a family hiding the existence of WWI from their elderly relative until she died at age 100.

Fascinating to think about from a number of angles. We all exist within some set of beliefs that shape our lives, for better or for worse. They no doubt routinely contain inaccuracies on a routine basis, often for benign reasons, but we also get intentionally deceived plenty.

sittingnut• 7 years ago

however well intentioned, this boils down to people deciding for and controlling others. disrespecting them, treating them less than fully human, less than themselves. that is the underlying evil in all evil actions.

1000units• 7 years ago

On a related note, it seems your account had been shadow-banned until this comment.

Stratoscope• 7 years ago

That usually means that someone "vouched" for the specific comment using the vouch link on the individual comment page. This turns off the "dead" flag for that one comment.

macspoofing4• 7 years ago

No. That's a very cynical interpretation of the events. In fact, it was the human instinct to protect those that need protection (elderly, children) that was the driving force.

American Life had a podcast about a Chinese family that hid their elderly matriarch's terminal diagnosis from her. The story is similar in spirit to this one. Whatever you may think of that decision, it was not an evil act. In another podcast, the adults shielded their girlscout troop from the harsh realities of a POW camp similar to 'Life is Beautiful'.

Sometimes, people will decide to carry a burden on behalf of others, and in general that is a deeply admirable quality.

skinnymuch• 7 years ago

The Chinese family anecdote sounds like it might be the basis for critically acclaimed indie film The Farewell that just came out.

ljm2• 7 years ago

It only really works if you can keep it up, because once the curtain drops you could be looking at a level of deceit or betrayal that becomes incredibly difficult to reconcile as the lie becomes more complicated.

I don't think you can call it a burden in that sense if the other person is totally oblivious to it. That's purely a burden of your own creation, because they had no say in it, and you're basically deciding that you don't like the truth, so they won't either, where in reality it could be quite liberating.

In that sense, I don't feel that's quite as compassionate as giving someone the truth and then supporting them through that if they need it; carrying that burden together if indeed it is a burden to them. It might not be.

trhway• 7 years ago

Not a war, yet still a pretty big happening, a paradigm shift that can be very traumatic too - East Germany from socialism into capitalism and unification. How you hide that? A good and funny movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin! :

"The story follows a family in East Germany; the mother (Saß) is dedicated to the socialist cause and falls into a coma in October 1989, shortly before the November revolution. When she awakens eight months later in June 1990, her son (Brühl) attempts to protect her from a fatal shock by concealing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. "

TazeTSchnitzel• 7 years ago

It's named and talked about at length in the article.

twic• 7 years ago

It is a very good film though.

antaviana• 7 years ago

There is also this Italian movie about a kid in a nazi concentration camp and his father making everything possible to pretend they are just playing a game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Beautiful

pge• 7 years ago

Part of the beauty of the movie is that at the end the mother appears to have been aware of, and amused by, the ruse all along. One wonders if the same is true of the OP's real-life story.

sixtypoundhound• 7 years ago

I already see the creative writing story... when she dies, goes to heaven... and is shocked to find it full of young soldiers...

anigbrowl2• 7 years ago

Write it - a brilliant denouement that goes to the heart of the issue.

kej• 7 years ago

This reminds me of my dad, who saw how much his family worried when his older brother was sent to Vietnam and decided not to tell them when it was his turn.

For the rest of her life my grandmother used the Army training my dad for jungle warfare and then stationing him in Alaska as an example of government mismanagement.

anigbrowl2• 7 years ago

I feel the author badly misses the point here. It's not that a person in difficult conditions will necessarily suffer horribly from knowing bad things; they might give up in despair, or they might rise to the occasion and do something startling with the limited options that are available to them.

What's really being protected here are the feelings of the more knowledgeable people; preserving an illusion for the vulnerable serves as a reservoir of hope for those already in despair. This is the 'noble lie' of Plato's Republic (sometimes referred to as a 'pious fiction' in religious terms; likewise the field of law is awash with 'legal fictions' that everyone knows are fictional but which are easier to maintain than addressing the underlying problem). The false picture of a reliable teleology serves to soothe the anxiety that would arise if it was widely appreciated that the people in charge don't know what they're doing a lot of the time and are just making slightly better informed guesses.

While individuals, tribes, and small societies can overcome that anxiety, accept uncertainty and persevere or even thrive, the larger a society becomes the more difficult it is to promulgate ideas and actions within it, and (perhaps more importantly) the greater the incentives for those who benefit most from the fiction to uphold or elaborate it at the expense of others.

Of course, most of us are wired to be protective of children and minimize unnecessary anxiety in favor of harmony. It can be both a kindness and good strategy to shield the vulnerable in hopes that they'll make it through bad times relatively unscathed. But taken to excess, it robs individuals of their agency for the sake of a comforting sentiment, imprisoning them in a gilded cage for the nostalgic pleasure of their jailers who are mourning their own loss of innocence. Should the cage be breached, the unwary inhabitant may fall from a cradle into a horror for which they are utterly unprepared, a far crueler fate than the most pessimistic decline.

How do you hide a war from your loved one?

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