Another coincident! Although I was born in Canada my parents are Italian and my father was in the war. As an eighteen year old. Even though his father, my grandfather, was a socialist and despised the Fascists my dad ended up in the army fighting for them. He didn't fight very long or very well and his battalion was captured by the Germans. He spent a number of years in a German POW camp and came out looking like a skeleton.
From my dad I learned that lesson in the video that Dr Peterson tried to impart to his students. He loved war movies. Documentaries and fiction. We would watch them together when I was young and he would always laugh at American war stories. He claimed most of them lied. People don't behave that way. He was saying the same thing Peterson was saying.
There was one story that he repeated a few times. In the POW camp there was a sergeant who was particularly brutal. Terrorized all the prisoners. Towards the end of the war when the Allies weren't far from the camp some of the prisoners along with my dad escaped. My dad and his war buddy ended up separated from the other escapees and were eventually captured by a German detachment - led by that cruel sergeant. He had them dig their graves and then told them to run for their lives. The Germans never fired on them and allowed them to escape. My dad at the time was certain digging that grave was the last thing he would accomplish.
There was an incident that comes to mind that always bothered me and only a few years ago I got my eureka moment. In four grade my best friend at the time was in the Boy Scouts and he wanted me to join up. So he dressed up in the Scout uniform and came over to my house to show my dad. We told him I wanted to join the scouts. The minute my dad saw the outfit he was adamant. No way was I joining the scouts. Although my dad was old school and stubborn that day was beyond anything he had ever done. At the time I thought it was because he was cheap and didn't want to fork out the money for the uniform. Only years later when I was middle-aged did I realize he ****ing grew up in Fascist Italy. For him uniforms represented totalitarianism and war.
That is quite the story, and based on his experiences it is hardly surprising that he associated such uniforms even those of the Boy Scouts with totalitarianism and war.
I have a story of my own to share that my grandmother recounted to me when I was but a boy. This took place a few months after the war ended after Hungary was occupied by the Soviets, my grandmother was out for a stroll pushing my recently born father in a baby carriage she had managed to hold onto in anticipation of his birth.
As she was pushing the carriage through the rubble filled streets a group of drunken Russian soldiers walked out of a bar and one of them pulled out his pistol and started waiving it around, and as he noticed my grandmother some distance away he, for whatever reason, decided it would be a grand idea to pop off a few shots in her direction for kicks I assume.
My grandmother was caught completely off guard but had the presence of mind to turn the carriage around and use her body to shield my infant father from the bullets, which fortunately did not strike her. Having had their fun, the soldiers drunkenly staggered away in the opposite direction, and it was only then that she noticed that a bullet had imbeded itself in the carriage in what was likely the first shot fired.
The carriage itself had a thick wooden plank apparently in the front, and as it turns out the bullet had struck it, and the tip of the bullet was slightly protruding from the other side and had it gone through it would have struck my infant father square in the face killing him instantly.
Fortunately for her and my father (and for me, by extension), the shot came from a far enough distance that it did not have the velocity to penetrate completely through that plank of wood, otherwise I wouldn’t be sharing this story today.
Another story she mentioned was when during the war there was a mass evacuation of civilians to be taken from Budapest to the countryside where they would be safer away from the city. As she told it she was already at the train station ready to depart when she forgot a book and necklace given to her by her older brother (who incidentally was also killed on the Eastern Front).
She couldn’t bear to leave them behind, so she left despite the protestations of her friends imploring her to stay and leave the city (she was pregnant with my father at the time), to retrieve these items despite the fact that there was no guarantee there would be another evacuation from the city in the near future.
It turned out to be a wise decision, for only later did she find out that the train carrying for the most part women, children and the elderly happened to be passing through an industrial area on its way to the countryside when an allied bombing raid struck, killing every single person on board leaving no survivors.
How thin the line is between chance and misfortune when one thinks about it, and that is just one of many stories I heard growing up and that’s just from my grandmother on my fathers side.
Looks like we have similar taste. I finished Brave New World a couple of weeks ago, before that it was The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and now I'm on The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Once done, I might go back to Dostoevsky, I hear Crime and Punishment is even better than The Brothers Karamazov.
Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are both excellent books in their own right, whether you shall enjoy one more than the other you will only know once you have read it which I highly recommend.
Enjoy
