Anthems
Found something unusual on Youtube last night: reaction videos.
I bumped into something very strange last night. I was mucking around on Youtube watching a couple of very recent episodes of ‘8 out of 10 cats does countdown’ which I believe is one of the funniest shows on television. While there a couple of videos popped up in the list at the side of the video being played. They included Americans watching the video and listening to the Redgum song ‘I was only Nineteen’1 which is a song written by John Schumann2, and was based on the story of a relative of Schumann’s who served in Vietnam. It is a superb, powerful, antiwar song (which is on the playlist on my phone) and deals with the subsequent psychological and medical effects of serving in the Australian forces in Vietnam. There are many versions of it on Youtube. One is the ‘official’ video1, while another is of the band playing in the Don Lane show in 19833.
The surprising thing to me, was that these North Americans had even heard of the song. Some were veterans of the Vietnam war themselves and their reactions are amazing and, in some cases, very emotional4-7.
As I looked at a couple of others, another few rolled up with the reaction to another superb antiwar song. This one was by Eric Bogle8 and is named ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’9,10. It is also on my playlist.
The reactions11,12 to this song are similar to those to Schumann’s song.
These reaction videos surprised me, both with their existence, something of which I was completely unaware, and by the emotional nature of the some of the reactions. If you get a chance, listen to the songs, if not the reaction videos.
Sources
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2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Schumann
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8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Bogle
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Band_Played_Waltzing_Matilda
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Hello from Johannesburg South Africa:
I’m 63, and I recently watched a documentary wrt the Vietnam War.
What struck me when I was watching was how all the young lads looked 14 years old at the beginning of their war stint, and then at the end, if they weren’t killed or maimed, they looked so much older.
Why has the world still not learnt?
Wars destroy people and homes and lives forever.
Only rich people make money out of this terrible misery.
I mean what were Americans doing all over there?
And then when they came back, they were made to feel ashamed of having served at all.
I understand the Cold War mentality of that time as we had it here in South Africa, too. But we didn’t have television here until 1975, and my dad only got us a television set in 1976/7, so we were isolated from the world events. I was in tears after I watched it.
The poor young chaps and the Vietnamese people who were killed and their family life and livelihoods destroyed.