
How do you hide a war from your loved one? - breitling
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
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kej
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.

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DoreenMichele
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.

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sittingnut
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.

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macspoofing
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.

~~~
ljm
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.

~~~
macspoofing
>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.

Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on the situation.

>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

So we can call it a 'burden' \- why argue semantics if you agree?

>because they had no say in it, and you're basically deciding that you don't
like the truth, so they won't either

Another cynical interpretation. No. That's not necessarily the consideration.
That's not necessarily the right interpretation.

> where in reality it could be quite liberating.

Maybe. Maybe not.

>I don't feel that's quite as compassionate as giving someone the truth and
then supporting them through that if they need it;

Maybe. Maybe not.

~~~
ljm
I’ve suffered people who think they’re mind readers and know what’s best for
me. Whatever burden they thought I was carrying, they couldn’t have got it any
more wrong. Those people stopped being a part of my life when I realised what
was was going on, because what I felt was betrayed. My own feelings didn’t
matter, it was their feelings about what they assumed about me that were more
important to them.

As such, I would favour open communication instead of being ‘protected’. That
requires serious trust. And a lot of these games that we play depend on a lack
of trust.

There’s nothing cynical about this, we’ve all done things with good intentions
in mind only to get bad results. Oftentimes it’s because we’re acting in our
own interest and not the person we’re putting it on.

~~~
macspoofing
It depends. That's all I'm saying here. It is t an absolute answer.

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

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

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anigbrowl
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.

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

~~~
twic
It is a very good film though.

