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Ride with the Devil
1999 · Film · 138 min
Directed by Ang Lee
Friends Jake and Jack Bull join up with Civil War guerrilla fighters, yet after the realities of war set in, they must decide what honor truly means.
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2 comments on Hacker News
One theory would be that CSA's draconian conscription operation (watch or read Cold Mountain, for example) emptied the countryside of its natural defenders. The conscription level may have been necessary given the idiotic location of the CSA capital, but quite a bit about CSA was idiotic.
In Missouri, which didn't secede but had a lot of Southern sympathizers, this conscription wasn't really a thing, and there was lots of asymmetric warfare. It actually started in the 1850s in what would become Kansas. (There are good movies about this too: The Outlaw Josey Wales and Ride with the Devil.)
This is what Ang Lee, the non-american director of the Civil War movie "Ride With the Devil" said:
"I grew up in Taiwan, where older people always complained that kids are becoming Americanized: they don’t follow tradition, and so we are losing our culture. As I got the chance to go around a large part of the world with my films, I would hear the same complaints. It seems so much of the world is becoming Americanized. When I read Daniel Woodrell’s book Woe to Live On, which we based Ride with the Devil on, I realized that the American Civil War was, in a way, where it all started. It was where the Yankees won not only territory but, in a sense, a victory for a whole way of life and of thinking."