The Red Dawn analogy

[CastorTroy]

I work in Houston with educated people who are pleasant and rational until you diss Bush and the battle against evil-doers.

I stumped one of them, who I knew to be an avid fan of rah-rah 'murican power movies, when I compared the insurgents in Iraq to the Wolverines!!!! kids who fought the invading commie bastards in the movie Red Dawn.

I mean if you look at it, the heroic cornbread farm kids who fought the brown-skinned and Slavic invaders were in fact TERRORISTS by the standards we have set in Iraq and the occupied/disputed Palastinian lands. In the movie, these kids blew up a bomb in the middle of town that maimed and killed several of the invaders and snuck around and hid in the hills. This movie displayed American nationalism at its finest (but a really cheesy movie).

The dumbass didn't want to admit that perhaps WE might have stepped into a hornets nest of ultra-nationalism ourselves, instead of battling the evil "Islamic Jihad Terrorists". AND when I pulled out the Red Dawn analogy this idiot didn't have an answer, just some incoherent string of George Bush-trademarked slogans like "they hate freedom" and "9/11".

[bkcc]

1. WOLVERINES!!

...sorry, couldn't resist...

[MissMarple]

2. Post Civil War Reconstruction is another example.

I saw this on another thread last week. The point was how southerners could not identify with Iraqi's defending their country from hated conquerors, since the South had similar sympathies when the Union virtually took political and economic control after the Civil War. "Red Dawn" is another good example that helps us see how the other side may feel.

[Johnny got his gun]

3. Indepence Day

Here is another example of us conveniently forgetting images in popular media, such as the movie Red Dawn, which we thought was so great when we were in elementary school.

Remember "Independence Day"? That movie that came out on July 4th a few years back? Well that movie ends with our heroic crazy old American pilot, running his airplane right into a giant alien structure that threatens the world.

Sound familiar?

-M

[Ms. Clio]

8. Most of what the South believes about Reconstruction is a myth

It's all part of the "Lost Cause" ideology.

[SnohoDem]

4. It's an excellent analogy

A good friend who's a Viet Nam vet, independent voter, political moderate, and movie fan, used exactly the same analogy several months ago. He said, "It's like Red Dawn, only we're the Russians".

The expectation that the Iraqis would greet us with flowers was beyond stupid.

From their perspective:

We invaded in 1991 and killed thousands of soldiers and civilians, all of whom had relatives.

We encouraged a Shiite rebellion, then abandoned the Shiia.

We imposed sanctions for twelve years, but left Saddam in power; the sanctions hurt Iraqi citizens, not Saddam.

We've invaded again, killed thousands more soldiers and civilians, elevated criminals into the government, imposed martial law, 'disappeared' their fellow citizens, and declared that we are bringing 'freedom' to Iraq.


How would we react to that?

[CastorTroy]

5. Don't forget pre-1990!

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

[SnohoDem]

7. How true - thanks.

I hadn't forgotten, I was just starting at Gulf war 1. The fact that we supported Saddam for so long makes us look even worse, doesn't it?

Maybe your friends in Houston think that Iraqis don't have memories.

[Guaranteed]

11. Great post. nt

[TahitiNut]

6. Go Blue!

:evilgrin:

[markses]

9. Wolverines = Viet Cong

Red Dawn was part of a cultural phenomenon that sought to reverse the dominant images of the Vietnam War - to recast the Americans as the underdog guerillas in the face of the invading mechanized army. Needless to say, the situation was the reverse in Vietnam. Yet the 1980's recovery images all have this simple reversal. So, Rambo and Chuck Norris are both underdog figures somewhat outside the bounds of polite society, fighting against the mechanized army of the Vietnamese. They are both skilled guerillas. Similarly with the Wolverines of Red Dawn, who pop out of spider holes and generally use the tactics deployed by the Vietnamese guerillas against the American mechanized army in the south of Vietnam throughout the war. The population in Red Dawn are herded into New Life Hamlets, much like the Americans herded Vietnamese peasants. The Wolverines in Red Dawn are the Viet Cong, but with the pathetic cultural reversal that makes the guerillas (rather than the invaders) Americans. This feature of 1980's Vietnam films has been noticed for years - it was a largely successful cultural project when combined with the laughable and false POW/MIA project. Americans couldn't take that they were the aggressors and wrong-doers in Vietnam, so they invented a whole cultural world in which they were the victims. It was, needless to say, a sad and neurotic fiction.

[CastorTroy]

10. Can you expand on that? In re: POW-MIA being bogus

Belive me, I'm not doubting you or anything. In fact, I find this very interesting because I've never heard that before.

I remember when I was in Boy Scouts we had this Scoutmaster who was one of those bellowing, middle-aged, angry vet-types that was really into hoisting that black POW-MIA flag around wherever we went on campouts. He was a freeper type deluxe and a cook in the Air Force who saw some cooking action in 'Nam (no, i'm not making that part up to make him look bad or mock Air Force cooks, it's just that his whole identity was angry 'Nam vet).

[markses]

12. There's a fascinating book on it

called

M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America: How and Why Belief in Live POWs has Possessed a Nation by a guy named H. Bruce Franklin.

He basically goes through the history of the emergence of the POW/MIA confusion (the categories were completely distinct until it became politically expedient to combine them) and does a careful examination of the available evidence. The book basically shows that the POW/MIA story is a politically concocted myth that was first used to keep the POW wives on board with Nixon's war strategy, then grew into a cultural phenomenon in the Reagan reconstruction. He tackles not only the factual evidence, but also this cultural emergence of the myth. Really fascinating stuff. Among the juicy bits of information is the decades-long involvement of H. Ross Perot - recruited by Nixon for this purpose - in the whole POW/MIA scam. The most devastating analyses are of the scammers themselves, who are 1000 times more culpable than any Vietnamese in hurting the families of those soldiers that were killed in Vietnam, and that these con artists bilked for tens of thousands of dollars by playing on their hopes. I've read a lot on this issue, including the works purportedly "proving" live POWs after the war, and I'm thoroughly convinced that there were none. The Vietnamese lived up to their side of the bargain. The Americans behaved like petulant children and invented a whole genre of bullshit that most people still believe.