BY KIRSTIN ROBERTS
Just days before the US began bombing Afghanistan, a Bush administration adviser met with Hollywood executives to enlist them in a Second World War-style propaganda offensive. The Hollywood elite have raced to show just how willing they were to grease the wheels of Bush's war machine.
The hurriedly released Black Hawk Down, about the disastrous 1993 US mission to Somalia, has already grossed more than US$75 million. This will certainly increase the confidence of studio execs to release more tales of US war glory replete with flag-draped heroes and swarthy enemies of the "American way of life".
In the works are more tales of bravery and self-sacrifice by US soldiers in Vietnam, Africa and the Philippines. Mel Gibson stars in We Were Soldiers, in which he leads an elite group of soldiers, "against all odds", in Vietnam.
Of course, anyone who looks beyond the silver screen for the histories of these conflicts will find a record of atrocities and oppression on behalf of US interests. But Hollywood won't let the truth stand in the way of a movie that makes you feel good about the USA.
Hollywood has always been a willing promoter of imperial adventures, especially when it sniffs a profit to be made from a slicked-up production starring the latest "hunk". Joe Roth, head of Revolution Studios, which is making Man of War — where Bruce Willis plays a special forces soldier in the middle of African tribal warfare — explained that patriotism didn't drive him to make the movie. The sense that money could be made did.
"Movies are their own reality", Roth told the Washington Post. You can say that again.
With theatres filling with an orgy of patriotic lies, here are some film recommendations that strip away the gloss and expose the true horror and causes of war. All of these are available on video and could be shown by anti-war groups seeking to involve new forces in the movement against Bush's war.
Two films by one of Hollywood's most gifted directors, Stanley Kubrick, are must-sees for the war-weary. Paths of Glory is his 1954 masterpiece about WWI soldiers caught in the insanity of a general's war. Kubrick's 1964 black comedy, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb should be required viewing for anyone who thinks Bush's Star Wars weapons program or the Pentagon's plans to nuke seven "rogue states" are good ideas.
With Iraq topping Bush junior's list of "evildoers", two films that look at Bush senior's Gulf War in 1991 are highly recommended. David O. Russell's Three Kings is so clear that the Gulf War was for oil profits at the expense of millions of lives that if it were released today, it would certainly be lambasted for anti-American bias. Documentary filmmaker Gerard Ungerman's Hidden Wars of Desert Storm portrays not just the misery that US military and sanctions policy produced for Iraq's people, but also examines how US soldiers suffering from the Gulf War syndrome have been neglected by the government that sent them to fight.
Two films dealing with Vietnam can help to teach a new generation of activists what that war was really all about. Hearts and Minds, a 1975 Academy Award-winning documentary, depicts US involvement from the point of view of the Vietnamese and the US "grunts" who fought. Coupled with The War at Home, an uneven but still exciting documentary about the protest movement against the war, these movies provide a glimpse of why the US ruling class still works to rid itself of the "Vietnam syndrome".
US wars on the people of Latin America have been chronicled in several good and important films: Missing, a Constantin Costa-Gravas film about the CIA-backed coup in Chile; Ken Loach's Carla's Song, about a survivor scarred by torture during El Salvador's US-sponsored civil war; Saul Landau's documentary Target Nicaragua: Inside a Covert War; and Barbara Trent's Panama Deception, about the 1989 US invasion and massacre are some, but not all, of the powerful films detailing US crimes in its own backyard.
This list would be incomplete without mentioning two films, which in their simplicity and honesty, say more about the horror of war than the gruesome opening scene of Saving Private Ryan ever could. Both are set in the First World War, the "war to end all wars".
Peter Weir's Gallipoli, starring a young Mel Gibson, shows the reality of trench warfare, where millions gave their lives for territory gains measured by the foot. And All Quiet on the Western Front — which exists in many versions, but look for the one from the 1920s — shows that, no matter what the generals and politicians claim, it's ordinary people who will suffer and die and who have no interest in their masters' wars.
These films serve as a much needed antidote to Hollywood's march to war.
[From Socialist Worker, weekly paper of the US International Socialist Organization. Visit <http://www.socialistworker.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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