War and Propaganda
Propaganda about Vietnam: US Heroism in Movies
Abstract
© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, 10 April 2003, Friday, 2 October 2009
Captain Marvel Kills the Gooks
The movies in Montgomery, Alabama. 1968. That year, children had died in the racist firebombing of a black church in the town. It was Saturday night and the local fleapit was packed with “good ole boys” who, mainly hung about gas stations giggling maniacally at anyone in a car with “out of Dixie” plates. The movie was The Green Berets, starring John Wayne.
From scene one they cheered. They threw their beer cans and yelped and when “The Duke” dealt single handedly with an entire regiment of gooks, a fat unfit freak, hoarse with adulation, stood and saluted.
For those who knew anything about Vietnam and its war, this was a bad movie—badly put together, badly acted, and risingly silly to the point of comedy. Although hailed in towns like Montgomery, where John Wayne is Captain Marvel, it was generally dissed. Its sanitised heroism was Hollywood at its crudest, and its antics did not vaguely correspond with TV images of the greatest military machine in history napalming civilians because it could do nothing more effective.
The Deer Hunter, was a more sophisticated film linking Vietnam with small town America. It was called “the film that could purge a nation’s guilt!” Either it succeeded or the guilty generation has died out leaving a newly brave one. The film made truth into lie, as usual for its type, reviving the triumphant lantern jawed Caucasian hero and showing a simple people courageously suffering under Satanic bombardment as subhuman Oriental brutes and dolts.
Compared with The Deer Hunter, The Green Berets was an honest film. Its B movie fantasy was discernible to all but the most one eyed “patriot”. For those who have forgotten what Vietnam was really about, or wanted to forget, or are too young to remember, or are truly naïve, the symbolism is leaden, the schmaltz distorted and the sadism gratuitious.
The strong, silent hero, and the brave, sensitive, baby faced rookie are Batman and Robin in this fantasy. The Dynamic Duo are captured, but naturally escape by wiping out a house full of their barbaric captors. Pow! Wham! Rat-tat-tat! It prepared the way for Rockie, a US President’s version of Jesus Christ.
Murder as Salvation
These Hollywood myths seem harmless, but they are not, and nor is the reality of them. The Wild West myth was harmless except for Native Americans, then called Indians, and the lasting resentment created in them. The myths of World War II and the Korean War were harmless except for the resentment of dumb Krauts or unspeakable Nips or commie Chinks, and the foolish implication that the US Grunt is immortal in battle—confirmed by the kill ratio!
The Vietnamese war depicted in The Deer Hunter shows subhuman Gooks unfairly winning battles by living like rats instead of standing in the open to be blasted by highly explosive bombs from seven miles high—dropped by more US heroes. It is not harmless to condition a malleable generation by endless simplistic, boasting, “immortal good guy”, “disposable bad guy” images of war. It is no less simplistic today to pretend that people are “saved” by destroying them with the irresistible force of weapons of mass destruction.
Whole Vietnamese communities were used as guinea pigs for the testing of a range of anti personnel military weapons. The corollary was “American teenagers lying in their own blood and shit”, as John Pilger put it, sacrificed for the satisfaction of inept politicians and their high brass, safe in their air conditioned bunkers. The blind, deaf, armless, legless survivors are locked away in “veterans' hospitals”, carefully cordoned off from popular view, and disdained for losing the war. Only Oliver Stone in his 1989 movie, Born on the Fourth of July, attempted to show the reality. Those who favour war ought to watch it now—but TV is unlikely to be screening it.
Modern American warfare is illustrated by Hollywood in The Terminator series. It is a war of technology against human beings. Robotic killers whether satellite controlled MOABs or anthropomorphic machines do the killing with no risk to a living soldier—whence the favourable kill ratios. Body bags returned to the USA are not what the US ruling caste want to see. It also costs a lot of dollars and hardware, making a lot of people richer.
Scenes of Russian roulette throughout the Deerhunter film left the audience thinking the Vietnamese simply gambled with human life. No one in Vietnam, whether correspondents or POWs ever heard about this game being played. It is another symbol in the film, but one that uncritical viewers took to be authentic. It illustrates the truth that people fighting for their homes and culture willingly risk their lives—even against poor odds. Even in the west it used to be considered honourable. And those with no hope and no technology have no choice but to risk and willingly surrender their lives, or die of shame. That is what opportunistic and simplistic US politicians refused to understand about 9/11.
The Vietnamese war was to save the Vietnamese from communism. What did the war achieve in fact? Much of North Vietnam was left a moonscape, devoid of any signs of life—no houses, factories, schools, hospitals, pagodas, churches—all had been obliterated. Forty four per cent of forests had been destroyed. Many of those still standing had no birds and animals. At Cu Chi, an horizon that was once thick vegetation now shimmers barren in the heat, laid completely to waste “for maybe half a century or more”, according to the report of a member of an American Academy of Science. “Operation Hades” was the defoliation and poisoning of the landscape and crops, and the sowing of the seeds of human mutations for generations. In Saigon, deformed babies are being born by the dozen, caused by an aerial defoliant spray of 2,4,5-T, banned in the US.
WMD—US Style
In 1980, an old man with a wispy beard kept a vigil at a place where 283 people died in a raid:
It was a block of flats. We were mostly the old, women and children. There was no time to reach the shelters. We sang as the bombs came down. Singing is louder than bombs.
Napalm B, which the Dow Chemical Company made specially for Vietnam, smoulders under the skin through the whole remaining life of the victims. People were sprayed with plastic needles from bombs specially made for Vietnam. The needles moved through human organs escaping detection by X-rays.
General William C Westmoreland, US commander in Vietnam, toured the UK in 1979 with his Illustrated History of the Vietnam War. Its 550 photographs showed American tanks, helicopters, planes, artillery and other weapons in spectacular action. It did not mention civilian deaths.
More bombs were dropped on Vietnam than ever dropped during all of World War II and Korea combined—the greatest aerial onslaught ever. Ham Long was bombed every day for four years—incessantly—from five in the morning till two in the afternoon, the planes came in low from carriers in the South China Sea. Even now, old lorry drivers cannot respond to the hooting of a horn because they have been deafened by incessant bombing. 30,000 children in Hanoi and Haiphong alone were judged permanently deaf from American bombing.
General William C Westmoreland, who with his B52s could not win a war against peasants on bicycles, blamed his failure on critics! The US leadership always blames someone else and has the propaganda machine to convince a largely ignorant people. So much for their vaunted belief in democracy. Doubtless, the US military in Iraq can do much better with their ten ton bombs that are almost nuclear in their devastation. But if anyone in the US expects worldwide love, prestige, respect and gratitude out of this, then they are fools. People who are bombed to death can offer no problems to the US, so they can be described as “saved”, but their friends and relatives will not think so. They are future terrorists, and far from solving the problem, US policy, as usual, hugely exacerbates it.
Adapted from a report by J Pilger
