James Bowman has a brilliant skewering of the "documentary" genre in movies nowadays, noting the crass propaganda purposes alleged "documentaries" are intended to serve. The genre's decline can be traced to Bert Schneider's awful and inaccurate Vietnam War film Hearts And Minds from 1974, and it's only gotten worse with Michael Moore and his ilk.
Bowman skewers two such propaganda "documentaries," This Film Is Not Yet R-ated and The Ground Truth. The latter is yet another antiwar film centered on Iraq featuring alleged "veterans" so traumitized as to turn against their country's cause. One unnoticed lesson from Vietnam is that there is no such thing as an antiwar veteran, best shown in the book Stolen Valor and also the book Why We Were In Vietnam. This being the case, it is impossible to take the testimony of the men offered in The Ground Truth seriously, especially given their supposed naivete about what to expect in a war and also given the richly documented good the US is doing in Iraq, notably in the varied writings of Karl Zinsmeister in such works as Boots On The Ground.
The most offensive line in the film is one alleged "veteran" who, discussing the deaths of his buddies, says, "I tried to tell myself they died for a reason, but I couldn't think of one, I couldn't justify it to myself." Yeah, sure. If he was in Iraq, he saw the savagery of the Islamo-Arab enemy, he saw how we are striving to rebuild a dysfunctional culture into one of true peace; he saw the good we are doing there. Moreover, not one soldier in Iraq is anything remotely resembling an involuntary participant. And with regard to Vietnam, the above is exactly true there as well, with only one caveat - there were draftees there, but they constituted less than half the number of those who served there.
Is it too much to ask Hollywood to for a change do a pro-US movie, or a pro-Iraq War movie, or a pro-Vietnam War movie?
4 comments:
When Clinton said, "it depends on what is is"...I thought that was so stupid. Now I'm starting to understand. What is the truth and who writes it? Is there a truth? I'm reading State of Denial by Woodward, is it fact or fiction? I guess it depends on what is is!
See Victor Davis Hanson's reviews of Bob Woodward's works for an idea of how much trust to invest in them.
Any veteran who's opposed to the war must be lying about being a veteran?
You seem to suffer from the delusion that you get to personally redefine the truth to suit your political views.
Shinimegami - the veterans who opposed the Vietnam war all turned out to have lied about being veterans. This was exposed in 1971's infamous Winter Soldier scam and later by Liveshot Kerry's deceptions about his own Vietnam "service" - which consisted of showboating and little else.
I don't redefine the truth - I respect the truth. You need to ask the antiwar "veterans" about redefining the truth.
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