Documentary

One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.

Thus begins the New York Times review (by Jeannette Catsoulis) published today.

Needless to say, in this fight I'm firmly on the side of Darwin's modern heirs. Prevailing science ought to be questioned, and probed for flaws and contradictions. But some people seem to hope that, if they just attack science in subtle enough terms, it will all just fall down and then we'll all go back to using the Bible for a science textbook. Which seems to me in some cases a tactic toward using the Bible as a literal guide to everything in life. In which case we might as well be Islamists with a different book.

My interest in anything Ben Stein does shrinks to zero with his involvement in this movie. I understand the point is not directly to argue for creationism, but to draw a sympathetic portrait of creationists in the education and scientific field who have been roughed up by their peers. But in that case I'm inclined to sympathize with the peers. Just like I'd be on the side of the humanities academics who expelled agenda-driven Ward Churchill from their profession. Honest, hard questioning of prevailing orthodoxies is one thing. Intellectual vandalism in the name of revolution is another.

The new film has been criticized in a number of extensive pieces for its twisty propagandism and loose play with facts, quotes, and interviews. That doesn't surprise me. There's already a fair degree of straw man in the usual creationist argument. For instance, nobody reputable in the world of biology thinks complex systems in living things "just happened by accident." And the creationists know well that the simplistic argument has an advantage in a public forum. Flat-earthers used to be judged winners in public debates in the 19th century, even by people who knew better. All they have to do is say, "look around you; you can see it's flat." An appeal to common sense that can be refuted, but only by a long explanation involving mathematics.

When I see atheist and agnostic and Shinto scientists embrace creationism or Intelligent Design, in any sort of numbers, and defend it as passionately and persistently as born-agains do, then I'll begin to take it seriously. When some biologist or paleontologist who has never even heard of the Bible reads an Intelligent Design text and says, "That fits the facts better than evolution by natural selection, and it explains them more coherently," then I'll pay attention.

[See more here and here and here and also this by quondam co-blogger reader_iam, to which I wholeheartedly consent. I should add that I also lament the excesses of some prominent voices for scientific rationalism when they step outside their turf and go after faith with a fundamentalist fervor.]

So the "New York Times" is unsparing in its evisceration of "Expelled," and I ought to approve that.

I don't.

Because I also remember this review.

Mixing sober outrage with mischievous humor and blithely trampling the boundary between documentary and demagoguery, Michael Moore takes wholesale aim at the Bush administration, whose tenure has been distinguished, in his view, by unparalleled and unmitigated arrogance, mendacity and incompetence. Of course, your estimation of the movie will largely depend on whether you share this view, but this unabashedly partisan collage of interviews, archival video clips and Mr. Moore's trademark agitprop stunts is nonetheless his most disciplined and powerful film to date.

I have not seen either film. But I see the two films -- as described by both their makers and their critics -- as essentially the same shabby thing in purpose, method, and ethos.

Yet the "New York Times" (two different reviewers, same newspaper) is scathing about the one:

This is not argument, it’s circus, a distraction from the film’s contempt for precision and intellectual rigor. This goes further than a willful misunderstanding of the scientific method. The film suggests, for example, that Dr. Sternberg lost his job at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History because of intellectual discrimination but neglects to inform us that he was actually not an employee but rather an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term.

Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every turn “Expelled” is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike. In its fudging, eliding and refusal to define terms, the movie proves that the only expulsion here is of reason itself.

And finds the other the work of a jolly good fellow who occasionally goes too far but his big heart is in the right place:

The movie's cheap shots and inconsistencies may frustrate its admirers, but by now we should have learned to appreciate Mr. Moore for what he is. He is rarely subtle, often impolite, frequently tendentious and sometimes self-contradictory. He is also a credit to the Republic.

A credit to the Republic! What contemptible bilge. There's not an ounce of intellectual consistency or probity in the art of criticism in the media, of course. That's not new. But the proof, to me, was rarely so baldly stated. You could reverse those two movie descriptions, and with a few noun changes, print them under each other's headline. So what makes for the difference?

If it's wrong in case A, it's wrong in case B. Perhaps, you will say, my accidental convergence of opposition to both Moore's self-serving America-skeptic pseudo-pacifist showmanship and "Expelled's" shabby special pleading for anti-scientific Trojan horses allows me to appear to take a higher ground than the "Times." I have spent the day trying to think of a single cause I advocate, however earnestly, that I would wish to see promoted by such tactics as these filmmakers use. One undeniable good that I think would be advanced by propaganda and deception and lies.

I cannot think of one. If I were framed for murder and on death row, I would not want Michael Moore to try to win sympathy for me.

Not at the Movies

This is going to be one of those posts that irritates people because I'm going to write about Hollywood while freely admitting not only haven't I seen the movies in question, I haven't seen the inside of a movie theater since 2004.

Another anti-war movie appears to be dying of lack-of-interest at the box office this week. Here the star of it bravely attempts to cast it as a nonpartisan human interest story:

In "Grace is Gone," John Cusack plays a young father struggling to tell his daughters their mother has been killed in Iraq. He says he wanted to get inside one family's grief and the Iraq war's personal toll.

"I just wanted to do something that just told the human side of it and would allow people of any ideological perspective to kind of come together and find common ground," Cusack told ABC's "This Week" in an interview that aired Sunday.

In the Weinstein Co. drama, Cusack's character delays telling his two daughters about their mother's death, instead taking them on a road trip while the former military man sorts out his complicated feelings about the war.

"I wanted to explore the reality of grief and loss, so that the war didn't become another abstraction that's on the television, and the pundits of both sides of left versus right, you know, they attack each other and use it as a political football," Cusack said. "I really felt very strongly that I wanted to tell a story about one of those coffins coming home and tell a story for those families."

Not that the coffins ought to be ignored. Or that they are not tragic. Hemingway's dictum always stands: "We never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead."

That was from a piece titled "Treasury for the Free World," written after World War II. And the "no matter how necessary, nor how justified" is the key to it. You could tell the tale of the coffins in any war. You could look at this:



And see only the ghastly dead men in the foreground. They cannot tell you if it was "worth it" or not. But the painter will. Or the producer will lead you to think one way or another by how he frames the scene. And anyone who wants to anchor the discussion of any topic -- be it a world war or a new refrigerator -- exclusively on the cost of it, is not concerned about reality vs. abstraction, or finding common ground. He's trying to talk you out of it.

Telling only a tale of loss, without a consideration of what it was for, what could be accomplished by it, may make a good movie (or a bad one), but it has nothing to contribute to an adult discussion of a difficult issue.



This is propaganda.



This, had it been all the artist painted and called it "The Battle of Eylau," would have been moreso. Not less true; cold corpses are the one indisputable fact of any battlefield. But less complete, and thus less honest. As would it be to only paint Napoleon on horseback and the adulation of the Lithuanian hussar, or whoever it is kneeling beside him.

So why aren't people going to these films? Some say they're just plain bad movies. I guess they might be, but people have flocked to bad movies in the past. Ever seen one of the "Batman" flicks that packed them in in the '80s?

Or maybe the people are just ungrateful students who don't appreciate the lecture they're being given.

And so far, all show how tough it is to turn this war into edifying entertainment for the mass audience.

For one thing, this war is tragic but not inherently dramatic.

... As a critic, I give the Iraq films now in release passing marks for good intentions and audiences an incomplete for poor attendance. Although nonfiction directors have tackled the war vigorously, from Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 to Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, it looks as if we may have to wait for Hollywood's definitive Iraq-war film. ... The great Iraq movie -- like a solution to the current Iraq quandary -- is still a thing to hope for.

Wonder how much it hurt him to type "qua-" and end with "-ndry"? Like stopping in the middle of a piss, I bet.

This confused post, meanwhile, would have the Hollywood Iraq movies aimed at "a lucrative safe haven in the populist antiwar movement," but at the same time an effective tool for "shaping our national conversation" because they are seen by "the Saturday night Twizzlers contingent" -- that would be you and me.

But that's a dubious proposition, at least as put forth at Huffington Post, since it's based on Michael Moore being on the cover of Time magazine (decidedly non-Twizzler media) and on an unlinked-to study that shows more people in Oregon bought Priuses after Al Gore's movie came out. Never mind that the tax break kicked in and gas shot up and stayed up at the same time. Correlation equals causation, except to us turnip-heads with Twizzler-stuffed maws.

Here's an older guess, but a better one:

Hollywood doesn’t need the Heartland anymore. There’s basically no pressure for Hollywood to change what it’s doing, because there are plenty of Blue State audiences and DVD sales out there to make even something like the gender-bending “Transamerica” a hit, so long as the film doesn’t cost too much.

I’ve heard conservatives tell me for years that ‘market forces’ will eventually force Hollywood to change, become more mainstream. The argument goes something like this: Hollywood’s product will eventually become so toxic, so nakedly political, that there will eventually be a ‘backlash’ from the public - at which point things in Tinseltown will magically change for the better.

Guess what? It ain’t happening. Hollywood simply doesn’t need the Red States any more. Hollywood’s more interested in how a film plays in Mexico or France these days than in Kansas. After all, Charles Krauthammer may hate “Syriana” - but the Germans and the Brits love it! So do the Spanish and the Italians. That’s the global economy for you - Hollywood’s now out-sourcing its audience.

It's been noted, I'm sure correctly, that anti-war films like "Lions for Lambs" have been scrupulously respectful to the U.S. troops, even while decrying the war as a fiasco. This only shows that Hollywood has one more brain cell than the average political blogger, and realizes the way to be persuasive is to praise the individual while making of him a victim, sent on a fool's errand by a corrupt and uncaring government.

It doesn't surprise me that people don't line up to see that, when the preaching about the government is the pill and the praise for the fighting men and women is the sugar coating. The answer to that isn't a "conservative" or a "pro-war" movie. It's one that tells the stories of real people in extraordinary conditions.

Like her or them or him or her. They could be Iraqis as well. You easily could make an anti-war polemic out of any of those lives. That would be a mistake. These are lives that blazed out from their circumstances. They are not victims; they did not live to spell out your easy answers.

I suspect Hollywood's apologists soon will hit on the answer that people are just tired of Iraq and don't want to see anything to do with it. I don't believe that. A local media columnist this weekend wrote about an afternoon drive-time DJ at one of the top stations in town who spent his whole young life building up a career in radio. He just pitched it all for a one-year contract to work as a "morale, welfare, and recreation coordinator" for troops in Iraq. He'll be organizing basketball tournaments for off-duty soldiers and marines. He wanted to do something meaningful in this challenging situation, so he did.

He didn't expect the response. A flood of e-mails poured into the station offices. Women called up in tears to express their admiration. Perfect strangers showed up in the lobby just wanting to shake his hand.

There's your audience, Hollywood. The Twizzler set and all. Can you stop sneering or lecturing long enough to bring them back?

The Enemies We Make

Atop a grieving Statue of Liberty, the demonic-looking U.S. president waves a banner reading "democracy," but in his other fist he clutches the club of "dictatorship." Around him, on the statue's crown points, a young woman hangs in fetters, "anti-war" soldiers carouse, U.S. workers protest, and a clown in a dunce cap emblazoned with the Star of David inflates a stars-and-stripes balloon.

The latest from Ted Rall, Ward Churchill, Steve Bell, or Michael Moore? Something from "Le Monde" or "Der Spiegel?"

No, the president caricatured is Roosevelt, and the image is by the great Japanese illustrator Ono Saseo, and it graced the pages of the January 1942 issue of the Japanese magazine "Manga."

Remember when it was our enemies, and not our friends and ourselves, who bent their natural talents to creating fanatical anti-American propaganda art?

Clive Davis writes today on the sad rise of anti-Americanism among the British. Not the effigy-burning radical kind of hatred, but the dark picture of Americans in the received wisdoms of the quiet, decent people of Britain. Really, after reading the media in Germany -- the native language for-home-use version, not the English language translations online -- it's a wonder everyone on the continent doesn't spit on us every time we set foot there.

It's no better in Britain, Davis writes.

There's no question that media bias plays a major part in skewing public perceptions. The BBC, which once brought us that epic TV series "Alistair Cooke's America", seldom misses an opportunity to portray the States as violent, dysfunctional and imperialist. A left-liberal mind-set is de rigueur at Broadcasting House, tarnishing what is still, in many ways, a great institution. In this closed world neocons, not Islamists, are regarded as the great threat to democracy. Unfortunately, even in these days of multi-channel broadcast, the Corporation's huge resources and its immense cultural reach mean that it still sets the agenda. While the national press is slightly less shrill, pro-American commentators are very much a minority. When the first bouts of hysteria erupted over Guantanamo Bay, it was the Mail on Sunday -- regarded as the voice of Middle England -- which published some of the shrillest commentary.

Perhaps as a consequence of all those hours spent sighing over Hugh Grant, Americans tend to assume that British are much more worldly and sophisticated than they really are. The truth is, when it comes to knowledge of American history and institutions, the Brits are woefully uninformed. What they are familiar with is American popular culture, which is -- as I don't need to remind you -- a different thing all together. The result of that false sense of familiarity is a toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance.

Davis pegs his piece on the World War II movie "Mrs. Miniver," America's romantic view of its British ally. But reading Davis made me think rather of another slice of wartime movie-making, Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" films. They're an object lesson in how to damn a nation with its own script.

Capra's propaganda films began as orientation pieces for U.S. troops. His depictions were meant to rally Americans to uphold the torch of freedom and overcome latent isolationism in the name of civilization. At Roosevelt's urging, they were released in public theaters as well. "Prelude to War" won the Academy Award for best documentary of 1942.

Capra's bright idea was to damn the enemy with his own work. Instead of shooting new film, he picked out snippets of existing footage and pasted them together in a way that presented a grotesque vision of the Axis.

Capra's raw material was millions of feet of confiscated or captured newsreels and propaganda films; he even used Japanese samurai movies and domestic dramas from the 1930s. With his legendary cutting-room skills and his eye for bold juxtapositions he made America and her allies shine (including the murderous Soviet Union), and showed off the Axis -- not just its leaders but the whole people of Italy, Germany, and Japan -- as demonic: regimented nations of ruthless killers, blindly devoted to their leaders. The enemies' menace contrasted with the freedoms and accomplishments of the Americans and their allies; the free world and the fascists; the Allied "way of life" vs. the Axis "way of death."

If this technique reminds you of Michael Moore, it ought to. He did the same thing, but with the morality and virtues in photo-negative.

Like Capra, Moore mostly used footage shot by others when he cobbled together "Fahrenheit 9/11." The IMDB "cast" list for the film names 40 public figures; of these, 37 are credited as from "archival footage." Even the common soldiers portrayed often weren't filmed by Moore. Some are from an Australian documentary, "Soundtrack to War," and were used despite the objection of film-maker George Gittoes, who said he had no idea his work was in "Fahrenheit 9/11" until it was screened at the Cannes film festival.

Moore's archival footage of Baghdad before the invasion shows the kind of happy glow Capra might have given to the American hearth. And where Capra showed the devastated cities of China strewn with civilian corpses, Moore gives us a U.S. military campaign in Iraq that seems to have killed only women and children.

Capra didn't want to be a propagandist at first. When Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall approached him with the idea, he demurred, saying he'd never made a documentary before. Marshall told him, "Capra, I have never been Chief of Staff before. Thousands of young Americans have never had their legs shot off before. Boys are commanding ships today who a year ago had never seen the ocean before." Capra apologized and signed on to make "the best damned documentary films ever made." After he began the project he said that all he had to do was let the enemy be himself on film, "and our fighting men will know why they are in uniform."

How ironic is it that the most significant piece of Hollywood propaganda produced in this current war is lauded by the people who would burn Hollywood to ash and sow its soil with salt if they had the chance? The religious authorities in Iran scrapped the scheduled program at the Farabi Cinema complex in Tehran to put Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" on display. "This film unmasks the Great Satan America," a spokesman said. "It tells Muslim people why they are right in hating America. It is the duty of every believer to see [this film] and learn the truth."

You can see a reproduction of Ono Saseo's Statue of Liberty art in John W. Dower's "War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War." The book mainly deals with the furious war between Japan and America. The war the U.S. and Japan waged in the Pacific in 1941-45 was incalculably more intense in brutality, mutual racist loathing, and sheer killing power than that waged by the U.S. against Germany and Italy in North Africa and Europe. It was felt to be so at the time, and this was borne out by statistics accumulated later.

And Dower gives great emphasis to the role of propaganda. In Japan, the image of the hated West was stunningly similar to that put forth by Bin Laden: decadent, materialistic, racist, bent on world domination. The Japanese felt they were a divine race, with a destiny to lead the world. Yet they felt pressed and weakened by the West, which they perceived as bent on world domination and direct economic strangulation of the Japanese civilization. The Japanese chafed under the disrespect shown in the West toward their civilization's power and glorious history; this situation was an inversion of the divine order. They also held specific and general grievances against the West, some of them more or less legitimate.

Japan told itself it had lashed out in the name of survival against an enemy bent on hegemony and economic control of crucial resources (oil, rubber, and tin in East Asia). What Americans saw as the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor was, in Japan, "the counteroffensive of the Oriental races against Occidental aggression."

And Dower writes that each combatant wove out of the other's reality, and of the other's self image, the grotesque parodies of propaganda:

"In everyday words, this first kind of stereotyping could be summed up in the statement: you are the opposite of what you say you are and the opposite of us, not peaceful but warlike, not good but bad. ... In the second form of stereotyping, the formula ran more like this: you are what you say you are, but that is itself reprehensible. On the part of the Japanese, this involved singling out the emphasis placed on individualism and profit making in the Western tradition, and presenting this as proof positive that Westerners were fundamentally selfish and greedy, devoted to self-aggrandizement at the expense of the community and the nation as a whole. Westerners, in turn, accepted Japanese emphasis on the primacy of the group or collectivity at face value, and used this as prima facie evidence that the Japanese were closer to cattle or robots than to themselves. One side's idealized virtues easily fed the other side's racial prejudices."

Two-thirds of Americans today say the use of atomic bombs on Japan was unavoidable. But when Congressman Tom Tancredo casually opened the door to bombing Mecca -- in retaliation for an Islamist nuclear attack on America that would dwarf Pearl Harbor -- even advocates of aggressive war on Islamism backed away from him.

The care taken by our people to avoid crude caricatures of the enemy's culture is worthy of praise. It sets this war apart from World War II -- ironically, the "Good War" -- when even Dr. Seuss got into the Jap-bashing act. But how sad that we've turned instead to making crude caricatures bashing ourselves.

Hearts and Minds

I'm glad to see Vietpundit back and blogging again. One of the things that moved Vietpundit back to the keyboard was the extended observations by Neo-Neocon about the Vietnam War and the generations of Americans who were, in any sense, part of it.

Like a lot of us, N-NC is in the "Sept. 10 liberal who got mugged by reality" category. At least I think I read her correctly. And like me she's still a little woozy from falling off the juggernaut. One of the most difficult adjustments is that you have to haul up all the certainties of your past and re-examine them. Probably none is more challenging, to those who were aware of it, than the Vietnam War.

I barely qualify. My memories of the war time itself are scant; I was born in 1960. I remember heated dinner-table arguments. My mother saw Bobby Darin speak out against the war on Mike Douglas, or some other talk show, and get booed for it. She said she sat right down and wrote him a fan letter; the first fan letter she'd ever written in her life, so she claims, though I always suspect Don Ameche got a few from her childhood home.

But if my father had an articulate view in support of the war, I don't remember it. I mostly remember his anger from those years. In fact, if anyone had a coherent defense of the war, it never percolated down to me in the Philadelphia suburbs. Our teachers who spoke about the war obviously were against it. The music we heard on the radio, to the degree that it was political, was anti-war.

"The Ballad of the Green Berets," I read, was the number 21 most popular song in the U.S. for the entire decade of the 1960s. I am sure I never heard it. Nor did I ever see John Wayne's movie of the same name. But I heard plenty of "One Tin Soldier" and "Fortunate Son," and I saw "Hearts and Minds."

I don't think any cultural artifact summed up American opposition to the war more than that one movie documentary. Statistics show it was the shift of moderate liberal opinion, which had supported the war, that doomed Johnson in the 1968 primaries. The role of media images in that is undeniable, especially the Tet offensive. Though "Hearts and Minds" came well at the end of the Vietnam era, it encapsulates the set of images that the anti-war authorites managed to get across to the American people.

SHORT HISTORY

So, my understanding of how we got into Vietnam militarily and failed to win there is based on subsequent reading, not personal remembrance. In a very streamlined version, and purely from the American point of view, it would go like this:

Vietnam represented, to the U.S., a Cold War departure from the classical American attitude rooted in Washington's Farewell Address and summed up by John Quincy Adams in 1821: "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America's heart, her benedictions and her prayers." But, he added, "she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

That was easy to say when America was a small power in a world dominated by Britain, and isolated, less by virtue of geography than by virtue of the techonlogy of the times, which could not project force easily across the seas. That picture changed wholesale with the rise of America to a superpower, and the development of missile systems and nuclear weapons. Among other things, this forced Truman and Eisenhower to stretch Adams' "her own" to include essential allies such as Europe.

The policy got a further, and dicier, extension with the end of the colonial era. In the early 1960s, new Third World nations presented an opportunity Khrushchev recognized and exploited, to leap over the West's "containment" of his communist empire behind a ring of allied states. He saw that the communists, with their natural affinity for revolutions, easily could seize the vanguard in the "national liberation wars" and "revolutionary struggles against imperialism" in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and turn the emerging states into Soviet satellites.

Kennedy took up the challenge, though typically with much enthusiasm and mixed results. The Peace Corps, the Green Berets (counter-insurgency specialists), the "Alliance for Progress," all were part of his response. Typically, too, the response embodied the American spirit of can-do-everything-at-once confidence and a tension between reckless idealism and selfish realism.

The British historian Paul Johnson outlines the problem with all this, from the "Realists" point of view:

But this was to ignore the central lesson of the British Empire, that the best any possessing power can hope to settle for is stability, however imperfect. To promote dynamism is to invite chaos. In the end, a possessing power always has to defend its system by force, or watch it disintegrate, as Britain had done. America had now created a new, post-colonial system, as Kennedy's Inaugural acknowledged. But it was still a possessing one, dependent on stability for its well-being. America's resources were far greater than Britain's had been. But they were still limited. The art, therefore, lay in selecting those positions which must be defended, and could only be defended by force, and devising workable alternatives for the others. Therein lay the weakness of Kennedy's universalism." [Modern Times, p.615]

For Johnson, Cuba was such a position. Vietnam was not. Whether or not that is so, the half-hearted American bid to overthrow Castro ended in a public relations fiasco. One result was that the U.S. Administration sought a balancing anti-communist victory and sensed it could get one in Vietnam. Kennedy said, "Now we have a problem in making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place."

From the realists' view, the fundamental American mistake in Vietnam had been political, not military, and it had been made under Eisenhower, especially when the U.S. did not back free elections, as called for in the 1954 Geneva Accords, because they likely would have brought a communist government over the whole country. Important leaders in the administration like Acheson, Kennan, and even Eisenhower himself (sometimes) had acknowledged that the U.S. did not have much strategic interest in Vietnam and that a communist government there wouldn't be the end of the world.

I wonder if that would have been better, for the South Vietnamese, than the government they got after 1975. They would have been spared the destructive war. They also would have forfeited the U.S. medical and other aid that allowed the population to swell, infant mortality to drop, and the overall standard of living to advance. Perhaps the native communist leaders would have been more flexible before warfare toughened them; perhaps the Sino-Soviet split, when it came, would have left Vietnam more isolated from Moscow, and spared it from Stalinist social engineering.

And the idealist in me says America should have stayed true to its commitment to free and democratic elections, if they truly would have been free (unlike the ones that brought communist governments to power in Eastern Europe).

Instead the unitary elections never happened, and the country defaulted into civil war. Political mistakes piled up after that: the anti-Diem coup chief among them. Another was Lyndon Johnson's poor decision to try to win the war by heavy bombing, as though he were fighting Hitler's Germany, not a rural and un-industrial nation of hill farms and rice paddies.

The slow, restricted, half-hearted American military tactics doomed the war. Sparing use of power, bombing (with frequent "pauses") instead of invading, and other policies that were meant, at least in part, to save civilian lives in fact probably killed more Americans and Vietnamese than a straight-ahead and vigorous U.S. pursuit of victory would have cost. Instead, such tactics were interpreted, abroad, as signs of weakness, and, at home, as signs of guilt. And the Vietnam War almost broke the soul of the U.S. military (as Algeria did the French), asked to fight, but not win, but not lose, for no clear purpose.

The modern double-standard was in full effect: the Vietcong tactic of converting villages into fortified bases was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention. The U.S. policy of evacuating civilians from war zones to create "free fire" fields actually was required by the 1949 Geneva agreement. Guess which side got accused of "genocide?"

"HEARTS and MINDS"

This site reprints an explanation and history, by Carol Wilder, of the film "Hearts and Minds." Wilder takes a generally glowing view of it. The piece often veers from analysis to throw cheap-shot elbows at Bush and Rumsfeld and wistfully imagine how bad they would be made to look if "Hearts and Minds II" were made today. If you can stomach that, the Web site is well worth a look.

Because it does note the criticism of the documentary as "manipulative," and in its analysis of the work it comes essentially to the conclusion that it was highly manipulative. "There were no 'bad' Vietnamese, no pro-war Americans who don’t sound like idiots or worse, and there was too much emotional pandering."

And it was utterly effective. It had a galvanizing power. It did double duty -- as propaganda for the anti-war movement, and in managing to make its critics look like spluttering buffoons.

It seems to me the power of "Hearts and Minds" was set up by what had been missing from too many Vietnam War debates. As loud and long as they were, Americans in them talked mostly about Americans. National interest, American atrocities, what was right and wrong for America to do. The nightly news showed our soliders in action, fighting against an enemy who never emerged from the treeline. In time it came to seem to some people that we were fighting the treeline. Meanwhile, our soldiers were protecting a people whose faces rarely appeared on screen.

What this documentary film did, in its highly partisan way, was put the Vietnamese people in the American eye. The effect was intense. When Michael Moore put images of kite-flying Iraqi families in "Fahrenheit 9/11" it wasn't considered among the film's most effective techniques. The point that innocents stand in the path of every battle was well-taken, but even Moore's peanut gallery knew (whether they said it or not) Saddam's Iraq was no picnic in the park for its inmates. But apparently that wasn't true of what we knew about North Vietnam in 1975, when "Hearts and Minds" showed us "the other" going about daily life.

They are human, they are real, they have feelings, they look small and vulnerable, not menacing. This other -- all but ignored by mainstream media -- is a sympathetic victim. The film reverses the figure/ground context of American popular culture by foregrounding the Other and bestowing it with value. Davis adopts the point of view of a knowing everyman, able to see the tragic story with a wide angle lens, where the “enemy” is as human as the viewer.

But of course, he was not a "knowing everyman." He was on fire with the zeal of a crusader. This was his armor. And his spear.

The Vietnamese Other is most powerfully rendered in a sequence of mourning and keening at the National Cemetery of South Vietnam. The funeral is for a South Vietnamese soldier, and is presented in all its dignity, ritual, and grief. It includes the unbearable suffering of a young boy who throws himself on the casket, leading the viewer to share a painful and intimate experience. While some evidence of cruelty by the South Vietnamese army is seen in shots of prisoners in “tiger cages,” images of cruelty by the “enemy” – the “other-other” NLF or North Vietnamese – are notably absent.

In nearly all cases Vietnamese are portrayed as sympathetic victims, even in a notorious and graphic brothel scene of prostitutes and American soldiers. The lone exception is a sequence of Saigon fat-cats, suggesting that South Vietnamese businessmen and government officials were complicit with the Americans in a war against the Vietnamese people.

"Americans in a war against the Vietnamese people." If one phrase can sum up the anti-war view in the U.S., perhaps that is it. The anti-war movement of the 1960s got tangled up in the civil rights movement. The moral indignation of the domestic struggle spilled over into the anti-war crusade. To an extent, it seems to me, the Vietnamese became confused in the popular mind with the righteous American blacks (the Southern ones, who weren't rioting). The victims of U.S. racist injustice merged into one. The same feeling of moral outrage flowed out for each.

Yet as Wilder points out, the Vietnamese presence in "Hearts and Minds" is highly selective. What about the goals and tactics of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leadership? The anti-war movement either embraced them ("Uncle Ho") or ignored them. The American anti-communists, who might have done a better job explaining things and warning us what would happen to the South Vietnamese people under communist rule, had by this time (early 1970s) acquired, or been tainted in the media with, bad names: They were rigid, reflexive anti-communist mental fossils of the McCarthy era; old-fashioned seeing-them-under-the-bed Red-baiters. They had short haircuts and square clothes, and they were inflexible bigots, with their stiff speech and tendency to associate with really unsavory characters like segregationists and John Birchers. Or so they were presented to us.

STUPID HIPPIE

"If demonizing the enemy is a first principle of propaganda," Wilder writes, "humanizing the enemy may be a first principle of peace." But that, manifestly, is not what "Hearts and Minds" did. It showed us North Vietnam under communism as a land of noble innocents, like the American Indians in their day. This was as false to reality as was Gen. William Westmoreland's notorious quote in the movie, his singularly inept assertion that “the Oriental does not put the same high price on life as the Westerner."

The most common for-the-war argument I remember hearing was Eisenhower's domino theory twist on realism: If Vietnam falls, then Thailand and Malaysia fall, then Singapore falls. To which my friends would answer, "so what?" And I never knew the response to that. Yet this, too, put the war entirely in terms of American interest. If we were killing people in Vietnam purely out of national self-interest, that might satisfy hard-hearted realists, but it's hardly an appealing motive to the idealism of youth.

On the other side was passion. Was conviction. Was that most intoxicating substance, moral indignation. As Americans, we responded when we were told that the Viet Cong were "people fighting for their freedom."

But I'm ashamed to say the young people I knew at that time had very little inclination to know about the Vietnamese beyond what served our opposition to the U.S. government. We thought they simply wanted to be communist (in the north) or wanted to be left alone (in the south) and we were bombing and killing them without cause or justification. "Communist" to us then, as far as we could determine it in the cheerful suburbs, meant simply "aligned with the Russians in U.N. votes and Olympics scoring."

"Hearts and Minds" contains the iconic images: the naked teenage girl running in terror from the napalm attack, the bullet through the head on a Saigon street.

Each one of these images was widely distributed by mainstream media and each encapsulated the essential horror of the war. In Hearts and Minds, not only are these arresting pictures included, but the moving image unpacks the more familiar still image, playing out the action to greater effect in what seems like slow motion. The still image of the execution on the Saigon street during the Tet offensive shows the moment of the bullet’s impact, but the full shot shows the victim fall on his side, spewing a fountain of blood from his ear.

To base political decisions on one image, however horrifying, you also must do some coldly rational inquiry: "One picture. How representative is it?" A heart on fire with moral indignation does not make such calculations.

It's easy to forget, in the triumphalism of the anti-war movement, that the American decision to start looking for a peace solution in Vietnam came in early 1968, when most Americans, including the under-35 demographic, still supported an aggressive war. Nixon's strategy was to set up an independent South Vietnam. In his first four years in office, he reduced American forces in Vietnam from 550,000 to 24,000 and cut war spending from $25 billion a year to less than $3 billion.

The Paris peace agreement of 1973 reserved the U.S. right to maintain aircraft carriers in Indo-Chinese waters and to use bases in Taiwan and Thailand to oppose Hanoi if it broke the accord. But any remaining U.S. will to defend South Vietnam was dragged down by the rising malaise in America, the domestic political scandals, and the media war against all things Nixon. By the time the North had built up its capacity and launched the destruction of the South, Congress was unwilling to lift a finger in defense of an old ally, despite President Ford's pleading.

And so probably my most vivid personal memory of the war years was tracking the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. I was 14; the "Philadelphia Inquirer" ran a front page story almost every day, illustrated with a map of the country, and one by one as the provincial capitals fell, the blocks that shaped the long sickle of South Vietnam shifted from white to gray. I believe they ran, after the fall of Saigon, a map that showed that unfortunate country entirely gray from tip to tip.

We then saw what we had been fighting against all these years, and saw it without the propagandist's lens and cutting techniques. The communist government colonized Laos, invaded Cambodia, and itself engaged in Cambodia-style mass resettlements of North Vietnamese peasants in 1977-78, moved untold thousands of city-dwellers from the South into rural poverty, demanded entire "submission to the will of the advanced class representing society," held 200,000 political prisoners by January 1977, and executed thousands more.

I think history will view the Cold War as a true war, and call it World War III. And, like the Hundred Years' War or the Peloponnesian War, it will come to be seen as a series of campaigns, even though to those who lived through it it seemed a series of small wars, punctuated by peace. The U.S. war in Vietnam will come to be seen like the Athenian expedition to Sicily: a military expedition based on a political necessity; a battle failure begun in a spirit of high moral enthusiasm, but in ignorance of the destination and with vague and unrealistic goals. Unlike Athens, which risked everything in Sicily, America was able to recover from the defeat, over time, and to protect itself and its allies during the recovery.

But for the Vietnamese people, especially those who believed in us and believed with us in their freedom, I wish I had a better story to tell.

"Amazed"

Michael Moore said he was “amazed” that people voted his "Fahrenheit 9/11" as their favorite fim at the People's Choice award.

“I love making movies and I’ll take this as an invitation to make more 'Fahrenheit 9/11s,’ " Moore said.

Ah, how nice, when you can write your own invitations.

LOS ANGELES Dec 10, 2004 — Filmmaker Michael Moore is back on the campaign trail trolling for votes this time, for the People's Choice Awards.

His documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" an unlikely summer blockbuster was one of the films selected in the "favorite movie" category of the annual populist prize ceremony. On Thursday he posted a letter on his Web site to mobilize fans to cast their ballots for the film.

"Education"

"Fifty-one percent of the American people lacked information (in this election), and we want to educate and enlighten them. They weren't told the truth."

Michael Moore, 2004, on why America needs his planned sequal to "Fahrenheit 9/11."

"We do not wish to win this small group to our world view by force or pressure. Rather, where ever and whenever it is possible, and without force or pressure, we want to use the means of education and public pressure on the foes of renewal."

Hugo Ringler, 1934, on "The Work of Propagandists in the National Socialist State" (translated from the original German).

The German Propaganda Archive is a fascinating site, an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the workings of the tremendously successful Nazi information machine. Besides examples of its work, the site reproduces writings and speeches by German propagandists about their process.

In these, the "openness" of the Nazi government gets a lot of emphasis. Yes, if course, you can be open in your deliberations if you trust that your news media are ideologically aligned with your agenda. And this allows the totalitarian government to boast of its transparency, while damning the democracies for shutting out, in crucial situations, their own contrarian media.

For an example, consider this 1939 essay, "The Political Work of the Radio Announcer."

But decisive political events [in Nazi Germany] do not take place “behind the scenes,” rather they are intended to gain the participation of the whole population. Dr. Goebbels opens the doors, the conference rooms, the meeting halls, the four walls of diplomatic negotiations, and lets the people and the world participate. The broadest public participates in important events through pictures, news reports, the accounts of capable announcers, or though direct broadcasts of political events.

The principle of National Socialist foreign policy is to mobilize the whole popular will for certain international goals. There is therefore no secret diplomacy in Wilson’s sense, no backroom negotiations like those Roosevelt, the English, and the cabinets of nearly all the European capitals have attempted to use against us this year.

Finally, this political cartoon, from September 1944:



Roosevelt, with a cane, and Eleanor look over a field of crosses. The caption reads, "Not to worry, Eleanor, many voters I promised I would never lead into the war can no longer vote against me ...." Which could nicely be reduced to, "Roosevelt lied, they died."

How Common is This?

The Ephrata Review, a local weekly up this way, reported Wednesday on the Ephrata High School senior class mock election of the day before. Bush won, of course, reflecting the prevailing sentiments in this conservative, religious community, by a tally of 81-35 with 46 percent of "eligible seniors" voting (what you had to do to be rendered "ineligible" in this election wasn't explained).

The Kerry backers in the school made up in volume what they lacked in numbers, it seems.

On multiple occasions throughout the three-hour lunch period, chants of "Drop Bush, not bombs" could be heard around the voting table in the high school cafeteria.

But what interested me most was this extended quote from an anti-Bush girl whose father is a public school social studies teacher who uses Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" as a teaching tool in class.

"Everything he (Bush) says is pretty much a lie," said Julia Boyer. "My dad's a government teacher and he and I watched the debates together and we just roll on the floor laughing. ..."

...Boyer said not only has she seen ["Fahrenheit 9-11"], her family has already ordered three copies of the DVD.

"My dad's using it in class and I am burning myself a copy because I have Michael Moore's permission," she said. "Me and my family -- we are going to try to have a screening in our house for our neighborhood before the election."

[emphasis added]

How common is this? Are teachers really passing off this bilious bit of propaganda as a civics lesson?