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Maoist movie reviews
"Red Dawn" (1984)
Red Dawn
Directed by John Milius
United Artists
Rated PG-13
114 minutes
1984
2009 February
This movie is about a few white teenagers who become guerrillas after
Soviet-led forces invade the United $tates. Named after their high
school's mascot, the "Wolverines" roam the outskirts of their town,
which is occupied, and harass the Soviets and their allies. A Latin
American commander with experience fighting occupation and now in the
role of occupier ends up sympathizing with the Wolverines. Despite
having this empathetic character and depicting guerrilla resistance
to an occupation, "Red Dawn" is an inspiration for Amerikans today
joining their country's military, which invades and occupies other
countries and kills people using missiles and unmanned aircraft from
miles away.
The new Tom Cruise movie "Valkyrie"
(2008) depicts an attempted military coup against Adolf Hitler by
people who want to sue for peace and seek to keep Germany an
imperialist country. "Red Dawn" depicts collaboration with the
occupiers of the United $tates, an imperialist country. Both
"Valkyrie" and "Red Dawn" depict kinds of change or action that are
possible in First World countries, not a revolutionary revolt by an
internal working class or revolution carried out by forces based on
an internal majority. Though "Valkyrie" depicts rats abandoning one
sinking imperialist ship for another imperialist ship and it is hard
to see any communists running around in "Valkyrie," organizing
capitulation to invading foreigners could be a communist task in the
First World. If the United $tates does have to be invaded by the
Third World to put an end to its aggression, organizing for
collaboration in any ensuing occupation could be a communist task,
too. In that context, to be a communist would look like collaboration
with the enemy from the Amerikan point of view. The Third World is
where collaboration and capitulation should be opposed -- this may
seem like an uncontroversial point, but patriotism abounds in all
forms in the First World, and there are pseudo-revolutionaries and
traitors either trying to get the oppressed in the Third World to
capitulate to the First World or trying to sooth the oppressed as if
there nothing to which to capitulate.
Of course, the Soviets, depicted in the 1984 "Red Dawn" as invaders
of the United $tates, in the 1980s were revisionist "Marxists" and
themselves imperialist. The downed-pilot character in "Red Dawn" says
that the Soviets nuke millions of Chinese. The same character reveals
that China is an ally of the United $tates in conflict with the
Soviets in the movie. In terms of reflecting the truth, the pilot's
words are progress in comparison with simplistic anti-communism
lumping China and the Soviet Union after the 1950s together. "Red
Dawn" both exaggerates, though, the contradictions between the United
$tates and the Soviet Union and understimates the contradictions
between the United $tates and China, because in actuality the United
$tates was in a position to give a green light for a Soviet nuclear
attack on China as early as 1969. A Beijing reduced to ashes with
Moscow still intact was not outside the fantasies of top U.$.
officials and planners themselves and there were concrete moves
toward realizing those fantasies, and so "Red Dawn" is somewhat
ironic. The Soviets discontinued using nuclear weapons in the war
with the United $tates in the movie, but to be able to capture intact
U.$. cities. (This reviewer imagines that fear of Chinese nuclear
weapons may have indirectly led to the conventional warfare against
the United $tates and occupation of the United $tates.)
Depicting a revisionist-led occupation of the United $tates, "Red
Dawn" is not the ideal movie for discussing communist strategy, and
"Red Dawn's" depiction of a Soviet invasion of the United $tates
circa 1980s is unrealistic. On the other hand, any united front
between the Third World and an imperialist country in which the
imperialist country ends up being invaded is the kind of united front
the proletariat would like to see, because it would be good for the
oppressors in a united front to lose more than the oppressed or at
least risk a lot. United fronts with an imperialist country in which
the imperialist country risks relatively little tend to be
opportunist. The best united fronts are based on difficult struggle,
not uniting with Euro-Amerikans on the basis of Condoleezza Rice's or
now Hillary Clinton's easygoing smooth-talking, for example, or
uniting with CIA fronts/dupes because they throw a few bucks at your
organization. Unity with a portion of the oppressors should exist
only when it is making sacrifices; at the same time, there is no
lasting unity among the oppressed without struggle. Shying away from
struggle and sabotaging struggle by polluting the environment for it
with petty or arbitrary(1) grievances leads to neo-colonial
dealmaking, division of the oppressed, and unity with reactionaries.
It means working with the man, i.e., Clinton, Obama, Mueller,
D'Agostino, etc., etc.
The quisling character in "Red Dawn" is dislikable, but Amerika
should have its quislings. There is nothing dishonorable in that,
contrary to social-patriotism, crypto-Liberal-democratism,
personality put-downs, and Klingon warrior culture. The international
proletariat does not have a proletariat in the Euro-Amerikan nation
to carry out revolutionary defeatism there. What there is is a nation
of exploiters -- different oppressor classes. Chinese, Indians,
Indonesians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nigerians and Russians aren't
landing on the beaches of the United $tates, but there needs to be a
"capitulation" movement in the United $tates and later on a
"collaboration" movement, not a vague "revolutionary" movement as if
whites in the United $tates could be organized for armed struggle
against U.$. imperialism or petty-bourgeoisie in the
exploiter-majority United $tates could do effectively revolutionary
work without scientific-communist leadership. Capitulation and
collaboration (particularly capitulation at this time because most
supposedly radical transnational political activity at the moment
will be spying/counterinsurgency or watery activity that is a cover
for spying) -- that is where the emphasis should be, whether it is
called a movement for peace, a global citizenship movement, or
something else, not Liberal or sectarian movements that use white
lynch mob manipulation/conducting strategies and confuse and
infiltrate the international proletariat under the guise of
sloganeering and cheerleading. Communism involves more than talking
and jazzing people up for distant goals (who end up being aimless
most of the time, causing problems involving disconnects between
rhetoric/theory and practice, and practice and science) and requires
actions that correspond to the circumstances in a country. In First
World countries, those include the tactics of dividing exploiters.
That does not mean trying to get the exploiters to think of
themselves as revolutionaries, nor even conscious capitulationists
necessarily, nor campaigning for the Democratic Party. The point
about "capitulation" as opposed to "revolution" in the United $tates
is that there has to be more going on in the First World than trying
to build a proletarian-internationalist revolutionary pole among
arrogant, decadent parasites with chauvinist and racist tendencies
who may end up just participating in conscience-cleansing
demonstrations, shopping at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and New Age
stores in the meantime, lounging in coffee houses talking idly and
fouling the idea of communism over wireless Internet with lazy
revisionism and stupid provocations, and -- because there was never
any science behind their rhetoric and so-called internationalism --
itching for pogroms against Jews, or Asians and gays stereotyped as
being affluent and businesspeople, professionals.
In "Red Dawn," the residents of the young characters' occupied town
are re-educated. Residents listen to a program about how the United
$tates has deviated from the ideals of its founders. There are
communist banners and so forth, but the occupiers aren't shown trying
to turn the Amerikans into communist revolutionaries. It's the kind
of propaganda one would expect to exist under an occupation of the
United $tates (part of the decolonization of North America).
Amerikans will go to parasite reform school first, not Marxist
university. In addition, there is a "friendship" collaboration center
in the town in "Red Dawn," not an Amerikan communist party
headquarters.
MIWS is one of the few communist entities in the English-language
context with a line on children as being an oppressed group. At the
same time, there are countless revisionists and social-democrats,
without a line on children, talking about youth (and adults in
college and graduate school opportunistically lumped with
middle-schoolers and called "youth") as a force for change with
language practically indistinguishable from Democratic and Republican
campaigners'. Animated by a peculiar Freudian-Liberal dualism and
centered on anatomy and sex, these people basically cannot see how
any group can be gender-oppressed except sexually repressed
heterosexual people with female anatomy (or objectified Western
females), and they seek to excite people for "revolution" or "change"
on a principally unscientific basis. There are levels on which even
Euro-Amerikan senior high school jocks are oppressed as youth, but
white youth rebellion is much more likely to look like "Wolverines"
than risking life or career to defeat U.$. imperialism. So, "Red
Dawn" reflects reality here, too. "My boy, get your head out of the
movies, put the iPod down, you don't want to die a pointless death"
may come out of the mouths of white old people facing grandchildren
for whom rebelling against elders means joining the military in the
midst of a fascist movement or being fanatic reactionaries, some of
whom were politicized and militarized by white-utopians and Liberal
idiots who thought they were sowing the seeds of a new generation of
revolutionaries. Instead of fantasizing about some future situation
in which Euro-Amerikan youth rebellion will play a paramount role,
and cooking up schemes to recruit white youth for a future
insurrection, efforts should be focused on tasks more suitable in the
First World.
There is a relationship between children's oppression and fascism,
though not what Western alleged feminists, Freudians and Reichians
looking at gender and the family might suggest. The seeming
deterioriation or reordering of relationships of power and privilege
between adults and young people has historically coincided with
fascist movements. Without giving rise to a conception of children's
oppression, "Red Dawn" and similar movies recognize, to an extent,
the powerlessness of youth and offer a kind of power in exchange for
support for reactionary movements. Snitching, lynchings, pogroms,
mass murder of foreigners, and a perhaps a more-pronounced pecking
order among young people -- these are what fascism offers. The guns
and grenades that First World governments offer youth are already too
difficult to resist for many. So, even though children are oppressed,
this does not everywhere necessarily mean resistance to oppression.
Of course, the actions of the female gender aristocracy in the First
World and some comprador-wannabe female Muslim nation traitors
collaborating with the U.$. State Department give the impression that
the struggle against patriarchy is hopelessly mired in
neo-colonialism until imperialism is ended, but First World females
are themselves patriarchal oppressors to begin with. The competitive
Euro-Amerikan gender aristocracy and its liberal boyfriends are at
the forefront of U.$. war in the early 21st century and enlist the
support and participation of adolescent males with stories about
unveiled females and offers of pornography and sex, and females with
offers of female empowerment and career advancement through killing
children in foreign countries. Overthrowing the gender aristocracy --
high in the global patriarchy and carrying out joint actions against
the oppressed with the labor aristocracy lynch mob and imperialists
in one big white-nationalist brotherhood/sisterhood -- is part of the
revolutionary-feminist struggle.
Supposedly, the Wolverines' tactics are based on the mujahideen's in
Afghanistan. This is interesting because counterrevolutionaries
calling themselves revolutionaries and communists, denying the
profound class differences that exist between the bourgeois United
$tates and proletarian Afghanistan, are spreading the idea that the
United $tates and Afghanistan today are economically and politically
similar while also promoting the idea that Afghan patriarchy is
particularly backward. It's not just U.$. soldiers fantasizing about
themselves as Afghan guerrillas fighting the Soviets, replaced by
"Islamic fundamentalists." The plan supposedly is to change Afghan
patriarchy by putting pressure in the West on males in Afghanistan
while rallying liberal Democrats to oppose one or two wars, and put
pressure on the President to be more competent/smart/honest while
oinking for even better living standards, as if U.$. war were just a
conservative-Christian phenomenon and this were just about war
against one or two countries and not a world war. Behind what looks
like an insane plan is plain old white chauvinism. The proletariat
does not need Amerikans' leaving one imperialist ship for another or
Amerikan youths' fighting to save imperialism, but these things will
happen anyway unfortunately, and they will happen partly as a result
of the actions of people calling themselves progressives, socialists,
and revolutionaries. The left wings of parasitism and white
nationalism exist, and they are still parasitic and
white-nationalist. The same dynamic that is involved in
non-scientifically oriented Amerikans' following Amerikan so-called
communists -- focused on style, personality, geopolitics with
relatively little thinking about U.$. conditions and the U.$.
majority's role in global politics as exploiters, abstractions (and
emotive stories) with comparatively little concrete thinking, and
petty-bourgeois concerns supposedly requiring addressing with
militant and cult methods -- can lead to fascism. No doubt, when the
Third World has become a greater military threat to the First World,
there will be "left" anti-invasion people styling themselves after
the Wolverines, some calling themselves socialists and even some
calling themselves communist revolutionaries.
A 2008 Slate review raises that "Red Dawn" is "a pretty good
movie about Iraq, with the United States in the role of the Soviets
and the insurgents in the role of the Wolverines."(2) One has to
remember that Slate was so good as to be an outlet for
Christopher Hitchens' "Islamic fascism" vomit, among other warmonger
and colonialist material up to the present day. That's nice,
Slate -- and social-fascists and pseudo-atheist New
Age/anti-Catholic/anti-Islamic, pot-legalization liberal warmongers
-- build for war in the first place, and criticize it later while
repeating some of the same ideological justifications. "Red
Dawn is not an exact parallel to our situation, of course. The
Iraq we invaded was no functioning democracy; our Army does not
execute civilians; many Iraqis favor the American occupation." Well,
at least Slate does not call itself communist. Despite, or
because of, views like Slate's, there is little reason to
believe that "Red Dawn" works as anti-militarist material today.
Notes
1. "Modern pseudo-feminists are still vanguard of imperialist
expansion,"
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/gender/nowwarmongers.ht
ml
"NOW can claim that Euro-Amerika does not have "honor killings" and
thus fire up the crackers that way, but NOW will never confront
systematically that the murder rate for romance culture is higher in
the united $tates than most of the countries NOW is criticizing."
Regretfully, such arbitrariness also appears among oppressed
individuals lulled by the gender aristocracy, some of whom become
traitors accepting envelopes with cash from the U.$. diplomatic and
intelligence community.
There should be a feminist movement in the Third World that makes
comparisons, primarily within the context of the Third World
(revolutionary China, for instance). Lazy and sensational comparisons
between an oppressed nation and the West typically serve no purpose,
except conciliation with imperialism and division of the exploited.
The important thing is for demands made between oppressed people to
be concrete and presented in an increasingly organized and collective
way within the oppressed nation, something on which unity can be
based -- not a thousand or five hundred million different
unresolvable vague or individual complaints.
2. David Plotz, "Red Dawn," 2008 October 8,
http://www.slate.com/id/2201320/