Red Dawn

[Kangaroo Feathers]

I watched the 1984 original Red Dawn last night. First time I've actually seen it. I've been aware of it for years, but I was quite shocked how many of the core points of Right Wing conspiracy theory are obviously drawn directly from it. Evil Latin infiltrators sneaking across the Southern Border? Check. Rounding up and mass executing "real" Americans? Check . Using gun registration and licensing to identify and arrest law abiding gun owners? Check. European allies abandoning America "in her hour of need", making international alliances pointless and useless? Check. Mass media propaganda as a form of control? Check. Untrained, logistically unsupported soldier citizens causing mass casualties against a numerically and technologically superior force with nothing but patriotic fervor, guts and a couple of hunting rifles? Big check.

I've been arguing with these idiots for years, but watching this movie last night, so much clicked into place. SO many of their fundamental talking points are lifted straight from this fairly forgettable pulp movie. It's like a Rosetta Stone for the paranoid Right Wing mind.

Just wanted to share the observation.

 

[Sunstone]

That's quite interesting. The movie was made two years after the Fairness Doctrine was abolished, which allowed Rush Limbaugh to go on the airwaves spouting almost exactly those same points.

 

[exchemist]

I watched the 1984 original Red Dawn last night. First time I've actually seen it. I've been aware of it for years, but I was quite shocked how many of the core points of Right Wing conspiracy theory are obviously drawn directly from it. Evil Latin infiltrators sneaking across the Southern Border? Check. Rounding up and mass executing "real" Americans? Check . Using gun registration and licensing to identify and arrest law abiding gun owners? Check. European allies abandoning America "in her hour of need", making international alliances pointless and useless? Check. Mass media propaganda as a form of control? Check. Untrained, logistically unsupported soldier citizens causing mass casualties against a numerically and technologically superior force with nothing but patriotic fervor, guts and a couple of hunting rifles? Big check.

I've been arguing with these idiots for years, but watching this movie last night, so much clicked into place. SO many of their fundamental talking points are lifted straight from this fairly forgettable pulp movie. It's like a Rosetta Stone for the paranoid Right Wing mind.

Just wanted to share the observation.

This might be a good moment to review Hofstadter's 1964 essay on the "Paranoid Style" in politics: The Paranoid Style in American Politics | Harper's Magazine

It makes quite a good read today, I think. It seems that this style of politics has been a perennial feature of American politics for at least 150 years, deployed in support of various causes, from anti-Catholicism to the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Trump and the far-right conspiracy theorists are merely the last in a very long tradition, evidently.

Trump, however, can't seem to settle on who his enemy is, which is a bit problematic. The Washington Swamp? Mexican immigrants? The "lamestream" media? The FBI? The Yellow Peril, Reprised? Democrats, generally? The European Union? It is pretty hard to see anything in common among such targets for this inexhaustible fount of blame and rage. Perhaps we should be thankful that his scattergun approach to choosing conspiratorial enemies must make it hard for a truly compelling paranoid narrative to emerge. (Though I note that Republican strategists currently seem to think the Yellow Peril, Reprised is the most promising option for the November election:https://static.politico.com/80/54/2f3219384e01833b0a0ddf95181c/corona-virus-big-book-4.17.20.pdf )

It seems to me one key insight of Hofstadter's is the element of psychological projection that he identifies. Perhaps what your observation shows is the restless yearning among sections of American society for a target for paranoia, as that provides the outlet for their frustrations and fantasies that they seem to need.

 

[Yazata]

I think that the original movie sought to illustrate the United States under foreign military occupation. The inspiration for that imagery was most likely World War II Europe.

Nazis were in short supply in the 1980's just as they are today, unless one wanted to make an alternative-history movie. The Cold War was still going, the Iron Curtain still divided Europe, so communists were pretty much the only military rivals out there with a halfway credible chance of putting everyday Americans into the position of having to choose between going along with imposed authoritarianism or rebelling and becoming a partisan resistance.

What set left-knees jerking was that instead of depicting the evil occupiers as Nazis, the all-purpose villains that everyone loves to hate, they were depicted in the Cold War contemporary style of the 1980's as communists. But casting communists as the evil authoritarians that they actually are, was and apparently still is perceived by those same communists and their fellow travelers as inexcusable "paranoia".

Left knees are apparently still wildly jerking.

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

I think that the original movie sought to illustrate the United States under foreign military occupation. The inspiration for that imagery was most likely World War II Europe.

Nazis were in short supply in the 1980's just as they are today, unless one wanted to make an alternative-history movie. The Cold War was still going, the Iron Curtain still divided Europe, so communists were pretty much the only military rivals out there with a halfway credible chance of putting everyday Americans into the position of having to choose between going along with imposed authoritarianism or rebelling and becoming a partisan resistance.

What set left-knees jerking was that instead of depicting the evil occupiers as Nazis, the all-purpose villains that everyone loves to hate, they were depicted in the Cold War contemporary style of the 1980's as communists. But casting communists as the evil authoritarians that they actually are, was and apparently still is perceived by those same communists and their fellow travelers as inexcusable "paranoia".

Left knees are apparently still wildly jerking.

No one mentioned having a problem with communists as the protagonists. Just because you completely missed the point of the thread, doesn't mean you have to broadcast that you missed it.