Myth+of+US+as+saviour+of+the+world,+Lourens+Ackermann,+Weekender



=Business Day Weekender, Johannesburg, 20 January 2007=

=The myth of America as saviour of the free world=


 * LOURENS ACKERMANN**

THE war movie, Flags of our Fathers, is about the famous photograph of the US flag planted on a hilltop on Iwo Jima Island in the Pacific, and the story of heroism and propaganda that surrounds it.

The movie is directed by Clint Eastwood so you would expect it to be well made, and it is: authentic, textured, gritty.

It also reveals the truth of why men fight wars. Home, freedom, loved ones all come second to the psychology that Eastwood accurately drills into: none of these factors motivates men to their deaths as strongly as loyalty to their buddies, or the fear of being seen by them as a coward. They come first; the rest a distant second.

The American GIs who stormed beaches in the Pacific occupied by fanatical Japanese fighters in pillboxes armed with machine guns, knew that a third of them would be dead or wounded within the first five minutes of landing.

But they did what they did because their fear of death was overridden by a greater fear of letting down the man beside them.

But the problem this movie has is the problem that all American filmmakers have making war movies. They wittingly or unwittingly join a trend that has cast the US foot soldier as the protector of democracy. Spielberg did not start the trend with Private Ryan, he merely consolidated it.

Private Ryan looms larger in our consciousness than Private Zukov (let’s call him) of the Red Army, because Hollywood did what Hitler couldn’t. It beat the Red Army.

In the Second World War the Red Army lost 11-million soldiers, the Americans 300000. Stalingrad, not El Alamein or the Battle of Britain, is now commonly viewed by military historians as the turning point, the place where the Red Army stopped the German generals, and if they had not, Hitler would have taken Moscow and with it command of Europe.

Stalingrad was won through unimaginable losses. To put these losses into perspective, consider that many more men were lost by the Red Army at Stalingrad, a single battle, than the Americans lost in the entire war.

In fact three-quarters of the war, and three-quarters of the deaths, both civilian and military, resulted from the war raging on the Eastern Front somewhere in the inferno that had become the lands between Berlin and Moscow. And so you may be forgiven today if you fought in that war and live now somewhere in Poland or the Ukraine, for thinking it a little rich that America claims it was they who made the world safe for democracy.

The historical paradox of that war is that it took a monster like Stalin with the military resources of a totalitarian regime at his disposal to stop another monster, Hitler, and in the process leave both so exhausted that the Allies could draw breath and regroup. At least, let’s tell it like it is.

But Hollywood can’t help itself, and who wants to watch a movie about a frozen tundra and 11-million dead souls, and so, slowly the myth is being believed as fact, and it becomes harder and harder to distinguish reality from fantasy.

The “right" to keep the world safe from tyranny was used to invade Vietnam and now Iraq.

While many believe that there is US self-interest at play here, just as many, and perhaps more, believe that America is continuing to do what it has done for over five decades: protect the flame of freedom.

While Flags of our Fathers sensitively depicts ordinary men performing extraordinary deeds, it has the drawback ultimately, and fatally — not its fault — of simply being American. That is to say, any US youth seeing it will continue to believe Private Ryan, and not Private Zukov, saved the world.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/weekender.aspx?ID=BD4A361158**

650 words