Hollywood's Wars

Victor Davis Hanson: The truth about 40 years in the movies.

This distortion of historical truth has come to dominate American popular culture, which has made the leftist libretto its default narrative, one immune to the repeated demonstrations of its falseness and bloody failure. Warren Beatty’s Reds, a ludicrous valentine to John Reed, one of Lenin’s most useful idiots, used the same technique of papering over historical lies with cinematic glamour and wide-screen flair. Just about every Vietnam movie made is pretty much a lie, depicting brave Americans as psychopathic killers or drug-addled victims drafted into an unjust war to serve the capitalist Evil Empire. In fact, if I needed ten good men I’d take any ten Vietnam vets picked at random over any ten college professors or reporters or movie directors. The same lying narrative is at work today in the depiction of the war in Iraq, where America’s best are killing our enemies and giving Iraqis a chance at freedom. I bet that in most of the movies about Iraq coming out this fall, these brave soldiers will be portrayed as pathetic dupes of the evil Man and his “illegal” war, their heroism ignored, their beliefs condescended to, and their suffering sentimentalized.