The Quiet American - Spoiler

[DuncanK]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
No, considering the alternatives.

[DuncanK]

Originally posted by DuncanK

MtG,

How can you say that? Even the justification that Truman gave at the time, although bull****, was not adequate. Civilians should never be attacked. That's terrorism. That's what we are fighting against now.

Anyway, we dropped the nukes on Japan to force an unconditional surrender so that we could build bases there and use their economy to fight the Cold War. That was why they really did it. It wasn't to save American lives. Our government is always giving us some bull**** justification for the **** they pull. Look at this upcoming war. They are scrapping for some bull**** to tell us that we will believe.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov


As MtG pointed out, he didn't have to be responsible for it in order for it to have happened. The CIA undoubtedly has done a lot of things without the sitting POTUS knowing.

If the President had simply said we should support The, he wasn't necessarily in on how the CIA chose to do so.

I don't know about you, but if this actually happened, I want an investigation. If it turns out that this was a roque CIA operation, all responsible should spend some time in prison.

Otherwise, we need to pin the blame on Truman.

America should not tolerate this kind of crap.

[KrazyHorse]

[Ned]

Originally posted by Frogger

Hah to you too.

We recently investigated a Korean War incident of a massacre at a bridge dating from June 1950.

We should investigate this as well.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by MikeH
So by that logic if Saddam had somehow managed to find a nuke and, in self defence, nuked the advancing US forces that wouldn't be an atrocity.

No, it wouldn't.

[KrazyHorse]

Is there any treaty that forbids the use of nuke weapons in the same way that the 3rd or 4th Geneva protocol (can't remember) bans the use of chem+bio weapons?

[KrazyHorse]

Not talking about something like the NPT, by the way...

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Ned


Hah to you too.

We recently investigated a Korean War incident of a massacre at a bridge dating from June 1950.

We should investigate this as well.

When you apologise to every country in SA that you've ****ed around with for the last hundred years then I'll pay attention to good faith investigations of this type of sh*t.

Until then you're living in a dream world.

[MRT144]

south america or south asia?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
If they can rationalize that starting the war would be for the ultimate good (independence from French colonial rule), then the difference becomes pretty fuzzy.

Independence was a political aim. Now, if the French were more murderous SOBs, then the fuzziness would creep in, but then again, there wouldn't be much need to stir up the masses and motivate them to rebellion.

This is assuming the purpose of dropping the bombs was to hit the military targets. That was clearly not the case, as they could have conducted normal bombing runs on the specific targets. Sure, that would have jeapordized the American pilots more, but it would have minimized civilian casualties.

Your technical ignorance can be excused, but you are completely wrong. High altitude bombing had been discarded because the jet stream over Japan made it so innaccurate that bombs could be miles off target in an otherwise perfectly executed run. Miles off, almost randomly, depending on wind velocity, direction and gusts, so we're not just talking displacement of the bomb pattern, but widespread dispersal, with less impact on military and industrial targets, and more impact on the civilian population and infrastructure.

Low-altitude bombing with incendiaries killed more civilians than the A-bombs, but took hundreds of aircraft, and the Japanese continued their efforts at dispersal of military production, military supply storage, garrisons, etc.

I'm not as familiar with Hiroshima, but there were about a dozen valid military or military production targets of varying significance, and a few more (17) in Nagasaki, where I used to live. (I had a nice view across the harbor of ground zero from my living room and bedroom window). There were plenty of military targets there, and the other cities on the target list that day. Nagasaki was the fourth target, (Niigata was first) but it was the only one unfortunate enough to have clear skies that day. All of the target cities on the August 9th frag list were problematic for low altitude bombing (mountains around the cities), and high altitude bombing gets back to that dispersal problem. It is absolutely incorrect that conventional bombing with the same level of effect on the military targets would have inflicted lower civilian casualties - if anything, they would have been far higher.

The purpose was to show Japan (and the USSR) that we had this incredibly massive weapon and weren't afraid to use it, even when it hit civilian targets. That was terrorizing the populace into submission.

"The populace" was a non-entity in WW2 Imperial Japan. You went along with the program, period. There was no dissent to speak of, and no influence. The people to be influenced were the leadership of the IJA and IJN, and that was it. The difference with this massive weapon was military, not terrorization. The firebombing of Tokyo had a far more terrorizing effect, but the combinations of weather, the massive number of aircraft needed, wear and attrition on the aircraft (lots of maintenance hours), limits on numbers of airfields, fuel, and aircraft storage, etc. all limited how often those types of devastating raids could be delivered, and the Japanese command knew all this - they ran airplanes, they knew what was involved.

The last ditch defense, while they trained ten year old kids to fight with spears, was to disperse what industrial base remained into cottage industries, and to prepare caves and fortifications for guerilla warfare in event of an invasion. This was considered feasible because there was a limit to the rate at which the US could carry out large scale air bombardments. The bomb changed all that - we could deliver with one B-29 what it would otherwise take a thousand to deliver, and we could put it on target. It wasn't terrorizing the civilians, it was convincing the military leaders that we could inflict damage faster than they could recover from it, in the remaining seven months before an invasion of the home islands would be feasible.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Frogger
Is there any treaty that forbids the use of nuke weapons in the same way that the 3rd or 4th Geneva protocol (can't remember) bans the use of chem+bio weapons?

No.

[KrazyHorse]

That's what I figured...

[Lung]

Just to throw a spanner in the works, here's an article i saw a few weeks ago in the Sydney Morning Herald. I can't verify anything in the article, but it has a lot to say about this. For the record, the author is considered in Australia to be a "wet liberal", which is entirely different to what it would be in America. It translates to "soft conservative".

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Face-off with the anti-Americans

Those who disparage the US are often the last to acknowledge obvious truths, writes Gerard Henderson.


So, John Howard is going to Washington to see the President. Yet again. The Prime Minister is correct in asserting the importance of the Australia-United States alliance. It's just that any indication of Australian subservience to this "great and powerful friend" (in Robert Menzies' terminology) may have the unintended consequence of diminishing support for the ANZUS Treaty Down Under.

Howard makes scant attempt to disguise his pro-Americanism. There is, however, an antidote of long standing - namely, anti-Americanism. This was well defined by Paul Hollander in his book Anti-Americanism (OUP, 1992). Here the concept was described as "a particular mind-set, an attitude of distaste, aversion or intense hostility, the roots of which may be found in matters unrelated to the actual qualities or attributes of American society or the foreign policies of the United States".

Hollander made it clear that he did not dismiss "all critiques of the United States with the term 'anti-Americanism"'. Moreover, he recognised that the phenomenon was evident both within and outside the US. In the former instance it is best seen as alienation, American-style. However, especially since what the Americans term "9/11", anti-Americanism is much more vibrant outside, rather than within, the contemporary US.

This explains the slow release in the US of Australian-born film director Phillip Noyce's The Quiet American (Miramax Films), based on the 1955 novel of the same name by the English-born writer Graham Greene (1904-91).

As Hollander has pointed out, Greene seldom criticised communist totalitarianism while the Soviet Union was extant. In his book Philby (Andre Deutsch, 1988), Phillip Knightley documents how Greene visited the Soviet Union several times in the 1980s. On each occasion he made contact with fellow Britisher Kim Philby, who spied for Joseph Stalin and his (Stalinist) heirs until it all got too hot and he defected to the USSR. Greene had corresponded with Philby (in Moscow) since the late 1960s.

In a letter to The Times on September 4, 1967, Greene (infamously) declared: "If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States I would certainly choose the Soviet Union." He went on to claim that he would also rather live in Castro's Cuba than other Latin American nations and that he would prefer "life in [communist] North Vietnam to life in [non-communist] South Vietnam".

Interesting sentiments, to be sure. But Greene chose to live a comfortable life within various Western democracies. Despite the bravado, he never chose to domicile in Stalin's or Brezhnev's USSR, or Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam or Castro's Cuba.

The Quiet American is an anti-American text. The novel's political message turns on the (alleged) involvement of US intelligence in a terrorist bombing in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1952 where the aim was to falsely blame the communist Vietminh. More importantly, there is the theme. The book's hero, Thomas Fowler (who shares certain similarities with the real-life Greene), exhibits a distaste for all things American.

However, Greene at least acknowledged in his novel that the communist Vietminh were engaged in murder and terrorism - on occasions at least. No such impression is created in Noyce's film. Indeed, a viewer unfamiliar with the history of Vietnam in the early 1950s (towards the end of French colonial rule and around the beginning of US influence) could get the impression that the Vietnamese communists could do no wrong - while the anti-communist Americans could do no right.

Interviewed by Maxine McKew on ABC TV's The 7.30 Report last year, Noyce claimed that errors were made in the '50s and '60s as to the way that communism was fought. He added that even self-declared "dyed-in-the-wood lefties" like himself now "have to admit" that communism "was a genuine evil, particularly the version practised by Stalin". Only now?

Noyce was born in 1950. By the time he turned 21, Soviet communism had been completely discredited - by the revelations of refugees and by the deeds of its communist rulers. What's more, the excesses of Mao's China were well documented by the early '70s while those of the communist regimes in Cambodia, Cuba and Vietnam were a matter of record by at least the end of the '70s - more than two decades ago.

It seems that film directors and scriptwriters are among the last to become aware of the evils of communism (but not of fascism). Take, for example, the film Frida, based on the life of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54) and her muralist husband, Diego Rivera (1886-1957). Both artists were committed communists who, briefly, gave succour in Mexico to the exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky. Soon after Trotsky was murdered on Stalin's orders in 1940, Kahlo and Rivera became Stalinists once again. Visitors to Kahlo's home (now a museum) on the outskirts of Mexico City will note the half-finished portrait, in her studio, of Stalin.

Watching Salma Hayek play Kahlo, you could easily forget that the painter was a Stalinist. Indeed, apart from the compulsive womaniser Rivera's bad behaviour, the only obnoxious character in the film is an American, of course. Namely, businessman Nelson Rockefeller, who demolished a Rivera mural he had commissioned for the Rockefeller Centre because of its kindly presentation of the Bolshevik dictator Vladimir Lenin. Even the authoritarian revolutionary Trotsky (brilliantly depicted by Geoffrey Rush) emerges as a saintly type. Really.

Viewing Noyce's The Quiet American and Julie Taymor's Frida, it would be easy to overlook the fact that opposition to communism was essentially home-grown. It did not depend on Americans - quiet or ugly or whatever.

Last year, Quynh Dao wrote to The Age's Green Guide protesting at a sympathetic review of the documentary About Us: Combat Women (which had screened on SBS) in praise of Vietnamese communist female fighters during the Vietnam War. She queried whether the reviewer was aware of Amnesty International's "extreme concern" about continuing human rights violations in Vietnam. Good question. A similar query could well be directed to Noyce, who seems to take praise by Vietnam's communist leadership for his film at face value.

The Bush Administration has done relatively well in the war against terrorism in Afghanistan. And it may well prevail in Iraq. But this does not mean that the American way is dominant. Or that anti-Americanism has been dissipated. Not at all.

Once upon a time anti-Americanism was centred on political activists within sections of the left. Now it is much more diverse - embracing some leftists and right-wingers alike, along with general opponents of globalisation and more besides. As Howard wings his way to Washington this weekend, it would be worth his while to catch The Quiet American and Frida - if he has not done so - if only to reinforce the point that support for the Australian-US alliance cannot be achieved by logic alone but also by surmounting (anti-American) prejudice, something which remains rife within Western societies.

This is a task which might best be achieved at home.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

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[Ned]

Lung, very interesting piece.

Like I said before, seeing the blatant anti-Americanism and pro-communism in the movie is a shock - even with the rampant anti-Americanism rampant in the world today.

I wonder how this movie will go down with the average American. I suspect they will leave the movie theater angry.

Undoubtedly, college kids will eat it up.