Seventy-three years ago (August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945) the United States unleashed atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed more than 200,000 individuals, many of whom were civilians.
Fast forward to the present day, and the U.S. military, under president Donald Trump’s leadership, is dropping a bomb every 12 minutes.
It follows on the heels of president Barack Obama, the anti-war candidate and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who waged war longer than any American president and whose targeted-drone killings continued to feed the war machine and resulted in at least 1.3 Million lives lost to the U.S.-led war on terror.
The United States long has had a penchant for endless wars that empty our national coffers while fattening those of the military industrial complex. Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, we’ve spent more than $1.6 Trillion to wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Add in our military efforts in Syria and Pakistan, as well as the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt, that cost rises to $5.6 Trillion.
Even with America’s military might spread thin, the war drums continue to sound as the Pentagon polices the rest of the world with more than 1.3 Million U.S. troops stationed at roughly 1,000 military bases in more than 150 countries.
To this end, Americans are fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a war zone.
In terms of human carnage alone, war’s devastation is staggering. For example, it is estimated that approximately 231 Million humans died worldwide during the wars of the 20th Century. This figure does not take into account the walking wounded, both physically and psychologically, who survive war.
War drives the American police state.
The military-industrial complex is the world’s largest employer.
War entertains us with its carnage, its killing fields, its thrills and chills and bloodied battles set to music and memorialized in books, on television, in video games, and in superhero films and blockbuster Hollywood movies financed in part by the military.
War has become a centerpiece of American entertainment culture, most prevalent in war movies.
War movies deal in the extremes of human behavior. The best films address not only destruction on a vast scale, but plumb the depths of humanity’s response to the grotesque horror of war. They present human conflict in its most bizarre conditions, where men and women caught in the perilous straits of death perform feats of noble sacrifice or dig into the dark battalions of cowardice.
War films provide viewers with a way to vicariously experience combat, but the great ones are not merely vehicles for escapism. Instead, they provide a source of inspiration, while touching upon the fundamental issues at work in wartime scenarios.
Although there are many films to choose from, the following 10 classic war films touch on modern warfare, from the First World War onward, and run the gamut of conflicts and human emotions and center on the core issues often at work in the nasty business of war.
• The Third Man (1949). Carol Reed’s The Third Man, which deals primarily with the after-effects of the ravages of war, is a great film by anyone’s standards.
• Paths of Glory (1957). This Stanley Kubrick film is an antiwar masterpiece. The setting is 1916, when two years of trench warfare have arrived at a stalemate. And although nothing of importance is occurring in the war, thousands of lives are being lost. But the masters of war pull the puppet strings, and the blood continues to flow.
• The Manchurian Candidate (1962). John Frankenheimer’s classic focuses on the psychological effects of war and its transmutation into mind control and political assassination. All the lines of intrigue converge to form a prophetic vision of what occurred the year after the film’s release with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
• Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964). One of the great films of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove burst on to the cinematic landscape and cast a cynical eye on the entire business of war.
• The Deer Hunter (1978). Michael Cimino’s Academy Award-winning film is one of the most emotion-invoking films ever made. This story of a group of Pennsylvania steel mill workers who endure excruciating ordeals in the Vietnam War is one film that makes its point clear: War is the horror of all horrors.
• Apocalypse Now (1979). I consider this Francis Ford Coppola’s best film. Based on Joseph Conrad’s novella, The Heart of Darkness, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) treks to the Cambodian jungle to assassinate renegade, manic Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando).
• Platoon (1986). This is not Oliver Stone’s best film, but it is one helluva war movie. Set before and during the Tet Offensive of late January 1968, it is a gritty view of the Vietnam War by one who served there.
• Full Metal Jacket (1987). Stanley Kubrick’s take on Vietnam is one of the most powerful and psychological dramas ever made.
• Jacob’s Ladder (1990). Adrian Lyne’s thriller touches on the sordid nature of war and the corruption of those who manipulate and experiment on us while we fight on their behalf.
• Jarhead (2005). Sam Mendes’ film serves up war as a phallic obsession in the oil-drenched sands of Kuwait and Iraq. Here soldiers fight not for causes, but to survive in the nihilistic pursuit of destruction.
These films illustrate, war is indeed hell.
I point out in my book, “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,” what we must decide is whether we’re stuck with the grim reality of war, or whether we’re prepared to do as Martin Luther King, Jr. suggested in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture and find an alternative to war.
Speaking in Oslo in 1964, King declared:
“Man’s proneness to engage in war is still a fact. But wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.”
—The Rutherford Institute