War Porn

Rating: Null/10 (14 November 2012)

Most war films delight in playing the victim card. Typically you're coerced into siding with a small group of beleaguered common folk who are forced by an unjust History into a position in which they must valiantly fight back against overwhelming and superior odds. In each case victimhood is conjured up and used as a ploy to justify victimisation. Godard called this Hollywood's "stage wagon" mentality, referring to old westerns which typically pitted outnumbered gangs of cowboys against hordes of Indians.
Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbour" spends its first hour on a corny love triangle. Its second hour is essentially an extended action sequence in which the Japanese Navy decimates Pearl Harbour and interrupts the gooey domestic normalcy of the first hour. Its third hour, of course, is an extended action sequence in which Americans bomb the hell out of Japan. It's WWII as "Rocky III"; a poor, innocent, out-of-shape America has to get its butt kicked before it gets "the eye of the tiger" back.
A big-budget cartoon - Spielberg and Cameron are the chief influences - the film bolsters all the usual WW2 myths. That Axis imperialism was a reaction to Allied imperialism is ignored. That much money was coming to Germany from "isolationist" countries is similarly omitted. As is the fact that wealthy factions in the US and UK supported Hitler up until 1938, as he was merrily crushing unions, anti-capitalists and communists. That many "allies" supported Hitler's taking "back" of Rhineland, Saarland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, West Prussia and Danzig is also whitewashed. Nevermind the fact that German's later expansions were formally no different to other Empires at the time. Indeed, as the US genocidally spread like a virus throughout the Caribbean, Philippines and Latin America, an equally psychotic Great Britain was ravaging India, the Middle East and Africa. Hitler himself justified his actions by likening Germany's land-grabs to Britain's slave trade. Hitler's allegiances to economist Gottfried Feder, and his defaulting on loans to outside banking cartels, proved even more irksome for the status quo. Cue Western blockades, some implemented as early as 1933.
Meanwhile the US was busy sucking up to buddies China and Russia, the former carved up by the UK, US and France, who kept it locked in exploitative trade deals which explicitly excluded Japan. Japan – a once isolationist country forcibly opened up by US gunboats in the 1850s for "market reforms", thereby setting it upon a path of Imperialism - thus moved into Manchuria, where it replaced dynastic dictators whom the Chinese themselves hated. Russia, China and the US freaked out. Wanting to expand into South East Asia and the Philippines, and wanting to protect Chinese assets and cosy up to Russia, the US began covertly and overtly attacking Japan. They put in place a series of embargoes, oil blockades, asset freezes and banking lock-downs, slowly strangling the country. Spooked, Japan began to back down. It offered to apply in China the principle of non-discriminatory trade relations on the condition that the Americans did the same in their own "acquired" territories in Latin America. The US told them to shut the hell up. The common view is that America then suffered an unprovoked attack at Pearl Harbour, but few officials believed this at the time. "America forced the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history to say that America-was forced into war," Captain Oliver Lyttelton would say. And Captain Russell Grenfell: "It is beyond doubt that Roosevelt wanted to get his country into the war, but for political reasons was most anxious to insure that the first act of hostility came from the other side; for which reason he caused increasing pressure to be put on the Japanese, to a point that no self-respecting nation could endure without resort to arms." Later the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal would come to the conclusion that the US provoked the war with Japan.
With the US and Japan now at war, Hitler declared war on the US. The US never intended to enter the European theatre outright, but Hitler was gambling that by declaring war, Japan would come to his aid and attack Russia with their Northern Forces. Japan didn't. They left Hitler hanging. So the US is dragged into Europe, Russia crushes Germany, China pushes Japan back and the US inadvertently comes out on top, holding this position for roughly a century.
So essentially you have one huge, childish scuffle over colonies, minerals and cash. Germany and Japan didn't have colonies and wanted some, the US, England and France had many and wanted to keep them. No sooner was the war over, did the West turn their backs on once-allies China and Russia. The conquered Japan and Germany were themselves brought into the economic circles of the West and quickly turned against the sequestered Russians and Chinese.
Forget good/bad binaries. Everyone was the "bad guy", everyone fought for old fashioned bounty, on all sides it was the poor who suffered at the expense of the rich, it was the big nations who indebted and bullied the small into violence, nobody had a clue what was going on, everyone read the future outcomes of their own actions incorrectly (the US expected to have big post war economic interests/assets in China; China shut them off) and every action sprung a myriad of unforeseen reactions.
Some lessons learnt: disrespecting the wants/needs of other nations (gains) leads to violent blow-back (losses), egos and pride bulldoze all attempts at cooperation/conversation, what we mistake as progress is but the accumulation of time, death and thought (progress is itself always loss, comes at a price), and the best way to topple a dictator is to either do nothing or to act wholly altruistically. WW2 is generally portrayed an an anomaly of a war, different to say, Vietnam and Iraq, but was largely the same thing.
2/10 - Worth no viewings.