To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly “South Vietnam,” the country America claimed to “save” and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse.
The “meaning” of the Vietnam War is no different from the meaning of the genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the leveling of every city in North Korea. The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American.
Quoting Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, “There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.”
Nothing has changed. When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on Sept. 19 – a body established to spare humanity the “scourge of war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its 25 million people. His audience gasped, but Trump’s language was not unusual. His rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a nation of more than 80 million people. This is the American Way; only the euphemisms are missing now.
Returning to the U.S., I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground.
#Guerre_des_images et imaginaires de guerre dans le cinéma de science-fiction nord-américain
Depuis la #guerre_du_Viêt-nam, le cinéma de Science-fiction Nord Américain, avec notamment des cinéastes comme John Carpenter, John McTiernan ou James Cameron et Paul Verhoeven, s’est fait l’écho de l’histoire sociale, politique ou belliqueuse du pays, à travers des systèmes d’échos, d’échanges et d’influences entre l’imaginaire et l’histoire d’une part, et entre le cinéma et la télévision d’autre part. Ces auteurs augurent moins des dérives à venir qu’ils n’énoncent des problématiques contemporaines, leurs imaginaires du futur, en se nourrissant de ces histoires inventées, nous parlent d’une histoire « en train de se faire », tout en s’inscrivant au cœur d’un questionnement sur la place de l’image dans les représentations historiques, mais aussi son rôle passé, présent et à venir dans l’évolution des sociétés modernes.