The Fog of War
2003 · Film · documentary · 107 min
Directed by Errol Morris
Former corporate whiz kid Robert McNamara was the controversial Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, during the height of the Vietnam War. Augmented by archival footage and cabinet conversation recordings, Errol Morris gives the conflicted McNamara a platform on which he attempts to confront his and the U.S. government's actions in Southeast Asia in light of the horrors of modern warfare, the end of ideology and the punitive judgment of history.
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In first 20 minutes of the documentary The Fog of War Robert McNamara goes over the Cuban missile crisis in detail. Even he admits it came down to luck.
His meeting with Cuba in the 90s and the new information presented that McNamara didn’t have during the crisis was especially sobering. McNamara ended the meeting early because he was “unprepared” to learn there were missiles already operational and authorization was already granted to launch if the Cuban build sites were struck.
Game theory assumes that all the players agree on the pay-offs. However this is often not the case in real world situations. Robert MacNamara (the ex US secretary of defence) said that he realized after the Vietnam war the US and the Vietnamese saw the war completely differently, even years after war had ended (see the excellent documentary 'Fog of War').
The Fog of War is a documentary that underscores this well.
Or perhaps the dimension was length, rather than weight?
> the corresponding receipt, then pinned them together and sent out a check, usually a few months late. To figure out how much money the company owed, they stacked up all the bills, measured them with a ruler, and through a formula of unknown provenance turned feet into dollars.
From _The Fires_ by Joe Flood (2010) Cited in https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/18z6i09/comment/kgnybnl/
But I could not find a quote in the Macnamara interviews from the _Fog of War_ https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html as cited by https://forum.woodenboat.com/forum/the-bilge/28529-the-film-fog-of-war#post856654
The Fog of War is definitely worth a watch. It was a fairly harrowing experience when I saw it. Actually, it is probably one of the hardest films I have watched. He clearly details the war crimes he presided over, and is open about the fact that he would have been tried as a war criminal had they lost.
He also pioneered the use of seat belts while at Ford. Which does make the morality-math a little more unusual.
In the documentary The Fog of War, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, who relayed the Presidential order to drop nuclear bombs on Japan, said: "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win? Selden mentions another critique of the nuclear bombing, which he says the U.S. government effectively suppressed for twenty-five years, as worth mention. On 11 August 1945, the Japanese government filed an official protest over the atomic bombing to the U.S. State Department through the Swiss Legation in Tokyo Truth is most people here are hypocrites, might makes right and the end justifies the means, but only for our side! Mind you, I'm no arguing that these obvious truths are wrong, but intellectual honesty shouldn't go to the trash in favour of wishful thinking and posturing.
The Fog of War. It caused me to see geopolitics from both a simpler and more constantly ambiguous perspective.
A River Runs through It. Even more so the book, but the movie gets the job done: the meanings of our experiences only make sense once their dust has settled.
The Leftovers. I'm going to cheat a little and say a TV show here. Better than anything else, it draws a connection between the philosophical immensity of things like 2001/Interstellar and the real drama of everyday human lives.
“[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.” George Orwell (31 December 1943)
This holds NO candle the the candor of Robert McNamara talking about fire bombing Japan in WWII. If you have never seen "fog of war" the documentary interview of him go and see it. The context of "McNamara's Morons" and forest Gump is lost on so many...
I have watched the Fog of War so many times.
It is just hard for me to rate the King of Kong or American Movie against the Fog of War though. Those are my top 3.
I will have to give the The Act of Killing a go.
Here is the list from the thread: --- 1. A Man Named Pearl
2. Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland
3. Microcosmos
4. Crip Camp!
5. Keep The River On Your Right
6. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed
7. Harlan County USA
8. Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story
9. Good Night Oppy
10. We Met in Virtual Reality
11. All That Breathes
12. Still
13. Can’t Be Stopped
14. The Amazing Jonathan Documentary
15. Searching for Sugarman
16. AKA Mr Chow
17. The Pigeon Tunnel
18. Little Richard: I Am Everything
19. I Know That Voice
20. Genghis Blues
21. Kings of Pastry
22. 20 Feet From Stardom
23. Stevie
24. Anvil: the Story of Anvil
25. Searching for Sugar Man
26. King of Kong
27. The Gleaners and I
28. Touching the Void
29. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History
30. 20 Days in Mariupol
31. Minding the Gap
32. How to Survive a Plague
33. Speciesism
34. Free Solo
35. Jim Allison: Breakthrough
36. Seven Up! series
37. Bowling for Columbine
38. The Fog of War
39. Rivers and Tides
40. Capturing the Friedmans
41. Spellbound
42. King of Kong
43. Crip Camp
44. Jesus Camp
45. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
46. Flee
47. Man on Wire
48. Queen of Versailles
49. The Thin Blue Line
50. Time Indefinite
51. The Gleaners and I
52. My Life as a Turkey
53. Happy People
54. Grizzly Man
>Saying that Germany and Japan were “bombed back into the Stone Age” is a wild exaggeration
Japan was firebombed pretty ruthlessly. McNamara openly stated that he would have been tried as a war criminal had the US lost the war. Here is a list of 67 Japanese cities that were firebombed with their destruction % and their US size equivalent:
http://www.ditext.com/japan/napalm.html#google_vignette
Source: The Fog of War (Documentary)
I guess this all depends on one’s definition “bombed back into the Stone Age”. I’m sure descendants of those that lived in Dresden might argue that they, in fact, were indiscriminately bombed to the point of ruin.
There's a difference between bombing factories and doing firebombing intended to raze the city as a whole.
As Mcnamara himself says in the documentary interview Fog of War, proportionality is a concept in warfare.
Yes. It’s the opposite of Robert McNamara’s rule number one: “Empathize with your opponent” (by which he meant not sympathy but putting oneself in his shoes). See the documentary “Fog Of War”.
I recommend Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control by Errol Morris. It’s a series of interviews with passionate geniuses in various areas, including a naked mole rat scientist.
I watched it in the 90s and gave me awareness that there’s people who have very deep interest in a subject and achieve fulfillment in studying and working in an area.
Morris directed many other good documentaries- Thin Blue Line, Fog of War- but I think FCOoC is his best.
Also Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (there’s a documentary and a fictional portrays) is interesting to show how someone can work on a seemingly pointless and impossible task. This was helpful in programming as frequently areas of interest seem so confusing to people outside my mind.
The World at War - BBC documentary series about WWII. Shows humanity simultaneously at it's best and worst.
The Vietnam War - Ken Burns documentary series. Very balanced and sobering take on the Vietnam war, events leading to the Vietnam war, and unrest in the US during that period.
The Fog of War - Errol Morris doc about Robert McNamara.
The Salt of the Earth - Doc about photographer Sebastião Salgado
Alone in the Wilderness - Dick Proenneke films himself building and living in a remote cabin in Alaska
Also can't go wrong with Adam Curtis.
I don't understand why you think this quote is relevant, maybe you think that was the only part used so the entire thing was an honest mistake that still killed many?
Here's some others parts from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
>In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War, the former United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara admitted that an attack on the USS Maddox happened on August 2, but the August 4 attack, for which Washington authorized retaliation, never happened.
>As the evening progressed, further signals intelligence (SIGINT) did not support any such ambush, but the NSA personnel were apparently so convinced of an attack that they ignored the 90% of SIGINT that did not support that conclusion, and that was also excluded from any reports they produced for the consumption by the president.
McNamara admits of didn't happen, the NSA admits they intentionally doctored the report.
The Errol Morris documentary "The Fog Of War" about Robert McNamara is amazing. Even though McNamara was in his 80s when it was filmed, his mind was still razor sharp. McNamara was highly self-reflective and was not someone to whitewash history, even his own.
The documentary covers various phases of McNamara's career, including his contribution to the Tokyo firebombing raids in WWII, and a short bit about his work at Ford Motor Company between the wars, but the Vietnam war part was the biggest section.
David Attenborough does not make the same style of programming that Curtis does.
Curtis has a very specific world view, or world vibe, let's say whereas Attenborough does have views about the world but not much else beyond visual grandeur.
His earlier stuff is definitely better than his more recent work, but I refer specifically to the hypernormalization documentary because it's absolutely full of "Syria this", "Assad this", "[large country or company] decided to do [remarkably simple thing]". Maybe it's right, but the point is that it's structured and edited in a way where he wants to make you feel his argument that the world is being forced into a state of inaction, not convince you that his argument is correct.
In this specific documentary, he is undeniably flying extremely close to the sun in how he presents his argument versus what he is arguing against. He argument is all about the "theys" and the men in palaces, and obviously some decisions are, but some inference one makes in this mindset are simply the result of being fooled by randomness.
Don't get me wrong, I like listening to Adam Curtis docs while I'm working, I just think that he goes too far. When he is covering identifiable flaws he is absolutely brilliant, e.g. his piece on Nick Leeson is really nicely done, when he is kind of mumbling about some kind of incompetent conspiracy to do [something] he is often charismatic but shallow.
Also (a point about documentary filmmaking in general) the use of interviews is actually something I sort of disagree to an extent with unless it's a documentary like the fog of war where it's about a person in particular. It is extremely easy to manipulate interview.
This (https://youtu.be/BBwepkVurCI?t=90) is an extreme example demonstrated by Charlie Brooker, but you can be really subtle. And what if they're lying? What if you end up lying by accident? Trust but verify.
https://youtu.be/itqMwuB8gOk This is an interesting documentary about secret maps and information in Britain. I find it interesting, use my above writing as a barometer for whether that entices you or not.
The documentary "the fog of war" is a nice view (via the study of Robert S. McNamara) of just how brutal the war in the Pacific was in terms of civilian casualties.
The US was using (in modern parlance, however ugly it is) data science to optimize bombing missions to the point that the nuclear weapons were merely a large blip rather than a sudden burst of killing sandwiched by silence.
Le May (whose group dropped the bomb IIRC) and McNamara both agreed they'd have been tried as war criminals.
For Truman at least I can see why he'd be annoyed. Maybe not as annoyed as he claimed to be, but in terms of decision making I think anyone who claims to have an easy answer to whether to drop the bomb or not is either a fantasist or an idiot.
These would be of interest for you: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16117-document-06-record-conversation-between https://archive.ph/gnqkv - among the signers who opposed the NATO expansion during the late 90s to include the Visegrad group, Former SoD MacNamara https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300259933/not-one-inch Fog of War (Errol Morris documentary) - rather telling in there is empathy for your adversary, and the fact that there's so many parallels with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Seems like we've learnt nothing from it.
Yes, I believe he did multiple RH podcast episodes on this. He has also released a book: "The Bomber Mafia: A Story Set in War". [1]
I think the first I heard of the Tokyo firebombing during WWII was in the Errol Morris documentary: "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara".
Robert McNamara was an officer under Curtis LeMay. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment. [2]
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Mafia-Story-Set-War/dp/0241535867/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War#In_The_Fog_of_War
McNamara basically admits this himself in the documentary The Fog of War:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
It's worth a watch but it's very soft on him and his role. Still a very good documentary.
> how AI will affect society’s sense of reality
Following the article, the scope is probably specific: they raise the problem of "transparency" ("how and why does the black box indicate this solution") as primary, especially in the context of policies and reaction. Decisions (long and short term) have been up to now taken as the result of a discussion between human minds. What happens if black boxes are now entrusted?
Results of the application of AI in the medical field suggest its increased adoption in other sectors, but the special quality of these outputs are in that they are surprising and obscure (as opposed to, notably, teaching new abilities). The possibility of application of these technologies - possibility called a certainty by the author, authoritative in his field - to matters of national security, defence, strategy and tactics, is surely a problem. What is proposed and encouraged is that countries with values consistent with those of the authors gain an advantage (to counter automated "psychopath" decisions).
--
From the interview documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara: McNamara met Fidel Castro years after the crisis, and Castro declared never having had issues with taking actions which could have caused the utter annihilation of Cuba. To the utter bewilderment of McNamara. This could represent an example of «values consistent with those of the authors».
> or something like what happened against the Japanese.
By the time the nukes were dropped, the 60 or so largest cities in Japan had been decimated by bombing (Kyoto was famously spared largely because of the sympathies of a single officer). When Tokyo was firebombed over 100k civilians were burned alive in a single night, the overwhelming majority of them women, children, and old men.
Justified as it may have been, we shouldn't promote a mythology that WW2 was a clean and narrowly targeted campaign by the allies.
There's an excellent documentary by Errol Morris named The Fog of War that has McNamara's very frank commentary on these issues. You also can find some letters Churchill wrote where he was engaging with these questions, such as asking himself if the fire bombing was morally much different from the use of chemical agents during WW1.
Any sort of pre-emptive strike by the US vs the USSR would have been similarly ugly, with very real human cost to ordinary people with no agency in the situation.
The problem with MAD is it requires perfect decision making or perfect luck with no graceful failure if things go wrong.
From the Cuban Missile Crisis portion of Fog of War
"Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today."
https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html
Robert McNamara speaks about this in the documentary "The fog of war" - they identified the problem (people were dying in crashes), implemented a solution (seatbelts + signs reminding people they were there), but couldn't get people to use them. Thus is the human condition, I suppose.
The opening part of the documentary going over the Cuban Missile Crisis is amazing. I can watch it over and over.
Fog Of War is probably the best documentary i've ever seen.
The fog of war is an incredible documentary. I'd suggest it to anyone who is willing to watch it.
People in the US misunderstand the Vietnamese perspective on the war pretty badly. Interestingly enough one of the best sources you can look at to learn about this is the documentary interview with McNamara, Fog of War. He's surprisingly frank about his own mistakes in perspective, as well as talking about conversations he had with his counterparts in later years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YONEXPMVaQM
Indeed. In particular, when OP said he wasn't moved emotionally by Glass's music, I immediately thought of the track "67 Cities" from Errol Morris documentary, The Fog of War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOCYcgOnWUM
Glass's score makes this a very powerful scene, IMO.
Additional recommendation: The Fog of War, the McNamara interview documentary. Absolutely fascinating look into the mind of the secretary of defense at the time.
> Victors get to rewrite history
Robert McNamara makes a great point about that in fantastic documentary The Fog of War.
> equal parts fascinating and sickening
That's how I felt when I watched the documentary about Robert MacNamara [0], when they started talking about how we are pretty sure that what we did to Japan _before_ the atomic bombs counted as war crimes.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
Interestingly, Morris also made a similar documentary on Rumsfeld: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Known
It's (IMHO) not as good as The Fog of War, but it's still very much worth a watch.
Errol Morris' documentary on McNamara, The Fog of War is well worth your time to watch.
The parallels with Donald Rumsfeld's time as Secretary of Defense are remarkable - it seems Rumsfeld was making all the moves and mistakes that McNamara made. I fully expect Eric Schmidt to suffer the same fate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
you can't attribute staying out of nuclear conflict to any head of state, morality, or even logic ( there was plenty of luck involved ).
For example, after Kennedy resigned himself to striking the sites in Cuba during the missile crisis it was someone else who told him he was wrong and reconsider. (see the documentary Fog of War)
To put a fine point on it, even after all the brinksmanship, analysis, diplomacy to resolve the Cuban missile crisis it was a long Soviet officer objecting to launch a nuclear armed torpedo in response to sounding depth charges (interpreted as an attack) from US ships. Pulling the trigger would have started a global thermonuclear war but it wasn't pulled, one officer decided that against a 2/3 vote in favor.
"Later that same day, what the White House later called "Black Saturday," the US Navy dropped a series of "signaling depth charges" (practice depth charges the size of hand grenades[114]) on a Soviet submarine (B-59) at the blockade line, unaware that it was armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo with orders that allowed it to be used if the submarine was damaged by depth charges or surface fire.[115] As the submarine was too deep to monitor any radio traffic,[116][117] the captain of the B-59, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.[118] The decision to launch these required agreement from all three officers on board, but one of them, Vasily Arkhipov, objected and so the nuclear launch was narrowly averted."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
There are plenty of examples where, basically, a roll of the dice saved civilization during the cold war. The destruction of society during the cold war was prevented by luck as much as anything else.
That was very interesting!
I really sympathize with his goal of interviewing people with the intent of getting an unforced explanation for whatever the interviewee has or is supporting. Adversarial interviews are more entertaining for sure, but how beneficial are they really at getting the interviewee to open up and share their unfiltered opinions, get them to lay out their own narrative? (with the purpose of learning about their world view)
At the same time the only movie I've watched of his is Fog of War and I wasn't a fan, felt like it was a lot of nothing.
I guess there is no "right" approach to interviewing, it depends on the interviewee.
I don't think super sound argumentation is really the solution to everything. There is this documentary Fog of War about the Vietnam War and one lesson there is that rationality alone won't save us. On the contrary it might have almost provoked nuclear war. ;)
About the side note, what forms of evidence do you think are stronger?
In later life McNamara was pretty forthcoming about his own past failings, if you watch this documentary. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
this reminds me of the documentary "the fog of war"[0] in which robert macnamara talks about the conventional type bombing of japan's cities with firebombs before using any atom bomb.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
The Venus Project: Future By Design - By Jacque Fresco. Introduced Jacque Fresco's philosophy, R.I.P., and also the empathy we must have in designing something that is good for the planet and for the future. I highly recommend.
Mike Maloney's "Hidden Secrets of Money" is a beautiful set of YouTube documentaries financed by Mike himself. It educated me and millions out there how money really worked in the real world, and how the Federal Reserve and banking manipulates currency. https://goldsilver.com/hidden-secrets/
The Corporation - When Corporations started to get the same rights and treatment as regular citizens, we have created a monster that have changed our world for the worst.
The Cove and Blackfish. Really sad and made me stay away from Sea World and circuses and places that held animals in captivity for entertainment.
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara - The 11 lessons are worth learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room/Inside Job - When corporations are run by sociopaths.
An Inconvenient Truth - Global warming.
Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel/Bill Cunningham New York - Learned so much about creativity and just being true to your unique self regardless of what the world thinks.
Zeitgeist - Esoteric knowledge.
Actually, the US only thought that there wasn't MAD. As mentioned in the documentary "The Fog of War", only decades later did the US discover that there were already nuclear missiles with warheads in Cuba when they began the blockade. And Castro was willing to use them!
That made the situation even more dangerous than they realized at the time. The US would not have come out intact. It's very lucky for everyone that the Soviets decided not to escalate the situation.
Of course, I suppose MAD isn't MAD if there isn't also mutual knowledge of mutually assured destruction. It's something even worse when both sides think they have the advantage.
While we're on the topic of McNamara, I'd like to plug the documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara [1]. It's great to watch, and you can see how McNamara's perspective has changed. I would recommend it to everyone, especially anyone who cares about defense/foreign policy.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/
The Fog of War is perhaps one of the best documentaries that I have ever seen.
There was a documentary on the City of God DVD that was better than the film (and I thought it was an amazing film).
A few from Netflix that I could find that I rated:
Endless Summer
Death in Gaza
The Filth and the Fury
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Baseball
March of the Penguins
The Art of the Steal
Born Into Brothels
The Aristocrats
God Grew Tired of Us
The Fog of War
The Lost Wave
The Last Waltz
Festival Express
Grizzly Man: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427312/ -- the folly of humans when it comes to interacting with wild animals well illustrated
The Fog of War: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/ -- whoa. Just: whoa.
The Thin Blue Line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thin_Blue_Line_(1988_film) -- when a conviction goes wrong.
I guess I really like Errol Morris and Herzog? Probably.
>The Century of the Self: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
I think all of Adam Curtis' documentaries are worth a watch:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL617BE1DB723DB1D6
Some others favourites off the top of my head:
808 (about the drum machine): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2268622/
Scratch: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0143861/
Hoop Dreams: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110057/
Startup.com (a classic!) : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
The Fog of War: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/
The Fog of War https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/
Robert McNamara gives his accounts of WWII and Vietnam wars.
He was a senior member of the White House administrations and saw a lot.
>I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were given.
I just want to be one anecdotal voice to disagree with this statement. I went to a city university and my American history class 1945-present included a curriculum with media such as:
A People's History of the United States
The Fog of War (documentary)
Hearts and Minds (documentary)
Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram
Gary R. Hess, Vietnam: Explaining America's Lost War.
Nick Turse. Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.
I know some of my friends took courses where the Vietnam War was referred to pejoratively as the American War. We learned about My Lai in high school even. Where did you go to school that the Vietnam War was glossed over in such a pro-American way? Maybe it's a regional thing? I was educated on the east coast.
It's easily the best documentary I've yet seen on the war.
Also highly recommended after watching that is "Fog of War" - direct interviews with a Robert McNamara who tells all prior to his death. Very interesting to have such a candid retrospective with such a vital figure during the war.
The recent Vietnam War PBS documentary covers the Mayday protest as one of many different protests as public opinion turned against American involvement against the war. Whether the tide turned because the protests were leading or trailing public opinion is probably arguable. There were also signficant organized violent counter protesters in favor of the war/against the antiwar protesters. A bit of the info in the documentary is covered in The Fog of War but it's pretty interesting for the similarities to today. Also, there was a Vietnam vets against the war protest in DC immediately preceding the Mayday protest that the administration specifically did not oppose with police/national guard in order to not generate positive press/sympathy for the antiwar effort.
In January 1992[1], long after the Cuba Crisis, Robert S. McNamara attended a meeting with Castro. He asked Castro: 1) Did you know the warheads were there? 2) Would you have recommended to Chruschtschow to use the in the face of an US American attack? 3) If he had used them, what would have happened to Cuba?
His response: 1) I knew they were there. 2) I would not have recommended to Cruschtschow, I did recommend to use them. 3) What would have happened to Cuba? We would have been totally destroyed!
I think this story should be kept in mind when trying to predict behavior, esp. when the stakes are this high.
[1] Retold by Robert S. McNamara in "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/
It's hard to fault them for this tendency–they have seen too often that complete openness tends to be risky, without rewards. They're reacting to the incentives the public sets.
One very small thing I'm trying to do is to speak up against unreasonable criticism when it's coming from "my side". That could be conspiracy theories (although the left is somewhat laking in those), or just the silliness of making a big deal out of some misspelled tweets by Trump.
It's much more effective, especially if people know I'm "on their side". I also hope that it could create a "culture of good faith", where politicians could be less afraid of their statements being taken out of context, or being interpreted in the worst possible way.
I have, from time to time, seen some excellent interviews with politicians actually showing that they have deep understanding far beyond the talking points. What usually works is: long (an hour or more), one-on-one, with an interviewer who is genuinely interested in the conversation, and mostly non-confrontational. There was a series of these interviews, called "Through the night with...", I believe, that had a few excellent episodes with this basic setup. "The fog of war" also comes to mind, although it's a different format.
The Robert McNamara documentary "Fog of War" has some excellent insight into the WW2 bombing campaign (mostly in the pacific) and the sheer scale of what was done. It is startling to say the least.
The documentary "The fog of war" shows actually that the Vietnam war was Conducted on a very rational base. Science cannot deal well with contradictions and human needs I think...
Agree with what you said and I'll underscore the 'especially' clause of your point regarding rational actors. I encourage people to watch Errol Morris' Fog of War which examines the life of Robert McNamara. In the documentary he states that a principle lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is that "rationality will not save us".
Rational actors believing they are proceeding in the best interests of their countries can allow a situation to escalate and cause the mutual annihilation of their civilizations. This was the case when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were heads of their respective states.
No one should have these weapons.
Fog of War, the documentary that inspired this page, is amazing. If you have an interest in history, and how powerful people make decisions, I recommend watching it. It's rare to see someone who once held an office of significant power be so frank in what they did wrong.
I think you're probably right about the concept, but I didn't know that it was "a thing" until the documentary The Fog of War[1]. Excellent retrospective about Vietnam.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
This reminds me of Robert McNamara's rule for proportionality in the movie The Fog of War. What amount of brutality is necessary to achieve a political objective?
It is not clear that dropping the bomb was necessary to end the war. Was it even necessary to develop it?
Eisenhower said "it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
At the time Truman said Japan had been "repaid many fold" for Pearl Harbor. In these new images there is a bit of graffiti on the bomb allegedly written by a Rear Admiral: "a second kiss for Hirohito". It seems to me like the mood in the US camp was "let's hit them hard, teach them a lesson." rather than a more considered or balanced calculation.
Edit: in the documentary "The Fog of War" on McNamara, there is discussion of Curtis LeMay's decision to firebomb Tokyo. In that case there was apparently a degree of cool-headed calculation. http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html
Some discussion of the nuclear bomb decision here: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/it-wasnt-necessary-to-hit-them-with-that-awful-thing-why-dropping-the-a-bombs-was-wrong/article/2534018 (I have no idea what the politics of that paper are, caveat lector)
Tangentially, in the documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara describes how accounting at Ford was so messed up that they had to weigh the invoices to estimate expenses. So this got me wondering if crooks don't just mail false invoices to large firms in case some pay without checking.
The documentary "Fog of War", which is basically a long interview with Robert McNamara, also covers some of that time, and was surprising.
Actually, here's some of the relevant stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZVR-DKERhc
People learn through stories and pictures. The documentary is a powerful teaching tool. Not perfect, and it can mislead, but powerful.
I've spent more hours than I care to admit over the past year going through a range of material from slick and well-prepared documentaries (including several on this list: "Inside Job", "The Four Horsemen", "Capitalism in Crisis", How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth", "The Fog of War", "The Ascent of Money" (well, I read the book). "Collapse" with Michael Ruppert.
And a few which aren't on the list: "The Prize", on the story of petroleum, based on Daniel Yergin's book of the same name. James Burke's "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed". And numerous conference presentations, interviews, and various other presentations.
What's particularly useful is watching these not online through a crappy video player, but by downloading the videos, where I can stop and start playback, and by checking up on points (did that really happen? is there documentation of that fact?), and taking notes. Sometimes I'll breeze through a light topic at 140% realtime, in others it may take me most of a week to get through a 90 minute lecture.
Yes, books have their place, but a well-made documentary or series which mixes spoken word, visual imagery, demonstration, and other effects, hits on the keys your mind uses to form memories. I'd watched "Connections" decades ago as a child, but bits stuck with me, and it was interesting to watch myself anticipating Burke reciting "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall", which I'd last heard some 30 years earlier.
Yes, there's material that tends toward the bogus, but sometimes watching good bogosity is decent training, or you can simply skip over that part of the list. I tackled an instance of this a few weeks back with an RT interview that was posted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6905655 Dissecting the elements of conspiracy (or finding out that the conspiracists were right -- reading up on COINTELPRO and Operation HOODWINK (an attempt to set the Communist Party of the US and La Cosa Nostra against one another) from the FBI's own website a couple of days ago was sobering in context of Snowden and related allegations: http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/hoodwink).
Ruppert's a case of one of the shakier videos. His history's pretty solid, his near-term future somewhat bleaker than I suspect is strictly accurate. If you read on background, the director notes that the story is as much about a man unmade by his own pursuit of an idea: "What I hoped to reveal was ... that his obsession with the collapse of industrial civilization has led to the collapse of his life. In the end, it is a character study about his obsession." (Ruppert's since continued to have a pretty hard time).
Still, anyone not planning to be dead within fifteen years had better consider what happens on the energy, resources, population, and sustainability fronts to be the biggest factors in their lifetime.
Dismissing the documentary format out-of-hand as some have done here, is simply uncalled for. Actually, it's pretty much straight out of the old FBI playbook. Perhaps even the current one.
"LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
Robert S. McNamara, in the documentary series The Fog of War.
[0] http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html
Manufacturing Consent was a life-changing event for me, so good luck. But suggesting the film will resemble "fog of war" seems odd since that was a confession by someone complicit in the tragedy under discussion. Frankly, i'd be happier with a sequel to Manufacturing Consent.
Surprised to see this on HNs front page when there's an Oscar-winning documentary that makes this pretty clear (Errol Morris's "The Fog of War").
Vonnegut also talks about this on Slaughterhouse-V:
"The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379 people. So it goes." (Chapter 9)
The nuclear attacks served their purpose, sure, but they were definitely not decisive for the outcome of the war.
An old story but a good one.
Reminds me of the documentary "The Fog of War".
The article's main point (emphasis mine):
> “With military enhancements and other technologies, the > genie’s already out of the bottle: the benefits are too > irresistible, and the military-industrial complex still > has too much momentum,” Lin says in an e-mail. *“The best > we can do now is to help develop policies in advance to > prepare for these new technologies*, not post hoc or after > the fact (as we’re seeing with drones and cyberweapons).”
To get a sense of the kind of moral and ethical issues raised by new combat technologies and techniques, I recommend watching the documentary "The Fog of War"[1].
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgA98V1Ubk8
> "Thinking man's detective" is a very unusual phrase. It's like "rich man's Rolls Royce" or "tall man's basketball player."
I think that your two sentences point up exactly why it is not such an unexpected phrase (the which, or something close to it, is I guess what you meant). "Rich man's Rolls Royce" is redundant: you have to be rich to have a Rolls Royce (more or less). "Tall man's basketball player" is not redundant: you don't have to be tall to have a basketball player (in the sense of preferring, rather than owning, I mean); you have to be a tall man to be a basketball player (more or less).
"Errol Morris: the detective who's a thinking man" would have been redundant; but "Errol Morris: the thinking man's detective" is not, as (one presumes) many stupid men through history have had detectives (in the sense now of employing them, or of reading about them, or … whatever).
P.S. And let me just take this chance to say: I love Errol Morris. Thanks to the other poster who mentioned 'Mr. Death'; it was the first film of his I saw, and remains probably my favourite. (Also high up there is 'Fog of War'.)
That's interesting, because last night I just watched the "Fog of War", the documentary about Robert McNamara, and he makes that exact quote. Apparently this idea applies to war as well. When I read this article I was surprised by the coincidence.
BTW I strongly recommend that film -- it was fascinating in so many ways.
A few of my favourite docs:
Spellbound: story about kids entering a spelling bee - great film about the fabric of America Fog of War: Former Sec of Defence talking about war Capitalism- a love story: humorous look at our economic system Planet Earth: Breathtaking view of our environment
---China:
Last Train Home http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1512201/
Up The Yangtze http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1114277/
Discovery Channel - The People's Republic of Capitalism - 4 parts series
China Rises, 4 parts CBC series
---Megacities:
Megacities http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169024/
BBC Megacities, BBC 3 parts series
---War:
Fog of War: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/
Restrepo: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1559549/
I love Errol Morris's documentaries (the maker of The Fog of War). You might want to check out Gates of Heaven. It's one of my favorite documentaries. It's about the owners of 2 pet cemetaries and is one of the most profound movies I've ever seen. Also, the cinematography in it is amazing.
Errol Morris said that the way he gets such amazingly candid confessions out of people is that he asks a question, the interviewee answers it, then Errol Morris just sits there. The interviewee feels the need to fill the silence and that's where the gold comes out.
"Enron - The Smartest Guys in the Room" seconded! It is by far my most favourite documentary.
In addition, I like the following documentaries:
- "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1638362/
- "Planet Earth" IMHO one of BBC's best productions with some of the most amazing nature shots ever (e.g., a [presumably stratospheric] shot that looks like fog or fire but is really a swarm of flies) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0795176/
- BBC has also two of the best documentary series regarding the second world war: "The World at War" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071075/) and "The Nazis: A Warning from History" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0207907/)
- Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096257/) and "The Fog of War" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/)
Given that it's shutting down, what's HN's favourite videos? I'll start.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9077214414651731007 - The Union: The business of getting high
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8653788864462752804# - The Fog of War. Incredible war documentary
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5968506788418521112# - If you only watch one, watch this. This is a Horizon's documentary 5 years after Chernobyl when they were still worried about a second explosion. The people there are all working under massive radiation doses, and there's loads of camera artifacts that are a result of radiation exposure (trails caused by the CCDs being exposed to radiation, white flicks of light on film etc.)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5267640865741878159# - Robert Newman's History of Oil
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3323021761394989726# - The human animal
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3840459477996788886# - A blank on the map
If you want to download the videos to keep then you can use a service such as http://keepvid.com/ or if you're using firefox, search for the flashgot extension. The resulting files can be played with a player like VLC (http://www.videolan.org/).
Not sure how accurate it is but I enjoyed Thirteen Days: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146309/
Fog of War also features the subject and is excellent: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/
EDIT: Falcon and the Snowman is also great and it's kind of related so it's worth a mention: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087231/
Fog of War is one of my favorite documentaries, but McNamara is not honest about two key incidents - the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.
In the movie McNamara claims he was "I was trying to help him (JFK) keep us out of war." actually he was pushing for bombing the Soviet missile site in Cuba since the third day. This is documented by recordings of meetings with JFK.
About the Gulf of Tonkin incident McNamara claims that he and Johnson didn't believe the U.S. destroyer Maddox had been attacked, even though the crew sent messages that the attack they had reported was a not an attack after all.
I learned this today [1] and it puts McNamara in a different light, although the lessons in the movie are still very valid.
[1] The lies of The Fog of War (http://www.slate.com/id/2092916/), linked to by TFA
You should watch Fog of War if you haven't. It is an unflinching look at the man and what he did (with a big impact because of the camera that Errol Morris to get direct on shots of interviews).
McNamara tried to systematize warfare like a factory. He played a high stakes game that ended up killing millions of people. He thought he could control the monster. He was wrong and it spiraled out of control.
The movie takes an honest look at his life and it's something we have to understand if we want to avoid repeating his mistakes. Which we apparently haven't since we're stuck in two wars right now.
Errol Morris interview with the "smartest man in the world."
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ak5Lr3qkW0&feature=related
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mfbUhs2PVY&feature=related
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA0gjyXG5O0
(Good interview, but the best one Errol Morris did with his tv series was the one with the mob lawyer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLEe496IS1o And the movie Fog of War, of course.)
Dont forget:
- Forbin project ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
- E-Money with Cringely ~ http://www.pbs.org/opb/electricmoney
- Nerds 2.0.1: with Cringely ~ http://www.pbs.org/opb/
- NerdTV: Cringely interviews ... ~ http://www.pbs.org/nerdtv/
- Doug Englebart Mother of all Demos ~ http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/doug_englebart_.html
- More Doug Englebart ~ http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097
SEEN
- Startup.com: 9/10: How things get all messed up b/w friends in startups, 'lets get to work'.
- Revolution OS: 8/10: Nerdy interviews with the GNU, Linux & Free software movement. Worth it to see Bruce Perens hair & Eric Raymonds 'we are your worst nightmare' speech to an MS exec in a lift.
- Pirates of Silicon Valley ~ 8/10: Very funny take on Gates, Woz & Jobs http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122
- The Triumph of the Nerds ~ 7.5/10: Cringley doing his stuff with web1.0 startups. Great to see Joe Kraus with Excite ~ http://www.pbs.org/nerds
- Apollo 13; 7/10: Brings back memories of my childhood & Apollo missions. Not long after I got this on DVD I got to see Jack Schmitt talk (last man on the moon). Best bit was on how they handled the complexity.
- The Fog of War ~ 7/10: Robert McNamara, how smart people can get fooled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
- Walking with Dinosaurs: 7/10: Ok
- E-Dreams: 6.5/10: Dark, gritty and how did they get all that money?
- Project Aardvark ~ 6/10: Uneventful, nerdy guys building co-pilot ~ http://www.copilot.com/
Documentaries for geeks or about geeks? The ones about geeks will probably be really boring. They'll leave out both the technical stuff and the potentially actionable war stories. "Revolution OS", for instance, was a well-crafted film, but pretty dull if you read Slashdot.
Branch out a bit. Off the top of my head:
"The Pleasure of Finding Things Out": Richard Feynman talks. (Danny Hillis pops up for a bit.)
"The Fog of War": a smart, reflective person discusses how he presided over a huge disaster.
"Lost in La Mancha": Terry Gilliam takes a bunch of risks to get a movie started and doesn't make it.
"Around Cape Horn": Captain Irving Johnson describes sailing around the Horn on one of the last windjammers.
"Walking with Dinosaurs": Woo! Dinosaurs!
"Apollo 13" is not an actual documentary, of course, but it's fun and reasonably faithful for a big-budget movie.