Hacker Cinema
Why We Fight
2005 · Film · documentary · 98 min
Directed by Eugene Jarecki
Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life? Jarecki's shrewd and intelligent polemic would seem to give an affirmative answer to each of these questions.
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8 comments on Hacker News
Browsing through the site I stumbled upon the "Why we fight" movie series[1].
Even though it is very biased and seems to have been a propaganda tool, the movies are actually pretty well crafted.
The "public domain movies" site does not have the entire series, but you can find them at youtube[2]
[1] http://publicdomainflix.com/browse-documentary-videos-1-date.html
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcAsIWfk_z4&list=PLugwVCjzrJsXwAiWBipTE9mTlFQC7H2rU
I believe it's from Eisenhower's "Chance for Peace" speech, one of his two major speeches against military spending. The other major speech was his farewell address, where he discussed the military industrial complex. If anyone's interested, I'd highly suggest watching Why We Fight, a documentary from 2005
It's not the only cause (I'll save you the rant on US defense spending, you can watch Why We Fight (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436971/) , but it's a positive feedback loop. I don't believe I used the word "led" or suggested one caused the other. I am suggesting that once gun ownership (and concealed carry) and police militarization are established, one reinforces the other.
You ask the right questions. The documentary "Why We Fight"[1] attempts to answer them. It's a fascinating look into the military–industrial complex and its 50-year involvement with US wars.
[1] https://vimeo.com/29896630
When I was a student (Cadet) at West Point the Social Sciences Department (colloquially known as "SOSH") sponsored a viewing of that film and invited the director, Eugene Jareki, to come and conduct an open forum discussion after the viewing. Probably one of the highlights of my time there. After the Q&A some of the cadets who were SOSH majors stayed to ask a few one-on-one questions and I got to ask him (and I'm paraphrasing here) whose responsibility it was to fix this obvious problem - a problem so obvious that the United States Military Academy's Social Sciences Department chose to show this film to a bunch of people about to fight these wars. (Granted, there is a statue of Ike that sits outside the Jefferson Hall Library[1]...so maybe there was some Old Grad hero worship going on.) His response was that he hadn't really considered who's responsibility it should be beyond the obvious (all of ours), and that he didn't mean to convey that responsibility on this generation of war fighters, but that he did have faith that younger people would be able to affect some change here.
That was a number of years ago. I suppose he meant the long game of when the young people grow up.
As an aside, the namesake of the documentary comes from the propaganda films made during WWII.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_Monument [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Fight
This is also shown in the documentary "Why We Fight". Very powerful.
WWII propaganda was about Americans coming together to kick Japan and Germany's ass. Unless you were Japanese or German, most of the propaganda and the general sentiment around the war effort was about all Americans joining forces to win the war. There's even a part in one of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" propaganda films calling on Americans of all ethnicities to set aside their differences and work together to win the war.
The documentary "Why we fight" opens with Eisenhovers farewell speech and addresses this very problem. It'a available on Google video here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9219858826421983682# and is worth watching.