What a Cheesy 1980s Teen-Flick Can Teach Us About the Bush Doctrine

By Brad Reed, AlterNet. Posted January 15, 2009.

The biggest parallel between Red Dawn and the Bush doctrine, however, is its views on American exceptionalism, which states that the American government can behave outside the bounds of international law and custom because it's naturally better and more enlightened than other governments. In one Red Dawn scene that would doubtlessly warm John Yoo's black little heart, the American insurgents torture a captured Ruskie prisoner by burning cigarette butts on his skin. When the godless Commie bastard predictably has no useful information to give his captors, they decide to summarily execute him. This then prompts the Commie to complain that he is not being treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. Swayze responds: "I never heard of it!"

All of this prisoner abuse and blatant disregard for international law proves to be too much for one of Swayze's comrades, however, and he tries to stop the future Dirty Dancer from carrying out his executions.

"What's the difference between us and them?" asks the silly American, who mistakenly thinks that appealing to moral principles will soothe Swayze's bloodlust. Swayze looks his friend in the eye and angrily explains to him that the difference between the Americans and the Russians is that "WE… LIVE… HERE!!!" And voila! A steel-tight justification for torture and extralegal executions is provided.

Dennis Prager provided an outline for this particular plank of the Bush doctrine in a 2005 column that chided liberals for looking to law as "the highest good," instead of instinctively knowing that that "America often knows better than the world what is right and wrong." In Prager's calculus, being "right" means that one "loves John Bolton, has contempt for the United Nations, mistrusts the World Court, regards Amnesty International as another morally confused leftist organization, thinks little of the world's media and academic elites, and regards 'world opinion' as morally confused and left-wing media manipulated." In other words, in order to be "right," you have to hate the vast majority of people in the world. Or to simplify things further, conservative Americans are always right because, "WE… LIVE… HERE!!!!!"

This sort of arrogance may seem completely unwarranted coming from the same crew of geniuses who brought us such fiascos as the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina and Terri Schiavo. And indeed, as the elections of 2006 and 2008 showed, the Right's belief that it is unquestionably and divinely right about everything started to look less credible once it started racking up large body counts. But while the Bush doctrine of hating foreigners and preventatively invading their countries has run out of steam for the time being, its central beliefs will sadly always be with us. Past empires, from Rome to Britain, had all outlined similar imperial doctrines that cited their nation's "specialness" to justify aggressively expanding their power and influence throughout the world. Even if Bush's era of misrule has permanently crippled America's ability to unilaterally invade and occupy countries without restraint, it isn't a stretch to think that future major powers will come up with similar justifications for their imperial ventures (Chinese exceptionalism, anyone?). 

While Red Dawn has not aged well as a film, the worldview that it espouses is tragically timeless.

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Brad Reed is a writer living in Boston. His work has previously appeared in the American Prospect Online, and he blogs frequently at Sadly, No!.

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