2004 is a big year. Not because of the Olympics. Not because of the presidential election. This year is the 20th anniversary of the movie where high schoolers fight back an invasion: Red Dawn.
The movie questions what would happen if America were under attack by the Soviet Union in World War II, the biggest threat to the nation at the time.
The movie begins with a class of high school students witnessing Soviet paratroopers landing outside their Colorado classroom while their teacher lectured on the invasion tactics of the Mongol horde.
Their town was taken over by these troops, but not before five young men, including Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, escape to the Rocky Mountains, armed with rifles and camping supplies.
These five teen-age boys and two young women become a guerrilla force named “the Wolverines” that attack the foreign army occupying their town.
This movie was great to watch as a teenager because it made me believe that I would do the exact same thing if America were invaded by Soviets.
Who wouldn’t want to be a badass machine gun-toting freedom fighter protecting their country from the dreaded Communists?
Then I saw this movie last week and I saw it in a different light. Don’t get me wrong, I’d still love to be a Wolverine! But seeing Red Dawn as an adult puts the movie’s message into perspective.
The right-wing agenda from the writer and director is quite obvious.
Shortly after the invasion begins, you see a bumper sticker on the back of a pickup truck stating the mantra of Second Amendment advocates everywhere, “They can take my gun away only when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers!” Then the camera pans down to see a Soviet soldier doing just that from the truck’s dead owner.
The invading troops confiscated a list of all gun owners in the Colorado town. They used it to find all the “troublemakers” and place them in concentration camps.
The men were later lined up and mowed down by machine gun fire while they sang “America the Beautiful” in a horribly off-key tone.
Later in the movie, a downed American fighter pilot tells the band of partisans how the enemy was able to invade.
All of our allies in Europe, except England, had abandoned us.
Soviets had nuked our missile silos scattered across the country and several “key points of communication” like Washington, D.C. and Omaha, Neb.
Cubans posing as Mexicans had illegally crossed over the Southwestern border and infiltrated the Midwest.
The ideas of gun control, illegal immigration, weapons of mass destruction, Europe not caring about the United States – all caused the downfall of our country. Does any of this malarkey sound familiar?
If you ever hear the words of Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly or any of the other conservative talking heads, it should definitely ring a bell.
People in high places believed that similar events found in Red Dawn could happen in real life.
Spend five minutes to look up the Reagan administration’s rationale for covertly funding guerrilla troops in Nicaragua with the Iran-Contra Affair and spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the missile defense “Star Wars” programs and massive military expansions if you doubt me.
Yes, Red Dawn is just an over-the-top movie that took itself too seriously. Good luck keeping a straight face when the Cuban commander in charge of the captured town refers to the Eagle Scouts as an “elite paramilitary unit.”
Watching it on its 20th anniversary shows that it was created with an outdated mentality of playing on people’s worst fears of communists.
There’s an old saying, “hindsight is 20-20.” In the case of Red Dawn and the Soviet threat, that phrase holds true.
I just wonder what our hindsight will be with the war in Iraq and the war on terror 20 years from now.

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