Podcast Host (1:28)

MLS 696-8911 History as it happens, it is autumn 1984. The United States stands alone as World War 3 begins. Eight young people, mostly teenagers, head to the mountains around their small Colorado town to fight guerrilla warfare against Russian, Cuban and Nicaraguan invaders. And a lot of the movie goes like this. Red dawn, directed by John Milius, released in 1984, was one of my favorite movies as a gung ho teenager growing up in the age of Reagan. The score, the action scenes, the heroes, teenagers like me taking out commie invaders and giving up their lives to do it. Such heroism as in this scene when Robert, played by C. Thomas Howell, goes down in a storm of bullets from a Russian helicopter. Red dawn glorified sacrifice and violent resistance during what was a very cold period in the Cold War. For example, the year prior Ronald Reagan gave his evil Empire speech.

Martin (3:02)

But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simple minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom. So I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority. So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all, and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

Podcast Host (3:50)

And it was taken as gospel on the Reagan right that the Soviet Union was trying to establish a beachhead, so to speak, in Latin America, justifying rollback.

Martin (3:58)

Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn't. It was a Soviet Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. We got there just in time.

Podcast Host (4:14)

But when I first watched red dawn some 35, 40 years ago, real world politics were probably not on my mind and the movie's politics were lost on me, although the film was indoctrinating me. As I now realize, pop culture does have an influence. Even if you're unaware it's happening, it shapes how we think about the past and present. So we're sort of wrapping up the year here on the podcast on a somewhat lighter note with historian Alexander Avigna, an associate professor of Latin American history in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Our conversation next. But remember, in this season of giving and gratitude, you can support history as it happens and help make the podcast sustainable by subscribing. For ad free listening, bonus content and 247 access to the entire catalog of 500 episodes go to historyasithappens.com again that is historyasithappens.com everyone deserves to be connected.

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Podcast Host (6:17)

Alexander Avigna welcome back.

Alexander Avigna (6:19)

Hey Martin, thank you for having me back.

Podcast Host (6:21)

Red dawn, one of my favorite movies when I was a teenager in the age of Reagan. You are a historian, you focus on Latin America. Why do you show your students Red Dawn?

Alexander Avigna (6:33)

I think it's a really effective cultural product to show my students what would the logical conclusion of some of the anxieties and fears that the Reagan administration talked about in the early 1980s toward Latin America. Like, what would those anxieties look like if they actually came to fruition? One way we can read Red dawn is it's a form of imperial projection, especially the Reagan administration. You know, the kind of policies that they're enacting in Latin America, particularly Central America in the 1980s, gets kind of reversed in the movie, right? So. And it turns the US into some sort of defensive empire or to use a Stephen Miller's recent characterization as a reverse empire. Right. So it turns the US into the victim from other countries that in real life the Reagan administration had characterized as some form of existential threat to the United States. When we get to Central America in the 1980s, I try to think of ways that I can really nail down some of the themes and the ideas and the questions that drove Reagan's policy towards Central America. And I think this movie is really effective in showing that we can talk about 1980 being a really important turning point with US policy toward Latin America. With the election of Ronald Reagan, we could talk about the Committee of Santa Fe and the report that they produced in 1980 that essentially later becomes accepted by the Reagan administration. And in many ways this report, the inter American report for the 1980s, is manifested in this movie in a really interesting way. I think the movie shows the worst fears of Reagan and Reagan's peoples coming alive right in this alternative future. And students reactions to the movies are also always very interesting.

Podcast Host (8:12)

Oh yeah. I mean, students today have no living memory of the Cold War. And that was a big deal for me watching the movie. We're shooting the Soviets, we're shooting the Russians. They were teenagers. There were Cubans and Nicaraguans there as well. You know, I just rewatched the film to prepare for our talk, and I had missed there were Nicaraguan soldiers as well, accompanying the Cubans in the invasion. You know, the movie is political. A lot of art is political. It is possible to be profoundly influenced or touched by a piece of pop culture while being oblivious to the politics. And as a teenager, I probably did not understand all of the politics there. I mean, do you agree Red dawn is a very political movie?

Alexander Avigna (8:53)

Oh, yeah, it's a totally political movie that was directed by a very political person. Right. John Milius, who was an ardent anti communist, you know, had a more libertarian streak. You know, he did his cinematic studies at the University of Southern California. He was part of what was referred to as the USC Mafia. It included people like George Lucas. So Milius was a really interesting figure because he will always consider himself to be on the right or a conservative within what he considered to be a very liberal Hollywood. And I think him and George Lucas had an interesting relationship, particularly if we think about. Compare Red dawn to something like Star Wars. I think all three Star wars movies had come out by the time that Red dawn came out in. I think it comes out in August of 1984. Red dawn is like Milius's take on Star wars in a certain way. Whereas Lucas was very clear about the rebels in Star wars being like Vietnamese resistance fighters and national liberation fighters. I think Milius kind of turns that on his head a little bit and reverses the situation in Red dawn where the Empire becomes the victims. So what will the Empire do when it gets attacked by people that are identified as existential enemies?

Podcast Host (9:57)

It's interesting that you bring up Star Wars. Of course, there's politics there as well. I mean, the plot is political, but there's an underlying politics. The rebels being. And I often don't racialize subjects, but I am going to here. The rebels were white. Right. And I wonder how audiences would have reacted to. Well, if they were Vietnamese, Luke Skywalker was Vietnamese or something like that. Right.

Alexander Avigna (10:20)

I think it would have been really interesting. George Lucas is on the record of saying that the model for these rebels, for this. This liberation struggle were the Vietnamese. But yeah, the racial dynamic in terms of thinking about audience in the US Would have been really interesting if they had messed with it a little bit more.

Podcast Host (10:33)

Yeah, I mean, the insurrectionists were. Were good guys in this case. Same with Red Dawn. Whereas, as you alluded to at the top of our conversation, the Reagan administration looked down on insurrectionists. Well, depending on their politics in Latin America. Yeah. Depending on the politics.

Martin (10:50)

Yeah.

Alexander Avigna (10:50)

And that's a huge part of the story. So one thing that we should think about with the Reagan administration is that they moved from a position of containing the Soviet Union to a position of aggressive rollback. The Soviet Union was an existential civilizational threat that could not just be contained as previous administrations had done. It had to be confronted, had to be rolled back, but not necessarily in unfriendal manner because obviously that would lead to, like, nuclear warfare. Right. So one way that the Reagan administration aggressively pursue those rollback features was to bankroll, train, financially support anti communist rebels throughout the global South. So we have the Contras in Nicaragua, we have Jonas of Bimbi and UNITAS in Angola, we have a group in Mozambique, we have the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, we have the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. And that I think, as we were discussing in our notes, Martin, I think the Mujahideen appear in some interesting ways in this movie as well.

Podcast Host (11:43)

Yes.

Alexander Avigna (11:44)

And Reagan and his people always represent these anti communist. I mean, they're essentially anti communist death squads. Right. But they're represented re represented as freedom fighters. Right. Reagan famously calling the Contras in Nicaragua as the moral equivalents of the Founding Fathers. And you see that play out in this movie in Red Dawn. Again, the empire becomes the plucky rebels against the evil communists who have invaded the United States. And it's this push by the Reagan administration and that particular political movement to recast themselves as the revolutionaries. And then the actual left wing revolutionaries is actually being quote, unquote, the bad guys. Right. The ones that are actually trying to take over the world and spread authoritarian, or to use their parlance, to establish totalitarian rule throughout much of the world.

Podcast Host (12:26)

Sure. You know, I do want to talk more about the movie, but what is interesting is during the mid-1980s, it didn't seem that anyone was arguing that Nicaragua, Cuba, whoever, was an actual threat to the physical safety of the United States. Well, Reagan would argue you can't allow a foothold. Well, Cuba could be turned into a Soviet aircraft carrier. I don't know. Why don't you pick it up from there, help clarify that. Because it is preposterous. Cuban and Nicaraguan paratroopers falling in Colorado and shooting up a school. But go ahead.

Alexander Avigna (13:00)

The discourse of the Reagan administration and some of his cabinet members was exactly that. The Sandinistas, this revolutionary, heterodox, Marxist liberation theology movement that came to power in Nicaragua in 1979 in a country of like 2 to 3 million people. Was somehow going to be an existential political threat to the United States. That was their messaging. I remember there's clips of Alexander Haig testifying before Congress saying that there's a quote, unquote, priority target list where he repurposes the domino theory and applies it to Latin America, particularly Central America. So what he says before Congress is that it starts with Cuba, but then once the Sandinistas take power in 1979, then the dominoes are going to start to fall. So El Salvador, which did experience a Civil War from 81 to 1992, was going to fall to the quote, unquote, reds. Then it was going to be in Honduras. Honduras was essentially one big US Military base. And then that would lead to Mexico, and then that would lead to United States. They were actually saying this as serious policy. Reagan gave a nationally televised address to the nation where he talked about El Salvador, and as being closer to Texas than Texas was to Massachusetts. Right. So it's really trying to push forth this idea that these popular movements in Central America taking power was somehow going to lead to some sort of political military threat to the United States.

Martin (14:14)

El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts. Nicaragua is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tucson as those cities are to Washington, where we're gathered tonight. But nearness on the map doesn't even begin to tell the strategic importance of Central America, bordering as it does in the Caribbean, our lifeline to the outside world. Two thirds of all our foreign trade and petroleum pass through the Panama Canal and the Caribbean. In a European crisis, at least half of our supplies for NATO would go through these areas by sea. It's well to remember that in early 1942, a handful of Hitler's submarines sank more tonnage there than in all of the Atlantic Ocean. And they did this without a single naval base anywhere in the area. And today the situation is different. Cuba is host to a Soviet combat brigade, a submarine base capable of servicing Soviet submarines, and military air bases visited regularly by Soviet military aircraft. Because of its importance, the Caribbean basin is a magnet for adventurism.

Alexander Avigna (15:27)

The hinge point was Mexico. And if you want to transition to the movie, we can talk about those title cards that kind of set up the context of the movie. The one that really strikes me, because I'm a historian of Mexico, is the idea that Mexico's plunged into revolution. But the previous title cards all work toward that. Domino theory.

Podcast Host (15:44)

Right.

Alexander Avigna (15:45)

They say that El Salvador and Honduras fall to the communists, and then the next one after that is Mexico plunges into revolution. And then we can talk about, in the movie, one of the. Through lines, one of the ways that the Cubans and the Nicaraguans actually invade the United States is by posing as migrant laborers. So then you add that the other concern of the Reagan administration, Right. Undocumented migration during the 80s as a national security threat. Except in the movie, it gets represented as an actual way that the Sandinista and the Cuban revolutionaries managed to, quote, unquote, infiltrate the United States States.

Podcast Host (16:15)

Yeah. I'm going to bring these title cards up right now and read them to our listeners. You know, the movie is light on how all of this happens with the exception of the opening. You know, they get it out of the way. And then there are some lines of dialogue that explain how the war happened. The main characters, the teenagers, the insurrectionists or the freedom fighters, they are strangely not interested in politics. They encounter an Air Force pilot who had been shot down and he fills them in on what happened. There was a brief nuclear exchange, but now it's a conventional war. These guys came in from this part of the country. We were invaded over here, blah, blah, blah.

Martin (16:52)

West coast, east coast. Down here is Mexico. First wave of the attack came in disguised as commercial charter flights, same way they did in Afghanistan in 80, only they were crack airborne outfits. They took these passes into Rockies. So that's what hit Calumet. I guess so. They coordinated with selective nuke strikes. And the missiles were a hell of a lot more accurate than we thought. They took out the silos here in the Dakotas, key points of communication.

Alexander Avigna (17:22)

Like what?

Martin (17:24)

Oh, like Omaha, Washington, Kansas City.

Alexander Avigna (17:28)

Gone.

Martin (17:29)

Yeah, that's right. Filtrators came up illegal from Mexico, Cubans mostly. They managed to infiltrate the SAC bases in the Midwest, several down in Texas, and reaped a hell of a lot of havoc. I'm here to tell you, they open up the door down here, the whole Cuban of Nicaraguan armies come walking right through, roll right up here through the Great Plains. How far did they get? Cheyenne across to Kansas. We held them at the Rockies and at the Mississippi. Anyway, the Russians reinforced with 60 divisions, sent three whole army groups across the Bering Strait into Alaska, cut the pipeline, came across Canada link up here in the middle. But we stopped to butt cold. Lines have pretty much stabilized now, but.

Podcast Host (18:22)

The kids take up arms simply because someone has invaded their country and has killed their family. And that's often happened in Iraq. For instance, a large part of the Iraqi insurgency is came together because US soldiers were killing so many Iraqi civilians in Their operations.

Alexander Avigna (18:39)

Yeah. And it's interesting to think about how Milius allots that possibility of resistance, quote unquote, apolitical resistance to these high school students that then become the Wolverines.

Podcast Host (18:48)

Right.

Alexander Avigna (18:48)

They name their guerrilla group after their high school mascot. But that's essentially like this general dynamic that occurs in Central America during all these revolutionary uprisings around during the 70s and 80s. Right. Like, it's as simple as that. It's peasants who are tired of getting exploited, massacred, beaten, disappeared by the landed elites that they work for. So they defend themselves. And then those different instances of armed self defense can then evolve or develop into more formal guerrilla insurrections that I think we talked about this last time I was on. It's. There's very heterodox Marxisms and liberation theologies that are influencing these revolutionary movements in Central America. What do you do in the face of tyranny? Is there. And this go. I mean, we can go back to the Declaration of Independence. Right? Or this can go back to Montesquieu. You can go back to St. Thomas Aquina. It's like, do people have a natural right to resistance in the face of tyranny? This is a question that someone like Fidel Castro famously brings up in his courtroom speech in the early 1950s. Like people have a natural right to resist tyranny and to rebel against tyranny. The question is, who actually is allotted that right historically and who isn't? Who's denied that right? And in this movie we get to see who. Who's allotted that right by Milius.

Podcast Host (19:57)

Yeah, I. On a recent episode with Khaled El Gindi about Palestinian resistance, how are they supposed to push back against the Israeli occupation of their territories since 1967? Are they allowed to use violence? If so, who can that violence be directed against? So here are the opening lines or the title cards of Red dawn, which is a fantasy, but it wants to. At least, that's my assumption, wants to be at least plausible, realistic. It is an action movie. You might even call it killing Communism porn. I think somebody actually put a video on YouTube with all the kill count and the number of people who are seen shot on screen during the course of the movie. It's a very violent movie. It's exciting. It's one of my favorite movies as a kid. As I said, is this supposed to be a convincing movie or is it just supposed to be a fantasy, an action flick, you know, a Nicolas Cage far fetched ridiculous movie? This is somewhere in between, so I'll shut up here. The opening title cards. Soviet Union suffers worst wheat harvest in 55 years. Labor and food riots in Poland. Soviet troops invade. We know that was a possibility in the early 80s. Soviets decided not to invade. Cuba and Nicaragua reach troop strength. Goals of 500,000. El Salvador and Honduras fall. Greens Party that should really say Green Party gains control of West German parliament demands withdrawal of nuclear weapons from European soil. Well, that was a real issue too. There was a lot of resistance to having American nuclear weapons in Germany. Mexico plunged into revolution. NATO dissolves. United States stands alone. Get the blood pumping, the heart pounding.

Alexander Avigna (21:44)

The U.S. stands alone. And then one of the interesting tidbits that Milius will include later in the movie with this downed U.S. air Force pilot that meets up with the kids and forms part of their fighting force is that China was actually on the side of the United States. So it's very cold War, Right. Like Milius is referencing the Sino Soviet split, the engagement of China with the United States during the Richard Nixon administration. And we now know that during the US Operations to fund the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, that China was helping them. They're helping the US in Angola as well. Right. So it's a really interesting, like inclusion of a geopolitical dynamic by Milius that may get missed, right, by, like, by the viewer.

Podcast Host (22:24)

Yeah, sure. Reagan was interested in, he was interested in improving relations, maintaining positive relations with China. At one point in the film, you know, the teenagers are. They're living in the mountains and they're not really listening to the news or watching tv and they're told by the Air Force pilot there was a brief nuclear exchange and the only people we have on our side are, pardon the expression, but this is what he says in the movie are like 600 million Chinamen.

Martin (22:50)

Well, who is on our side? 600 million screaming China. Last I heard, there were a billion screaming China.

Podcast Host (23:01)

There were.

Alexander Avigna (23:03)

It was part of the, the genius of Richard Nixon, if we can use those words together, of like splitting the communist world in half, right. By helping to further that Sino Soviet split and to, you know, also while recognizing the position that China, China occupied within the non aligned movement within the global South, Right. It was a way of kind of dividing the enemies as defined by the United States. And it's interesting that the way it gets played out in this movie is that when the Soviet Union in some way goes to war with China and kills hundreds of millions of Chinese people in some sort of nuclear war because China had intervened to help out the United States.

Podcast Host (23:38)

And this was a cold period in the Cold War more broadly, we don't have to go back into the Latin American situation. You did a great job of discussing that, elaborating on that at the top of our talk here. But broadly speaking, Reagan's first term there was a hard line taken against the Soviets. This was a cold period in the Cold War where a movie like this would have been more convincing.

Martin (24:00)

Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness. Pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that. That while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

Alexander Avigna (24:24)

The movie comes out in August of 1984. That's an electoral year, right? Like that's a few months before the election. There is a pivot away by the Reagan administration during their second term. Part of it forced, right? There's so much scandal in that second.

Podcast Host (24:38)

Administration and Gorbachev was different than the.

Alexander Avigna (24:40)

Previous, and Gorbachev was different. And that actually disappointed a lot of Reagan's most ardent supporters, particularly the movement that later will become known as a neoconservative. These guys who actually were part of that committee of Santa Fe that put together that 1980 report and two of whose members ended up working in the Reagan administration, Lewis Tams and Roger Fontaine. In 1984 is a really interesting moment for this movie to come out. Going back to your question, Martin, about believability, the fact that he sets up this invasion of the United States and by the countries that he picks, I think that lends to the believability for an American audience, right? Because by this point you have an American audience that has been constantly fed this idea that Cuba is. Is a Soviet beachhead, right? There's no Cuban agency, there's no Cuban autonomy or independence vis a vis the Soviet Union. It is just a Soviet aircraft carrier in the Caribbean. And it's there to do Soviet things in the Americas in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. A lot of this movie. Another way to read this movie is that this is what happens. This movie is what happens when the Monroe Doctrine is not enforced by extension or by inference. When Latin Americans get self determination, national sovereignty, they invade the United States. That's one way to read this, this particular movie.

Podcast Host (25:46)

I mean, how the hell would Cuba ever be able to. The United States had invaded Cuba a bunch of times. So there's the irony there. You know, this was a reverse Bay of Pigs. Except this one was successful in the movie, right?

Alexander Avigna (25:59)

While at the same time the US was helping the Contras wage horrific death squad counter revolutionary violence in Nicaragua against the Sandinista. So it's even more preposterous to think that the Sandinistas would have the military and material capacity to join with the Cubans and then to invade the United States. But again, to me, the interesting part is how they managed to infiltrate the United States dressed as undocumented migrants. And to me, that's really interesting. The only thing that's missing there to really bring in that other anxiety during both Reagan administrations. And it coalesces around this idea of narco terrorism is drugs. If Milius had found a way to include narco traffickers into this, this movie would be perfect. And then I could really use it in a variety of different. Of my courses, not just. Not just like the Cold War class.

Podcast Host (26:43)

So, you know, I'm watching the film and I did do a couple of fist pumps. You know, it takes me back to when I was a kid and this stuff was important to me. However, I also was asking a more analytical question, you know, all right, so all these world events have taken place. They set the backdrop for the film. But why would they have to invade? Like, wasn't there something else they could. There's like no real reason given as to why the Soviets, Cubans and Nicaraguans then decided, well, now we have to actually invade the United States preemptively. Right. Nuclear strikes to take out their capability.

Alexander Avigna (27:12)

From a US Perspective, Right. Like the Cold War propaganda that's been generated since the late forties is this is what Communists do.

Podcast Host (27:18)

That's right.

Alexander Avigna (27:19)

Right. The Communists are innately and inherently expansionist. And of course, this is why this is going to happen. The downed pilot actually provides a really interesting metaphor, right? When the kids ask him why the war happens, and he's like, well, there's the two toughest kids on the block, and eventually they're going to come to blows.

Martin (27:34)

The Russians need to take us in one piece, and that's why they're here now. That's why they won't use nukes anymore and we won't either. Not on our own soil. Whole damn thing's pretty conventional now. Who knows? Maybe next week will be swords. What started it? I don't know. Two toughest kids on the block. I guess sooner or later they're gonna fight. That simple. Maybe somebody just forgot what was.

Alexander Avigna (28:02)

It was like a very interesting way of putting it. But I think this movie, again is rendered more believable for a particular generation in the United States. It's because they've been fed this propaganda since like the early 1950s, at least that this is what communists do. Like, part of the way to also read this movie is to watch some of those like PSAs that they put out in the 1950s. There's one in particular that I'm thinking of when they recreate. Like what when the communists invade and take over a town in Wisconsin. This is from like the mid-1950s as.

Martin (28:30)

Part of a long range plan to destroy our free way of life.

Podcast Host (28:34)

These young communists are studying the economic.

Martin (28:37)

Political and religious institutions that are the very heartbeat of America.

Podcast Host (28:44)

They're studying you, the way you talk and think, for becoming acquainted with supermarkets.

Martin (28:51)

Baseball games and hot dogs with all the pressure freedoms which Americans so casually enjoy.

Alexander Avigna (28:59)

This is a cinematic version of that.

Podcast Host (29:01)

They did it because they could. They were waiting for an opportunity and at the first opportunity they did so. Right.

Martin (29:06)

Yeah.

Alexander Avigna (29:06)

And Reagan called them the evil empire. And evil empires are innately expansionist. And of course they were going to try to come and take out their only rival. Particularly, again, going back to the title card, the US stands alone. The last block to communist supremacy around the world.

Podcast Host (29:20)

That's right. And now here they are stuck fighting an insurgency of eight teenagers in the mountains of Colorado. Would we get ourselves into, you know the line of dialogue you mentioned before? That was Powers Booth. Booth Powers, the actor? Yeah, the downed Air Force pilot explaining why it happened. I was wondering if that was a waste of an opportunity to talk more about what actually was going on. But not really. It actually suits the film just enough of the politics to kind of bring it all together right in between action scenes.

Alexander Avigna (29:50)

That's all you need. I mean, you think about 80s action movies, all you need is just a little bit of like virulent anti communism. And that's the only political explication that you need. I mean, we can also think about the Red dawn and being in line with all those other 80s action films like the Rambo movies that came out ridiculous. But there's also another genre that comes out in the 80s which is like teen movies, teen stars. So it's not by accident that we have like Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Gray. Like there's also these teen movies that come out around the same time, like the Outsiders. So they're trying to combine Rambo with the Outsiders in an anti communist guerrilla way. And I think that's a really interesting thing that Milius is trying to do in that film.

Podcast Host (30:28)

Here is the cast. Many future stars in this film, if they weren't stars already. Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen, Leia Thompson, Jennifer Grey, just to name a few. Harry Dean Stanton, who is an established actor, makes a brief appearance. He plays their father.

Alexander Avigna (30:46)

That's a great part.

Podcast Host (30:47)

Yeah. Re education camp. So about the movie. It's unmistakable that they chose this fictional town in Colorado as the backdrop. Because I'm thinking Afghanistan. I mean, the mountains in Afghanistan are probably just as, if not more forbidding than the Rockies. And often the Wolverines, as they're called, look like Mujahideen because they're wearing headscarves and firing AK47s.

Alexander Avigna (31:12)

It's more of these symbols and the imagery that Milius is deploying to convert these high school Americans into freedom fighters and anti communist revolutionaries.

Podcast Host (31:23)

What did you think of the choice of having teenagers be the heroes? The adults kind of stand aside, side and say, okay, kids, here's some shotguns and canned soup. You can head out up into the mountains and resist.

Alexander Avigna (31:34)

So one thing to remember is that Patrick Swayze, supposedly the leader, he had just in the movie, he just graduated from high school. In real life, he's like in his mid-30s. So. But in the movie, the idea of using teenagers, I think I read somewhere or I watched an interview with Milius where he says that he strategically used teenagers because teenagers are, quote, unquote, innocent. And part of this movie involves the loss of innocence involved in waging guerrilla warfare against tyrannical outside forces. My first book was on guerrilla movements in Mexico. And one of the things that people that I interviewed would tell me is that there is a moment where people who are involved in these type of armed struggles have to engage with the fact that they're going to wage violence against other human beings. So what does it take? Like, how does that transform you as a human being? By waging violence against other human beings to potentially taking their lives. So on a very micro level, every armed struggle has that level of thinking, like philosophical, political, material thinking that allows someone to take the life of someone else. And I think maybe that's one of the reasons why Emilius chooses teens as their gorilla. I mean, it lends like a. An era of talking about believability. This makes it to me unbelievable because it's these high schoolers and they're football stars, etc. But I think it does make a strong point about, like, teenagers, those teen years and the loss of innocence involved with the deployment of violence.

Podcast Host (32:52)

Well, in guerrilla movements or resistance movements, there are of course, teenagers who are fighting. But, yeah, these kids are very, very innocent. They're in a lily white community in Colorado. Their teacher is black. He actually happens to be the first person killed in the movie. He is shot to death when he goes outside the classroom in the very beginning to ask these paratroopers, who the hell are you? Get out of here.

Alexander Avigna (33:28)

Yeah, there are troopers that are setting up tripods, like machine gun tripods. He's like, let me go talk to him.

Podcast Host (33:32)

The Wolverines, who have no military training, although two of them were handy with rifles because they had been hunters, right?

Alexander Avigna (33:37)

Yes.

Podcast Host (33:38)

They become tactical geniuses, setting up ambushes, firing machine guns. Of course, 1980s action films. You never reload your gun. Yeah, yeah. The two girls, Jennifer Gray, Leia Thompson, who are added to the band of six boys, they become proficient in tactical warfare, guerrilla warfare, firing a machine gun, throwing hand grenade. But, you know, Red dawn does try to be a serious movie. And at the start of their turn toward violent resistance, you can see these kids, these immature kids, struggling with this, grappling with this.

Alexander Avigna (34:29)

It is World War Three down there. People are being killed.

Martin (34:37)

Those could be Russians.

Alexander Avigna (34:40)

Jed, what about your family, huh?

Martin (34:51)

I don't know, but I'm alive and I'm staying here. My family would want me to stay alive. Your family would want you to stay alive when you think you're so smart? Man, she's just a bunch of scared kids.

Podcast Host (35:11)

They question these things earlier in the film, but then once they. They're in it, well, I guess one of them does betray the others. One of the kids has enough and he wants to quit, so he betrays them and they kill him.

Alexander Avigna (35:22)

What's the difference, kid, huh?

Martin (35:24)

I'll do it. Shut up, Robert. Tell me, what's the difference between us and them? Because we live here. Don't shoot. Don't. Don't shoot.

Podcast Host (35:41)

You.

Martin (35:41)

Don't shoot.

Podcast Host (35:42)

You.

Alexander Avigna (35:48)

Another common process or event that armed struggle movements have to deal with. What do you do with informants? What do you do with collaborators? And then what are the consequences or fallouts of dealing with these figures in a violent way? I mean, I think that is one of the more interesting parts of the film, to me, at least, with thinking about the Wolverines. Because honestly, to me, I don't like the movie. It's a really useful, teachable movie. I think there's really interesting things about it because of the context that it emerged in. But what I think is really interesting about it is how Milius represents the differences between, like, the Nicaraguans and the Cubans vis a vis the Soviets. And. And part of that difference emerges with the figure of the Colonel Ernesto Bello Bella. Yes, the. The Cuban revolutionary leader who's wearing the beret. The actor is Ron o', Neill, who, if you've watched like black exploitation films from the 70s, like, he's Superfly. So the fact that Emilius chose to put a black man as the leader of the Cuban forces in this particular instance of occupation, and then to see him grow, right, Like Colonel Beya talks about how he used to be the revolutionary and now he has to carry out a counterinsurgency against people who he identifies kind of in a position where he used to be. Because the way the Soviets are represented is radically different. There's really no empathy that Milius extends to them. Right. They're goofy, they're idiotic, they're stupid.

Podcast Host (37:05)

They fall caricatures too.

Alexander Avigna (37:07)

Yeah, they're like very one dimensional and flat. But like this Colonel Ernesto Bella, he's really interesting to me. The way the movie ends really highlights. There's a scene where the Wolverines decide to take on the forces that are stationed in the town. They suffer catastrophic military defeat. Patrick Swayze is still alive. He's carrying his dead brother with him. And as they're trying to flee the town, this colonel runs into them. And instead of imprisoning them or executing them, the colonel lets them go. He looks the other way and he tells them, go with God. Leading up to that, the Cuban colonel had been complaining to the Soviets that, like, we need to do hearts and minds operations. Like, I don't know how to do a military occupation. I'm not a policeman. I used to be the revolutionary. I'm not a counter revolutionary. And all that builds up to him allowing these last two remaining members of the Wolverines to escape. And then he actually not just escaped, but he says, go with God. That's really, that's really interesting. Like what's going on with Milius there? Like he gives something or he permits something with the Cubans and the Nicaraguans that he denies the Soviets. And I think that's really interesting to think about.

Podcast Host (38:09)

Yeah, I mean, it's not a sophisticated film as far as screenplay goes, but there are moments there where, yeah, there's a debate among the Latin Americans and the Soviet commanders, although the term Soviet, I never heard it in the film. They say Russian, the Russian commanders, about how to do this. And they bring in some, you know, square jawed, rough and tumble Soviet, new Soviet commander who's now gonna finally put down this insurgency. Whereas, as you say, the Latin American characters, the Cuban commander says, you know what? We gotta stop the reprisals now. It's backfiring. It's not working. We have to win hearts and minds. That shows up. That is a nod to Vietnam, obviously. Exactly.

Alexander Avigna (38:49)

You anticipated what I was gonna say. I mean, the specter of Vietnam is all over this. And actually the specter of Vietnam is fueling a lot of Reagan's foreign policy formulations and it's shaping a lot of the ideas and policies that Reaganites and people of that movement were developing in the late 70s and early 80s. A lot of this is like, how do we deal with the failure in Vietnam?

Podcast Host (39:09)

The message of the film, though is don't do these occupations. Don't go into other people's countries. It's kind of funny, right? It's.

Alexander Avigna (39:18)

But I think you're right. No, I think you're right. Perhaps what Milius is doing there is that he's doing this thing that like people like Mark Twain would do. There was an original point of how the United States began as an anti colonial revolution and that that somehow gets lost when the US becomes an empire. And for Mark Twain, it was the Spanish American War and the occupation of the Philippines in the late 19th, early 20th century. I think Milius, because of his libertarianism, like, I think he's trying to do something similar. Like, is there something recoverable within the United States in its quote unquote, pre imperialist or settler colonial ways? Which obviously it's an impossibility because. Because this country begins as a settler colonial entity. But in this imaginary, there is, how do we recover the revolutionary impulse of the United States. And for Milius and for people like Mark Twain, perhaps they have to go back to 1776. And maybe that's what Milius is trying to do. The other thing I think Milius is trying to do, and this is another way to read this film, and this film is all about settler colonialism, or at least like settler colonial anxieties. They talk about Native Americans or the way that Native Americans pop up in this film is really interesting. The fact that Jedediah, the main character, Patrick Swayze, his name is Jedediah. He's named after Jedediah Smith, who was a frontiersman, one of the first white settlers who comes out to the Rockies and starts mapping different routes. There's a scene, I think, toward the beginning where you see the back of Patrick Swayze's truck and there's a sticker that says native. And it has like the Rocky Mountains in the back. Maybe this is like a, this is a Western where the Native American is turned into the whites resisting Soviet Nicaraguan saying Cuban intervention and invasion.

Podcast Host (40:48)

And there's a rah, rah, pro American sensibility to the film. But our country was doing to Latin America what this film says Latin America wanted to do to us. Well, not quite the same way. The United States never physically invaded. Well, it did invade Cuba, as I mentioned, in 1961, the Bay of Pigs. But you know, the Marines didn't paratroop into Nicaragua. There was a covert operation.

Alexander Avigna (41:10)

The Marines, they parachuted into the Macon Republic in the States.

Podcast Host (41:13)

Oh, that's right, that's right. Yeah, but during the Vietnam.

Alexander Avigna (41:16)

Yeah, yeah, but your point stands, like, at least in the Cold War era, overt US military intervention in Latin America is very rare. This is why the current madness about Venezuela is kind of as a Latin American is. I don't know what to do with the fact that that's a possibility because it's actually very rare. Right. We have Panama, we have Dominican Republic, and then we have all sorts of covert operations.

Podcast Host (41:33)

You're right. Johnson, Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines into the Dominican Republic.

Alexander Avigna (41:37)

25,000. Right. As they're building up their forces in Vietnam, which is interesting.

Podcast Host (41:41)

People forget about that. Another thing here, guns. There's a scene in the film where I forgot who said it. They were going around, I guess, finding a registry of guns or maybe the local gun shop had a list of everyone who had bought firearms. And now the occupiers are going around and rounding up these people. This is what the NRA has told us. The reason why we can't have stricter gun laws or registration. Gun registration. Because the oppressive government will then come around and take your guns away. I mean, that's in this movie.

Alexander Avigna (42:16)

Oh, totally. And I think Milius actually worked with nra. And there's that scene after the invading forces establish control over the town. And the camera pans over to, I think it was the back of a car. And there's a bumper sticker that says something like, you'll take my gun away when you take it from my cold dead hands. And then there's actually a dead American with a handgun in his dead hands. And the Soviet troop like steps on the hand and takes the gun. Right. So, yeah, it's really ham fisted. If I remember correctly, John Milius was involved with the NRA. And the NRA radically changes after 1979. 1980. So what it was before 1979, 1980, what its title actually says, right As a sportsman or rifle club, whatever. It does become much more politicized by the late 70s, early 80s. And its first president was a former Texas Ranger turned border patrol guy who actually killed a Mexican kid in the 1920s. 1930s. The drive by Truckers have a great song about this. Ramon Casiano. And then Milius was involved with the NRA in the 1980s as well, I think. So that's, that's. You're totally right. It's all over this film. Give up your guns, you give up your freedom.

Podcast Host (43:18)

That's right. NRA became a radical, I would even say un American organization recently. So, you know, there were so many good movies about the Vietnam War made shortly after Red Dawn. Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, Apocalypse now, which was a Vietnam movie, came out actually in 1979. But in the mid to late 80s, there was a period there where Hollywood and the American public was willing to, I guess you would say, have a reckoning with Vietnam. Most war movies, say about the Second World War are a lot different than the indictments of war that we see in Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill. By the way, one of my relatives was killed on Hamburger Hill. Battle of Hamburger Hill, 1969. I never knew him. I wasn't born yet. So I do remember watching that movie as a kid and being, you know, horrified by it because that's what war supposed to be. Is Red dawn an anti war movie? I don't think so.

Alexander Avigna (44:17)

I don't think so. I mean, I think one of the.

Podcast Host (44:20)

Issues it should be because all the. All the characters are killed, but they're fighting for their freedom.

Alexander Avigna (44:24)

Yeah, I remember the end, right? The. The way the movie ends, it justifies that sacrifice. It implies at the end that the US somehow wins this war against the Soviet Union. And the narrator, I think it's one of the women, right? One of the women Wolverine fighters who, doing the voiceover, talking about the sacrifice that the Wolverines had, had done for their country. And it implies that the US had won somehow. So I don't know if it's an anti war.

Podcast Host (44:46)

Here it is.

Alexander Avigna (44:53)

I never saw the brothers again. In time. This war, like every other war, ended. But I never forgot. And I come to this place often.

Martin (45:04)

Though no one else does.

Alexander Avigna (45:07)

In the early days of World War three, guerrillas, mostly children, placed the names of their lost upon this rock. They fought here alone and gave up their lives so that this nation shall not perish from the earth. Freedom ain't free. The problem, I think that all those movies that you shared, which I think are all better quality than Red Dawn. The problem is, to the point where it's become a meme online, is that all those movies take the perspective of an American, right? So, like, it's the issues and the contradictions and the problems that arise from US Foreign policy and intervention in a place like Vietnam. The analysis extends to the interior of individual soldiers, right, and the consequences that they suffer, whether it's in Vietnam or when they come home. But, like, who they were fighting against, like, that line is almost never explored, right? So the meme online now is that, like, the US invades a foreign country, in 20 years from now, we're going to get movies about how hard it was for those US Soldiers when they invaded a foreign land, right? That's the joke. And we don't get serious grappling or reckoning with like, quote, unquote, the other side. Like the people who actually suffered the consequences in Vietnam of Agent Orange, you know, mass bombings, et cetera.

Podcast Host (46:24)

You know, I often wonder if there is such a thing as an anti war movie. Even anti war movies or movies that are made with an anti war message have a way of being exhilarating pro war. You know, you can't also control how any one person is going to consume a film. So you can have people walking away from a film like Hamburger Hill or Full Metal Jacket saying, you know what, the war was actually worth fighting. We should have done it differently. Or, you know, though, to your point about the other side and how US Power affects other people, the end of Full Metal Jacket when the soldiers, the Marines, encounter the teenage girl, Vietnamese girl, sniper, and they, you know, they brutalize her. They kill her, they shoot her. She had been shooting them. To me, that scene epitomizes what the Vietnam War was, the Vietnamese experience for the United States, right? If we're in a country and they're willing to give up their kids, that girl was doomed. She was simply in Hue City. Maybe you disagree with my interpretation of this. I'll get your take in a second. But for those who may not know she's in Hue City, just to slow down this group of Marines that's coming through, she knows she's gonna die at some point, right? She's all by herself. They find her and they kill her. What are we doing here? We have to kill their kids to win the war. What are we doing here? Me?

Martin (48:06)

If you want to waster, go on. What do you say?

Alexander Avigna (48:13)

And this is what Red dawn is, but it's the reversal, right? And I think that's potentially what the Most interesting aspect of it. And then the fact that we get a little bit of interrogation of the operation from someone like this Cuban colonel Ernesto Bella. Again, probably the thing I find most interesting about. About Red dawn, the difficulty, again, because these movies are American movies and they're being told from an American point of view, like, how do you create a movie that recognizes the humanity and the right of non American peoples to resist and to rebel against American tyranny? Like, how do you represent that in a fair way? How do you represent that in a way that tries to capture accurately why a Vietnamese villager would take up arms to resist the US Marines invading their country in the 1960s? Is that even possible? Right. And then that leads us to your question about whether, can you even make an anti war movie? When I think of a war movie that is, I think, very complex, generates critical thinking beyond watching. The movie, which I think is hard to accomplish for a film, is the Battle of Algiers. Because the Battle of Algiers by Puente Corvo, you think? It's one of my favorite movies. And one of the things. The first time I watched it, I went in thinking, this is going to be a strictly anti colonial, pro anti colonial, revolutionary movement film, which I think it is. But it still leaves nuances. Right. There's, like, really interesting nuances and complexities that are explored in that film.

Podcast Host (49:35)

Absolutely.

Alexander Avigna (49:35)

That leave the watcher, the film viewer, with more questions at the end, perhaps, than answers. That is, I don't think Red dawn does that. Right. And I don't think any of the Vietnam War films, I'm speaking in generality, there might be one, but I don't think they do that either. But I think Battle of Algiers does.

Podcast Host (49:49)

That is one of my favorite movies, a true classic. The Battle of Algiers by Gilo Pontecorvo, which starred one of the Algerian rebels. He was still alive at the time. Well, the movie was made shortly after that war ended. That is a great, great movie. It shows. Yes, they resorted to terrorism because they felt like the French occupation of their country was an act of violence. So they weren't just targeting the French military. They sent people into nightclubs and into cafes with suitcase bombs, left a suitcase in there, killed everyone inside, to deliberately provoke a massive French response because they were trying to get the French out of there and they had to fight a war to do it. I'm not saying I agree with those tactics, but that is what happened. That is how the Algerians ultimately, at a horrendous human cost.

Alexander Avigna (50:51)

And I think that movie captures. Captures that. Right. It doesn't romanticize revolution. I think what it does is it captures like the cost of it. It's not saying don't do revolutions. What it's saying is there are really serious costs to waging revolutions. This is something that movements go into clear eyed about. And for me, that one of the brilliant parts of that movie is when one of the captured FLN leaders is giving a press conference and a reporter asked him like, don't you think it's cowardly that you, that you're placing bombs in baskets in like cafes and, and discos? And he's like, well, if you planes and artillery, then we wouldn't have to resort to those tactics. That is so smart. Right? And that captures the asymmetry and some of the contradictions in wars of national liberation or in revolutionary resistance movements.

Podcast Host (51:37)

To your point about whether we can relate to others doing what the kids in Red dawn did and say, okay, you know, they were justified in doing that. Well, maybe some viewers of Red dawn will say, oh, you know what, I can relate now to what other people are doing in other countries. Or they could come away with it and say, you know what? It's only legitimate when the good guys are doing it and we're the good guys.

Alexander Avigna (51:58)

I think James Cameron has actually figured it out and he says, look, I just have to invent movies where you have blue skinned aliens who are waging national liberation struggles. And maybe that's how people will generate empathy with these struggles for liberation and freedom. I don't know. Wolverines. Who has the right to rebel? Who has the right to wage violence in the service of freedom and liberation and against tyranny? And I think these are questions that are obviously still compelling and urgent today as we look, you know, particularly in a place like Palestine, because there's a lot of work that goes into denying these peoples those rights that in a movie like Red dawn are so freely given to, to these high schoolers that call themselves the Wolverines.

Podcast Host (52:44)

All right, Alex, I know you don't really love the movie, but this music gets my. Here it is. And that is good. On the next episode of History As It Happens. It is the last new episode of 2025, our year in review with historians Jeremy Surrey and Jeffrey Engel. The following week I'll play Best of History as it Happens episodes and then new shows will resume in early January. Thank you for a great year. One more to go. And remember, you can subscribe to my free newsletter. Just go to substack and search for History as it Happens.

Alexander Avigna (53:54)

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