Many decades ago, actually, in 1984, a film, Red Dawn[1] was released. It was directed by John Milius from a screenplay he co-wrote with Kevin Reynolds and starred Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey with supporting roles played by Ben Johnson, Darren Dalton, Harry Dean Stanton, Ron O’Neal, William Smith and Powers Boothe. The film impacted me a great deal in a number of different ways. It instilled a great deal of empathy in me for people I’d been taught to view as uncivilized terrorists, for people I’d been taught I should despise and hate and who were subhumans not entitled to human rights (even though none were represented, even indirectly, in the film). But it also made me wonder how the United States citizenry would actually react were the United States ever to be successfully invaded and conquered by a foreign government. Little did I know at the time that such conquest had already taken place, albeit imperceptibly.
The film dealt with a takeover of the United States by foreign communist forces, Soviets and Cubans as I recall, acting under a United Nations mandate during a major internal crisis, and of the refusal of a small segment of United States civil society to accept foreign domination, even if it was purportedly well intentioned. The film, as history has demonstrated, was inversely prescient as well as revealing. The roles, in reality, are and have always been the obverse of reality where it is the United States and its allies that have been and are the invaders and occupiers and looters virtually everywhere. Something the United States inherited from the British and the French.
The emotional irony involves the profoundly empathic justification generated by the film for the resistance, one with which United States’ citizens viewing the film emotionally bond not realizing that such resistance mirrors resistance against United States colonialism and imperialism all over the world. Che Guevara, of course, comes to mind but so do the members of Al Qaeda and Isis who resisted the US conquests in the Middle East, and Hamas and Hezbollah in Palestine, and today’s Iranians, and the Cubans and Nicaraguans who have been resisting the US for more than half a century. And Chileans in 1973, and Argentinians in the 1970’s and today, Panamanians, and Grenadians, and Haitians, and Yemenis, and Libyans, and Syrians, etc., etc., etc.
In today’s context, internally, given the current situation within the current United States, the film leads has led me to reflect on how far from reality John Milius and Kevin Reynolds strayed when they wrote the screenplay given that current history exposes a United States occupied and looted by Fifth Columnist[2] “Israel Firsters”, bought and paid for by the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (“AIPAC”), a United States whose citizens, for the most part, be they politically Democrats or Republicans, accept domination by (rather than resist) a tiny foreign power that uses money to fuel its occupation instead of bombs and bullets (those are reserved for use elsewhere), a situation where many (and at the federal level, most) United States elected officials receive the bulk of their income “sort of” from abroad. Where elected officials in many instances receive many times their official salaries in the form of political contributions but also in the form of highly paid post-retirement consultancies and stipends, from AIPAC and its billionaire allies. My use of the phrase “sort of” reflects the irony (and irony is an oft repeated term in this article) that the funds used to make such payments (some would refer to them as bribes) come indirectly through a devious route from the pockets of United States tax payers whose taxes then to Israel and the “defense” industry (against which Ike, in his wisdom, once warned us[3]) and through them to select investors who then contribute a portion of their “winnings” to AIPAC, which then recirculates a portion of them (everyone needs a bite of the proverbial apple) to the servile “civil servants” who authorized their misdirection in the first place. Sounds a lot like a shell game doesn’t it? But a shell game with consequences far worse than mere small time peculation.
Even worse perhaps, at least in the context of the film’s premises, many active and retired United States military and police personnel wholeheartedly support the looting of the United States and the commission of genocide, ethnic cleansing and wars of conquest, at the expense of United States tax payers, violating every principle they purportedly hold dear, applauding the wholesale murder of journalists and medical personnel and educators as well as the wholesale slaughter of women and children. It is even worse from my perspective because some of them have been my classmates and are people I have long loved and admired and believed to be profoundly honorable as well as patriotic.
It makes me wonder whether the film was an intentional satire ridiculing who the populace of the United States thought they were. After all, the United States, building on the framework initiated by Woodrow Wilson in Hollywood during the purported war to end all wars (with George Creel as his handyman), has always appropriated the heroism of others as its own. Witness the perception in the United States that it was primarily responsible for victories in World Wars One and Two when the reality was far, far different[4]. Or the purported bravery of United States aviators murdering thousands of civilians from miles in the sky or safely ensconced in videogame style bunkers as they rain down death on civilians below. Those are not mirrors into which we enjoy gazing. We prefer the illusory Hollywood spectacles where United States’ Davids destroy foreign Goliaths against impossible odds.
Again, ironically (that word again), the United States utterly corrupt leaders and brave but naïve military men and women are standing by and indeed assisting in the looting of their three-hundred-and-fifty-million co-citizens by the most evil selfish and depraved ten million people the world has ever known. So while those ten million enjoy free health care, free education, subsidized housing and alimentation and unbounded military weaponry, all paid for by overworked and underpaid United States taxpayers, none of those benefits exist at home. Horrors!!! That would be socialism. But apparently, paying for socialist programs is fine as long as we are not tainted by benefitting from them.
Irony indeed reigns.
All of the foregoing is massively supported in the United States by Christian Zionists cheering on the end of the world so that Jesus can return and consign those ten million who they currently hail and support as well as many innocent Jews to perdition, … after Jesus returns.
How sick is that?
Israeli Zionists know that and scoff. How can a Jesus consigned to boil in pools of feces in the Hell to which Zionists are sure he’s been consigned ever return at all? He’s as securely disabled as are the tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims that Zionists have been able to “eliminate” since the blessed year of 1948. 1948; ironically (again), the year when Eric Arthur Blair, writing as George Orwell, first published his seminal dystopian novel, 1984.
So, “Red Dawn”.
Enlightening in a sick way to the few who can see and who care about morals and justice and equity and peace but, fortunately for the powers that be, those few are an insignificant lot, more like gnats, troublesome but not all that dangerous thanks to the blinded mases who keep cheering for their captors and for the Fifth Columnists who lead and purportedly protect them. “Rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air by the dawn’s early light” a nice turn of phrase by a vehement supporter of slavery, one that all citizens of the United States, even the descendants of former slaves, are expected to revere. But nowadays we can safely note that they’re our bombs and our rockets raining down on others (through our “generosity”) as they once purportedly rained down on Fort McHenry in Baltimore’s harbor.
In the film, one aspect touched me was when Ron O’Neil, playing the role of Cuban Colonel Ernesto Bella, spared captured United States’ “freedom fighters”, having become disgusted by his senseless role in the subjugation of others. A role not echoed by very many United States “patriots” today. But one can hope. One can hope that at some point our military, if not our political leaders, will come to their senses and awake from the somnambulant nightmare in which they’ve permitted not only our country but our world to be placed.
That Red Dawn was released in “1984”, the year when Eric Arthur Blair predicted that our world would have attained its current form may have been deliberate, but probably was not.
It should have been though.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
[1] See superficial description of the film on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn.
[2] See description of Fifth Columnists on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column
[3] “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” President Dwight David Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (January 17, 1961), at https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address.
[4] The casualties suffered by the major participants in World Wars One and Two were as follows: The Soviet Union/Russia suffered the highest losses in World War Two (22–27 million) and 2 million deaths in World War One. China experienced 20 million deaths in World War Two, mainly civilians due to Japanese occupation. Germany suffered about 5.5 million military deaths in World War Two and roughly 2.7 million in World War One. The United Kingdom lost only 383,600 deaths in World War Two but 886,000 in World War One. On the other hand, the United States only lost 416,800 deaths in World War Two and 116,000 deaths in World War One.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé 