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Now I am become Useful Idiot.
With the Hollywood blockbuster forcing everyone to remember the nuclear bomb again, Oppenheimer expert Greg Mitchell, who you can find on Substack here and here, joins the Useful Idiots to analyze Hollywood’s portrayal of the man and his bomb.
“Only four movies in 75 years” have really dealt with the bomb, he tells us. We have countless movies about World War II, but when the US becomes the killer, Hollywood has fallen silent.
So how did the fourth movie, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, do?
“What is included in the film is extremely accurate,” Mitchell says, but the details omitted tell a different story. “In the movie we don’t see warnings about the radiation effect, we don’t see the horror in Japan.” Nolan apparently leaves the audience with a grave warning about the future of nuclear warfare, but is he giving a pass to his characters who dropped the bombs already?
“There’s tremendous focus on the Trinity test,” he says, explaining something the movie does show. “Every filmmaker loves to focus on Trinity because no one died there and there’s great special effects and it’s a great moment of triumph and celebration.”
But what’s omitted: “They’d rather do that than look at happened when we killed 160,000 civilians.”
Watch the full interview with author and historian Greg Mitchell where he explains the faults of the “harm reduction” argument, the rising nuclear tensions in North Korea, and how the Ukraine proxy war has brought us dangerously close to nuclear war.
Plus, check out this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Congress Says the Aliens are Coming
And join the Absurd Arena live discussion board with Katie and Wilson every Tuesday at 12pm est in the Substack app.
Watch the full interview here:
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