Film and Genocide

8. The Specter of Genocide in Errol Morris’s The Fog of War

The Specter of Genocide in Errol Morris’s The Fog of War kristi m. wilson Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he’s speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people unnecessarily—his own troops or other troops—through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand. But he hasn’t destroyed nations. robert s. mcnamara, interview in The Fog of War When I started it [The Fog of War], it was about history. It was about events that occurred 40, 50 or even 60 years ago. But as we continued to work on it, suddenly it became more and more obvious that we were making a movie about today. errol morris, interview in Ryan, “Making History” In virtually every modern instance of mass murder, beginning, it appears, with the Armenians, the key element—not the only element but the key element, which has raised the numerical and psychic level of the deed above the classic terms of massacre—has been the alliance of technology and communications. arlen, Passage to Ararat 157 8 Introduction: The End of the “Good War,” Channels of History, and the Specter of Japan On any given day, with the click of the remote, one can revisit the glories of World War II on the History Channel. Featured shows, such as Patton 360, Battle 360, Hero Ships, Dog Fights, Lost Worlds, Hitler’s Eagles Nest Retreat, and more, offer a never-ending celebration of American bravery during the “good war”: “our all-American war in which we fought the bad guys to a standstill because they forced us to do it.”1 The near ubiquitous range of World War II program offerings, website forums, video games, and gift shop items available on the History Channel’s companion website attests to Andreas Huyssen’s concern that the act of preserving memory at all costs has usurped the act of envisioning the future in Western societies.2 More specifically, the type of memory discourse that produces such entities as the History Channel relies explicitly on marketing strategies whose packages include as much mythology as reality about the United States’ range of political dealings in foreign affairs in general: The geographic spread of the culture of memory is as wide as memory’s political uses are varied, ranging from a mobilization of mythic pasts to support aggressively chauvinistic or fundamentalist politics . . . to fledgling attempts, in Argentina and Chile, to create public spheres of “real” memory that will counter the politics of forgetting pursued by postdictatorship regimes either through “reconciliation” and official amnesties or through repressive silencing. . . . The fault line between the mythic past and the real past is not always that easy to draw—one of the conundrums of any politics of memory anywhere. The real can be mythologized just as the mythic may engender strong reality effects.3 In his tireless efforts to convince lawmakers and politicians of the importance of his newly invented term, “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin referred to the dangerous aspects of the politics of memory as occurring in “the twilight between knowing and not knowing.”4 For example, while the History Channel promotes a version of history in which the United States acts as a leader in the Allied fight against the perpetrators of the Holocaust (and, by extension, leaders in the fight against the horrific crime of genocide), the historical record suggests a radically different story. According to Samantha Power, from the Armenian genocide, to the Holocaust, to Pol Pot’s killing fields, to Saddam Hussein’s murder of Northern Iraqi Kurds, to Bosnia, to Rwanda, American policymakers have turned a blind eye to genocide and have embraced a rhetorical stance of avoiding the term in general: “Yet notwithstanding all the variety among cases and within U.S. administrations, the 158 kristi m. wilson 159 The Specter of Genocide in Errol Morris’s The Fog of War U.S. policy responses to genocide were astonishingly similar across time, geography, ideology, and geopolitical balance. . . . [Lemkin] believed a ‘double murder’ was being committed—one by the Nazis against the Jews and the second by the Allies, who knew about Hitler’s extermination campaign but refused to publicize or denounce it.”5 Even after the extent of Nazi war crimes was exposed at the Nuremberg Trials...