Culture Watch

How Accurate is Munich?

by Steve Bowden

“The world was watching in 1972 as 11 Israeli athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics. This is the story of what happened next.” Thus begins the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s recently Oscar-nominated film Munich. While this “inspired by a true story” movie, which covers the revenge missions the Mossad Israeli spy agency took against the group responsible for the massacre – Black September – has received m

Glory Road: The Mixed Legacy of the 1966 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship

by Ron Briley

It is most appropriate that the people at Disney used the Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday weekend to open Glory Road, a civil rights sports movie whose story is long overdue. It is amazing that it has taken Hollywood 40 years to portray the 1966 NCAA national championship game between Texas Western University (now UTEP), starting five black players, and the all-white University of Kentucky. Texas Western won the game, and the sport of basketball was revolutionized. The film focuses

What We Can Learn from James Bond

by Jeremy Black

The world of espionage powerfully grasped the popular imagination over the past fifty years, and James Bond was the main reason for this. Bond's impact on the public's perception of espionage, through both Ian Fleming's novels and the films made of them, is hard to overestimate. He was the most successful adventure hero in history, thwarting "the instruments of Armageddon" in the film The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) or saving the world as the seconds tick away in Moonraker

Brokeback Mountain and the New Western History

by Ron Briley

Director Ang Lee’s fine film Brokeback Mountain is often popularly referred to as the “gay cowboy movie.” But Brokeback Mountain is more than just a gay film. It contains universal themes for anyone in life who has let society’s expectations or one’s own inhibitions deny personal happiness. Nevertheless, with the film’s attention to lavish Western landscapes and the “macho” cowboy image of protagonists Ennis (Heath Lodger) and Jack

Munich: A Descent into Moral Ambiguity

by Ron Briley

Steven Spielberg is growing up. The director’s earlier films viewed extraterrestrials and uncomplicated heroes, such as Indiana Jones, with the wonder of a young child. His mature historical work, Schindler’s List (1993) and Amistad (1997), perceived the world as a struggle between good and evil. In his latest film Munich, the filmmaker demonstrates a far more sophisticated appreciation for the role played by ambiguity and paradox in historical

The Nightmare Vision: King Kong as Captivity Narrative

by Ron Briley

This holiday season the dreams and nightmares of Western culture are apparently battling for dominance at the Hollywood box office. The Disney studio’s film adaptation of the C. S. Lewis classic Chronicles of Narnia, with its Christian message of redemption, is being challenged for financial supremacy by director Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which continues to draw upon the dominant culture’s fear of the “other,” dating back to the captivit

Why Syriana Is Frighteningly Close to the Truth

by Ron Briley

The Bush administration is in the midst of a major Christmas (to use the language insisted upon by the administration’s Fox media news outlet) offensive against critics of the President’s foreign policy. Vice-President Cheney visited both Iraq and Afghanistan, while the President in a series of addresses defended the war in Iraq and his authorization of National Security Agency spying upon American citizens. The President’s poll numbers have risen slightly, leading some obse

"I Pledge Allegiance"

by Cecilia O'Leary and Tony Platt

During the flush years of an exuberant dot.com economy, being an American meant little more than the freedom to consume or visit Disneyland. But since the September 11th attacks, a resurgent patriotism is omnipresent and nowhere is it more on display than in our schools. From the White House the Bush administration launched a series of initiatives aimed at prescribing patriotism among the nation's 52 million schoolchildren. Government officials urged students to take part in a mas

Books: Why FDR Decided to Demand Unconditional Surrender

by Thomas Fleming

The following is excerpted from Mr. Fleming's new book, The New Dealer's War. Within a week of the Democratic Party's debacle in the 1942 midterm elections, the New Dealers had a war to sell. On Sunday, November 8, at 7 o'clock, reporters were summoned to the White House to be told that an American army under the command of an unknown general named Dwight D. Eisenhower was landing in North Africa as part of a giant pincer movement designed to clear the south shore of the Me

The Korean War Hero You Never Heard Of

by Thomas Fleming

The longer I read and write history, the more convinced I become that the unexpected is a crucial ategory of the historical experience. Seldom do events unfold the way presidents and prime ministers and politburo chairman assume they will. Nor, when the upheavals are investigated by historians, do they turn out to be as simple as they seem in the headlines. This prevalence of the unexpected is amply demonstrated by my experience with the story of Lieutenant Eugene Clark's role in the 1950 inv

How the Future Looks Now

by Thomas Fleming

The last time I saw Harry S. Truman, in the spring of 1971, we talked about the mess the country had created in Vietnam and the mess Vietnam had created in the country. I had never seen the eighty-seven year old ex-President so pessimistic about the future of the United States."I'm glad I'm not my grandchildren," he said. Yet America survived that"suicide attempt," as historian Paul Johnson called it. The country even survived Watergate, which the gods mercifully spared Mr. Truman by s

Hollywood: 9-11, The Movie

by Rachael Hanel

Murderous plots. Explosions. Disaster. Conflict. Good vs. evil. All elements of a good movie or television show. And all are elements of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks upon the United States. So, when can we expect the big budget remake of the disaster? If history serves as any indicator, the answer is soon. Already television news magazine shows have hurried to churn out dramatic re-enactments of the last minutes of doomed flights. The movie-like segments show plane doors closing in

The Last Days of Publishing?

by Tom Engelhardt

When his publisher asked him to answer a series of questions about his new novel, The Last Days of Publishing, for the benefit of radio interviewers, Mr. Engelhardt was stumped. It seemed too weird and contrived. But then, as he told us, he decided he should"deal with 'the interview' as a form in itself and have some fun. So

Mein Kampf and the Koran

by HNN Staff

Should incoming students at the University of North Carolina be required to read the Koran? As Juan Cole reported in HNN in July, Fox's Bill O'Reilly compared"the class reading of a book about the Koran now to assigning Mein Kampf or a work about Japanese emperor worship during World War II." This got us wondering. Was Mein Kampf ever assigned to students during the thirties or forties? Unfortunately, we have not been able

Books: Stephen Kantrowitz's Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press)

by P.M. Carpenter

Putting the “Pol” Back in “Politics” In focusing on South Carolina’s post-Reconstruction resurgence of white supremacy as a “political program,” Stephen Kantrowitz has performed a valuable service to modern historiography. While not ignoring cultural and socially structural influences on the “reconstruction” of white hegemony, he reintroduces the centrality of raw politics in the development of systematic, violent, and degrading change. The 1868-1876 intercess

Review of Jeremy Bernstein's Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma

by Stanley I. Kutler

Jeremy Bernstein is a physicist and gifted writer who has succeeded admirably in making the history and sociology of science understandable to laymen. His profiles of scientists appeared in the New Yorker for nearly 30 years and his book on Albert Einstein gained a wide audience. Until now, Bernstein never wrote at length about J. Robert Oppenheimer (or "Julius Robert Oppenheimer," as J. Edgar Hoover preferred), who conducted the orchestra of brilliant physicists, chemists and others

Review of Samuel Huntington's Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity

by Jim Sleeper

With the publication of this, his thirteen book, the magisterial, sometimes dyspeptic Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington has once again indulged - nay, has stage managed - his inclination to administer jolts of counterintuitive, debate-changing Truth to distracted American elites. Once again, establishment players of many stripes are swooning in dismay at his dark revelations or girding up their loins to join him in another long, twilight battle for Western civilizati

Remember the Alamo: The Persistence of Myth

by Ron Briley

A vivid memory from my childhood is a birthday party in which my wish for Davy Crockett merchandise was granted. I trotted off to a small Texas Panhandle school with Davy Crockett lunch box, coonskin cap, buckskin shirt, and replica of Crockett's musket, affectionately named "Ole' Betsy." Until late in the evening, I would reenact Crockett's last stand at the Alamo; a most unusual childhood game culminating in the heroic fantasy death of myself and my playmates. Of cou

Remember the Alamo: The Persistence of Myth

by Ron Briley

A vivid memory from my childhood is a birthday party in which my wish for Davy Crockett merchandise was granted. I trotted off to a small Texas Panhandle school with Davy Crockett lunch box, coonskin cap, buckskin shirt, and replica of Crockett's musket, affectionately named "Ole' Betsy." Until late in the evening, I would reenact Crockett's last stand at the Alamo; a most unusual childhood game culminating in the heroic fantasy death of myself and my playmates. Of cou

Why Gibson's Movie Deserves an Academy Award for Bigotry

by Mike Davis

The most evil film ever made was probably Jud Suess, commissioned by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in 1940 to fan hatred of the Jews on the eve of the Final Solution. A thousand years of European anti-Semitism were condensed in the image of the cowering rapist Suess, with his dirty beard, hook nose, and whining voice. The audience was instigated to rejoice in the lynching of this subhuman monster at the film's end. To anyone who has ever seen Jud Suess (