"Hollywood brings soft power." Yes. That's the problem. Soft power is not innocent.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2037495271689720167
"Hollywood brings soft power."
Yes. That's the problem.
Soft power is not innocent.
Soft power is not neutral.
Soft power is not simply culture flowing naturally across borders because people find it interesting.
Soft power is the ability to make your version of events the default version.
To make your perspective feel like the objective one.
To make your heroes feel like humanity's heroes and your victims feel like nobody in particular.
Hollywood didn't just make movies about Vietnam.
Hollywood made movies about Vietnam that were distributed in every country on earth, subtitled into every language, taught in film schools globally, celebrated with Academy Awards, and absorbed by billions of people who had no other frame of reference for what happened there.
And in every single one of those movies, the Vietnamese are either villains, victims with no interiority, or simply bodies.
This is what soft power does.
It doesn't need to lie.
It just needs to choose who gets to be human and who doesn't.
It just needs to decide whose grief is cinematically interesting and whose death is background noise.
And then it scales that choice across the entire world for fifty years.
You called it fascinating.
I call it the second war.
The one they actually won.
Not in the jungles of Vietnam.
In the cinemas of London, Paris, São Paulo, and Tokyo.
They lost the military war.
They won the narrative one.
And you, sitting wherever you are, having watched those films, absorbing that framing, calling the question of our three million dead "complex," you are the evidence that the second war worked.
posted by Satish Sharma at
01:43
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