Yesterday, August 15, Kabul fell, in a repeat of the Vietnam War collapse of Saigon, back in 1975. Then on August 15, 1979, Francis Ford Coppola’s last masterpiece came out, Apocalypse Now, the culmination of a decade’s work, the most astonishing successes a right-wing artist has had in American cinema: Patton (1970), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), & The Conversation (1974)—one drama after another, incredibly popular & also always on the Oscar lists. This was a rare showing, a hint of what great art is—Coppola revealed for us to see the connection between beauty & tragedy: America was in agony politically, spiritually, morally. The justice of American war simply stopped mattering—because elites did not know what victory meant or what it would require, because they could not say whether it would be wise to fight such a war, & because the nation’s moral confidence was itself broken when its universal or imperial principle, equality, faced fierce resistance. The children of the heroes of World War II were not only denied heroism in turn, but learned to fear themselves & they came of age in a country torn apart by dark passions previously reserved for enemies. What it means to be a man was not only no longer obvious, but its goodness was radically questioned.
Coppola offered criticism of the Vietnam war from the right, including even the opinions of French colonialists. Above all, he revealed that the demand of the people for patriotism & the demand of the elites for success in policy, or efficiency, would lead the noblest warrior to become a monster. Success would create, demand failure. Horror or tragedy.
This is a vision that applies to our times as well, & would be of great help in criticizing the elites that have led us here. Infamously, in Apocalypse Now, the issue comes up that Americans are bombing Vietnam into hell but cannot write curses on their planes or bombs. They are supposed to kill morally. So also now, our elites want soldiers & drones to kill in the name of feminism. Morality itself, apparently, requires slaughter! This is a fundamental problem, one that has driven our elites mad, because they’re not particularly prudent people & rather cowardly to begin with…
Here’s the podcast:
& youtube:
Charles at the Claremont Review said this last month; sadly this was all too predictable given who Biden is and who the Taliban is. The prediction could have been made as soon as the war season began this summer. Who we are explains it all
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/who-lost-afghanistan/?fbclid=IwAR1-aJ2VskOwwQ0HZ2aGreuF6NIa3cenGpFgrWG-pBUCPblqPMtxsmlc2uw
Charles is right!
He has the irony of the elegant, so he doesn't point out, Americans are too powerful for their own good: Afghanistan is worse off than it was in 2001, but so is America, unfortunately...