Rage, Radicalism, and Netflix-Style Propaganda
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I recently spent a couple days chatting with a guy who, in any other context, might’ve been my opp. He has a reputation for being a China hawk. We have opposing prescriptions for Taiwan. And we think about the meaning of security—and how to achieve it—in very different ways. He’s even been a co-author with someone who considers me his enemy.
But we got on just fine. He seemed extremely sympathetic, if not to my policy positions, then at least to the philosophy and analysis that leads to them. I might’ve even won him over on the margins.
I suspect our good-faith bonhomie was only possible because we were both part of Generation GWOT. He served in the Marines, I served in the Air Force. We joined and separated the same year. And even though we never crossed paths in the policy world, we had many of the same friends (he’s still friends with some of the very people from whom I’m now totally alienated).
We commiserated about the failed experiment called the Global War on Terror that consisted of America’s political elite accumulating eight trillion dollars in debt to finance sending our comrades to die (and kill) for absolutely fucking nothing. We both eventually recoiled from liberal establishment politics because of it, but went in somewhat different directions with our dissatisfaction. He found purpose in helping the national security state plan for the next “great” war (which, ironically, is also a project of liberal establishment politics).
I, of course, went in an altogether different, Graham Platner-like, direction.
And it’s my road less traveled by that leads me to watching Netflix’s new docuseries, Marines, with fist-quaking rage. On my other show, The Bang-Bang Podcast, we had a great critical conversation about this four-part propaganda film—a literal recruitment tool for the Marines. If you do choose to watch it, I strongly recommend listening to our episode about it as a critical companion.
Marines has the Netflix patina—that hyper-real, color-saturated, digital 4k-style gloss that makes it indistinguishable from a show about oligarch-lubricating real estate agents. And to give it some credit, Marines depicts some of the realities of military service in the Pacific during the 2020s:
The Marine colonel with a stack of Foreign Affairs issues in his office ignorantly spouting off about “Chinese grey zone tactics” and “great-power competition,” which gestures to the hollow intellectual girding that justifies his mission.
The military exercise where a Marine gets injured, evoking the list of 5,605 US casualties in military exercises (not combat) between 2006 and 2020.
The straight-to-camera interviews with grunts who candidly admit to desperately wanting to kill, with one even saying, “Everyone deserves some violence.”
The machine-gunner who informs us that the average lifespan during combat for his specialty is seven seconds, and how his life’s goal is merely to last longer than seven seconds.
The Navy lieutenant commander who has to leave her kids for a deployment, insisting that what she’s doing has to be worthwhile because of the personal sacrifice, even though you can tell she doubts whether it is.
But the show strips the Marine Corps of its history entirely; it’s presented as a violent institution outside of time that simply protects America by killing imagined baddies. Nothing about overthrowing governments in Latin America and installing banana republics. Nothing about Smedley Butler. Nothing about 20 wasted years in Afghanistan. For god’s sake, the film mostly takes place in Okinawa and it shows nothing of the anti-US, anti-base politics of that ongoing Japanese colony.
Marines shows an institution that makes boys into men without really questioning the purposes to which we put that man-making process. The Marine Corps is not simply a place where America sends violent people; it’s a place America sends people who desperately need something—whether purpose or a paycheck—and encourages their violence.
But if you watch it closely, you can glimpse deeper truths. See the faces of boys and girls—most combat troops are college-age—as they train to fight for an utterly vainglorious geopolitics that nobody in the chain of command grasps at more than a Wikipedia level. Shrouded in ignorance and propaganda, these professionals are ready, willing, and able to lose the next Great War.
I can’t blame them; I was them. But I can blame an unaccountable political class—I was them, too—that cavalierly throws away the lives of people like me to preserve a system that swells the ranks of the desperate and poor. They don’t deserve our sympathy nearly as much as the troops.
Check out our episode if you get the chance:
