"Red Dawn" - Could it happen here?

[Q]

I didn't really like the movie 'Red Dawn'. It was kind of hokey and in many ways improbable.

But could something like the kind of invasion of the US portrayed in Red Dawn really happen?

In case you've never had the stomach to sit through the whole movie...here's the plot summary

Red Dawn: 1984:

Amazon.com video review: The Ronald Reagan 1980s were all about going back to the future--rewriting the past to better suit Reagan's upbeat vision of the present. So, Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo (a psychotic, shell-shocked Vietnam vet in the original film, transformed into a flag-waving hero in the sequel) was able to go back to Southeast Asia and "correct" history by decisively (and single-handedly) winning that messy ol' war on behalf of America. Red Dawn is a paranoid cold-war cautionary tale that presents us not with a rosy alternative past, but with an ominous vision of the future, metaphorically plopping a piece of Russian-occupied Afghanistan into America's back yard. In this celebration of the Second Amendment, storm troopers from the Evil Empire descend upon the inadequately defended United States and hold America hostage. Stealthily avoiding the invaders, a motley group of red-blooded, small-town, gun-toting teenagers go underground to form the Wolverines, a guerilla resistance squad dedicated to making those Russkies rue the day they parachuted onto U.S. soil. It's a darn good thing those kids had the right to keep and bear arms, huh! Written and directed by macho filmmaker John Milius, the self-described "Zen fascist" who also cowrote Apocalypse Now, as well as the horrifying shark story Robert Shaw tells in Jaws. The cast includes Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey (a few years before she and Swayze took up Dirty Dancing), Charlie Sheen, Powers Boothe, Harry Dean Stanton, and Ben Johnson. Red Dawn was a commercial success, although audiences invariably split into two camps, finding it either patriotic or appalling. Whatever your verdict, the film remains a telling reflection of its era. --Jim Emerson

[AuntPatsy]

1. You can't be serious, if you need to fear anyone enforcing such

a coup, I feel you should be alerted to some of your fellow Americans, thats where our real fear should be directed at....

I believe the actions of the last several years are a good indicator that our enemny does not reside over seas..

[punpirate]

2. Sure...

... but the uniforms of the invaders would be blue pinstripe and US Army camo....

Cheers.

[Nobody]

3. Insurgents, I tell you, insurgents! Terrorists!

Let's see, nation invades another sovereign nation, civilians rise up against the invaders. The insurgents, by the way, are the good guys?

Oh wait, we were talking about a movie, not the invasion of Iraq.

[William769]

4. Anything is possible, but it's not probable.

[NewJeffCT]

5. absolutely impossible

Unless the Russians or Chinese developed some sort of Cylon-like weapon to disable all our defense systems like radar, sonar, missiles, ships, airplanes, etc, there is less than the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of it happening like that.

If you go back to 1944 technology (which would take nukes out of the mix, which you can't really do) and Germany & Japan had combined to conquer Europe & China respectively (saying that Germany never invaded Russia & Japan hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor) the Axis likely would have snagged Hawaii, Alaska & maybe eastern Canada or Mexico to launch air raids on the US industrial base in the mainland... after months of bombardment, they'd invade through Canada and/or Mexico.

[Q]

9. Tend to agree with you...

...but then again...a small group of Saudi hijackers with box cutters were able to 'attack the US' without any kind of response from the US military.

[Journeyman]

6. I remember a comic from that era . . .

it was a family standing in front of a monument that marked the spot in Texas from which President Reagan had declared that invaders from Nicaragua were only a couple of hours away if they decided to attack. The family were all getting out of the car and the wife was calling to her husband,

"Oh, look, dear -- an hysterical monument."

[Autumn Colors]

7. Was Q really suggesting a coup?

I'm wondering if the CURRENT administration might use the military to do something like this ... no need to parachute in, they're already here. You only have to watch the video of the military pulling a raid on that Utah rave a few days ago to see it right before your eyes.

Hey, if you think Red Dawn is odd, did you ever see the 1987 mini-series called "AMERIKA: 1997 (Ten Years After the Soviet Takeover)"? It had Kris Kristofferson, Robert Urich, Cynthia Picket, and Christine Lahti in it. It was only aired once.

I bought a UK format video (we have a multi-system VCR) on ebay a few months back to rewatch it and some of the quotes in the movie were frightening in that they're almost word-for-word quotes out of the Bush era. THAT'S what I found so unnerving.

I watched the movie picturing the Soviets as a dictator Bush-controlled army ... since the "Soviet" storyline is rather laughable in this era.

[Q]

10. Never even heard of that movie...

...perhaps I'll watch it someday when I'm feeling especially bored.

[Autumn Colors]

15. Well, you'll need a LOT of time...

It's a 12-hour long mini-series and very rare. I've only seen UK copies on ebay so I'm not even sure it was released on video over here.

[SledDriver]

17. I think you mean "Red Dwarf".

:shrug:

[Autumn Colors]

18. No, no, no

Oh, I thought the person responding to ME about renting "it" for an afternoon was responding to my post about the mini-series "AMERIKA: 1997 (10 Years After the Soviet Take-Over)" from 1987. See my previous post. That 12-hour mini-series was on ABC and only aired once.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092316/

Maybe that poster was referring to the original post and "Red Dawn" and just responded to my post in error. Yeah, "Red Dawn" was a feature film and had Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen and Jennifer Grey in it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087985/

[Cleita]

8. When I was growing up we were propagandized that it could

happen and if we lived on the west coast, there could be millions of communist Chinese landing on our beaches at any time. Well considering that we can get half way around the world to trash a small arab nation, I guess a determined enemy with the military strength and money to do it could theoretically do it but why?

There really is no advantage to anyone to invading us. We've already sold them everything we have and now thanks to GWB we owe China everything we have. There would be no advantage to invading us. However, there would be an advantage to throwing us out of places that we have colonized and appropriated the assets.

[Q]

14. Because of the Bush Junta...we're now a 'rogue nation'...

Motivation? Who knows.

[the_spectator]

11. There was a TV miniseries in the 80s based on a similar theme -

called "Amerika" it was about a takeover of the U.S. by the Soviets, relatively non-violently (meaning taken over politically rather than in an out-and-out war.)

Not exactly the same thing, but some people might remember "A Very British Coup" also a mini-series, from Britain which appeared on Masterpiece Theatre in 1988 or 1989: in this one, a newly-elected lefty working-class Labour Prime Minister pusues a strongly socialist program. Because he also kicks American bases and missiles out of Britain, and arranges a huge loan from the Soviet Union to the British Government to allow it to act with an amount of financial independence, the Americans and the establishment within the British government do what they can to illegally overthow him.

"Red Dawn" and "Amerika" were made from a moderately right-wing perspective, while "A Very British Coup" was written from a moderately left-wing one. But I remember seeing all three of them at the time, the 1980s, and the reason such things were made then and aren't now is that back THEN, one really did feel that something just like it could happen.

So could any of this stuff "really happen" right now? Not really. Back then there really was an equal and opposite threat in the Soviet Union and its allies. Osama bin Forgotten could hurt us pretty bad, I guess, but you know there's no way that old cavedewller is going to end up as Boss of the U.S! :shrug:

[DS1]

12. Not a chance, I'm waaaaay out of shape

:D

[jmowreader]

13. Red Dawn shouldn't have happened in the movie

The first time I saw Red Dawn was right after it came out, and I thought it was a fine movie.

The second time I saw it, I'd been studying Soviet Army tactics for a while and I thought, "you mean these people deployed all the way from the Soviet Union without any mortars?" Every Soviet/Russian infantry company has a few mortars. Fuckin' Wolverines start ambushing Soviets, eventually someone's going to get the bright idea to stick a mortar in the back of a BMD and start heading down the road in it. Eventually you'll find the little bastards.

[Skip Intro]

16. As a pre-emptive self-defense measure, maybe. Other major world powers

aren't going to just sit by and watch bush invade and occupy nation after nation - claiming control of more and more of the world's resources - without doing someting about it.

Red Dawn portrays the US as a sympathetic victim to an evil invader. We were innocent victims. In today's reality, America is seen by the world as that evil invader, a growing threat to their national security. Other nations have contingency plans to defend against us, there is no doubt. I doubt even blair's Brittain is without a plan to defend from a hijacked, renegade US deploying weapons of mass destruction on a massive scale.

So yeah, I think something similar could happen. I think the US could be invaded - maybe by a coalition of the sane (or opprotunistic), motivated by self-preservation (or greed), at a point when we are, because of various wars of our own making, unprepared to defend the homeland.

[Porcupine]

19. What we should fear is an embargo.

Sixteen months without the constant flow of container ships into U.S. harbors and you will have soccar moms hawking the charms of their teenage daughters. Seriously, without the spare parts we get from the rest of the world things will fall apart and we will all slowly go bananas.

We HAVE NO REAL ECONOMY!! Flipping real estate just doesn't count unless you can get food, clothing, shoes and heat for the winter. Most of our economy is retail, real-estate, health care and government. In short we are all playing with monopoly money while China makes us sandwiches and pays the bills.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

20. It was little more than an NRA wet dream.

They went down the playbook move by move. It couldn't have been more obvious if they'd tried. The real pity is, the Swayze character survived. Intolerable.

[unschooler]

21. Sounds exactly like the games we used to play in our tree house!

Only we used broken sticks for automatic weapons.

[OrlandoGator]

22. The only nation that could conventionally invade the U.S. is China.

Our enemies aren't thousands of paratroopers landing on high school football fields.