Red Dawn Encourages More Asian Racism And Threat Construction

OMFG. Here we go again. As if the barrage of racist tweets against Psy for performing at the AMAs weren't enough, Hollywood coincidentally, had to add fuel to the fire by releasing an offensive, vociferous movie where an exclusive group of white American teenagers, the Wolverines, counterattack the North Koreans who invade my homeland, not North Korea, but the United States of America. I was going to let this story fall by the wayside, but I encountered too much of this kind of bullshit throughout my life to just sit here and let these ignorant assholes degrade what my country stands for.

I get it. Many of these tweeters are adolescents or young adults, immature and still learning what it means not to be ignorant. Nevertheless, one would think that the collective consciousness of the American youth has continued along its evolutionary tragectory and not regressed to this pre-Civil Rights or Civil War era.

Ah yes. Brings back memories of growing up Asian in the U.S.

Someone will incessantly argue, "Its just a movie. Its fictitious. Get over it."

Really?



How can Americans simply "get over it" when you see someone below saying that they now "hate all Chinese, Japanese, Asian, Korean people"???

Seems like tweeter TODDDler loves waving his douchebag bigotry flag proudly by advertising his hate toward the Asian population over something that isn't even real.

Never mind the fact that one of the main actors is Australian making him less American than I am or any other Asian American, or the implausible premise, albeit a rancid fantasy from Hollywood that North Korea has the military might and readiness to take on our country. Even foreign policy experts find the Red Dawn remake laughable as investigative reporting blog Mother Jones cites.

Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense to Ronald Reagan, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress:

What!? Really? How are the North Koreans gonna get here? We're talking about thousands of miles. Did they stage an amphibious landing like we did in Normandy? Did they fly over? Each of the pilots in their air force only flies four hours each year! Their military is in terrible shape, they don't have enough fuel, and they don't have the artillery. Like, how exactly is this going to happen?

Christopher Preble, vice president for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute:

The premise is actually no more absurd than Independence Day, or the aliens in the new Battleship. So to pose the North Koreans as a credible threat to the continental United States is as ridiculous as the spectre of all-out alien invasion. Also, how exactly would they get from there to here??

If foreign policy experts find this movie ridiculous then what is its underlying objective?

Threat Construction, brought to you in part by Hollywood

What MGM has done is intentionally stirred up threatening anti-Asian sentiments with their theatrical rhetoric spurning the possibility of racial harmony in my beloved country. You know, the one I pay taxes in. The cultural landscape of America continues to evolve where ethnic diversity sprouting from American soil abounds so it only makes sense: common, social and economic sense, to cast an Asian American actor to play a lead Wolverine battling the front lines as well.

Of course, Hollywood isn't going to allow for that because minority heroines are merely token characters that end up dying first anyway. Movie critic, Roger Ebert for instance, references the BADF action movie rule - "The Brother Always Dies First". So all this talk about Hollywood being liberal and culturally progressive is an absolute, invariable lie. Let's just see it for what it is. A bunch of fucking suits that go around pushing their "white = good" and "other = bad" propaganda machine so they can continue their hegemony. Its what political scientists call threat construction.

Ronnie Lipschutz in his critique On Security says it best,

Security is, to put Waever's argument in other words, a socially constructed concept: It has a specific meaning only within a specific social context. It emerges and changes as a result of discourses and discursive actions intended to reproduce historical structures and subjects within states and among them. 

In other words, if you continue to speak of some other entity as a threat, they eventually become one because you've now internalized it in your mind that they are real, even though it doesn't even exist. Let's just take a look at the some of these tweets for instance,

"I usually love Asians but in Red Dawn I found them terrifying."

"omg red dawn looks so spooky #whatif #asian"

"After seeing Red Dawn, I'm suspicious of every Asian I see #Wolverines"

Ideas of a threat are more potent than even the material weapons themselves. Here is an excerpt from Alexander Wendt and David Friedman from International Organization,

Idealists are not saying that states do not act on the basis of power and interests but rather that this is contingent on the social structure in which states are embedded. In a conflictual system power and interests matter, but what makes a system conflictual is an underlying structure of common knowledge. The threat posed to the United States by five hundred British nuclear weapons is less than that posed by five North Korean ones, because the British are friends and the North Koreans are not, and amity and enmity are social, not material, relations. In that sense it is "ideas all the way down."

After the oil spill disaster caused by BP several years ago in the gulf region, did Americans go making similar hateful remarks about the British? Not that I recall quite frankly. And perhaps this is why Hollywood can't seem to wrap their myopic, pretentious idiotic heads around a non-white actor to play as an American heroine because they still see anything not white or Will Smith us as the "other".

Asian Americans, or any other persons of color, need to take a stand against racism and the threat construction imposed by the mainstream media. They are here to divide, not harmonize. So on a positive note, I'd like to end this by saying that there are Americans from all backgrounds, whites included, who are taking a stand and speaking out against the racism after Red Dawn. Props to those who are.