For French, Dr Strangelove comes to life

By Julio Godoy

PARIS - French commentators are comparing the behavior of US military leaders in Iraq with that of the fictitious figures in Stanley Kubrick's black comedy of militarism and nuclear age Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

The US war against Iraq has also led to a revival of Kubrick's film, now being shown in several movie theaters in Paris.

Jean-Marie Colombani, publisher of the daily newspaper Le Monde, was the one of the first French commentators to compare US President George W Bush and his closest military aides with Dr Strangelove. On March 24, in a leading article on the Iraq war, Colombani wrote: "George Bush, viewed from Europe, looks very much like a Dr Strangelove of our times."

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In his film, released in 1964, Kubrick depicted a foolish, fascist US military leadership that, by tinkering with nuclear weapons, provokes the "ultimate war" with the Soviet Union and paves the way for the destruction of planet Earth.

Frequently seen as a perfect burlesque of political and military insanity, Dr Strangelove's plot sounds today in many ways as premonitory: Arguing that the Soviet Union may have poisoned water in Washington and surroundings, the fanatic US General Jack D Ripper - a barely veiled reference to the legendary British mass murderer Jack the Ripper - launches without consultations a preemptive nuclear strike against Moscow.

The Soviet Union counters the threat with a so-called Doomsday Device, supposed to destroy the Earth. While the world hangs in a deadly balance, US President Merkin Mefflin, one of three characters in the film played by the late Peter Sellers, engages in hilarious hotline negotiations with his Soviet counterpart.

Mefflin has as closest aides the outrageously frantic General Buck Turgidson (played by the late George C Scott), whose presidential advice consists mainly of statistics about "acceptable losses" - a silly contention in face of an all-out nuclear war.

Another advisor to the president is the former German scientist Dr Strangelove (also played by Sellers), one of the creators of the bomb about to destroy the planet. Strangelove, confined to a wheelchair by a mysterious handicap, while madly smiling all the time keeps restraining his right arm from lifting to make the typical Nazi greeting.

Another memorable character is the Texan Major T J "King" Kong (Slim Pickens), who in the end of the movie rides into oblivion atop an accidentally launched atom bomb.

Dr Strangelove was based on the 1958 nuclear-war novel Red Alert, written by Peter George, a former British flight lieutenant and nuclear-disarmament activist. The character of Dr Strangelove did not appear in the original novel, and was created by Kubrick and co-writer Terry Southern for the film version.

The character of Buck Turgidson was inspired by General Curtis LeMay, head of the US Strategic Air Command during the 1950s and early 1960s.

When Dr Strangelove was released, Kubrick's way of depicting a mad militarist was seen as funny, satirical, and extremely pessimistic. By using obvious phallic references throughout, Kubrick mocked at the military mindset and equated the military-industrial complex to a sexually obsessed outfit.

Though Dr Strangelove is a laugh-out-loud comedy, the implication of the film is very dark indeed, suggesting that given the chance, human beings will destroy themselves and take the whole world with them for the sake of ideology.

Since Jean-Marie Colombani of Le Monde first compared the present US military hierarchy to Kubrick's mad gang, the analogy has been taken over by several other commentators and analysts.

Alain Bashung, a rock singer and a leading peace activist, said in an interview, "If you see Kubrick's movie today, you could think it is a documentary on the manner how the US is ruled now."

The French Jewish philosopher Claude Lanzmann used the same analogy in a comment this Monday, on the apparent mistakes of the US strategy in Iraq. "The Drs Strangelove from Washington, pretending to remodel the Middle East, were unable to foresee Iraqi patriotism in the face of their invasion," Lanzmann wrote.

"These Drs Strangelove also ignored the lesson history teaches that human beings often transform the oppression they may be suffering, perhaps because of tradition and culture, into a value to defend even to death," Lanzmann added.

Lanzmann is director of the monthly Les Temps Modernes, the philosophy magazine eminent French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre founded after World War II. Lanzmann and Sartre worked together for many years, until latter's death in 1980.

Serge July, publisher and editor-in-chief at the daily newspaper Liberation, also has used the figures Kubrick created 40 years ago to describe the present US leadership. Commenting on the initial miscalculations of the US strategists, July wrote: "The failure of the military parade in the Iraqi desert, aimed in principle to make the dictatorship to implode in a couple of days, is a setback for [US Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld and all the gang of Dr Strangelove of this democracy gone mad."

Other commentators, while avoiding comparing Rumsfeld and Co with Strangelove, have straightforwardly called the US leadership "a band of psychopaths".

Francois de Bernard, a psychoanalyst and philosopher, argued that since the beginning of George W Bush's presidency more than two years ago, the United States has become "a republic ruled both theologically and pathologically".

"Now, the US government, composed of a band of psychopaths, takes all its decisions in the name of God," de Bernard claims. To prove his thesis, de Bernard analyzed the interventions of the US leadership during the Iraqi crisis.

"In these interventions, we can see emerging, without any apparent goal, a paranoid vision of the world, immersed in a delirium of the most reactionary crusades, with imprints of a frightening symbolism," de Bernard said. "In this vicious vision of the world all external contestation becomes a crime, and all internal decisions, all internal actions, are sealed by a revengeful divinity."

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