Page 67 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Ideologies 51

hundred civilians were murdered by American soldiers. In the film, in a
move common to conservative thinking, one ’ s own bad motives are
assigned to the adversary to justify one ’ s own bad motives for violating
their rights.
The primary character, Walter Kurtz, a renegade Special Forces
colonel who “ goes it alone ” against the enemy, defying his superiors and
achieving spectacular results by using the enemy ’ s hit - and - run tactics, is
constructed as a repository of conservative values of the kind that would
in American society justify deregulating financial markets especially so

that private gain would trump the good of the community as that is

embodied in government. The film argues that such individualism is
superior to “ bureaucratic ” institutions that are ineffective in fi ghting the
enemy. Bureaucracy was a word conservatives used to characterize liberal
governance in the 1970s and 1980s. In the world, liberal regulatory
government was portrayed as restraining heroic economic entrepreneurs
who, according to conservatives, would save America from the economic
recession of the 1970s, which according to this argument, was caused by
excessively costly government regulation of business. In the fi lm, bureauc-
racy takes the form of government outposts that have no leader, rules
of war that hamper effective action, less - than - serious military command-
ers, soldiers distracted by entertainment instead of becoming hardened
killers like the enemy, and misguided policies that hamper the truly
effective individualist. Just as political conservatives argued that heroic
individualist entrepreneurs operating without any communal restraints

or government regulations would save America financially and economi-

cally, the film argues that the Vietnam War would have been won if
heroic individualists who possess superior intuition and a willingness to
operate outside community rules were left free to pursue the war in their
own way. Conservatives would come to endorse the murder of adver-
saries without due process through surrogate death squads in the 1980s
and to endorse torture, a crime against humanity, in the later war

against terrorism, and in the film, almost in preparation for these events,
Kurtz summarily executes suspected spies without trial. The fi lm notes
that after he did this, enemy activity decreased markedly, thus endorsing
his breach of human and legal rules. That such extralegal activity serves
as a metaphor in the film for the conservative economic ideal of

unregulated entrepreneurship would be one of the ironies of the global
economic collapse brought on by conservative economic theory in action
in 2008.