Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers is a brilliant, bitter examination of the reality of WWII. By following the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, Eastwood navigates the delicate balance between truth and propaganda, gently deconstructing the “American Hero” without villainizing the soldier.
Growing up in America, I was taught the incomprehensible evil of the Pearl Harbor attacks. While Tolkien reminds us that “war must be” to defend against a destroyer, the process of creating “enemies” is a dangerous one. Lessons on the atrocities of kamikaze pilots quickly bled into a general demonization of the Japanese people. I was a 27-year-old educated man before I truly looked at that iconic Iwo Jima photograph from any perspective other than the American one.
Constructing the “Other”
This realization introduced me to the concept of the “Other”—a process popularized by Edward Said in Orientalism. It is the act of defining our own identity by constructing dehumanizing roles for those outside our group.
We see a rudimentary version of this in sports. As a Seahawks fan, my identity is partially defined by my rooting against the “villainous” San Francisco 49ers. In the stadium, this is a harmless rivalry; in war, however, this “line in the sand” becomes a matter of life and death. When we define ourselves solely by who we are against, we risk losing our own humanity in the process.
The Historian’s Dilemma
History is often written from a personal perspective. As Alexandre Dumas wrote in The Count of Monte Cristo, “The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.”
Modern relativism has used this fact to break open boxes of dogma that were nailed shut for centuries. In a graduate-level history class, a professor once suggested to me that because all history is perspective, we may never truly understand reality. This is the “Gully of Relativism”—the idea that since no one is perfectly objective, no truth actually exists.
Complexity vs. Absolutes
The reason I was able to navigate the heavy themes of Flags of Our Fathers is that I already understood the tension between right and wrong. I had a foundation of moral absolutes that acted as a filter. I could empathize with the Japanese perspective without abandoning the reality of objective evil or the necessity of sacrifice.
The problem arises when we try to teach children the “moral complexities” of history before they have been given the “moral absolutes” of character. If you teach a child that everything is “perspective” before they know that some things are “true,” you don’t create a critical thinker; you create a cynic who has no garbage disposal for bad information.
To appreciate the “sharpness of the sword” and the “glory of the warrior” in their proper context, we must first love “that which they defend.” We must know what the “Solid Land” looks like before we can safely navigate the fog of war.
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