MovieChat Forums > Hearts and Minds (1975) Discussion > Randy Floyd breaks my heart near the end...

Randy Floyd breaks my heart near the end:

posted 12 years ago by sonyablade
1 reply | jump to latest

The interviewer asks Floyd, "Do you think we’ve learned anything from all this?"

His reply:

"I think we’re trying not to. I think I’m trying not to, sometimes. I can’t even cry easily, from my manhood image. I think Americans have tried, we’ve all tried very hard to escape what we’ve learned in Vietnam, to not come to the logical conclusions of what’s happened there. The military does the same thing. They don’t realize that people fighting for their own freedom are not going to be stopped by just changing your tactics, you know, adding a little more sophisticated technology over here, improving the tactics we used last time, not making quite the same mistakes, you know I think history operates a little different than that. I think those kind of forces are not going to be stopped. I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminality that their officials and their policy makers have exhibited."

As trued today as it was nearly 40 years ago! Have we not learned anything?

I tried to figure out what became of him and ended up finding a bunch of links to his daughter's writing, some of it about her dad. Sadly she died of breast cancer herself a couple years ago: http://floydsk.wordpress.com/

*sigh* Circle of life I suppose.

Williams: I'll be too busy looking gooood.

[–] Kawada_Kira 10 years ago

Agreed, that was a powerful scene. And he was right. Well, we don't learn anything because the powers that be don't want us to learn anything. There's a great quote from Karl Marx on how the dominant ideas in a society come from its ruling class, the political and economic elite, the rich and powerful, who own the media and control the education system and use it to ensure the dominance of their ideology, their view of the world. It's often said that "history is written by the victors", but it's more accurate to say that "history is written by the owners". We haven't learned the lessons of the Vietnam War because our education system and our media gloss it over and generally perpetuate the "rah rah America" narrative, in which the MOST anti-war criticism you can possibly make is that the war was a "well-intended mistake", as opposed to a monstrous crime against the country and people of Vietnam. If we want to learn the lessons of history, we the people have to own history for ourselves, and stop letting the narrative promoted by the political, economic and military elites, the narrative promoted by the ruling class in its own interests, be the dominant narrative of history.

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas."
- Karl Marx

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
- Goethe