Guest Post by Debbie Lerman
I went to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer biopic with some reservations, worried that the scientist who gave us the nuclear bomb, and the military-industrial complex that spawned and abused it, would be presented in too positive a light.
I’m happy to report that Nolan actually did an excellent job of portraying the devastating toll of the nuclear bombing of Japan on Oppenheimer’s psyche and on the rest of his life. Moreover, when Oppenheimer vociferously opposed the nuclear arms race and tried to promote world peace, he was hauled in front of a committee of McCarthyist political and military hacks, pre-determined to humiliate him and declare him a “threat to national security.”
Nolan unequivocally portrays the noxious military-government operatives with their paranoid anti-Communist views as the villains. He reserves the tragic-heroic halo for the patriot scientist who gave his life’s work and compromised his conscience for his country, yet was castigated by the power establishment and cast out of the inner circle.
I was struck by many similarities between the movie’s themes and current political and cultural trends: a deep state intent on creating weapons of mass destruction – in our time genetically engineered bioweapons – with blithe disregard for the potentially devastating consequences; scientists hounded and discredited for promoting unpopular ideas that contradict the mainstream narrative; a government in thrall to a paranoid notion of internal enemies (controlled by Russia!) who must be silenced and shunned, the Constitution be damned.
Ring any bells?
Judging by the reviews and responses to the film that I’ve read, not at all. In fact, in the upside-down, inside-out, and backwards world of the mainstream media bubble, the conscience-stricken, publicly humiliated Oppenheimer somehow manages to embody “our public health servants during the pandemic.”
This is the astonishing and intellectually bankrupt interpretation put forth in a New York Times editorial by none other than Kai Bird, co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer – the book upon which Nolan’s film is based.
You might think someone so intimately familiar with the indignities inflicted on a world-renowned scientist who spoke out against the establishment would be sensitive to present-day parallels. I would argue that you have to be wilfully blind or ignorant to miss the comparisons between Oppenheimer’s fate and the reputational and career destruction suffered by all the scientists and doctors – many world-famous in their fields – who risked their livelihoods and good standing in the scientific community by speaking out against the prevailing Covid narrative.
At first, it seems like Bird might have an inkling. He lists Oppenheimer’s offenses against the military-political establishment, which included criticizing the decision to build a hydrogen bomb, saying that the Hiroshima bomb was used “against an essentially defeated enemy,” and warning that the atomic bomb “is a weapon for aggressors.”
Basically, Oppenheimer wanted the world to use his weapon of mass destruction as a deterrent against all future wars.
As a result, Bird explains:
These forthright dissents against the prevailing view of Washington’s national security establishment earned him powerful political enemies. That was precisely why he was being charged with disloyalty.
Bird extrapolates from Oppenheimer’s fate to the fate of other anti-establishment scientists and intellectuals:
After America’s most celebrated scientist was falsely accused and publicly humiliated, the Oppenheimer case sent a warning to all scientists not to stand up in the political arena as public intellectuals. This was the real tragedy of Oppenheimer: What happened to him also damaged our ability as a society to debate honestly about scientific theory – the very foundation of our modern world.
Sounds about right.
But wait. At this point, Bird does one of those contortionist intellectual maneuvers that flip truth and reality on their heads and make your head spin:
Sadly, Oppenheimer’s life story is relevant to our current political predicaments. Oppenheimer was destroyed by a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues.
Just recall the former president’s fact-challenged comments on the pandemic or climate change. This is a worldview proudly scornful of science.
In other words: The biggest political problem we face – according to Bird – are bad, bad Trump and stupid, ignorant, racist Trump supporters. They are the existential threat to our democracy and our freedoms.
One might logically infer from Bird’s argument that it is Trump and his “anti-intellectual” supporters who silenced John Ioannidis, one of the most highly regarded and widely cited epidemiologists of our time, when he spoke out against Covid lockdowns. Their “demagoguery” apparently prevented the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration – again, among the most respected scientists in the world – from disseminating vital information during the pandemic.
Furthermore, if we continue to follow the perverse line of reasoning that posits “our public health servants during the pandemic” as moral and intellectual descendants of Oppneheimer, we might conclude that it was Anthony Fauci et al. who were pushed out of the mainstream and branded “fringe epidemiologists” by government officials. Or who are no longer able to publish their work in respected scientific journals and whose opinions are deemed dangerous to national security.
Yet we know this to be the opposite of what actually happened.
The free-thinking, establishment-challenging heroes of the pandemic were world-class experts including Ioannidis, the Great Barrington Declaration doctors, and scientist-intellectuals like Aaron Kheriaty – the director of Medical Ethics and a Professor of Psychiatry at UC Irvine, who was fired for opposing the anti-scientific, unethical and indefensible vaccine mandates at his institution.
Needless to say, Fauci and other leaders of the public health-industrial complex are not among those heroes. In fact, they are the agents of the government-military-intelligence alliance that wielded all the power, resources, and megaphone of the federal government to blanket the media with anti-science, anti-public-health propaganda.
It was their censorship and propaganda that “damaged our ability as a society to debate honestly about scientific theory – the very foundation of our modern world.”
And it was Trump and his supporters – no matter how much one may disagree with them politically or despise them personally – who were actually accused of being Russian agents and of threatening national security by spreading “misinformation.”
I find it tragic that someone as familiar with Oppenheimer’s life as Kai Bird can participate in the very same paranoia and censorship of dissident opinions that he ostensibly decries.
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The bomb was a fly fart in a thunderstorm, compared to Fauci’s intravenous nuke; plus, he’s not regretting it and speaking against it, like Oppenheimer did. It’s up to the people of Earth to fill Fauci with regret.
Metal…………….fill the MAGGOT with metal.
.40 S & W full graphene jacket?
Are we to believe this kike dressed as a wop is all by his lonesome without a detail?
First off……………who pays to see a movie glorifying a KIKE ………….and made by KIKES out of PEDOPHILE hollywood ?
Secondly……………if you worship the PARASITE VERMIN MAGGOT fauci………………your a jackoff democrat SHEEPNIGGER like some of the COWARD CUNTS on this board who HIDE behind the “anonymous” handle.
COWARD CURS who love downvoting and SNITCHING to admin when their feelings are hurt.
I long for the day when the police stand down and we settle this MAN to COWARD CUR democrat !
He did an excellent job…
Of what exactly ?
Easy there keyboard warrior. Settle…settle.
Good boy.
The time had come for this, as too many people are starting to question nuclear weapons. So the public is fed the narrative yet again, in a memorable, national, highly emotional motion picture “event” meant to make any dissent appear stupid and heartless.
This woman made it to the second paragraph before she started up the propaganda machine, so she gets points for that, but she still did start it. Since there was no “nuclear bombing of Japan,” there was also no “devastating toll” on “Oppenheimer’s psyche,” as if she or anyone else had or could access such a thing. If the man did have mental problems and later became a “security threat,” it is probably because he did not want his name to be forever associated with one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated.
‘..Nolan unequivocally portrays the noxious military-government operatives with their paranoid anti-Communist views as the villains.’
Say no more.
But it’s not true…
Oppenheimer was definitely a communist and was probably a spy. Even if he wasn’t a spy he knew the Manhattan project was full of them. McCarthy was a hero and if anything was underestimating the extent and significance of the jew/commie infiltration.
Great movie, but your criticism of the review is wrong…Oppie had been sloppy about security, both with respect to the visit by the communist he didn’t report, and (not shown) letting one of their young minds go on vacation without telling the FBI, and him running right to the Russian embassy…But the committee agreed Oppie was a patriot and had done a great job, but as General Groves said, neither he nor many other people there, (including Klaus Fuchs) could meet the 1953 security standards….which was true.
How can you blindly trust a movie out of hollywood ?
Have read any books on this subject matter ?
I commend your efforts but dont expect me to buy into your assertions.
The biggest hurdle for Oppenhiemer and the Manhattan Project team in getting an atomic bomb to detonate, was that they never did.
The only thing they ever acheived was massive fuel air explosions, filmed with the playback speed altered and rumbling foley bomb sounds added at Lookout Mountain post production.
Ha!
Maybe. Nothing is beyond their will to power and willingness to lie. But, if so, what about critical mass? Why do they keep fuel apart in rods in the power plants?
That’s a huge flaw in the theory I suppose, as was clearly proved by the multiple mushroom clouds over Fukushima after the fuel rods were denied cooling water and the melt down allowed the rods to touch and then Big Badaboom!
Atomic explosions and mushroom clouds?
Wait, sounds like a memory implant
Hmm, I’ve never been to Recall.
The article is entirely retarded.
I almost got a knot in my brain trying to parse that.
So Kai Bird is “willfully blind” because he doesn’t compare Oppenheimer with the people who opposed the prevailing Covid narrative?
A man who himself did create the thing he belatedly came to regret, with people who questioned the PR narrative but didn’t create Covid? Not doing such a comparison constitutes willful blindness??
Could you construct an even more contrived ‘accusation’ towards Bird, if you tried.