Daily Dialogue — August 5, 2016

GROETESCHELE: Excuse me. Every minute we wait works against us. Now, Mr. Secretary, now is when we must send in a first strike.
BLACK: We don’t go in for sneak attacks. We had that done to us in Pearl Harbor.
GROETESCHELE: And the Japanese were right to do it. From their point of view we were their mortal enemy. As long as we existed we were a deadly threat to them. Their only mistake was that they failed to finish us at the start. And they paid for that mistake at Hiroshima.
STARK: You’re talking about a different kind of war.
GROETESCHELE: Exactly. This time we can finish what we start. And if we act now, right now, our casualties will be minimal.
BLACK: You know what you’re saying?
GROETESCHELE: Do you believe that communism is not our mortal enemy?
BLACK: You’re justifying murder.
GROETESCHELE: Yes, to keep from being murdered.
BLACK: In the name of what? To preserve what? Even if we do survive, what are we? Better than what we say they are? What gives us the right to live, then? What makes us worth surviving, Groeteschele, that we are ruthless enough to strike first?
GROETESCHELE: Yes! Those who can survive are the only ones worth surviving.
BLACK: Fighting for your life isn’t the same as murder.
GROETESCHELE: Where do you draw the line once you know what the enemy is? How long would the Nazis kept it up, General, if every Jew they came after had met them with a gun in his hand? But I learned from them, General Black, oh, I learned.
BLACK: You learned too well, Professor. You learned so well that now there’s no difference between you and what you want to kill.

— Fail-Safe (1964), screenplay by Walter Bernstein, novel by Eugene Burdick & Harvey Wheeler

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Activism. Today’s suggestion by Will King.

Trivia: Columbia Pictures produced both this movie and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Director Stanley Kubrick insisted his movie be released first, and it was, in January 1964. When Fail-Safe (1964) was released, it garnered excellent reviews, but audiences found it unintentionally funny because of “Strangelove”, and stayed away. Henry Fonda later said he would never have made this movie if he had seen “Strangelove” first, because he would have laughed too.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Will: “Activism is about trying to convince others, to get them to accept, or better work toward, your point of view. Some of the best scenes, the scenes with the most tension, occur when opposing viewpoints are given the chance to debate. Here the stakes are larger than just a clash of viewpoints because there is an audience watching, a group of powerful leaders to be persuaded by one side or the other. The fate of the world depends on which character wins the most adherents among those in the room.”