Throughout the film, I came to see the dangerous manipulative capacity of the medium I call “identification with the protagonists.” The audience has all the information to feel that Oppenheimer is an unsympathetic and even unsavory character. Oppenheimer drove the project on to conclusion even when he knew that Germany had surrendered. He pushed the project on to defeat the Japanese, and when that rationale could not convince the dedicated scientists who wanted to end the Los Alamos project, he convinced them, or mainly himself, that dropping the bomb, killing and torturing more than 220, ,000 people, was a noble experiment. More
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eric Mann.