In the 1984 film Red Dawn, American teenagers in a Colorado town wake to Soviet paratroopers descending from the sky. Their community is suddenly under foreign control. The film, a product of Cold War anxieties, tells a story of ordinary citizens resisting an occupation that stripped them of their freedom.
Four decades later, the imagery feels uncomfortably familiar. This time, the ‘invaders’ don’t arrive under a foreign flag. They wear American uniforms.
When the National Guard rolls into U.S. cities during protests, or when ICE conducts early-morning raids in immigrant neighborhoods, the parallels are stark. Armored vehicles block intersections. Heavily armed officers patrol streets. Families are wrenched from their homes at dawn. To the people on the ground, it doesn’t feel like safety. It feels like occupation.
That’s the paradox. In Red Dawn, audiences naturally rooted for the rebels. The invaders were deemed illegitimate because they weren’t part of the community, leaving citizens no choice but to resist. But when the government deploys militarized forces at home, we’re told it’s necessary for ‘order.’ The lived experience, however, is nearly indistinguishable: fear, disruption, and the sense that power is being imposed from outside.
The irony is stark. The Wolverines of Red Dawn fought foreign troops to preserve American freedom. Today, communities face government agencies that use the same imagery of force—armored trucks, tactical gear, overwhelming firepower—but justify it in the name of that same freedom. This is not an argument against public safety or law enforcement. It is a call to recognize how easily those missions can cross into militarization. A neighborhood flooded with troops is not reassured; it is unsettled. A family awakened by armed agents is not made safer; it is traumatized.
The United States once imagined its greatest threat as a Soviet invasion. Red Dawn tapped into that fear, dramatizing it with teenage heroes fighting for their homes. But its lesson has aged in unexpected ways. Freedom can be threatened from within as well as from abroad. When government power arrives with rifles, armored vehicles, and dawn raids, it becomes hard to tell the difference.
The Wolverines recognized their occupation when they saw it. The question is whether we do.
