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Reviews
American Experience: Radio Bikini (1988)
U.S. as a failed colonizer of the Pacific
I saw this movie as a teen when it first came out, just two years after my first trip to Micronesia. There, I had got my first glimpses into the failures of U.S. colonialism in the Pacific. Upon my return stateside from Micronesia I couldn't help wonder why more Americans were not aware of our colonial possessions in the Pacific. This great documentary provides, at least, some partial answers. It is said that the mark of a civilized man is the ability to look at a column of numbers and weep. With 500 cases of cancer among Marshallese Islanders related to U.S. atomic testing in their home still yet expected to manifest, it was truly the basest and most uncivilized actions the U.S. took to test our atomic arsenal on our own military soldiers and the people of the Marshall Islands. Perhaps you, too, with seethe with the anger and outrage at the U.S. government that I did when first viewing this documentary. Or perhaps you are as calloused as the American government itself. Either way this is a fascinating look at an example of the worst a colonial power can perpetrate and a rational for why American colonial possessions in Micronesia were kept so secret from the American people.