Black History Month 2012: Review: Tears of the Sun

Bruce Willis's Tears of the Sun explores the Nigerian Civil War

Nigeria

Tears of the Sun is a 2003 film starring Bruce Willis about a U.S. Navy Seal rescue team sent into Nigeria during a fictional civil war.

The movie is clearly inspired by the true story of the Nigerian Civil War when the Igbo in southeast Nigeria seceded in 1967 and formed the short lived Republic of Biafra.

In the Hollywood version, Lieutenant A.K. Waters and his U.S. Navy Seals team are sent into Nigeria to evacuate Dr. Lena Fiore Kendricks and three Christian missionaries following a coup d’état against the Akuza presidential family. The northern Hausa-Fulani Muslims then launch a genocide against the Igbo Christians in the southeast.

The Christian missionaries refuse to leave behind the sick and wounded. They are later slaughtered by Muslims in the Nigerian military. Kendricks agrees to be evacuated to Cameroon on the condition that Waters and his Navy Seals evacuate a group of Igbo refugees.

Lieutenant Waters deceives Kendricks in order to succeed in extracting his “critical persona.” The Igbos are left behind as Waters, Kendricks, and the Navy Seals take off in two helicopters. As they are flying out of Nigeria, the helicopters pass over the hospital where the Christian missionaries and the sick and wounded who were left behind have been massacred.

Kendricks has a White Man’s Burden moment on the flight, orders the helicopters to turn around, and evacuates the Igbo children. He decides to lead the rest of the refugees overland to the Cameroon border. After coming across another Hausa-Fulani massacre in an Igbo village, Waters intervenes militarily in the conflict and the Navy Seals take out the murderers and the rapists who are cutting the breasts off Igbo women.

Trekking through the jungle, Waters and the Navy Seals learn they are being pursued by the Nigerian military and that there is a spy among the refugees who is broadcasting their location. Eventually, they learn that there is an Igbo prince hiding out in the group who is the only heir to the Igbo royal bloodline. The prince explains that his family was wiped out because they supported democracy.

Lieutenant Waters and the Navy Seals do some soul searching and decide not to abandon the refugees. They decide to lead the refugees into Cameroon to make up for their “sins” of following orders and failing to intervene so many times in the past. A typical bloodbath follows when the Nigerian military attacks and Waters ends up losing several of his men before getting the refugees across the border.

As the credits begin to roll, a quote from Edmund Burke flashes across the screen: “all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” The moral of the story is that America should have a liberal “duty to protect” foreign policy. We are guilty of “sin” unless we launch military interventions in Africa for humanitarian purposes.

Do these liberal clichés have any resemblance to the truth?

The truth is that Nigeria was the most spectacular example of an African state that made no sense whatsoever. The country was divided between three major ethnic groups – the Hausa-Fulani Muslims in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest, and the Igbo Christians in the southeast – and 240 minority groups that made up a third of the population.

Nigeria was launched as a constitutional republic with a federal government in which the north, west, and east had their own separate regional governments and civil service to diffuse ethnic and religious tension. The Hausa-Fulani made up 54 percent of the population and could dominate the federal government in a democracy through sheer numbers.

In the first six years of independence, Nigeria became notorious for the corruption and nepotism that penetrated every aspect of society. In 1966, the Hausa-Fulani dominated federal government was overthrown in a military coup that was initially popular in the north. The country’s top political leaders were executed by a group of Igbo military officers.

The coup brought General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi to power who overthrew democracy, instituted military rule, and attempted to create a unitary state. This aroused suspicion of an “Igbo conspiracy” in the north which resulted in a counter-coup by Hausa-Fulani officers that brought Yakubu Gowon to power who reversed Ironsi’s consolidation of the separate regional governments.

A massive pogrom erupted in which the Hausa-Fulani Muslims drove thousands of Igbos out of the north. More than a million Igbo refugees were driven out of the north and west back to Igboland in the east. The most reliable estimates are that only about 7,000 Igbos were killed in the wave of ethnic cleansing although the number was radically exaggerated to give it the appearance of a genocide.

The Igbos were outraged and retaliated by ordering all non-easterners to leave their region. On May 30, 1967, the Igbos under Governor Chukwuemeka Ojukwu proclaimed the independence of the Republic of Biafra, which contained Nigeria’s vast oilfields and was thus too important as a source of revenue for the federal government to be allowed to secede.

Colonel Gowon launched an invasion of Biafra to crush the rebellion and preserve the union. After three years of fighting for their independence, the Igbos were defeated and Biafra was conquered by the Nigerian federal government. Gowon even quoted Abraham Lincoln and talked of “binding up the nation’s wounds” and how there been “no victors and no vanquished” in the conflict.

OD celebrates Black History Month 2012 by remembering the Nigerian Civil War in which anywhere from 1 million to 3 million Igbos were killed to preserve the union. The Igbos were vanquished and their oil wealth was siphoned away into the private bank accounts of corrupt Nigerian politicians and businessmen.

Note: The Biafra national anthem was “Land of the Rising Sun.” The Igbo cause attracted a lot of sympathy in the United States and Europe. The Nigerian Civil War wasn’t about genocide or democracy though so much as it was about which ethnic group would control the rich oil fields in the Bight of Biafra.




About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

27 Comments

  1. The subtext of course is rescuing the delightful Italian bird.

    I’d fight through Hell for her.

    Anyway,

    if I were in charge of a carrier task force I’d go all Nelson on the Nigerians and begin a war of extermination. Forget the Special Forces. Use the heavy ordinance. A Carrier group has more power than Nigeria itself.

  2. This blog should be required reading for every college classroom in the country, minus of course certain incendiary comments or at least those like mine which equate negroes to the cockroaches of humanity, which though quite true is more insult than level-headed emotionless fact, which is what the HBD Movement needs. Let’s call it the BPPHBDR Movement (Better Public Policy Through Human Bio Diversity Realism [recognition?] movement).

    Somebody needs to come up with an HDB Bloggers Award – in a perfect world the ceremony would look like what they just pulled off at the Oscars. Maybe I’ll invest my inheritance in it.

    Just kidding.

    Note: Tears of the Sun was directed by a black dude, Antoine Fuqua (born January 19, 1966. He also did “Training Day”. )

    More later about everything.

    Keep up the good work HW.

    – Artur

    crimesofthetimes.com

  3. Biafra is famously connected to the Beatles returning their Knighthoods.
    Also connected to the Dead Kennedy’s tangentally through the lead singer’s stage name.

    And now Bruce Willis B Movies.

  4. If Black History were truly explored that would be the end of civil rights. No it’s celebrate Black Oppression by YT month. That’s all.

  5. Thanks for this piece, we were discussing this movie, but didn’t have the title to it. More ridiculous leftist tripe.

    “The prince explains that his family was wiped out because they supported democracy.”
    Then what is the problem? the 54% of population that is muslim voted to slaughter everyone else. That is the very definition of democracy.

  6. It was a thinly veiled reference to South Sudan. Right? Muslims massacring Christians? The garbage we were fed about the darkies down there.

  7. Does the movie ever explain the title? Are “tears of the sun” like solar flares or something? Or does it just lay there, trying to seem fake-profound?

    Also, is the tone of the movie a lecture-y “message” film or is it just a military-action movie with elite commandos and cool fight scenes that just has a liberal message fig leaf stapled on so they can excuse all the shooting?

  8. I think Antoine Fuqua also directed that dreadful, boring spite-filled remake of King Arthur a few years back. Crappy revisionist tripe designed to piss all over another perfectly good White mythos:

    In the movie Arthur isn’t a king and he isn’t even a Briton, Christians are evil, superstitious and bad (of course!), and Guinevere is a sort of guerilla archery expert with blue tattoos and no chest.

    It has one good line though, where a Saxon warrior confronts a competent good guy (might even be Arthur, I forget) and he sort of smirks and says, “Finally, somebody worth killing!”

    It was an expensive movie to make, and they just threw away another profitable franchise, just for another chance to shit on white folks. A pretty expensive hobby if you ask me.

  9. The confusion of that Arthur film was amazing.

    A Sarmatian? Jebus.

    He couldn’t have been a Breton or Welsh accented could he? Ioan
    Gryfdd made a good attempt at it. Clive Owen is too much of a Southern English accented English.
    And the Angles were all German! No, they were English. Most would have been mercs in Roman service. The words they spoke would have been partially understood by us. The accents uncannily similar to English Farmers today. No Cornish either!

  10. Sequel to come out:

    Tears of the Sunshine State Fair

    Igbo blacks resettled in Minnesota decide spontaneously to chimpout and subject the state to a crime spree that lasts a week.

    Oh wait this basically happened.

    Or

    Tears of Mogadishi.

    Four Somali refugees, resettled in Leicester UK, nearly beat to death a white woman
    in the street while they scream “Die White Bitch”.

  11. Hunter- your series of columns on ‘Black History Month’ are superb.

    I can add no more except to quote “Cambria” whose most recent post merely corroborates your thesis:

    “In hindsight it appears to me that men like Corbett and Hodgson should have stayed in Europe and worked to defend Christendom from the heathens instead of trying to make heathens part of Christendom. But what we cannot say about the liberals, that their hearts were in the right place, we can say with certainty about whites like Corbett. Their hearts were in the right place. They tried to convert the heathens of color. Their efforts were unsuccessful because of the colored peoples’ hatred of the light, not because of any failing on their part.

    Will I not concede any imperfections in the whites who lived and worked in the colored lands? No, I will not, because throughout Liberaldom there is a hue and cry against the whites who took up the white man’s burden. I will not join the mob of liberal Jacobins. When taken for all in all — and that is how human beings should be taken – the white man’s efforts on behalf of the colored heathens should be lauded to the skies, not condemned and covered with liberal scorn and derision.

    The liberals present themselves as the light-givers. On a daily basis they shed light on the terrible racist past of the white men who ruined the Eden-like perfection of the colored lands. In print, television, and movie the white man is depicted as the great despoiler of the noble colored people. But is this unquestioned doctrine of the liberals true? Isn’t there anyone left who can see that the liberal Emperor has no clothes on? The naked truth is this: Wherever the Christian European went – China, Africa, India, and so on – the colored heathens in those lands were shown there was something infinitely more sublime and beautiful to be found in Christianity than in their heathen faiths. What has happened since the white man left the colored lands? The natives have returned to their Egyptian night.”
    -http://www.cambriawillnotyield.blogspot.com/2012/02/symbol-and-substance-of-europe.html

    As Christ so aptly put it, (in regards to White amelioration of non-Whites, in ANY instance) ‘Let the dead bury the dead.”

    They can be nothing but what they are. Cursed spawn of a cursed race.

  12. “White guilt” is an embarassment to even people who practice it, just ask the next do-gooder you run across.

  13. Look what has happened and is happening to Whites in South Africa. South Africa allowed blacks to pour into their country. Whites tried to civilize them, included them in their society, and look what it got them, death, destruction, and genocide. Whites around the world ignore the plight of Whites in South Africa. They do not know or do not want to know is that what happens to Whites anywhere in the world happens to Whites everywhere in the world.

  14. George,

    Yep. They cannot conceive the possibility that the black could have ” the whip hand” as Enoch Powell put it.

    Do they not see a potential scenario for their own homelands in the rapid dispossession of the Afrikaner and the Boer or the Rhodesian?

    What leads them to think they are immune from the riptide of black Demographic expansion and white delegitimization?

    Could it be that they secretly believe whites are superior enough to survive? Or is it just suicide writ large?

  15. “In print, television, and movie the white man is depicted as the great despoiler of the noble colored people. But is this unquestioned doctrine of the liberals true? Isn’t there anyone left who can see that the liberal Emperor has no clothes on? ”

    Mel Gibson made a pretty solid attempt at that with “Apocalypto”.

  16. As the credits begin to roll, a quote from Edmund Burke flashes across the screen: “all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” The moral of the story is that America should have a liberal “duty to protect” foreign policy. We are guilty of “sin” unless we launch military interventions in Africa for humanitarian purposes.

    I think that line is used out of context. Good men have no duty to protect evil from evil.

  17. Its all those fuggin missionaries fault. Them using their fucking luminati links to our politicians is what stopped em from killing each other off and nig political movement here yelling itself to death, that’s what. You can always leave it to chandala jew fucking Roman Catholics who don’t know their place in society to persuade people to do irational things. Give us all this anti abortion jargon when everyone and his uncle knows that our women are not as degenrate as the shegro. India calls the groid out for what he is, adharma incarnate. No more nigger cunts and they can reincarnate into animals like they ought. The pope lovers are jumping around with em and SENDING EM HERE SINCE THE GODDAMN 50.s Sure, our nigger is no world soul but how unaware is this sick institution that it still believes with all its childish heat that everything revolves aorund it.
    That’s how niggers think.
    That’s how NIGGERS think!
    2000 years of exposure to the “flower of life”, the pangaea culture of 5 different continents and they still believe their entitled to … Oh my god thats 100% how darkies see themselves in relation to EVERYTHING. They have more in common than two halves of the same ass crack.
    They are the original NIGGER lovers/life deniers and I honestly believe they will burn together with them. No charitable anything will save them. When the economy crashes, they will get their due for having worked so hard to undermine the damn thing with their Catholic La Raza welfarenomics hucksterism and their corruption of many well standing people who were trusting enough to believe them.
    This is the lot apportioned for them, let no self respecting white man be fooled by an romantic past associations, they are fucking demons. I say let Obomber take their privilege away (and let us not give it back), they have misused it for 1000 yrs to long. When he falls on hard times let us offer him no support. Better an atheist, wifebeating oildriller than some superstitious subversive papist.

    As for south africa, totally their fault thats what you get for not clearing out the groid when you have access to racially sound labour from india and malaya. People who make you BETTER! Groids explode. Gerrymandering fucking nations for them wont stop that. Simple as that. This man could see it coming as early as the 1920s, false comfort is the only reason south africa did not. How you have fallen, son of the dawn. You will never reach the heavens again.
    That is all.

    • You are an uneducated, ignorant racist without compassion or empathy. We all are all human beings despite race. It is people like you, who hate and voice hateful things that cause violence and chaos in society. Black people have suffered enough bloodshed and oppression. Who are you to insult them?

  18. Eek, major typos and a megaupload link? If i have to rant I at should at least be awake when i do it. Sorry Virginias!

  19. Based on the facts of the movie itself,people losing their lives over the greed of oil, is sickening, seems like the bad soldiers were fellow country men,woman men & children discarded like their lives had no meaning, if I were faced with that decision I would have turned back and no explanation required, this movie “Tears of the Sun” lends to the reality, I sincerely wish for no harm to anyone, may those who want to live, make way for those who will live, P.S. ‘Soldier of thought’

  20. it is based on true events,

    just go down to sudan, nigeria, or any war torn country and you will see it happen right before your eyes,

  21. tears of the sun,

    it is based on true events that happen daily,

    just go down to sudan, nigeria, or any war torn area in africa and you will see it happen in person, that is if you can get out alive,

  22. This movie should be classed as fiction. Nigeria shouldn’t even have been mentioned because non of the facts in the movie is true and it doesn’t in anyway represent our History. I am Nigerian and I know we have never had a President Called Azuka, the Ibo Nation should have more than 100kings as they don’t have a centralized empire so there is no such thing as king of the Ibo Nation. The part of South Eastern Nigeria that shares borders with Cameroon is not even Ibo Speaking. The rebels in the War were Ibos even though they were fighting for a good cause which means the people who would have been chasing the refugees and killed the missionaries were federal Troops. And at the time the Oil rich parts of Nigeria were not on Ibo land, they were on the lands of other minority tribes like ijaw, Urhobo, itsekiri. Tribes that were almost played no role during the war.

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