At the very end of this sentiment is the fact that all movies depicting invasion should only be made if it's Alien invasion. In that way, no one's sentiment would be hurt and no one would be portrayed evil. At some point you have to ask yourself, do you want to remember history, it's atrocities, invasions, war-crimes etc and learn from it or do you want to forget all of that and be happy always?
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There's huge a difference between a WW2 documentary accurately depicting the axis and allies, and the US films of the 1980's that were all anti middle-eastern / north african propaganda of wars that never happened.
I believe the comment you are replying to is addressing the latter.
"Any kid can conquer Libya just give him a fighter plane." - Dead Kennedys, "Rambozo the Clown"
Fwiw The Battle at Lake Changjin is historical. Red Dawn isn't. Despite that I think both points do stand and there is some balance needed.
I have a feeling that the Dead Kennedys would not be in favor of editing artwork to avoid offending anyone.
There's a difference between being racist and speaking truth to power.
Jello Biafra was powerfully anti-racism, which is what this thread is about. He punched up.
I think that the point I'm trying to make is a bit different. If you do make a movie that's not a documentary and follows the traditional recipe of good vs evil, then there must be some evil that has to be portrayed. You make movies about "Mafia", then it might be the Italians, you make movies about "Cartels", might be Mexicans, make movies about "Jihadists", Afghans and so on.
At some point, a realization and acceptance that yeah, something along the lines of what's being shown happened but it's probably a bit spiced up cause it's a movie is needed. Either that or my original point i.e. make movies about Aliens exclusively. (Until their existence is proven anyways).
I agree many movies are offensive to one group or another, but maybe that means we should be more careful of offending people instead of less. Other common bad-guy groups like Muslims and Russians probably don't like being used as villains in movies; their voices just go unheard because they don't have the economic clout that the Chinese do.
And every group of "bad guys" is a little different. The enemy governments of Nazis, Japanese, Soviets, and British Imperialists are gone, those conflicts are over, and those countries are now American allies; the mafia and cartel movies tend to glorify those lifestyles; the European bad guys never faced as much racism in the USA as the Asian ones; etc.
I don't want to be the fun police... But the USA (unlike most countries) advertised itself as a multiracial immigrant country in the past 50 years, and a lot of multiracial immigrants signed on, so I guess we should be tasteful when making movies about shooting their relatives.