I had read the stories from Gaza after Israel’s so called “operation cast lead”. I had read the reports. I thought I had cried enough then not to cry again. But this film went to my heart, stirred everything up, made the tears fall and fall and here I am now, with a hollow, spooned out hole in my gut because bombs were dropped on sleeping children, helicopters rained the death and disfigurement of white phosphorous on terrified civilians huddling at a UN school for shelter… and no one is doing anything about it.Tears of Gaza lays bare the lies, the cover ups and Richard Goldstone’s moral flip flopping. It takes you into the heart of Gaza’s tormented landscape to show the truth behind craven and mendacious headlines with words that describe Israel’s slaughter as an “incursion” or “self defense”. This film shows us these truths through the luminous spirits of children. It is not to be missed!

I first heard of Tears of Gaza when Bernard Henri-Levi launched an attack against Lokkeberg and me in major newspapers throughout Europe. She and I were in touch after that and I was finally just able to get hold of the film to watch it. It is a monumentally important work. It is beautiful and painful and honest and devastating.

Vibeke Lokkeberg gives us the names, faces, and stories of three ordinary Gaza children with extraordinary spirits. We first fall in love with Yehya, a 12-year-old boy who wants to become a doctor so he can heal people who are shot by Israelis. We see him on a small motorboat, lost in the magic of childhood as he is taught to steer the boat. His beautiful eyes and brilliant smile during these moments make his tears all the harder to bear when he talks about his beloved father. The losses that follow in his life are incomprehensible and overwhelming merely to hear about.

Until you meet Amira, 14 years old, and walk through her world.

Amira is beautiful. It’s the kind of beauty that holds an ineffable pain not often seen in the young. Her life, too, is marred by death and destruction and disfigurement of her body by ammunition. She tells us that she wants to become a lawyer so she can take the Israelis to court for the crimes they’ve committed. Then, recalling her father and brothers, she admits wishing she had just “gone with them”.

Like Amira, Rasmia is far beyond her 11 years. Arabic speakers might detect things about her that non-Arabic speakers will not. This is largely because of the translation; and this is my only criticism of the film. When Rasmia goes into what seems like a waking trance, her mother tells us in Arabic that she is “imagining”. The translation says “memorizing”, which doesn’t make sense and it distracts from an important subtlety. Her mother explains that she sometimes just “imagines” things from the attacks. I suspect that most psychologists witnessing those scenes and hearing her mother’s explanation would agree that she was experiencing flashbacks and exhibiting clear signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another example where the wrong translation obscures important nuances is when Yehya is telling us about losing his father. He is, in fact, speaking in the third person: “when someone loses their father, it’s like they’ve lost the whole world” etc. But his words are translated as if in the first person: “when my father died, it’s like I lost the whole world.” The distinction might not seem important, until you realize that he cannot get the words out without breaking down when he speaks in the first person. It’s a faint distinction, but one that makes your heart break even more.

And we should all allow our hearts be broken over Gaza. It’s the least we can do. To hear these three children and ask others to hear them is the very least we can do. Vibeke Lokkeberg has given us a monumentally important record of what happened in December 2009 to January 2010; so no one can ever say “I didn’t know.”

Lest we forget, lest our tears dry or outrage subside, and lest our hearts heal before Palestine is free, I hope this film will be shown throughout the world, across university campuses, communities, organizations and living rooms. Take this not just as a review, but a call to action.

We live in an age of the superlatives as well, ironically being touted as the Age of Austerity by the state-capitalist oligarchs. But the superlative qualities of our age mark a world in decline. Consider some of our superlative achievements:

• Scientists have renamed this era the Anthropocene, to denote the unprecedented impact humans are having on the planet, an impact that is driving the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet.
• The US financial “crisis” of 2008 was the largest private sector theft of public money in history, an estimated $16 trillion, followed by an aggressive global “austerity” push that targets the poor, the middle class, and people of colour to pay for the systemic fraud that caused the crisis.
• The US income disparity gap between rich and poor is the greatest of any industrialized country.
• For the first time in US history, student debt exceeds consumer debt. Never has a young generation of Americans seen this much debt, and consequently they await a life of serfdom in the capitalist order.
• The global 2011 Billionaires List recorded a record number of billionaires and combined wealth.
• There are more slaves today than at any time in human history.
• Worldwide military spending reached a record high in 2011.

And those are just a few records.

Notice a trend?

The world is dying, and capitalists are making record profits as it dies. There are more slaves and billionaires than ever before. The military-industrial complex is the largest it has ever been.

In this context, poor and working people have been asked—well, told—to reduce their expectations for the future and for their quality of life in the present. The word of the year for 2010 was “austerity.”

The systemic fraud of 2008—a comma in the run-on sentence of capitalist exploitation—for which the poor are being asked to pony-up was not some hiccup in the benevolent functioning of capitalism: it was fraud, in an economic system predicated on fraud and massive exploitation. They stole trillions from the global poor, in particular from racialized people in the US. Now they want us to pay for their crisis.

I decided to make a documentary film about austerity, about a year and half ago, because I was perplexed by the absence of a mass rebellion against capitalism in North America, especially in the aftermath of 2008, and because I believe if we don’t stop the austerity agenda we will collectively be coerced into a neo-feudal era of heavily militarized and technologically sophisticated state capitalism. That may sound like hyperbole, but consider the trends in the statistics above and the near-complete control corporatism has over the existing political institutions.

In the US, several states have begun to repeal workers’ rights (or what’s left of them) and pass laws allowing state governments to default on state pension plans, plans already made venerable by their investments in the same marketplace now trying to destroy them.

President Obama, hailed by some liberals as the progenitor of change, has continued the same policies of economic and military imperialism as his predecessor. His top advisers upon taking office were a collection of silk-suited thugs from the very same investment-banking coterie that pulled off the heist in 2008.

One of the objectives of the capitalist Age of Austerity is to break what remains (and that’s not saying much) of organized labour, most of which exists in public sector unions. In Canada, Harper’s hostile treatment of the postal workers’ union indicates an embrace of the austerity agenda: workers’ rights, such as they are, will not be respected. Recent layoffs at Environment Canada, and the regressive agenda of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, suggest a massive evisceration of public services in Canada is on its way. Some union heads estimate as many as 30,000 civil servants may be axed.

The bankers and finance capitalists caused the crisis. Now public services such as education, health care, environmental protections, and essential infrastructure are going to pay for it. Unless, of course, we fight back.

I asked academics, activists and authors to define “austerity” and to suggest how we might fight back. The result is Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity, a feature documentary that examines the nature of capitalist crisis, and some of the places where people have confronted capitalism including Greece, the G20 summit protest in Toronto, and the exhibition of mass solidarity in Madison, Wisconsin.

In the film, Chris Hedges (author of Death of the Liberal Class) and Derrick Jensen (author of Endgame) discuss the pathological character of capitalism. Hedges describes the BP executives as “executioners” at the helm of a system that will “kill most of us” if it is not stopped. I held a conversation with the unlikely pair back in July 2010, during the BP oil spill.

York University political scientists David McNally and Leo Panitch discuss the context for the current crisis of capitalism, which Panitch calls the “first great depression of the 21st century.” McNally suggests the Age of Austerity may last for “a generation.”

I talked to a variety of radicals. Michael Hardt, the Duke University professor who co-authored Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth with Tony Negri, discusses an autonomist Marxist reading of the Great Depression and FDR. In some sense, we have to see ourselves as the crisis. We have to acknowledge that we have agency, that we can determine the outcome of this ongoing social war.

Max Haiven, a professor from Halifax, talks about the social ways in which debt narrows the radical imagination, leading to a mass forgetting of anti-capitalist movements of the past, and produces gestural and ineffective forms of resistance.

Ajamu Nangwaya, a graduate student at the University of Toronto and a former VP of CUPE Ontario, warns us not to be confused by the apparent resurgence of Keynesian economics in mainstream media discussions. The ruling class, he says, will do whatever it takes to preserve the system. The embrace of Keynesian economics by some capitalists is not an endorsement of socialism.

Queen’s University professor Richard J.F. Day talks about the long history of capitalist accumulation. He also comments on Harper’s probable agenda at the G20 summit crackdown.

I don’t want to give away the entire film here. Actually, I do (below). But I hope you will watch it and join the fight against austerity. This is not a fight that can be won through electoral politics. It requires a mass social movement, and it requires that capitalism be erased from the face of the earth forever.

Now is not the time to “restore the middle class,” the message from Big Labour; now is the time to restore human dignity and prevent the current crisis from being our last, by building an alternative to capitalism. We need a revolution, not a reformation.

It may be their crisis, but it’s our problem.

Captain America offers spectator-consumers the chance to yet again sit back and be taken for a phantasmagorical ride. The new Hollywood film is another forces of good versus the forces of evil production, where the goodest good guy is a white superhero whose scrawny body is technologically transformed into the perfect muscular male. Moral, good, manly, just, brave, caring, altruistic — all in a physical package that buckles women at the knees. He might as well be God.

Is there anything realistic about the film? Is it the American propaganda tool that the Russia media venue Russia Today (RT) has portrayed it as? Look at the comments that follow this short RT Captain America video and you see that people question Russia Today‘s motives — rejecting it as a flagrant example of ugly Americana.

Here’s one example. “Can’t anyone just enjoy a movie?” said a guy, DaveSquibbSr, who seems to display some rather hysterical patriotic fervor about how the mass media lies to the people and falsely demonizes private enterprise.

Another example: “Dear RT News: Fuck You. By the way, Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now are without a doubt anti-war movies. And the others mentioned contain anti-war messages too,” wrote Austionous, who lists his favorite video as Glen Beck’s patriotic cheer-lead The Real Story: Iraq.

The real story is that the Pentagon’s military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan — never mind Somalia, Congo, Ethiopia, Libya, Rwanda or any of the other sites of U.S. covert operations — has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1,228,000,000,000 since 2001, and the ticker is ticking, and the United States economy and all social services are in collapse. The real story is that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi people and at least 4000 US troops have died, with scores of thousands of U.S. veterans wounded and traumatized. Remember Iraq war veteran Timothy McVeigh?

But here’s the best RT Captain America comment of all, replete with the threat of violence that differs little from the threat of violence advanced by Norwegian freedom fighter Anders Behring Brievik — label and segregate, kill the multiculturalists amongst us, and purify Europe by forcibly repatriating all Moslems.

“Anyone who points at Hollywood and accuses them of doing anything other than making entertaining movies for profit,” says acircleoflight, “needs a tattoo on their forehead that says, ‘I’m too stupid to understand fiction’. And then when we have all these people properly labelled, kill them and send their meat to a starving country. Nothing that comes out of Hollywood is nonfiction. Movies based on ‘real events’ or ‘based on a true story’ are still Fiction. Its never actually what happened.” This guy or gal self-identifies as a ‘pagan’ whose “spirituality is based in logic and reason.”

And that’s a death threat against, well, against your humble correspondent. Alas, I’ll have to go into hiding now, hunker down and secure my own little heavily armed fortress in preparation for the Christian crusaders, soon to come my way, as this story gains readership.

Hmmm. I wonder if that’s what Moslem immigrants or Rwandan Hutu refugees feel like? I mean, the mass media, governments, and plenty of the common people hold these awe-fully biased and ugly stereotypes about Moslems, you know, towel-headed camel jockeys and all that, and about people of color (niggers, spicks, chinks, gooks), more generally, and every Rwandan Hutu is considered a genocidal machete-wielding savage. How did these stereotypes and mythologies of persecution become so deeply seated in the mass psychology?

What is it about multiculturalism that people find so scary? The idea that we should share? Do unto others as we want others to do unto us?

Anti-Islamic fervor is whipped up by governments, corporations and individuals to provide an excuse for state terror and rationale for weapons proliferation. Such fervor is alive and thriving in the white power economies of the U.S., Canada, England, Italy, Japan (though this is changing), and, well, Norway. When stories about the twin Oslo attacks first broke, the mass media immediately launched into their private inquisition about Islamic jihadists, grounded in nothing but speculation and fear-mongering. Russia Today was no different and just as bad as the British and U.S. press.

Your correspondent, a bit too quick to speak (several friends were quite correct about this) but also caught off guard, was stupid enough to get caught up in it, and missed the chance to say, “Hey, wait, it’s a blond-haired blue-eye white man who looks more like the Viking comic book superhero THOR… This is no Osama bin Laden recruit, so please kick your Islamophobia, and stop perpetuating war against innocent people…”

Too Stupid to Understand Fiction

It seems that Norway’s self-proclaimed savior decided to launch his own personal revolution, hoping to inspire Christian Holy War against non-white immigrants who are, in somebody’s mind, soiling the blood of virile white men and defiling their (the white man’s) virgin white women. This sounds like a Neo-Nazi screed about Aryan blood purity. In fact, he has been labelled a Nazi, and saddled with all kinds of other labels, which people and organizations — who seem to have a lot in common with Breivik — have used to distance themselves from him.

Did Breivik act alone? Did he independently flee the proverbially chicken coop of Norwegian normality and privately hatch his personal ideology and revolutionary intent? Christian purity, dirty Arabs, the imminent destruction of Israel? I don’t think so. I think there are other cells, and plenty of them, or movements, and militias, spread over Europe and North America, who are quite pleased with Breivik’s as-yet simmering revolution.

I think Breivik knows perfectly well that his ideas are embraced, and that’s what gave him the sense of entitlement to do what he did. He expects to see Europe “burn”. They are also shared by plenty of North Americans. In fact, the celebrated American Islamophobe Robert Spencer was cited 64 times in Breivik’s ‘Manifesto’. Spencer co-founded the hate group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and Jihad Watch. The latter was funded (2003) by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (Center for the Popular Study of Culture), a “conservative” group that set out to influence Hollywood and spread their ideas about freedom.

“Some of the ideas [Breivik] expressed are good, barring the violence.
Some of them are great,” Italian official Mario Borghezio reportedly told British press. Borghezio is a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. How does a guy like that defend civil liberties? It brings a whole new meaning to the words. “Christians ought not to be animals to be sacrificed,” he said. “We have to defend them.”

The xenophobic hatred of non-white people is written all over the walls of Fortress Europe and Fortress America and Fortress Canada and Fortress Israel. Who could miss it? Kill the Moslems. Kill the Libyans. Kill the Somalis. Kill the Yemenis. Kill the Iraqis and the Afghans and the Iranians. And kill every last Rwandan Hutu — the fact that they are Christian doesn’t matter, since their spirituality was void and null after they, according to the standard mythology, chopped off their own sisters’ heads. Kill the Palestinians. To justify, to win popular support, the same people who advance these racist sentiments, and generally the ones who take action on them, are the ones who secretly produce and secretly disseminate much of the supposed ‘hate’ propaganda (Kill the Christians, Kill the Americans, Kill the Jews) that is directed at their own ethnic demographic (Christians, Americans, Jews).

Hollywood plays a huge role. Films like Captain America… well, tattoo my forehead “I’m too stupid to understand fiction.”

Kill the Arabs in Sudan — another rallying cry — and arrest Omar Al-Bashir, the Arab Islamic president of Sudan: He’s committing genocide says the powerful Jewish ‘Save Darfur’ lobby, and he’s enslaving good Christians the Christians redouble. Hollywood actors and the mass media say so, it must be true. This rhetoric spews forth from think tanks and universities and ‘human rights’ agencies and from the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Empire operates in a curious manner. Take Smith College, Northampton Massachusetts, where English professors like Dr. Eric Reeves sit in their quaint offices, surrounded by Shakespeare and Milton (and by eugenics professors like Seymour Itzkoff), worshipped by starry-eyed bleeding heart liberal elite women, and they hatch political screeds on genocide informed by intelligence operatives — you know, Central Intelligence Agency types — who are fomenting the Pentagon-backed guerrilla insurgencies on the ground in those far off places like Sudan.

Harvard University’s Samantha Power has confirmed that this is our problem from hell: America has entered the age of genocide. Of course, we don’t have anything to do with it, and poor Lady Liberty has to drag her allies with her, kicking and screaming, and stepping on the tails of her gown dragged through the mud on the rocky road to freedom. Of course, we sell ‘em the humvees, missiles, tanks and fighter-bombers to get there.

The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists

What’s a guy gotta do to get a little recognition in the world? It was only a few days after his shooting spree in Oslo and the former nobody Anders Behring Breivik already had a huge Wikipedia entry with 164 references — and it’s expanding by the day. Obviously, he didn’t create it. Is this capitalism? Or education? No one has created a page for me. Not a single word!

I mean, Rwandan government agents like Tom Ndahiro, who spin the lies for President Paul Kagame, have labeled me a “notorious Tutsi genocide denier” and such praise for my work is not restricted to Rwandans. Canadian academic Dr. Gerald Caplan, who is often seen at the side of dictator Paul Kagame, has published articles deriding me and the other “genocide deniers who drink the each other’s putrid bath water.” (Seems Caplan forgot to have his work peer-reviewed: its rather hysterical.) Meles Zenawi, the dictator in Ethiopia was a bit nonplussed by my exposure of genocide there. You’d think someone would create a Wikipedia page for me.

What’s wrong with this picture? Do I have to become an elite warrior of the Christian Knights Templar? Embrace Zionism? Steal a few million diamonds from Congo and get away with it? Plagiarize the Unibomber’s manifesto and then re-enact the Crusades by massacring a bunch of kids at summer camp? Or should I dress as a soldier and have my picture taken like King Leopold II? Leopold is still celebrated in Belgium, his crimes covered up. Is this the future historical situation of Mr. Breivik — our modern day THOR?

“The recent killings in Norway were horrific,” said British rock star Steven Morrissey (former Smiths singer). “As usual in such cases, the media give the killer exactly what he wants: worldwide fame. We aren’t told the names of the people who were killed — almost as if they are not considered to be important enough, yet the media frenzy to turn the killer into a Jack The Ripper star is… repulsive. He should be un-named, not photographed, and quietly led away.”

Does the coverage around this one Norwegian guy at all remind anyone of a guy named O.J. Simpson? Like the twin World Trade towers demolitions in New York City on September 11, 2001, did the twin Breivik attacks provide the corporate media system with the perfect topic to whip up hysteria and manufacture mass distraction? The media is now turning over every rock they can find in the hunt for clues to Breivik’s madness. Imagine if they investigated the crimes of the big mining or military or pharmaceutical corporations, or the kickbacks to government officials?

Breivik’s most favorite movie was the vaingloriousy bloody Roman war flick Gladiator. No. 2 was 300, an American comic fantasy action thriller marketed by Warner Brothers. No. 3 was independent film Dogville, with Hollywood stars James Caan, John Hurt, Lauren Bacall and, especially, Nicole Kidman — who has the townspeople killed for sexually and emotionally abusing her.

Dogville is under attack. Danish director Lars Von Trier, a self-proclaimed Nazi, stated that he’s “sorry for having made it” [the film] whose machine-gun massacre at the end might have inspired Breivik’s armed assault on the little Norwegian island Utoya. While advocates of Nazism might want to look at themselves in psychotherapy, at the very least, the film Dogville is a harsh critique on American ‘society’ and there is absolutely no reason for Von Trier to apologize for making it. Why is an independent filmmaker bullied and shamed into apology? Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino applauded Dogville; does that make Tarantino culpable in mass murder? Why isn’t director George Lucas under attack for making Star Wars now that killer robotic drone technologies are deployed against innocent people all over the world?

Why isn’t Steven Spielberg under attack — if not arrested — for his alliance with the Pentagon in the war production Saving Private Ryan, for which he was awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Service by Secretary of Defense William Cohen at the Pentagon? The award honored Spielberg for making “a historic contribution to the national consciousness.” Stephen Speilberg also has the unprecedented distinction of producing mass hysteria about sharks through the one film — Jaws — responsible for demonizing sharks as ruthless killers and, in large part, for the ongoing decimation of shark species and the uncertain fate of our oceans. What kind of national consciousness does such cinematography contribute to? How is Cohen’s ‘national consciousness’ any different from the disease of nationalism?

William Cohen was Secretary of War under President William Jefferson Clinton at the height of the U.S. invasion of Central Africa. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair. Cohen has been involved at the deepest levels of secrecy and denial in, for example, intelligence, torture, and special operations.

Saving Private Ryan provokes deep psychological sentiments and emotions based in the standard constructions and discourses of nationalism, patriotism, democracy and freedom. “Ryan, I must be quick to point out,” Secretary of War Cohen disingenuously declared, “is not a recruitment promotional for the Pentagon. It speaks to us, however, about the importance of values, discipline, determination and sacrifice.”

Who is “US”? It doesn’t speak to me that way. It speaks to me of war, blood, private profits and deceptions that have ripped apart millions and millions of people’s lives, and for no good reason, and that have exterminated entire nations of people. How are Cohen’s important characteristics — values, discipline, determination and sacrifice — different from the patriotism and nationalism that the Pentagon uses to conscript and recruit young people to do its dirty work? Under the Nazi regime, all music had to ‘fit’ within certain standards defined as ‘good’ German music — and censorship was ruthless. How does that differ from the Pentagon’s approval or or rejection of films?

Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen escorts Steven Spielberg through a military honor cordon into the Pentagon (1999).

The Pentagon routinely influences the scripts and the direction of Hollywood films. Plot-lines have been changed, history altered, and scripts modified to meet the Pentagon’s approval. If the Pentagon doesn’t like the direction, plot, themes or characters of pre-production films they won’t support them, and don’t.

In keeping with the privatization of war, the Pentagon’s interests are often served by civilian firms packed with ex-military who maintain tight ties to the war room. Professional soldiers with long service records in covert and psychological operations — Navy Seals or 10th Mountain Division Rangers or Green Berets — are often hired as consultants to enhance war films.This way, the Pentagon and U.S. officials can ‘plausibly deny’ involvement in a film’s direction or production — but the links, ideologies, patriotism and emotional hooks all satisfy the ideals of the American fighting machine.

Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine who earned three purple hearts in Vietnam, has worked in Hollywood as an actor, producer, writer, and consultant, with major credits for Saving Private Ryan and Platoon. “We are fighting Islamo-fascists who will not tolerate the existence of non-Muslims — infidels — on this earth,” Dye said in a Los Angeles Times article. “These are folks who are told they cannot rest until every infidel is driven from this earth…. They aren’t people you can negotiate with.”

Dye’s consulting company is Warriors, Inc., but he works three days a week to influence mass media reportage on wars the U.S. is involved in. He is a frequent ‘independent expert’ cited in corporate media stories. Dye worked as a reporter for Soldier of Fortune magazine, and he has run his own radio program. Dye’s record in Vietnam raises questions about his involvement in illegal operations like the Phoenix Program. Later, during the Reagan administration’s terrorist covert guerrilla wars Latin America, Dye worked “reporting and training troops in guerrilla warfare techniques” in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Reagan projects in Latin America were meant to subvert democracy, institute dictatorship and further U.S. corporate interests; hundreds of thousands of people died from massacres, beheadings, dismemberment and disappearing.

Who says violence in cinematography has no connection to the real world? In Captain America we find some fascinating themes that should inspire anyone to question the motives of the corporate enterprises and the star-studded casts — Hollywood, the Pentagon, Viacom, Paramount, Walt Disney, Marvel Entertainment — that bring such phantasmagorical extravaganzas to the public’s pleasure.

Isn’t Empire the main theme of Captain America? Military superiority in a we-are-the-forces-of-good-they-are-the-forces-of-evil narrative that never threatens our sensibilities or ever makes us squirm in our fifteen-dollars-a-shot-plus-popcorn-and-soda seats? Is the film aimed at indoctrination for war and the manufacture of consent for our participation in elite military imperatives premised on private profit and power?

What about Hollywood’s presentation of ideas about the manipulation of the human body achieved by modern science through genetic engineering, pharmaceutical products, (breast implants, plastic surgery, liposuction), hormones and steroids? Are there any references to these scientific advancements?

What about the theme of patriarchal male domination and the ideologies of the sexual control of women and male supremacy? Come on, can’t anyone just sit and watch a movie?

Not Just a Soldier, a Good Man

“We’re gonna make a new breed of super-soldier,” one of the military grunts proclaims. “Stay the way you are,” the slightly mad scientist with the German accent tells the scrawny un-superized-soldier, prior to his physical transformation to glossy super-chested hero. “Not just a soldier, but a good man.”

A good man. “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn,” the as-yet-unsuperized hero says. Could be anybody from America. The mythology is that any one of us can rise to great heights if we set our minds on it. Isn’t this the great American dream?

The soldier is a good man. The goodness projected by our Captain America savior translates directly to the commonly held belief in the goodness of the average U.S. soldier who, of course, is spreading truth and democracy around the world. This is not a guy who tortures or massacres innocent people, he is a very principled and very ethical hero — like the great white American savior Jake Sully in the blockbuster 3-D emotional sensation Avatar. The projected image of the good soldier in these films maps directly onto U.S. forces deployed at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, or the heroes “defending American values” in Afghanistan through Operation Enduring Freedom. America’s soldiers are not unprincipled killers — the kind of sociopath that some people are portraying Anders Behring Breivik out to be — they are good men. Right?

Of course, Hollywood has its way with reality. Camp Lemonier is a Pentagon outpost for so-called ‘snatch-and-grab’ terrorist operations run by covert forces, in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia, with secret CIA torture centers. These illegal operations and covert guerrilla wars involve violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The U.S. backs bloody dictatorships and nasty warlords all across the region. Such facts are obscured by Hollywood and its propaganda films, aren’t they?

Survivors of U.S.-backed state-sponsored genocide in Ethiopia; the government of Meles Zenawi is committing massive atrocities against numerous indigenous tribes. (© Keith Harmon Snow, 2006)

We Take the Brain

The new Captain America film is packed with action adventures and high technology war weapons. Consider the film’s presentation of the secret weapons of the HYDRA — the Nazi deep science division presented as the ominous evil enemy. It sure looks a lot like the Pentagon’s billion dollar boondoggle the Northrup-Grumman Corporation B-2 bomber. Coincidence?

Well, in the film this stealth bomber has a different name altogether, and its not our name for the thing, its the Nazi’s name for it. Like the choice of the language that the Allied scientist speaks with — a decisively Germanic accent — the choice of the stealthy ‘flying wing’ resembling the Pentagon’s B-2 bomber is no coincidence, but an intentional choice based in the hidden history of allied war crimes of WW-II.

Modern aerospace programs and technologies had their genesis in the secret aerospace programs of the Nazi-American war machine. On April 12, 1945, having crushed the last bastion of Nazi military resistance, U.S. forces under General Dwight D. Eisenhower secured Thuringia, the heart of the Nazi secret weapons research and development programs in Germany. Eisenhower led the charge to transfer superior and futuristic Nazi weapons technologies to the United States before the weapons facilities were turned over to the allied invading Soviet army on July 4, 1945. The Soviets, of course, drew the iron curtain over Thuringia and Eastern Germany for the next 43 years (until 1989).

General Eisenhower personally oversaw the removal of futuristic aerospace ‘assets’, including the Fi 103 ‘flying bomb’ (propaganda name ‘V1′), the A4 rocket (‘V2′), and the world’s first deployable jet turbine aircraft, the Messerschmidt Me 262 (which as a fighter could attain speeds of over 800 km/h). At least five Me 262 planes were assembled under the direction of U.S. forces in control of the Messerschmidt Me 262 production factory from April to July 1945.

The biggest and most secretive catch was an intact prototype of an all-wing, single engine, single-seater jet plane, type named the Horten Ho IX or Go 229 V-3. The futuristic Northrup-Grumman Corporation ‘stealth’ bomber — the flying wing — unveiled in the United States (circa 1989) bears a striking similarity to the Nazi Go 229 V3. It is widely unknown that at least one complete Go 229 V-3 plane and a large number of finished parts of the prototype fell into U.S. hands and disappeared into supra-governmental ‘black’ programs in the secret weapons complex post WW-II.

Who ran this weapons complex? John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1952-1959. Allen Dulles ran the Central Intelligence Agency, until recently known as the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.). The Dulles brothers had ties to Nazi Germany in the 1930′s and into the war. Most interesting was the Sullivan and Cromwell — Dulles brothers’ law firm to a guy with a mustache named Adolf — one of their clients. So began the post WW-II era in secrecy and denial, the Cult of the Atom, and the mythology of the comic strip superhero, Captain America.

“While watching the trailer for this movie I spotted a number of what-if planes and tanks,” posted a guy named ‘Nick” on a specialized military technology Internet forum. “The main one is a giant Nazi flying wing bomber that looks like an overgrown Ho-229 [sic] and it was being chased by what looks like an XP-55 Ascender. There were also some Nazi armoured cars that looked rather slick and streamlined, only on screen for a few seconds so not too sure. This should be a fun summer movie to switch off the brain and enjoy!”

Allied intelligence ascertained well in advance the locations of the supreme Nazi weapons facilities, including the exact factories and their production capabilities but the Allied bombing campaign did not target the weapons complex. For example, while bombs fell in an ostensible attack on the V2 rocket production facilities near Nordhausen on April 3, 1945, the V2 centers were entirely spared: some 8,800 civilians instead died when the bombs hit the town. There was no military significance to these killings, merely eight days before the American troops arrived. This is yet another example of U.S. government war crimes that went unchallenged.

General Eisenhower personally oversaw the exfiltration of over 2000 Nazi scientists — experts in biological warfare, rocketry, munitions, intelligence and psychological operations (torture and propaganda) — to U.S. military and intelligence bases, mostly, but not exclusively, in the continental United States. This mass and secretive recruitment and exfiltration occurred under highly classified programs of the O.S.S. — and continued under its later incarnation, the Central Intelligence Agency. These O.S.S./CIA programs were called Project Paperclip and Project 63. Through the defense and intelligence establishment’s then “Operation Sunshine,” Nazis belonging to the elite ‘Gehlen Org’ — named for Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen — were exfiltrated into the CIA.

The U.S. Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) was set up early in WW-II and tasked with collecting scientific data on the level of research attained by the Germans in select technical fields and weapons — primarily, at first, concerned with the atom bomb. Some 3000 researchers and engineers wearing U.S. Army and Air Force uniforms were attached to General Patton’s Third Army solely for this purpose, and they converged en masse on the Nazi secret underground weapons complex in Thuringia after the Allied invasion.

Their slogan was: “We take the brain.”

Taranis, an unmanned combat aircraft prototype unveiled in Britain in 2010.

Taranis, designed and manufactured by Northrop Grumman with assistance from Boeing, the B-2 ‘Spirit’ bomber aircraft each averaged US$737 million in 1997 dollars ($1.01 billion today). Total procurement costs averaged $929 million per aircraft ($1.27 billion today), while the total program cost (development, engineering, testing) averaged $2.1 billion per aircraft in 1997 dollars ($2.87 billion today). In 2010, Britain’s scandal-ridden BAE Systems unveiled a new unmanned stealth bomber prototype of its own, Taranis, funded by the people of Britain to the tune of 143 million pounds.

The B-2 has been deployed in Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and in the recent illegal war against Libya, yet Hollywood films glamorize weapons of mass destruction, and they inspire young people to want to operate them, no matter the moral or ethical questions, which are never asked. Raining bombs down from the sky is as immoral as sitting in a remote office somewhere far from the actual war theatre pulling some joystick which rains UAV-deployed weaponry down on innocent men, women and children. Pakistan offers an egregious example which has only slightly scratched the surface of the impenetrable western mass media propaganda system.

The film Top Gun offers the premier example of western technological war propaganda and nationalism, completely stripped of all moral and ethical conundrums cast as another contest of good (US) versus evil (them). Captain America (Tom Cruise), to the rescue. Of course, he always gets his girl. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.

The Brain Drain

The military-entertainment complex comprises a lot more than the sleek propaganda and psychological mind-melts plastered across the big screen in such films. Often there are direct ties between current or past Pentagon or intelligence officials. For example, Captain America is a Paramount Films, Viacom Industries, Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Corp. production (the exact relations between these industrial giants are opaque and fluid).

One Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer director for some 19 years, who  directed the interests of the corporation, was former U.S. General Alexander Haig — the former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army (1973), White House chief of staff under Presidents Nixon and Ford (1973-74), Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Forces (1974-79), and secretary of state under President Reagan (1981-82). While serving MGM, Haig was also a director of the multinational defense contractor United Technologies International (UTI), the parent company of Sikorsky Helicopters, the maker of the Blackhawk choppers of the Pentagon’s Somalia propaganda film Black Hawk Down.

Other highly leveraged corporate ties proliferate. For one example, one of the directors of aerospace and defense giant GE Company, Barbara Scott Preiskel, is also a director of the Washington Post, and she is Senior Vice-President of the Motion Picture Associations of America, New York, NY. You see the Motion Pictures of America cited on every pre-preview trailer. For another example, consider that Lucille S. Salhany sits on the Hewlett Packard board of directors with Philip M. Condit, Chairman and CEO of The Boeing Company, and that Lucille S. Salhany was President of United Paramount Network (1994-1997); Chairman and Director of Fox Broadcasting (1993-1994); and Chairman of 20th Century Fox Television (1991-1993).

Directors of Viacom Corporation (the parent company of numerous other media entities) include media magnate Sumner Redstone, a 1944 Harvard University and 1947 Harvard Law School graduate who served in the “Military Intelligence Division” during World War II. ” While a student at Harvard, he was selected to join a special intelligence group whose mission was to break Japan’s high-level military and diplomatic codes. Mr. Redstone received, among other honors, two commendations from the Military Intelligence Division in recognition of his service, contribution and devotion to duty, and the Army Commendation Award. Mr. Redstone served in the Military Intelligence Division during World War II.”

Redstone’s 2010 annual compensation for Viacom was $35.3 million, while Viacom CEO received the largest annual compensation in America — $84.5 million — while Viacom’s No. 2 director received $64.7 million in 2010.

The U.S. government’s Joint Intelligence Committee, established soon after Pearl Harbor, had the dual mission of providing intelligence advice to the joint Chiefs of Staff and representing the United States in combined Military Intelligence matters with its British counterparts; they were also involved in interrogation operations (torture) against Japanese and German war prisoners. The Military Intelligence Division was also used to coordinate and implement various international ‘deception operations.’

The film Pearl Harbor only advanced nationalistic and patriotic sentiments meant to further indoctrinate and recruit warriors. Starring great white hope Ben Affleck, the 2001 production is rife with inaccuracies and devoid of any serious geopolitical context. The oversimplified plot was purely based on emotion and jingoisms. Even U.S. military historians agreed.

One of the great cover-ups of the World War II era was the U.S. government’s advance knowledge of an impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. However, it seems that U.S. taxpayers needed to be coaxed into another blood-drenched war that would claim the lives of so many aspiring Captain Americas.

But that was not the only big World War II whitewash that Hollywood has massaged for the Pentagon and its corporate allies. While the blockbuster film Schindler’s List also helped recast the hidden history of World War II, it serves other propaganda purposes — favorable to capitalism and the elites who benefit most from it.

Schindler’s List fits neatly into the narratives about the Holocaust that have become industries unto themselves. Remember the wealth that ghetto refugees carried along with them in the film? Diamonds, easily concealed: the state of Israel was born out of the blood diamonds plundered from the Congo (Africa). While the suffering of the Jews in Europe was very real, it is their ‘victim’ status that has been used and abused to shield them against all charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide being perpetrated by Israeli interests in the Congo, Angola, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana — its a long list — and the Palestinian territories. (Of course, the same ‘victim’ status has been used, falsely, by the elite Tutsi dictatorship ruling Rwanda today.) But Jewish film director Stephen Spielberg has played a major role in creating war propaganda that suits his personal preferences and private interests in real life. Exemplifying his deep anti-Arab sentimentality, Spielberg was boycotted by the Arab League for having secretly donated $1,000,000 to Israel in 2006 during the second War on Lebanon.

The ‘good versus evil’ dichotomy is often used to inculcate emotionally seated ideas about patriotism and nationalism, and to indoctrinate subjects and citizens, and this dichotomy was profoundly advanced by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals and the post-WW II Cold War propaganda.  Nuremberg and the formation of the United Nations  were nothing more than sham dress rehearsals for the victor’s justice of the international criminal tribunals on Yugoslavia (ICTY), Rwanda (ICTR), the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the International criminal Court. The fire-bombings of the city of Dresden and Nordhausan (Thuringia), and the atomic atrocities at Nagasaki and Hiroshima all warranted investigation and prosecution for war crimes. Had the American and British and Belgian and French military officials and the monopoly capitalists that backed them been tried in an international court of law by a truly international League of Nations, the world would most likely be a far different place today.

Instead, the prevailing establishment narratives about genocide — born out of the Nazi Holocaust — set the stage for the evolution of deeply manipulative and hegemonic discourses that politicized the international human rights and war crimes arenas. These politicized doctrines have transformed all reasonable definitions and applications of international ‘humanitarian’ law into tools that the most powerful nations use against their ideological, political or economic enemies. Schindler’s List quite neatly fits into the political economy of genocide and the financial and political imperatives of the Holocaust industry, and it’s no surprise to find that corporate executives from Hollywood film enterprises — like Viacom director Sheri Redstone — and are deeply connected to powerful Jewish and Zionist organizations.

And the weapons procurements, productions, proliferation and profits continue to rise.

Norway is a key partner in the ongoing and illegal “War on Terror.” Norway provides a base station (on its home turf) for the U.S. Missile Defense program intelligence and reconnaissance gathering against Russia and its neighbors. Norway is the 14th largest arms importer in the world, and a major exporter, with the highest military expenditures per capita of any country in Europe.

In 2002, Norway sent 18 F-16 fighter-bombers to support the Pentagon’s illegal ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ and the illegal coalition attacks against Afghanistan. Norwegian Armed Forces are involved today in covert ‘counterterrorism’ [read: terrorism] operations with U.S. and British Special Forces in Afghanistan: between 2001 and 2010, Norway had sent over 6938 soldiers who participated in the illegal International Security and Assistance Forces (ISAF) occupation of Afghanistan.

Norway is also part of the international coalition that attacked Libya, in contravention of international law, on March 17, 2011. Norway has six General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets, and two Lockheed Martin C-130 J-30 tactical transport aircraft, operating against Libya from an air base in Crete. By April 26, 2011, Norwegian F-16s had dropped over 200 bombs on the people of Libya.

The people of Norway are not innocent spectators to the wars their government and troops and intelligence apparatus are involved in. The anti-Arab sentiments in the country are reflected by their global position vis-a-vis the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Israel — the predominant purveyors of Empire. The Norwegian government’s recent shift to stand up against Israel’s war crimes is certainly something to watch.

Imagineering War

In 1999, the University of Southern Califonia was awarded a $42 million grant by the U.S. Army to establish the Institute for Creative Technology (ICT). The ICT “was created to combine the assets of a major research university with the creative resources of Hollywood and the game industry to advance the state-of-the-art in training and simulation.” The ICT is an Army University Affiliated Research Center (UARC). The contract is managed by the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s Simulation Training Technology Center (RDECOM STTC).

“At USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), high-tech tools and classic storytelling come together to pioneer new ways to teach and to train. Our goal is to create engaging and effective immersive experiences that shape the future of learning. With applications for leadership, and decision-making, ICT also seeks to redefine the range of skills these experiences can address.”

Sound pretty benign? Check out the page where this text appears and you will see that it revolves around U.S. military agendas. The graphics openly display soldiering and military hardware. One of the main thrusts of interactive simulations is war gaming, a billions of dollars a year industry.

The Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) has enlisted film studios and video game designers and it reflects the extensive overlap between Hollywood and the Pentagon. Officers from the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) sector of the DoD play an integral part in developing these simulations. ICT video games Full Spectrum Command and Full Spectrum Warrior use the Xbox and Sony Playstation platforms. Pac Man, Game Boy and DOOM were all used by the military as training simulation programs.

It is important to truly appreciate the subservient role that the mass media and entertainment industries play in further institutionalizing the American addiction to war and space. It is no anomaly that the Pentagon has sponsored hi-tech ‘brainstorming’ sessions with some of Hollywood’s most celebrated science fiction writers and producers. With a five-year, $45 million dollar contract with the U.S. Army, the Institute for Creative Technology in Marina del Rey (CA) has been tapping the creative genius of John Milius (co-writer: Apocalypse Now), David Ayer (writer: Training Day), Ron Cobb (creature designer for Star Wars films). Hollywood consultants are paid anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a day to dream up new high-tech military gizmos — coming to an Army near you.

It doesn’t take the brawn or brains [sic] of Captain America to figure out that this Pentagon research and development institute facilitates advanced robotic and simulation warfare systems. Drones. That is, robotic killing technologies such as Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUVs) and a whole fleet of related warfare technologies.

Early in 2002, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld added over $1 billion to the fiscal 2003 defense budget request to develop certain Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle (UAV) programs. The DOD invested more than $3 billion in UAV development, procurement and operations between 1996 and 2001; invested $2.3 billion more by 2005 and another $4.2 billion before 2009. According to the so-called UAV Roadmap produced several years ago, the UAV inventory of all the military services was expected to grow to 290 vehicles by 2010. How many are really out there now?

The deployment of drone technologies with bombing and strafing capabilities represents the most egregious American immorality and cowardice — the opposite of everything the Captain America supposedly stands for. There’s no courage involved in the war games environment where some G.I. Joe operates a joystick — hardly any different than masturbation — in some isolated control room far from the killing fields.

Contrary to the propaganda of assurance and accountability ever touted by the Obama administration, the drones are every day deployed to spy on, terrorize, strafe and bomb innocent civilians from Pakistan to Iraq to Darfur to the Mexican border of the U.S.

Farmers working in poppy fields in Balakh, Afghanistan. (© Keith Harmon Snow, 2006)

“Al Qaeda seeks to bleed us financially by drawing us into long, costly wars that also inflame anti-American sentiment,” John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s Office of Homeland Security counter-terrorism adviser. “Going forward, we will be mindful that if our nation is threatened, our best offense won’t always be deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.”

America will pursue war “in the shadows” Brennan said, “relying heavily on missile strikes from unmanned aerial drones, raids by elite special operations troops, and quiet training of local forces to pursue terrorists… No civilians are ever hurt… And by that I mean, if there are terrorists who are within an area where there are women and children or others, you know, we do not take such action that might put those innocent men, women and children in danger.”

“In the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral [civilian] death, because of the exceptional proficiency, precision, of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop,” said good soldier John Brennan, lying through his teeth. According to a British investigative journalism agency, and countless witnesses on the ground, civilians are routinely killed by drones. Brennan is a veteran CIA operative with a distinguished career in deception and death for profit.

Never explained are the direct connections between drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the poppy (opium) growers who are not on the Central Intelligence Agency’s list of approved growers. The opium trade is used to fund covert operations all over the world — to back our Captain Americas in their pursuit of freedom and truth.

In 2005,  Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld appeared in a Pentagon press conference with Marvel superaction heroes Spiderman and Captain America. The purpose of the Pentagon photo op was to launch a new domestic war propaganda program aimed at active duty troops dubbed “America Supports You.”

Under Donald Rumsfeld and his successor, the Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle sector has grown exponentially, exceeding its own expectations, and the military roles, uses, launch platforms, control rooms and payloads of UAVs — like government expenditures on research, development and acquisition — are out of sight. In 2005, tactical and theater level unmanned aircraft alone, had flown over 100,000 flight hours in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The United States, Belgium, France, Germany and Israel are the leading producers of UAVs and related weaponry.

These are the Predators and other UAV drones being deployed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon to bomb and strafe “insurgents” in remote Afghan villages, to patrol and surveil national borders in Israel and Texas, and to “stop genocide” in places like Sudan, where NATO alliance forces — especially the US, Canada, Britain and Israel — are deeply involved in perpetrating war crimes.

For example, instead of offering anything close to the truth about Sudan, the military-entertainment complex’s “Save Darfur” (a province in Sudan) narrative has been based on flagrant propaganda channeled from the Pentagon and intelligence operatives in Sudan, and onto the western English-language press, through mouthpieces like National Security Council operative John Prendergast or the Holocaust Memorial Museum or Smith College English professor Eric Reeves. The ‘Save Darfur’ and ‘Never Again’ sloganeering advances by these propagandists relies accusations (e.g. Reeves) of a “genocidal war against African people’s” ostensibly being committed by President Omar Al-Bashir, whose government is under a Pentagon ‘regime change’ attack.

May the Force Be with You

Today’s battle-fighting environments — often cast in jungles, like Apocalypse Now or Rambo or the post-apocalyptic Mad Max genre films or Predator — are awash in weaponry and mythologized storylines that destroy the links between state-sponsored terrorism and domestic violence, between war propaganda and our complicity in war crimes, environmental destruction and terrorism. The ugly truth is that the ‘universal American soldier‘ is indoctrinated to kill, and to kill ruthlessly, and is not some aberration who went astray of the pack and lost his sense of ‘goodness’.

We see this lone aberration soldier gone awry in the Rambo films, and it is most starkly personified by Marlon Brando’s caricature of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. The film is packed with references to Central Africa, culminating in the bloody death where Kurtz (Brando) exclaims, “the Horror, the horror,” right out of Joseph Conrad’s famous novel on Belgian atrocities in the Congo, Heart of Darkness.

Apocalypse Now is no anti-war film. Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) is a Special Operations assassin with the Pentagon’s Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG). Captain Willard is sent up the Mekong River to deep territory to assassinate a rogue U.S. Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who has gone ‘native’. There’s that theme of rogue U.S. commando again. In fact, MACV-SOG was responsible for covert operations, and sometimes these actually were against U.S. military — but probably against officers and soldiers who opposed the illegal Pentagon or CIA operations and had become ‘liabilities’ that needed to be ‘neutralized’.

The MACV-SOG operations supplemented a ruthless CIA ‘counterinsurgency’ program called ‘Phoenix‘ — an instrument of terror, accountable to no one, a psyop gone mad — that cut like a scalpel deep into the hearts and minds and bodies of Vietnamese civilians in violation of the Geneva Conventions and all reasonable codes of war. Tortures, assassinations, kidnappings, detention for years without trial or survival — ‘neutralizations’ of soldiers, fathers, mothers, supporters, innocent bystanders, friendly agents, entire families and entire villages, that occurred late at night after people went to bed. “Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.” And everything occurred behind the smiling faces and democratic assurances — standing up in front of the patriotic Western mass media for photo-ops — of intelligence and defense officials’ lies.

Hollywood cinematography introduced robotic technologies to the general public through the Hollywood Star Wars trilogies — everything from the 1970′s hit TV series The Six Million Dollar Man to the Schwarzennegger Terminator films. Thus we can say for certain where the language and public introduction of the new Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAV) technologies came from — language like ‘drones’, names like Predator and StrikeStar and DarkStar. These films habituated U.S. citizens to an increasingly militarized environment, the physical and social environments of every day life now characterized by rapid technological changes that are occurring at a rate far more accelerated than the rate of human adaptability, and beyond the capacity for any organized social protest.

These major Hollywood productions clearly facilitated the military objectives of “turning science fiction into fact” and it is in the context of the popularity of these films, and the hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to their production and proliferation, that we can situate the realities of the “death-and-destruction” technologies that were developed behind them. Indeed, the technologies did not appear overnight: the Hollywood Star Wars type films were the chronicles of death foretold. Drones, droids and other ‘futuristic’ robotic systems employed in war zones today include sophisticated gadetry like Robotic Vehicle Trainers and these, in turn, revolve around simulation and gaming technologies.

“The robotic vehicle trainer teaches Soldiers how to operate robots like the Talon, SWORDS and PackBot,” reads the US Army RDECOM Research Laboratory description, “using a virtual environment in the ‘America’s Army’ video game.” RDECOM is the U.S. Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command, another war-making agency that has a direct relationship to Hollywood.

Simulation centers create the means for remotely piloted killing machines to perpetrate atrocities (war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide) on innocent civilian populations in places where the Pentagon seeks to limit soldier (human) casualties.

While the text explaining what the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is supposedly about makes laudable (I’m being very sarcastic) attempts to classify their activities as civilian — there is always some civilian benefit, like the peaceful atom and the medical uses of biological weapons — there is no attempt to cover up the fact that this “university research center” is highly militarized and serves the Pentagon’s war-making agenda: it is written all over the ICT web site.

For those traumas and casualties that do occur, the survivors can try to piece themselves — and their relations with their significant others — back together and lead semi-productive lives with the support of Bill Ford — one of the ICT’s trauma recovery simulation coaches. Retired Sergeant Major and Vietnam war veteran Bill Ford is a virtual human who is “based on the personality and experiences of real soldiers and marines.”

Remember that rush of emotion that overwhelmed your body when watching the 3-D simulation of the decimation of ‘Home Tree’ in Avatar?

Hollywood, in conjunction with academic and military research institutions, has honed in on subliminal psychology and ways to more deeply impact and influence human emotion. Avatar was no progressive film, but a deeply compromised narrative with all the same old stereotypes and ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy, and contrary to commonly held public beliefs, the film helps to inculcate deeply insidious messages that actually enhance the western imperial project of Empire.

That is, Avatar facilitates conquest, and resource plunder, it does not challenge it. It does not challenge the destruction of the earth, and it facilitates the ongoing genocides of indigenous peoples, everywhere. Like Captain America, already is, or King Kong, Avatar became an industry unto itself — complete with Na’vi action superheroes, books, costumes, T-shirts, and other materialistic paraphernalia peddled by Toys R’ Us and other garbage producers.

Enter scientists like Jonathan Gratch, a member of the ICT research and development team, whose research focuses on virtual humans and computational models of emotion. He studies the relationship between cognition and emotion, the cognitive processes underlying emotional responses, and the influence of emotion on decision-making and physical behavior. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, AFOSR and RDECOM. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and AFOSR is the Air Force Office of Scientific Research — two of many amongst the most secretive military-intelligence entities on earth.

ICT’s Associate Director Dr. Stacy Marsella has lead research efforts on a number of technologies, but his most recent work includes “modelling beliefs about others (Theory of Mind) plays in multi-agent based social simulation and the design of virtual humans, software-artefacts that look like, act like and can interact with humans within virtual environments.” Doctors Gratch and Marsella’s accomplishments include development and implementation of the Pentagon requisitioned MRE/SASO warfare systems: the “Mission Rehearsal Exercise” [play MRE Movie Clip] and the Stability and Support Operations [play SASO Movie Clip] training prototypes.

ICT Associate Director Dr. Albert Rizzo’s latest project “has focused on the translation of the graphic assets from the Xbox game, Full Spectrum Warrior, into an exposure therapy application for combat-related PTSD with Iraq War veterans.” ICT director Randall Hill graduated with a bachelor of science degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point and subsequently served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army for six years with assignments in field artillery and military intelligence before getting an advanced degrees in computer sciences (artificial intelligence).

No connection between Hollywood and the Pentagon?

The Marvel Universe

The Pentagon’s public web pages — for all these agencies — are awash in public relations, greenwashing (the Pentagon is the top global environmental polluter) and propaganda (read: perception management) whitewashing their true missions, agendas and record. Hollywood sets the stage by programming the minds of entertainment consumer-spectators.

While Hollywood continues to falsify the consciousness of consumer-spectators through the bombast of 3-D film extravaganzas like Captain America, the other forms of mass media — the information overload of “news” productions, advertising and military-corporate whitewashing — are sure to help finish the job.

Walt Disney Corporation purchased Marvel Entertainment in 2009. Hollywood’s Walt Disney productions are legendary, of course, with such animation films as The Lion King, Madagascar, and Pocahontas — each with its own subliminal themes dedicated to the indoctrination of youth in service to the entrenchment of capitalist interests (values, desires, associations) at a young age.

The indoctrination of children to serve the military-entertainment complex in its operational war theaters begins at an early age. It’s not just the films. Amongst the many commodities being mass marketed by Marvel Industries are a whole line of superhero action apparel for children. You can also get your superaction hero dolls and fleece blankets and T-shirts and underwear.

That’s right, for just $16.50 you can order your superaction hero pajama tops and shorts set on line today and tuck your tiny tot into bed in his Captain America pajamas for a restful night of superhero action associations — influencing the developmental character structure at a deeply subconscious level through dreams — which translate into early childhood indoctrination for weaponry, war and patriarchy. The Lion King, for example, has a deeply anti-immigration message, this crafted over and above the more obvious racial stereotypes and patriarchal themes of male power and dominance that serve the ongoing evisceration of resources from Africa, and the depopulation that attends these. Such animation shorts are filled with mythologizing themes and images that distort the spectator-consumer’s perceptions of reality, underscoring the supposed supremacy of the white societies (the light-skinned lions) and the supposed sociopathologies of people of color (the dark-skinned lion plotting with sniveling and drooling hyenas to leave the ‘spoiled’ badlands and take the good lands).

Never mind the elderly ape with walking stick being the closest thing to a human. While the Pentagon and multinational corporations are engaged in exercises to depopulate landscapes in Africa, we have co-existent and simultaneous the production and mass consumption of racialized animation imagery of The Lion King or Madagascar — and it’s not a whole lot different with Out of Africa either, it’s just different — that inculcates the white consciousness with the un-peopled Africa. This is yet another debasing projection of savagery and bestiality onto African people — and the blotting out of indigenous tribes of East Africa in favor of the mining and tourism interests of white western capitalism, backed by the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Along with these primary western agents of disinformation come the Pentagon’s ‘humanitarian’ entourage, Hollywood actorvists like George Clooney, Mia Farrow, and Don Cheadle, our Captain Americas for Sudan, and Ben Affleck, Angelina Jolie and now Emile Hersch, our Captains America for Congo. Hollywood films that disinform consumer-spectators and whitewash the historical and contemporary realities of western military and multinational corporate interventions in Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Congo are spread around the globe through the global cinema distribution complex. These films include The Devil Came on Horseback (Darfur, Sudan); Hotel Rwanda; Black Hawk Down; The Last King of Scotland; King Kong and Blood Diamond.

In the late fall of 2005, the Hollywood film King Kong opened to sellout crowds everywhere. The high-action cinematography and special effects combined with the racy recycled story of Beauty and the Beast to bring home a walloping fortune for everyone involved. Behind the film, however, is a dark forest of conservation organizations, primatologists and public relation firms peddling billions of dollars in so-called ‘conservation’ programs for Central Africa. Behind these conservation organizations, funding them, or working with them directly, are some very interesting corporate species. As you penetrate deeper and deeper into this jungle of surprises, the landscape gets curiouser and curiouser.

The King Kong industry and Kong paraphernalia was peddled at Starbucks and Burger King, but there’s a whole jungle of Kong-related products on sale out there. The King Kong media machine pumped articles into many print magazines, including WIRED, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Turner Broadcasting (CNN/TBS/TNT) ‘scooped up’ the rights for the television network premier of King Kong from owner-producers NBC/Universal and Universal Studios Home Entertainment peddled the King Kong DVD and King Kong computer games.

Remarkably, there are many real life parallels to the characters and events in the King Kong epic. Included in these are interests connected to Universal Studios. One interesting entity cashing in on the King Kong frenzy is the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I). Behind or partnered with them are a whole troop of multinational corporations whose interest in gorilla conservation appears to be a front for the control and exploitation of Banana Republics — Rwanda, the two Congos, Uganda, Central African Republic, Gabon.

One of these secretive firms, ESRI (Earth Sciences Research Institute), has worked in the defense sector for years, initially focused on supporting defense mapping organizations and advanced terrain analysis and other cartographic military necessities for military base development. “Now as a result of Congressional mandate,” said expert John Day in Military Geospatial Technology, “technology is being deployed into a wide range of warfighter, intelligence and base support programs; and ESRI is playing a leading role in that transformation.”

At the heart of the King Kong tale is the white damsel in distress. Like the Tarzan myth, the sassy white female makes the adventure, and her sexuality is the central draw. Ann Darrow (actress Naomi Watts) makes her Kong debut in a flimsy nightgown and she closes the film in an equally seductive dancing gown. The seductress captures the imagination of the viewers, adding a titillating energy of subliminal sexual desire, but her white femininity is situated in a subordinate role, and her sexual availability is advertised most clearly when the big beast pokes at her. For the spectator-consumer, the titillating advances provoke subliminal sexual emotions.

Like Tarzan‘s Jane, Kong‘s Ann Darrow offers a metaphor for the real life femme fatales of the primate conservation community involved in the imperial enterprise of ‘conservation’ in Africa. A central character is Dian Fossey, the primatologist whose pioneering research on the mountain gorillas of Rwanda led to her murder in 1985. Another is Sigourney Weaver, the Hollywood star who played Dian Fossey in the late 1980′s Hollywood film Gorillas in the Mist. And then there is Jane Goodall, the internationally renowned chimpanzee specialist. More recent femme fatales to enter the fray are Daryl Hannah and Madison Slate.

The buck doesn’t stop there. The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) has a base in an out-of-this-world place called Walikale, in South Kivu province, Congo. The JGI has been involved with militias and land theft, and is indirectly backing extortion, war crimes and genocide in Eastern Congo.

Of course, like the place itself (Walikale), such stories appear completely off the map of establishment media reality — an so they appear as crazy as the people of color, portrayed as drooling tribal zombies, in King Kong.

Black Hawk Down

“And ah, can someone explain to me how Hollywood was dishonest with Black Hawk Down?” said DaMarlboroMan3, commenting on RT’s Captain America video. “We were there to help people and they tried to kill us and we killed a lot of them to defend ourselves. Somalia has no resources we would want unless dust becomes the next big thing on wall street.”

And, ah, DaMarlboroMan3 watches too many Hollywood movies (or smokes too much). Black Hawk Down was an outrageous war propaganda production that completely falsified the story of western occupation and plunder of Somalia. Scandalous corporate entities like Save the Children, and the deceptive spin on the Pentagon’s war machine there, were chronicled in journalist Michael Maren’s expose The Road to Hell.

The early 1990′s crises in Somalia had its roots in the invasion of Western humanitarian aid organizations that occurred steadily as big money and big relief flooded into Somalia from 1981 onward. By the mid 1980′s the aid machine had crippled the local economy and Somalia could not feed its own people.

After a furious political scramble involving Royal/Dutch Shell, Agip and other petroleum vultures, all oil concessions were granted (1989) to Conoco, Chevron, Amoco (BP) and Philips Petroleum. The Pentagon’s Operation Restore Hope was never a “humanitarian” mission: that was the cover story.

U.S. forces killed scores of thousands of Somali people — and a few Captain America wannabees were dragged through the streets to ridicule our American arrogance. The Israeli-American-Ethiopian-Ugandan mission in Somalia today is far more nasty, involving U.S. Covert Ops in war crimes qualifying the US and Israel for the International criminal Court, and the western powers are equally culpable in the massive ongoing famine. So, oil in Darfur, covert operations in Somalia? This is the new, old, ‘humanitarian’ warfare in Africa and Hollywood covers it all up.

Like the representations of the females in Avatar, in the Indiana Jones series, in The Lion King Pocahontas and the many King Kong flicks, the typical Hollywood propaganda film casts females either in weak or subservient roles, or as lusty sex-craved female fatales out to eat every good man alive. In both cases the stereotypical females are overshadowed by dominant male roles, protectors and saviors of all that is good, out to rid the world of the scourge of evil.

The White Male Savior-Slaughterer

Sigourney Weaver appears in Avatar as an older woman scientist who can hardly trot for the scenes where she appears in human form, and so she is recast as a young, nubile, sexually attractive Na’vi avatar. Weaver can’t accomplish what she wants, nor can the other non-white minorities (Latino helicopter pilot), until their dominant white male Jake Sully comes along and saves the day. The crippled Jake Sully is portrayed as an impotent soldier who, like the Six Million Dollar Man, can be made whole again through the technological transformation to an avatar. But even as a paraplegic, Jake Sully retains his white male superhero savior status and all the privileges that come with it, and this status is enhanced and reconfigured — just as Captain America is physically reconfigured — when he embodies a Na’vi, the people his occupying imperialist other-worldly corporate-dominated (earth) society has come to conquer.

Many Hollywood propaganda films promote technological utopia: science and technology are presented as a religion we should all (continue to) worship. The scrawny weakling but omnipotent moral soldier in Captain America is marvelously transformed into a spectacle of masculinity. Not only is he smart, and moral, now he is the super athletic man. In Avatar, Jake Sully goes native with the help of the futuristic technologies of the conquerors (that would be you, me, US). Here is the glorification of science, and the real-time corporate influence (aligned with Hollywood) provides the impetus behind the higher ‘moral’ purpose to save and not bomb ‘Home tree’. Weaver’s scientist character facilitates this medico-pharmaceutical-academic narrative which, translated, means biopiracy and theft of indigenous people’s traditional knowledge, intellectual property, and ways of life. Sounds a lot like genocide, but the film does not leave ANYONE with any greater awareness of the actual genocides against indigenous people’s that are happening while we sit in the theater watching the film.

The story is only slightly different in District 9. The weaponry is futuristic, to the average spectator-consumer’s eye, but the Pentagon has already created weaponry which the general public is almost totally unaware of: directed energy weapons; advanced artificial intelligence systems; nanotechnology; biological weapons; and weather as a weapon. These things don’t just appear out of the blue. District 9 is another film with a deep, dark anti-immigration message, but now the ‘illegals’ and ‘refugees’  are actual aliens from elsewhere in the universe. I saw in District 9 a depiction of a present day state, South Africa, which had fallen from black control under the unseen hand of white corporate control in the near future,” says anthropologist Dr. Enoch Page. “That white control was exemplified in that film by a white male corporate executive who superficially seemed to be a racist bungling idiot, but in exercising his racism against the aliens he got infected with their genetic material and began to morph himself into the physical form of that oppressed alien population. As the man morphs into the other he is, of course, rejected by his own who deem him crazy or at least lost in battle. Consequently, he can only gain safe haven among the oppressed and begins to assist their liberation (but only with the thought of being healed so he can return to his white wife and white life). The total completion of his metamorphosis probably will be the basis for a sequel to that film. So we are seeing in recent films venues for projecting an imagined future in which the strategy of appropriating the physical form of the oppressed becomes the vehicle for a white male hero.”

District 9 builds tension in the spectator-consumer by playing on deep-seated psychological anxieties about bodily fluids and primordial origins of existence. This tension is mapped over all the standard racial stereotyping where the whites — the forces of good — are superior, civilized, educated and rational, and they (we) must protect them (our) selves. In contradistinction, the non-whites — the mixed up crazy forces of evil fighting amongst themselves — are disgustingly irrational, violent, drug-dealing crack-addicted savages (the African warlords in the films) out to get us, or disgustingly insect-like alien prawns, whose biological material is infectious and dangerous to our society, mimicking the Africa disease narratives about ebola and malaria and HIV/AIDS spreading to the uninfected global north. “It is important [to note] that we are seeing in both these films images of formerly colonized people of color who are aiding and abetting the white invasions as fellow Americans,” says Dr. Page. “In District 9 we never see them come to the aid of the aliens. Even the raunchiest Africans engaged in the lowest of trade and behavior racially despise the aliens, while at the same time seeking to gain parts of their bodies to enhance their own sexual and physical powers. In Avatar people of color are positioned more centrally in support of the hero and defect from the cause of the invasionary force along with him but not on their own.”

Avatar went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time, grossing more than US$2.730 billion ($2.8 billion adjusted for inflation) in box-office receipts worldwide. It should be no surprise to find out that Sam Worthington (Jake Sully) also stars in Call of Duty: Black Ops a first-person shooter video game released worldwide on November 9, 2010 for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 consoles, with a separate version for Nintendo DS. Within 24 hours of going on sale, the game sold more than 7 million copies, 5.6 million in the U.S. and 1.4 million in the U.K.

Talking about immigration and plunder of resources and human trafficking, note that Marvel Entertainment director Morton Handel is also a director of American Uranium Mining and Trump Entertainment Resorts. The Trump casinos in Atlantic City exploit Mongolian students, lured into the United States through a U.S. State Department affiliated program, in hopes of experiencing the American Dream, and then forced to accept horrendous working conditions, to engage in survival sex, to be subject to rat infested living conditions and drug dealers and armed gangs. This is the trafficking and slavery side of the war on immigrants, refugees and people of color.

The film Blood Diamond also stars a muscular great white male (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a seductive white female (Jennifer Connelly) who assumes a subordinate role. Here the white savior warrior is again the savior of the other protagonist subordinates [1] first, the white female; [2] second, the African negro and freed diamond mine slave (Djimon Hounsou) who found the big diamond everybody is killed for.

Blood Diamond is packed with overt and covert racial codings that further entrench white superiority and the discourses that proclaim the need for white economic, political and military deployments to rescue/save Africa. “It’s my teekit to geet out of thees God-forsaken continent,” the white South African mercenary hero (DiCaprio) tells his soon-to-be-lover girl.

Blood Diamond appeared at precisely the same time as the diamond industry was whitewashing its bloody operations through the Harvard University-sponsored development of the Kimberley Process — another faux mechanism shielding the true agents of warfare and plunder in Africa through a hegemonic protection mechanism — conquerors policing themselves — that criminalizes anyone who cuts into the profits of the big diamond cartels.

Blood Diamond ends by informing the reader that the Kimberley Process has sorted it all out, when in reality it merely rinses the blood off the diamonds sold in western luxury boutiques. The happy Hollywood ending arrives when the freed slave succeeds in testifying at some faux international court — another euphemistic ‘United Nations’ reference — and the journalist chick (Connelly) gets her story. Both of the subordinate role (white female, freed negro slave) successes relied on the supreme white warrior savior muscle male (De Caprio) who, in the end, is presented as a reformed and moral man, a good man, a martyr.

The Captain America of the savage jungles — themes of darkness portrayed in such films as King Kong — is our Hollywood hero Tarzan, another white Marvel comic action hero of stellar repute, and a popular fixture around Hollywood since the 1950′s. Of course, every Tarzan has his seductive and easily seduced sidekick, Jane.

Tarzan and the Lion Man was set in the Ituri forest in Congo. “It has the makings of a good story,” the publisher wrote, on the book jacket of the 1934 Edgar Rice Burroughs classic. “A motion picture company in the wilds of Africa, two beautiful girls, ruthless Arabs [emphasis added], a half-maniacal scientist, a tribe of gorillas that he has taught to speak English, a coward who looks like Tarzan, and Tarzan himself.”

The whole Tarzan genre set the stage for the historical and ongoing conquest of Africa — led by the Central Intelligence Agency, the French and Belgian and Israeli (Mossad) secret service, the Pentagon and the French Foreign Legion, and the rapacious multinational corporations that have long been plundering and killing on the continent.

In this 2009 AFRICOM image screen-captured from a 'Operation Lightning Thunder' video, the Pentagon forgot to expunge the white pilot.

Hollywood and the Holocaust in Central Africa

Hotel Rwanda covers up the United State’s invasion of Central Africa. From the very first words, where the image has yet to appear and the screen is completely black, the film Hotel Rwanda sets up viewers to think a certain way about what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Here is a story about good versus evil. An ominous African voice is heard, clearly the announcer on a radio program, and he is describing the Tutsis as ‘cockrrrRRROACHES.’ The voice is black and the cataclysm unfathomable, as anyone will tell you, and the black screen underscores the evil darkness of Africa. This voice of terror returns throughout the film to haunt the innocent Tutsi refugees, on screen, and the viewers gripping their seats.

The good guys are the Tutsis, the victims of genocide. They are not killers in the movie: they are never killers. At the end of the film, when a well-attired guerrilla force is shown — the “rebels” of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) — they are rescuers. They are disciplined, organized. They keep a tidy United Nations camp safely behind their lines. They don’t kill Red Cross nurses, or orphaned children, in the film: they reconnect them to their families. They are good men — the forces of good fighting the forces of evil. The Hutus in the standard Rwanda genocide stories are always the bad guys, and they are all bad guys. Every Hutu is a genocidaire. These are Hollywood’s forces of evil.

“Speaking as an Englishman I am often appalled by the blatant propaganda that comes out of Fox News,” said randomsamno9, commenting on Russia Today’s Captain America video. “But on an equal level or perhaps even more so RT is pure propaganda… RT just spends all day bitching about the US rather than giving you actual news. Also ‘The Last King of Scotland‘ may have been a fictionalized account but that doesn’t change the fact that Amin was a real mass murderer rather than a fictional one.”

Oh really? Back in the late 1960′s the big imperialists were alarmed by Ugandan President Milton Obote’s socialist shift. Imagine the audacity of an African leader — who was supported by Israel — actually taking care of his people at the expense of foreign interests! In a new alliance with Sudan, Obote challenged the Israeli backing of southern Sudanese guerrillas from Uganda, armed by Israel to punish Sudan for backing Arabs in the Six-Day War (1967). Everywhere derided as a nasty dictator today, Obote was a truly great African leader who was saddled with false accusations of genocide and war crimes, these actually committed by his enemies.

Idi Amin Dada received training in Israel after Ugandan independence. As one of Obote’s generals, Amin maintained Israeli supply lines to the Sudanese rebels. Backed by Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli Defense attache, Amin’s army overthrew Obote in 1971 and restored relations with Israel (severed in 1967). In 1972 Israel refused Amin’s request for tanks, and so Amin expelled Israeli residents from Uganda, severed relations, and forged a pact with Libya. Well, we all know how Washington and the Israelis feel about Muammar Gaddafi — the supreme commander of the Islamic forces of evil, and so Israel and the west blockaded the Amin government, which overnight became a ‘dictatorship’ in western news reportage. Enter and the falsified narrative in Hollywood’s Last King of Scotland.

The real mass murderer is Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president for the past 25 years, but this is the Pentagon’s man. The Last King of Scotland deflects public attention away from the ongoing Acholi and other genocides committed by the Museveni dictatorship, and Museveni is far more bloodthirsty and ruthless than Idi Amin ever was. The early 2009 US-Israeli-Ugandan ‘Operation Lightning Thunder‘ was a massive military failure that led to thousands of civilian deaths in the border areas of South Sudan, northern Uganda and eastern Congo. But I am not even scratching the surface on the Museveni apparatus of terror in Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, Somalia or Congo. The prisons in Uganda are packed, the people starving, with high maternal death rates, after 25 years of “a model African success story”. All “development” aid to Uganda has been converted into weapons and war.

All of the documentary films about the Uganda/Sudan/Rwanda region — The Devil came on Horseback, Shake Hands with the Devil, Lost Boys of Sudan, Invisible Children — serve a one-sided and essentialized agenda: the advancement of Empire. Enter the Pentagon’s PR machinery — each year pumping thousands of “news” stories into the New York Times and Washington Post and National Public Radio — and the pictures of U.S. troops holding smiling African children orbuilding  schools in desert villages. Enter the great white actorvist hero Ben Affleck and the corporate sustained catastrophe in the Congo that his debonair Hollywood image and sleek Stars-and-Stripes privileges shield us from seeing.

Do western war superhero films like Captain America influence children? Exit the matrix, jump back to the most deadly conflict in the world: Congo. The western human rights nexus likes to shake its trigger-happy fingers at foreign armies, rogue militias and uncooperative governments, and the Pentagon and State Department, with the help of USAID, are quick to accuse them of everything and anything the US, NATO and Israel are also doing. Massacres, torture, mass rape, spreading land mines across the land, and, of course, child soldiers. Well, look at the image of the child soldiers below, a photo snapped by your soon-to-be-killed foreign correspondent in eastern Congo. There’s no mistaking the red-white-and-blue superhero graphic splashed across one soldier’s T-shirt, and the twelve year-old children with AK-47′s and cigarettes didn’t pick these fruits of western progress out of the trees of the King Kong forests nearby.

“The recruitment of young people to military service in African conflicts has provoked a unanimous moral outcry from the West,” writes Danish academic Dr. Kasper Hoffman. Child soldiering is by no means new or restricted to Africa, Hoffman notes, since children aged 16 can bear arms in U.S. military, and the West engages in a disingenuous hegemonic discourse where the use of child soldiers is always equated to disorder and moral corruption in Africans. But Hoffman found that child soldiers in Congo were heavily influenced by Hollywood superaction hero films.

The West likes to point its trigger-happy fingers at African conflicts, like the wars in Congo, where many child soldiers — called ‘kadogos‘ — joined militias of their own accord to defend their country against foreign invaders. The West use accusations of child soldiering, immorality, tribalism and irration spirit magic to demonize the highly organized and nationalist Mai Mai militias, and most all violence is blamed on the Mai Mai or the remnants of the Hutu Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) that fled the illegal RPA invasion in 1994. Mai Mai do not fight with any sense of purpose or morality, according to arrogant Western agents and the corporate mass media, themselves complicit in plunder and genocide in Congo — the Mai Mai worship spirit mediums and they rip out and eat the bloody hearts of their victims and they walk backwards into battle wearing bathroom fixtures on their heads (Newsweek, 1996).

Hoffman found that Mai Mai militia members fight out of a sense of pride, nationalism and a highly ethical sense of home-defense. They have seen entire villages wiped off the face of the earth by the U.S.-backed Rwandan (Kagame) and Ugandan (Museveni) troops and they know very well that clandestine cells of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) are perpetrating terrorism there. The RPA/UPDF employ ruthless and unaccountable false flag operations and pseudo operations (covert psychological operations developed by British Maj. Frank Kitson during the Mau Mau insurgency on Kenya) to disguise their origins and intent.

The Global War on _____  (please fill in the blank).

Western governments and United Nations, and the human rights, development and ‘humanitarian’ industries — the merchants of death that profit off violence — all play along with Western media reports that generally whitewash reality to exonerate Rwanda and Uganda and the corporations involved in eastern Congo (Banro, Moto Gold, DHL International, OM Group). More expedient to the mass media whitewashing of war in Congo, every Congolese Mai Mai and Hutu soldier is accused of mass rape, this offering another essentialized narrative convenient for conquest, and one that is peddled by tabloids from the New York Times to Wired to the BBC, from CNN to OPRAH to Democracy Now. Even the rape of men is excluded by the international discourse which confines all discussion about war in eastern Congo to the manipulative discourse about rape of women.

“The influence of Western action films emerges clearly in the care of the self among the kadogos Mai Mai,” reports Dr. Hoffman in The Ethics of Child Soldiering. Popular culture influences the forms of violence, slang, gestures, and body language of the militia members that re-enact the attitudes and actions of ‘freedom fighter’ heroes. They aren’t just mimicking Captain America: the kadogo internalize the deeper ethical constructs of freedom and resistance and apply them to the formation of their self and strength of purpose. The Rambo (Stallone) and Commando (Schwartzenegger) films were especially important in offering a sense of purpose and ethical direction to sustain their unending struggle.

“In these films the heroes are subject to grave injustices and are made to suffer immensely before they vanquish their enemies against all odds through the use of spectacular violence,” wrote Hoffman. “The sublime qualities of the hero such as manliness, bravery, initiative, innate sense of justice, strength, speed, power, muscularity, warrior-skills, tactical abilities, etc., insure him of victory in the end.”

Of course, the heroes in these films are the white saviors, the good men, the super-ethical-anything-in-the line-of-duty-goes-soldiers, the Captains America and Captains Norway.

Breivik in a Navy Seal type scuba diving outfit pointing an automatic weapon.

“I grew up in the 80′s and read a lot of comics — not Captain America but i know the story line,” says CasinoHijack, another commenter on the Russia Today Captain America propaganda video. “Looking back at my old comics I saw a ton of guns, violence, and every woman superhero looks like a stripper. Now that I’m older and more aware of the world we live in I see the propaganda in those comics and how it helped getting young men to fight for something they are not truly aware of. I educate kids all the time of the negative side of comics and superheros. Now I’m their super hero.”

Super heroes, super heroines. We have become saturated by media that seeks to create super duper dumbed-down spectator entertainment warfare consumer conquerors who plead ignorance, rationalize our supposed non-participation in war, and even fight back against all who suggest that we might be more culpable than we want to believe. Kill them and feed their bodies to the starving masses in Somalia…

“The military-industrial complex, contrary to initial expectations, did not fade away with the end of the Cold War,” wrote Tim Lenoir, in the excellent research paper All But War is Simulation. “It has simply reorganized itself. In fact, it is more efficiently organized than ever before. Indeed, a cynic might argue that whereas the military-industrial complex was more or less visible and identifiable during the Cold War, today it is invisibly everywhere, permeating our daily lives. The military-industrial complex has become the military-entertainment complex. The entertainment industry is both a major source of innovative ideas and technology, and the training ground for what might be called post-human warfare.”

Sadly, post-human warfare prosecuted by western military institutions and their highly armed proxy forces involve real human beings on very real battlefields. What has not evolved to match the technologies themselves are the moral and ethical standards by which these post-human battles can be seen to be inhuman, fostered by machine thinking, cold warrior killing. This is the all-too-omnipotent man that the military-entertainment complex has created — the man whose psyche is grounded in absolutes about god versus evil themselves informed by nationalistic propaganda themes based in fear, hatred, difference and the false beliefs about superiority.Nationalism, patriotism, subliminal sexuality, female sexual control, and the destruction of matriarchal power all go hand in hand, as this translates to the anchoring of authoritarian beliefs in the basic character structure of the human beings in everyday technological society.This is fascism. “‘Fascism’ is the basic emotional attitude of man (sic) in authoritarian society,” wrote Dr. Wilhelm Reich, in his potent 1933 work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, “with its machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical view of life…. It is the mechanistic mystical character of man in our times which creates fascist parties, and not vice versa.”We can name several of the most egregious manifestations of this post-human fighting man. We saw him in Avatar — no, not Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), he was the ‘good soldier’ of the Captain America variety whose goodness and humanity is projected into the consciousness of the masses by the military-entertainment complex and its video games and other industrial war-making offshoots. It is the antagonist, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the supreme destructor who takes out ‘Home Tree’ and everything else that gets in his way.

We can be sure that Quaritch will be back, more lethal than ever, along with the corporate world government Imperial earth forces — Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 are already in production and, as we have seen over and over, imperialist forces never die, they only come back to finish the job. The early (white) conquistadors to arrive in the Philippines were slaughtered after the indigenous people were abused and their goodness exhausted. Ditto the first (white) Puritans to land on Turtle Island (North America) and the first (white) settlers who became the subjects of umpteen Cowboys and Indians films.

Dances with Wolves was no radical critique of western military conquest and genocide: the narratives about ‘good’ soldier / ‘bad’ soldier, ‘good’ white man / ‘bad’ white man, and whitey-goes-native all reared their ugly heads. The white hero also saves a white woman in this film — though she too first had to undergo a transformation to native. The good-versus-evil / savior-versus-savage films all entrench racial (white) superiority and they are coexistent with the overwhelming racialized propaganda about Christians versus Pagans, Christians versus Moslems, Christians versus Arabs, Israelis versus Arabs, Jews versus Arabs, Arabs versus black Africans, civilized people versus savage others, Christianity versus Islamic Fundamentalism.

So what are the real life consequences of all this warfare gaming, warfare simulation, warfare propaganda, racial propaganda, anti-immigration propaganda, technological propaganda, and weapons proliferation?

Well, most of the actual atrocities occur out of sight of the western media, because the media corporations are directly tied to the profits and perks of the power structure and the imperial project falsifies our consciousness about victims and killers. Soldiers do what they do because they can. They can get away with it because they are taught to. Their training, their education, the dynamics of the groups they are surrounded with, the messages in the mass media, the entire process of enculturation within and from a society premised on the supposed permanence and necessity of war, conquest and private profit.

The international legal term thrown around by ‘human rights’ and ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrines is impunity. People are not being held to account for their wrong actions. Wrong actions come from wrong thinking, wrong education, wrong messages about virulence and domination and entitlement encoded in a zillion different ways in the mainstream cultures of technological civilization. Such wrong thinking infects and grows in the minds of people increasingly isolated and disconnected from their true inner nature, their loving and compassionate selves and from the earth. Every now and then somebody is called out for their white supremacy — some Bronx Catholic Seminary principal or other — but most of the racial profiling and extrajudicial executions committed by police go unchecked by the system, unnoticed by the (white) public, and the perpetrators are often enough rewarded or celebrated.

The fears and insecurities are compounded by the many forms of class warfare and structural violence that We The People are increasingly subject to. Meanwhile the very same elites producing and disseminating the disturbing propaganda — disguised as harmless entertainment — are benefiting from the manufacture of consent and the structural violence that insures their elite economic status. More and more ordinary people, all over the world, are watching as their lives and loves are being stolen from them. We can see the contradictions that surround us, and we are many.

While presenting good versus evil narratives to justify bombing the coasts of North Africa, there is little discussion of why there are so many people, mostly people of color, seeking refuge and survival in the economically advantaged countries of North America and Europe. Refugees are presented as aliens, devoid of context or agency, people who ostensibly seek to steal our jobs and steal our land and steal our sons and daughters and steal everything that we have worked so hard to build. There is little discussion or awareness of why or how the rich First World countries got so rich or came in ‘first’.

At its roots, the film engages in class warfare against the average middle and lower class spectator-consumers of the United States, and it facilitates imperialist conquest against people everywhere else, based on a hierarchical order of ethnicity that values white people and devalues people of color by degrees and categories and labels.

On immigration and refugees and displaced peoples, the military-entertainment and their corporate ‘news’ partners inculcate emotional and irrational beliefs grounded in fear, confusion, associations, falsified history, stereotypes and simplifications. The manufacture or production of ‘refugees’ and ‘displaced peoples’, or the political economy of the misery industry that feeds on them, are never examined. These things falls under the rubric of charity and philanthropy and… with all the ‘good’ things we are doing for those people over there, the least they could do is stay put and show some appreciation.

That is: “I think RT is stretching on this one” said MarcFaust. “The REAL story is the fact that it was renamed “The First Avenger” to other parts of the world because the USA is SO fucking horrible. How dare the US do whatever it takes to quell terrorism and donate billions across the world with aid… fucking Americans!”

These films distill the context and truth of the world down to nothing of value, save to perpetuate suffering and further institutionalize injustice. It is all summed up by that moment in Avatar when the white conquerors are force-marched (very politely!) onto their aerospace weapons platforms and sent back to earth sans unobtanium. The losers look for sympathy. It’s as if they expect more privileges, even as losers.

Of course, almost every Hollywood film has some brand recognition and product placement. For example, how many products do you see advertised in the ‘anti-war’ film Across the Universe? And what about product placement and brand recognition in The Matrix? How many products do you see there? Neo gets a cell phone delivered by Fed-X. But what else? Take a hard look, and then look again, and then again. How many?

So, coming to the end of this little not-so-comic tale, we can at last examine the violence perpetrated within the dominant cultures themselves — in North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Norway — the so-called thriving democracies. The psychic propaganda assault — of patriotism, nationalism, xenophobia, racial superiority, male domination, subliminal sexuality, consumerism, individuality and desire — saturates our society with irrational emotional beliefs and psychological insecurities. Fear is a driving force, and testosterone its sidekick. These are the effects inculcated by the propaganda films of the military-entertainment complex.

When the story of the Oslo massacres first broke, mass media outlets of all stripes, including Russia Today (“Oslo-Terrorist-Norway-Jihadist“), were quick to broadcast the typical western fear-mongering propaganda about Islamic jihad.

Naturally, the global assault on our consciousness, where everything Islam is suspect, where Israel is above reproach, has not spared Norway. Not every Jew is a victim, and many are perpetrators. Not every Christian is a fundamentalist, and many are. Not every Hutu is a genocidaire; many Tutsis are. Not every Tutsi is a victim; many Hutus are.

Of course, the killing sprees perpetrated by individuals are no different then those perpetrated on the battlefield. In one case the mass murder is sanctioned by society, and in the other case society is victimized by it.

You get what you pay for. We get what we pay for. Perhaps that’s why we have more killing, more bloodshed, more conquest, more rape, more white supremacy of the Anders Breivik and Tim McVeigh variety. These men are products of the societies in which they lived. Both men apparently believed themselves to be superheroes, called to rid their societies of the scourge of evil, to assault a tyrannical federal government out of control, and both brought other innocent human lives to a definitive end.

And so we have Timothy McVeigh, who appears to be a fine example of what our society teaches people they can do. Norwegian nationalist Anders Behring Breivik — now described as an aberration, a Christian fanatic, a psycho, fascism behind a mask of morality — appears to be another. McVeigh might have been part of a government conspiracy; he claimed to be a martyr in defense of U.S. government tyranny, but he was a Gulf War veteran socialized by our permanent warfare society and he probably suffered from serious post-war traumatic stress disorder. Breivik saw himself as a martyr who would spark a revolution, “a real European hero”, “the savior of Christianity” and “the greatest defender of cultural-conservatism in Europe since 1950,” and he called for a patriarchal revival. The two men held some similar beliefs. They are very much not alone in their fanaticism. They are Captains America, by any other names.

Make Love, Not War

Why did Anders Breivik target the young people? Vulnerability, for one: they were an easy target and the most vulnerable to attack. He targeted them for political currency: they symbolized multiculturalism and waved flags calling for Palestinian liberation and truth and equality. If I had any heroes in this story, it would be these kids. They didn’t do anything wrong. Were these kids naive? I don’t think so. They stood up for what they believed is right, and good, and just. They believed in working for a better world. I guess they believed in love, and advocated for it. They had something going for them: the bluebird of consciousness.

I mean, just look at these kids — really look at them — and weep.

Some of the younger victims of the Breivik massacre in Oslo, Norway, 2011.

And if you can’t weep, then you are moving too fast, watching too many Hollywood movies, drinking too much coffee, consuming too much New York Times or Economist, chasing after some addiction or other, caught up in meaninglessness, in denial, suffering from collective amnesia or the mass psychology of fascism, and stuck.

Stuck. Are you stuck?

These could be your friends, or your kids. They are not just someone else’s kids, they are now part of our collective responsibility to wake up and stop the violence. To show compassion and tolerance, to sacrifice and to share, to organize for the betterment of all. There’s plenty of information out there on how this needs to be done. What is lacking is the courage and the initiative. What is needed is love, more love, and more love.

Gosh, I can’t think of a single Hollywood movie where love is the motivation for superheroism. We see plenty of love nonsense in the Hollywood war films, white male white female protagonists fall in love, blah blah blah, and in sit-com films like City of Angels or Beyond the Universe, films that ostensibly have nothing to do with war, blah blah blah, but where do we ever get propaganda that peddles love? Where is our U.S. Government Department of Peace? Why isn’t the Dalai Lama speaking out for state-sanctioned acts of love in Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan, achieved through an immediate U.S. military withdrawal?

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a man masturbating with an American flag – forever.  That is at least part of the message that I took away from Captain America: The First Avenger.¹ The US is that unique superpower that will never fall, and as evidence for such a position withers, the way that the history of such a power is presented can make all the difference in the remaining number of true believers.

The film is set during the final years of World War II, when the US was kicking Nazi ass and preparing to become captain-in-chief of the post-war planet.  In the 21st century, Nazis are incredibly useful storytelling tools.  They were white, so you don’t have to worry about those annoying charges of racism and the hard work of checking for privilege in the script writing.  They’re the nearest there is to a consensus when it comes to identifying real-life bad guys (so you don’t have to worry about alienating too many potential customers), whereas every murderous rampage since has been morally murky and not suited to superhero simplifications.  And for an increasingly large majority of people, they are not known by memory, and can thus be embodied with whatever evil or comical characteristics suit the occasion (and of the minority who do remember, not too many go to summer blockbusters). If the country has been waging war in the name of peace since before we can remember, why shouldn’t we think that it will extend at least that far again into the future, if not indefinitely?

Whilst we’ve been continually retelling the story of our ‘finest hour,’ however, the world has, in fact, changed.  Domestic dollars no longer provide enough of the monetary expansion needed, and while the proportion of the global population mired in poverty has scarcely changed (thanks to decades of neoliberalism and economy crushing depressions), there are still more opportunities abroad than in 1945.  Just as the gangrenous News Of The World was severed by Murdoch, the filmmakers have cut out a lot of the overt pig-headed chauvinism embodied in a character who is so laughably named (aside from the occasional “there’s flags in MY future” comments; i.e., the American flag; i.e., the American nation).  The script makes fun of cheesy wartime bond-selling efforts.  It doesn’t mention the dictator Mussolini or his military even when a significant part of the plot takes place in 1943 Italy, separating that group of potential ticket holders from the “real” villains, the Nazis (a trick employed with more sophistication in the forward-thinking 1943 Humphrey Bogart film, Sahara).² The story of German defector Abraham Erskine, an anti-Hitler scientist who develops the “super soldier” serum but is then immediately and unfortunately assassinated out of the rest of the series, is retained.

A Frenchman is given one line, and looked at funny for saying it in French.  Unlike the actual army, Captain America’s handpicked team is integrated, yet the Nazis are apparently so well documented that the white supremacist nature of their threat is never even mentioned, lest we notice the glaring contradiction of Allied powers with legal systematic racism and centuries-old empires fighting for freedom.  In fact, since the real baddies of the film are not Nazis but a weird fictional cult who don’t think the Nazis can manage the job, Germans are further assured that their money is welcome.  At one point an English soldier says “Mind the gap” for no logical reason, purely for the amusement of American viewers, but hell, those limeys should be happy that they were even bloody well included.

Which brings us to the English love interest, patronisingly dolled-up for the modern era with a feisty right hook and some military knowledge.  Despite such skills she, of course, falls for the muscleman in the stupid rubbery outfit and does her best to support him in his serious manly tasks.  Like their involvement in American conflicts since at least the first Gulf War, the point of the UK soldier in this case is to serve as a fig-leaf for international co-operation.  No matter the size of the deployment, they are generally presented as enough proof that the US is not the testosterone-fueled lone ranger serial killer that it secretly fears itself to be, and the adventures can continue.  It is important to show that not only was the US the big dog of power even way back then (bigger than it actually was, extending the imaginary future), but that it was viewed and admired as such by select foreigners.  Despite the desire of Churchill to involve the US in the war in the early years, that was a matter of practicality, not worship.  At the time many English people viewed the US in the way Westerners view more recently freed colonies today: a quaint little pseudo-country, which can be tolerated as long as it doesn’t get too ambitious.  You see, arrogance in declining imperial nations takes a generation or two to even begin to subside (as the US is now learning). But never mind accuracy — here, England is the lapdog. England has always been the lapdog.

Several other myths are dragged out of our grandparents age to serve the current agenda.  America is the humble little shit who believes in justice and tries his best, then through ingenuity and new technology improves his situation and clambers to the top of the heap, where he deserves to be.  Having gotten there, with many jealously still picking on him, he turns the other cheek and saves them in glorious fashion.  Our enemies, the Islamo-/fascists, have the same destructive technology as us, but cannot be trusted to be responsible with it (whether super soldier serum or nuclear weapons).  When Captain America saves New York from a suicidal plane by taking it down early and sacrificing himself, you can practically hear the writers soapboxing: this world of fictional history is around us today!  September 11th is a one-dimensional tale of good versus evil and could have been prevented had we realised it in time!  We don’t need to worry about the details and complexity that surround us or about our role in terrorism, because superheroes fight bad guys and always win!  Just in case this isn’t obvious enough, the Captain is then frozen in ice and wakes up in the present day — in New York.

Yes, the character was created in 1941, and we should make some allowances for the prejudices and viewpoints of the day.  Yes, Captain America is sent to the future to set up the next Marvel film, The Avengers (also laughably named. It would more suit an un-American group. Al-Avengers perhaps.)  No, the observations made here were not necessarily the goals of the people involved.  But that does not mean that the film is incapable of unwittingly pushing certain agendas or fitting certain convenient narratives.  If you want to prolong an empire, keeping up the confidence of its inhabitants will ensure that they continue to work hard for it.  The subheading for the film, character accuracy aside, should not be The First Avenger  but The First Shots.  It was during the mid-1940′s that the United States went for global domination while it had the chance, setting up the UN Security Council, IMF and World Bank to work in its favour³, and dropping nukes to tell the USSR to back off.  The makers of this film are both desperate to return to this time of glory and reshape it to make Americans feel good today.  When both the past and present are distorted, the future becomes an unnerving blur.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), a film by Marvel Studios/Paramount Pictures. Starring Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Hugo Weaving. Directed by Joe Johnston.
2. See part of the impassioned speech that seeks to draw a distinction between wartime Germany and Italy here
3. George Monbiot, How to Stop America, New Statesman, 9th June 2003

The documentary follows the exploits of climate activists in the UK during the run up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009, giving an unprecedented insight into the passion and motives of those who risk arrest in the name of environmental justice. Focusing on six different individuals within the movement, filmmaker Emily James submerged herself in the networks of Climate Camp and Plane Stupid over the period of a year to document their clandestine activities. The result is a roving, humorous and motivating account of the tireless energy that sees mostly young, twenty-something protesters close down banks, prevent airport expansion, and blockade polluting factories.

One of the film’s undoubted stars, Marina Pepper — a charismatic, middle-aged woman from Brighton who always carries a tea pot to demonstrations to provide refreshments for activists and the police – summed up the spirit of civil disobedience from the first opening shots. “I’m a domestic extremist”, she says. Asked what that means, she says: “You would have to ask Special Branch. I’m considered extreme because I’ve gone well beyond recycling and walking my kids to school. I don’t mind putting my body in the way, and I don’t mind being arrested.” Later in the film, Marina is seen with other protestors outside the Vestas factory on the Isle of Wight, attempting to prevent the wind turbine company from closure back in 2009 – until the activists were unceremoniously evicted by police after four months of living in the middle of a roundabout.

Does It Do Any Good?

In one moment, asked by the camera if “all of this does any good?”, Marina struggles for a painfully long time to formulate an answer. “I think you can’t do nothing”, she eventually says. “That wouldn’t have done any good. One of the problems is if people realise there’s a problem and they think they can’t do anything, that’s so depressing, that’s suicidally depressing, that is roll-over-and-die depressing. But if you think you can make a difference, by putting your body in the way, then that’s empowering. So you are actually taking back control of your life, even though all of those decisions are taken by politicians over there. So, yes, it has done good.” In a Q&A with the film’s director after the screening, we were told that Marina had been evicted from a guerrilla garden project in a disused local school (converted into a sustainable allotment to prevent it being demolished for housing) that very morning.

It is a theme that is explored throughout the documentary; does civil disobedience on behalf of a nebulous, intangible goal of saving the planet do any good in the face of formidable corporate and state power? Or are the climate activists who break the law on behalf of a greater good too idealistic, impractical and naive to believe that the world can be changed through the defiance of a relatively few crusading individuals? The film’s answer is made clear in its portrayal of the creativity, street savviness and organisational ability of those who take part in protest stunts and demonstrations.

At the Camp for Climate Action held in South London during the summer of 2009, for example, activists are filmed sitting in a circle as they plan a secretive direct action at a certain unmentionable bank. Batteries are taken out of mobile phones to prevent the watching police, perched on a high rise crane in the corner of the field, from listening in. The next morning, cameras run alongside protesters as they successfully blockade the Royal Bank of Scotland in Central London by locking themselves to the entrance, while other “arrestables” (the term given to those willing to break the law) superglue themselves to the bank’s trading floor. The intention, according to organisers, was to transform RBS into the “Royal Bank of Sustainability” and force it to stop investing in fossil fuel projects – hence the banners unfurled outside that read “RBS: Under New Ownership” and  “Ethical Renovation in Progress”.

Another protest filmed in action was the infamous ‘Great Climate Swoop’ of October 2009. Unlike the more covert missions, the attempted siege of Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power station was advertised online beforehand and responded to by many hundreds of protestors across the country. Although the plans for a people-led takeover of the plant were foiled by a massive police presence and mass arrests on the day, the success of organising the event through twitter and other websites – as well as the success of generating widespread media coverage, however biased – remains a testament to the kind of non-hierarchical, grassroots organising that has come to define informal protest movements worldwide.

‘I hope I Can Add Something Positive’

Against the charges of impracticality or unrealistic expectations that are often levelled against activists, the film is peppered throughout with snappy quotes by the different protestors that shed light on their motivations. Ellie, a Cambridge University student who is filmed chaining herself to the home of ex-Business Secretary Peter Mandelson during one suffragette-style protest, says at one point: “Mass civil disobedience is necessary when the law is unjust… the damage [polluting industries] are causing is a billion times worse.” Rowan, another young protester who was filmed closing down a coal power station before getting arrested, says: “Of course it’s futile, but you have to have to hope… you never know if you will win or lose.” Or as another activist simply put it, a campaigner for Plane Stupid who moved house to a noisy village called Sipson that would have been obliterated if a third runway was built at Heathrow airport; “When my life is over, I hope I can add something positive, rather than just take something negative away”.

The documentary culminates at Copenhagen in December 2009 when government ministers gathered for the pivotal UN climate talks. Rather than focusing on NGO pressure groups and negotiations within the conference halls of the summit, the scene of action becomes a legalised squat north of the city where teams of activists have formed the so-called Bike Bloc. The plan, as widely advertised beforehand through the internet, was to utilise the hundreds of abandoned bicycles in Denmark’s capital and transform them into a protest cavalry – a “machine of creative resistance” that could join the thousands of international activists who intended to shut down the UN conference for a day and transform it into a ‘People’s Summit for Climate Justice’.

What happened at the Reclaim Power! action on December 16th is now well known; a colossal Danish police pepper-sprayed crowds outside the conference centre, beat up many of the frontline demonstrators with small clubs, arrested hundreds of people on the street and captured most of the Bike Bloc protesters before they even set off. But the film’s footage manages to capture the spirit of resilience and self-belief that characterised the activist groups in Copenhagen, despite the failure of world leaders to produce any binding commitment to tackle climate change. One protestor describes the atmosphere inside the cages where hundreds of protestors were interned for the day; it was like an international collaboration, he says, in which everyone sang each others’ chants of solidarity and defiance in different languages against the authoritarian policing.

By the end of the film, you could say that ‘Just Do It’ has a fairly clear political message. As the film’s director herself admitted; “There was interest [from broadcasters] if I was going to be cynical about the subject matter. But these people are heroes. Yes, it’s a sympathetic portrait. But everything I make is propaganda, so fuck it.” Before the credits roll at the end, you are reminded that the UK energy company E.ON cancelled plans to build a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth; plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport were scrapped by the government; and Danish courts eventually ruled that the detention of nearly 2,000 protesters during the UN climate summit was illegal. Protest tactics work, is the implication. Or in Marina’s final words: “There’s more to life than what you shop”.

• The film opens on 15th July at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, London, and then tours cinemas in the UK throughout the summer. Check out the website for international screenings.

This is a game / I’m your specimen

— Sly Stone

Lately, it seems, Hollywood has been drilling deep for the bottom of the barrel of mediocrity. The official consensus goes: at the turn of the millennium, a new medium seized the hearts of today’s youth, operating at a level and speed unlike anything ever before, and this medium effectively wiped clean the slate of existing templates, rendering everything before obsolete, setting new paradigms for all other media forms, whether the news, sitcoms, dramas, even movies. To keep up, then, rival packaging understandably becomes glossier, less engaging, more entertaining, and certainly absolved of all content which might make unfair demands on the fragmentary, flickering intellect of the average 21st century consumer.

So of no surprise should it be that this past weekend’s big release, Bad Teacher (Sony), affords nothing of value to any film goer with interests above the carnal and caustic lusts of the stereotypical teenager. [Plot is revealed below -- Eds]

Elizabeth Halsey (played by Cameron Diaz) is a sharp-mouthed seventh-grade English teacher at a Cook County public middle school, plagued by a mission to achieve the barest minimum in the classroom. She’s comfortable coming to school routinely stoned or wet, leaving the kids nourished on a daily movie run. The world is plotted against her, it also seems, as her latest drive to get breast implants was derailed for financial reasons. Her students are at best disposable twerps underserving of love or respect: when one brings in home-baked cookies on the first day of class, she spits them out. At a PTA conference, she solicits bribes from parents, even guaranteeing one of her daughter: “She will get an A—or your money back.” At a student’s home, she steals a glass dolphin.

And yet through all she finds time to square against a nemesis, built from the start as a good-natured, exemplary, however hyper-energized teacher across the hall who remains ever suspicious of Elizabeth’s antics, much of her information coming from kids bullied into confessing all they know, one even threatened with points deduction for not answering sufficiently—perhaps a long march from Abu Ghraib? Before long, in stumbles an accidental character, substitute teacher Scott Delacorte (played by Justin Timberlake), tasked to spice up a script not terribly surplus in content and character.

Nevertheless it’s classic Hollywood:

Cat fight—Check

Love Triangle—Check

Casual Racism—Check

Faux Narrative Arc—Check

Aspirationalist Tendencies—Check

Cheesy Romantic Ending Utterly Unrelated To Plot—Check

But there’s a lesson of pressing urgency, for Elizabeth acknowledges her decision to teach was made for “all the right reasons”; namely, “shorter hours, summers off, no accountability.” During conversation with a gym teacher, as both contemplate their middling realities, he asks her: “What went wrong in your life that you ended up educating children?” And she answers: “Maybe I was a bad person in another life.” This is the set narrative until one night she learns of the annual bonus granted the teacher with highest performing students on the state standardized test, a whopping $5700. And this switches her drive, turning overnight from slothful, irresponsible, indifferent bum into fascist/dictator/super-mean teacher, amping up the cruelty for the glory of the bonus, to make the down payment on the boob job.

“Things are about to change around here,” Elizabeth announces to her students the morning after. “Recess is over!” And to ring this message home, she slams dodgeballs into the faces and bodies of students who miss questions on a pop quiz. When test time approaches and her students don’t seem enough prepared, she uses sex and drugs to deceive a test official, steals a copy of the test, and shows no remorse when later exposed—getting the official to fall on his sword through sexual blackmail.

Recently, Ms. Diaz spoke of the motivation for playing this character. “By the time I got to the end of the script I realized I didn’t have to redeem her, and that was so refreshing.” Timberlake seemed inspired along the same lines: “It’s not often a comedy like this comes along where every single character can kind of get away without being redeeming at all.”

Of course their artistic choices must be respected, but in a politically volatile period, when public school teachers are struggling to survive amidst the indefatigable attacks of liberal and hard-Right charter zealots, the decision to play teachers with no redeeming value could be strikingly insensitive, if not downright idiotic. And never mind this movie is rated R, meaning many likely to see it are parents with kids in schools. Yet both seem too smart to give critics the upper hand, Ms. Diaz declaring recently, “I am as public as education gets,” and Timberlake opining, “We have to figure out a way to pay teachers more. … The teachers we actually learned more from taught us life lessons more than trigonometry. They have such a huge responsibility and are under-appreciated and underpaid.”

It’s a delicate tension between good and bad, fiction and reality, two trifling hours in a dark theatre and a looping soundtrack of denigration from the powerful and prestigious, blaming you for all the ills of society. Watch closely, and Diaz’s character seems eerily cribbed from a classic Michelle Rhee diatribe—yes, the failed former chancellor of DC Public Schools who reckoned herself Superwoman and loved to brag of the thousands of teachers fired during her three-year reign.

Last September 2010 when the propaganda documentary Waiting for “Superman” premiered, Rhee was welcomed onto Oprah’s couch as a “warrior woman for our side!” and she took up the audience in sweeping ecstasy, telling the tale of a teacher “in our district who over a decade’s span would be AWOL, she wouldn’t come in for days at a time, and the kids would be left without a teacher, and then finally she started falling asleep in class.” Rhee decided to terminate her, but the teacher grieved it and was only suspended, “and then when she came back she was in a parent’s meeting and swore at them, called them bad names.” And only after 10 years was the sleepy, foul-tongued, union-backed teacher finally terminated. Only a few months prior, Rhee was desperately defending the mass firing of teachers, a defining feature of her tenure: “I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school.”

This would be Elizabeth Halsey, who’s passed out for most of class period, who smokes weed in front of her seventh-grade students, assuring them “it’s medicinal,” who seems built without any moral or ethical strand, a cartoon, caricature character, absolutely fiction, flat in true cinematic terms, hopelessly irredeemable, yet in control of over 20 students on any given day.

This wouldn’t fall under what Norman Mailer called the “sinister edge of serious film on a large screen in a dark theater.” So it’s much too easy to conclude the movie is banal, trite, silly, and useless, to dump its memories and images into a dustbin, irredeemably trash and filth; but to interpret Bad Teacher so simplistically would mark a general ignorance of the role Hollywood films play in our society, as teaching machines—educating all, young and old, with rapturing graphics, bawdy humor, gory scenes, shoddy plots, and captivating suspense thrillers which almost always spill outside of the theaters onto the main streets of everyday life and even into the living rooms and bedrooms of society.

Films, therefore, however different from legislations, ordinances, or publications, take form equally as message apparatuses, merely entering the same room through different doors. And within this context, certain meanings resonate higher in the public sphere than others. Certain registers count, leaving others devalued. In this instance, the notion that most public school teachers are reckless bums living lavishly off the hard work of parents, enjoying “shorter hours, summers off, no accountability,” comes just as genuinely rendered as the latest chest-pounding drivel drips of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie or billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates or non-educator entrepreneur Geoffrey Canada.

Elizabeth lies, cheats, steals to get the bonus, and no critique of the corporate sensibility creeping into public education, which drives senseless competition among public servants identified as educators—nothing but the craven desire for cheap chuckles registers. Public schools, in this film, are shunned as unregulated, abuse-ridden, chaotic environments, and the writers and director wouldn’t bat an eye defending their work as an apolitical representation of the absurd.

The formula, they know, needs no reinventing—smash language, sex, drugs and conflict together, and an eager public seats at the ready, waiting to lap it all up. After three days, a strong $31,000,000 debut—second place, behind the animated Cars 2.

James Baldwin worried in 1959 what was becoming of his native land. “We cannot possibly expect, and should not desire, that the great bulk of the populace embark on a mental and spiritual voyage for which very few people are equipped and which even fewer have survived,” he wrote. “What we are distressed about, and should be, when we speak of the state of mass culture … is the overwhelming torpor and bewilderment of the people.”

But our world, Baldwin knew, runs on supply and demand, and absence of demand doesn’t nullify supply. At a time when corporate CEOs have stooped in the public consciousness lower than drug dealers and politicians, no recent film, save for Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2, takes a parodic lens to their chicanery. Whether or not the overwhelming polity thinks public school teachers have lost their touch and have at long last become unnecessary burdens on society fails to count in this chain, and Baldwin knew why: “The people who run the mass media and those who consume it are really in the same boat. They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need.”

Maybe Sony Pictures Studios wouldn’t mind refunding my $7.50—no popcorns.

SPOILER ALERT! I reveal the ending of “Blow Out,” so if you haven’t seen it and intend to, you might want to stop reading now.

Travolta plays Jack, a sound technician who serendipitously records an auto accident which turns out to be the murder of the governor of Pennsylvania and  potential presidential candidate. Jack rescues Sally (Nancy Allen) from the crash scene and the story follows their efforts to interest the authorities in the evidence they have, the conspiracy/cover-up they are met with and their own fated investigation as they battle against the political operative/murderer Burke, played by John Lithgow. The film is set in Philadelphia against the backdrop of a splashy patriotic ain’t-we-great “Liberty Days” celebration.

Jack and Sally represent marginal members of the American working class, motivated chiefly by guilt and trying to redeem themselves. The fact that they feel guilt is in stark contrast to the powers that be in the movie or to America’s real political, financial and military elite who would find it unfathomable to redeem themselves because they would never imagine that they’ve done anything wrong –  except, perhaps, not made enough money or not bombed enough countries.

Jack and Sally are pitted against Burke who is no mere private eye gone bad. No, Burke has superior knowledge of surveillance, wiretapping, the staging of “accidents” and various ways to kill people. It’s never made explicit in the movie but I take Burke as some kind of ex (?) government agent, probably a CIA assassin. He is a one man death squad who ties up the “loose ends” and engages in false flag murders of complete strangers to cover up the murder he really wants to commit. The powerful and privileged are protected at all costs.

The greatness of “Blow Out” is due to the contrast between what America thinks itself to be versus what it actually is. In the movie, as in real life, while the people are having an Old Glory-gasmic celebration of the America they think they live in — freedom, democracy, the light unto the world — in reality, in the  underbelly of the nation, the real work is being done by people like Burke, who murder innocent people right and left and get away with it, violating every law and premise the nation was supposedly founded on — except murder and theft are exactly what it was founded on. The “Liberty Days” revelers whoop it up in mirage America, the America that never was or is always just out of reach, just one more election away, celebrating fake freedom (the one that doesn’t know it’s chained up because it never moves) and fake democracy (the one where we’re supposed to be eternally grateful to vote for one of the twin heads, Republican or Democrat, of the capitalist freak.)

“Blow Out’s” roof top climax, played out beneath the exploding fireworks of “Liberty Days,” is one of the most memorable scenes in all of film. Travolta’s character Jack does everything in his power to do the right thing but he and Sally are ultimately destroyed, Sally physically and Jack, more pertinent to everyday life in America, mentally, socially, emotionally and spiritually. When Jack tries to be an honest, altruistic full participant in society, when he becomes the most vital and self-actualized, and the least little bit effective (a hero for the working class, as opposed to Navy SEAL death squad heroes for the ruling class), America promptly destroys him. Jack lives in trickle-down America where evil, not wealth, trickles down and ruins many a small life. “Blow Out” is a great and terrible Greek-like tragedy because Jack gets the person killed that he  risked his own life to initially save.

It was actually the audiences, not the critics, who best understood “Blow Out.” The critics were too cowardly and unclassconscious to acknowledge the truth of a film that took on the Great Satan, they could only speak of De Palma’s technical brilliance. But the audiences — they understood in a visceral way, the ending smacked them in the mouth, the ending said all is not well here, their hopes and dreams and notions of justice crushed, innocence laid waste (as represented by Sally), the mockery of the “promise” of America and all the lies told to children every day in every school. Audiences recoiled at seeing themselves as the mindless “Liberty Days” revelers instead of the heroic resisters like Jack and Sally — they understood that they betray the founding icons every day — by never taking a risk to overthrow the illegitimate ruling class — even as they celebrate those icons.

On the roof top in “Blow Out,” on a raw revelatory monumentally sad Independence Day night, the flags wave, the fireworks explode and the cheers rise while, out of sight and under the din, another innocent person is anonymously killed for the American ruling class. That’s the American creation story, by God: the good don’t triumph and there is no justice. America wrecks the world, America moves on — and it all so easily escapes the notice of the revelers. America doesn’t pay, America doesn’t make amends, so get used to it, red man, black man, yellow man, sand man. And if every once in a blue moon the serfs get hit and bellyache, “Why do they hate us!” — and the masters go on a ten-year murder tantrum across the earth — well, for Wall Street, the Pentagon and the corrupt politicians who successfully run on racism and warmongering, well, it’s all good. In fact, it’s a bonanza. Let a thousand Blackwaters bloom. That’s your American revolution, that’s your gift to the world.

De Palma took much more heat for his 2007 film “Redacted” than he did from the 30-year-old “Blow Out” even though the latter will probably go down many years from now as the most consummate film critique of America. (“Redacted” was based on the true story of Abeer Hamza, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl who was gang-raped and murdered in her home by American soldiers. The troops also murdered her mother, father and 6-year-old sister. Just a little slice of life in America’s nonstop unconstitutional wars which weak-ass liberals insist that their hero Obama continue. Yes, liberals support the gang-rape of children and mass murder — see how easy it is to be Fox News when your Dumbocratic targets don’t, in fact, have any principles except getting their unprincipled man elected?)

The one faulty thing about “Blow Out” is that John Lithgow’s character is presented as a rogue operative whereas the lawlessness and murderousness that he symbolizes have always been US government policy, though, unlike today’s world, they used to be officially denied and decried. Also of note: Lithgow’s character is cut loose in the end by his superiors as opposed to, say, the way Obama moved heaven and earth to get CIA agent Raymond Davis, accused of murdering two Pakistanis, out of a jail in Pakistan and back to America.

Another divergence between “Blow Out” and the present concerns the idea of conspiracy. In “Blow Out” there is an all-encompassing successful conspiracy. But that was so then (Reagan) and this is now (Obama). And what’s different now is that the constitutional scholar/shredder Obama has normalized his predecessors’ crimes: undeclared wars, torture, indefinite detention and extra-judicial assassination (including of American citizens) are now openly defended and celebrated. When you can openly get away with these crimes and more, when there is no effective opposition to anything you do, what need is there for a conspiracy?

Now that I’ve given you my bleak interpretation of Brian De Palma’s bleak vision of (bleeping) America, let me cheer you up. I’m no comedian but I do know a few jokes.

Did you hear the one about the country that got its pride back after ten years by summarily executing a 54-year-old dialysis patient? Booyah! You don’t think that’s funny?  Well there’s lots of college students, who were only ten years old at the time when the pride was lost, who think it’s a riot… Tomorrow belongs to them and they are well prepared — look at all the American flags apparently stashed in their dorms, ready for any Old Glory-gasmic celebration that comes along…

What about the one where a government walks into a bar and says give me billions of dollars each year to fight a terrorist boogeyman and then, when the same government has the opportunity to easily capture the terrorist and question him about his worldwide links to other terrorists, and put him in handcuffs and frog-march him into court for months on end and demystify him — but, instead, chooses to immediately gun him down and silence him, thus insuring his martyrdom…? You heard that one too? You’re so hip, you must watch a lot of TV!

OK, what about the killing of the terrorist in Abbottabad, Pakistan and the 24-hour aftermath where, in Washington (District of Costellobad), the White House took back the tale of the bloodthirsty fiend shot dead in a fire fight while cowardly using one of his wives as a human shield in his luxurious mansion while his impoverished followers freeze their jihadis off in caves? You don’t think that’s funny? You know, you’re a tough crowd, so let’s just call it a night before I start heckling you back.

Just go out and get the Criterion Collection’s recently released “Blow Out” on Blu-ray or a double disc DVD containing lengthy interviews with Brian De Palma and Nancy Allen, De Palma’s 1967 feature “Murder a la Mod,” a booklet and many other extras.

Count William lounges in decadent repose upon a red velvet couch, dressed all in black and adorned with a rapier that shines as bright as the light of his intellect.

- from the concept for Counts of the Netherworld

Like more than a few things these days, this movie review is Ayn Rand’s fault. There I was, waiting for American: The Bill Hicks Story to roll, reflecting on the howling reviews of Atlas Shrugged: Part I. Sure, that cinematic train wreck was a pompous, barn-side target, but savaging idiotic pop culture and herdthink is what Bill Hicks did best, serving up flaming contempt for fevered egos. It’s not hard to imagine, had he lived, ten raucous minutes on “Who is John Galt?” American is a fine chronicle told by those closest to Hicks, contemplative and with engaging visuals and rare footage.

This documentary is aided by the passage of time, so it may not be fair to compare it to 1994′s Totally Bill Hicks, which was worthy but sullied by the murkiness surrounding Hicks being censored on television. Few were fooled by the shallow posturing which didn’t deserve inclusion in that film. However, when Letterman hosted Hicks’ mother in 2009, offering a profuse, heartfelt apology and a full-show discussion on a Friday night, the most contentious chapter was closed and Bill Hicks’ life can be recounted in a more settled manner.

Except it’s still a gobsmacked political nightmare in America. Since Hicks’ passing, America has continued to devolve under the lash of billionaires, speculators, fundamentalists, and their various tools; think the Four Horsemen roaring through a meth-and-champagne bender. American is a good film for those who know Bill’s material well or those seeing him for the first time, showing the contours of his life and the space in which he operated. This documentary breaks new ground in offering a better feel for Bill Hicks as a person.

Briefly, the career: His several recordings, including the superlatives Arizona Bay and Rant In E-Minor, are each at least seventeen years old, but refuse to tarnish. Largely unknown in America during his lifetime (this Yank writer discovered him a few years after his death), he found welcoming audiences in Canada, England, and Australia. Easily one of the greatest cult figures in American culture, Bill Hicks is Generation X’s lost Lenny Bruce. He left the scene having earned his peerage among George Carlin and Richard Pryor, and could possibly have unseated Bruce himself had his show Counts of the Netherworld reached production. Bill Hicks tackled scathing social commentary at a time when stand-up comedy had exhausted its early 1980′s renaissance and was fitted for a gaudy white jumpsuit. (Patton Oswalt on comedy audiences’ input circa 1990: “When you gonna smash some fruit?”) He died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at age 32. These facts are well-known.

Where American excels is by supplying the ground-level view of these events, an unsentimental but often enthusiastic narration. While lacking the pop of continuous green room anecdotes or blazing Betty Ford Center collapses, the arc of Hicks’ life emerges without pretense (excepting his love life but, to be fair, that wasn’t his claim to fame). An early talent and vigorous iconoclast with an awkward home life, he roamed the continent alone in his white Chevette, chasing down a comedic vision, suffered lapses and setbacks, his star still deservedly rising when the curtain fell too early. We see his growth through much experimentation and the realization of “inner voice equals outer voice equals greatness.” Of course several hundred stops at places like Adolf’s Comedy Bunker in Idaho were required.

Hicks’ comedic edge isn’t blunted in this re-telling, but gains depth through how much he valued his friends and in a simple exchange with his mom, a few weeks before he passed. Over the course of time, Mary Hicks would sometimes find him on the back deck, sitting in a lounge chair in his preferred solitude. On that day she asked him, “Bill, do you want to be alone?” and he replied “Mom, who really wants to be alone?”

Despite “We’re a virus with shoes” and “People suck and that’s my contention,” Bill Hicks had courage against the void and to the end held to his motto of “Love, laughter, and truth.” That’s more than we can say for another cult figure, who was happy to dip into Social Security and Medicare when laissez-faire objectivism sprang a leak. Hicks fans haven’t had to confront hypocrisy from their man, but luckily for Randroids John Galt’s dick “has many heads, so all these little demon piglets can nuzzle up and suckle all at once… Put that big scaly pecker down your gullet!”

No American movie captures with greater poignancy the total moral bankruptcy of American society and the death of the American soul. In this bleak new world, there is no life outside of work. Nothing matters except one’s career and getting ahead at work.

In this inhuman and soulless landscape, the most mindless and heartless rise to the top. Those who still have a conscience, sink to the bottom.

Ryan, played to perfection by Clooney, is incessantly airborne, and actually spends more days in the air then he does at home. Indeed, home for him has in fact become the act of flying itself. At one point in the film, Ryan is asked where he is from, to which he responds while pointing down at the airplane, “I’m from here.” He has become a man without an identity, and bereft of a human soul. He has also become, although one would never be able to guess it by his suave demeanor and his ever-present smile, a cold-blooded killer, an assassin, and a heartless murderer of his fellow Americans. Yet he is proud of what he has accomplished, and is quite happy and content with his life.

Ryan’s apartment in Omaha, where his company is based, is a metaphor for contemporary American society: Empty, barren, sterile, loveless, and enveloped in a terrifying shroud of loneliness and silence. Indeed, his apartment has even less furniture than the hotel rooms he regularly stays in.

On the surface, our protagonist appears to be quite a likeable fellow, which adds considerable depth to Clooney’s diabolically masterful performance. Equally impressive are Vera Farmiga, who plays Alex Goran, and Anna Kendrick, who plays Natalie Keener.

Alex and Ryan first meet in a hotel bar, where the two engage in a kind of capitalist strip poker, both whipping out their wallets and throwing their elite cards on the table: The Hilton Honors Card, the Hertz Gold Card, elite credit cards for racking up miles, credit cards for those with only the finest credit. They are, in the words of Alex, “both turned on by elite status.”

As it turns out, Alex is even more soulless than Ryan, and her treatment of him ultimately tests his belief in his unfeeling and self-absorbed philosophy. Which brings us to a critical motif of Up in the Air: How romantic relationships can profoundly mirror how Americans are treated at work. Since workers can be sacked at a moment’s notice, and without cause, why not dismiss one’s lover with a text message?

In Ryan’s company, which is exclusively devoted to the firing of Americans, arguments abound, not over the morality of the heartless act, but rather, over how the firings should be done. Newcomer Natalie proposes that the firings be done electronically over a computer screen. This rouses the resentment of Ryan, who delights in incessantly flying all over the country carrying out his solemn duty of lopping off heads for the plutocracy.

Natalie has graduated at the top of her class from Cornell. In a world where everything is upside down, and where the “best and the brightest” are all too often the most brainwashed and the most reactionary, it is only fitting that she should, upon graduation, take a job firing people for a living. Natalie initially appears even more cold-blooded and icy than Ryan, but a series of events will unfold which will cause her to question this rather dubious form of employment.

In this barren wasteland, where both national and local communities have disintegrated and all but disappeared, absolutely nothing matters except getting ahead at work. If a worker at Ryan’s company were to speak out against the practice of mass firings, would it not be they who would then be fired? And would it not be they who would then be plunged from the ranks of the assassins to the ranks of their victims? With the working class destroyed, and the middle class under a ruthless and devastating assault, one is either in the ranks of the master or with the ranks of the slave.

As dictated by the underlying mores of 21st Century American society, Ryan, Natalie, and Alex all view themselves, and are undoubtedly viewed by a great many others, as “winners.” What matters is that they have great salaries, drive nice cars, stay in fancy hotels, and eat in expensive restaurants. What they have had to give up to get these things is irrelevant. They are all warriors and survivors, but they are also mindless soulless automatons, who will blindly obey any order to get ahead at work.

Advancing one’s career is no longer a means to an end to do good, but rather, has become an end until itself. Ryan, Natalie, and Alex are all proud of what they have accomplished. At the temple of selfishness where they worship, there is no shame, only joy in the blood monies that they have earned, and the material possessions which they have accumulated. This is particularly true of Alex, who proves to be the greatest assassin of them all.

When Ryan goes to a family wedding, we see how estranged he has become from those who were perhaps once close to him. Work has usurped the position once held by the family. Ryan’s life mission as a crusader for capital has caused him to reject, and to teach others to reject, meaningful long lasting relationships. Humans have become disposable commodities, but it is in this atomized landscape of inhumanity that he has come to feel most free.

Ryan feels absolutely no remorse or sympathy for the thousands of Americans he has fired and continues to fire. He is too busy dreaming of his infantile goal of being just one of seven people to have reached ten million miles.

At one point in the film, Ryan’s boss, who could be the very devil himself, and who delights in sadistically watching his henchmen sacking humiliated Americans over a computer monitor, tells the entire staff of corporate lackeys how horrible things are. Virtually ever sector of the economy is in the dumps: Housing is dead, manufacturing is dead. Never before in the history of the country have things been this bad. This is great news he informs his gladiators. The worse the economy gets, the better things are for us! The vultures of capital are gorging themselves.

Up In the Air vividly depicts the horrors of the new post New Deal America, and the war of all against all which has followed. With the nation deindustrialized, and the ruling class waging a ruthless and unprecedented war against its own people, massive numbers of Americans are being plunged into slavery. After the apocalypse, which has all but obliterated even the cultural fabric itself, little remains but the cockroaches.

Directed by Jason Reitman; written by Mr. Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the novel by Walter Kirn; director of photography, Eric Steelberg; edited by Dana E. Glauberman; music by Rolfe Kent; production designer, Steve Saklad; produced by Ivan Reitman, Jason Reitman, Daniel Dubiecki and Jeffrey Clifford; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.

WITH: George Clooney (Ryan Bingham), Vera Farmiga (Alex Goran), Anna Kendrick (Natalie Keener), Danny McBride (Jim Miller), Jason Bateman (Craig Gregory), Melanie Lynskey (Julie Bingham), Amy Morton (Kara Bingham), Sam Elliott (Maynard Finch), J. K. Simmons (Bob), Zach Galifianakis (Steve) and Chris Lowell (Kevin).

The Idiot Cycle
Written and Directed by Emmanuelle Schick Garcia
JPS Films (2009, 96 mins)
Screenings: Showtimes
The film can be rented for 4.99 € ($7 USD) at JPS

Authors William Engdahl and Shiv Chopra appear in Emmanuelle Schick Garcia’s powerful film, The Idiot Cycle: What you aren’t being told about cancer. Both writers provide detailed evidence of a corporate-government conspiracy to adulterate the food and water supply with dangerous substances linked to a host of illnesses. The Case Against Fluoride, a book using hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, provides more evidence. In David Gumpert’s Raw Milk Revolution, we get a peek at the US government’s war on the natural dairy industry.

Looking at six companies, Dow Chemical, BASF, Bayer, Dupont, Astrazeneca (Syngenta), and Monsanto, Idiot Cycle exposes corporate-government collusion in the release of carcinogenic chemicals, but also reveals how some of the same chemical companies then profit from treating cancer. It’s a cycle only an idiot would tolerate. Going further, much of the film then addresses genetically modified food and its potentially disastrous effect on health and the environment.

Before making the film, Garcia and her team spent three years on research, and it shows. The film is chock full of disturbing facts. How many people know, for example, which synthetic chemical will cause more cancer than any others? Or that only 5-10% of all cancers are genetically inherited? Or that testicular cancer in young men has increased 50% in every industrial country? In 2002, the film asserts, the top ten drug companies made more money than the top 490 wealthiest US companies combined. At $1,600 a month for cancer-treatment, we can see why it’s called Big Pharma.

Important tidbits like these make the film a must-see. But the filmmaker shows real courage when she then includes the connection with genetically modified foods. It is with this additional component that a global conspiracy more fully comes into focus.

Idiot Cycle interviews world renowned scientists Arpad Pusztai, Eric-Gilles Seralini and Shiv Chopra, two of whom suffered job loss and all of whom endured campaigns to smear their professional reputations. In the GM debate, getting the message out about hazards to human health and the environment can cost you your career.

Silencing Negative Findings of Independent Scientists

1. Arpad Pusztai

Arpad Pusztai is no doubt the most famous scientist in the film. He first blew the whistle in 1998 on the hazards of GM crops, costing him his job at Rowett Research Institute in Scotland. Having studied biotechnology for 35 years, Pusztai had well earned the title as the world’s leading expert in this highly specialized field. In 1995, he won a three-year, $1.5 million contract from the UK government to establish a testing methodology for regulators when assessing the safety of GM crops.

This marked the world’s first independent study of GM food safety, according to Engdahl. He interviewed Pusztai in 2007 for his book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. Engdahl notes that Pusztai “was fully certain the study would confirm the safety of GM foods.” His team used potatoes modified by Monsanto to produce an insecticide. Writes Engdahl:

The rats fed for more than 110 days on a diet of GM potatoes had marked changes to their development. They were significantly smaller in size and body weight than ordinary potato-fed control rats in the same experiment. More alarming, however, was the fact that the GMO rats showed markedly smaller liver and heart sizes, and demonstrated weaker immune systems. The most alarming finding from Pusztai’s laboratory tests, however, was the markedly smaller brain size of GMO-fed rats compared with normal potato-fed rats.

When he reported his findings on national television, excluding the smaller brain size info for fear it would induce mass panic, he also added that he wouldn’t eat GM foods. For two days, the Institute applauded and supported him, even issuing a press release clarifying that his concerns were based on “ a range of carefully controlled studies.”

But then the firestorm hit. President Bill Clinton contacted Prime Minister Tony Blair, who then contacted Pusztai’s boss at the Institute. Within two days, he was fired, along with his wife, another respected researcher at Rowett. Then began a mass media campaign to discredit him and his work, as revealed by UK journalist, Andrew Rowell. The Pusztais were gagged from defending Arpad under threat of losing their pensions.

In Idiot Cycle, Pusztai called it “criminal” that GM crops have been foisted on the world without full and complete safety studies, especially in light of preliminary studies showing serious potential harm.

2. Eric-Gilles Seralini

The next most famous scientist in the GM debate, arguably, is Eric-Gilles Seralini, whose ground-breaking studies we covered here. Seralini has also been vilified by the biotech community. In The Idiot Cycle, he describes the battle that he endured to publicize Monsanto’s blood test results of rats that had eaten GM corn for three months. Once the information was made public, independent scientists could then review Monsanto’s “safe” finding.

Normally, two years of testing is the “gold standard” in the scientific community. Seralini called it “absurd” that only three months of testing allowed the GM corn to be approved in over a dozen nations. Any reputable scientist would agree. Upon reviewing Monsanto’s raw data, he and his team found, among other problems, liver damage and physiological changes into a pre-diabetic condition among the rats which had eaten Monsanto’s GM corn. And that’s just from three months of eating such food.

The rate of diabetes in the U.S. has nearly doubled since GM foods were secretly foisted on us in 1996. Today, 26 million people have it and another 79 million are pre-diabetic, according to new estimates released in January. These figures include those actually diagnosed with the disease, plus an estimate of those who have diabetes but are undiagnosed. If we look at just the “diagnosed” numbers over the last three decades (which is less than the actual number who have diabetes), we see that diabetes has tripled since 1980:

Many believe that the prevalence of GM corn and GM sugarbeets used as sweeteners in processed foods (such as high fructose corn syrup) is a leading contributing factor to the spike in diabetes. Actos, made by Takeda Pharmaceutical, and Avandia, made by GlaxoSmithKline, reportedly treat Type II diabetes, and both increase the risk of heart failure – in one study by 72%.

3. Shiv Chopra

Canada Health whistleblower, Shiv Chopra, who authored Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower, explains the genesis of the misanthropic aims of these chemical companies and their government protectors. Beginning 50-60 years ago, he says in the film, chemicals began playing a major part in agriculture. “On the one hand, they’re contaminating people’s food, and they do damage. Then they come back with chemicals to treat them.”

Chopra was eventually fired from Health Canada, along with two others, for “insubordination” because they refused to authorize (among other food processes) the long-term use of antibiotics and GM hormones in food-producing animals, given their questionable safety. In particular, he adamantly refused to authorize rBST, a genetically modified bovine growth hormone created by Monsanto and Eli Lilly to stimulate milk production in dairy cows. Studies show that large percentages of cows develop lameness and mastitis from the GM hormone.

In Corrupt to the Core, we learn that one of the other “food processes” they objected to was feeding BSE-infested slaughterhouse waste to meat and milk animals. BSE, more popularly known as mad cow disease, gives humans the lethal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Chopra makes a significant contribution to human health when he discusses his Five Pillars of Food Safety:

“The source of food-borne diseases during approximately the last 50 years is reported to originate from indiscriminate application of the following five substances in food production: hormones, antibiotics, slaughterhouse wastes, genetically modified organisms and pesticides.”

In the book and in Idiot Cycle, he charges that use of these substances violates the Food and Drug Act of both the U.S. and Canada. Because the first three are banned in the European Union, the US and Canada cannot ship beef to the EU. This issue, incidentally, continues to be debated at the World Trade Organization.

4. Andres Carrasco

Though not in the film, another globally recognized scientist in the biotech world is Andres Carrasco. He and his team from Argentina and Paraguay found that Monsanto’s Roundup causes birth defects in frogs and chickens. “The findings in the lab are compatible with malformations observed in humans exposed to glyphosate during pregnancy,” he told GMWatch. In 2009, he was threatened at his lab, and in 2010 physically attacked by local police and the hired hands of a wealthy GM rice grower.

Contaminating the Natural Food Supply

GM crops contaminate natural plants, converting ownership to the patent holder under twisted, but recognized, legal logic. Idiot Cycle stresses this as a deliberate move toward complete control of the world’s food supply. It’s no idle accusation. GeneWatch UK and Greenpeace have documented over 300 contaminations through July 2010. Genetic contamination of natural plants is vast and ongoing and, until recently, courts have repeatedly penalized the farmer victimized by such contamination.

Many have heard of Percy Schmeiser’s battle with Monsanto that resulted in a pyrrhic victory for the farmer. Unaware his crops had been contaminated with transgenes, he reused the seeds. Monsanto sued, but this time, after a long and expensive litigation process, the Canadian Supreme Court backed Schmeiser and ordered Monsanto to pay for the clean up of his fields. Though not in the final release of Idiot Cycle, he does appear in the bonus clips.

An 84-page report by the Center for Food Safety published in 2005 details cases like these and others. In 2008, Vanity Fair’s Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele also posted an in-depth investigation, providing more details of farmers being victimized by contamination and then being successfully sued by Monsanto. The CFS report also describes cases where farmers bought GM seeds third hand, signing no agreement about their use or reuse. This happened to Tennessee farmer, Kem Ralph, who is also featured in The Idiot Cycle.

In court, Monsanto presented an agreement which bore his forged signature. Judge Rodney Sippel, a former Monsanto attorney, awarded judgment for Monsanto in the amount of $2.9 million. CFS documents evidence of Monsanto presenting forged signatures in court. “Forging farmers’ signatures on Technology Agreements is called ‘common’ by seed dealers. Nearly one in 10 of Monsanto’s lawsuits involve such forgeries.”

In the film we learn that Judge Sippel in Kem Ralph’s case sat on ten other lawsuits involving Monsanto, corruptly refusing to recuse himself. In all of those cases, Monsanto won.

We also find such conflicts of interest on the U.S. Supreme Court with the ethically challenged Clarence Thomas, a former Monsanto attorney. In 2001, he wrote the high court decision allowing biotech companies to patent GM seeds. Thomas also corruptly refused to recuse himself from Monsanto v Geertson Seed, which allowed the USDA to impose a partial deregulation of GM alfalfa last June. (This January, the USDA completely deregulated GM alfalfa, even removing the requirement for buffer zones.) Plus, Thomas’ new sidekick on the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, defended Monsanto’s right to contaminate natural alfalfa crops when she served as Solicitor General arguing against Geertson.

But not all judges work for the biotech industry.

After Bayer CropScience contaminated a third of the US rice supply in 2006, it found itself facing 6,000 lawsuits. In addition to cases it has already lost or settled, each under $2 million, Bayer now faces a whopping $380 million lawsuit from Riceland Foods in a trial currently underway in Arkansas. Stuttgart Daily Leader has been covering the trial, with articles posted February 22, 2/24, 2/25, 2/28, March 4, March 8 and March 10.

Cases like these are what is surely behind a recent decision by the world’s largest seed company to modify its Technology Stewardship Agreement wherein Monsanto has shifted all liability arising from transgenic crops onto farmers who plant their seeds. How’s that for taking corporate immorality to new depths?

This falls in line nicely with a recent Supreme Court decision that protects vaccine makers from liability. In the film, one European regulator, Willy de Greef, informs us that GM crops only account for 5% of all biotechnology. Most drugs and vaccines contain GMOs. A host of deleterious effects from vaccines has been documented, including narcolepsy, sterility, mental retardation, paralysis, autism, and death. “First do no harm” has succumbed to “Make the most money.”

Given the USDA’s recent deregulation of GM alfalfa, and the certainty that natural alfalfa will become contaminated, Monsanto’s attempt to shirk responsibility with this no-liability clause “appears to be unconscionable” said environmental attorney Anthony Patchett in a video interview with Morph City. Patchett formerly worked as Assistant Head Deputy District Attorney of Environmental Crimes, OSHA Division.

That decision to deregulate a perennial plant with tiny seeds that can travel miles can be seen as nothing other than a deliberate intent to contaminate North American natural alfalfa. Biotech firms will gain ownership of contaminated fields. This will also destroy the organic meat and dairy industry in the United States, and likely Canada, as well. Biotech and chemical firms, along with all growers who chemically douse their crops, will profit enormously from the collapse of the untainted food industry. The question is, can we survive their victory?

Sick Food, Dangerous Vaccines & Eugenics

Controlling the world’s food supply is one thing. As evidence mounts that biotech crops sicken us, this assures increased profits for biotech companies that develop drugs to treat us. But some wonder if GM crops will do more than sicken us. We have preliminary findings that GM crops cause sterility in test animals, and that Roundup is associated with spontaneous abortions in farm animals fed wheatlage under weed management using glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup. Coupling this with globalist concern with rising population, how can we avoid questioning if biotechnology is being used as a weapon?

In the film, author William Engdahl talks about his research for Seeds of Destruction. He briefly describes the relationship between depopulationists like the Rockefellers and IG Farben, the company that gassed millions to death in Nazi Germany and which also killed thousands more when testing drugs and vaccines on captured populations. For these crimes against humanity, after the war, IG Farben was broken into its original constituent companies. Bayer, BASF and Hoechst (now Aventis) eventually expanded into plant genetics. (In 2002, Bayer acquired Aventis.)

Engdahl writes: “The Rockefeller-I.G. Farben relationship went back to 1927, around the same time the Rockefeller Foundation began heavily funding German eugenics research.” Paraphrasing from his book, he explains:

‘The Project’ I referred to is the project of the Rockefeller Foundation and powerful financial interests since the 1920’s to use eugenics, later renamed genetics, to justify creation of a genetically-engineered Master Race. Hitler and the Nazis called it the Ayran Master Race.

The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet. Now this is getting really intriguing. The same Rockefeller Foundation created the pseudo-science discipline of molecular biology in their relentless pursuit of reducing human life down to the ‘defining gene sequence’ which, they hoped, could then be modified in order to change human traits at will. Hitler’s eugenics scientists, many of whom were quietly brought to the United States after the War to continue their biological eugenics research, laid much of the groundwork of genetic engineering of various life forms, much of it supported openly until well into the Third Reich by Rockefeller Foundation generous grants.

Seeds of Destruction provides a wealth of detailed evidence of “the hidden agenda of genetic manipulation.” It’s clear from having read the book why Garcia chose to interview him for her film. Seeds highlights bioweaponry, in the form of pandemics, and the drugs used to treat them. The recent Swine flu hype was a repeat of the Avian flu engineered just a few years before. Vaccines used in Nicaragua and the Phillipines actually sterilized people. Spermicidal corn was developed for Mexico.

Though Rockefeller et al may be looking to improve human genetics for traits they deem more desirable in their club, “you ain’t in it.” Neither am I; nor is 93% of humanity, if the Georgia Guidestones are any indication of what the ideal population level should be. What we get, instead, are toxic foods, grown or raised on toxic farms, and further treated and processed in toxic factories. Then we’re prescribed toxic drugs that cause side effects which hasten our death. Nice racket.

Bayer and BASF aren’t alone. Monsanto also has a history of “incidental” ecocide and genocide by the creation and deployment of Agent Orange (dioxin), PCBs, DDT, rBST, and the neurotoxin, Aspartame.

Biotech and pharmaceutical companies have also produced several hundred “pharma crops” – food that contains vaccines against a variety of diseases. Never mind that such a plan fails to consider appropriate dosage specific to a person’s age, weight and medical condition. The same failure applies to fluoride treated water, which lowers intelligence, causes skeletal and dental fluorosis, and induces depression and lethargy. (See the 2010 book, The Case Against Fluoride and this short 30-minute film, Professional Perspectives on Water Fluoridation.)

Criminalizing Nature

One final element briefly mentioned in the film plays heavily into this growing body of evidence supporting the idea of a global conspiracy to harm humanity for profit. The Idiot Cycle mentions Iraq Order 81, which bans the saving of seeds. Iraqi farmers must buy GM seeds, every year. This outrageous law is a direct attack on the right to food freedom: the evolutionary imperative of humans to eat whatever natural foods their bodies crave.

Beyond that, a string of national and international laws, rules, and regulations criminalize natural plants. This will give the pharmaceutical industry complete control of health care, since the world’s best medicines come from plants. For example, prior to 2000, Monsanto began genetically modifying marijuana, and last November, the US Drug Enforcement Agency proposed a subtle rule change that will decriminalize synthetic THC for use as a medicine, reports Pencil Method, a medical marijuana news site:

1. “Paul Armentano of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws reads the proposal as a way of legalizing marijuana so just Big Pharma can make money from it.
2. “’DEA is taking a shortcut by saying, well, we can reschedule organic THC because it mimics an existing drug on the market,’ Armentano said. ‘Which is ironic given that they are saying the organic substance is derivative of the synthetic substance that is actually based on the organic substance.’”

Kitty Campion, a world renowned herbalist who has written several books, and who holds a PhD from the School of Natural Healing (Utah), warns that:

[G]overnments all over the world are joining hands with Big Pharma and Big Food, (meaning the industrialised processed food giants) in an unprecedented pogrom against herbal medicine. I left Britain in December last year after 30 years in full time herbal practice and came into Australia on a Distinguished Talent Visa, precisely because so many of the herbs I needed in my extensive herbal pharmacy had been banned by the European Commission. The Gestapo tactics have long begun. In Germany and in the UK, the ‘drug police’ recently confiscated natural remedies as though they were contraband drugs. The EU’s main strategy has been to try and place every natural product, natural remedy or natural service firmly under the thumb of prescription drug law and, of course, if a substance is treated like a drug it has to be evaluated and studied like a drug. The millions that this costs, mainly for safety and efficacy evaluation, is out of reach of the vast majority of herbal manufacturers – in effect it is a de facto ban.

Several similar laws around the globe further the scheme to criminalize nature. Here’s a brief sampling, with some victories for food freedom:

* On May 1, 2011, thousands of herbal medicinal products become illegal in the European Union. In an email, Shiv Chopra said, “As for the sale of herbal remedies, homeopathic, Ayurvedic and Chinese medicines, EU and NAFTA are on the same page. All of them, without counting Mexico, are determined to ban any substance that interferes in the sale of their big pharma products, including drugs and vaccines causing disease and death. I am not sure what China plans to do about it but India as we all know is selling out its stakes to join the rich man’s club, without any concern for the public interest.”

* Australia has proposed a ban on thousands of plants including its national flower, since they contain DMT – a naturally-occurring hallucinogen. Marketed as a war on drugs, the bill ignores that most of these common garden plants have never been used to extract DMT, since only trace amounts are found in them. Humans also produce DMT in their bodies, so we know this is something we need.

* Canada just passed a “consumer protection” law known as C36, though the final version exempted natural health products after a nationwide fight. However, the law violates human rights by authorizing home invasions to search for suspected products. Through Canada’s 2004 Food and Drug Act and other regulations, thousands of natural health products are no longer available, writes Karen Stephenson.

* Last December, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered one pharmacy to stop making injectable Vitamin C, a known cure for cancer. When taken intravenously in large doses, it has remarkable healing properties. IV Vitamin C even cured a New Zealand man on death’s door with the swine flu.

* The FDA is also waging a war on natural dairy, shutting down producers and distributors even though no one has become ill from their products. David Gumpert’s book, The Raw Milk Revolution, details the government’s war on food rights (which I reviewed here). As a complete food, raw milk provides innumerable benefits, including reducing childhood allergies. Many who are labeled “lactose-intolerant” safely drink raw milk.

* Also on the dairy front, Monsanto complained to the Federal Trade Commission about organic dairy farmers who labeled their product free of artificial hormones. Though the FDA allows such labeling, it maintains that rBST (also known as rBGH) is safe and that there is no difference between organic and GMO milk. Last September, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, overturning an Ohio law banning such labels. The court found a “compositional difference” between the two kinds of milk, and also ruled that prohibiting such labels violates the first amendment rights of organic producers.

* The US Food Safety Modernization Act, signed into law in January, “extends control over all food in the US, violating the fundamental human right to food,” explains Steve Green. Providing a comment for that article, Shiv Chopra said that the bill precludes “the public’s right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes. It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one’s choice.”

* Operating under the UN and the World Health Organization, Codex Alimentarius harmonizes international food standards, ostensibly to facilitate trade. Summarizing the work of Scott Tips and the Alliance for Natural Health, Brandon Turberville writes, “At best, the guidelines will reduce dose levels [of vitamins and other supplements] to minuscule amounts too small to be beneficial, as well as causing the prices to skyrocket for both consumers and producers.”

Taken together, we are witnessing corporate-government seizure of the means by which humans survive and thrive. Major corporations, backed by government, are causing cancer and other diseases with their toxic products. Yet, natural foods and remedies are being criminalized, forcing us to rely on Western drugs with often lethal side effects. On top of this, our water supply is deliberately treated with a substance that, among other problems, lowers intelligence.

The Idiot Cycle provides an excellent summary of the major forces working against humanity, which are well documented in several books, including those listed below.

The film has been awarded the Lola, the German equivalent of an Oscar, for best picture, and Kekelli has been awarded the Lola for best actress. Kekilli performs with a grace and beauty that is truly timeless. Capable of drawing the viewer into a secret inner-world of breathtaking emotional depths, brutally crushing heartache, and deeply disturbing cultural contradictions – Kekilli is unforgettable.

In the beginning of the film, Umay, who has been wedded to a Turkish man and has moved to Turkey to live with him, suffers emotional and physical abuse under his tyrannical roof, and when he turns on her son, Cem (Nizam Schiller), in a similarly despotic manner, she flees and returns to Berlin.

Umay’s father, played with impressive emotional depth and nuanced acting by Settar Tanriogen, initially believes his daughter is simply homesick and warmly greets her. When he and the rest of the family learn that she has left her husband and returned for good, they grow increasingly upset with her, feeling that she is bringing an unspeakable act of shame and humiliation upon the family, threatening their standing both with the in-laws and with the Turkish-German community.

Umay’s mother, Halima (Derya Alabora), and her deeply possessive older brother, Mehmet (Tamer Yigit), who is even more patriarchal and inclined towards medievalism than his brother-in-law, are both adamant that she return to Turkey immediately, or destroy the good name of the family forever.

Umay’s younger sister, Rana (Almila Bagriacik), and younger brother, Acar (Serhad Can), are initially sympathetic, however this changes when they begin to feel the hostility of the Turkish-German community bearing down on them. In the end, Umay is tragically and hopelessly alienated from those she loves.

One of the subtler mysteries of When We Leave is how Umay has managed to assimilate into German society far better than the rest of her deeply segregated family. She continues to believe until the bitter end that her family will forgive her, and that it will somehow be possible to strike a reconciliation and peaceful marriage between these two diametrically opposed cultures.

The film is filled with marvelous subtleties and nuances, such as when Umay speaks Turkish to her parents one moment, and German to her younger siblings the next.

When Umay initially pleads with her father for understanding, he refuses to take her side, even when she tells him that her husband has beaten her. “The hand that strikes is also the hand that soothes,” he tells her. However, as the drama unfolds, Umay’s father reveals himself to be a man of conflicting emotions and profound complexity.

When We Leave may also force the more intellectually astute in the audience to consider the implications of a government bringing foreign workers into a Western country so as to exploit them as cheap labor, while simultaneously doing everything in the power of the state to see to it that they stay as segregated and ghettoized as possible.

For innocent souls like Umay, who grow up in the West, yet are taught from the earliest possible age to not integrate, the clash of cultures that invariably ensues is often terribly tragic, and not the romantic utopia that liberals are always promising it will be.

The film’s German title translates as “strangers.” Indeed, Umay’s family have become strangers to Germany, alienated from the land of their birth, and in the end, most tragically, strangers to each other.

Devastating, somber, and gripping, When We Leave is a heart-wrenching tale of globalization in the throes of darkness, and a people lost in a world of terrifying and dehumanizing barbarism.

Written and directed by Feo Aladag; director of photography, Judith Kaufmann; edited by Andrea Mertens; music by Max Richter and Stéphane Moucha; production design by Silke Buhr; costumes by Gioia Raspé; produced by Feo Aladag and Züli Aladag; released by Olive Films. In German and Turkish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. This film is not rated. WITH: Sibel Kekilli (Umay), Settar Tanriögen (Kader), Darya Alabora (Halime), Florian Lukas (Stipe), Nizam Schiller (Cem), Ufuk Bayraktar (Kemal) and Tamer Yigit (Mehmet).

Format: DVD/62 minutes
Publisher: Media Education Foundation
Subtitles: English

Needless to say, I was eager to see Not Just a Game, the new documentary in which Zirin, in collaboration with the Media Education Foundation, shows why arguing that sport is apolitical is like arguing that Hosni Mubarak deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.  The film does not disappoint, and it successfully takes on the “de-politicized, sanitized, and hyper-commercialized sports world” by tackling four main themes: the militarization of sport, struggles for gender equality by female athletes, struggles for racial justice by athletes of color, and the commodification of sport.

Using footage of Air Force fly-bys and on-the-field military enlistment ceremonies that are now standard fare at sporting events in the U.S., the film begins by illustrating how sports media construct a seemingly natural connection between the hyper-masculinity of elite athletes and the ‘warrior ethos’ that undergirds the culture of the American military.  Zirin argues convincingly that by uncritically building this link, coverage of American sports promotes a sanitized version of ‘war’.  For example, by constructing a direct analogy between ‘combat’ on the gridiron and combat on the battlefield while only showing the details of the former, the media’s presentation of American football encourages spectators to ignore the horrific realities of what is happening in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.  As a case in point, Zirin documents how sports journalists, after aping the military’s concocted story about the ‘heroic’ death of NFL-star-turned-Army-Ranger, Pat Tilman, simply ignored revelations about the fact that he actually died from a friendly fire incident, and that, by the time of his death in Afghanistan, he had developed strong anti-war sentiments.  Of course, acknowledging these inconvenient details might have called into question the legitimacy of dressing up Fox’s football commentators in army fatigues as they broadcast from military bases in Afghanistan.

The documentary does its best work in the next section, in which it goes beyond a celebration of the same old liberal integration narratives that describe individual athletes overcoming prejudice through hard work, determination, and faith in American ‘democracy’.  Importantly, the film’s success in this regard does not depend exclusively on its discussion of relatively well-documented cases of resistance in sports like Muhammad Ali’s defiance of the draft or the iconic Black Power salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics.  While Zirin does provide commentary on these classic examples of radical protest in sport, it is his insistence on highlighting the unrecognized radicalism of athletes whose image is so often tied to the sanitized textbook narrative of liberal inclusion that makes the film so powerful.

Instead of a Billie Jean King who simply gave a shot in the arm to Second Wave feminism by beating Bobby Riggs in the famous “Battle of the Sexes,” Zirin reminds us that she was also the president of the first ever women’s sports union and an athlete whose working-class background was a driving force behind her tireless struggle for pay equity in professional sports.  And rather than the early Jackie Robinson, who lent his image to anti-communist propaganda and touted the health of American ‘democracy’, Zirin hones in on the later Robinson, who joined forces with Martin Luther King in the 1960s to combat the ‘triple evils’ of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.  After showing the film to students in a course I teach on the politics of sports media, I asked how many of them knew before watching the movie that Billie Jean King was a union organizer, or that by the 1968 presidential election Robinson was speaking out against African-Americans using success in realm of sports as a substitute for more systematic social change.  Not a hand in the room went up.

The documentary closes with a meditation by Zirin on how the increasing commercialization of sport has been central to the growing reticence on the part of superstar athletes to speak out on political issues.  In this regard, the rise of Michael Jordan marked a sharp departure from the example of competitors like Ali, as athletes began to heed the call of sponsors more than that of their conscience.  As Zirin explains, we have “Ali on the one side, showing how greatness in the ring doesn’t require sacrificing greatness outside of it.”  And we have “Jordan, on the other, ushering in a new age of corporate rule that loves to glorify the image of rebellion while stripping it of its substance.”

If the film has one weakness, it’s that it passes over a more substantive discussion of team owners and league administrators who have gone to great lengths to counteract the radical legacy of social justice struggles in sport, and who have often used their teams and arenas as vehicles for reactionary political projects (including Christian ‘faith days’ at the ballpark and invitations to Sarah Palin to warm up the crowd at hockey games).  Perhaps it would be difficult to find enough footage to support such a discussion in a film like this, especially considering the reputation of many of the more notorious owners for living a behind-the-scenes shadow existence that shields them from public scrutiny (Zirin deals deftly with this issue in print in his most recent book).  Nevertheless, I think that a film set on raising our consciousness as to the political relevance of sport has to engage more directly with the draconian economic and social projects underwritten by owners and league management.

To be clear, everyone—sports fans and non-fans alike—should see this movie.  That said, it will be especially useful for those who teach courses on the history and politics of sport in the U.S.  My sense is that teachers and scholars have been caught up in an endless repetition of the same three examples—Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and the Black Power salute at 1968 Olympics—whenever they want to prove Zirin’s point that sports and politics do mix.  Certainly, these are important stories, and Not Just a Game gives them the attention they deserve.  But the documentary does one better by demolishing the sanitized narratives of athletes like Billie Jean King, Jackie Robinson, and Pat Tilman—athletes who, unlike Ali and Brown, rarely get discussed outside the context of vapid references to ‘tolerance’, ‘colorblindness’, or ‘service to country’.   Hopefully, the movie will cause some discomfort for those who, like many of my students, want desperately to believe that the sports they hold so dear are just a game.

Human Resources begins with the psychological research on animal behavior, how rat, dog, pigeon behavior might be shaped. Behaviorist scientists John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner applied the behavior-shaping experiments to humans.

The human experiments turned even more sinister with an emphasis on eugenics, which is based in the notion that there are superior and inferior humans, superior and inferior races. Academia was very much involved in this movement, and as the documentary points out, it went to the highest levels of government, as president Calvin Coolidge supported eugenicist notions. Corporations funded the research, with the Rockefellers playing “a particularly devious role,” said historian Sharon Smith.

Rebecca Lemov, author of World as Laboratory, said the Rockefeller largesse made for the most funded social science project in history.

Taylorism and the Disempowerment of Workers

Even though moral philosopher Adam Smith had warned against the division of labor, another man, Frederick Taylor, disagreed. He atomized the workplace and work tasks. He set target times for worker tasks. This increased efficiency but at a cost of de-skilling workers and disempowering them.

Skilled labor was undermined by the atomization of tasks, the result being a loss of power and control by skilled workers. The exemplar is the assembly line instituted by anti-worker Henry Ford, which consolidated hierarchical control.

Human Resources calls it dehumanizing.

Labor does not need to be dehumanizing though. Human Resources interviews Michael Albert who, with Robin Hahnel, espouses an economy called participatory economics – or parecon. Albert says the corporation is pathological.¹ The pathology is the drive for profit without concern for people or the environment. The parecon workplace is egalitarian.

Paradoxically, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin supported Taylorism’s scientific management although it was disliked by workers. Human Resources quotes Lenin: “Socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly.” If this is the case, then the state has merely replaced the corporations in the economic system, and the Marxist refrain of a dictatorship of the proletariat becomes a meaningless slogan.

Human Resources argues that Lenin and Trotsky destroyed socialist institutions and waged a war against anarchists. They forced industrialization, leading to totalitarianism.

Thus, argues anarchist professor, Noam Chomsky, the term “socialism” became degraded.

Mikhail Bakunin, an anarchist opponent of authoritarian Communism, had foreseen the dangers of the state. Consequently, hierarchical political systems became entrenched worldwide.

Political scientist Stephen M. Sacks discusses the Hawthorne experiments, which looked at the quantity of work and worker satisfaction. It found that having discussions with workers, regardless of whether or not workers concerns were taken into consideration, increased productivity. Sachs says it doesn’t have to be that way. The workplace can be democratized.

Why should the economic system not be rational, for example, like a parecon?

Educating Workers

Educator John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down, illustrated how the education system makes people unable to think in context. Initially, he says, compulsory schooling was resisted by parents (who battled for control) and enforced by state militia.

Corporations, however, feared educated workers, and students were converted into “obedient tools.”

Educational theorist Alfie Kohn extolled on the paucity of critical thinking and debilitation of forced competition. He argues against grading because grades 1) cause a loss of interest in learning; i.e., it is no longer learning for the sake of knowledge, 2) lead to shallower thinking, and 3) lead students to choose easier tasks (the logical choice).

Competition, says Kohn, undermines character and destroys relations. He points to research which shows that competition isn’t necessary for excellence and tends to impede excellence at most tasks. Competition disrupts more difficult tasks and problem solving.

“Excellence,” he says “pulls in one direction and competition in another.”

If the system is one of competition, then that system must have winners and losers of competition. What does that mean for a society?

The Origins of Violence

Noble segues into causes of violence. He turns again to behaviorist psychology (which really does not have that much sway in contemporary psychology) and the frustration-aggression hypothesis which states that thwarting people from achieving their just rewards frustrates them and leads to aggression.

Human Resources portrays rampant hatred of the other in American society that is promulgated by the media. Historian Howard Zinn, in one of his last interviews, saw an intentionality in design; the hatred of others is scapegoating — deflecting the anger onto to others so the system can perpetuate itself.

Anthropologist Elliot Leyton even implied the system as being partially responsible for mass murders. He saw multiple murderers as “alienated individuals … that represent central cultural themes” that “are relatively ignored by government institutions…”

Governments, said Leyton, focus much more on control of public than serial and mass killers. “Governments and politicians are the main killers.” The state is a mass murderer.

Human Resources holds that modern military training best encapsulates the frustration-aggression hypothesis. The military funnels frustration into hatred and fear of a group.

Fear was used to manipulate human behavior.

Mind-control Experimentation

The CIA’s mind-control project MKULTRA “abandon[ed] any pretense to morality, leading to a nightmarish search for the holy grail of social engineering: a fully controlled, fully obedient human being.”

Projects included Artichoke, Bluebird, MKULTRA (truth serum, mind wipes) etc. Since 1973 these projects remain classified.

Under the auspices of the government, military, CIA, academia (universities and “leading professors”) drug, electroshock, brain surgery, noise manipulation, and other experiments were carried out on animals, patients, soldiers, citizens, and even children as “unwitting guinea pigs” for various drugs. Among the outcomes were psychosis and death. Compensation is denied for many cases.

Psychiatrist Colin Ross says authorities typically deny human experimentation, or when undeniable blame the laxer restraints of the time period. In the case of children used in mind-control experiments, national security was proffered as a justification.

MKULTRA was deemed a failure except that it produced Kubark, in essence a “torture manual.” It detailed deprivation experiments, stress positions, and electric shock – all used by US personnel on humans at Abu Ghraib, as horrific video shows.

How is that humans can live in a system that subjects them unwittingly to dangerous experimentation? How is it they can allow their country to terrorize people in other countries in a “war on terror”?

Human Resources points to TV and its fear-based programming which becomes reality. TV entertains but it also induces passivity and suggestibility in people.

Eugenics underlies Human Resources. Yet, a capacity for cruelty has been demonstrated in supposedly learned people, even by those who might consider themselves superior: management, politicians, commanders, and doctors.

Human Resources is another excellent documentary by Noble – a documentary that should cause all people to question the nature of the society they live in, who the authorities serve — and even more — should society have authorities, should it exist as a hierarchy? The film causes us to ask who we should fear – the authorities who pursue the development of weapons of mass destruction, who develop and implement the practice of torture, who use their own citizenry as unwitting guinea pigs? Who is the genuine terrorizer? Who is the genuine enemy?

1. The thesis of another excellent documentary, The Corporation.

Psywar explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the “elitist theory of democracy” and the relationship between war, propaganda, and class.

This film is designed both as an introduction to the concept of psychological warfare by governments against their citizens and as an exploration of certain dominant themes in American propaganda. Significant time is also devoted to different conceptions of “democracy” as theorized by figures like Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, and the “founding fathers” of the United States itself.

Psywar illuminates how the state of the world reached the point it is at today: where an imperialist United States wages several wars abroad and maintains the support of its people, despite a growing and yawning chasm between the haves (who profit from warring) and the have-nots (cannon fodder deluded by unquestioning patriotic idealism). The US has managed to drag its fellow capitalist nations along in more-or-less support of its imperialist aggressions.

People who analyze the state of the world and consider the manifest moral and humanitarian violations might be forgiven for shaking their heads that such a whopping segment of humanity could go along with such inequality, such carnage, such insouciance.

Psywar begins by looking at how people’s distorted perceptions are crafted and maintained

In the opening segment of Psywar, there is video footage of American soldiers defacing a statue of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein with the Old Glory. It was a staged event by psyop group. The film then segues into another infamous pysop about the fallen American soldier Jessica Lynch. Both events were disinformation campaigns that deliberately misreported events.

John Rendon, an “information warrior and perception manager,” is a major player in the $200 billion a year perception-management industry. Rendon is the figure who orchestrated the effort to sell the American public on a war against Iraq. The American public was buying it early on. At best, it can be stated the government thought highly enough about the public acumen that it resorted to disinformation; at least public perception matters.

The corporate media is heavily complicit in the warmongering and warring, even to the extent that psywarriors at CNN “helped in the production of news.”

Psywar points to a synergy: “The invasion of Iraq represents a pinnacle of domestic psywar in the United States, an unparalleled integration between [sic] public relations firms, corporate media, and military psyops.”

The perception management was so powerful that even soldiers were so deceived that they engaged in the greatest crime as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal at the end of World War II: aggression.

Perception management is “steeped in class warfare.” Psywar tells the story of the exploitation of workers by the wealthy Rockefeller family. Striking coal miners seeking better working conditions and pay were attacked by the National Guard who were in the pay of the Rockefeller family. It is known as the Ludlow Massacre.

In one of his last videotaped interviews, historian Howard Zinn explains the dilemma of the working poor against plutocrats such as the Rockefeller family.

The Ludlow Massacre was a PR nightmare for the Rockefellers. An early psywarrior, Ivy Lee was instrumental in attempting to rehabilitate the image of the Rockefellers. His public relations involved smears and disinformation against the coal miners and their supporters. As Psywar mentions later in the film, Lee would later propagandize for Nazis against Americans.

Early on, it became clear that public perception needed to operate behind the scenes. Staged PR was arranged, such as charity.

Richard Coniff, author of A Natural History of the Rich, challenges the philanthropy of rich – stating that the rich hold a “functional view of wealth rather than a strictly charitable view.”

Zinn agreed, noting that charity can be exploitative and that the American system is exploitative. Zinn said that the “system is maintained [...] by giving people a little bit, and giving enough people just enough to prevent them from breaking out in open rebellion”

In the second part of the documentary, Noble looked at propagating the faith. It begins with Graeme MacQueen, co-founder of the Center for Peace Studies. He also holds that the support of the people is necessary for war. However, he said “war is disgusting to most people”; therefore great psychological pressure is brought to bear upon soldiers.
National Security is there to swindle people

Christopher Simpson, author of The Science of Coercion, says propaganda is about mindset and ideology.

Recognizing this, Psywar relates how president Woodrow Wilson helped cast the propagandistic George Creel Commission which would pave the way for the US to enter World War I by planting false atrocity stories, stoking fear in Americans and calling on them to fight the good fight for democracy.

The propagandist firm of Hill and Knowlton arranged an infamous staged op as a prelude to an assault against Iraq. A teenage girl, Nasriyah, cried crocodile tears and lied about babies being ripped from incubators by Iraqi soldiers. The false story moved American sentiment to back military action against Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait.

Patriotism is the sentiment widely relied upon by governments to attain their ends against foreign foes. Historian Michael Parenti appears to challenge typical notions of patriotism. He identifies patriotism as being about greater values than attacking foreign lands; he sees it as about social justice, peace and stability, an end to racism, etc.

Another problem identified as preventing a public solidarity was that unions were based on gender and ethnicity.

Historian Sharon Smith said a breakthrough came with the anarcho-syndicalist union the Industrial Workers of the World (better known as the Wobblies) which set out to organize and include women, immigrants, and African Americans in one big union.

Anarcho-syndicalist scholar Noam Chomsky holds that it is natural for humans to free associate.

The unity among humans is thwarted by a state which uses war to accumulate power and by corporations to gain enormous fortunes. The Left worldwide labor movement is in disarray

In part 3, We the People, Psywar elucidates on how people are pawns in a system set up in favor of the wealthy.

The existence of democracy is refuted. Chomsky calls elections “a marketing exercise.”

Says William I. Robinson, editor of Critical Globalization Studies, we live in polyarchy: “a system of elite rule.” That is the way the system was designed to be.

Historian John Manley states that the so-called founding fathers were slave owners who sought to protect propertied interests. To this end, the Constitution was crafted behind closed doors. Chomsky notes that James Madison, the major framer of the Constitution, designed it to protect the opulent from the majority.

Littler known is that the US Constitution is based on the Kaianerekowa (Great Law of Peace) of the Haudenosaunee (called Iroquois in Psywar). Stephen M. Sachs, author of Remembering the Circle, lists how the Kaianerekowa allowed the Haudenosaunee to easily remove corrupt leaders, that women had a major role in decision-making, that everyone was involved in policy formation, thus creating a participatory society.

One weak link stood out in Psywar. Why did the film turn to a white man to tell the history of “native Americans”? Why not talk to one of the Haudenosaunee?

The final part of Psywar is Consumers. People are indoctrinated to see themselves as consumers. Advertising reminds people of this. The system would have people work to consume. To this end, the emphasis is on work, not leisure. It is feared that less hours of work might foment radicalism.

Sut Jhally of the Media Education Foundation attacked consumptive society: “The problem of capitalism is the problem of consumption. And the problem is that after your needs have been met, there is no real need for consumption.”

The system is reeling now. Neoliberalism calls for cutbacks and results in increasing inequality. Parenti said we are back to about 1900 in terms of inequality. “People are poor because they are paid less than the value that they produce. You need poverty. Poverty is needed if you are gonna have wealth.”

Psywar argues that it is the monopoly media’s relentless propaganda that holds up capitalism. Democracy and capitalism are argued to be mutually exclusive. If capitalism is sacrosanct, then you can not have democracy.

“Behind political democracy was economic equality.”

Psywar tells the story of how and why the world is the way it is now. It tells of the system, why it was concocted and why it is kept in place.

Knowledge is requisite to combat propaganda and disinformation. It is necessary to overcome the system and to erect a people-centered system that respects the needs and aspirations of the society as a whole. Psywar makes clear that public opinion is important. If it were not important, then there would be no need for perception management. It is the incessant propaganda and disinformation that creates a perception of reality. Noble reveals the framework that exploits class, race, gender, and resources to benefit the already wealthy at the expense of the masses.

Psywar is a documentary that augurs well for future filmmaking by Noble who made the film for $1500 while working a blue collar job. It is a good example of the democratization of filmmaking occurring via the internet.

This metaphor is the strongest argument I can make against Japanese whale hunting in the international waters of the arctic sea. It’s certainly not foolproof: the region under question, the icy waters of the Southern Ocean is not a public park. To challenge the public park analogy, people generally don’t have access to this forbidding sea near Antarctica, so mining whales, in this case, will almost never directly diminish the experience of other individuals. The battle here is mostly conceptual. Anti-whalers argue that whales are intelligent and should not be killed; that the whales are endangered and should be protected; that Japan is violating international law by faking a research program. These claims, the contents of the debate, are debatable. Whether whales should be killed or not is a matter of culture, perception, and opinion; whether certain species are endangered is hotly debated; whether Japan has the right is also open to interpretation (one that may, thankfully, come due to the Australian government’s pursuit of a lawsuit against the whalers). But the image of a public park is easy to imagine if you try; it’s a kind of precedent we can point to when disputes over communal property arise.

The dolphins killed in Taiji, Japan are another matter.

Culture Clash

Japanese nationalists who protested the screening of the Academy award winning documentary The Cove are right about one thing: the film is about a clash of cultures. The clash, however, is not East-West or American-Japanese. Rather, the clash is between those who love and care about dolphins and those who kill dolphins for profit. In more general terms the clash is about preservation vs. exploitation. This clash has been picking up steam since the Industrial Revolution, a time when notions of “preservation” were virtually unknown and seemingly unnecessary. Moreover the clash knows no boundaries, from the redwood forests of California, to the rainforests of Brazil, and even to the remote Arctic seas where the Sea Shepard battles Japanese whalers.

The Cove, directed by National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos, is as much about Ric O’Barry’s genuine love for dolphins and his quest to atone for previous sins as it is about the Taiji slaughter. This personal angle makes it compelling for those who sympathize with him and his beef with dolphin slaughters, and problematic for defenders of the slaughter. O’Barry, who trained the dolphins in Flipper, the U.S. TV show of the 1960s, tells about his dramatic awakening after being ‘as ignorant as he could be for as long as he could be.’ One day a Flipper dolphin named Kathy “committed suicide” in his arms by choosing to not come up for air. The next day, distraught about his role in imprisoning and exploiting Kathy, O’Barry was arrested for releasing other dolphins, and his 34 year odyssey as a dolphins-rights activist that would one day lead him to an isolated cove in Wakayama Prefecture Japan had begun.

Bias

It’s clear from the start that the documentary’s aim is not to objectively explore whether Taiji’s dolphin slaughters are right or proper, but rather to take and disseminate images of the slaughter to mobilize public opposition to stop it. If the film pretended to adopt the former aim, Japan’s right wing protesters would be right that the film would be hopelessly biased. But in the spirit of Michael Moore (who also must contend with charges of bias from America’s right wing), the filmmakers perceive an injustice and present their case to the public much like a prosecutor would to a judge. Due to this, Japanese nationalists are appealing to the public and attempting to censor the film in Japan.

This sort of “position documentary” is not unheard of in Japan either. The Japanese documentary Atomic Bomb Hiroshima takes a similar approach. The film focuses on the extraordinary damage and suffering the atomic bombings caused while completely ignoring the details that led up to the atomic blast. To most Japanese, and many Westerners, this emphatic condemnation of the use of atomic weaponry might seem fair enough, but one effect is to paint Japan as innocent victim. Would the same right wing factions be troubled by this documentary for its bias? In the same way that Atomic Bomb Hiroshima ignores the causes of World War 2, and Moore ignores insurance company claims in his documentary Sicko, The Cove largely ignores the views of the local fishermen and local officials.

The Cove filmmakers did, however, make an appeal to Taiji city hall to ask permission to do the film, but were, predictably, stonewalled. As the film later explains, protests by Australian surfers and others in the early 2000s ramped up security and secrecy around the Taiji dolphin slaughter. In that sense the film is an expose, a dogged and expensive effort to show the world the way Taiji fishermen slaughter dolphins.

It’s easy to understand what would lead this film crew to take the side of dolphins. As a National Geographic photographer, Psihoyos documents the degradation of oceans; divers Kirk Krack and Mandy Rae swim and commune with dolphins in the open sea; and of course O’Barry has dedicated his life to saving dolphins from slaughter and confinement for objects of human entertainment. To these filmmakers, dolphins are intelligent if not majestic creatures worthy of our awe and respect. To the fishermen the dolphins are a commodity; they make their living by capturing and selling live dolphins (to dolphinariums), or by selling fish and dolphin for human consumption. O’Barry explains that he actually makes an offer to pay the fishermen himself so they will then set the dolphins free, which leads to a shocking response. Taiji fishermen say the capture and slaughter is not about money, but about “pest control.” Thus, they see the dolphins as competitors for limited sea resources. Selling the dolphin meat is merely a byproduct, a way to make a little money after eliminating an ocean competitor. But the real money comes from the more lucrative business of selling live dolphins to Sea World type shows.

The alleged bias also extends to the way the Japanese were portrayed in the film: a bulky bouncer-like man harassing photographers, bureaucrats and scientists speaking stilted English, a fisherman giving the film crew the finger. In one sense, including these clips was fair enough, for they weren’t scripted; Japanese did what they did on film and were exposed for it. On the other hand, if the filmmakers purposely chose footage to make the fishermen and officials as bad as possible, then the criticism might be valid. In the documentary Manufacturing Dissent, Canadians Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine charge Moore with such a deception in Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. The film shows Moore opening unlocked doors (demonstrating the safety of Canada and relaxed attitude of Canadians), but the filmmakers claim Moore simply cut the numerous examples of locked doors. In the case of The Cove, however, it’s difficult to imagine many scenes of kind and welcoming fishermen being cut in favor of the scenes included, which make some Japanese uncomfortable.

Pro-slaughter individuals in Taiji are certainly not above making a biased, emotional appeal. In a 1994 statement from “the people of Taiji,” the following points are noted:

“Thus, it was a traumatic experience that our values were attacked fiercely by western environmentalists and animal right activists, and the International Whaling Commission (IWC) mercilessly forced us to stop whaling.” And later vow, “No matter how viciously the environmentalists and animal right activists condemn us, we will not give up whaling.”

But is the supposed bias of a “position documentary” really the issue?

Animal Rankings

At one point in The Cove, O’Barry incredulously notes that dolphinarium spectators can actually enjoy the dolphin show while eating dolphin meat. Americans are probably too sentimental, or animal rights groups too vocal, to ever allow this to take place. Because of the ways that dolphins have been incorporated into “untouchable” animal category in the consciousness of most Americans, this fact seems striking. However, it’s not at all difficult to imagine Americans spending time at a tourist ranch, state fair or rodeo while munching on a hamburger, which brings us to another criticism of Japan’s right wing: that Westerners have no problem cruelly slaughtering pigs, cows and chickens, and it is only a cultural mores that define those animals as fair game while putting other animals off limits. This criticism is more difficult to dismiss. Who decides what animals should be killed and for what reasons?

Deer hunting is a good example of reverse sensibility. While Japan struggles with a population unwilling to pick up guns to shoot deers for food (or for “pest control”) America has no problem finding hunters. In fact, for some animals like moose in Vermont a lottery has to be held to limit the number of hunters. But no animal-values analogy will ever work perfectly. Japanese, for example, simply don’t want to hunt, and are not critical of America’s love for hunting.

Some try to articulate principles to rank killability, and the film’s criterion is intelligence. At one point it is even conjectured that dolphins are more intelligent than humans (to which one wonders why they aren’t able, after all this time, to elude the crude tactics of the fishermen who simply pound on metal to confuse the dolphins). This point, however, leaves two issues to be grappled with: just how intelligent are dolphins? (i.e. can humans ever fairly gauge animal intelligence?) and does it matter? Japanese who want to eat whales may not care about their intelligence. Moreover, vegetarians have long maintained that pigs are actually very intelligent, but the American meat-eating public has largely remained unmoved.

But pointing to the intelligence of dolphins is just another rational argument which can be turned on its head or countered in any number of ways. For others it’s just a matter of consciousness. New York Times writer Paul Greenberg explains, “We have come to see the whale not as something we fish for, not as something we farm, but as something we appreciate and maybe empathize with. Instead of expanding our stomachs or our wallets, whales have expanded our consciousness, our very humanity.” In that sense, The Cove is an attempt to raise awareness and consciousness to get more people to think like Greenberg.

While nationalists cling to the tradition argument, the fishermen claim the right to fatten their wallets. Many Westerners, however, would side with the fishermen, including those who trap wild animals to kill them for their fur, Canadian groups that club baby seals in the far northern territories, or for that matter the Faroe islanders in Denmark who have their own version of dolphin slaughter.

Animal Imprisonment

Since the big money is made by selling live dolphins to dolphinariums such as Sea World, the heart of the matter may be the animal trade. The Cove makes the case that dolphins are accustomed to cruising enormous ocean distances and actually suffer from depression in captivity for which they are medicated. In addition, many have died from their confinement. Watching dolphins glide across the sea and dive to the depths makes analogies to cow killing seem facile. The film that deals with the larger issue of animal rights is the 2010 documentary Earthlings. The film spares no abuser or animal life, from factory farms in the U.S., to the ways cows are virtually tortured in India in their journey to become boots and handbags, to the senseless cruelty of bull fighting, rodeos, and puppy farms. Earthlings also contains footage of Taiji’s dolphin slaughter: at one point a live dolphin roped to a truck is dragged on the ground until it bleeds. Later fishermen hack the still gasping dolphin even while schoolchildren walk past the bloody scene.

The Earthling’s main tenet is, if racists and sexists are guilty of objectifying their victims, speciesists do likewise to animals. One can imagine Europeans and Americans of 300 years ago discussing the plight of slaves. Some might have claimed they don’t suffer in the same way “we whites” suffer; others might have wondered whether they were actually human. Now any such notions appear absurd; such views are nothing more than extreme, ugly racism. Can’t the same logic that labels degrading treatment to women as “sexism” and degrading treatment of other races as “racism” lead us to comprehend and be moved by the notion of “speciesism”? A speciesist regards the welfare of his own species above that of other species, and in fact doesn’t take the suffering of other species into consideration, whether the issue is food, clothing, entertainment, or research. If we humans benefit, anything goes.

Censorship

In early June 2010 three of the 20 or so theaters in Japan scheduled to screen The Cove caved in to right wing protests and decided to pull it. Their stated reason was that the protests would create a disturbance in the neighborhood. But by the end of the month a Japanese court took the step to ensure free speech by barring protesters to assemble in front of theaters, the tactic they used to intimidate theaters and viewers (and also led to the cancellation of several planned university screenings).

In an effort to bridge the dolphin gap, 600 individuals attended a symposium in Tokyo in June to show the film and allow critics to air their grievances with the O’Barry. Besides the complaint that the film was made stealthily, and individuals faces were not blurred, critics also reportedly disputed the facts presented in the documentary, but the NHK article provided no other details. One could imagine that the estimated number of dolphins killed each year, put at 36,000 in the film, is under question. Finally, the critics questioned why voices of locals were not included in the film, apparently missing the irony of the fact fishermen who actively and aggressively tried to keep their actions secret are now protesting that they were not given a chance to tell their side of the story.

Some Japanese nationalists go even farther, demanding censorship because the Cove is “terrorist propaganda.” One such nationalist, “tamagawaboat” charges on his blog “as subjectively as possible” that Sea Sheppard protesters endanger life and property out at sea with tactics like tossing bottles of acid on board or trying to entangle ship propellers with rope. No great effort is made to explain why The Cove, which only utilizes the weapon of communication, is guilty of the Sea Sheppard’s supposed sins.

Conclusion

In the Earthlings documentary about cruelty to animals narrator Joaquin Phoenix states, “We must learn empathy. And see that their life has value because they are alive” while a live dog is being tossed into a garbage truck, soon to be crushed alive. Viewing such cruelty only gives the film’s message more relevance and poignancy. The filmmakers of The Cove hope to move viewers in precisely the same way. Perhaps, instead of confrontation, anti-whalers should make the same sort of appeal.

On October 10, 2010 at the Mission Cultural Center of Latino Studies in San Francisco, the Freedom Archives will premier its latest documentary. Titled Cointelpro 101, this hour-long film makes it quite clear that the US government is certainly not above such practices and that, furthermore, it has a long history of them. For those who don’t know, Cointelpro was the abbreviated name for the intelligence and counterinsurgency operation waged against a multitude of organizations and individuals deemed threats to national security during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by the FBI and other US law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Short for counterintelligence, Cointelpro involved the use of a multitude of methods up to and including murder in its crusade to neutralize any and all left opposition to the status quo in the United States. From Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Weather Underground Organization, any one considered an enemy of the US national security state because of their opposition to the US war in Vietnam or their support for the self-determination of people of color in the United States was a potential target of the Cointelpro program.

Cointelpro 101 opens with the April 1971 break-in by antiwar activists at the federal offices in Media, Pennsylvania. The activists were searching for Selective service files to destroy when they came upon files labeled Cointelpro. After a quick perusal of the file’s contents, they removed as many as they could find from the office, made copies and released them to the press. The program was unknown to the broader public at the time and the files proved a revelation to the country. Many politicians were offended and, after the 1972 discovery of the Plumbers unit run by G. Gordon Liddy under the direction of the Nixon White House and the subsequent months of Congressional hearings around Watergate, Senator Frank Church called for hearings to investigate the Cointelpro program.

As the history related in the film makes clear, Cointelpro’s stretch was broad. Beginning in the 1950s with a focus on the Puerto Rican independence movement and continuing through the 1960s and into the 1970s when much of its focus had shifted to the black liberation, Chicano liberation and American Indian movement, the program racked up a number of assassinations, false imprisonments and ruined lives. No government official was ever punished for actions taken under the program’s auspices. The film details this history through the artful use of still photos and moving images of the period covered. Films of police attacks and protests; still photos of revolutionary leaders and police murders graphically remind the viewer of Washington’s willingness to do whatever it takes to maintain its control. Organizers who began their political activity during the time of Cointelpro discuss the effect the program had on them and the organizations and individuals they worked with. Indeed, several of the interviewees were themselves targets and spent years in prison (some on charges that were false, as in the case of Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt) or on the run. One of the interviewees, Wesley Swearingen, is a former FBI agent who was involved in Cointelpro operations in Los Angeles and elsewhere and later published a book exposing his knowledge. His recollections reveal the nature of the war the FBI was fighting.

Former Black Panther member Kathleen Cleaver states toward the end of the film that Cointelpro represented the efforts of a political police force making the decision as to what is allowed politically and what is not. Anything outside the parameters set by this force was fair game. Nothing that was done by government officials or private groups and individuals acting on the government’s behalf was perceived as wrong or illegal. As Attorney Bob Boyle makes clear in his final statement in the film, Cointelpro is alive and well. The only difference now is that most of what was illegal for the government to do during Cointelpro’s official existence is now legal. The PATRIOT Act and other laws associated with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security have insured this. The September 24, 2010 raids mentioned above are but the most recent proof of it.

Cointelpro 101 is a well made and appealing primer on the history of the US police state. Produced, written and directed by individuals who have themselves been the target of tactics documented in the film, it has an authenticity and immediacy that pulls the viewer in. Although too short to cover the history in as full detail as some may desire, the film’s intelligence and conscientious presentation of the historical narrative makes it a film that the student, the citizen and the activist can all appreciate.

“I feel very strongly that the world needs to see, to consider, to be aware that there are some very dark and sinister forces at play shaping what we think is an independent opinion,” he told me via email.

Pratt shows how BP’s control of the US government over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill catastrophe supports his theme that a shadow government of the world’s wealthiest are bent on further concentration of wealth, regardless of cost to the environment or human lives.

The swine flu hoax, ObamaCare and fraudulent elections get a mention, but the focus is predominantly on mind control via mass media. Netrooters understand better than most that the free flow of ideas in today’s electronic world only occurs when people can access any website they want, any time they want. Obama seeks to shut down this access via the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act.” Talk about a 21st century police state.

Deceptions emphasizes the vital need for all people to have access to ideas and information from around the world — just like goverments do.

The film takes a deliberate pace exploring the structures of the shadow government, in a format adapted for classroom use. Each segment was designed as a stand alone video clip that can be viewed independently. His website, DeceptionsUSA, provides information about acquiring the film for screenings in theatres and schools, how to become a citizen journalist, Net Neutrality, a variety of resource links, and a six-page booklet for teachers.

Though a novice filmmaker, Pratt’s virgin launch is tightly developed, with spot-on music and imagery. While he won’t win any awards for enunciation, the use of subtitles overcomes this small weakness while underscoring his points. Instead of fear-mongering, Pratt presents the facts in a straightforward and logical manner.

Remarkably, Deceptions was made for less than a thousand dollars in 16 months. A former systems analyst living in Brattleboro, Vermont, Pratt shows how, for a bargain price, a concerned citizen can be informative, compelling and inspirational to anyone seeking the truth.

“I have no ax to grind, no money to make – just awareness – that is my goal,” he said.

1. Released September 2010, 78 minutes.

Written and directed by award-winning journalist, Kevin O’Keefe, and produced by Declan O’Driscoll, the 60-minute film explores the Michael Schmidt case, a biodynamic farmer who legally challenged Ontario’s ban on raw milk.

The Bovine gave it high praise, saying the film “dug deep and presented perhaps the most complete picture yet of the raw milk story around Michael Schmidt and Glencolton Farms.”

Having been raised in post-Nazi Germany:

Michael sees, perhaps more clearly than most, that the greatest challenge to the freedom and liberty we cherish and that our forefathers fought for, is coming not from terrorists or outsiders, but from an unaccountable proliferation of regulations that looks, from the outside, like bureaucrats on a power trip.

Producer Declan O’Driscoll has long been a cowshare member and brought the idea to ichannel, Canada’s political and social issues network. In an interview with radio show host, Kevin Bernard, writer-director Kevin O’Keefe gives background into the making of the film. Included in the film is a view into biodynamic farming, which O’Keefe describes:

“It’s sort of like hyper-organic farming. It’s beyond organic. It’s a very strict system of farming developed by an Austrian philosopher, Rudolph Steiner.”

At the center of this David and Goliath story is living food. “Milk is a living product. It’s alive. It contains lots of bacteria,” O’Keefe explains. Schmidt’s strict biodynamic system allows him to produce living milk safely, unlike conventional dairies that often sell tainted supplies.

O’Keefe then mentions the poisoning of Walkerton, Ontario. In 2000, a deadly strain of E. coli from factory dairies leached into the water supply. Thousands took ill and seven people died.

Canada is the only G8 country that bans the sale of raw milk, says O’Keefe. In the US, ten states allow for retail sale of raw milk for human consumption. According to an interactive map created by the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, those states are Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Idaho and Washington.

“The Queen of England drinks raw milk,” O’Keefe said. In fact, raw milk is legal throughout most of Europe. David Gumpert, author of The Raw Milk Revolution, reports that, in Europe, people often buy raw milk from vending machines.

After viewing the film recently, it appears to us that the main reason the U.S. movie industry bestowed the honor is that Kathryn Bigelow, who also received the Best Director prize, concealed the real nature of the American war in two distinct ways.

1. The film did not even hint that the three-man Army elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad operating in Baghdad a year after in the U.S. invasion was engaged in an unjust, illegal war, and thus were participants in what international law defines as a war crime.

According to the film website, the task of the GIs in question was “to try and make the city a safer place for Iraqis and Americans alike.”

Unmentioned is the fact that the war destroyed perhaps a million Iraqi lives, created over four million refugees. Or that it took Washington’s divide-and-conquer policy of exacerbating sectarian religious and ethnic rivalries to produce a stalemate instead of a humiliating defeat for the Pentagon at the hands of up to 25,000 poorly armed, irregular and part-time guerrillas.

The film’s odd title, according to the producers, “is soldier vernacular for explosions that send you to the ‘hurt locker.’” But in the “collateral damage” of this unnecessary war — the civilian dead and wounded and millions wrecked lives — has no place in The Hurt Locker. Only American pain is stored there, not Iraqi.

2. Director Bigelow and the film’s big money backers mischaracterized their efforts as “nonpolitical,” as did virtually all the American reviewers.

As one reviewer wrote, it was “remarkably nonpartisan and nonpolitical.” Another wrote: “It’s a nonpolitical film about Iraq. Many films about the Iraq war have fallen into a trap of appearing preachy or at least having a strong point of view.” The New Yorker‘s David Denby said the film “wasn’t political except by implication — a mutual distrust between American occupiers and Iraqi citizens is there in every scene,” but the real meaning is that it “narrows the war to the existential confrontation of man and deadly threat.”

If “war is a mere continuation of politics by other means,” as von Clausewitz famously and correctly surmised, a “nonpolitical” film about what is virtually universally recognized as an unjust war is a conscious misrepresentation of reality. The Hurt Locker is an extremely political film, largely because of what it choose to omit, masquerading as apolitical in order to disarm the viewer.

Bomb disposal teams exist in all modern wars, but they do not exist in a moral or political vacuum. One side often represents the oppressor, and the other the oppressed, and it is morally dishonest to conceal the distinction.

For example, one assumes Japanese bomb teams were at work during the Nanking Massacre in China, and the time of the notorious Bataan Death March in the Philippines; and that German teams worked in Poland during the Warsaw Uprising in the Jewish ghetto, and during the horrific Nazi siege of Stalingrad.

These Japanese and German handlers of unexploded bombs were extremely brave, as are their American counterparts today, and some lost their lives, particularly since they didn’t have all the protective gear and bomb destroying robots available to Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But what should we think about a German war film dealing with the Warsaw rising and the slaughter of Stalingrad, or a Japanese film about Nanking or the death march, that focused only on the heroism of their bomb-disposal troopers, without any reference to the aggressive wars that situated them in Poland, Russia, China and the Philippines? Most people would characterize such films as “enemy propaganda,” particularly while the wars were still going on, as are the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen (as well as Iraq, despite Washington’s claim that “combat operations” are now over).

Suppose you were an Iraqi, who lived through 12 years of U.S.-UK-UN killer sanctions that took another million Iraqi lives, followed by seven years of invasion and occupation. What would you think of a U.S. war film where nearly all the Iraqi characters were villains or crooks, and the occupying GIs were depicted as heroes or at least well-meaning?

What would you think when you read from the producers that The Hurt Locker is “a riveting, suspenseful portrait of the courage under fire of the military’s unrecognized heroes: the technicians of a bomb squad who volunteer to challenge the odds and save lives doing one of the world’s most dangerous jobs…. Their mission is clear — protect and save.”

You’d probably think this film, which won six Academy Awards while the war was still going on, was enemy propaganda.

Well, propaganda is propaganda no matter who’s the perpetrator. Most Americans, it seems to us, are unable to distinguish self-serving war propaganda from reality when it is delivered by the U.S. government, the corporate mass media, or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

We can’t read director Bigelow’s mind, but objectively The Hurt Locker seeks to justify the Bush-Obama wars. It does so by suppressing the political context of the wars, and by individualizing and conflating the scope of the conflict to resemble, as reviewer Denby suggests, an “existential confrontation [between] man and deadly threat.”

The Hurt Locker war is no longer a matter of U.S. foreign policy, military power, and the quest for geopolitical advantage and hegemony over the world’s largest petroleum reserves. It’s simply a matter of how three American guys in a very dangerous military occupation respond emotionally to the extraordinary pressure they are under.

The Hurt Locker is a movie of pro-war propaganda. Had this powerful war film instead told the truth about America’s ongoing imperial adventure in Iraq, even as it continued to focus mainly on the dilemmas confronting the bomb disposal team, it never would have been nominated for, much less become the recipient of, the most prestigious award in world filmmaking.

If I was president Ahmadinejad’s national security advisor, and he asked me what to do, I would tell him to acquire a nuclear deterrent.

– Professor John. J. Mearsheimer, July 9, 2010¹

John Mearsheimer’s imagined advice to Ahmadinejad leads to a simple and obvious conclusion. A country like Iran, which has been placed on the executioner’s list known as the “axis of evil” may have only one option if it is to survive. Get a nuclear deterrent – and notice Mearsheimer’s carefully chosen word is “deterrent.” The nukes need never be used, but they must be in one’s hand to keep one’s neck out of Empire’s noose. Given the fate of bloodied, ravaged and occupied Iraq, which did not get a nuke, and North Korea which did, the lesson is clear. It follows that the principal impulse for nuclear proliferation comes from the United States and Israel, since they are the countries now issuing threats of invasion, destruction, occupation and servitude, threats routinely carried out. This is a message that will not be found in the allegedly anti-nuclear flick Countdown to Zero, demonstrating one more time that the most effective lies are those of omission.

Countdown to Zero is now playing in a theater near you, at least if you live in a very “blue state” or a “blue neighborhood,” for example, Cambridge, MA, my hometown, or San Francisco. The movie is aimed squarely at the antiwar, anti-nuclear pro-Obama audience, which dwells therein and is all too susceptible to the “humanitarian” streak of imperialism. It is a very shrewd propaganda flick, as Darwin Bond-Graham demonstrated in his superb review,² a film which in fact helps to pry open a little bit further the door to a war on Iran.

The film is divided roughly into two parts, the first warning of “nuclear terrorism,” emanating mainly from the brown-skinned world of Arabs and Muslims, although a few seconds are devoted to Japanese terrorists. The second part considers the possibility of an accidental nuclear war and the very fallible command and control systems for these instruments of mass murder. The problem is that these two issues are equated. A “terrorist” nuclear attack with one or even a few nuclear bombs would be a crime against humanity on the scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But terrible as this is, it is quite different from the existential threat posed by the nukes of US and Russia, thousands of them on hair trigger alert, subject to all the vagaries of technical failure, misjudgment and miscalculation. An accidental or ill-considered nuclear exchange of this magnitude is of an entirely different scale, a slaughter worse than all the previous ones in human history combined, and a threat to the very existence of the species, given the real possibility of a nuclear winter. Osama bin Laden looks like a pesky mosquito compared to this danger. Countdown fails completely to draw that distinction.

The compulsory scenes of Muslim men chanting thanks to Allah for giving Pakistan the bomb were prominent in the Countdown, but Harry Truman’s televised speech to the nation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so vividly shown in the classic documentary Atomic Café, is missing. Truman told America that the Bomb was a great gift and that God had given it to us. In his enthusiastic praise of the pro-American Deity, dispensing radioactive hellfire even as Japan was scrambling to surrender, Truman did not thunder “God is great,” but he did not have to. The explosions that incinerated hundreds of thousands of Japanese were loud enough. America was out to show the world, and especially the Soviets, that it not only had nukes, but would not shrink from using its God-given gifts.

The segment of Countdown that deals with the possibility of a nuclear accident or miscalculation is of some worth and drew the participation of some well-meaning activists. In fact most people do not know how close we have come to nuclear Armageddon on more than one occasion since the end of the Cold War. But it seems to this observer that this segment was used to sell the demonization of Iran and the Muslim world in the earlier segment. It also seems that removing the thousands of US and Russian nukes from hair trigger alert, which is a major threat now, can be readily accomplished. Obama and Medvedev ought to be able to do it with the stroke of two pens. But the US and Russian heads of state are apparently unable to perform this simple act that would remove the sword of a nuclear Damocles dangling so dangerously above us. The is due to the modern culture of empire, in part a product of the missionary zeal of Western civilization, which runs deep from Washington all the way to Moscow.

Coming at this time Countdown appears designed in large part to scare those who are likely to be antiwar into supporting further moves by the Obama administration against Iran. The hoax of weapons of mass destruction, most notably nuclear weapons, was employed to frighten the American public into a war on Iraq. And now the same is being done with Iran. As “W” told us, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, …..” Well, you know.

1. “Israel’s Nukes Harm US National Interests.” by John Mearsheimer, July 09, 2010. The entire piece deserves reading but to put the quote in context, here is a slice:

   “There are going to be cases where it’s in Israel’s interest to do certain things, and not in America’s interest to allow Israel to do those things. And there is no issue I believe­ where that is clearer than the nuclear issue. As I made clear in my opening set of remarks, I do believe it was in Israel’s interest to develop nuclear weapons. By the way, I think it’s in Iran’s interest today to develop nuclear weapons. If I was president Ahmadinejad’s national security advisor, and he asked me what to do, I would tell him to acquire a nuclear deterrent. Is that in America’s interest?

   “Absolutely not.

   “Iran and the United States have different interests. No two states have the same interests. I believe it was in Israel’s interest to acquire nuclear weapons. But it was not then in America’s interest for Israel to acquire nuclear weapons and it is not in our interest now for Israel to have nuclear weapons.”

2. “Disarmament for Some: Co-opting the Anti-Nuclear Movement.”