A new HBO documentary called ‘The Crime of the Century’ lays bare how firms like Purdue used bribery, dodgy marketing, and shady political deals to make fortunes by getting millions hooked on super-strong painkillers.
What would it look like if an illegal international drug cartel were allowed to advertise? Perhaps it might take the form of slick music videos and glossy magazine ads promising an ‘end to pain’. Certainly, they would minimise the negative effects of their drugs on your life, your future, and your loved ones. If questioned about what they were doing, we can imagine them blaming those who use their drugs, not themselves for providing them.
It sounds mad – madder still that anyone would believe them – but this is exactly what has been allowed to happen with large pharmaceutical companies and their marketing of highly addictive opioid drugs.
At least, this is the argument put forward in a new two-part HBO documentary series released this week entitled, ‘The Crime of the Century’. Across its nearly four-hour run-time, director Alex Gibney lays bare the bribery, underhanded marketing tactics, and shady political dealings that enabled the devastating overproduction and over-distribution of synthetic opiates. In devastating detail, the documentary portrays American pharmaceutical companies and the doctors who recklessly doled out prescriptions as elements of a glorified drug cartel – dealers in lab coats, suits and ties.
Systematically overselling the benefits of synthetic opioids and downplaying the risk of addiction, the documentary traces how drug companies are driven to pursue ever stronger and more exotic medications as patents on old treatments run out and profits dry up. In many ways, it traverses territory that is already well known, but is no less useful for highlighting in shocking detail just how much these companies have become a major risk to public health.
This is particularly true in their penchant for ‘discovering’ and treating ever more chronic conditions. While the efficacy of opioids for treatment of acute pain and end-of-life care has been well known, there is little incentive to develop and provide drugs solely for such patients, who tend to be few and far between and whose needs are often short-term. No, the real money is in long-term use in greater numbers. And this is where the dangers of pushing these drugs on patients with any kind of pain became increasingly clear.
Through heart-rending stories of suffering and loss, Gibney adeptly shows how a deadly cocktail of business incentives to push for over-prescription at escalating doses, inherent addictiveness, and, in some cases, communities facing economic despair, combined to produce the ‘perfect storm’ that became the opioid crisis.
In one story, a former heroin addict details his experience being used as a human guinea pig, prescribed a daily dose of pills equivalent to 200 hits of heroin. In another, a victim whose family described her as living a happy, functional life using nothing more than Tylenol was prescribed high doses of a range of opioids and muscle relaxants that regularly rendered her unconscious. One day her husband found her dead next to a phone that she’d attempted to use to call for help.
What could possibly fuel such enormous failure of caution? The obvious answer is greed and profit. Indeed, the meagre payouts and settlements companies like Purdue Pharma were ordered to pay over the years paled in comparison to the eye-watering profits they made misrepresenting their drugs. But the story is much deeper. The ‘opioid epidemic’ itself was preceded by claims that most Americans were actually being undertreated. What is more, they were being left callously to suffer in an ‘epidemic of pain’. Throughout the series, company representatives and even policymakers refer over and over to a ‘growing epidemic’ of pain suffered by millions.
This is what prepared the ground for the epidemic of over-prescription, permitting claims detailed in the documentary like “chronic pain patients can’t be addicts”, and the development of pseudoscientific terms like ‘pseudoaddiction’. The latter reflects an attempt to assuage the growing fears of prescribing physicians that the person before them is indeed becoming addicted to the drugs they were being prescribed. No, they only appear this way because they are in so much pain. You must help them. Prescribe more.
And prescribe more they did.
While it is easy to blame this situation on the greed of companies like Purdue Pharma and the owning Sackler family that lived luxuriously in its shadow, they would not have found such a ready market had they not been able to feed and exploit a culture with a preexisting aversion to pain. Indeed, many of the physicians and sales executives responsible for pushing large doses of highly addictive pain medications justified their actions with their belief that a life with pain was a life not worth living. They had convinced themselves that any pain was worse than death.
Supplanting everything that once made life meaningful, the pursuit of health and even mental health have become ultimate goals. The notion that one might tolerate pain, whether physical or psychic, is seen as beyond the pale. It is no longer, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Any pain or negative experience is seen as intensely damaging to the human psyche.
In a life without meaning, any pain becomes unbearable. We all become patients in waiting. Easy targets for these drug dealers in suits and ties.
Ashley Frawley is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at Swansea University and the author of Semiotics of Happiness: Rhetorical Beginnings of a Public Problem.
A few days ago, Vimeo deleted our Documentary Feature “trustWHO”, directed by Lilian Franck, from their platform, stating that they do not support “Videos that depict or encourage self-harm, falsely claim that mass tragedies are hoaxes, or perpetuate false or misleading claims about vaccine safety.” This claim about our documentary is both misleading and false. “trustWHO” has been thoroughly researched for 7 years; it has been fact-checked and approved by lawyers, experts in the medical field and even by key executives of the WHO itself. The documentary simply investigates how efficiency and transparency of the World Health Organization are undermined by both corporate influences and a lack of public funding. It is a journalistic investigation based on facts – and far from what Vimeo makes it out to be.
This is our full statement on the matter, presented by Robert Cibis (Filmmaker, Co-author and producer of “trustWHO”).
Watch this brief statement and selected excerpts from the film:
New documents show the makers of the film – the highest-grossing in history and now re-released – secretly liaised on its plot and dialogue with the Corps. The subsequent attack on it was all about military control over Hollywood.
The 3-D sci-fi epic Avatar was recently re-released in China, and revenues from the People’s Republic have seen the movie overtake Avengers: Endgame and reclaim its position as the highest-grossing film of all time.
This tidbit about box office statistics has resulted in a flurry of news coverage, but hidden behind the endless reports from journalists with dollar signs in their eyes is a tale of covert military propaganda, and how the DOD pressures filmmakers to produce more pro-war content.
Flashback: When the Marine Corps slated Avatar
Shortly after its original release in 2009, Avatar met with a wave of criticism, despite its enormous popularity with moviegoers. A Vatican newspaper commented that the picture “gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature,” while a review on Vatican Radio said it “cleverly winks at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium.”
American conservatives accused Avatar of being anti-American and anti-capitalist, while liberals skewered the film for its supposed racism, for the storyline of blue-skinned natives being saved by a noble white man – Jake, a paralysed former Marine.
Likewise, the semi-official Marine Corps Timesreported how “Avatar has been the target of anger and backlash from some who see it as an affront to the Marine Corps and a negative allegory for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
They also published a letter from the then-director of Marine Corps public affairs, Bryan Salas, which said that Avatar “Takes sophomoric shots at our military culture and uses the lore of the Marine Corps and over-the-top stereotyping of Marine warriors to set the context for the screenplay.”
James Cameron apologises to the military for the movie
Salas’ public criticisms were widely reported and led James Cameron – the producer of Avatar – to reach out to the public affairs chief to discuss his concerns. Cameron then gave an extended interview to Marine Corps Times where he effectively apologised for the movie, and denied that it was anti-military.
Cameron told the Times, “I am also concerned that some people are simplistically saying that Avatar is ‘anti-military’. The highly sympathetic main character of the film, through whom the audience experiences almost every moment of the story, is a former Marine. His courage in the face of overwhelming odds makes him a hero of mythic proportions by the end of the story.”
He continued, “While the enemy force in the film are mercenary troops, who are clearly stated to be acting as corporate security contractors, it is not a goal of the film to criticize legitimate military forces, especially the courageous men and women who defend this country.”
The producer, who worked closely with the Marine Corps on his action blockbuster True Lies, went on to explain that his youngest brother John David Cameron joined the Marines in 1985 and fought in Operation Desert Storm. Cameron added, “After that conflict, Dave has worked for me, along with several of his fellow Marines, until the present. And I still have several former Marines working directly for me who have become like family.”
Cameron explained that his brother worked on Avatar as a technical advisor to Sam Worthington, who plays Jake in the film. He concluded, “So even though the US Marines are not mentioned specifically in dialogue, I felt it was important to make this association as a tribute to the calibre of people created by the Marine Corps’ training, spirit and values.”
Documents reveal the truth about the military and Avatar
Years later, in response to Freedom of Information requests, the Marine Corps released nearly 1,700 pages of activities reports from the Corps’ entertainment media liaison office. The documents tell a radically different story to the media storm that followed the release of Avatar, and reveal a close relationship between the Corps and Cameron during the film’s development.
A report from April 2009 lists Avatar as a supported project, and details how Hollywood liaison officers “Met with director/writer James Cameron on 28 March for a sci-fi feature that finds a Marine paraplegic war veteran on another planet. In the project, the main character encounters a humanoid race with their own language and culture, which later comes to odds with humans.”
The reports goes on to say they offered “support for verbiage in the script dialogue” and that they “expected to meet with Mr. Cameron again to continue with script changes.” Another document from two weeks later records how they met with the producer on set to continue providing support.
Exactly what script changes were made as a result of these meetings is not recorded in the documents, but a draft script treatment by Cameron offers a glimpse into what disappeared.
In the draft version, Jake was paralysed when he “fell out a window, drunk, at a base party.” This detail went missing from the final film, replaced by Jake getting wounded in combat, and dialogue such as “I became a Marine for the hardship. To be hammered on the anvil of life. I told myself I can pass any test a man can pass.”
In December 2009, officers from the Marine Corps media liaison office attended the Avatar premiere, and later reports noted how the film had passed the $1 billion mark at the box office. The liaison office got back in touch with Cameron to arrange screenings on CENTCOM military bases, as well to have the actors and producers take part in a “Navy Entertainment Program visit to 11th MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit] and other units in the AOR.”
The updates on Avatar continued for months after the Salas letter and Cameron’s interview responding to it. Emphasising how the military actually saw the film as a propaganda success, an Army report from 2011 refers to a military panel at Comic Con featuring entertainment liaison officers. It lists several officials who appeared on the panel along with some of the projects they worked on – including Avatar.
How the Pentagon gets Hollywood to make more pro-war movies
In light of these documents, we need to take a more nuanced view of the military’s relationship with Avatar, and the public criticisms made by Salas. It was around this time that the DOD embarked on a more proactive approach in Hollywood, seeking greater influence in Tinseltown. The DOD-Hollywood chief at the time, Phil Strub, began giving more public interviews, liaison officers started having meetings with studio heads to discuss projects before they had even asked for support, and all the different military branches stepped up their outreach efforts.
By publicly criticising an apparently left-wing, anti-military film, Salas’ letter played into the narrative that Hollywood is full of peaceniks who hate the military, and thus pressured filmmakers to make more pro-military, pro-war films.
This same narrative, that Hollywood makes too many anti-military films, was repeated by several participants at an online conference hosted by the US Naval Institute last October. The conference featured several current and former military-Hollywood officials as well as retired military officers who work as technical advisors to the entertainment industry, and was likely a part of the same efforts to increase the Pentagon’s influence on the movie business.
However, there is no evidence to support the narrative that Hollywood is anti-military – seven of the top ten highest-grossing film franchises of all time have benefited from DOD and other government support, including the Marvel Cinematic Universe, James Bond and The Fast and the Furious. Other major franchises supported by the Pentagon and/or CIA include Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean and Mission: Impossible.
Indeed, the only $200 million dollar tentpole movie that deviates from the norm and could possibly be seen as anti-military or anti-war is Avatar, and it was publicly criticised by the Marine Corps even though they had a hand in rewriting the script. Thus, the Avatar episode only serves to highlight how the Pentagon won’t tolerate major movies having even a marginally anti-military vibe, and are seeking full-spectrum dominance of Hollywood.
Tom Secker, a British-based investigative journalist, author and podcaster. You can follow his work via his Spy Culture site and his podcast ClandesTime.
Below is a brief clip from of David Cohen, a professor and Associate Dean for Research and Development of at the Luskin School of Social Work, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research focuses on psychoactive drugs (prescribed, licit, and illicit) and their desirable and undesirable effects as socio-cultural phenomena “constructed” through language, policy, attitudes, and social interactions.
He has conducted research on the side effects of psychiatric medications and on withdrawal. Public and private institutions in the U.S., Canada, and France have funded him to conduct clinical-neuropsychological studies, qualitative investigations, and epidemiological surveys of patients, professionals, and the general population.
In the clip, taken from the Medicating Normal documentary, he explains how antidepressants may provide a very short term mood boost for patients. He also expresses why pharmaceutical companies only conduct short-term studies instead of long term studies for antidepressant medications.
A study published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology looked at 185 meta-analyses on antidepressant medication and found that one third of them were written by pharmaceutical industry employees and that almost 80 percent of the studies had industry ties.
A study published in the British Medical Journal by researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen showed that pharmaceutical companies were not disclosing all information regarding the results of their drug trials. Researchers looked at documents from 70 different double-blind, placebo-controlled trials of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) and serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRI) and found that the full extent of serious harm in clinical study reports went unreported.
“We really don’t have good enough evidence that antidepressants are effective and we have increasing evidence that they can be can be harmful. So we need to go into reverse and stop this increasing trend of prescribing them.” – Joanna Moncrieff, a psychiatrist and researcher at University College London (source)
These medications don’t seem to be prescribed based on honest evidence when it comes to the cause of these illnesses, as well as what exactly these drugs are doing to our brain and biology. For example, a New England Journal of Medicinereview on Major Depression is one of multiple that express these sentiments:
… numerous studies of norepinephrine and serotonin metabolites in plasma, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid as well as postmortem studies of the brains of patients with depression, have yet to identify the purported deficiency reliably.
According to Daniel J. Carlat, M.D., Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine,
“And where there is a scientific vacuum, drug companies are happy to insert a marketing message and call it science. As a result, psychiatry has become a proving ground for outrageous manipulations of science in the service of profit.” (source)
A 2002 article in the American Psychological Association journal Prevention and Treatment describes the lack of efficacy for antidepressant drugs. Even if there is a difference between drug and placebo, it is clinically insignificant. The majority of studies on antidepressants actually found no significant difference between drug and placebo. The negative results were not published and the researchers had to request access to US FDA documents to review the data.
A 2008 meta-analysis in PLoS Med has this to say about the lack of efficacy for antidepressants:
“Drug-placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication.”
A 2008 article by prestigious researcher John Ioannidis reviewed the evidence that antidepressants are not effective.
“While only half of these trials had formally significant effectiveness, published reports almost ubiquitously claimed significant results. ‘Negative’ trials were either left unpublished or were distorted to present ‘positive’ results.” This article ends with the statement: “Nevertheless, even if one feels a bit depressed by this state of affairs, there is no reason to take antidepressants, they probably won’t work.”
A recent report that appeared in the British Medical Journal/Evidence-Based Medicine which concluded antidepressants should not be prescribed because there is no evidence that their benefits outweigh the harms- even for major depression.
The Takeaway: When it comes to issues such as depression, nutritional, holistic and mindful interventions never really see the light of day and are never really discussed or recommended by your everyday psychiatrist.
In today’s day and age, self education is a must, and that goes for doctors as well. When it comes to solutions to these issues, one must also considered options outside of the pharmaceutical industry and dive into other resources to seek out interventions that may not be motivated by profit. This is why awareness is key. As more people become aware of this type information they begin to seek out alternatives and make new choices.
It would be helpful if more effort and funding was applied to study other interventions that may not provide profit for the pharmaceutical industry. Perhaps this also shows the limitation in basing public well being on a capitalistic economy. Perhaps it’s simply a measure of our societal worldview.
Depression may not be a problem with brain structure, chemical flow and neurotransmitters. Instead, the mood of depression we experience comes from other factors that in turn may lead to changes in biology, brain structure, chemical flows etc. Mainstream medicine does not identify this issue, because the issue is not biological and is instead rooted in human experience, trauma, how one perceives the world and much more.
The new Black Panthers movie is one of the best of the year. But it’s being critically misinterpreted in order to scuttle working class solidarity in favor of maintaining the status quo through racial hysteria.
Judas and the Black Messiah, which opened in theaters and on the streaming service HBO Max on February 12, recounts the true story of the betrayal of Fred Hampton, the charismatic chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, by Bill O’Neal, an FBI informant.
The flawed but fantastic film, written and directed by Shaka King, features a fascinating story and scintillating performances from Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as O’Neal, making it among the very best movies of this thus far cinematically calamitous year.
Predictably, many critics are using the film to connect the more recent Black Lives Matter movement with the revolutionary Black Panthers of the 1960s spotlighted in the film.
This is an intellectually egregious and mind-numbingly vacuous interpretation of the movie and its narrative.
The film isn’t about our current manufactured myopia regarding race; it’s about power and the great lengths those with it will go to subjugate those without it in an effort to maintain the status quo.
Infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, embarrassingly portrayed in the movie by Martin Sheen in an obscenely amateurish prosthetic nose, deemed the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” because, among other reasons, their free breakfast program for kids wasn’t just for black kids, but for all kids.
In response, Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) and its dirty tactics on the Black Panthers, just as he had done previously to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and other leftists.
As highlighted in the film, the Black Panthers and Hampton were seen as direct threats to the power structure of the US, because they worked to bring all poor and working-class people together, be they black, Native American, Latino, and even Confederate flag-waving whites, against a common enemy, the ruling class, which subjugated and abused them.
Hampton, Malcolm X, and MLK weren’t targeted by COINTELPRO’s massive surveillance and infiltration operation and ultimately assassinated under extremely suspicious circumstances because they were standing up just for black people, but because they were trying to bring all people together to fight against the corrupt and criminal political power exploiting the poor and working class in America and across the globe.
In comparison to the towering revolutionaries of Hampton, King, and Malcolm X, Black Lives Matter are shameless courtesans to the establishment.
The FBI obviously doesn’t see BLM as a threat; hell, it is such a collection of useful idiots, you wonder if the feds started it in the first place? The power structure’s greatest fear is that poor and working class black and white people will stop directing their anger at each other and start directing it at Washington, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. BLM is a critical tool to thwart that impulse and keep the proletariat separated by race – conveniently divided and conquered.
This is how something as innocuous as ‘All Lives Matter’ is transformed into a racial slur instead of a rousing rallying cry. BLM gives away its establishment protection game by so aggressively making enemies out of potential allies, proving it would rather separate people than bring them together for a clear common cause – stopping police brutality.
There are other signs that BLM is the establishment’s controlled opposition.
For example, when a protest by QAnon clowns at the Capitol building turned into a riot, it was immediately labeled an ‘insurrection’ and false stories about it were propagated throughout the mainstream media, with the feds hunting down the perpetrators. But these same feds and media supported BLM’s “mostly peaceful protests” that attacked police stations and government buildings, took over portions of major cities like Portland and Seattle and turned others into looted, chaotic, burning madhouses for months.
Another example is highlighted in the film when Hampton belittles the idea of a school name change as some kind of substantial victory. BLM specializes in this sort of self-righteous symbolism, empty sloganeering (‘Defund the Police’), and toothless grandstanding that intentionally doesn’t address the actual conditions under which poor people suffer. It is all style over substance, as BLM would rather bring down statues than hunger, homelessness, or homicide rates.
What makes Judas and the Black Messiah so poignantly tragic is that it shows that the FBI, which the left now adores, has always been the front line for American fascism, and its victory over genuine dissent has been spectacular.
This is why we now have vapid, race-hustling, racial grievance grifters like Al Sharpton instead of intellectual giants like Malcolm X and MLK. And why we got the ‘hope and change’ charlatanry of Barack Obama, a maintenance man for the status quo who dutifully bails out Wall Street while Main Street crumbles, instead of the revolutionary Fred Hampton. And why we are fed the lap dog of Black Lives Matter play-acting at defiance, while being whole-heartedly embraced by the corporate and political power structure, instead of the bulldog of the Black Panthers putting genuine fear into the establishment.
The Black Lives Matter contingent think they’re Fred Hampton, but they’re frauds, phonies, shills, and sellouts, just like Bill O’Neal. And that’s why I recommend Judas and the Black Messiah… not just for the standout performances of Kaluuya and Stanfield, but because it rightfully exposes those bourgeois BLM bulls**tters.
Michael McCaffrey is a writer and cultural critic who lives in Los Angeles. His work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog. He is also the host of the popular cinema podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota.
If you want to support and speed up the making of this documentary, possibly mini-series, please hit our website 👉 https://silview.media/ and share our work or hit the Donate button to Paypal us. We will deliver ASAP anyway, but the amount of evidence is staggering and our equipment is not really fast.
Lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, has been banned from Facebook owned Instagram just days after he penned a comprehensive account of Bill Gates’ attempt to monopolise and dominate global food production and public health programs.
Kennedy had 800,000 subscribers on the platform, which has said that he was banned for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the #coronavirus or #vaccines.”
It also emerged that just hours before the account was taken down, The Washington Post lobbied Facebook to take action against Kennedy, after he posted a section of a video from the “Planet Lockdown” movie.
The film was made by Catherine Austin Fitts, and seeks to expose connections between Big Tech and the federal government and how they are engineering a system of planetary control.
Sections of the movie present arguments that the COVID vaccination push is being controlled by an elite cabal, and that the vaccines are part of a push toward synthetic biology, which can be patented, and has been claimed to cause infertility.
Kennedy has been outspoken on his opinions regarding vaccines for some time.
While Kennedy still remains on Facebook and Twitter, both have pledged to crack down on information relating to claims about vaccines that do not align with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other governmental health authorities’.
On 11 January, Israel’s Lod District Court ruled against Palestinian film-maker Mahmoud Bakri, and ordered him to pay hefty compensation to an Israeli soldier who was accused, along with the Israeli military, of carrying out war crimes in April 2002 in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
As reported by Israeli and other media, the case seemed to be a relatively simple matter of defamation of character and so on. To those familiar with the massive clash of narratives which emanated from the singular event known to Palestinians as the “Jenin Massacre”, the court’s verdict not only has political undertones, but also historical and intellectual implications.
Bakri is a Palestinian born in the village of Bi’ina, near the Palestinian city of Akka, now located in Israel. He has been paraded repeatedly through Israeli courts and censured heavily in the local mainstream media simply because he dared to challenge the official discourse about the violence in the Jenin refugee camp nearly two decades ago.
The director’s documentary Jenin, Jenin is now officially banned in Israel. The film, which was produced only months after the conclusion of this particular episode of Israeli state violence, did not make many claims of its own. It largely opened up a rare space for Palestinians to convey, in their own words, what had befallen their refugee camp when units of the Israel Defence Forces, with air cover provided by fighter jets and attack helicopters, pulverised much of the camp, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds more.
Israel claims to be a democracy, remember. For it to ban a film, regardless of how unacceptable its content is to the authorities, is wholly inconsistent with any definition of freedom of speech. To ban Jenin, Jenin, indict the Palestinian filmmaker who made it, and then compensate those accused of carrying out war crimes is outrageous.
The background of the Israeli decision can be understood within two contexts: one, Israel’s regime of censorship aimed at silencing any criticism of its occupation and apartheid; and two, Israel’s fear of a truly independent Palestinian narrative.
Israeli censorship dates back to the inception of the State of Israel atop the ruins of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. The country’s founding fathers painstakingly constructed a convenient story regarding the birth of the state, erasing Palestine and the Palestinians almost entirely from their narrative. The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said had this to say in his essay “Permission to Narrate“: “The Palestinian narrative has never been officially admitted to Israeli history, except as that of ‘non-Jews,’ whose inert presence in Palestine was a nuisance to be ignored or expelled.”
To ensure the erasure of the Palestinians from Israel’s official discourse, the state’s censorship has evolved to become one of the most elaborate and well-guarded programmes of its kind in the world. Its sophistication and brutality has reached the extent that poets and artists can be put on trial and sentenced to terms in prison for merely challenging Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism, or penning poems deemed offensive to Israeli sensibilities. While Palestinians have borne the brunt of Israel’s ever-vigilant censorship machine, some Israeli Jews, including human rights organisations, have also suffered.
The case of Jenin, Jenin is not one of routine censorship, though. It is a statement, a message, to those who dare give voice to oppressed Palestinians and allow them to speak directly to the world. These Palestinians, in the eyes of Israel, are certainly the most dangerous, as they demolish the layered, elaborate yet fallacious official Israeli discourse, regardless of the nature, place or timing of any contested event, starting with the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948.
My first book, Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion, was published almost simultaneously with the release of Jenin, Jenin. The book, like the documentary, aimed to counterbalance official Israeli propaganda through honest, heart-rending accounts from the survivors of the violence brought down upon the refugee camp. While Israel had no jurisdiction to ban the book, pro-Israel media and mainstream academics either ignored it completely or attacked it ferociously.
Admittedly, the Palestinian counter-narrative to the dominant Israeli version, whether on the “Jenin Massacre” or the Second Intifada which was still underway at the time, was humble, and largely championed through individual efforts. Still, even such modest attempts at narrating a Palestinian version were considered dangerous, and rejected vehemently as irresponsible, sacrilegious or anti-Semitic.
Israel’s true power — but also its Achilles heel — is its ability to design, construct and shield its own version of history, despite the fact that the narrative is hardly consistent with any reasonable definition of the truth. Within this modus operandi, even meagre and unassuming counter-narratives are threatening, for they poke holes in an already baseless intellectual construct.
Bakri’s story of Jenin was not attacked relentlessly and eventually banned simply as the outcome of Israel’s censorship, but because it dared to blemish Israel’s diligently fabricated historical sequence, starting with a persecuted “people with no land” arriving in the alleged “land with no people”, where they “made the desert bloom”. These are two of Israel’s most potent founding myths.
Jenin, Jenin is a microcosm of a people’s narrative that successfully shattered Israel’s well-funded propaganda. It sent (and still sends) a message to Palestinians everywhere that even Israel’s falsification of history can be challenged and defeated.
In her seminal book, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith brilliantly examines the relationship between history and power. She asserts that, “History is mostly about power… It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others.” It is precisely because Israel needs to maintain the current power structure that Jenin, Jenin and other Palestinian attempts at reclaiming history have to be censored, banned and punished.
Israel’s targeting of the Palestinian narrative is not simply official contestation of the accuracy of facts or of some kind of fear that the “truth” could lead to legal accountability. The colonial state cares nothing at all about facts and, thanks to Western support, it remains immune from international prosecution. Rather, it is about erasure; erasure of history, of a homeland, of a people: the people of Palestine.
Nevertheless, a Palestinian people with a coherent, collective narrative will always exist, no matter the geography, the physical hardship and the political circumstances. This is what Israel fears above all else.
The new film, released just before Martin Luther King Jr. Day and available from various video-on-demand sites, poses as an important piece of work, but avoids the big questions in favor of placating the establishment.
I’ve heard it said that Americans are the most propagandized people on the planet. I think that statement is quite accurate.
What makes the propaganda fed to Americans so insidious is that it’s so subtle that audiences, even the supposedly intellectual ones, are blissfully unaware of their indoctrination and conditioning.
A perfect example of this is MLK/FBI, the new documentary directed by Sam Pollard that premiered in theaters and video-on-demand on January 15, which chronicles the FBI’s wiretapping and harassment of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
A documentary dealing with intelligence community nefariousness and MLK, the greatest American strategist and tactician of the 20th century, has my attention.
Unfortunately, after watching MLK/FBI, I was left frustrated and infuriated because it was so obviously a docile and deferential piece of establishment-friendly propaganda meant to distract and deceive viewers.
This movie is 104 minutes of flaccid history and impotent insights disguised as setting the record straight with revolutionary revelations. But there is no new information presented in the film and no new perspectives on the information already known.
The most interesting statement in the movie comes in the final ten minutes and is from MLK aide Andrew Young, who would go on to become a congressman, the US Ambassador to the UN, and the Mayor of Atlanta.
This should be where the movie starts, not where it ends. Young says in regards to James Earl Ray, the man convicted of the assassination of MLK, “I don’t think James Earl Ray had anything to do with that, Dr. King’s assassination, so I can’t really comment on that.”
What makes the FBI’s harassment of MLK noteworthy is that they were gathering salacious information on his private life in an attempt to assassinate his character and thus derail his morally authoritative movement.
The FBI actively tried to get members of the press to publish stories of King’s infidelity but none took the bait, and so the agency was left with lots of ammunition but no one willing to fire it.
It was when King expanded his civil rights work and, in 1968, began the Poor People’s Campaign, which set out to bring poor people of all colors together to fight for economic justice and against American militarism, that the FBI ratcheted up its anti-King work, and this is where the infamous “rape participation” allegation first is documented by the FBI.
The claim, that King watched and laughed as another pastor raped a woman, is dubious and is not thoroughly fleshed out in the film, but it reveals that the FBI understood the greater threat King now posed to the ruling order with the Poor People’s Campaign, and that it was willing to push the envelope to stop him.
Other civil rights groups and leaders faced similar escalation when they dared to cross color lines and work on behalf of all people instead of just black people.
It wasn’t until Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and evolved into a more racially inclusive yet no less revolutionary figure, that he got assassinated under shadowy circumstances.
The Black Panthers’ free breakfast program, open to children of all races, was deemed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to be “the greatest internal threat to the United States.” The Black Panthers were quickly infiltrated and some, including Fred Hampton, were assassinated.
And so it was with King’s Poor People’s Campaign, which triggered the FBI to “up its game.” Coincidentally, just a few weeks later he was assassinated in Memphis.
MLK/FBI is much too “respectable” to investigate or challenge Andrew Young’s claim regarding Ray’s innocence in the assassination of King, even though Ray himself claimed he was not guilty, the King family believes he is innocent and a civil court ruled he was not the assassin. It’s this desperation for respectability at the expense of truth that makes the film establishment propaganda.
The other tell-tale sign it’s propaganda is that the film acts like FBI and intel community deviousness and depravity are some remote experience from a dark, distant past instead of a pressing issue of our time.
This allows liberals, especially ones like Bill Maher and John Oliver who pose as anti-establishmentarians, to continue to fawn over and fellate the “heroes” of the intel community under the guise that malicious misdeeds only occurred in the past.
The FBI’s invasive surveillance of King pales in comparison to what the intel community is capable of now. What the FBI did to King the intel community is now able to do to everyone, since we all carry cell phones, mini eavesdropping devices that track our every movement, contact and conversation.
The film’s flaccidity also allows liberals to continue to giddily cheer the intel community’s crackdown on nationalists, militias and Julian Assange, just as conservatives once cheered Hoover’s targeting of King, civil rights and anti-war groups, and communists.
It also surreptitiously endorses the Black Lives Matter movement and allows woke advocates to deceive t$hemselves into thinking they’re morally equivalent to Dr. King.
BLM is no Poor People’s Campaign meant to threaten the establishment order. It’s a contrived and manipulative movement meant to uphold the status quo, not disrupt it, which is why it’s been swiftly embraced by Washington, the media and corporate America.
In conclusion, by being a documentary that talks an awful lot but never really has anything useful to say, MLK/FBI is a deceptive piece of establishment propaganda not worthy of your time.
Michael McCaffrey is a writer and cultural critic who lives in Los Angeles. His work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog. He is also the host of the popular cinema podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota. Follow him on Twitter @MPMActingCo
The Lod District Court in Israel on Monday banned the screening of a documentary about Israel’s brutal 2002 campaign in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
‘Jenin, Jenin’ can no longer be aired in Israel after an Israeli soldier who was depicted in the footage stealing from an elderly Palestinian filed a lawsuit against the film.
The judge said Israeli soldier Nissim Magnaji had been “sent to defend his country and found himself accused of a crime he did not commit”. The court ordered director Mohammed Bakri to pay damages to Magnaji of 175,000 shekels ($55,000) as well as 50,000 shekels ($15,936) of court expenses.
In her ruling, judge Halit Silash went on to say some of the representation in the video was untrue.
Bakri, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, told the AFP news agency the decision was “unfair” and that the judge had acted on instructions “from above.”
“I intend to appeal the verdict because it is unfair, it is neutering my truth,” Bakri told the Walla News website.
Objecting to the court’s ruling, the chairman of the Balad faction in the Joint List party, Member of the Israeli Knesset Mtanes Shehadeh, was quoted by the Times of Israel saying: “It’s not the film that should be shelved, but the occupation and its crimes.”
The documentary shows footage and eyewitness accounts of the massacre committed by the Israeli occupation forces in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin in 2002. At least 52 Palestinians, including women, children, and the elderly, were killed in the rampage that unfolded over a two-week period in a refugee camp, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigation.
Among the many controversies surrounding the events of 9/11 one of the most prominent has been the question of how, many hours after the collapse of the Twin Towers, the 47-storey WTC7 building suffered a total collapse, all in a matter of seconds.
The persistence of this controversy is hardly surprising. WTC 7 was not hit by an airplane, it had suffered from only a few isolated office fires whilst multiple sources on the day were foretelling the collapse of the building, even though in history no steel-framed skyscraper had ever been brought down by fire alone.
Questions were hardly mitigated by the remarkable length of time it took NIST (the National Institute for Standards in Technology) to publish their investigation of the collapse nor their eye-brow raising conclusion.
The belated NIST investigation concluded that isolated office fires had caused thermal expansion leading to the failure of a single column and then, extraordinarily, an immediate cascading collapse of all columns in the building.
This then brought the building down symmetrically, in a manner consistent with controlled demolition, in under 12 seconds.
To many this did not appear to be a particularly persuasive analysis, and certainly not for the grouping of engineers and architects (AE 9/11) who had been questioning for some time the initiation and behaviour of the building collapses on 9/11.
Indeed, so dissatisfied were the architects and engineers that they funded an independent scientific study in order to rigorously evaluate NIST’s ‘completely new’ theory of thermal expansion and progressive collapse.
Seven tells the story of this scientific study, focusing upon its lead researcher, Professor Leroy Hulsey from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who spent four years examining the WTC 7 collapse along with two engineering PhD students Feng Xiao and Zhili Quan.
The film is beautifully produced and directed by Dylan Avery, narrated by the well-known and much-loved actor Ed Asner, and is underpinned by a powerful music score by Johan Back Monell. It was produced by Richard Gage, Ted Walters and Kelly David from AE9/11.
Interviews with Professor Hulsey are skillfully interwoven with expert testimony from Roland Angle (civil engineer), Kamal Obeid (structural engineer), Scott Grainger (fire protection officer) and Tony Szamboti (mechanical engineer).
The integrity and expertise of these experts is juxtaposed with embarrassing silences from news anchors when members of the US public phone in to ask about Building 7 and the sheepish Shyam Sunder, lead investigator for the NIST study. At one point in the film, having introduced the matter of the corroded steel, retrieved by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and reported by the New York Times as ‘perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation’, Sunder is heard awkwardly attempting to explain away its significance:
Er, there is, there is reference often made to a piece of steel from Building 7. There was no evidence that any of the residue in that steel, in that piece of steel, er had any, er, relationship to, er, an an, undue er fire event in the building … or any other kind of incendiary, incendiary device in the building.
The extreme temperatures needed to have corroded or melted the steel were many times higher than those identified by NIST as having occurred due to the isolated office fires. As with so many other aspects of the NIST investigation, evidence that did not fit a preordained conclusion was simply ignored. Scientific method and rigour was thrown to the wind.
Hulsey’s integrity and rigour stands in sharp contrast to NIST’s disgraceful and un-scientific conduct.
Seven carefully describes how Hulsey’s team systematically unpicked the flawed claims advanced by NIST, including demonstrably inaccurate calculations relating to their explanation that thermal expansion worked to move a girder off its seat, and implausible claims that the resulting failure of a single column (out of a total of 50 odd) could ever lead to a global collapse of the entire building at free fall speed.
Using two separate computer programs, Hulsey’s team explored how the building would have behaved according to NIST’s explanation and found that the NIST account was wrong.
When confronted with issues relating to their study, NIST simply responded with evasions and secrecy: they have refused to release their key data whilst specific errors identified in their study received curt responses signed off, not by an engineer, but by a NIST public relations staffer. Hulsey’s study, conversely, and all of its data and calculations, has been fully open to expert and public scrutiny.
After one year of public consultation (2019-2020), almost no substantive issues were identified and his reported was officially published by Alaska Fairbanks University. The Hulsey study conclusions are delivered with devastating effect. The final report states:
… the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.
This conclusion is based primarily upon the finding that the simultaneous failure of all core columns over 8 stories followed 1.3 seconds later by the simultaneous failure of all exterior columns over 8 stories produces almost exactly the behaviour observed in videos of the collapse, whereas no other sequence of failures produced the observed effect
Hulsey is more concise in the film:
All those interior columns came out at once, at once, the exteriors also a few seconds later came out at once, giving you free fall which comes down, straight down.
To its credit, Seven remains focused on the scientific question of why WTC 7 collapsed and, only at the very end, are the broader implications hinted at.
If the building was not brought down by office fires, something else caused it to come down. The events in New York and Washington D.C. on September 11 2001 led directly to a global ‘war on terror’ and multiple wars, with countless lives being destroyed and ruined, and the crumbling of basic civil rights and democracy in the west.
The film closes with Hulsey’s understated but powerful words:
I’m worried, I’m worried about this country right now. We just seem to be doing a lot of yelling and screaming and no hearing. No listening, maybe some hearing but no listening. So are we in a post 9/11? Yes we are. Does that mean just that is a problem? I think it’s bigger than that, I just don’t know where we are right now. It’s a bit troublesome.
Ultimately, Seven calmly and carefully tells a story of good scientists and professionals with integrity battling to establish an important truth through scientific rigour and objectivity. And that truth relates to one of the most important and consequential events of the 21st century whose ramifications are felt ever more powerfully today.
But the struggle they have had is testament to how far Western institutions and public spheres have been corrupted in the service of power and become, to all intent and purpose, mediums of propaganda.
At an early stage two students, although keen, elected not to study with Hulsey’s team because of the controversial nature of the research; one prominent University blocked an attempt to discuss Hulsey’s findings; nefarious so-called ‘debunkers’ contacted members of Hulsey’s team and told them not to continue with their work. Hulsey himself speculates that fear of losing lucrative government funding streams has deterred debate among architectural and engineering firms.
The creation of a spiral of silence, fuelled by a compliant and lazy corporate media all too eager to childishly dismiss any questioning as ‘conspiracism’ or ‘conspiracy theory’, has meant that public discussion and debate has been subdued.
The conduct of NIST, more than anything else, highlights how respected scientific organizations have become corrupted.
But, as much as Seven serves to highlight how far the West’s Enlightenment tradition has been eclipsed by corruption and propaganda, it also serves as an example that not all hope is lost. ‘Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority’ and is achieved through the determined efforts of people with integrity and courage.
Academia needs more people like Professor Hulsey and so too does the world, never more so than today.
You can rent and buy Seven on multiple platforms, here.
Widely-respected voice of the 9/11 Truth Movement, strong critic of the official accounts of the 9/11 collapses, David Chandler talks about ‘Seven’, the new documentary released by ae911truth.org, dealing with the recent findings of Dr. Leroy Hulsey of the University of Alaska Fairbanks relating to the likely cause of WTC7’s mysterious and unprecedented collapse.
In my presentation about WTC7 at the Toronto Hearings in 2011 I began with a story about the shortest proof of the Pythagorean Theorem by a 12th century Indian mathematician, Bhaskara. He simply drew a diagram and said, “Behold!”
I pointed out that with regard to WTC7 a detailed analysis was not needed to see the truth that the building underwent demolition. The clearest proof is to point at the building collapsing and say, “Behold!” I went on to show that the building entered actual freefall. I described this work as simply “proving that you are not crazy.”
Leroy Hulsey’s work takes this to another level. Not only can we see by the externally observable motion of the building that it was demolished, Hulsey and his team show that even with a detailed structural analysis of the building components there was no mechanism by which fire and gravity alone could produce the effects we can see on videotape.
Furthermore, Hulsey and his team document numerous places in the NIST analysis where they committed scientific fraud by misrepresenting the actual structure of the building in their computer model. Without these alterations, even the NIST model would not have initiated building collapse.
The Hulsey report was brought about by the incessant demands of the segment of the engineering profession that has been in denial of reality. As such, the real audience of “Seven,” and the Hulsey report itself, is the engineering community. Seven does a good job in communicating the issues as simply as possible, so the scientifically literate layman can follow the argument.
The bottom line is that the best argument for the demolition of WTC7 is a video showing the event, with the simple comment, “Behold!” For those who waver, showing the measurement of freefall will usually cause reluctant eyes to open. For those who have reinforced their biases with layers of “sciency” rationalization, Hulsey’s work blows those rationalizations out of the water. Good job, Leroy!
Everyone needs to watch Seven to see how strong our case really is.
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You can rent and buy Seven on multiple platforms, here. View the Trailer below:
David S. Chandler has a BS in physics from Harvey Mudd College and an MS in mathematics from California Polytechnic University. He has taught physics, mathematics, and astronomy at the high school and college levels since 1972. He is now retired and living in Denver, Colorado.
Destruction of the World Trade Center North Tower and Fundamental Physics. He has written a six-part serial essay posted at Medium.com, titled Free Fall.
David maintains a website in collaboration with several other scientific researchers at http://911speakout.org.
The Kevin Barrett-Noam Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective
Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | July 14, 2016
… Chomsky in discouraging skeptical investigation of 9/11 reveals himself to be a Trojan horse that has succeeded in subverting the Left from within. … Read full article
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