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Argo Apostasy

By GARY CORSERI | CounterPunch | February 28, 2013

A friend sends me a PressTV posting by Dr. Kevin Barrett  As is usually the case at that site, it’s a well-written, well-thought-out piece by someone with creds who has something to say.  And, as with the best journalism, poetry, drama, fiction, conversation, etc., good thinking should inspire more of the same… and even consummate in focused action!  Let’s have a go!

Dr. Barrett’s first paragraph: “The only award the makers of Argo deserve is a criminal conviction for crimes against humanity. Instead, Hollywood’s Zionist mafia has handed them an Oscar for best film of the year. The members of the academy should themselves be in the docket, facing war crimes charges, right alongside Ben Affleck.

Argo is a propaganda film. Like the films of Nazi publicist Leni Riefenstahl, it is well-made. Like those of Riefenstahl, it glorifies a murderous criminal organization. And like those of Riefenstahl, its ultimate purpose is to elicit hatred and turn its audience into mass murderers.”

There’s meat to chew on there (or organic, free-range chickens, if one prefers) but, as I wrote my friend, “The biggest problem with Barrett’s analysis is the usual specious analogy; i.e., Naziism/Riefenstahl/WWII and CIA/Hollywood/WWIII.  Best go a little further back in history to get a better sense of how dangerous and insidious ARGO really is.”

Here’s what I mean: We’ve been living in a media-driven world since Edward Bernays applied his uncle’s– Sigmund Freud’s—psychological insights to mass-consumer-marketing and public relations… and then to matters of State propaganda (which often correlates to matters of war!).  Born in Austria in 1891, Bernays was a baby when his family moved to the US a year later.  (Snapshot Wikipedia intro: “[Bernays] combined the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of … Sigmund Freud.”  Here’s the key point: Bernays “felt… manipulation was necessary in society, which he regarded as irrational and dangerous as a result of the ‘herd instinct.’”)

Now, let’s get back to the historical record and why Afleck’s film is far more egregious than the work of Leni Riefenstahl.

Of all the major powers in WWI, Germany had tried hardest to avoid that cataclysmic conflict. Following Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote imploring letters to his royal cousins (really!) in Britain and Russia imploring them to settle the matter of the Serbian insurrection diplomatically, to disentangle themselves from the disastrous network of alliances that had split Europe into armed camps. Nothing happened for about a month during the “July crisis” of 1914.  Austria-Hungary made demands on Serbia to repress the rebellion, but the Serbs were encouraged to press on by “outsiders” (chiefly their Slavic cousins in Russia who wanted to re-establish their power base in the Balkans, but also by Britain and France–determined to crush the rising power of Germany and ensure their control of their Middle Eastern empires!  And if these entanglements and hidden agendas sound a lot like our contemporary situation in Israel, Syria, Libya, Egypt and the whole shebang of the Middle East today, well, Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose!)

Needless to say, the Kaiser was barking up the wrong family tree! His letters and diplomatic missions came to kaput!  The toll on Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire was unimaginable (only Russia would suffer comparable damages among the Allies!). Following the Armistice, there was the sell-out of the Versailles Treaty, the Balfour Declaration, and so forth–with much input by Zionist Jews (especially in Britain and the US) determined to seize the moment to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

Were there “good guys” and “bad guys”… or were politicians, industrialists, armaments manufacturers looking out for their own best interests, figuring how to advance themselves—and the devil be damned?  And the common man or woman or child—what did they understand of those interests?  They were “herded” together to die in filthy trenches, to slaughter, and be slaughtered by, strangers. (Poets like Thomas Hardy in “The Man He Killed” and Wilfred Owen in most of his poems, and a poet-novelist like Remarque best captured the horrific ironies.)

Following the grotesque war (as all wars are!), Germany suffered a further dozen years of hyper-inflation (wheelbarrows of deutchmarks, etc.), starvation, kids dying in the street, etc.  Meantime, kids were dancing the Charleston, etc. during America’s triumphalist Roaring Twenties. So, is it any wonder that German voters turned to Hitler and the Nazis in 1932, and, any more wondrous that by the Berlin Olympics of 1936, artists like Riefenstahl were celebrating a resurrected Germany?  (And, notably, German artists were not alone in their adjulation.  There are old Life magazines from the 1930s showing Herr Hitler as amiable host in Berchtesgaden, and one can find quotes by bulldog British imperialist Churchill praising Hitler’s accomplishments!) Notwithstanding the accomplishments, Germany remained threatened on every side by its former enemies.

No doubt there were injustices in Germany/Austria/Hungary, etc.–as there were in all the major powers of that time. Have we forgotten what it was like to be a black man in the US South back then—the public lynchings with grinning white men, women and children watching the “niggers” swing?  Should we forget that long before there was any kind of “holocaust” engineered by German fanatics, there was at least as terrible a holocaust—in terms of numbers killed, 5-7 million–engineered by our future ally Stalin in Ukraine?

And this is the essence of our problem now—a problem badly exaccerbated by a movie like “Argo.” Since Bernays, we live in an often baffling, multi-layered, complex world with simplistic historical frames of reference; with simplistic solutions, pitting “good guys” against “bad guys.”  (Aside: incredible to me that adults can take a phrase like “bad guys” seriously to justify drone warfare, torture, renditions, sanctions against a non-belligerent like Iran!)  Fact is, Leni Riefenstahl had valid reasons to celebrate the accomplishments of Naziism between 1932 and 1939, and Germany had every reason to be wary of the empires—British, French, Russian and American—that had already devastated it two decades before.

Making Hitler and Naziism the locus of all evil in the world at that time, we have forgiven ourselves the barbarous acts we ourselves committed before and after the holocaustic Second World War!  And, transferring that locus of evil to another opponent—the Soviet Union for over 40 years, or Iran for the past dozen years—we forgive ourselves in advance of committing horrors in the name of peace, security, our “freedom,” our “democracy,” our “way of life,” etc.

The situation in America today is far different from that of Germany in the 30’s! Our country has not been attacked and devastated by Iran. We have, rather, been bringing about our own ruin by the aggressive policies we have pursued since the end of WWII. There never was a “smoking gun” (in Exxon’s Condoleeza Rice’s preposterous phrase), nor yellow-cake uranium (as touted by “military hero” Colin Powell)—nor any of the other charades acted out on the world stage in order to justify the US holocaust against the people of Iraq during the last dozen years.  Our CIA and Hollywood have helped to build the shaky scaffold of Middle Eastern ruin and our own.  It is scaffolding that could come crashing down if the “herded” masses will awaken from their sleep–their dreams and their nightmares–and not only reclaim, but demand, their humanity.

Movies like “Argo” should be boycotted!  Academy Award ceremonies should be picketed in the name of the First Amendment! Such movies have nothing to do with “freedom of speech” and everything to do with suppressing free speech and the truth for the sake of profits, promoting wars and hatred and slaughter.  They are worthy of nothing but the fullest condemnation.

Let the Occupy Movement emerge from its long winter hibernation and focus its admirable energy on our spurious media—this “entertainment industry” that has cast a vail over common sense and decency for the sake of promoting Zionists, billionaires and corporatists (and let’s throw in the decadent, pederast Catholic Church Establishment, too!). That is the real story that needs to be told!

Gary Corseri has taught in US public schools and prisons, and at US and Japanese universities. He has published books of poetry, the Manifestations literary anthology (edited), and the novels,  A Fine Excess and Holy Grail, Holy Grail. He can be contacted at Gary_Corseri@comcast.net.

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February 28, 2013 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hollywood’s Imperial Propaganda

By JOE GIAMBRONE | CounterPunch | February 20, 2013

Hollywood likes to pretend that things aren’t political when they are.  It’s that bi-partisan nationalist myth that if both corporate parties agree to cheer for the empire, then everyone cheers for the empire.  It’s gotten so bad now that races like the Oscars and the Writer’s Guild screenwriting award are tight contests between one CIA propaganda film and another CIA propaganda film.  The first one helps to demonize Iranians and set up the next World War scenario, while the second film fraudulently promotes the effectiveness of state-sanctioned torture crimes.

If there ever was a time for loud disgust and rejection of the Hollywood / Military-Industrial-Complex, this would seem to be it (contact@oscars.org).  Naomi Wolf made a comparison of Zero Dark Thirty’s creators Bigelow and Boal to Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (Triumph of the Will).  That, to me, seems inappropriately offensive to Leni Riefenstahl.  The good German filmmaker never promoted torture through deception.  Nor was Triumph a call to war.  The film was simply an expression of German patriotism and strength, rebirth from the ashes of World War I.  The current insidious crop of propaganda, as in the CIA’s leaking of fictional scenes about locating Osama Bin Laden through torture extraction, are arguably more damaging and less defensible than Riefenstahl’s upfront and blatant homage to Hitler’s leadership.

The Zero Dark Thirty scandal should be common knowledge by now, but here is what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wrote to Sony Pictures about it:

“We believe the film is grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden…  Instead, the CIA learned of the existence of the courier, his true name and location through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program.”

The filmmakers had every opportunity to explore the issue more fully, instead of relying on the “firsthand accounts” of the torturers themselves, and/or their allies within the Central Intelligence Agency.  Notably, torturers are felons and war criminals.  Those who know about their crimes and help cover them up are guilty of conspiracy to torture.  Thus, these self-serving fairy tales that illegal torture led to the desired results (bin Laden) are tangled up with the motivation to protect war criminals from prosecution.  Not only does this claim of successful torture help insulate the guilty from legal prosecution, it also helps to promote further criminal acts of torture in the future.

Once this red flag issue was raised by the Senate, the filmmakers could have taken a second look at what they had put up on screens and reassessed the veracity of their material and the way it was being sold to the world.  Instead they doubled down.  Bigelow and Boal want it both ways, extraordinary access to CIA storytellers for a documentary-like “factual” telling of the bin Laden execution, but they also want license to claim that it’s just a movie and can therefore take all the liberties they please.

Jessica Chastain, who plays a state-employed torturer/murderer, who also allegedly located Osama bin Laden, said:

“I’m afraid to get called in front of a Senate committee… In my opinion, this is a very accurate film… I think it’s important to note the film is not a documentary.”

In a nutshell, that’s the Zero Dark Thirty defense.  It’s a highly sourced “very accurate film,” but we can take all the liberties we like because it’s not a documentary, and so if we made up a case for torture based on the lies of professional liars in the CIA, then oops.

Mark Boal went so far as to mock the Senate Intelligence Committee, at the NY Film Critic’s Circle:

“In case anyone is asking, we stand by the film… Apparently, the French government will be investigating Les Mis.”

Any controversy over the picture seems to help its box office, as more uninformed people hear about it.  The filmmakers themselves suffer no penalty as a result of misleading a large number of people on torture, to accept torture, to accept a secretive criminal state that tortures with impunity.

Kathryn Bigelow’s wrapped-in-the-flag defense of the film:

“Bin Laden… was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.” (emphasis in original)

Nice propaganda trick at the end equating those who “gave all of themselves” and “death” with the individuals who “sometimes crossed moral lines.”  Everyone’s dirty; you see.  All heroes are torturers; so it’s okay.

Bigelow’s half-assed response to getting called out by the Senate for putting false torture results into her film, is to say:

“Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn’t mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn’t ignore. War, obviously, isn’t pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.” (emphasis added)

Ignore? By her reasoning, because the Central Intelligence Agency tortured people, she was required to fit it into the plot somehow, whether it was relevant to the investigation or not. That’s her excuse. No matter that the scenes are fabrications, and the actual clues about bin Laden’s courier came from elsewhere (electronic surveillance, human intelligence, foreign services).

Bigelow told Charlie Rose, when asked the same question about the torture: “Well I think it’s important to tell a true story.”  Unfortunately, when confronted with the Senate investigation, truth quickly takes a back seat.

The truth Bigelow now clings to is that, “Experts disagree sharply on the facts and particulars of the intelligence hunt, and doubtlessly that debate will continue.”  To Kathryn Bigelow, the fact that the so-called “experts” she has sided with are torturer criminals with a vested interest in her portrayal of their crimes never occurs to her.  She can dismiss the entire matter as a “debate.” Perhaps she no longer finds it “important to tell a true story?”

Kathryn Bigelow, America’s Leni Riefenstahl, claims that Zero Dark Thirty tells “a true story,” even when confronted by evidence that it is a lie.  She is unapologetic and completely divorced from the real world damage her propaganda encourages. If this film takes home the Best Picture Oscar, it should serve as the cherry on top of a brutal, deceptive, decrepit and immoral empire, and signal this reality to the rest of the world. If this is allegedly the “best” of America, then we are truly finished.

As for Ben Affleck’s Argo, its sins aren’t so readily apparent. Both films show wonderful Central Intelligence “heroes” acting to further US interests and take care of imperial problems. The Argo scenario is a rescue, however, instead of a hit. The problem is that Iran, a country thrown into a bloodthirsty dictatorship after its nascent democracy was murdered by the very same CIA in 1953, is now the bad guy. There are clearly two sides, and the film takes sides with the people who destroyed democracy in Iran and propped up an illegitimate monarch in order to control its oil and its refineries. When this despotic monarch whose secret police disappeared, tortured and murdered the political opposition – with the help and training of the CIA – is overthrown, we are supposed to overlook all that, because America is always good. We rescue our people. We risk our lives, and we come up with elaborate creative plans to help our people. We are heroic and triumphant vs. the inferior wild-eyed Persians and Arabs of the world.

Now I do believe there’s a real story there, and the situation is ripe for telling, but an extreme sensitivity to the political context would be required.

As Jennifer Epps put it:

“… [T]he Iran we see in the [Argo] news clips and the Iran we see dramatized are all on the same superficial level: incomprehensible, out-of-control hordes with nary an individual or rational thought expressed.

… But we never go behind-the-scenes at this revolution. (Instead, Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio’s tempering historical introduction is soon outweighed by the visceral power of mobs storming walls, chador-clad women  toting rifles, and banshees screaming into news cameras.)

… The problem is that viewers … aren’t going to walk out of [Argo] muttering “gee, it’s more complicated than I thought.” Instead, they’ll leave with their fears and prejudices reaffirmed:  that Middle Easterners create terror, that Americans must be the world’s policemen, and that Iranians cannot be trusted because they hate America.

… Argo almost completely ignores individual Iranians; its portrait of an entire culture is neither refined nor sophisticated; and it does reinforce a simplistic, Manichean perspective.”

Enough said?

So why are Argo and Zero Dark Thirty receiving all these awards?  Are the awarding bodies so full of hyper-patriots who believe pro-American films can deceive and demonize with impunity, that they want to send an unequivocal message of support for these practices?

Is hyper-nationalist propaganda in vogue now?

With the ascendancy of Barack Obama, there is no longer a moral anti-war voice of any significant size in America. Obama, the smooth talker, has soothed away morality, ethics, law and rights.  The empire is beyond reproach because Obama runs it. So the liberal center/left says nothing. Nothing but empty blather and ignorant praise of the Democrats. Murder is being codified in secret as we speak. Bush’s wars are being publicly scaled down, only to ramp up new covert wars of conquest across Africa. Nothing substantial has changed since George W., only the style.

There was a time when no one trusted the CIA. Far from heroes, they were the prime suspects in the assassination of president John F. Kennedy, and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. CIA support of terrorists was well known, if not loudly opposed. This agency has sponsored Cuban exiles to commit acts of terrorism inside Cuba. Its Phoenix Program kidnapped and murdered Vietnamese villagers by the thousands, torturing and killing them for alleged communist sympathies. The CIA overthrew democracies from Iran to Gutemala to Chile, and was instrumental in waging a terror war against Nicaragua by employing drug-running mercenary terrorists called “Contras.” When the Church Committee investigated the agency in the mid-70s, lots of dirty laundry was aired. The agency was reined in for a time. Assassination was made technically illegal.

In the 1980s, the CIA fought a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by funneling money and arms to radical Islamic Jihadists – like Osama bin Laden – and creating an intelligence/military monster in Pakistan, known as the ISI. With untold billions of dollars of US tax money, plus Saudi oil money, the Pakistanis were propped up as a central hub for militant groups to operate throughout the region. Pakistan is where Osama bin Laden allegedly ended up living for the last decade of his life, half a mile from the Pakistani military academy.

The CIA today is instrumental in the blitzkrieg of terror across Syria. It funnels arms and money to radical Islamic Jihadists, exactly as it did in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In 2011 it participated in the Libyan Crime Against the Peace doing much the same type of activity on behalf of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a group that helped take over that nation despite being included on the US State Department’s Terrorist List! The LIFG has sent its fighters over to Syria, after the fall of Qadaffi, to assist in the genocidal guerrilla war against the Syrian state, as well as civilians. The CIA assists in these activities.

But of course those victims aren’t Americans. So none of that counts.

“…Is it healthy for us to hold up images of Cold War CIA agents as selfless do-gooders?” –Jennifer Epps

 Joe Giambrone is a filmmaker and author of Hell of a Deal: A Supernatural Satire. He edits The Political Film Blog, which welcomes submissions. polfilmblog at gmail.

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February 20, 2013 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | 4 Comments