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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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 Posted: Tue Jul 03, 2007 3:49 pm Post subject: |
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On the other hand: here I reproduce Chalmers Johnson's passage on Hollywood from his The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004): Ch. 4, "The Institutions of American Militarism," 112-114.
This book primarily provoked my thinking on this issue and partly inspired this thread.
| Chalmers Johnson wrote: |
Another aspect of the Pentagon's creative efforts to attract more recruits is its support for pro-war Hollywood films. This is nothing new. This first Hollywood film about aerial combat, made with military advice, personnel, and equipment in return for an advance look at the script and the right to make changes, was Wings in 1927. As Lawrence H. Suid, as historian of military films, has written, "What Price Glory, Wings, Air Force, Sands of Iwo Jima, The Longest Day, and hundreds of other Hollywood films have created the image of combat as exciting, as a place to prove masculinity, as a place to challenge death in a socially acceptable manner. As a result, until the late 1960s, American war movies have always ended in victory, with our soldiers, sailors, marines, and fliers running faster than their enemy -- whether German, Italian, or Japanese. These screen victories reinforced the image of the American military as all-conquering, all-powerful, always right." During and after Vietnam there were some changes -- Patton (1970) introduced an element of realism into war films and the Pentagon declined to assist Apocalypse Now!, about one officer in Vietnam sent to kill another, who has gone mad. In the post-Vietnam era, it also did not support films like Demi Moore's G.I. Jane, featuring a woman determined to join the all-male SEALs. Soon, however, the old pattern was largerly reestablished. Each branch of the military now has a Los Angeles office, and the relationship between producers and the Pentagon "project officers" sent on location to watch everything being filmed and offer advice is closer than ever.
A contemporary example of the direct ties between Hollywood and recruiting efforts was Disney Studio's Pearl Harbor. The movie premiered on May 21, 2001, with a special showing on the flight deck of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. Bleachers had been built, a huge screen installed, and the carrier moved (without its aircraft) from its home port in San Diego to Pearl Harbor specifically for this purpose. The navy and Disney invited more than 2,500 guests to the film's premiere. As the credits reveal, numerous U.S. military commands helped make the movie and in turn extracted changes in the scenario in order to protray the military in a favorable light and promote the idea that service in the armed forces is romantic, patriotic, and fun. According to the Chicago Tribune, military recruiters even set up tables in the lobbies of theaters where Pearl Harbor was being shown in hopes of catching a few youths on their way out of this three-hour recruiting pitch.
Disney and the Pentagon also worked closely with the media to promote the idea that Pearl Harbor recounted the achievements of what the NBC broadcaster Tom Brokaw has called "the Greatest Generation" in his book of that title -- as distinct from the Vietnam generation, which the Pentagon would prefer the public to forget. On May 26, 2001, the day after the film opened in theaters, the Disney-owned ABC-TV network ran a one-hour special on the Pearl Harbor attack narrated by David Brinkley, and the next day rival NBC broadcast a two-hour National Geographic special on the subject, featuring Tom Brokaw himself. The NBC affiliate MSNBC then put on a two-hour program about the survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack narrated by General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in the Gulf War.
After the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon introduced a short movie advertisement presumably meant to bolster civilian support for the armed forces and designed to be shown before numerous films. Entitled Enduring Freedom: The Opening Chapter, the trailer was created by Lieutenant Colonel James Kuhn at a cost of $1.2 million. "Operation Enduring Freedom" was, of course, the title of the military's campaign against Afghanistan. Although some parents objected to attaching the film -- which shows scenes of the airplanes ramming New York's World Trade Center -- to G-rated children's movies, the public seemed to accept its running with films like The Four Feathers or Sweet Home Alabama. The military's camera crews shot over 250 hours of footage in making the film -- on location with an antiterrorist squad in Kabul, Afghanistan, at the marine base at Twentynine Palms, California, and in the Indian Ocean, Hawaii, Yuma, Arizona, and Norfolk, Virginia. The leftover footage will be made into recruiting commercials and DVDs. In a tie-in with Regal Entertainment Group, the nation's largest theater chain, the Pentagon also planned to show the short [film] before all feature presentations on Regal's 4,000 screens.
Closely related to the Pentagon's film activities are its general public relations operations. These include helping mass media portray the military in a favorable light, cultivating promilitary civilian groups at public expense, and suppressing information the military does not want Congress or the public to have. As with support for war movies, so the manipulation of the media to whip up pretexts for military action has a long history in the United States... |
One is supposed to read these muckraking chapters and react as bin Laden did after reading William Blum's Killing Hope or Hugo Chavez did after reading any number of Noam Chomsky's books: one is encouraged and indeed expected to see American democracy as dead, and that the military-industrial complex has subjected the country to an Orwellian police state. One is further expected to see the United States as the world's primary menace. We are, allegedly, the universal enemy and a servant of Evil, On the other hand, aiming to enslave the world. Or, as Johnson implies via innuendo when he cites Ian Fleming -- probably because he knew how popular the James Bond films are, and people would understand his point -- we are like SPECTRE: "It's the same old dream -- world domination." (Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 67)
Did it suprise you in any way, then, when Chavez stood before the United Nations, holding one of Chomsky's books, and proclaimed the following...?
| CNN Reports wrote: |
"As the spokesman of imperialism, [W. Bush AKA "the Devil"] came to share his nostrums to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: 'The Devil's Recipe.'"
Chavez held up a book by Noam Chomsky on imperialism and said it encapsulated his arguments: "The American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its hegemonistic system of domination, and we cannot allow him to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated." |
In any case, I do not think Johnson -- or his editors and publishers, for that matter -- would share your dismissing Hollywood's impact as "not one whit's worth of difference either way." |
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darkhorse_NZ
Joined: 20 Feb 2007
Location: South Korea
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| Posted: Tue Jul 03, 2007 11:01 pm Post subject: |
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yes, some Hollywood films do export Anti-americanism. Especially the history distorting epics.
In films where foreigners are portrayed they (we?) are nearly always betrayed as hopeless incompetents waiting for a suave, rugged American to help us out of our predicament.
Plus, a lot of your films portray you as psychopathic, guntoting, morally bankrupt, crazies. Which is a hard stereotype to overcome when it's been drilled into you from a young age.
Just my thoughts |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 12:05 pm Post subject: ... |
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| Quote: |
| One is supposed to read these muckraking chapters and react as bin Laden did after reading William Blum's Killing Hope or Hugo Chavez did after reading any number of Noam Chomsky's books: one is encouraged and indeed expected to see American democracy as dead, and that the military-industrial complex has subjected the country to an Orwellian police state. One is further expected to see the United States as the world's primary menace. We are, allegedly, the universal enemy and a servant of Evil, On the other hand, aiming to enslave the world. |
Whose words are these? Yours?
On another note, I will say that I found 9/11 shocking, but not surprising. Those were my own thoughts. I didn't get them from a book, or Chomsky, or an academic conspiracy to subvert America. It would seem here that you're implying that anyone who agrees with Ron Paul is subscribing to Johnson and, in turn, Blum. I don't think that agreeing with Paul makes one a de facto Blum adherent. In fact, I wouldn't assume that Paul got his ideas from these books. Perhaps they were the closest published thing to his view of what happened, which stands in contrast to the view of someone like Giuliani. |
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Tiger Beer
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 5:25 pm Post subject: Re: ... |
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| Nowhere Man wrote: |
| Quote: |
| One is supposed to read these muckraking chapters and react as bin Laden did after reading William Blum's Killing Hope or Hugo Chavez did after reading any number of Noam Chomsky's books: one is encouraged and indeed expected to see American democracy as dead, and that the military-industrial complex has subjected the country to an Orwellian police state. One is further expected to see the United States as the world's primary menace. We are, allegedly, the universal enemy and a servant of Evil, On the other hand, aiming to enslave the world. |
Whose words are these? Yours?
On another note, I will say that I found 9/11 shocking, but not surprising. Those were my own thoughts. I didn't get them from a book, or Chomsky, or an academic conspiracy to subvert America. It would seem here that you're implying that anyone who agrees with Ron Paul is subscribing to Johnson and, in turn, Blum. I don't think that agreeing with Paul makes one a de facto Blum adherent. In fact, I wouldn't assume that Paul got his ideas from these books. Perhaps they were the closest published thing to his view of what happened, which stands in contrast to the view of someone like Giuliani. |
Some good truth in that.
I've actually read Blowback.. but it is just a book. I don't take any one book very seriously. The fact Ron Paul mentioned it during a Republican National Convention and suggested Guiliani should read it (among a whole list of other books) doesn't make it required Ron Paul 101 reading.
It just basically means that guys like Guiliani should get their head out of their ass and realize that 9-11 didn't happan because 'they' were 'jealous and hate freedom' message that gets so often circulated around Republican and conservative circles and propogated out to the masses. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 6:58 pm Post subject: |
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| mindmetoo wrote: |
| Kuros wrote: |
| The guidelines you put out are good ones, but I think they're just guidelines. The real problem I have with your guidelines in particular is that Americans operate under different criteria than non-Americans when it comes to being anti-American. Why is that? |
For the same reason I can call a member of my family an idiot but you can't. Or why Jews can make jokes about being Jewish. Or why black people can use the N word. That's a whole other debate, surely. |
This exchange proved thought-provoking, so I will add to it, even though I do not believe it will lead to changing your view on "antiAmericanism," Mindmetoo.
Consider this analogy: I recently observed a criminal proceeding where the state had charged a man with arson and a combination of other crimes, including attempted murder with a deadly weapon. Defense counsel made much ado about a supposed claim the accused was making, that he owned the house he had destroyed. His deceased ex-girlfriend, he alleged, wanted him to have the house.
His ex-girlfriend's daughter saw things differently, however, and ordered him to vacate the house so that she might sell it. Defendant was a loser, gambing-addicted alcoholic, etc. To make a long story short, he felt his ex-girlfriend's daughter had antagonized him to the point where he was justified in destroying his ex-girlfriend's house so that if he could not have it, then no one would. Then he broke down the doors to his ex-girlfriend's daughter's house and fired seven buckshot shotgun blasts into her bed before fleeing and then turning himself in to the police, stating several times "I just killed someone and blew up my house..."
The point is this: defense counsel argued that, as he had legal claim to the house, even if disputed, then he could not have committed arson. Because one can do whatever one likes with one's property.
State cut the legs off that argument by citing the law on the matter, however: it does not matter whether one owns the property one burns down or not, it remains arson. That is, if you choose to destroy your own house by fire, that remains a crime. You place the larger community in danger, for one thing.
Now that I think about it, one cannot harm one's children or parent's either. And, moreover, whether they are one's children or parents or not makes no difference: it is still child-abuse or elder-abuse or what-have-you.
Now you, Mindmetoo, are citing people who merely throw around insults, while I have been talking about people intending to damage and harm America -- America's reputation and, in at least one documented case, above, American officers' lives -- by recklessly hurling an unyielding barrage of harsh and unreasonable, indeed hyperbolic, propagandistic, and in at least some cases, false, "criticism" designed to incite hatreds -- not to mention "outing" hundreds at CIA in the 1970s and urging groups like Greece's 17-November to kill them.
They do much more than merely call "family members" "idiot," Mindmetoo.
You protest that this is protected speech. I have never disagreed. I merely point out that we ought to be just as skeptical of them as they are of America (fair is fair, right?), and we ought to also be mindful of their intentions, and then consider their "information" in that light.
In any case, your definition and your analogies do not suffice, at least not in my view.
Last edited by Gopher on Fri Jul 06, 2007 1:35 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 5:11 am Post subject: |
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| mindmetoo wrote: |
| Quote: |
I have no urgent need of an objective definition because anti-Americanism is not a crime and cannot be prosecuted in a court of law. As an American often critical of the government myself, I can often tell the difference between when someone says something anti-American and when someone is merely being critical of the government. Moore often explicitly sticks to the latter, but he has goofed up before and actually revealed himself to be anti-American, as I will explain below.
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If you have no definition then you set yourself up for the moving goal post fallacy. You can simply change your definition anytime an argument is presented. Being a quack is not a crime either but in skepticism where we operate under rules of evidence and logic, we have good definitions. A good definition of something is a basis for debate. |
No, I don't necessarily fall into the so-called moving goal post fallacy unless I actually move goal posts. 'I-know-it-when-I-see-it' certainly can lead to such an error, but it doesn't have to do so. As long as I stay consistent according to some standard, I don't need to set out that standard explicitly. The risk I take by putting out a standard early and prior to evaluating whether certain people hold certain views is that my definition may not be inclusive enough.
What it looks to me like you're trying to do is strong-arm the argument by insisting that any examination of the subject must fit into a neat definition of what constitutes an anti-American. But I'll comply and provide a general guideline.
The fact is, anyone can be anti-American to the extent that they are against Americans as a whole or as a nationality. Constructive criticism does not make one anti-American, but criticism for the sake of merely demeaning or rallying support against America or Americans as such would be anti-American. Intention holds a clue as to whether the statement or action is anti-American, but certain acts or statements are by their very nature anti-Americans ('Americans are a plague on this Earth'). This definition is broad but I believe it is far superior to your much more narrow definition, which has to specify two different definitions depending from whom the attitude of anti-Americanism originates. |
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