Censored 2014 (43 page)

“The elites and their courtiers in the liberal class,” wrote Chris Hedges in his book
Death of the Liberal Class,
“always condemn the rebel as impractical. They dismiss the stance of the rebel as counterproductive. They chastise the rebel for being angry. The elites and their apologists call for reason, and patience. They use the hypocritical language of compromise, generosity, and understanding to accept that we must accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel, however . . . refuses to be bought off with foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book contracts, academic appointments, or empty rhetoric.”
¹²

Such is the stirring prose of a celebrated liberal foe of censorship. I had written to Chris Hedges on June 13, 2011, quoting one of his pieces on censorship, entitled “Kafka's America.” I explained what had happened and sought his support. He wrote back, “Dear John, I heard about this and am as mystified as you are . . . Chris.”

Some eighteen months later when Hedges was promoting his book on liberal America, I wrote again. He replied, “Until I see evidence otherwise, I have to take Patrick at his word.”

I provided the evidence otherwise. He said only that it was “out of character” for Lannan to censor otherwise. He added that Patrick Lannan and Amy Goodman were “two of the very few allies I have left. It is pretty bleak over here.” Chris Hedges is a Lannan Foundation “Fellow” frequently hosted in Santa Fe. His book is published by Nation Books, supported by Lannan.

Such are the ties that bind often-beleaguered liberal opinion in the United States to powerful foundations like Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Lannan. The annual “Socialism” conference in Chicago—at which I have spoken—is funded by the billionaire of Santa Fe. This is not to suggest powerful individuals like Lannan do not promote exceptional cultural and political work; Patrick Lannan has been unstinting in his support for Palestinian writers, such as the late Edward Said. Neither am I implying that the dependents of Lannan-style largesse perform to any agenda. But there are always invisible boundaries: that is the nature of liberalism. Overstep these unwittingly, and the reaction can be swift, as it would be in any royal court. In his ruthless behavior toward me, my film, and David Barsamian, Patrick Lannan merely demonstrated his capricious license to do what he wanted, when and how he wanted, and without having to justify his action. It is this wielding of a power based entirely on wealth
—not
any theory of why he behaved the way he did—that is the essence of this episode. It is the power, in microcosm, of imperial America.

In a 2011 article in the
Santa Fe New Mexican,
Robert M. Christie, professor emeritus of sociology at California State University–Dominguez Hills, wrote:

JOHN PILGER
has been a war correspondent, author, and filmmaker. An Australian based in London, he is only one of two to win British journalism's highest award twice. He has been International Reporter of the Year and winner of the United Nations Association Peace Prize and Gold Medal. For his documentary films, he has won an Emmy and a British Academy Award. His first film,
The Quiet Mutiny,
made in 1970, revealed the rebellion within the US Army in Vietnam. His epic 1979
Cambodia Year Zero
is ranked by the British Film Institute as one of the ten most important documentaries of the twentieth century. His
Death of a Nation,
filmed secretly in East Timor, had a worldwide impact in 1994. His books include
Heroes, Distant Voices, Hidden Agendas, The New Rulers of the World,
and
Freedom Next Time.
His website is
www.johnpilger.com
.

Notes

^1.
This is an expanded and updated version of an article originally published in the
New Statesman,
July 7, 2011,
http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2011/07/pilger-foundation-obama-film
, also at
http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-strange-silencing-of-liberal-america
.

^2.
John Pilger,
Heroes
(London: Vintage, 2001[1986]), 411–412.

^3.
Ibid., 516–520.

^4.
“CIA Activities in Chile,” Central Intelligence Agency, September 18, 2000,
https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/chile/
; Church Report, “Covert Action in Chile 1963–1973,” US Department of State, December 18, 1975,
http://foia.state.gov/reports/churchreport
. asp; Mark Zepezauer,
The CIA's Greatest Hits,
2nd ed., (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2012), 40–41.

^5.
Paul Weideman, “Pilger: Claim of Too Few Tickets for Lannan Talk is Absurd,”
Santa Fe New Mexican,
June 15, 2011,
http://www.sfnewmexican.com/Local%20News/Pilger--Claim-of-too-few-tickets--absurd-#.UbZMKOvR2aw
.

^6.
Ibid.

^7.
Ibid.

^8.
Ibid.

^9.
Ibid.

^10.
See especially “John Pilger: Global Support for WikiLeaks is ‘Rebellion' Against U.S. Militarism, Secrecy,”
Democracy Now!,
December 15, 2010,
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/15/john_pilger_journalists_must_support_julian
. See also “John Pilger Calls UK National Health Service a Treasure, Blasts US Lawmakers for Being ‘in Bed with Powerful Interests' and Neglecting ‘Their Own People's Basic Human Rights,'”
Democracy
Now!, July 2, 2009,
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/2/john_pilger_blasts_us_lawmakers_on
; “John Pilger on Honduras, Iran, Gaza, the Corporate Media, Obama's Wars, and Resisting the American Empire,”
Democracy Now!,
July 6, 2009,
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/6/filmmaker_journalist_john_pilger_on_honduras
; and “John Pilger: There Is a War on Journalism,”
Democracy Now!,
June 29, 2010,
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/29/john_pilger_there_is_a_war
.

^11.
See Bob Feldman, “‘Democracy Now!' Program Underwriter, Lannan Foundation, Censors Anti-War Journalist John Pilger,” Educate-Yourself, July 9, 2011,
http://educate-yourself.org/ag/feldmanlannanfoundation09jul1.shtml
; “‘Democracy Now!' Show Funder Censors Anti-War Journalist John Pilger,”
Where's the Change?,
July 9, 2011,
http://wherechangeobama.blogspot.com/2011/07/democracy-now-show-funder-censors-anti.html
; and Bob Feldman, “Lannan Foundation's Tactical Air Defense Services/Nation Magazine Link?” February 10, 2010,
Where's the Change?,
http://wherechangeobama.blogspot.com/2010/02/lannan-foundations-tactical-air-defense.html
. Amy Goodman and Lannan connections are further elaborated here:
http://www.lannan.org/bios/amy-goodman
.

^12.
Chris Hedges,
The Death of the Liberal Class
(New York: Nation Books, 2010), 215.

^13.
Robert M. Christie, “Purging Pilger Damages Public Interest,”
Santa Fe New Mexican,
July 4, 2011,
http://www.sfnewmexican.com/Opinion/Looking-In--Robert-M--Christie-Purging-Pilger-damages-public-in
.

Rob Williams

Interested in livening up a sleepy cocktail party in the Homeland? Here's one way—suggest to your fellow guests that Hollywood plays a deep and abiding role as popular propaganda provider for an ever-expanding United States of Empire bent on “full-spectrum dominance” of the planet and the demonization of all things Muslim. I know what you're thinking. Most American moviegoers cannot be bothered with so-called “conspiracy theories” about how US film projects advance a larger imperial agenda. Filmmakers and their audiences often argue that movies are just mindless eye candy for purely entertainment purposes. However, if ever a single year of popular film culture were to prove them wrong, it would have to be this past one, which featured some of the most sophisticated propaganda of our post-9/11 era, in-cluding two this essay will explore in more detail—
Argo
and
Zero Dark Thirty.
Unless you have killed your television dead (not a bad idea) and stopped watching movies, you've no doubt heard of these
two films, which have received mountains of critical acclaim (and a bit of controversy) in the US popular press.

A few points of clarification: I use the word “screening” in this chapter title as a
double entendre,
to describe both the technique of the narrative process—propaganda disseminated 24/7/365 via ubiquitous screens, including movie theaters, TV, and all manner of mobile devices
—and
the political process by which the Hollywood industry “frames” audiences' understandings of vital issues of import, filtering and censoring our cultural understanding of what we might call “real life.” When Hollywood filmmakers insist that certain of their films are “based on actual events” (a claim made by the production crews of both
Argo
and
Zero Dark Thirty),
discriminating audiences ought to reach for their collective cultural crap detectors.
²

According to popular mythology and rabid pit bull pundits of the Faux News variety, Hollywood “liberals” and the Washington DC Beltway crowd are locked in a perpetual ideological war. The truth is exactly the opposite—Hollywood and DC not only need each other, they are sleeping together in serial multiplex fashion. As former president Lyndon B. Johnson's White House aide and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) CEO Jack Valenti once tellingly explained, “Washington and Hollywood spring from the same DNA.”
³
It is here, at the intersection of realpolitik and art, where Hollywood pop culture plays a critically significant political role—producing and deploying powerful image-driven stories designed to legitimize US imperialism abroad. In other words, if we apply to US foreign policy the radical cultural critiques of scholar bell hooks—that Hollywood “fantasy” continually mediates US state “fascism”—what can we conclude?
⁴
That via the silver screen, Hollywood's job is to prepare American hearts and minds for embracing the collective actions of the state— both domestically and globally—on behalf of advancing US hegemony in the Middle East and around the world.
⁵

A few words about the “fascism”: let's start with some basics about the United States—“facts submitted to a candid world,” as Thomas Jefferson famously stated in 1776. The twenty-first century US is no longer a self-governing republic, but an out-of-control empire that is essentially ungovernable, unreformable, and unsustainable. Easily accessible federal government documents, such as the vision articu
lated by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC),
⁶
make clear that the chief goal of the twenty-first century US is nothing less than world domination in the name of waging a sequential, global war for the planet's remaining fossil fuel energy resources. Looking back over the decade since the 9/11 tragedy,
⁷
the US has quickly morphed into a military–industrial–surveillance state that is obsessed with homeland security and marked by a rapid reorganization and centralization of federal agencies, the curtailing of constitutional rights and liberties under the USA PATRIOT Act and related legislation, and the expansion of corporate commercial power, wedded to an expanding state bureaucracy.
⁸
None of this is news to longtime Project Censored readers, who aren't afraid to call this “new normal” by its real name—“fascism,” which Benito “Il Duce” Mussolini in the 1930s defined as the marrying of corporate and state power. And Fascism, Mussolini said, ought more rightly be called
corporatism.

Looking globally, two-thirds of the planet's recoverable oil reserves are located in the greater Middle East, a region hotly contested by the US, Russia, and China, featuring repressively governed “client states” propped up with loans from the “international community” (read: International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the US), which are currently experiencing a series of turbulent economic and political upheavals—Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and now Syria—simplistically dubbed the “Arab Spring.” A complex and highly misunderstood region of the world, the Middle East is home to the modern Jewish state of Israel—which, since its creation in 1948, has been an intimate ally of the US—as well as the majority of the world's Arab peoples (most, but not all, of whom are Muslim), who trace Bedouin tribal lineage back thousands of years. To control this strategically vital region, the US has historically blended diplomacy's “hard power” with “soft power”—sticks and carrots—as well as relying on domestic popular propaganda like Hollywood films and television shows, as researcher Jack Shaheen explains in his book
Reel Bad Arabs,
to create enduring regional and cultural stereotypes for Western moviegoing audiences. The result? “Islamophobia,” a deeply rooted media-induced fear of the Arab “Other.”
⁹
Not surprisingly, then, do our highly visible Hollywood movies focus audience attention on the relationship between the US and the greater Middle East.

ARGO:
“REEL BAD ARABS” REDUX

Consider the seven Academy Award nominations received by the hugely popular film
Argo,
Hollywood's 2013 Oscar winner for Best Picture, as well as Best Film Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay (#irony?), directed by Ben Affleck—who credits the film's popularity with reviving his Hollywood career. In case you missed
Argo
(spoiler alert), the story revolves around Central Intelligence Agency operative Tony Mendez (played by Affleck), who convinces the Agency to build a fake movie production agency from scratch, slip into post–Revolutionary Iran, and liberate six Americans stranded in hiding at the Canadian embassy under siege in Tehran.
¹⁰
°

Regarding
Argo,
Affleck himself went public on many occasions with the “truthful” nature of his film. “It's okay to embellish, it's okay to compress, as long as you don't fundamentally change the nature of the story and of what happened,” Affleck explained to
Fresh Air
radio host Terry Gross. And to the
London Evening Standard:
“This movie is about this story that took place, and it's true, and I go to pains to contextualize it and to try to be evenhanded in a way that just means we're taking a cold, hard look at the facts.”
¹¹
Given the long history of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Hollywood connections, and the subject matter at hand, this seems to be a tall order.
¹²

So, what's the story?
Argo
recounts a tiny footnote to the drama of the 1979 US/Iranian hostage crisis, and does lend itself to a Hollywood retelling based on sheer creative audacity alone. Adoring American moviegoing audiences and critics turned out in force, and were subjected to the film's remarkable flaws: the almost complete lack of historical context and/or misrepresenting of the decades-long US/Iranian political relationship, the odd downplaying of the Canadian embassy's central role in rescuing US hostages (real-life former Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor was outspoken in his criticism of
Argo,
noting that the film portrayed the Canadians as being just along for the ride), and major moments from
Argo
that Affleck's production team invented whole cloth, including
Argo
's climax, featuring machine gun–toting Iranian soldiers pursuing the hostage's departing airplane down a Tehran runway in a high-speed Jeep chase that ends badly (for the Iranians) and triumphantly (for the Americans).

Note: According to everyone involved in the real-life escape, the sheer lack of drama and ease of exit proved to be their escape's most defining feature.
¹³
But, in the world of American cinematic triumphalism, such details are easily replaced by more Hollywood-esque endings, complete with obligatory national high-fiving, scorekeeping, and nose-thumbing toward Tehran; the film's final few intoxicatingly nationalistic minutes would make any pro-American public relations professional sit up and cheer.

American film critics' collective adoration of
Argo,
particularly by progressive and liberal observers occasionally critical of US imperial policy and propaganda, is perhaps best captured in Manohla Dargis's celebratory
New York Times
column. Calling
Argo
a “smart jittery thriller,” Dargis concludes that “in the end, this is a story about outwitting rather than killing the enemy, making it a homage to actual intelligence and an example of the same.” Indeed, perhaps what won over
Argo
audiences is this time-honored trope of proven Hollywood hokum—the “good guys” (Americans and Canadians) outmaneuver the “bad guys” (Iranians) with smarts and creativity instead of smart bombs and shock troops.
¹⁴
Most disturbing, however, is how this fictitious framing of 1979 events—“white hats” versus “black hats”—papers over
Argo's
Islamophobic tendencies, at a time when real-life US/Iranian relations, including mutual saber-rattling and the US government's “all options are on the table” approach, are edgy, at best. Devoid of any mention of the US-backed Shah's autocratic government or the Iranian people's genuine grievances (remember, Persians, not Arabs, for anyone who is keeping track of such cultural differences),
Argo
paints a stereotype of Middle Eastern people that reeks of the worst cultural clichés. A few mainstream US critics picked up on this disturbing stereotype. “Instead of keeping its eye on the big picture of Revolutionary Iran,
Argo
settles into a retrograde ‘white Americans in peril' storyline, recasting the oppressed Iranians as a raging, zombie-like horde,” observed
Slate's
Kevin B. Lee, who called
Argo
the year's “worst Best Picture Nominee.”
¹⁵
But Lee's critical voice was drowned out by the film's Hollywood hype, culminating in the Best Picture award being given to
Argo
on Oscar night by none other than First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama via live video feed from the White House, surrounded by US military men and women in
their uniformed finest. Citing “movies that lift our spirits, broaden our minds, and transport us to places we have never imagined,” Ms. Obama went on to note that “these movies made us laugh, they made us weep, and they made us grip our armrest just a little tighter.” (Full disclosure—I did all three while watching
Argo,
but not for the reasons Michelle Obama mentioned above). Here's Affleck's tortured rationalizing about accuracy in another interview about
Argo:

“I didn't want [Argo] to be politicized,” insisted Affleck.
¹⁷
But, as Affleck himself must know, all movies are political, using powerful image-driven media to entertain, educate, and inspire (as
Argo
certainly does) with narratives that shape our hearts and minds. In the final analysis, we can thank
Argo
for perpetuating destructive Middle Eastern stereotypes, distorting history, and eroding cross-cultural understandings among peoples. The envelope, please . . .
¹⁸

ZDT: REVEALING BLACK OPS, FEMINIZING IMPERIALISM,
CONDONING TORTURE AND EXTRAJUDICIAL KILLING

If
Argo
was the big winner on 2013 Oscars night, Kathryn Bigelow's acclaimed film
Zero Dark Thirty
(ZDT) proved the big loser. Or was it? As a director, the talented Bigelow has crafted a deserved reputation for gritty realistic depictions of war—think Jeremy Renner as an emotionally detached bomb squad leader in
The Hurt Locker. Zero Dark Thirty,
which garnered multiple Oscar nominations, emerged as a gripping story—“witness the greatest manhunt in history”—based on Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal's recasting of facts garnered from “unusual access to senior officials at the Pentagon and CIA who were deeply involved in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.”
¹⁹
(More on this in a moment.)