[Peace-discuss] Fw: Kathryn Bigelow film producer - Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of torture

Mon Jan 7 15:32:37 UTC 2013

Thanks for sharing this piece. I disagree with Wolf that The Hurt Locker
was a beautiful, brave film. Yes, it depicted war-time stress, but it also
projected intensely racist stereotypes and made militarism seem heroic and
exciting. Recall the ending, in which the main character marches back into
a war zone, blaring metal music driving away any tragic sympathy we might
be feeling for him (or the wife and baby he leaves behind). Could the
Department of Defense have scripted a better advertisement for
reenlistment? I think it fits very comfortably alongside the corny
advertisements the DoD pays for itself.

On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 3:33 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森" <ewj at pigsqq.org>wrote:

> **
> Naomi Wolf originally was a supporter of the Obot way back in early '08
> before she
> somehow got "woke up" and "chose the red pill".
>
> She clearly pointed out in her speech at the R[3OVJ]UTION  march at the
> steps
> of the Capitol Bldg. and in her documentary and book End of America exactly
> what steps the Obama Administration would take in continuing and
> intensifying
> the authoritarian anti-we-the-people pro-war pro-fascist policies of the
> Bush Admin.
>
> She has also pointed out how ridiculous are the charges against Assange.
>
> Naomi is not exactly a Cassandra figure.  Some people are listening but so
> far
> those listening are not enough for the PTB to put the Tim Johnson-esque
> Assange-like quietus on her.  The freedom of the press (the freedom of the
> US Government to press down hard on those who expose it effectively) would
> be expected to
> eventually pressure her somehow.
>
> Perhaps they will investigate her tax returns.  Who knows what else they
> will do
> if she becomes a really credible threat.  Another option is for them to
> pervert
> and redirect or misappropriate her message or kill it with kindness
> somehow,
> which has been a fairly effective way
> to nullify some trouble makers where outright assassination is just too
> messy.
>
>
>
> On 01/07/13 1:13, David Johnson wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* David Johnson <dlj725 at hughes.net>
> *Sent:* Sunday, January 06, 2013 11:01 AM
> *Subject:* Kathryn Bigelow film producer - Leni Riefenstahl-like
> propagandist of torture
>
>  Zero Dark Thirty: A Pentagon Tale
>  I was going to write a short piece on this new film by Kathryn Bigelow
> about the assassination of Bin Laden, although like Spike Lee with Django,
> I am not going to watch it.    However, Naomi Wolf seems to have a done a
> good job on it and we reprint it here. Reprinted from: Reader Supported
> News<http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/15403-zero-dark-thirtys-torture-lie>
> If readers haven't seen them yet make sure you see The Tillman Story and
> The Road to Guantanamo.
> And don't forget how they tried to fool us with the Jessica Lynch
> adventure Hollywood style and even more importantly, tell your children
> about the Gulf of Tonkin.
>
>  Zero Dark Thirty's Torture Lie
> By Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK
> 05 January 13
>
>
> *By peddling the lie that CIA detentions led to Bin Laden's killing, you
> have become a Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of torture*
>
>
> he Hurt Locker was a beautiful, brave film; many young women in film were
> inspired as they watched you become the first woman ever to win an Oscar
> for directing. But with Zero Dark Thirty, you have attained a different
> kind of distinction.
>
> Your film Zero Dark Thirty is a huge hit here. But in falsely justifying,
> in scene after scene, the torture of detainees in "the global war on
> terror", Zero Dark Thirty is a gorgeously-shot, two-hour ad for keeping
> intelligence agents who committed crimes against Guantánamo prisoners out
> of jail. It makes heroes and heroines out of people who committed violent
> crimes against other people based on their race - something that has
> historical precedent.
>
> Your film claims, in many scenes, that CIA torture was redeemed by the
> "information" it "secured", information that, according to your script, led
> to Bin Laden's capture. This narrative is a form of manufacture of
> innocence to mask a great crime: what your script blithely calls "the
> detainee program".
>
> What led to this amoral compromising of your film-making?
>
> Could some of the seduction be financing? It is very hard to get a film
> without a pro-military message, such as The Hurt Locker, funded and
> financed. But according to sources in the film industry, the more
> pro-military your message is, the more kinds of help you currently can get:
> from personnel, to sets, to technology - a point I made in my argument
> about the recent militarized Katy Perry video.
>  It seems implausible that scenes such as those involving two top-secret,
> futuristic helicopters could be made without Pentagon help, for example. If
> the film received that kind of undisclosed, in-kind support from the
> defense department, then that would free up million of dollars for the
> gigantic ad campaign that a film like this needs to compete to win audience.
>
> This also sets a dangerous precedent: we can be sure, with the "propaganda
> amendment" of the 2013 NDAA, just signed into law by the president, that
> the future will hold much more overt corruption of Hollywood and the rest
> of US pop culture. This amendment legalizes something that has been illegal
> for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or pro-military messaging
> in media, without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.
>
> Then, there is the James Frey factor. You claim that your film is "based
> on real events", and in interviews, you insist that it is a mixture of fact
> and fiction, "part documentary". "Real", "true", and even "documentary",
> are big and important words. By claiming such terms, you generate media and
> sales traction - on a mendacious basis. There are filmmakers who work very
> hard to produce films that are actually "based on real events": they are
> called documentarians. Alex Gibney, in Taxi to the Dark Side<http://youtu.be/WX0MPcN08Zc>,
> and Rory Kennedy, in Ghosts of Abu Ghraib <http://youtu.be/P31RzaYp-Kg>,
> have both produced true and sourceable documentary films about what your
> script blithely calls "the detainee program" - that is, the regime of
> torture to generate false confessions at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib - which
> your script claims led straight to Bin Laden.
>
> Fine, fellow reporter: produce your sources. Provide your evidence that
> torture produced lifesaving - or any - worthwhile intelligence.
>
> But you can't present evidence for this claim. Because it does not exist.
>  Five decades of research, cited in the 2008 documentary The End of
> America <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1294790/>, confirm that torture does
> not work. Robert Fisk provides another summary<http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-torture-does-not-work-as-history-shows-777213.html>of that categorical conclusion. And this
> 2011 account from Human Rights First<http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/2011/05/03/five-reasons-why-torture-did-not-help-us-forces-find-bin-laden/>rebuts the very premise of Zero Dark Thirty.
>
> Your actors complain about detainees' representation by lawyers -
> suggesting that these do-gooders in suits endanger the rest of us. I have
> been to see your "detainee program" firsthand. The prisoners, whom your
> film describes as being "lawyered up", meet with those lawyers in rooms
> that are wired for sound; yet, those lawyers can't tell the world what
> happened to their clients - because the descriptions of the very torture
> these men endured are classified.
>
> I have seen the room where the military tribunal takes the "testimony"
> from people swept up in a program that gave $5,000 bounties to desperately
> poor Afghanis to incentivize their turning-in innocent neighbors. The
> chairs have shackles to the floor, and are placed in twos, so that one
> prisoner can be threatened to make him falsely condemn the second.
>
> I have seen the expensive video system in the courtroom where - though
> Guantánamo spokesmen have told the world's press since its opening that
> witnesses' accounts are brought in "whenever reasonable" - the monitor on
> the system has never been turned on once<http://archive.truthout.org/073109C>:
> a monitor that could actually let someone in Pakistan testify to say, "hey,
> that is the wrong guy". (By the way, you left out the scene where the CIA
> dude sodomizes the wrong guy<http://news.antiwar.com/2012/12/13/human-rights-court-cia-tortured-sodomized-german-citizen/>:
> Khaled el-Masri, "the German citizen unfortunate enough to have a similar
> name to a militant named Khaled al-Masri.")
>
> In a time of darkness in America, you are being feted by Hollywood, and
> hailed by major media. But to me, the path your career has now taken
> reminds of no one so much as that other female film pioneer who became,
> eventually, an apologist for evil: Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl's 1935
> Triumph of the Will, which glorified Nazi military power, was a massive hit
> in Germany. Riefenstahl was the first female film director to be hailed
> worldwide.
>
> It may seem extreme to make comparison with this other great, but
> profoundly compromised film-maker, but there are real echoes. When
> Riefenstahl began to glamorize the National Socialists, in the early 1930s,
> the Nazis' worst atrocities had not yet begun; yet abusive detention camps
> had already been opened to house political dissidents beyond the rule of
> law - the equivalent of today's Guantánamo, Bagram base, and other
> unnameable CIA "black sites". And Riefenstahl was lionised by the German
> elites and acclaimed for her propaganda on behalf of Hitler's regime.
>
> But the world changed. The ugliness of what she did could not, over time,
> be hidden. Americans, too, will wake up and see through Zero Dark Thirty's
> apologia for the regime's standard lies that this brutality is somehow
> necessary. When that happens, the same community that now applauds you will
> recoil.
>
> Like Riefenstahl, you are a great artist. But now you will be remembered
> forever as torture's handmaiden.
>
>
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