Editor’s Note: This is an important topic, and we’re glad that Ross Brummet tackled it. However, we’re not entirely sure he did it with the proper grace and feeling for some of the causes he critiques. In any case, judge for yourselves. And remember that it is people like those misguided “feminists” who defend imperial apologist Kathryn Bigelow from critics for the simple fact of being a woman that justify Brummet’s lashings.—PG

Ross Brummet, OpedNews

Liberals like to think of themselves as being unselfish, but to what extent are liberals disproportionately concerned with issues that concern themselves as opposed to issues that concern humanity as a whole? As an addendum to my article on gun control, I address four issues that, while important, receive a bizarre amount of attention from the liberal press.

I was recently confronted by a charming fellow after I suggested that Climate Change was a more important issue than gun control — see “A Tale of Two Sandys” by Paul Street. My suggestion was racist, of course, as that “ecological sh*t” was merely a white liberal issue. This was truly bizarre considering that global warming is an issue that is disproportionately caused by white people that disproportionately effects non-white people. Calling it a white liberal issue is insane, unless one believes the only people who believe in science are white liberals — a factual absurdity. Nevertheless, this claim made me consider what issues could really be considered white liberal issues, or alternatively bourgeois issues. These issues generally have some level of marginal importance, but seem to have the disproportionate and unjustified concern of a small group of white liberals who are disproportionately affected by them. So, with that said, consider this an addendum to my previous article, which offers examples of more important issues that require greater attention, as opposed to the following topics which require less.

Unreasonable Concerns: It’s not so much that reasoned argument isn’t important. The inaction on most of the issues I address in the previous article, stem from some faith or another, whether it’s a rejection of the science of climate change, or the nationalism that justifies indifference to global poverty and the victims of war. However, instead of focusing on these important issues, or even important problems with organized religion, atheists in America obsess over the trivial existence of god, marginal attacks on the theory of evolution, and the minor infractions atheists face in the US. It all makes me reflect on a comment by Noam Chomsky when considering the topic of New Atheism, “If it is to be even minimally serious, the ‘new atheism’ should focus its concerns on the virulent secular religions of state worship.” The problem is that they fundamentally do not. They choose to be reasonable about a few trivial issues, while remaining oddly indifferent and unreasonable about important issues. While people that can tentatively be called New Atheists aren’t the amalgamation of the worst views of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens that Chris Hedges falsely accuses them of being, they aren’t, however, the rationalists they like to pretend to be.

Adorable Animal Rights: How often do you see something to save this species or that species? Or prevent the cruel and barbaric practice of dog fights? Or an insistence against fur? Here is the thing, it isn’t so much that you shouldn’t be against these things, it just that even when it comes to animal rights they amount to little more than trivial emotional appeals. Species die every day, other species are born, the problem only comes when the latter outweighs the former — not when a particular adorable one dies. Fur might seem unpleasant but it is hardly worse than leather. The suffering of dogs is comparatively less than the suffering of pigs — which are more intelligent, if less fluffy. One of the possible reasons for the obsession over these issues is that they are much more polite than the argument against factory farming — a problem in which most people remain complicit. It’s easy, for instance, to condemn dog fighting because no one does it, but most people still like cheap bacon. The former leads to the suffering of a couple animals whereas the latter not only leads to suffering of billions, but also plays a key role in climate change. Which, in turn, will wipe a lot more species than whaling. In short, it’s not that discussion of our treatment of animals is unimportant but the way in which we choose to talk about it.

The Most Important Issue of Our Time: While in some parts of the world homosexuality is against the law, as world leaders deny its very existence… in the United States, and elsewhere in the western world, gay people are relatively well off. Does that mean that they don’t face a myriad of issues? Of course not. From a lack of worker rights, marriage rights, to a culture that condemns them or alternatively finds them faintly amusing. Yet, can we really say that gay issues deserve the amount of attention they get among liberals? I have heard liberals call gay marriage the most important issue of our time, which is interesting because I didn’t know that discrimination against gays threatened the existence of the species. Ok, fair enough, just the most important civil rights issue of our time then. Really? Because I’m pretty sure there are more black people in jail than were enslaved in the 1850s. I’m sorry to say but I think that is more important than some official equality — ask the average black person in prison, how official equality works out for them. Gay people deserve equal rights, and I’m not asking them to wait for them. All I’m saying, is that we need to calm down and look at this issue reasonably. I think my gay friends should be able to get married, but I don’t think that is more important than any given child starving in Africa.

A Final Topic from A Misogynist Pig : One is often confronted with blogs from white bourgeois liberals who like to think of themselves as feminist, bravely defending women from sexism and misogyny — issues that trump all others. So, for instance, Richard Dawkins might have spent the majority of his life arguing against the most oppressive force against women in history, but we should boycott his works for his insensitivity on the topic of hitting on women in elevators. Julian Assange might be despised by the most powerful institutions in the world, but anybody who suggests his legal problems might have something to do with that is a sexist. After all, he has has been accused of rape, and no person in the history of the world has ever been falsely accused of rape — that Tom Robinson did it. Here’s the thing. Richard Dawkins might lack some sensitivity to women, but that has nothing to do with what he writes about. The accusations against Julian Assange may or may not be true, but that doesn’t mean that Sweden, The United States, and Britain aren’t attempting to use those allegations to crush an important activist. Both of these issues illustrate that for some “feminists”, issues outside of woman’s rights aren’t relevant. Or they are significantly less relevant than issues that directly affect them. The Democrats are a capitalist party, that supports empire while opposing democracy? Yeah, but the Republicans will overturn Roe V Wade! The U.S. is waging an imperial war against Afghanistan that results in thousands upon thousands of innocent deaths? Yeah, but the Taliban treated women despicably!

Feminism has a noble tradition, but the greatest feminists always kept some level of perspective. Susan B. Anthony was a leader in the crusade for women’s suffrage, but fought hard to abolish slavery. Rosa Luxemburg wrote articles advocating for greater women’s rights, but was a Marxist who considered female equality as only a part of a greater class struggle. A personal favorite of mine is Emma Goldman — notably imprisoned for advocating birth control. She occasionally took unpopular positions within feminism, famously opposing the fight for women’s suffrage. Not because she opposed equality, but because she understood that voting rights are meaningless in a society in which elections are little more than distracting illusions. Maybe she was wrong, maybe she wasn’t, but it was principled and fitting with a coherent ideology that viewed sexism and misogyny as problems, but not the only problems. Modern white liberal “feminists” would do well to read what she wrote. As would everyone else.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ross Brummet is a student and writer in Los Angeles. He recently wrote a short dystopian film called And Upside Down In Air Were Towers — currently in post-production. Considering himself a utilitarian with libertarian socialist sympathies, he is fond of the views of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Peter Singer. However he finds Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams more amusing.

Joe Giambrone

Jessica Chastain: The all-American babe who gets the bad guy.  Hooray! As simple as that. 

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:

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:

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 who don’t already know their Chomsky or William Blum 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.

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 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.

Joe Giambrone
The Political Film Blog
http://politicalfilm.wordpress.com/
polfilmblog@gmail.com

The Cure for the French Malaise: Cut Worker Pay

By Peter Hart, FAIR  

Spanish protesters who evidently aren’t reading the Washington Post. (Photo: Reuters)

With an unemployment rate at just over 26 percent and regular street protests against government austerity policies, it’s hard to imagine anyone holding up Spain as a model.

But here’s Howard Schneider, writing in the Washington Post (1/16/13), doing just that–warning France (unemployment rate: 9 percent) that it had better shape up and be more like Spain:

It was a small sign of what could become a defining trend in the euro zone. The most troubled nations, including Spain, have slashed wage costs and overhauled labor and social rules in an effort to become more competitive.

So France is talking about nationalizing a steel plant and raising taxes on millionaires–the wrong way to do it, evidently. Spain is on the right track–becoming more “competitive” by slashing “wage costs”–otherwise known as how much workers get paid.

As Schneider writes:

See how ‘competitive’ Spain is? (TradingEconomics.com)

The assumption here is that Spain’s harsh “medicine” is working. The only problem for the Post is that they can’t seem to find any evidence to that effect–the anecdote about auto plants expanding is all you get. After just barely beginning to recover from the devastating 2008 economic crisis, Spain’s GDP has been contracting for the past year. But the Post is focused on things in France that have  “worried public officials in Washington and elsewhere”–like “attacks” on the rich.

The article is a crystal clear example of how corporate media cover the economy, when the facts don’t matter as much as what are consider to be the “right” policies–and media have decided, against all available evidence, that austerity is the right answer for what ails Europe.

As Schneider puts it:

As neighboring countries retool their labor laws, trim social benefits and overhaul Europe’s social contract, they may be forming a new baseline France will have to match.

In other words: “Hey–there’s a race to the bottom. Hurry up or someone else will beat you to it!”

PETER HART is a senior editor with FAIR.