War Porn Keeps Americans Committed To A Bogus Fantasy Of What Our Wars Are

War Porn Keeps Americans Committed To A Bogus Fantasy Of What Our Wars Are

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “This is the amazing thing.  Our government that cannot be trusted to hire agents to tax us — most of you people do not trust the IRS.  You do not trust the government that hires the IRS.  You don’t trust the Department of Homeland Insecurity.  You don’t trust the people that are hired to don the blue gloves to feel you up before you go through or after you go through the porno scanner.  You don’t trust the EPA when it comes to having an agent come out to your house and telling you that you’re living on a wetland.  You don’t trust, you resent, you don’t like, you question the authority of everything this government does except killing people and blowing things up in countries most of us can’t identify on a map. ”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Back to the writing of Peter Van Buren:

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Fortunately, we have just the ticket, one that has been punched again and again for close to a century: Hollywood war movies (to which the Pentagon is always eager to lend a helping hand). American Sniper, which started out with the celebratory tagline [Mike: This is true. Remember, when American Sniper first came out, it was taglined with the movie posters and the television commercials . . .] “the most lethal sniper in U.S. history” and now has the tagline “the most successful war movie of all time,” is just the latest in a long line of films that have kept Americans on their war game. Think of them as war porn, meant to leave us perpetually hyped up. Now, grab some popcorn and settle back to enjoy the show.

Wandering around YouTube recently, I stumbled across some good old government-issue propaganda.  It was a video clearly meant to stir American emotions and prepare us for a long struggle against a determined, brutal, and barbaric enemy whose way of life is a challenge to the most basic American values. Here’s some of what I learned: our enemy is engaged in a crusade against the West; wants to establish a world government and make all of us bow down before it; fights fanatically, beheads prisoners, and is willing to sacrifice the lives of its followers in inhuman suicide attacks.

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Though its weapons are modern, its thinking and beliefs are 2,000 years out of date and inscrutable to us.

Of course, you knew there was a trick coming, right? This little U.S. government-produced film wasn’t [Mike: Before I tell you, what do you think the propaganda film is aimed at, what audience, 2015? El wrongo.] about the militants of the Islamic State. Made by the U.S. Navy in 1943, its subject was “Our Enemy the Japanese.” [Mike: Gee, the storyline hasn’t changed since the Japanese? Wow.] Substitute “radical Islam” for “emperor worship,” though, and it still makes a certain propagandistic sense. While the basics may be largely the same (us versus them, good versus evil), modern times do demand something slicker than the video equivalent of an old newsreel. The age of the Internet, with its short attention spans and heightened expectations of cheap thrills, calls for a higher class of war porn, but as with that 1943 film, it remains remarkable how familiar what’s being produced remains.

Like propaganda films and sexual pornography, Hollywood movies about America at war have changed remarkably little over the years. Here’s the basic formula, from John Wayne in the World War II-era Sands of Iwo Jima to today’s American Sniper:

American soldiers are good, the enemy bad. Nearly every war movie is going to have a scene in which Americans label the enemy as “savages,” “barbarians,” or “bloodthirsty fanatics,” typically following a “sneak attack” or a suicide bombing. Our country’s goal is to liberate; the enemy’s, to conquer. Such a framework prepares us to accept things that wouldn’t otherwise pass muster. Racism naturally gets a bye; as they once were “Japs” (not Japanese), they are now “hajjis” and “ragheads” (not Muslims or Iraqis). It’s beyond question that the ends justify just about any means we might use, from the nuclear obliteration of two cities of almost no military significance to the grimmest sort of torture. In this way, the war film long ago became a moral free-fire zone for its American characters.

American soldiers believe in God and Country, in “something bigger than themselves,” in something “worth dying for,” but without ever becoming blindly attached to it. The enemy, on the other hand, is blindly devoted to a religion, political faith, or dictator, and it goes without saying (though it’s said) that his God — whether an emperor, Communism, or Allah — is evil. As one critic put it back in 2007 with just a tad of hyperbole, “In every movie Hollywood makes, every time an Arab utters the word Allah… something blows up.”

War films spend no significant time on why those savages might be so intent on going after us. The purpose of American killing, however, is nearly always clearly defined. It’s to “save American lives,” those over there and those who won’t die because we don’t have to fight them over here . . .

Our soldiers are human beings with emotionally engaging backstories, sweet gals waiting at home, and promising lives ahead of them that might be cut tragically short by an enemy from the gates of hell. The bad guys lack such backstories. They are anonymous fanatics with neither a past worth mentioning nor a future worth imagining. This is usually pretty blunt stuff. Kyle’s nemesis in American Sniper, for instance, wears all black. Thanks to that, you know he’s an insta-villain without the need for further information . . .

Our soldiers, anguished souls that they are, have no responsibility for what they do once they’ve been thrown into our wars . . .

For war films, ambiguity is a dirty word. Americans always win, even when they lose in an era in which, out in the world, the losses are piling up. And a win is a win, even when its essence is one-sided bullying as in Heartbreak Ridge, the only movie to come out of the ludicrous invasion of Grenada. And a loss is still a win in Black Hawk Down, set amid the disaster of Somalia, which ends with scenes of tired warriors who did the right thing . . .

In sum: gritty, brave, selfless men, stoic women waiting at home, noble wounded warriors, just causes, and the necessity of saving American lives. Against such a lineup, the savage enemy is a crew of sitting ducks who deserve to die. Everything else is just music, narration, and special effects. War pornos, like their oversexed cousins, are all the same movie.

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Mike:  We proceed from the notion that we’re the only people that have, A, lives that are worth a crap, B, a future that is worth preserving, C, families and children that we love and only wish to return home or protect at home, etc., etc.  No one else has any of these things.  This is what the war propaganda has done to otherwise sensible people.  It has caused us and now makes us think rabidly, angrily, to the point of lethality, that no matter what the cause, where the location, what the incursion, who the enemy, it’s just because we’re involved.

This is the amazing thing.  Our government that cannot be trusted to hire agents to tax us — most of you people do not trust the IRS.  You do not trust the government that hires the IRS.  You don’t trust the Department of Homeland Insecurity.  You don’t trust the people that are hired to don the blue gloves to feel you up before you go through or after you go through the porno scanner.  You don’t trust the EPA when it comes to having an agent come out to your house and telling you that you’re living on a wetland.  You don’t trust, you resent, you don’t like, you question the authority of everything this government does except killing people and blowing things up in countries most of us can’t identify on a map.  That cannot be coincidental, it can’t be.  That’s the point he’s making here.  I’ve tried to make this point before.

You don’t want the U.S. government involved in Laredo, Texas, but if Laredo was in Iraq, you’re more than happy to have it involved.  You’re more than happy to have the people there subjugated under your rule.  You’re more than happy to have martial law imposed on a foreign population.  Americans don’t have any problem with this, so long as it’s not happening in your Laredo.  And it doesn’t matter what the justification is.  All you have to do is say: Hey, we’re protecting American lives.  Well, is Lois Lerner and all the agents at the IRS, are they protecting America’s bank accounts?  Are they protecting America’s bottom line?  That’s what the IRS does after all, right?  They collect the money so the debts and current bills can be paid.  Does anyone trust the Drug Enforcement Agency?  Does anyone trust the NSA?  Most of you trust the CIA.  Name your ABC agency here.  Does anyone trust the federales that showed up at Cliven Bundy’s ranch?  [mocking] “They need to get off Cliven Bundy’s property.”  Put the same guys pointing rifles at landowners or land squatters in a foreign land and all of a sudden, [mocking] “We need more of those guys over there.  Those guys are the enemy.”  Think.  Then Van Buren concludes:

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But it’s just a movie, right? Your favorite shoot-em-up makes no claims to being a documentary. We all know one American can’t gun down 50 bad guys and walk away unscathed, in the same way he can’t bed 50 partners without getting an STD. It’s just entertainment. So what?

So what do you, or the typical 18-year-old considering military service, actually know about war on entering that movie theater? Don’t underestimate the degree to which such films can help create broad perceptions of what war’s all about and what kind of people fight it. Those lurid on-screen images, updated and reused so repetitively for so many decades, do help create a self-reinforcing, common understanding of what happens “over there,” particularly since what we are shown mirrors what most of us want to believe anyway.

No form of porn is about reality, of course, but that doesn’t mean it can’t create realities all its own. War films have the ability to bring home emotionally a glorious fantasy of America at war, no matter how grim or gritty any of these films may look. War porn can make a young man willing to die before he’s 20. [Mike: Then he goes into some of the reasons why.] Take my word for it: as a diplomat in Iraq I met young people in uniform suffering from the effects of all this. Such films also make it easier for politicians to sweet talk the public into supporting conflict after conflict, even as sons and daughters continue to return home damaged or dead . . .

You can see a lot of war porn and stop with just your toes in the water, thinking you’ve gone swimming. But eventually you should go into the deep water of the “exceptions,” because only there can you confront the real monsters.

There are indeed exceptions to war porn, but don’t fool yourself, size matters. How many people have seen American Sniper, The Hurt Locker, or Zero Dark Thirty? By comparison, how many saw the anti-war Iraq War film Battle for Haditha, a lightly fictionalized, deeply unsettling drama about an American massacre of innocent men, women, and children in retaliation for a roadside bomb blast?

Timing matters, too, when it comes to the few mainstream exceptions . . . [Mike: Then he goes into some of the exceptions.] [/private]

In propaganda terms, think of this as controlling the narrative. One version of events dominates all others and creates a reality others can only scramble to refute. The exceptions do, however, reveal much about what we don’t normally see of the true nature of American war. They are uncomfortable for any of us to watch, as well as for military recruiters, parents sending a child off to war, and politicians trolling for public support for the next crusade . . .

Of course, there are elements of “nothing new” here. The Romans undoubtedly had their version of war porn that involved mocking the Gauls as sub-humans. Yet in twenty-first-century America, where wars are undeclared and Washington dependent on volunteers for its new foreign legion, the need to keep the public engaged and filled with fear over our enemies is perhaps more acute than ever.

So here’s a question: if the core propaganda messages the U.S. government promoted during World War II are nearly identical to those pushed out today about the Islamic State, and if Hollywood’s war films, themselves a particularly high-class form of propaganda, have promoted the same false images of Americans in conflict from 1941 to the present day, what does that tell us? Is it that our varied enemies across nearly three-quarters of a century of conflict are always unbelievably alike, or is it that when America needs a villain, it always goes to the same script?

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End Mike Church Show Transcript