Fighting Terrorism
A BBC television spy series, M I-5, which is now being marketed to the U.S., portrays a heroic group of British government agents who have been beefed up and empowered since 9/11 to fight the rising threat of terrorism.
In the first episode, the terror threat came from a pro-life bomber—an American female with a Southern accent. The pro-life fanatic, of course, was an adulteress and a hypocrite who did not really care for children.
In the second episode, the terror threat comes from a white racist who instigates thugs to beat up and set fire to poor immigrants, thus causing the poor immigrants to riot. The bigot, a successful businessman who says he loves his country, is also, of course, a wife-beater, a killer, and an illegal alien smuggler! It is made clear that the victims in this case are immigrants who are unobtrusively identified as Muslims.
Episode 3: The terrorists are Kurds (who don’t look anything at all like Kurds) who are threatening poor Turkish diplomats. But it turns out that the poor Kurds are really victims too, being manipulated by an evil Englishmen who is using them as cover for a bank job.
In Episode 4 we have yet another egregious threat to world civilization—a group of German Green extremists trying to disrupt George W. Bush's visit to London.
There is nothing like observing the tried and true rules of winning a conflict. First, identify your problem clearly. Second, get your priorities straight. And third, know you enemy. Television is a pretty good reflection of the imperial mind-set. It is good to know who our rulers have in mind when they invoke the Terrorist threat—pro-life people, opponents of immigration, and environmentalists. It is not jihad. It is, Dear Reader, a vicious and dishonest caricature—of you and me.
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The fact that so many Americans and Brits are silly enough to watch such insulting garbage as this and CSI and other similar shows illustrates how mindless moderns are on both sides of the pond. The only good thing is that many, in their ignorance and mindlessness, wont pick up on the propaganda cues in these shows and so the propaganda value will dissipate as the twisted moral messages of the episode they are watching goes right over their heads. Ignorance and mindlessness imposed by government education do sometimes have their ironic good side. If you teach children not to think, then when they grow up, they often will miss what it is you are trying to make them think via propaganda. They just wont get it.
A similar thing happened with that 1930's movie, 'The Grapes of Wrath'. It was nothing but a slick piece of Communist propaganda, but still to this day, you hear older people talk about what a great movie it was, and they dont know it was propaganda, they weren't influenced in their political views by it, and so the movie failed completely in it's real purpose, all because the propaganda was delivered in a too-subtle fashion. Modern TV shows like CSI and MI-5 are not nearly so subtle, but people are dumber nowadays.
On the other hand, it is worrisome what such TV shows as these will do to the minds of young children who's parents are dumb enough to let them watch such tripe during their formative years. How will it affect their develpoment and worldview? Will it instill racial guilt and shame? What will seeing all those depictions of rotten corpses in coroner's labs, often with close up views, even of the interior of the corpse, do to children in the long run?
No homophobe terrorists? Maybe that comes later.
I don't know—CSI Miami works pretty well as a comedy. Mr. (Allen) Wilson is right about that one being very propagandistic, though. Do most people notice the fact that nearly every case turns on fingerprints or some other evidence being found in a massive Homeland Security database?
I can't agree on The Grapes of Wrath, however. My people were Arkys, and many of them rode that same path to California to pick fruit in order to stay alive—sort of a real-life version of Merle Haggard's "Hungry Eyes."
If only more of today's Arkies would pay attention to Dr. Wilson's point and realize that their imperial media sees them as the terrorists.
I am half-inclined to accept that the series is true-to-life. If MI5 are busying themselveswith pro-lifers etc, it would explain why they miss the real terrorist threats under their noses.
"How MI5 missed the links to the July 7 suicide bombers"
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2069464,00.html
It's hard to see why Mr A Wilson finds 'The Grapes of Wrath' a failure. We had the pinkest president since James Buchanan in charge-- though a different shade of pink-- so, to borrow a baseball term, the film should be seen as an 'insurance run'. The side which scored was already ahead.
'Grapes' did fail in Russia, however. FOF Joe Stalin used it to show his people how poor Americans could be. When they saw that the poorest of Americans had their own trucks, Joe pulled it before they started asking too many questions.
As Mr. Peter Hitchens notes here, MI5 does get interesting in the later seasons, putting the spotlight on the danger posed by a strong centralized state itself to its citizens.
Probably written by the same team that brought us that other stellar Brit series: Foyt's War (sp?) in which I learned after two episodes that Americans were bad and communists were good.
MI-5 is still understated in its aims compared to American shows like Law & Order.
That sounds like the gayest plotline on TV (including Will and Grace).
Allen, you are right about the propaganda often misfiring these days. Before The War, many Southerners read UNCLE TOM'S CABIN and said "Ain't it awful how that Yankee Legree mistreated his people." Of course, that was not ignorance but simply innocence of propaganda and that they were the objects of unaccountable hate.
New site looks great.
All quiet on the Western Front
Just last night I had a distinct displeasure of catching a few glimpse of the “Peacemaker” a feature film, dealing with the Russian thugs who smuggled nuh’kular weapons to Serbian militants in Republika Srpska (today’s constituent portion of the Bosnian Federation).
Dr. Wilson’s remarks, in conjunction with the above toxins reminded me of a fairly successful Night of the Long Knives – where the decent, law-abiding SS troups killed of most of the sexually deviant SA – and therefore eliminated all competition in the Nazi power struggle. To make their victory even more pronounced they also helped ordinary Germans by eliminating the hated (racially inferior) Jews in the ensuing years.
Nobody could have said it better, Dr. Wilson’s observation is right on:
“There is nothing like observing the tried and true rules of winning a conflict. First, identify your problem clearly. Second, get your priorities straight. And third, know you enemy. Television is a pretty good reflection of the imperial mind-set. It is good to know who our rulers have in mind when they invoke the Terrorist threat—pro-life people, opponents of immigration, and environmentalists. It is not jihad. It is, Dear Reader, a vicious and dishonest caricature—of you and me.”
Neil Postman, in his book on the telly, called all all this “amusing ourselves to death”. He has inspired this observation:
Orwell wrote the better book, seen merely from an aesthetic point of view; yet Huxley was the better prophet of dystopia. Big Brother doesn’t watch us; we watch him. And that’s how we’re controlled. Soma for the eye.
Well now, while we're all riffing on the decline of Western society, I have to ask whether we really know the motive of the BBC in this. Are they actively trying to create propaganda, or merely trying to be inoffensive. Because, people, including Muslims, might get irate if there were a show that portrayed Muslims as the terrorist enemy each and every week. And when Muslims in particular get irate, people start hiding. On the other hand, you can always count on Westerners to hate themselves, so no risk there.
So, while I don't expect the BBC to lead the vanguard against the self-destructive tendencies we Westerners have in any case, they might well just have their hands tied rather than any ideological motivation.
As a partial aside, Charlie Reese says we have nothing to fear from Islam. http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese356.html
So who's right?
Reese's column is devoid of fact and he's simply wrong, particularly his assertion of "living at peace" with Islam for a millenia and a half. Oh, if you're an Englishmen, German, Pole, or Scandinavian I guess you've "lived at peace" with Islam since the Sultan never got that far north. But if you view the matter as "European", Reese's assertions are ludicrous lies (in Dr. Johnson's construction of lie as "speaking falsely"). Hungarian, Bulgarians, Austrians, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Greeks, etc., would have quite a different view, having lived under the Ottoman yoke (except for Italy and Austria) for centuries, and the Austrians suffered invasion by the Turk. And that is to leave aside the violence suffered by Christians in the Middle East for centuries prior to the "Crusades."
If Reese wishes to join the rest of the propagandistic orientalist/Arabist/Islamophiles (like Esposito, Juan Cole, etc.), he certainly may do so. But, just for sake of honesty and honor, he ought to be as open as them and admit he's really a self-loathing leftist.
No one here has any truck with the neoconmen and their Marxist "Islamofacist" construction of a false war by the West on behalf of Zionism and universalist ideology, but that doesn't mean Islam isn't what it in fact is, a false, anti-Christ religion that has been violent and murderous from its inception.
In defense of Charley Reese, it might be said that he is an America Firster. Except to the extent we meddle with Islam and allow Islam into our homeland, it is no threat to America. The standpoint he is coming from, as I see it, is that it is not America's business to become a tool for battles among foreign interests.
If they were not over here and we were not over there, it would not matter what the nature of Islam is.
Perhaps, but if Reese is making the insulationalist argument (a good reformation of the old "isolationist" label), then he should pointedly say so. It 's certainly true that before the US began aggressively intervening militarily in the ME (beginning with Reagan's Lebanon intervention and accelerating out of control in the past 10 years), we were not a particular target of Muslim ire. If we returned to a noninterventionist policy, some of that conflict would defuse with time (at least as direct conflict, with the "clash of cultures" not being relevant if we're separated from it, as you say). As is, though, his column is an apologia for Islam based on canards.
Given that the managerial elite are as intent on bringing Islamists here as in going and meddling in their business over there, we won't be able to escape facing the nature of Islam, as it's already here.
I have contemplated CR's musings about the Israeli-Palistinian conflict as well. The neocon support of Israel has made him (CR) so mad that he - as evidenced by his writings - has gone the full distance as to JOIN the Palistinian cause. I'm not sure Dr. Wilson is correct about CR anymore. Joining the Palistinian cause is a strange thing for an America Firster to do. I can certainly fathom disappointment with Israel's behavior, but siding with the Moslem's???
Charley Reese is a great guy but like many people he was picked a side in the Middle East and that distorts his otherwise sound judgment.
On the Grapes of Wrath, one has to distinguish between the story and the propaganda. As a story, it is, though too long, a wonderful film with excellent performances from everyone but Henry Fonda--to cold-blooded to be an Okie. John Carradine puts in one of his best performances, and Ford's directing, though a bit heavier and more portentous than in some films, is sure. Those were, after all, tough times, not because of what people had done but because of stupid government policies--including a Homestead law that did not provide enough land for the drought cycle. Take a look at Meet John Doe, a clearer picture of the age, where people are hurting and come together to help--explicitly without government--and how they are manipulated by politicos. Ford, unlike Frank Capra, may have been a sentimental liberal in many respects, but he was no Commie
Patrick Moore, the astronomer, has turned his mind to the question of what is wrong with the BBC. In his opinion, the problem stems from the rise of women in the corporation He is in a position to know, having presented a BBC programme since 1957.
As much as I admire him - he is an old-style conservative of a kind now nearly extinct - I am not sure that he is completely correct about the BBC. The men are wimpish enough to ruin the organisation without any female help.
"The BBC is being ruined by women, says Patrick Moore"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1760061.ece
A great comment on the awful aesthetic in TV on both sides of the Atlantic by Sir Moore
“I was in hospital once and I watched a whole episode of EastEnders. I suppose it’s true to life. But so is diarrhoea – and I don’t want to see that on television.”
Since "reality" is the sum and substance of "art" these days (ok, not real "reality" as Dr. Wilson's post points out in the first place, "muslim terrorists, no muslim terrorists here"), perhaps we should sit back in the recliner and pass the Pepto.
Granted Islam is evil and a threat, as Dr. Trifkovic has laid out with such great learning and pertinence. Perhaps I read my own idea into Charley's column. That Islam is evil and a threat is a correct opinion that should be universal and always kept in view. But that does not automatically give us the right to expend our fellow citizens' blood and treasure to save the Europeans from the Muslims, especially since they don't seem inclined to save themselves. Or to save Israel from the Muslims; or to impose "democracy" on them; or for that matter to coerce "democracy" on China. That is the bad thinking I was trying to isolate, and the bad thinking that has turned the American Republic into the American Empire.
With Dr. Wilson's last comment, I wager there is full agreement (at least from me).
Mr Wolf's disagreement with my statement on
'The Grapes of Wrath' is understandable. My family were also Arkies who took that same path to California and picked fruit in the San Joaquin valley, and that time period is part of my family's lore. It's not the movie's story itself, which is accurate and actually a good story. It's some the details in the movie which made me see it as propaganda, and I hesitate to illustrate these details since I haven't seen the movie in a long time.
TJF has said some things on the subject of this movie which I was going to say in response Mr Wolf. I agree that Ford was no Communist. It could be that the propaganda was already in the original novel by John Steinbeck and got translated into the movie by default. Perhaps it was actually the novel that failed at being propaganda, though it may have been a good novel.
I suppose even propaganda can sometimes be a great work of literature or cinema (but I dont think 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' is a great work of literature). I have heard that some movies made in Vichy France were really good movies, and 'Alexander Nevsky' was obviously propaganda but some say it was one of the greatest movies ever made.
I also agree with Dr Wilson that it is sometimes simply innocence and not realising that one is the target of unaccountable hatred that causes people to miss the point of propaganda. How else do we account for the movie 'Deliverance' not causing riots throughout the South when it came out?
Some of these discussions seem to be like the American Chestnut tree - after surviving for a while they are attacked by uni-cellular viruses and perish. I think it's time to shut this one down.
"American Chestnut tree"
Isn't the Chestnut coming back now?
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