Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

HOMELAND – SERIES – SEASONS 1-3

The action of the series is extremely dense and as such the series is interesting, entertaining, suspenseful. But it takes more than simple action to make a good series.

The first problem it envisages is the fact that a US soldier captured in Iraq or Afghanistan, kept prisoner for eight years and liberated as some kind of collateral incident of one particular raid on a Taliban or jihadist post, goes through debriefing and even lie-detecting without a hitch though he has been turned during captivity. Yet one CIA agent is suspicious but she cannot come to anything conclusive.

The whole story turns around the fact that this marine was turned or broken by his captors. The way they did it, and we learn right at the end it was decided by Iranian people directly under control of the security boss in Iran, is original and at the same time standard. First torture knowing that all the man says during the first seven or eight days is worth nothing because a marine is trained to resist torture for seven to eight days. Then he can say everything he knows, after eight days, because he knows that by then everything has had time to change or be changed. In other words torturing well trained elite fighters is useless since they will be speaking freely and the truth only the truth but after eight days during which all they had told was lies and prepared inventions in order to let their side change what has to be changed.

The second element is that after this torture that can only last a short time, you have to get the chap into total absolute isolation with rare moments of contact with the outside world and under perfect guidance. The prisoner will little by little get out of his mind and to keep some sanity he will turn to a god or some kind of spiritual or religious belief. That’s when the Stockholm Syndrome can hit hard on the prisoner. In that total loss of contact, perspective and connections with the world if some kindness is proposed by one of the captors, if possible one that has played a role in the torturing but not the direct torturing part, rather the commanding part in the torture, then the prisoner will become grateful and if this kindness goes on and increases the prisoner will naturally turn. His religious need will lead him to adopting the religion of his captors. In this case the prisoner is entrusted with teaching English to the son of the leading figure among the captors and this brings the prisoner into an emotional situation where he falls in love with the child, the young boy. At this moment the prisoner has become a member of a situation that makes him part of the captors’ world. The torture broke him and the kindness turned him.

It is then a US drone that kills dozens of children in a school, and among these children the boy whose education our prisoner had been entrusted with, that completes the turning of the man. Then the rest is detail. He becomes the willing live suicidal bomber that will kill those who are responsible for the bombing of the school, and that is the US Vice-President and his security outfit or team if you prefer.

The third element here is that this turning cannot be reversed but it can at first be blocked by small elements that come from his previous life, and in his case his wife and his children, particularly his daughter. You can turn a man but you cannot erase his past. You can block that past and train him so that he can go through any debriefing and any lie-detecting, but you cannot delete his past, and you must not because this past is what is going to make him able to go back to his society to fulfill his mission there. But this past contains emotions that are revived for some of them by his coming back to his previous life and that can block the resolve and mission of the turned prisoner. The film gives two cases and the same element, attachment to previous wife and children, is the blocking element, the emotion to which the two people go back to and that can become the stumbling stone. Turning a man is never complete because it is impossible. That’s what the series tells us.

It goes, in the last episodes of the third season, as far as showing the turned prisoner can first be turned all over again and back to what he used to be, a Marine, and then the mission he had been entrusted with when he was turned the first time can become the very incentive for fulfilling at any cost the mission he has been entrusted with when he was turned back to his initial Marine format, and the intermediary turning of the man by his captors will become the force that will motivate his vengeance or vengeful power which will lead him to fulfilling the second mission: he will eradicate those who turned him the first time out vengeance.

The second theme of the series is very debatable. To pretend that the present change in Iran is the result of a CIA opposition that liquidated the historical main security leader in Iran and had him replaced by a CIA undercover agent is simply absurd. This undercover CIA agent was the chief of security under the Shah and then became the second man in command of the security system under the ayatollahs. In other words he is a turn-coat. To pretend that he has embezzled great sums from his own security operations and hence from the regime in Iran is just foolish. It takes an embezzler to recognize another. That’s the type of tactics the CIA uses and they consider everyone does the same. Since the CIA leads the people they want to buy to embezzling money through their double-agent situation, they think it is natural for everyone to dream and desire to be an embezzler. What’s more to think that the evolution of Iran is nothing but secret service corruption and penetration and infiltration from the CIA is mental simplicity. The evolution of a country in any direction can only come from the people themselves if it is to be long lasting and serious. We seem to forget Hitler and Mussolini were elected. At that level the ideology of the Mossad (this series is adapted from an Israeli series) is so obvious that we wonder if the series is not financed by that Mossad.

The final remark I will make is that the CIA is using, at times at top level, people who are psychologically deranged or non-functional. Here the main agent in these “adventures” is a woman and she is bipolar, hence highly sensitive to any withdrawal from her drugs and she should not even be sent in hostile fields since she could be tortured by just being cut off from her drugs. Such “motivations” or “abilities,” I mean the abilities that are developed in such psychologically deficient situations, can be useful for some extreme situations but they are extremely dangerous in the long run because the person cannot be trusted.

And she sure cannot be trusted, so much that she can easily be manipulated including by the CIA in order to fulfill objectives she is not even conscious or aware of. This vision of humanity (man is nothing but a manipulated manipulating manipulator) is a denial of humanity itself. We can see what it may lead to with ISIS or Ukraine. In the first case Iran finds it easy to laugh at the West who actually financed the various movements that now have turned out to be ISIS. In the same case it does not take much from Putin to manipulate Ukraine back to some kind of a compromise after the Ukrainians (including the remnants of the nazi units that had managed to survive in the West as political refugees from the USSR and had come back to be the agents of the West, and particularly the European Community, after the fall of the USSR) had been manipulated into ousting the properly elected President during the Sochi Olympic Games.

If this world has any future it will only come from consensual properly expressed wills and desires of the mass of the people of every single and all countries in the world. Scotland is there to prove the point: in spite of all public opinion polls manipulated by the media to predict such a close result that they could not even tell which side dominated, the winning margin of NO was so wide that there cannot be any kind of doubt.

This series is typical of the new Cold War ideology that is developing in the West confronted to the fact that this West has lost the leading position in the world and the future is in the hands of the BRICS and their allies or partners. Who – apart from me and Ivan Eve, THE INDIAN OCEAN THE MARE NOSTRUM OF HUMANITY [Kindle Edition] – could have said four or five years ago that Sri Lanka was going to be the maritime hub in the Indian Ocean and what’s more the security hub in this Indian Ocean. What this means is not clear as for the security hub, so far, but it is crystal clear as for the maritime hub with the latest announcement about the development of Colombo’s harbor.

This Cold War flavor is regrettable because the series is fascinating at many levels.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU