Thursday, May 18, 2017

 

With time from propaganda to prophesy


BEN AFFLECK – MORGAN FREEMAN – THE SUM OF ALL FEARS – 2002

This is a film that was essential at the time when it came out and that is all the more important today as a generic film on global tension in a time when tension is seen as some aphrodisiac drink by some politicians.

In 2002, one year after 9/11, the same year when the invasion of Afghanistan was ordered and performed and one year before the similar strike was ordered and performed in Iraq, this film showed that politicians are constantly manipulated by various factions in various agencies or out of them, and what’s more are the victims of all sorts of plots from isolated but networked individuals, isolated since they are representing no one at all and networked because they are half a dozen and they are engaged in some “project” that makes them both dangerous and tied up together. To step out means to be eliminated radically to death.


That was a strong call against any limitless war project against terrorism because it was inevitably going to rekindle the animosity between the USA and Russia, especially since the Russian president in the film is typically a personification of Putin though the film insists too much on the fact that he does not really control his military or even the political system at all that is still in the hands of the old Soviet Communists. This last fact is just not feasible since Putin was the last generation of security top officers, working outside the USSR mostly trained by the KGB under Brezhnev. That could maybe have been right for Gorbachev but cannot be true for Putin, though like any state there are contradictory motivations among the bureaucrats or civil servants. This is perfectly well shown on the American side where the President is surrounded by people who have very contradictory opinions from extreme war mongers to rather conciliatory peaceful minds.


But the film has to be taken today as a generic film about the danger of nuclear war in our modern world and we have to keep in mind the opposition between Trump’s USA (and I insist on the fact we are talking of the USA under the leadership of Trump) and North Korea. Or as for that China and Russia, not to speak of Iran, Syria, Turkey and so many other countries in the world. All those who defy the absolute leadership Trump wants to represent and impose after the USA definitely lost it in Iraq after having partially lost it in Vietnam.


Of course North Korea is a mystery. Their young leader may be considered as easily manipulatable though from what me know or may know he seems to be strong-headed too and able to get rid of people who are in his way, including his uncle and his own brother. That might be because he is under control from one faction in the upper tiers of the regime, or he has his own agenda and he has managed to bring enough people around his agenda to be secure.

On the other hand, Trump on the American side is impulsive and does not know what even medium range thinking is all about. He fired the FBI director in the worst possible way but he certainly had not foreseen the backlash after this event, with a first official reason from employees, and then another one completely different from the President himself that caused the worst possible speculations, accusations, and amplified backlash effects by connecting the firing with the Russian investigation, and this firing brought the private memos of the Director on the various conversations he had had with the president and that brought the next wave of tsunami rage bringing the suspicion of possible corrupted obstruction of justice, which is impeachable. Unpredictable, impulsive and what’s more unable to say in any way “I was wrong but I have changed my mind and I am sorry about what I said before” and this last characteristic is strong in appellate courts where he has to defend his travel bans and runs into the contradiction between his strongly anti-Muslim declarations during the campaign and the fact he has never stepped back and clearly said he had changed his mind on this point before signing the two executive orders of his travel bans against seven at first and then six dominantly Muslim countries.


In the film you have the Israelis connected – is it accidentally or is it openly – with the descendants of Nazi war criminals and other Nazi continuers who try to correct what they call the stupidity of Hitler who went at war against the USA and the USSR instead of doing what the modern world makes very easy, i.e. to make the USA and the USSR fight each other to death and then the surviving Germans would have been able to pick the pieces and draw the chestnuts from the roasting pan without burning their paws too much. Today we know that Israel was vain enough to use cyberwar weaponized software devised by the Americans, probably within the NSA in 2007-2009, on their own and with some modification against Iran’s nuclear project in such a reckless way that it went out public on the Internet. And even more advanced in time we know the latest global cyber-attack by criminal hackers used a ransomware that had gone public “accidentally” but that had been devised by the NSA as a cyber-war weapon to be used against terrorist organizations (and some other nation states of course). Adding a line or two of code to turn a weaponized tool exploiting a vulnerability in Windows Operating System to turn it into a ransomware is rather easy and possible for small hacking groups, whereas they could not devise the whole software because they do not have the means nor the time nor the equipment to do it on their own.

When politicians get engaged in such at-the-brink cliffhanging procedures and actions there is no way to say whether they will back up in time or that they will let the whole world go the way this reckless procedure is bound to go. And the film is just that.


Of course it is a film and it has to be both frightening but also with a certain hopeful dimension. That hopeful line is provided on both sides by some individuals who have the intelligence, the stamina and the guts to play it cool and just push the right button at the right time to block the most dangerous developments. And at this level the film is most pregnant with human reason and human vision. And it is these human reason and vision that make me consider a man like Donald Trump has nothing to do in the White House. He is dangerous and he may cause a political and military catastrophe before the end of the year. Here again he has to be humble and he is not able to be. He has to admit the USA have been wrong all along with North Korea when they refused to implement the agreement negotiated with North Korea so long ago no one remembers in spite of Jimmy Carter’s recollections about it since he was the main negotiator. At the time there was not even the slightest nuclear allusion. But now it is too late. The USA have to negotiate with North Korea as a nuclear power, one nuclear power to another nuclear power and they can ask a few other nuclear powers to help like in Asia Russia, China, India and Pakistan. But Trump will never be able to do that on his own. He will have to be forced to do it by a global alliance that might get the attention of Congress.

This film is a masterpiece then and it is the recipe how to avoid the Apocalypse that will destroy the red Babylon and the Red Babylon is the Red Republican Party in the USA. This Republican Party will have to be destroyed if they do not want to put Trump on the side, and they better accept the voice of reason and the vision of sanity. This film will remain prophetic for a long time because humanity being what it is there will always be a crisis situation of some sort developing among the nation states of this planet. They get that from the milk they drink after birth and the diapers they are wrapped in on minute one after birth, after being checked and measured and made ready to be given to the mother wrapped up in some kind of diaper and a woolen blanket. The germ of it is in our genes.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU


OLDER REVIEW ON AMAZON, 5 December 2007
Propaganda is hateful, especially when it smells antisemitic

This film could have been a good one. It came out after 9/11 but before Iraq, at the time of Afghanistan. It is about the "final" confrontation between the USA and Russia. A nuclear terrorist attack is organized in Baltimore so that the USA may believe it comes from the Russians and may start the procedure leading to a full out nuclear war. From the very start the theory that is illustrated here is that terror in the world is organized by the Israeli secret services with the help of some western autonomous adventurers and with the complicity of the hard liners in the Russian and Ukrainian armies.

Then the whole story is difficult to believe because of the total lack of real believable hard facts. The American president appears as quite manipulated by his own military personnel and his State and Defense Secretaries, without speaking of the CIA. The Russian president appears just as much manipulated but with maybe a little bit more nerve. The whole plot fails because a small CIA intellectual agent manages to speak to the Russian president directly via the red telephone and make him take the decision to halt his alert, a decision that the US president immediately imitates. How can we believe that.


The Weapons of Mass Destruction are quoted  in some remote small sentence somewhere unimportant but the propaganda is clear. The various actors of this plot are then eliminated one after the other in the most radical way possible. That's a shame in a way because the film is rather well made and acted but it is obvious war propaganda that supports the theory pretending the world is being manipulated if not controlled by the Israelis, a resurgence of sorts of the old hitlerian anti-semitism of old. I guess some believe that good old hate-theories can always be revived in a way or another, with a little bit of upgrading if necessary.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines


ANCIENNE CRITIQUE SUR AMAZON.FR, 5 décembre 2007
La propagande de guerre fleurit toujours abondamment aux USA

Un film sorti après les attentats de septembre 2001 mais avant la guerre en Irak, probablement en même temps que la guerre en Afghanistan. Une histoire de politique fiction à peine crédible, mais c'est la piste terroriste israélienne qui est développée ici : les services secrets israéliens en connivence avec les purs et durs dans l'armée ex-soviétique et maintenant russe ou ukrainienne. On est après Eltsine mais pas très clair sur le président américain qui apparaît comme manquant pour le moins d'information et manipulé facilement par ses propres extrémistes dans l'armée ou la diplomatie, ni sur le président russe qui semble tout aussi soumis à des pressions mais pourtant plus lucide et prêt à nettoyer son écurie. 


On découvre en même temps que l'attentat nucléaire qui doit provoquer la destruction mutuelle des USA et de la Russie a été fait avec du plutonium volé par la CIA aux USA et fourni aux Israéliens en 1968 pour en faire une bombe qui sera perdue quelque part dans le Sinaï. De fil en aiguille on va tout droit à l'ordre final et c'est un petit agent intellectuel de la CIA qui parle directement avec le téléphone rouge au président russe qui accepte d'arrêter son ordre d'attaque, ce en quoi le président des USA le suit. 

Puis les comploteurs sont tous éliminés radicalement d'un côté comme de l'autre. On cite les armes de destruction massive, mais on nous raconte la fable que ce ne sont ni les Russes ni les Américains qui veulent la guerre, mais qu'ils sont les victimes d'un complot international mené par les Israéliens et quelques autonomes d'origine occidentale. C'est dommage que ce film soit trop plein de propagande car les acteurs jouent relativement bien et le film est assez bien ficelé. Il y a de l'argent pour les films de propagande militaire aux Etats-Unis.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines





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