The BRICS Revolt: Is Biden’s War in Ukraine Fueling the Collapse of US Hegemony? Plus: Film Documents CIA’s Covert Takeover of Hollywood, w/ Roger Stahl | SYSTEM UPDATE #125
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, while the U.S.
fixates obsessively on the war in Ukraine and on the apparently vital and pressing question of who will govern various provinces in eastern Ukraine, the rest of the world is reorganizing its core alliances and power structures.
For the last 20 years, an alliance of developing countries called BRICS, named for its key members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has been rapidly growing.
It would be a clear exaggeration to assert that BRICS is on the verge of replacing the U.S.
and NATO and the various neoliberal institutions of the West in exercising hegemony, but every year it is getting closer to doing so.
And nothing has fueled the ambitions of BRICS more than the virtually monomaniacal fixation of the U.S.
national security state on the war in Ukraine.
While the U.S.
sends tens of billions of dollars after tens of billions of dollars and depletes its own stockpiles of weaponry and gives away major concessions in order to avoid a humiliating loss to Moscow, the BRICS alliance and its undisputed leader China has been aggressively expanding its influence and power on every continent on the planet other than North America and Antarctica.
Washington's obsession with Kiev and this war is providing a major boost to BRICS, in part by distracting American and European policymakers, but even more so by fueling the core narrative that BRICS exploits to fuel its growth.
Namely, that the U.S.
has a long history of colonizing the developing world, of abusing its hegemonic power at everyone else's expense, and of attempting to rule the world through superior military force and threats of endless war.
What matters is not so much whether this narrative is correct, though clearly at least parts of it are, but rather how the U.S.
involvement in the war in Ukraine with no end in sight is enabling Beijing, Moscow, and other BRICS members to play on long-standing resentments toward the U.S.
and bring more and more countries out of the sphere of influence of the U.S.
and NATO and into the seemingly Much more comforting arms of the China-led BRICS Alliance.
We'll examine all the implications of exactly how this is taking place, where it's taking place, and how the war in Ukraine is the biggest boost to it.
Then, it is probably not surprising to learn that Hollywood has long ensured that its biggest films about war and the American military align with the U.S.
government's propagandistic narratives and policy aims, but an extraordinarily well-researched and compelling documentary released last year called Theaters of War Demonstrates just how deep, multi-pronged and systematic is the control by the Pentagon and the U.S.
security state over many of the most popular studio films, including ones that do not appear to be directly about topics of the military or war.
FOIA requests have unearthed sprawling and rigid contracts between the Pentagon and the CIA on the one hand, and some of the most famous producers and directors of many of Hollywood's most successful films on the other, that give those agencies full power and script approval in return to giving filmmakers various rights and privileges that are often necessary for the film that only the Pentagon and the CIA can provide, such as access to aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and even top-secret information.
The director and narrative of this truly compelling film, the University of Georgia professor Roger Stahl, will be with us tonight to talk about this film's key revelations and just how longstanding and deep this control is over the most influential, mass-marketed films that Hollywood has produced.
As a reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night after our live show here on Rumble, we have a live interactive show for subscribers only on our Locals platform that is part of Rumble to become a member of that, which gives you access to that show that's designed to be interactive in nature.
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And in fact, one of our subscribers is a participant in that Locals community is the person who brought this film to my attention and to the attention of our team here, and that's what caused us to watch it and become so excited about speaking to the director and telling you about the film.
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We have focused a lot on this show on the multiple costs of the war in Ukraine.
The fact that we are now sending more than $100 billion to this war, even though there's no one in sight, even though Russia currently occupies 20% or so of Ukrainian territory and doesn't appear close to giving any of that up.
They have a very entrenched defensive position that, at least thus far, Ukraine has been highly unsuccessful in trying to breach.
Obviously, there's enormous amounts of death and devastation brought to that country.
The people of Ukraine, many of them don't want to actually fight in this war, which is why they're fleeing, often risking their own lives or their liberty to do so.
Zelensky has to fight with a conscript army and significantly increase the punishments for trying to flee.
So there's all kinds of devastation and death and waste coming from this war, which whoever you want to blame, Now it depends upon the United States fueling one side of it as a proxy war.
If the United States didn't, there'd be an effort to negotiate peace, usually involving many countries, and this war could finally end.
So those costs are something that we spend a great deal of time uncovering.
But one of the costs that might be at least as significant as all of those in terms of American interests is one that hasn't gotten a lot of attention, which is the ability
of competitors to the United States and to its hegemonic power being able to exploit long-standing resentments toward the United States by trying to put this war into the context of that narrative that the United States uses its military force and wars to go around the world trying to control other countries and destroy other countries for its own benefit.
There are a lot of lingering resentments from all kinds of developing countries that are very important and powerful economically, becoming more so every day, who previously could never do anything about it because the United States, after the fall of the Cold War, the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, really was the most powerful country by far on Earth, one of the world's great hegemons.
And there was no alternative, there was no competitive framework, and countries couldn't do anything other than simmer in their own anger and resentment.
But the emergence of BRICS, this 20-year-old or so alliance between countries that have grown enormously, particularly China but also India, the other three countries are Brazil, Russia and South Africa are now really providing a genuine alternative to the United States.
And this war in Ukraine is driving a lot of countries, valuable and important geostrategic countries, into the arms of BRICS and away from the United States.
Here, for example, from the German newspaper Deutsche Welt is on April 10th of 2023.
The headline is A New World Order.
Bricks Nations offer an alternative to the West and this article basically just walks through the foundational history of BRICS and how it is becoming ever more powerful.
Quote, the acronym began as a somewhat optimistic term to describe what were the world's fastest growing economies at the time.
But now the BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, are setting themselves up as an alternative to existing international financial and political forums.
Quote, the founding myth of the emerging economies has faded, confirms Gunther Mallard, deputy director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, or SWP.
Quote, the BRICS countries are experiencing their geopolitical moment.
Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa are trying to position themselves as representatives of the Global South, providing an alternative model to the G7.
The G7 is an informal forum of heads of state of the world's most advanced economies, founded in 1975.
Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, Canada, and the US are members as the EU.
In 2014, with $50 billion, around €46 billion in seed money, the BRICS nations launched the New Development Bank as an alternative to the World Bank and the IMF, the International Monetary Fund.
In addition, they created a liquidity mechanism called the Contingent Reserve Arrangement to support members struggling with payments.
These offers were not only attractive to the BRICS nations themselves, but also to many other developing and emerging economies that had painful experiences with the IMF's structural adjustment programs and austerity measures.
This is why many countries said they might be interested in joining the BRICS group.
Since the start of the Russian war in Ukraine, the BRICS countries have only distanced themselves further from the so-called West.
Neither India, Brazil, South Africa, or China are taking part in sanctions against Russia.
This has become increasingly clear with near historic levels of trade between India and Russia or in Brazil's dependence on Russian fertilizer.
Quote, diplomatically, the war in Ukraine appears to have drawn a stark dividing line between eastern-backed Russia and the west.
Political scientist Matthew Bishop from the University of Sheffield wrote for the Economics Observatory late last year, quote, Consequently, some European and U.S. policymakers worry that the BRICS may become less an economic club of rising powers seeking to influence growth and development and more a political one Defined by their authoritarian nationalism.
Now obviously, Western academics and Western journalists are going to malign and disparage anything that becomes a competitor to the United States.
The reality, however, is that three of those countries of the five, Brazil, India and South Africa, clearly are democracies by every sense of the term.
And in fact, although there may be some authoritarianism in all of those countries, there certainly is.
There's a lot of authoritarianism in the West as well.
And what makes this really important, this alliance, is that this is where population growth is taking place.
While demographics and population growth slow in the West for all kinds of reasons, including growing secularism and the Emergence of women in the workforce who are postponing having children or turning away from the marriage framework that produces a lot of children.
Economic growth is very significant in most of these developing countries and these countries, especially these five kind of core anchor members of the alliance, are talking about major, major countries, including the two largest countries in the world, China and India.
Brazil is the sixth largest country in the world, and they're looking to expand into many highly populated and geostrategically crucial countries, including, potentially, Saudi Arabia, one of the anchors of American power in the Middle East.
And of course, this year, while the US was single-mindedly fixated on Ukraine for whatever reason, Ukraine, a country that nobody ever considered to be of much importance, Geopolitically.
In fact, President Obama often said, when asked why he didn't confront Russia more over Ukraine, that Ukraine is not of a vital interest to the United States.
That has been the view of Washington for decades, because of course it's not.
But while Washington is monomaniacally obsessed with Ukraine, sending huge amounts of American tax dollars to fuel that war, China waltzed into the Middle East and forged a peace agreement between the two most important countries in that region, Iran and Saudi Arabia, right under the United States' nose.
Something that would have been inconceivable, unthinkable.
As recently as five years ago, but that is one of the costs, the many costs, of the very bipartisan obsession with keeping this war in Ukraine going.
Here's another article, one from Reuters in June of 2023, that describes the growth of BRICS.
Quote, more than 40 nations are interested in joining BRICS, South Africa says.
Quote, more than 40 countries have expressed interest in joining the BRICS groups of nations.
South Africa's top diplomat in charge of relations with the bloc said on Thursday.
The question of how far and fast to expand the club is top of the agenda at the Summit of Nations seeking to offset perceived hegemony of the U.S.
This is Reuters, so of course they have to say perceived hegemony of the U.S.
Perceived hegemony of U.S.-led West and global affairs.
Aside from the 22 countries that had formally asked to join, Sukhlal said there was, quote, an equal number of countries that have informally expressed interest in becoming BRICS members, including all the major global South countries.
South African officials want BRICS to become a champion of the developing world in Argentina, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, and Kazakhstan have all expressed interest.
That represents a gigantic portion of the world's population.
And as usual, the media narrative at the start of the war in Ukraine was that, quote, the entire international community is on the side of the United States and against Russia.
And what the international community means is the United States and Canada, its Western European allies, and whatever countries happen to be bribed or coerced or just falling on the side of the United States at any given moment.
That's the international community.
And everyone else is talked about as, quote, the rest of the world.
So you have the international community over here, that's the United States, and everybody subservient to it at any given moment.
And then you have the rest of the world.
The problem is that the rest of the world is becoming bigger and stronger and more powerful and more united, largely as a result of the war in Ukraine.
Now, one of the things that I found most Interesting, most revealing is that it wasn't people like me and critics of US foreign policy who have been pointing this out only very recently.
In fact, in May of 2023, just two or three months ago, Fiona Hill, who is a highly beloved insider in Washington, she was in the Trump administration for a little bit of time, but she's a fanatical hawk on both Russia and China.
She's the kind of person who cheers every American war.
She's half American, half British.
She is a disciple of John Bolton.
That was one of her primary allies inside the Trump administration.
I say all that just to indicate that she is the opposite of a radical critic of U.S.
foreign policy and the foreign policy community or national security state.
She is representative of it.
And yet she delivered this lecture called the Leonard Murray Lecture that gathers all foreign policy elites in Western European capitals and the United States.
And it's supposed to be a gathering of all the great policy minds in the West.
And she used the opportunity of this speech to warn the West that although they claim to their populations that the war in Ukraine is so noble and benevolent, And they had their media try and convince its citizenry that the entire international community was united on the side of the United States and the West.
The reality is starkly different.
Instead, she said, the war in Ukraine and the United States and NATO's
Very aggressive involvement in it, attempt to fuel it, obvious desire to prevent any diplomatic resolution, is fostering and nurturing and fueling the long-standing resentments that Russia, China, and the rest of these countries that are trying to create an independent pole of power exploit to convince countries that they are better off following BRICS, which essentially means falling into the sphere Of China.
So let's listen to a portion of what Fiona Hill said.
I actually think this is one of the most important speeches of this year.
Not so much because of what she said, that's something I would say and a lot of other people would say for a long time, but principally because of who it came from and the audience to whom she delivered it.
Let's take a look at that speech.
Now, since 1991, the United States has seemingly stood alone as the global superpower.
But I would argue that today, after a fraught two-decade period, shaped by American-led military interventions and direct engagement in regional wars, The Ukraine war highlights the decline of the United States itself.
Now, this decline is relative, of course, economically and militarily, but it is very serious in terms of U.S.
moral authority.
And again, we've heard quite a lot about that as well.
Unfortunately, just as Osama bin Laden intended, the U.S.' 's own reactions and actions have eroded its position since the devastating terrorist attacks of 9-11.
America fatigue, and we actually heard about that
As part of Osama bin Laden's vision after 9-11, regardless of how you think 9-11 happened, Osama bin Laden in interviews saw the very exciting potential to him that by overreacting or using 9-11 as an excuse to start a bunch of new wars and bomb a bunch of countries and engineer regime change and a bunch of others,
That just as Fiona Hill just said the United States is doing in Ukraine, that the United States through its own actions would essentially be digging its own grave.
That it would be fueling the resentment and reaction against the United States.
And over the next 15 years, so many things obviously happened in terms of what the United States did when it came to avenging 9-11, or at least in the name of avenging 9-11.
But if you look, and I reported on so many of these cases, at every person who was arrested who was a Muslim or who pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda or ISIS, Who either carried out a terrorist attack on Western soil or who got caught attempting to carry out an attack on Western soil.
They all said the same thing.
Which is that prior to 9-11, they didn't particularly have a lot of hostility toward the United States, but that as a result of what the U.S.
did after 9-11, going around the world, killing a bunch of innocent people, drone bombing children under President Obama, and wiping out families the way President Biden did on his way out of Afghanistan, that it just drove them, it caused them to feel all sorts of rage Over watching the United States go to these other countries, predominantly Muslim countries, and kill huge numbers of people.
And I remember, in particular, reporting on the case where the person accused of being the Times Square bomber, somebody who was going to try and detonate a bomb in Times Square, The judge who was presiding over his sentencing looked at him with disgust and shock and said, I understand that you have what you regard as righteous anger about what the United States has done, but you weren't going to kill American leaders.
You were going to kill innocent people, children.
How can you possibly justify doing that?
And he looked at her and he said, why don't you ask American leaders that when they send their drones that kill Muslim children and kill innocent people throughout the Muslim world the way you've been doing for decades now?
The CIA has a term for that.
It's called blowback.
That when a country appears to be bullying the world through its superior military force, killing all kinds of innocent people, Then that is going to produce huge amounts of anti-American sentiment.
And that's exactly what happened in the wake of 9-11, and that's what's happening now in the war in Ukraine.
It's difficult, I think, for a lot of Americans and Westerners to see it this way, because the media has been more dissent-free about the war in Ukraine than any other war in my lifetime, including Iraq.
I am absolutely convinced of that.
There was one person in all of corporate media who was vocally opposed to the U.S.
role in Ukraine.
Just one.
His name was Tucker Carlson and he got fired and so now he's off the air.
There were a couple of other Fox personalities like Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters who have expressed opposition to the war in Ukraine but nowhere near with the vigor and as emphatically as Tucker was doing almost every night to the point where
News articles reported that Republican establishment politicians were thrilled that he was off the air because they said it would make their lives so much easier, particularly when it came time to approving more money, American money, money of American taxpayers to go to the war in Ukraine.
That's how dissent-free this war is.
And so, so many Americans, so many Westerners walk around just convinced that this is an incredibly noble war, that we are on the side of good, that we are attempting to repel a war of aggression.
And the problem with discourse that is free of dissent And that doesn't permit opposing sides to be heard.
Remember, the Europeans made it illegal, illegal for social media platforms to allow Russian state media even to be heard.
So if you're a European adult, an adult in any European state, and you just want to listen to what the Russian government is saying about this war by listening to RT or Sputnik, it's illegal.
You can't do that.
Obviously, if you go to extreme lengths, use VPNs, you're able to find a way to do it.
But in general, for most people, it was rendered illegal.
That's why Rumble is unavailable in France because the French government ordered Rumble to remove RT from its platform, even though Rumble is not a French company or a EU company, and when Rumble refused, France made it clear they were going to cut them off at the IP level and so Rumble sued France and in the meantime Rumble is not available in France.
That's how closed this information system is.
That's what censorship does.
It prevents us from even considering the other side of how other people might be perceiving this war.
And here in Brazil, where the Brazilian government is adamantly opposed to getting involved in that war, even though there has been a lot of pressure on Brazilian President Lula da Silva from the West to do so, We've reported before about how involved the United States was in the 2022 election that led to Lula's victory over Jair Bolsonaro.
The CIA was sending emissaries to Brazil to tell Jair Bolsonaro that you better not engage in fraud, making it very clear whose side they were on.
There has been all kinds of censorship of Brazilian political discourse by big tech companies, including Facebook.
We showed you the CIA, the former CIA official who's now responsible for censoring international discourse at Facebook, and he was in charge of censoring for Brazil.
He worked at the CIA for 20 years.
And almost all of the censorship in Brazil was aimed at pro-Bolsonaro voices.
And so there's kind of a sense that the West has that when they talk to Lula, the Brazilian president, of kind of like, look at all those things we did for you.
Remember all those things we did for you.
We expect you to join our war effort.
The German chancellor came to Brasilia and met with Lula and asked for munitions for German tanks.
And Lula said no, and his position has been, This is not a war that Brazil has.
Brazil has no war with Russia.
We're not going to use our country's resources to fuel a war.
We're going to try and solve this war.
We're going to try and stop this war.
We're not going to fuel this war.
And his position has been that the resources of the Brazilian people are to improve the lives of Brazilian people and not to fuel a war on the other side of the world that Brazil has no interest in.
And that has been the view of so many countries.
Around the world.
And in fact, many countries see this war as one that NATO provoked.
Lula himself has often said that NATO and the US and Zelensky bear at least 50% of the blame for this war by provoking it, by telling Zelensky he can win, by impeding any motivation that he might have to try and have a diplomatic resolution, because the West has been telling you, we're behind you to the end, you have everything you want.
And so the view of Lula, who is a very well-respected and integrated member of the quote, international community, there's not some fringe view.
Is that the war in Ukraine is a war that has been provoked by the US and NATO and the last thing any of these countries do or want to do is use their resources to defeat Russia.
Why would they?
Why would they want to join the United States and join NATO given their perception that the United States and NATO have been abusing them and interfering in their politics and colonizing and exploiting their resources for many many decades.
That is the perception Everywhere other than the West, practically.
It's just that we don't hear that because there's no dissent in our dominant media.
And what Fiona Hill was trying to say, and we're gonna listen to the rest of her speech or part of this, is, look, I, Fiona Hill, don't agree with this.
I know that they're wrong.
Of course I think the war is noble.
She had to make that clear to the audience, and she probably does think that.
But she's at least perceptive enough and informed enough to warn people in the West You are the minority on this issue and more broadly on the role of the U.S.
in the world.
You are not the majority.
And that is becoming an increasingly dangerous reality.
On the panel, as you might recall, I'd already had that in my notes, and then we heard one of our panelists actually say it.
America fatigue and disillusionment with its role as the global hegemon is widespread.
And this, I would argue, also includes in the United States itself, the fact that we frequently see on display in Congress, news outlets, and in think tank debates.
For some, the U.S.
is a flawed international actor with its own domestic problems it should be attending to.
And for others, the U.S.
is still a new form of imperial state that ignores the concerns of others and throws its military weight around.
Alright, so that pretty much gives you a good sense for what she said.
We've covered this speech before.
There's some more parts where she essentially says that The Global South and the rest of the world, as we call them, are now becoming the international community.
And we are really the rest of the world.
And again, you may still be in favor of the war in Ukraine.
You may still think, for whatever reasons, that it's somehow important to the United States to undermine Russia, to weaken Russia, even though Russia is not threatening the United States.
Russia has never attacked the United States.
President Obama cooperated with President Putin on all sorts of priorities, including the war in Syria and the deal that he wanted to engineer in Iran.
Russia is an important player in the Middle East.
They have an important ally in Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
And this was President Trump's view as well.
That I think more than anything else caused the U.S.
security state to just explode with rage and make him an enemy, which was he was saying during 2016 when the top CIA priority was not the war in Ukraine like it is now.
Instead, it was the CIA regime change war in Syria to remove Bashar al-Assad for whatever reasons.
Trump was saying, why?
Do we want to remove Bashar al-Assad?
Why are we going around the world trying to change the governments of other countries?
We can work with Bashar al-Assad and Russia.
We should be working with them to attack our common enemies, which were Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Remember, Al-Qaeda and ISIS were on the side of the CIA.
All of them were fighting against Bashar al-Assad's government.
The insanity of imperialism is that you launch a 20-year war of civilizations, a war on terror against Muslim extremism, and within 10 years you're fighting side-by-side with them in the same war.
It's proven that many of the U.S.
weapons that ended up being sent to Syria to arm the Syrian moderate rebels ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda and ISIS.
We were arming the very groups That we said we were in a civilizational war against for decades to come.
And Trump started questioning exactly the logic of these sorts of things and that was why the U.S.
security state went ballistic against him as Chuck Schumer warned that they would.
Because he was trying to say this is not in the interest of the United States or the American people.
And this is what Fiona Hill, ironically, despite how much she now despises Trump, she thinks Trump is a menace to all things decent.
Essentially, she's giving the same warning, or really what she's doing is she's vindicating Trump's worldview about how counterproductive this is to the interests of the American people.
Oftentimes, American interests mean the interests of the tiny portion of the ruling class and the arms manufacturers, but the interests of the American people, in the sense of ordinary Americans who wake up and go to work every day, is not served by trying to remove Bashar al-Assad.
It's not served by sending all their money to a war in Ukraine over who rules provinces in eastern Ukraine.
That was Trump's core worldview, the populist worldview, that turned neocons and the U.S.
national security state so vehemently against him.
And this is a really crucial warning.
This is not only directed at the United States.
As you might know, there are several countries in Africa over the past two or three years, in Western Africa in particular, that have suffered coups, military coups, where their government, largely pro-Western governments, have been replaced by Military juntas.
And each country is very complicated.
The most recent one was Niger, where a military coup unseated the pro-Western government.
The West loved this government that just got replaced.
And these are all French colonies, former French colonies.
And there's enormous resentment toward France.
And Putin has used the war in Ukraine in order to lure a lot of countries in Africa on the side of Russia to the point where even neoliberal outlets like The Economist are admitting this happened.
So here, just this week, The Economist, from a couple days ago, you see the headline on the screen, Niger spoils Macron's plan for an African reset.
The coup is another blow to French influence in Africa.
Quote, six months ago, ahead of a four-country African tour, President Emmanuel Macron promised a quote, new era for France's ties with the continent based on a partnership of equals.
French military bases in Africa, he said, would henceforth be jointly run by local armed forces with a, quote, visible reduction of French soldiers on the ground.
It was to be a new phase in the Franco-African reset that Mr. Macron first laid out in his speech in 2017 in Burkina Faso.
Vowing that he was, quote, of a generation that doesn't come to tell Africans what to do.
Last week's military coup against Niger's elected president leaves hopes of a fresh relationship severely frayed.
On July 30th, protesters in Niamey, Niger's capital, declared, quote, down with France and waved Russian flags.
A crowd attacked the French embassy, setting fire to the doors and smashing windows.
On August 1st, France began to evacuate its nationals and other European citizens from Niger.
Already, France's departure from Mali was a blow to its prestige.
At one point, the French had 2,500 soldiers in the country, a regional counter-jihadist mission, which grew from a French operation that first launched in 2013 at the request of Mali's government, that successfully pushed back a jihadist march on the capital, Bamako.
When Francois Hollande, France's president at the time, visited soon afterward, he was mobbed by cheering crowds.
But the overthrow of its government in 2020, followed by a second coup the following year, and the new junta's decision to hire mercenaries from Russia's Wagner Group, Change the calculation.
By August 2022, all French soldiers had quit Mali.
Taking with them some 4,000 containers of kit and 1,000 vehicles, Barkhane was shut down.
Since quitting Mali, France has been rethinking its operations on the continent.
A review is due later this year.
The plan is to ensure a lighter footprint and a more discreet presence.
Indeed, in Niger, France has already been acting more as a partner, less as a boss.
Quote, France has been trying to apply the lessons from Mali to be sensitive to Niger's concerns.
Note Michael Shurkin, a specialist on the Shahe at the Atlantic Council, a think tank based in Washington DC.
Is that this rethink may in essence be too little, too late.
China, Russia, and Turkey have been lending, investing, or securing contracts in West Africa with scarcely a murmur.
China has replaced France as the chief source of imports to the region.
Other European countries train forces in the Sahel.
America runs a big intelligence operation out of Niger.
Because of its colonial history, France is often singled out for policy inconsistencies that are sometimes overlooked in the case of other French powers.
The French have not found a credible way to counter the post-colonial narrative of occupation and exploitation that is efficiently used against it, spread by Russian troll factories and disinformation that prevails today even against the evidence.
So as usual, of course, the real problem is that Africans are too dumb to think on their own or to know their own history.
They're being deceived and manipulated by Russian disinformation.
Everything is Russian disinformation in the West.
Even though, says the economist, the view that France is at the heart of African problems or that colonialization is a source of big problems in Niger is just fabricated.
It's contrary to the evidence.
It's disinformation emanating from Moscow.
Whatever.
The West can go around.
It's kind of just like a loser's mentality, constantly whining that what people think That's contrary to what Western establishments want them to think.
It's just because Russia is playing unfairly.
But the reality is, for whatever reasons, blame Russia if you want, the huge parts of the world in Latin America, in Asia, in Africa, are increasingly being torn away from American influence.
In large part based on this anti-colonialization, anti-imperial narrative that the West and especially the United States have been doing to the world what they're now doing in Ukraine, namely prolonging wars, killing people, destroying countries.
Exploiting their resources all for the benefit of a tiny sliver of Western elites and everybody else's expense.
And BRICS has now given people, and China's economic growth has given people, countries an alternative somewhere to go that they never had previously.
They had to swallow it before and now they don't.
The media outlet that I, to my great embarrassment, co-founded, The Intercept, also this week published an article that if you had showed me 15 years ago when I was founding it, or 10 years ago when I was founding it rather, I would have immediately cancelled the entire endeavor.
But it's also designed to promote exactly the same narrative promoted by The Economist, namely that the only reason People in these African countries are turning against the West is because Russian disinformation is being permitted to proliferate on Facebook and other social media outlets.
So basically it's a it's a It's a dual propagandistic article.
On the one hand, it's essentially saying that the current CIA enemy, Russia, is evil.
Thank you, The Intercept.
If we didn't exist, nobody else in the West would be saying that.
And it's also simultaneously pressuring Facebook to censor more content That is contrary to the narrative of the West on the grounds that it's deceiving Africans into leaving the Western sphere of influence and moving to Russia and China.
The Intercept has become this, like every other corporate media outlet practically in the West, just a outlet for pro-West, pro-American, pro-CIA, pro-Pentagon propaganda.
Here you see the headline on the screen, quote, a pro-Putin Facebook network is pumping French language propaganda into Africa.
The pages promote Russia's line of the war in Ukraine to more than 4 million followers, casting doubt on MEDA's pledge to combat foreign influence campaigns.
So that's the role of The Intercept.
To publish the same tripe The Economist publishes, and to demand that Big Tech censor content that is contrary to the narrative of the CIA.
I mean, it's shocking for me to look at.
It's nauseating to look at.
Now, as Fiona Hill tried to tell Westerners, set aside whether you agree with the narrative or not.
Set aside how you view the American role in the world.
Set aside whether you blame Russia or NATO or both for the war in Ukraine.
The reality, whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not, is that this resentment toward the U.S.
is pervasive.
On the part of many countries whose history has been shaped in their view detrimentally by the endless appetite that the United States has for interfering in their internal affairs and exploiting their country for the benefit of America's elite and that this resentment is being successfully exploited by these BRICS leaders and especially by China and Russia to lure people away from the United States.
When Putin declared war on Ukraine and announced what he calls a special military operation, which was an invasion of Ukraine, there was a lot of emphasis on some of the more extreme things he said, which of course the media paid most attention to.
But if you look at the speech, There was clearly at least one eye toward the goal of trying to induce countries to either side with Russia or remain neutral by reminding everybody of all the reasons they have to resent the United States.
Here was his speech on February 24th as published in Al Jazeera.
There you see the title of it.
No other option.
Excerpts of Putin's declaring war.
Here's part of what he said that shows you how this narrative is being used.
in Europe since World War II, Putin addressed his nation.
Here's part of what he said that shows you how this narrative is being used.
Quote, of course, in practical life, in international relations and the rules that regulated them, it was necessary to take into account changes in the state of affairs in the world and the balance of power.
This should have been done professionally, smoothly, patiently, taking into account and respecting the interests of all countries and understanding one's own responsibility.
But no.
The euphoria from having absolute superiority, a kind of modern-day absolutism, and the low level of general culture and arrogance of decision-makers led to decisions prepared, adopted, and pushed through that were beneficial only for themselves.
The situation began to develop according to a different scenario.
You don't have to look far for examples.
First, without any approval from the UN Security Council, The US and the West carried out a bloody military operation against Belgrade, using aircraft and missiles right in the very center of Europe.
They carried out several weeks of continuous bombing of cities and cultural infrastructure.
We have to remind them of these facts, as some Western colleagues do not like to remember these events.
And when we talk about it, they prefer to point out, not to the norms of international law, but to the circumstances that they interpret as they see fit.
Then came the turn of Iraq, Libya, Syria, the illegitimate use of military force against Libya, the twisting of all decisions taken by the UN Security Council on the Libyan issue led to the complete destruction of that state, to the emergence of a major hotbed of international terrorism, to a humanitarian catastrophe and a civil war that has not ended to this day.
The tragedy to which they doomed hundreds of thousands, millions of people, not only in Libya but throughout the region, gave rise to a massive migration wave from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe.
They ensured a similar fate for Syria.
The Western Coalition's military activities on the territory of this country, without the consent of the Syrian government or the approval of the UN Security Council, are nothing but aggression, intervention.
However, there's a special place for the invasion of Iraq, which was carried out also without any legal grounds.
As a pretext, they put forward supposedly reliable information from the United States about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.
As proof of this, publicly, in front of the eyes of the whole world, the U.S.
Secretary of State shook some kind of a test tube with white powder, assuring everyone that this is a chemical weapon being developed in Iraq.
And then it turned out that all of this was a hoax, a bluff.
There were no chemical weapons in Iraq.
Now, this is something that we have all moved beyond in the United States, or most of us, and the reason for that is that the people who did all of that, the people who lied the United States into a war in Iraq and destroyed that country, killing hundreds of thousands of people at least, the people who destroyed Libya,
Through a regime change war that had nothing to do with anything other than French and British interest in Libyan crude oil, which Gaddafi was threatening to exploit not for the interest of the West, but for the Libyan people.
The complete murderous, bloody destruction of Syria.
Because the United States wanted to remove Bashar al-Assad and of course the monstrosity and atrocity that was the war in Iraq.
One of the reasons we moved beyond that is because the people who did all of that are the people who still run The most influential mainstream political and media precincts.
They're the people who occupy the United States government currently.
Remember, Joe Biden was an adamant supporter of the war in Iraq, probably the most important Democratic senator as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, along with Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.
It was the Obama administration that carried out the devastating wars in Syria and Libya, of which President Biden was a part.
All throughout major media, The people on the staffs who host shows, who are the news analysts, are people who are either from the Bush and Cheney administration or from the U.S.
security state.
Obama is CIA director and his homeland security director.
These are all the people who are running the media.
The neocons are more popular than ever, and so of course they're constantly Manipulating American thinking and the population to forget that all that happened and only focus on Russia.
Look over there, that's the bad people, that's Russia.
And so when the United States stands up and says, we are devoted to fighting authoritarianism, we are devoted to combating wars of aggression, To American and Western ears, this makes sense because of how relentless and closed is the propaganda system, and because the people they're told to venerate are the people who did those wars.
But I promise you, in the rest of the world, it provokes nothing but scorn and angry laughter.
And that's the reason why Fiona Hill is warning people to see it because we're so propagandized, our media system is so controlled with censorship and propaganda that we don't really think this about ourselves, even though the rest of the world does.
Here's a video report that I stumbled into.
This is, it has the date of today, but it's not actually from today.
It's from several months ago, I believe.
We'll confirm that when it was on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
It's a British media outlet, ITV.
And it's not that this is anything so groundbreaking or special.
But it's three minutes or so of just summarizing the war in Iraq that I think is very important to watch as just sometimes we do forget how extreme that atrocity was and how much anger and disgust there is toward the United States around the world and toward Great Britain and toward NATO countries who participated.
Because of what was done.
It's really the worst crime in the last 25 years and we're constantly conditioned to either not think about it or to think about it in some way that oh it was well-intentioned people doing it who are just mistaken in good faith.
So just watch the reality of what it is.
Welcome the invaders.
It would become a disaster.
Still nobody knows exactly how many people died.
One estimate suggests around 300,000 Iraqis were killed by direct violence between 2003 and 2019.
2003 and 2019.
179 British Armed Forces personnel were killed in Iraq, and nearly four and a half thousand American troops had died by 2010.
As Garen Vincent reports, the invasion's terrible legacy is still being felt today.
In the middle of the night, 20 years ago, the most powerful country in the world unleashed its might on the Iraqi capital.
Explosions.
Remember, that was called shock and awe.
We all watched it, at least those of us old enough to have lived through it.
The US dropped enormous ordnance, just bombing everywhere in Baghdad, obviously civilian sectors.
And shock and awe meant that the United States was going to unleash so much indiscriminate military force, just awe-inspiring explosions.
That it was going to terrorize the Iraqi people into surrendering.
It was going to make the Iraqi population believe there's just no point in trying to fight against the world's greatest militaries.
It was just massive destruction and bloodshed from the skies.
This is a tiny little piece.
This was what was done all throughout Baghdad and Baghdad and so many other countries.
Have you seen similar carpet bombing imagery like this in Kiev from Russia?
That has the capability to do it if they wanted.
But hasn't done this kind of bombing yet.
Let's think of more.
...in Baghdad marked the start of the U.S.-led coalition's operation to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
At dawn, far to the south, hundreds of thousands of Allied troops invaded Iraq over the Kuwaiti border.
Their immediate objective, the city of Basra, a city which was and still is home to Zainab Hamid and her family.
Zainab explains that she was seven years old when the invasion began.
Her mother and two of her brothers were killed in a coalition airstrike on her neighbourhood.
Zainab was among the injured.
The invasion changed my life, she says, and changed my country for the worse.
The threat that Saddam posed to the world, and in particular his possession of weapons of mass destruction, was the reason the coalition gave for its invasion.
Weapons that were never found.
One of the first British soldiers into Basra 20 years ago was Alan Jones of the Royal Marines.
Legal justification for that war probably wasn't As foolproof as it should have been.
You can't not regret the catastrophes that followed because of it.
Mass collateral, mass loss of life within the Iraqi population.
You do think about that a lot, yes.
So regret, yes.
It is now a regret for me.
The catastrophes came thick and fast.
After the coalition had declared its mission accomplished, Iraq was soon engulfed in sectarian violence and then full-blown civil war.
Dr Ali Methana was an Iraqi exile who returned to his country after Saddam had been removed.
The United Kingdom and the United States invaded Iraq without an obvious plan to build the country or to restore the country and suddenly we found all our military forces collapsed and we were seeking the first principle thing that the human being is asking for, which is the security.
They have a little bit of Paul Bremer, the person who was responsible for running Iraq for the Bush administration, who tries to justify it, saying how great this war ended up being for Iraq.
But here's the gentleman who you just saw, who concludes the report.
I just want to show you what he says.
He threatens to undermine.
Twenty years since the statue of Saddam was pulled down, Dr. Muthana walks to the spot where it used to stand with a question.
Yeah, that is definitely a good question.
Iraq.
This is the question I'm raising for the United Kingdom and the United States.
And I hope someone could answer me.
Why?
Why did you come and destroy this country?
Yeah, that is definitely a good question.
One that has never actually been fully answered.
But I think it's important to look at that, even though, again, it's nothing groundbreaking Anyone who knows anything about the war in Iraq knows all this, but when you put it together this way, with the imagery and the views of the Iraqi people, I don't think it's difficult to understand, given that the U.S.
has done this time and time and time and time and time again, why the U.S.
has a great deal of difficulty trying to unite the world, or anyone outside of Western Europe, behind this military conflict the United States claims that nobody takes seriously, except for the domestic population and its media particularly, is about the international
The system of rules and laws or the rules-based international order or combating wars of aggression or fighting for democracy.
Nobody believes that about the United States except for the American media and people they've successfully propagandized in the West.
That's what it's for.
Now we have Roger Estall and I'm really anxious to get to showing you the key parts of his film and talking to him about the film so let me just conclude this segment because I want to read to you the similar efforts of the Chinese government and the way in which they too are using this narrative about U.S.
hegemony and again I started this segment saying we need to remember the cost of the Ukraine war and the U.S.
role in it beyond just the money and the destruction of Ukraine, namely the erosion of Americans standing in the world.
Even further still, at the very time that BRICS, as that article said, they're having their geopolitical moment, They finally have enough influence and power to present a credible alternative to the IMF, to the World Bank, to NATO, to the United States, and they're using this narrative to do it.
Here is the Chinese Foreign Ministry in February of 2023.
And this is what they said, quote, Since becoming the world's most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain, and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community.
The United States has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage, quote, color revolutions, instigate regional disputes, and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom, and human rights.
Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has ramped up block politics and stoked conflict and confrontation.
It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls, and forced unilateral sanctions upon others.
It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a, quote, rules-based international order.
U.S. military hegemony has caused humanitarian tragedy.
Since 2001, the wars and military operations launched by the United States in the name of fighting terrorism have claimed over 900,000 lives and some 335,000 of them civilians, injured millions and displaced tens of millions more.
The 2003 Iraq war resulted in some 200,000 to 250,000 civilian deaths.
Ironically, that's undercounting by a lot of counts in the West, including over 16,000 directly killed by the U.S. military and left more than a million homeless.
The United States has created 37 million refugees around the world.
Since 2012, the number of Syrian refugees alone has increased tenfold.
Between 2016 and 2019, 33,500 civilian deaths were documented in the Syria fightings, including 3,800 killed by U.S.-led coalition bombings, half of them women and children.
The Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, reported on November 9, 2018 that the airstrikes launched by U.S.-femmesis were not only in the forces on Raqqa alone killed 1,600 Syrian civilians.
The two-decade-long war in Afghanistan devastated the country.
A total of 47,000 Afghan civilians and 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers, unrelated to the September 11 attacks, were killed in U.S.
military operations, and more than 10 million people were displaced.
The war in Afghanistan destroyed the foundation of economic development there and plunged the Afghan people into destitution.
After the, quote, Kabul debacle in 2021, meaning Biden's withdrawal, the United States announced that it would freeze some $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan Central Bank, a move considered as, quote, pure looting.
After World War II, the United States led efforts to set up the Bretton Woods System, the IMF, and the World Bank, which, together with the Marshall Plan, formed the international monetary system centered around the U.S.
dollar.
In addition, the U.S.
has also established institutional hegemony in the international economic and financial sector by manipulating the weighted voting systems, rules, and arrangements of international organizations, including approval by 85% majority and the domestic trade laws and regulations.
By taking advantage of the dollar's status as the major international reserve currency, the United States is basically collecting, looting from around the world, and using its control over international organizations, it coerces other countries into serving America's political and economic strategy.
Now, that is the other part of it, is that by Imposing the U.S.
as a reserve currency all over the world, the U.S.
also uses its sanction regime to suffocate countries where it wants to change the government.
It's been doing that to Cuba for decades.
It's doing that to Venezuela.
It's doing it to Syria.
It's doing it in part to Afghanistan.
And so huge parts of the population just suffer because the U.S., usually unsuccessfully, uses the power of the dollar to force other countries to sanction and refrain from doing business with countries whether or not it wants to.
There was a recent interview with the General Secretary of the African National Congress in South Africa, when asked by a Western reporter, why would you allow Vladimir Putin to visit your country given this war in Ukraine?
And he reminded her of all the wars of aggression fought by the West, showing that this narrative no longer works.
And just today, after Lula again refused to involve Brazil in the war in Ukraine.
President Zelensky came out in a press conference to Latin American media and attacked him, saying he doesn't have a wide enough view of the world.
He's not bringing peace.
He basically believes, Zelensky does, just like the United States told him to believe, that it's the obligation of every country to involve itself on Ukraine's side in this war because the United States wants them to.
He accused Mueller of advancing Putin's narratives.
It's just an arrogance that exudes from the United States and from the West, and you can think whatever you want about China and Russia, but that is the perception all over the world, that there's no reason that people should be on the side of the United States.
The country should be on the United States, given everything that they've done.
And the war in Ukraine is not only bringing that narrative with much greater force, but it's creating an opportunity for these competing countries, with the United States so focused on Ukraine, and sending your money there, and just thinking about the war in Ukraine all the time.
The leaders of BRICS, especially China, are taking full advantage of that and developing more and more influence around the world and creating a multipolar world in which the United States' hegemonic rule is a thing of the past.
That might be good.
That might be bad.
You're obviously free to decide that.
But the fact that it's happening is difficult to contest.
And the more the United States devotes itself to this war in Ukraine, the more it's going to be undermining and eroding its own power.
So we are excited to have as our next guest the director of a film issue.
It's a documentary that was released last year that I only saw recently and immediately decided, along with pretty much everyone in our studio who also watched it, that I wanted to talk to the film's director.
The title of the film is Theaters of War, and it really combines highly produced and well-crafted filmmaking with the best kind of investigative and explanatory journalism.
I've known for a long time, I've heard people discussing, people like Oliver Stone, how much influence the Pentagon and the CIA wield in Hollywood, especially in the Hollywood studio systems, and especially when it comes to films that are about war in the military.
All you have to do is take one look at films like Hunt for Red October or Rambo and Top Gun and it barely disguises the fact that it is devoted to glorifying U.S.
military force usually by exploiting the honor and integrity of soldiers, of the troops, and the positive sentiments people have for them to glorify the orders ordered by American leaders.
And I really focused for the first time on this issue as a journalist in 2012 when the film Zero Dark Thirty was released.
And it was in an election year.
It was about President Obama's successful campaign and effort to find Osama Bin Laden and then kill him.
And this film got released, and it was blatantly propagandistic for so many reasons, including the fact that it falsely presented this narrative of history that the reason the U.S.
was able to find Osama bin Laden was because it successfully used torture to extract information from detainees that were necessary to find him.
There you see the headline on the screen at The Guardian that I wrote, Zero Dark Thirty, CIA Hagiography, Pernicious Propaganda.
And it turned out the original plan for this film was that it was going to be released shortly before the election.
Remember, the killing of Osama bin Laden was fundamental to Obama's re-election campaign.
He ran on a campaign of GM is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead.
That's how crucial Osama Bin Laden's killing was to Obama's 2012 campaign and this film, this Hollywood film with a lot of studio money was designed to glorify and remind Americans of how great President Obama was.
So I had focused on this.
It turned out, here you see an article in The Atlantic that Obamacare director and Pentagon chief Leon Panetta had actually passed top-secret details about the raid to the producers of Zero Dark Thirty.
Of course he was never punished for that.
President Trump is currently being prosecuted because he allegedly maintained classified documents, top-secret documents, negligently in Mar-a-Lago.
Leon Panetta took Top secret documents and pass them to the director Catherine Bigelow and the producers of Zero Dark Thirty to enable them to create a geography about the Successful hunting of Osama Bin Laden.
That's how close Hollywood on the one hand and the CIA and the Pentagon are and how much involvement the latter has in Hollywood's products.
But it wasn't until I saw this film, Theaters of War, that I really began to understand the full extent of this influence and how systematized it is and how desperately filmmakers depend upon the approval of the Pentagon and the CIA for their scripts.
And especially how aggressively the U.S.
National Security State wields its power to ensure that scripts of the most mass-marketed films reflect and promote the narratives of the U.S.
National Security State.
Before I talk to the director and narrator of the film, who is Roger Stahl, take a look at the trailer of the film.
I really can't recommend this film highly enough.
So, say you're a producer and you want to make a war film.
You would walk into the entertainment liaison office in downtown Los Angeles.
You say, I want to film an Air Force base, or I want an aircraft carrier, or I want some black hole helicopters, or whatever it is.
And they would tell you straight away, give us your entire script.
We've worked with Mr. Bay here since Armageddon, if I'm not mistaken, and hope to do more of the same.
I've got a direct line to the Pentagon.
Some people probably would say, well yeah, I've heard of this, like the Top Gun, maybe Black Hawk Down, maybe some of the Marvel series.
But what they don't know is how systematic this has been and how huge this operation has been.
You can call it censorship, you can call it propaganda.
It's all of these things.
Now these freedom of information requests that have been successful allow us to actually look at that list and it's stunning.
What we've found is that thousands upon thousands upon thousands of products have been affected and are often rewritten at script level by the national security state in the United States.
Do normal people know about that?
No, of course they don't.
Thank you.
The director and narrator of the film is Roger Saul, who is a professor of communication studies at the University of Georgia.
He studies rhetoric and media and culture, and in large part his work is focused on understanding propaganda and public relations as they relate to state violence, conflict, and security.
He's written several books on what he calls the military entertainment complex, and that obviously is the topic of Fears of War, which is a highly accomplished film of both filmmaking Thank you so much for joining me.
Good evening, and I know I'm a little belated with this, but congratulations on producing such an important and really compelling documentary.
Oh, thank you.
It's very kind of you.
Good to be on your show.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you.
So the trailer that we just showed mentioned Top Gun, and your film talks about films like The Hunt for Red October that obviously have, if not the heavy hand of the Pentagon and the CIA, certainly messaging that would please the people at the agency.
So one of the things that I did not know before watching your film that really surprised me was that there are actual contracts that you got your hands on that other people have gotten their hands on that describe the legal relationship between these filmmakers that accept this relationship and these agencies.
What do those contracts consist of?
How do those work?
Well, that's kind of the meat of the deal.
These two entities get together, you know, the producers, the directors on the one hand and the military or the CIA on the other.
And it's not an ad hoc type of relationship.
It is contractual, and it involves handing over the script, the entire script, Responding to often two or three pages of script change requests of some kind and if it's to the Pentagon satisfaction or the CIA satisfaction then they go to the contract stage and that's where they lay out exactly what the military is going to offer the production team and what
The question I'm sure that a lot of people have is, there's obviously no law that requires filmmakers to gain the approval of the Pentagon or the CIA or submit their scripts for approval.
You couldn't obviously have such a law.
all the official instructions. - So the question I'm sure that a lot of people have is, there's obviously no law that requires filmmakers to gain the approval of the Pentagon or the CIA or submit their scripts for approval.
You couldn't obviously have such a law.
And yet, a lot of filmmakers, including some of the most successful, some of the biggest names in Hollywood, do do this seemingly with great enthusiasm and gusto.
What is the motivation for why big-name Hollywood filmmakers and producers and studios would submit their scripts and their film in general to approval from the Pentagon and the CIA?
You can almost boil it down to the profit motive.
It's free stuff.
It increases production values.
It gives them the most bang that they can get for their buck.
It gives them a sense of realism to the film and puts them in a position where they are going to create a product that will be successful enough that Have I frozen up?
A successful product that will then, you know, launch that producer's career to the next film.
So, as long as people don't talk about it, as long as it doesn't erode support for the studio's bottom line, it's going to be a win-win for them.
Unfortunately, it's a lose-lose for the American public.
Just for people who are watching, your audio is fantastic.
We're hearing every word as clearly as we can.
I think your video is a little bit frozen, though.
So you look like you're in some kind of natural setting.
But I don't know if that's the issue.
But anyway, we will make do.
I'd much rather have a clean audio and a troublesome video than the other way around.
But let me ask you something about Hollywood culture.
Because obviously, the film does a great job of kind of Making clear what the profit motive is, namely that, as one of the experts you interviewed says, the Pentagon has some really cool and expensive toys.
And there's no substitute if you want to do some spectacular blockbuster film for having access to aircraft carriers, or fighter jets, or just very expensive military hardware that the Pentagon will give to these films, often to destroy, in order to have access over their scripts.
So that motive seems a little bit clear to me.
I want to ask you what you think about Hollywood culture.
I remember maybe 10 years ago, 12 years ago, a little bit before the Snowden reporting began, I went to an event in Hollywood that I was told was going to be Hollywood leftists, you know, like I don't mean just liberals and Democratic Party adherents, but I mean like Hollywood leftists.
And we went there and there were a lot of, maybe it was 60, 70 people, a lot of very big names in Hollywood were there.
And when the part of the conversation began that was about foreign policy, it amazed me, this is the Obama era, how many of them were defending Obama's drone program, defending the regime change war in Libya, just in general kind of having the Hillary Clinton view, and a lot of them were actually Democratic Party adherents, they were not really leftists.
Hollywood obviously has a reputation for being it's the Hollywood left.
And so I think it would surprise a lot of people to learn that Hollywood is churning out pro-Pentagon and pro-CIA propaganda independent of the profit margin that you've just laid out.
Do you think there's kind of like an ideological component as well to why people in Hollywood throughout the Cold War and then in the War on Terror have been producing this sort of stuff?
Well, first let me say that your viewers might be wondering why I'm all frozen up and why you can only hear my voice.
I've had to make do.
We had this northeast storm come through, and this is the most creative I can get, so thank you for putting up with it.
We have a really cool image of your face now on the screen that matches the aesthetics of our show, so don't worry about it.
We fixed it, and we're hearing you great.
We asked about the Hollywood left and, you know, culturally, yes, there's a leftist contingent in Hollywood, I would say.
It's identifiable.
But once you get past the border of the United States, once you talk about international issues, you're back to the dual party consensus, right?
You're back to neoliberal democratic consensus of, you know, the values of the military establishment and the values of the Democratic Party.
And so there really isn't a lot of pushback, as you've noticed, apart from milquetoast renditions of Iraq and Afghanistan here and there that don't really take any critical steps.
But beyond that, mixed with the profit motive of not wanting to anger the Pentagon system that is feeding a lot of the production of those sorts of images, you're not going to get much out of the Hollywood system.
Yeah, I think people sometimes forget that, you know, Hollywood is a very big business.
It's like Wall Street or Big Tech or the insurance business and the people who run it and the studio heads are part of gigantic corporations and alienating and offending major parts of the U.S.
government is not typically something corporate bosses try and do.
I think the people in Hollywood like to think of themselves as artists, but at the end of the day, the people who are financing them and making them very rich have a much different motive than art in mind.
One of the things that I thought the film did a great job of illuminating, and it's not something I had previously realized so much as well, is it's not just films that...
are obvious to the public would be of interest to the Pentagon and the CIA about war and the military and the Pentagon, but even just kind of mass market big cultural films like various Superman films or Godzilla, Jurassic Park.
How is it that the CIA, the Pentagon worms their way into those kinds of films and what is the influence that they exert when it comes to those kinds of movies?
It seems like that started around 2007-2008 with Transformers and Iron Man.
You have a big dip in public appreciation for the adventures in Iraq.
So public opinion just took a nosedive.
And so, you know, Hollywood at the same time started to recognize the war movie as a genre as somewhat toxic, especially war movies about Iraq and Afghanistan.
So you notice that all of those representations not only fell off the front page of the papers, but also off the movie screen.
So they, I mean, Partly it's desperation.
I mean, they need venues in order to push these narratives.
And what's left?
Well, Marvel movies and comic book movies, fantasy movies of different kinds.
So, Transformers, the first one, was the first film that featured cooperation from all four branches of the military.
So they went all in on that.
It was extremely successful.
Reached the right age demographic for recruiting, which is just one of their motives for getting involved in the movie business.
And it kind of took off from there.
So it became fantasy, comic book movies, and reality TV, rather than, you know, what they'd done for the previous 40 or 50 years, which is get themselves heavily involved in war movies proper.
One of the things I think about a lot because of the work I do and the issues we report on and cover is I think a lot of people like to believe that they're immune to propaganda.
I think we all like to believe that.
And yeah, propaganda oftentimes is very insidious.
It's something that has been studied over many decades.
It's a very sophisticated weapon.
involves the fields of psychology and sociology and is catered to the inner workings of our brain and what we as humans kind of crave and desire and what stimulates us.
It's not something that's easily evaded, especially when it's kind of relentless, but particularly when it's a little bit hidden.
And one of the things I thought was so interesting in this film was your point that propaganda is more effective when people don't anticipate it.
So maybe if they sit down into a news show or they hear an interview with the Pentagon chief, they're kind of being armed against propaganda.
But if you're just taking your kids to what seems like an innocuous Hollywood film, your kind of guard is down there.
There was a quote in the film that caught my attention where when people go to films, they're quote, voluntarily sitting through a two-hour infomercial.
Talk about that component of it and the reason why, especially maybe with the films that are less overtly militaristic, this propaganda is so effective in the eyes of the government.
Yeah, that quote was from a U.S.
Army document that was talking about the effectiveness of their involvement with lone survivor.
So they called it a two-hour infomercial and obviously didn't expect anybody to FOIA and do a Freedom of Information Act request on that particular document.
So they're awfully guileless in a sense that they don't, even as public relations officers, don't really know how to speak in code so that they aren't found out later.
So that's part of the interesting thing.
But you're absolutely right that, you know, when we think about propaganda, we think about government-produced stuff.
And this is not exactly that.
This is government-influenced entertainment.
And, you know, you might see Zero Dark Thirty and think, okay, the White House or the CIA had a hand in that.
And yes, there was a big controversy about that eventually.
You know, when you watch Iron Man or watch Godzilla or even Jack Ryan, I mean, you're not expecting that there's going to be some sort of official entity coming to the script and getting rid of ignoble attributes or airbrushing history.
So it speaks right to our sort of emotional centers in a way that traditional propaganda tried to do but couldn't do.
As well as, you know, a narrative film or a comic book movie.
One of the points you made was that there are particular directors in Hollywood who are very well known, very successful, who the Pentagon kind of looks at, or the CIA looks at, as very reliable partners.
And this is why I was asking earlier whether it's just the profit motive or if some of these people are just happy to be producing Propaganda for the U.S.
war machine because there, for ideological reasons, there was definitely a big component of that in old Hollywood.
Obviously, I was there of World War II.
A lot of people were very convinced of the nobility of American power.
A lot of those actors enlisted and then they were happy to do those kind of films.
But talk about some of the directors who have multiple times gone back to this well who the public would probably know.
They would know Michael Bay, who I think is like half true believer, half opportunist.
You have Jerry Bruckheimer, who did the Top Gun films and a bunch of other stuff.
He did Crimson Tide.
He's, I think he's more of an opportunist.
I think, you know, he's showed himself to be a critical thinker from time to time.
And then you have, you know, producers names that you might not recognize, like Mace Neufeld, who did all of the Jack Ryan series, and that had Except for the first film had support from both the Pentagon and the CIA all the way through, all the way through the recent Jack Ryan series.
So I can't speak to the ideological component of these people, but some of them, especially Michael Bate, seems like he's on board in a way that seems to suggest he's a true believer in the kind of narrative that he's peddling or being asked to peddle.
One of the points the film was trying to make is that this is not this meaning approval of the CIA and the Pentagon is not.
Oftentimes something is kind of a small bonus for the film.
Oftentimes it's absolutely indispensable for the film even to happen.
And you talk about some of the films that never got made because they couldn't get approval from the CIA and the Pentagon.
You have a lot of documents about that as well.
What do those documents reveal?
Oh, gosh.
Well, you know, we've got anecdotal information from from folks like Jerry Bruckheimer said, you know, Top Gun would just not have been made without Pentagon support.
Probably the second one either.
Pearl Harbor would not have been made, he said.
So you have, you know, producers who are going on record saying, you know, that Pentagon support is necessary for us to do this kind of film.
And then we have the documentation that shows, and if we go through the database that we were able to get through a FOIA request that showed the database that the Pentagon keeps, that showed about 800 films, far fewer than the total number that we've been able to document, which is about 2,500.
You know, 30 or 40 of those films were listed as not supported and never made.
And that's about three or four times the number of films that we could find in that database.
It was like that Sigourney Weaver film that seemed actually like it would have been a good film, but unfortunately it didn't get made because it couldn't get the approval of... So what are the reasons why... Talk about some of these reasons, like when has the CIA or the Pentagon rejected films or said we don't approve of these and what are some of the reasons?
In the documentation, they call these reasons showstoppers.
They call them showstoppers.
And they'll tell the producers, you know, if you don't get rid of this particular showstopper, if you don't talk lovingly about the bombing of Hiroshima instead of critically about it, then we're just not going to support your film.
So, you know, the list is pretty long, but, you know, there's showstoppers that involve internal politics to the military, things that will hurt recruiting.
So any talk of sexual assault or racism in the military, Suicide, PTSD, anything that's not laudatory of, you know, the experience that an enlistee might have with the military.
And then you have, you know, ranges all the way to historical or international affairs subjects that, you know, including war crimes or, you know, the security of the nuclear arsenal, things like that.
So you can imagine this list.
I'm not going to list them all, but, you know, it's...
Yeah, so last question, we're just running out of time, but I do want to get to this.
You know, you alluded to this fact that, you know, maybe they wrote it down sometime.
I don't know.
But it's, you know, they go back to it, you know, in almost every document, you see evidence of the showstoppers.
Yeah.
So last question, we're just running out of time, but I do want to get to this.
You know, you alluded to this fact that, you know, maybe they wrote it down sometime.
Well, you know, the reason why I consider this film, you know, at least as much a work of journalism as a work of filmmaking is because it is very document dependent, which I think is so important because I think a lot of these things are things people would be inclined not to believe or to believe that maybe it's being overstated.
When you look at the documents, you see the true scope of...
What this work really is, you know, when I did the Snowden reporting, one of the first things I realized was, wow, when they're talking in a way that they think no one's going to ever hear, they're really honest and they kind of just lay it out there with no euphemisms or anything else like that.
If the U.S.
government is anything, it's very bureaucratic.
So in order to have people in the CIA and people in the Pentagon whose job it is to kind of go through scripts and approve the scripts, you need some kind of scope of function that the government does at the CIA, the Pentagon.
do, and you actually got your hands on the documents that show the evolution of what originally this was intended to be, their work with Hollywood, and what it has now become, the way it's expanded.
Talk about some of that and what the documents that empower the CIA and Pentagon to do this stuff say is the function of it.
We don't know that much about the CIA.
We have got select documents from them, but we don't have the kind of paper trail that we do at the Pentagon for obvious reasons.
But if you look to the early documents, the directives that set out what this relationship was supposed to be between the Pentagon and Hollywood, they said, you know, portray the military accurately.
And I'm talking 1960s, 1950s.
This office was formally set up in 1949, but portrayed the military accurately and aid with recruiting.
And over time, those directives changed.
So by the 1980s, right before Top Gun came out, they added this one that said, you know, it's not only recruiting, not only accuracy, but also aid in the public understanding of what the military is all about.
And they were off to the races with that one because it could be liberally interpreted as almost anything.
So, you know, that's part of the mission creep.
I mean, it's in the directors themselves.
Yeah, actually, I do have one last question.
This will be the real last question, which is, there were some really interesting examples of instances where they did get the approvals, the filmmakers did, from these agencies, but the agencies did request changes to the script along the way.
Talk about a few of those.
Like, what is it that the Pentagon will say, oh, we want you to do less of this and more of this, or this character needs to change?
Talk about a couple of examples that illustrate how this works.
A lot of people know the Godzilla franchise.
I keep going back to Godzilla 2014 because it's a great example of this kind of stuff.
I mean, the list is extremely long.
They were interested in changing the portrayal of the nuclear bomb, especially the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
So one of the characters is a Japanese character.
Godzilla, historically, has been all about the bomb.
It's been a metaphor for the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But they wanted to take that vital component out of the movie.
So there's a Japanese character who says, you know, my father was in the bombing.
He survived.
He gives this long speech about how there were bodies everywhere and paints a really gruesome picture.
And the Pentagon comes back and says, Just get rid of this.
If this is supposed to be an apology for using the atomic bomb, which it seems like it is, we don't want it in the script.
That's one thing I do talk about in the film, that particular change.
But there are many, many others.
I mean, the main character was this kind of ruffian ragamuffin who had a military backstory, but was estranged from his family and his kids.
And they completely rewrote him in order for him to be what they call a true Navy hero.
They counted up the number of military casualties that were inflicted upon U.S.
military by the monsters.
They counted them as they went through the script and essentially said, this is too many.
You've destroyed too many F-18s, or I think it was F-22s in that film.
You can't have somebody crashing a plane without parachuting out first.
So all of that was changed.
So it gives you a kind of thumbnail view of what those changes are all about, how broad they can be.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, it's a great film.
Honestly, if you had just made a film without the documents and just kind of narrated and made these claims, even I, as somebody who harbors all kinds of skepticism and even cynicism toward the U.S.
security state, might not have been willing to believe that it really is this systematic and goes so far.
But the film was incredibly convincing, in part because of the journalistic aspect to it.
So congratulations again.
Let people know where it is that they can find it.
It's Theaters of War.
And how is it that they can go about watching it?
It's on Vimeo for the buying public.
We're making a commercial version right now that'll be out within the next three or four months.
But it's put out by a distribution company called the Media Education Foundation that caters to colleges and universities.
So it's on the educational market right now.
So if you're at a college or university, you can request to see it.
All right.
Well, great.
The film was fantastic.
It was incredibly interesting.
I found the discussion with you interesting and illuminating as well.
I really appreciate you taking the time to join us tonight.
Thank you so much for having me on.
Absolutely.
Absolutely, have a great evening.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night we do our interactive live show on Locals where we listen to your feedback and interact with our audience.
