A new narrative is needed to open our eyes to the truth about war and occupation. But don´t look for Hollywood or other mainline media outlets, either corporate or state-owned, to provide us with such a narrative of truth.
Occasionally Hollywood changes its tune somewhat, but that´s only part of a new approach in the same old propagandocratic game. It is necessary to present some element of critical views to appeal to the disenchanted when the dominant narrative becomes too discredited. However the alternative narrative generally does not challenge the agenda of the elites in any fundamental way and simply serves to re-direct attention from the worst crimes of the state. The establishment media are the most important and most potent tools of our system, the propagandocracies of Europe, North-America, Australia and all those puppet regimes in the developing world.
The other night I watched an American movie with the title “The Kite Runner” on TV. At first it seemed to be interestingly different from ordinary Hollywood fare: It was the story of two young boys, friends from different social classes living in Afghanistan in 1979. One of them finds out many years later, living by then in the US, that they actually had been brothers from the same father. His brother had been killed in the Afghan civil war. And subsequently the protagonist sets out to rescue his brother´s young son and bring him to the “safe haven”, the United States .
At first glance a pretty good story, as I said. Hollywood had also taken a cue from Hollywood rebel Mel Gibson, realizing that Americans are actually capable of reading subtitles. And so the whole movie was more or less in the Dari Persian one of the official languages of Afghanistan, to give it more authenticity.
But that´s as far as Hollywood would go in truth-telling. In it´s 2 hour run-time the movie manages to portray Pashtuns, the people America is fighting and bombing in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the moment, as racists, Russian soldiers as rapists, the Taliban as sole destroyer of a former vibrant oriental country, as well as not only misogynistic hardliners, but also corrupt hypocrites, who break all the rules of their own religion and are violent child-molesters on top of it.
In one stroke the movie manages to justify Americans meddling in Afghan affairs in the 1970s and 80s to save the poor Afghans from the evil Russians and the American invasion and occupation since 2001.
Conveniently the movie never mentions that top American policy makers, like Zbigniew Brezinski, actually boasted about goading the Soviets into the invasion by arming and financing the Mujaheddin and later on the foreign fighters, which now are know by the name “AlQaida”.
The movie also forgets to mention that the Taliban, the most retrogressive of all Islamic movements, were trained in schools built by the American backed Pakistani intelligence agency ISI and payed for by the CIA. They then were infiltrated into Afghanistan and armed once again by the CIA using American tax-payer money.
The Taliban then were able to take over the rule of the country because they were seen by the general population as the most honest of all those Mujaheddin groups America had financed in it´s proxy-war against the Soviet Union. Even now, when Afghans are asked, why they dislike the American imposed Karzai regime, they talk about the corruption and arbitrary violence of the war-lord supporters. They also talk about how the Taliban had established “law and order” in their time of rule.
It was the war against the Soviet invaders and the subsequent civil war between the different Mujaheddin fractions, which destroyed the economy and everything else in that already poor and non-industrialized country, not any corruption on the part of the Taliban.
As for their strict adherence to their faith, the seriousness with which the Taliban took their strict puritanical interpretation of the Islamic religion could be seen in the way they actually eliminated all opium production from the areas they controlled until America and it´s allies invaded the country in 2001. By doing so the Taliban denied themselves an enormously large source of income.
Whatever you can say about the Taliban, one thing they weren’t was hypocrites.
With “The Kite Runner” Hollywood created a master-piece in the art of war-propaganda. While the movie´s plot ended in the year 2000, it´s “logic” made the American invasion and subsequent war against the Afghani people look like an act of mercy, saving the Afghanis from themselves.
A narrative told from the perspective of the bombed, the occupied and the oppressed will not come out of Hollywood or any other North-American or European mainline media outlet.
It could come from alternative and independent media, from the internet or from countries victimized by the west in the present or in the past:
As in “Grave of the Fireflies”
What I find most interesting about this Japanese Anime about the young boy Seita and his little sister Setsuko is, that the stories I have heard from the older people in Germany are so very similar:
the rain of bombs from hell with the unquenchable phosphor fire, the fighter planes flying close to the ground strafing everything that moves, and the hunger, the terrible hunger, because food had become so scarce and more precious than any other possessions.
And the hell of fire-bombing so many people experienced during WWII, was visited upon the people of Gaza just a year ago. And right now similar bombs paid for by American and European tax-payers, fall upon the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and soon it might be on Iran and Sudan.
I have felt this at times too. It seems that what is good depends on perspective,not ours but that of the media. Like in the movies where we have the protagonist and the anti-protagonist, no matter what the ‘hero’ does, it’s portrayed as justifiable, for the ‘greater good’ and is the right thing to do in the view of who ever made it. But after watching it, it becomes our view (provided that they are persuasive enough). But I don’t think it’s just confined to just movies and news channels, talking about which, I have read somewhere that journalism is about getting the raw facts and presenting it to the viewer, the opinion is supposed to be discerned by him, however most news media that I’ve seen seem to do that part too, one sided view points, forcing the opinion disguising the whole affair as an ‘interview’ etc.
I used to be a regular viewer of history channel, discovery etc. but in one show sometime back they were glorifying this guy who defected from the erstwhile Soviet Union providing the U.S. with lots of classified stuff. I mean here is a guy who betrayed his home country, the place where he grew up and lived all his life tempted by the offers of an opposing one and he jumps over. As a neutral observer I think he’s done wrong but thats like the complete opposite of what the media is saying.