Come you Masters of War ... I'm just want you to know I can't see through your masks

The Peter Jackson edited Get Back Beatles documentary is a fascinating insight into the way the most famous band in the world worked together a year before splitting up for good. It forces a revision of the idea that their rehearsals were marked by a simmering acrimony as suggested by the contemporary – and now suppressed – film Let It Be, which was based on the same footage. The much longer Jackson compiled film suggests they actually got on quite well, despite George Harrison flouncing off at one point. We see the Beatles working as a group on songs – such as Harrison’s 'All Things Must Pass' and Lennon’s 'Gimme Some Truth' – that would later become some of their authors’ most famous solo efforts.

It’s easy to forget you are watching fly on the wall footage that is over half a century old. And some of the most innocuous scenes, on closer inspection, reveal their age. Take the debate in the film over the idea ؘ– proposed by original filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg – that the Beatles should hire a ship to take them to Libya where they would perform in a Roman amphitheatre on the coast (the Get Back sessions were meant to prepare for a TV performance which would eventually morph into the rooftop concert). “How are you going to get a ship in a couple of days?” asks Ringo Starr. “We got the American Navy for How I Won the War” says John Lennon, a reference to a 1967 film he acted in. To which Starr responds, “Yes but they were passing by and you only got them for a few hours”. Cue images from the film of the actors disembarking from a D-Day style landing craft.

Toy Story

To utilize a popular phrase, that could never happen nowadays. Something that is made painfully evident from the documentary Theaters of War which shows how the US military now meticulously controls the content of films and TV programmes, to the extent of insisting on line by line script changes to make sure they appear in a desirable light. In 2023, the PR savvy U.S. Navy would never allow their ‘toys’ to be used in a film as subversive as How I Won the War. Director Richard Lester said the film was an “anti-anti-war film” in that it portrayed war as intrinsically hostile to humanity itself rather than just being against the war crimes of the other side. The plot shows the battalion coming to the conclusion they have to kill their commanding officer as his incompetence is leading them to their deaths (unfortunately they don’t and it does). The effect is rather muted by the fact that he is played by Michael Crawford, later to become famous as Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (although to be fair people wanted to kill him too).

According to Theaters of War, thanks to incredibly persistent Freedom of Information requests, it’s clear that “thousands upon thousands” of films and TV shows have been “rewritten at script level” by the Pentagon and the CIA. If the filmmakers want military cooperation – access to all those aircraft carriers, fighter jets and troop extras – they have to hand over their entire script for vetting. If they don’t, they don’t get to use the military equipment, which is usually essential for box office success. If they do agree, they have to sign a contract and the Pentagon “are effectively like another producer”.

This ‘help’ is most obvious in blockbuster movies like Top Gun (which according to the Pentagon “completed rehabilitation of the military’s image which had been savaged by the Vietnam War”) and its 2021 sequel, Pearl Harbor, or The Hunt for Red October. And it’s evident in TV series like 24 and Homeland which bear the hallmarks of the CIA’s decision to follow the Pentagon’s lead and open an office to liaise with television and cinema in 1996.

The Pentagon Universe

The national security state is also integral to the greatest ‘cinematic’ innovation of this century – super hero movies. The original script for Iron Man, for example, had its hero, Tony Stark, battling against the arms industry. But by the time the film went into production this had entirely flipped. In the actual 2008 film, he inherits his father’s arms business and the subsequent franchise is “an outright celebration of the arms industry”.

In fact, super hero movies like Man of Steel or Captain Marvel are the perfect advertisement for new military ‘toys’. And the Transformers franchise is little more than a showcase for new weapons. Until 1988, rules stated that the Department of Defense should only help films achieve “authenticity” and “dignity”. Subsequently, however, these were enlarged to allow promotion of “public understanding”, help with recruitment and support of government policy.

And this mission creep has had tangible effects. Captain Marvel was “a recruiting bonanza, a vehicle for the Air Force to reach young women”, channelling, according to its star, Brie Larson, “the spirit of the Air Force”. 2021’s The Suicide Squad has an assortment of super-hero bad asses overthrow a fictional anti-American government in Latin America. Any similarity to actual events is strictly coincidental.

These are just stupid films for kids, you might object, and besides anti-war films do get made. Both demurrals have some validity but don’t erase the basic problem. Super-hero films have a cultural impact way beyond their immediate fan base. Apart from being some of the highest grossing movies of all time, they reach a far wider audience by being constantly repeated on prime time TV. Critical war films – for example Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July or possibly 2005’s Jarhead – do get produced but they are swimming against the current. Oliver Stone’s Vietnam films were delayed for years because of their “unacceptable themes”.

Rehabilitating Nukes

We are talking about a gradual cultural seepage. According to one interviewee, filmmakers are well aware their films are going to get vetted, so “they write their scripts in ways they know will ultimately please the Pentagon …. People self-censor and tone down any potential critical view.”  Much like journalists, you might say.

This process of cultural acclimation can be sent in a frankly scary (pun intended) segment about what happened to Godzilla. In the original 1954 Japanese film, Godzilla was literally created by hydrogen bomb testing and survivors of the monster’s attacks had radiation poisoning. Godzilla was “an allegory for the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan”. This association survived in the 1998 Roland Emmerich version but by the 2014 iteration the U.S. Department of Defense was involved. A passage in the original script where a character recalls how their father survived the Hiroshima bomb was replaced by musings about the “arrogance of man”. And far from being the source of the mutation, nuclear weapons were the solution. Nuclear tests in the 1950s were actually attempts to kill Godzilla.

Revealingly, the 2019 reboot Godzilla: King of the Monsters was made without Pentagon assistance but stuck with the “nukes as heroes theme”. The filmmakers conclude: “It’s hard to imagine a more complete reversal. This long time warning about the dangers of proliferation is now an extension of the U.S. military and something of an advertisement for the bomb”.

Essentially, and terrifyingly for the future of humanity, nuclear weapons are being ‘rehabilitated’ and Hollywood is integral to that redemption. The subdued reaction to the possibility that nuclear weapons may be used in Ukraine may be evidence that it is having the desired effect.

That’s Entertainment

What Theaters of War unmasks is just how PR-saturated our popular culture is. With all due respect to Noam Chomsky, this is not about manufacturing consent through news and current affairs coverage. It is a form of propaganda that works through the slow accretion of subconscious associations and acquiescence with outwardly fictional, often absurd, depictions. “This is more insidious than state control and state-produced propaganda,” one interviewee notes, “because it passes off as just entertainment.”

As one internal Pentagon document observes, “Features films reach far greater audiences than any single news media story about the actual events. Audiences will voluntarily sit through a two hour ‘infomercial’ [about an army operation]”.

The contrast with the 1960s and How I Won the War could not be starker. That decade and the following one were laden with overtly critical, and fundamentally subversive, films about war. Paths of Glory, Dr Strangelove, The Hill, The Battle of Algiers, The Bed Sitting Room, Oh! What a Lovely War, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Catch-22, M*A*S*H and Apocalypse Now all reached large audiences. Sure, they were outnumbered by celebratory depictions of war (invariably involving daring exploits against nefarious Nazis), but the point is they existed and competed with standard fare. Nowadays, in an era when PR has hugely extended its tentacles, if they ever got made in the first place they’d be shunted off to the art house sector and only seen by people who attend film festivals.

This affects TV as well. In the 1980s the BBC could produce the nuclear war docu-drama Threads and the basically seditious Monocled Mutineer. Whereas now we are treated to The SAS: Rogue Heroes. For assorted cranks and weirdoes, the former are available on DVD.

It might seem strange to say in the aftermath of the Corbyn and Sanders insurgencies but, as Theaters of War demonstrates, the long march of PR is making our societies more and more conservative and averse to change. If the Left cannot find a way to counteract this tendency and reach mass audiences, it – and maybe humanity as a whole – will not have a future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overthrowing the system with Tories

 That archetypal “good Tory”, Rory Stewart, was brandishing his emotional intelligence again last week. In the Financial Times, he unveiled the bombshell that Boris Johnson is “a terrible prime minister and a worse human being”. But, he stressed, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s awfulness is no aberration. He is the “product of a system that will continue to produce terrible politicians long after he is gone”.

Before we start celebrating any epiphanies, note the absurd narrowness of Stewart’s definition of ‘the system’. In the liberal Tory imagination he personifies the system comprises the first past the post electoral system, unserious and partisan politicians, a lack of critical thinking and an obsession with winning elections. Naturally Europe is presented as the alternative. “Germany had Angela Merkel” says Stewart. That’s the same Angela Merkel who inflicted a regime of economic sadism on Greece and allied with the antisemite Viktor Orban in the European Parliament, using his party’s votes to help elect failed politician and Merkel protégée, Ursula von der Leyen, as European Commission President. Lucky old Germany.

We must also brush over the fact that the policies Stewart advocates – and has implemented as minister under Cameron and May – are cruel, irrelevant or weird. He opposes “cuts to the army” little more than a year after Johnson announced a £16 billion increase in defence spending. And he repeats Tony Blair’s lament that there are no “new ideas” in British politics. And they say satire is dead.

It’s strange but I seem to remember some new ideas – and critical thinking – emanating from the official opposition from 2015 to 2019. I’ve also got this odd sense that a Labour leader from that period displayed some actual empathy in contrast to Johnson whose only capacity for empathy is for himself.

But the real problem with Stewart is total obviousness to the fact that a couple of years ago the entire system – finance and business, politics, the media, the armed forces, religious leaders, the higher civil service and so on – chose Johnson, either explicitly or effectively, and united to obliterate the anti-Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn.

Rather than spending a week or so going over the whole tragic saga, let’s just concentrate on the role played by the fearless fourth estate, the media. Lest we forget, Johnson was elevated to the status bumbling, self-deprecating, national chum by regular appearances on the BBC’s Have I Got News for You. A journalist himself, after resigning as Foreign Secretary he returned to the Daily Telegraph on a stipend of around £23,000 a month. During the 2019 election campaign, when they weren’t eviscerating the Labour leader as mortal threat to the nation’s soul and security, the media were urging voters to give Johnson a chance even though they – of all people – knew what he was really like.

Conservative but independent-minded journalist Peter Oborne says he was told by senior BBC executives that they didn’t want to expose Boris Johnson’s lies because, to do so, would undermine trust in politics.

But it’s in the current furore over Johnson’s lockdown partying that the role of the media is really laid bare. For obviously these parties did not happen last week. They occurred more than a year ago but remained a secret to the public – who are suitably outraged – until now. Why? Dominic Cummings alleges that “lobby hacks” didn’t say anything because they were at some of the parties. Whether that’s true or not, we do know that one party was a leaving do for the future deputy editor of the Sun.

It beggars belief that the higher echelons of the media were in the dark until leaks about – up to now – 17 parties.

 

In the words of writer Dan Hind, “The antics in Downing Street have been transformed into matters of political consequence deliberately and with considerable skill, skill that could have been used against Johnson at any time. This is not ‘news’, this is a redistribution of knowledge, from the tight circuits of elite complicity into the wider world.”

It is sobering to realise just how much of our ‘national conversation’ consists of matters the elite chooses to talk about and deem important.  Johnson’s soaring popularity, underpinned by the support of most of the press, survived revelations over corrupt PPE contracts, damning official reports into thousands of avoidable pandemic deaths and a proven recourse to lying when under pressure. None of it had any discernible effect until last autumn when a section of the press mysteriously found the lucrative lobbying jobs taken by MPs a step too far and started talking about it incessantly. It’s revealing, by the way, that Stewart’s indictment of ‘the system’ does not include the fact that nearly half of Britain’s top 50 corporations have “connections” with a sitting MP.

Now in the aftermath of the ‘bring your own booze’ scandal, Boris’s approval ratings have sunk to Jeremy Corbyn levels. That’s power.

For nearly four years, the opposition was scrutinised to within an inch of its life. But now a member of the Trilateral Commission is in charge that scrutiny has simply vanished. Sir Keir can purge Labour party membership of left-wingers, exile his predecessor for telling the truth, impose ‘normal’ candidates on local parties, and replace a social democratic policy programme he promised to uphold with a blanket reassurance that he won’t do anything to even mildly inconvenience the elite – all without fear that virtually anyone in the mainstream media will deign to pay attention. And if they do, they’ll approve anyway.

“We pretend”, says Stewart, “that the politician can wear a deceitful mask before the voters and then take it off in the cabinet room”.

You pretend. We stopped engaging in this farce ages ago.