Imperial War Machine

"In western Christian culture, war is sacred. The church is the pentagon and the soldiers are the priests, which is why you cannot criticise soldiers in American movies because they are the priests, they are warriors of  god, they get screwed up but they always do their job well. You can humanise the soldiers but you cannot give them a background for why they are there, whether it is Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, there is no background. It is about making the soldiers priests of God" - Oliver Stone, Vietnam war veteran and Oscar award winner.

War porn-Vogue

Harsh, to the point and fair. When you look through the list of American and British war porn movies it is a glorious run of Imperial war machine victories with depiction of heroic acts. The benevolent nature of the Imperial war machine is well documented from Hurt Locker to Saving Private Ryan, yet it was not always this way.
Apocalypse Now and Platoon are examples that portrayed a very different vision of war and the atrocities committed by both sides, this was not good for America particularly as the war in Vietnam being so fresh in the peoples minds, served to reinforce the message that no good comes from war and that ultimately we all lose.

Then came Top Gun.

Top Gun was the Pentagons movie wet dream as they collaborated with Hollywood and conspired to make one of the best advertising movies, only bettered recently by What Women Want. I must confess to being sucked in by the Top Gun theme and the idea of 'heroism' at a young age, but then who wasn't? At least I was not old enough to be recruited at the box office as a lot of young men were when they exited their showings, dreaming of wearing a white military uniform and serenading women up and down bars across the continent and the world. It is said that recruitment went up by 20,000 uniformed personnel the year after Top Gun was released.

There have been a succession of war porn films released since, showing the American military in a brave and heroic light such as Black Hawk Down, Tears of the Sun and We Were Soldiers. This has been compounded by the targeting of our children through the glorification of the armed forces in computer games such as the highly successful (and brutal) Call of Duty series, and in movies aimed at a younger audience, such as Iron Man, Transformers and the latest Marvel comic book superheroes movies X-Men- First Class and Captain America. Hollywood has been complicit in this with the Pentagon to the point where if production does not include the input from their man, Phil Strub, then they may as well forget the movie. Phil Strub has a list of accredited movies to his name if you type his name into IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0835243/
With Hollywood's approval of a script the film makers get access to machinery, personnel, tactics and techniques to ensure a realism. This is ironic because as a viewer we are being held back from witnessing a directors true vision of things.

The danger is now if you go against the party line, as advertised by the mainstream media and the movies then you are in danger of being made an outcast by people such as Bill O'Rielly on Fox News. This happened with the movie Redacted which came out in 2007. O'Rielly is offensive at the best of times but he called for people to take 'support the soldiers' signs to theatres that played the movie and stop people from watching it. A great advert for liberty and the right to free speech that he and his war mongering friends like to claim we are helping the rest of the 'uncivilised' world to have. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83qPmcmt8Z4

Over the years we have become a people desensitised to the atrocities of war, we allow our governments to send our troops off to war with out ever really questioning 'why?'. It is our duty to stop the governments from fighting unjust wars with our soldiers, it is our duty to to ensure that the government does not ditch the responsibility of looking after those it has sent to be killed and maimed on to us. It is time we all took a stand against this military industrial war machine.


Please take the Earth time to check Aljazeera's 'Hollywood and the War machine' on Top Documentaries and the Guardian article by George Chesterton in the links below.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/hollywood-war-machine/
http://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/commentisfree/2011/dec/23/military-love-affair-dangerous