“America is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as it will be a few years from now – recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censorship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that government of the people by the people is possible and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be fueled, from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts. That so many of the well-fed young television-watchers in the world’s most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing but not too surprising.”

– Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World Revisited” (1958)

As discussed in Part 3 of this series, Aldous Huxley would be mentored in the ways of Monte Verità, Ascona through the mentorship of D.H. Lawrence. It was through Lawrence’s teachings that Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard and Christopher Isherwood would form the core of the group, Sonnenkinder (The Children of the Sun). Lawrence’s teaching of Ascona to the Sonnenkinder (greatly influenced by Mikhail Bakunin and Otto Gross, a disciple of Freud) would go on to shape the Human Potential Movement and the Esalen Institute to which this paper will focus on. [Note: Carl Jung was also a significant member of the Monte Verità, Ascona.]

Monte Verità became the international meeting place for all those who rebelled against science, technology, and the rise of the modern industrial nation-state.

As already discussed in Part 3, the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) had established their headquarters in Basel, Switzerland as the “Anational Grand Lodge and Mystic Temple” (aka Verità Mystica) and at Monte Verità as the “Hermetic Brotherhood of Light.”

In August 1917, Outer Head Theodor Reuss issued a manifesto for his Anational Grand Lodge (O.T.O), called “Verità Mystica.” He then held the “Anational Congress for Organizing the Reconstruction of Society on Practical and Cooperative Lines” at Monte Verità August 15–25, 1917. He wanted to create a new ethic, a new social order, and a new religion, to be achieved through the establishment of utopian-bohemian colonies and settlements throughout the world that was to run counter to the world of science and technology and the industrial nation-state.

Recall from Part 3 that Light is a common theme (Children of the Sun, Brotherhood of Light). It is also mentioned by the Theosophical Society, a sister organization of Monte Verità, started by Madame Blavatsky, in her “The Secret Doctrine,” where she references the mystery of the “fall” to Earth of the rebellious angels – the solar angels or agnishvattas, to which Lucifer is the best-known representative.

[Note: see “Descent and Sacrifice” by the Lucis Trust, originally titled Lucifer Publishing Company, a major public player within the United Nations, which was founded by prominent Theosophical Society member Alice Bailey.]

In the words of Alice Bailey, from her book “Rays and the Initiations,” we must add “darkness unto light so that the stars appear, for in the light the stars shine not, but in the darkness light diffused is not, but only focussed points of radiance.”

Thus we must bring forth the darkness…

In this interpretation, Lucifer is good and represents the Light. In this context Children of the Sun (the Sonnekinder) could also be connoted as Children of the Solar-Angels; and thus the Children of Lucifer (see Part 3). This explains what influenced the gruesome Solar Lodge to choose such a name, a so-called renegade society of the Ordo Templi Orientis in California, which used the curriculum of the A∴A∴ established by Aleister Crowley (A∴A∴ is a so-called magical organization created by Crowley in 1907 and claims to use the essence of Theravada Buddhism with Vedantic yoga and ceremonial magic).

[Note: the Ordo Templi Orientis also practised “Sex Magic” a corrupted Western version of Kundalini Yoga or Tantric Yoga.]

In 1921, Aleister Crowley succeeded Theodor Reuss as Outer Head of the Order of the Ordo Templi Orientis.

In 1935, Crowley founded the Agape Lodge No. 2 in Los Angeles.

In 1937, Aldous would move with his family and his fellow Sonnenkinder Gerald Heard to Hollywood, where he would remain until his death. Christopher Isherwood would make the move to Hollywood in 1939.

And just like that, the teachings of Ascona in Hollywood became a primary focus of Crowley and the Sonnenkinder, and together they would dominate the scene out of which the counterculture movement would be born.

It is here that we will resume the story.

Hollywood’s Fake Guru Industry

“For the radical and permanent transformation of personality only one effective method has been discovered – that of the mystics.”

– Aldous Huxley (1941) (1)

It did not take long upon the arrival of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard to California for them to become quick friends with Jiddu Krishnamurti, who had moved to Ojai, California in 1922.

Krishnamurti had been selected by Annie Besant, a prominent leader of the Theosophical Society, as a young adolescent boy in India as the likely “vehicle for the Lord Maitreya” in 1909. Maitreya means “future Buddha” and the Theosophical Society promoted Krishnamurti as an advanced spiritual entity that periodically appears on Earth as a World Teacher to guide the evolution of humankind.

The World Teacher, who supposedly had no religion nor followed any particular school of thought, was ironically tutored solely by Annie Besant for his entire education as a youth.

Interestingly, Krishnamurti was regarded with great suspicion by the Vedanta Society, the latter to which Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood were also very close to and frequented the Southern California branch regularly. They were known as the three English “beacons” of Vedanta. (2) The Vedanta Society promotes the study, practice and propagation of Vedanta, one of the six ancient schools of Hindu philosophy and is part of the Ramakrishna Order.

Alan Watts, a renown Western Guru of Zen Buddhism, describes in his autobiography “In My Own Way” (1972) an encounter he had with Swami Prabhavananda, of the Southern California Vedanta Society:

Swami – “…his [Krishnamurti’s] teaching is very misleading. I mean, he seems to be saying that one can attain realization without any kind of yoga or spiritual method, and of course that isn’t true.”

Watts – “No, indeed, if in fact there is something to be attained.  Your Upanishads say very plainly, Tat tvam asi, You ARE That, so what is there to be attained?”

Swami – “…But this is ridiculous. That amounts to saying that an ordinary ignorant and deluded person is just as good, or just as realized, as an advanced yogi.”

Watts – “Exactly. And what advanced yogi would deny it?  Doesn’t he see the Brahman everywhere, and in all people, all beings?”

Swami – “You are saying, that you yourself, or just any other person, can realize that you are the Brahman just as you are, without any spiritual effort or discipline at all!”

Watts – “Just so.  After all, one’s very not realizing is, in its turn, also the Brahman. According to your own doctrine, what else is there, what else is real other than the Brahman?”

Alan Watts, who would also become a part of the Sonnenkinder group, was a student of Christmas Humphreys, who founded the London Buddhist Lodge in 1924. The impetus for founding the lodge came chiefly from Annie Besant (President of the Theosophical Society from 1907-1933). Alice Bailey also frequented the lodge.

Thus, Krishnamurti and Watts were from the same school of Annie Besant.

Interestingly, Swami Prabhavananda of the Vedanta Society, had reported that Annie Besant had been banned from the Ramakrishna Order in India by the Head of the Chief Monastery Brahmananda, since Besant was trying to infiltrate the Order.

In 1929, Krishnamurti had disavowed the title of “World Teacher” and gave the impression that he had also disavowed the entire Theosophical Society, which is not true.

Not only did Krishnamurti continue a dialogue with many of the members of the society, but he co-founded the “Happy Valley School” in 1946 with among others, Aldous Huxley. The school today is recognised as a continuation of Besant’s vision for an educational community, which was renamed the “Besant Hill School” in 2007.

Aldous and Krishnamurti were so close that when Aldous had moved in 1945 to the mountains in Wrightwood, San Gabriel with his family from their Llano ranch, Krishnamurti followed them moving into a place a few houses down. (3)

It appears much of Krishnamurti’s supposed distancing from the Theosophical Society was mainly for the public eye, and as clearly showcased here, many of the members of the Theosophical Society including Annie Besant had made a very shoddy impression on the Hindu religious leadership.

Perhaps Krishnamurti was attempting a second infiltration, thinking his odds would be better if he claimed to disavow the Theosophical Society, despite his teachings remaining the same.

Krishnamurti’s emphasis on skipping steps would be a very destructive influence that laid the groundwork for the counterculture movement as we will see, and regardless of what Huxley’s intention was with the Vedanta Society, one thing can be sure, he decided in the end to dedicate himself to the path of Krishnamurti.

Music, Trance and Schizophrenia

“The resolute facing of the world as it is, when the garment of make-believe, by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features, is stripped off.”

– Aldous Huxley (4)

Another prominent base of contact Huxley had made upon his arrival to California was with Austrian-Polish actress and screen writer (for MGM and Greta Garbo roles) Salka Viertel’s Sunday salon in Los Angeles which was from the 1930s-50s a central place for networking, consisting of Hollywood intelligentsia and the émigré community of European intellectuals- many of whom formed the basis of the new Frankfurt School.

Among its regular Sunday attendees were Arnold Schoenberg, Maria and Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Theodor W. Adorno, Thomas Mann (who collaborated with Adorno on “Doctor Faustus”), Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Greta Garbo, and George Cukor.

Theodor Adorno, in his youth was a promising future concert pianist, who later studied in Vienna under the atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg. In 1946, while in the U.S. working on the Frankfurt School’s “Cultural Pessimism” agenda, he wrote the book “The Philosophy of Modern Music,” a diatribe against Classical culture, writing:

“What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man…Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is not that schizophrenia is directly expressed therein; but the music imprints upon itself an attitude similar to that of the mentally ill. The individual brings about his own disintegration…. He imagines the fulfillment of the promise through magic, but nonetheless within the realm of immediate actuality…. Its concern is to dominate schizophrenic traits through the aesthetic consciousness. In so doing, it would hope to vindicate insanity as true health.”

This was to be one of the major undercurrents that shaped the philosophy of the COUNTER-Culture movement. The name said it all. And the so-called freedom from the “shackles” of classical culture was to take the form of invoking schizophrenic traits through the domain of the aesthetic consciousness (aesthetic means the set of principles that underlie how we define and appreciate a standard for “beauty”).

It was the application of the Frankfurt School’s “Critical Theory” where everything that came before us within any field of established learning now had to be thrown into the garbage and we had to face the task of reprogramming how we viewed our world, our reality. This could only occur by invoking extreme states of fragmentation, schizophrenia, in order to build back the pieces in a so-called more truthful way without the cultural blinders from the past.

Part of this freeing oneself from classical culture, was to free ourselves from the classical understanding of aesthetics, and thus a central tenet of the counterculture movement was to now regard the ugly as beautiful, the beautiful as ugly, and insanity as the new sanity.

In Huxley’s “Brave New World Revisited” (1958), he quotes Dr. Erich Fromm, “philosopher-psychiatrist” from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory:

“Our ‘increasing mental sickness’ may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But ‘let us beware,’ says Dr. Fromm, ‘of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend’…”

Interestingly, Tavistock-linked psychiatrist William Sargant, with whom Huxley had also come into close correspondence, had discussed in “Battle for the Mind” (1957) his intrigue in the “dancing mania” phenomenon that arose during the Black Death which caused a heightened suggestibility capable of causing a person to “embrace with equal force, reason and folly, good and evil, diminish the praise of virtue as well as the criminality of vice.” (5)

Sargant goes on to write:

“The Voodoo cult of Haiti shows with what ease suggestibility can be increased by subjecting the brain to severe physiological stresses. Voodoo has numerous deities, or loa…The loa are believed to descend and take possession of a person, usually while he or she is dancing to the drums…The ease of men and women who have ben worked up into a state of suggestibility by Voodoo drumming shows the power of such methods…[they] found it more and more easy to respond to the drums and the dancing, and…the sense of ‘being overwhelmed by a transcendent force…[this] softening-up process…made them suggestible to the most varied types of dogma.”

Sargant quotes Aldous Huxley from a special appendix to his “The Devils of Loudun” (considered Huxley’s best work by many modern critics today):

“No man, however, civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting…and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality. It would be interesting to take a group of the most eminent philosophers from the best universities, shut them up in a hot room…and measure…the strength of their psychological resistance to the effects of rhythmic sound…Meanwhile, all we can safely predict is that, if exposed long enough to tom-toms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with the savages.”

Sargant concludes:

“But we do also know that there are philosophers who are more easily converted to new behaviour patterns and new beliefs by means of solitary prayer, and fasting, or even by the use of drugs such as mescalin.”

Aldous had a very clear interest in how one could bring about a schizophrenic state chemically, also allowing for heightened suggestibility. Six years before writing “Brave New World Revisited,” in 1952, Huxley would arrange to meet a Dr. Humphrey Osmond who had just published a psychiatric study titled “A New Approach to Schizophrenia.”

Osmond, the man who would coin the term “psychedelic” meaning “mind-revealing,” had been working with mescaline and had asserted in his study that psychedelics produced a psychological state identical to schizophrenia. Osmond was studying mescaline for its chemical similarity to adenochrome, a substance produced in the body through the oxidation of adrenaline and linked to inducing schizophrenic traits.

In 1940, a doctor had noted that “the characteristic effect of mescaline is a molecular fragmentation of the entire personality.” (6)

It was Huxley’s experience taking mescaline in the presence of Dr. Humphrey Osmond in 1953 that would inspire his writing “The Doors of Perception,” considered the instruction manual for what started the counterculture movement.

Although many were appalled by Huxley’s detailed disclosure of his taking mescaline and linking it as a short-cut to passing through the door that would reveal to one the secret mysteries, yes even Aldous believed this himself, it is nothing surprising.

As already discussed in detail in Part 2, T.H. Huxley (Darwin’s bulldog) was considered an almost god-like figure in the Huxley household, with Aldous’ father focusing much of his work writing on the work of T.H. and Darwin. Aldous and Julian would be raised in this larger than human personality with the pressure that it was their calling to continue this legacy. Anything short would be considered a terrible failure.

In fact, the Victorian period of Aldous’ birth was a time of enormous interest in parapsychology. One of T.H. Huxley’s close associates on Darwinism, Alfred Russell Wallace, was among the new breed “scientifically” testing psychic powers, along with William Crookes, F. W. H. Myers and renown psychologist William James. Their efforts to develop rigorous tests of mediums, telepathy, and materializations led to the founding of the Society of Psychical Research, the Theosophical Society and their American branches. (7)

Small world isn’t it?

One of the “forbidden books” that were kept in Mustapha Mond’s library was “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature” by William James, which is a study of private religious experiences and mysticism.

With T.H. Huxley having coined the term agnosticism (from Greek agnōstos, “unknowable”) meaning one can only claim to know anything through their direct sensory experience, Aldous owed it to his god-head grandfather to keep an ever “open mind.”

As Aldous was experiencing his first trip on mescaline in 1953, which was recorded for further study, Dr. Humphry Osmond asked him (8):

“So you think you know where madness lies?”

My [Aldous] answer was a convinced and heartfelt, “yes.”

“And you couldn’t control it?”

“No, I couldn’t control it.”

The Esalen Institute: The Human Potential Movement Meets the Tavistock Institute

“Welcome, this is the first manifestation of the Brave New World”

– spoken at the Human Be-In “A Gathering of Tribes” Jan. 1967 which is credited for launching the “Summer of Love”

At this historical “Gathering of the Tribes,” Lenore Kandel, American poet with the Beat Generation  exclaimed “The Buddha will reach us all through love, not through doctrines not through teaching…And as I am looking at all of you, I feel more and more that Matreiya is not this time going to be born out of one physical body, but born out of all of us. It’s happening perhaps today. This is an invocation for Matreiya, may he come.” (video min 12:03)

The reader should take note, the very clear sharing of philosophy with that of Krishnamurti. That there should be no work for reaching the stage of “enlightenment,” rather it is simply to open oneself as an empty vessel and let the “universe,” or whatever is around, pour in.

This perversion of Indian philosophy was similar to the sleight of hand that had then been occurring in the Christian world guided by Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (a close friend to Aldous’ brother Julian Huxley)- whose concept of a trans-human noetic evolution guided by an oncoming “Christ consciousness” shared many parallels to this eastern variant.

Aldous was very much interested in the study of Christian mysticism which led to his writing “The Devils of Loudun” among other works.

“Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.” (9)

This is also interesting in the context of Gerald Heard’s intellect having been “hewn by the Jesuits and by Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge” according to the author of “Huxley in Hollywood,” David King Dunaway.

The Human Be-In was organised as an LSD-25 event. It had a turnout of anywhere between 25,000 to 50,000 people. Free sandwiches were distributed laced with LSD and the “Summer of Love,” otherwise known as the first manifestation of the Brave New World, was born.

The reader should be aware, though it gets much much stranger, that The Grateful Dead were among the bands to play at this “Gathering of Tribes.” The Grateful Dead was and is regarded as the epitome band of the counterculture movement. Interestingly, Alan Trist, the son of Eric Trist (who is the founder of the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, the psychological warfare division of British Intelligence) is the one that put together the band.

In 1962, Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist, was among the volunteers for the renown anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s Palo Alto experiments using LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, for Stanford University. The research was covertly sponsored by the CIA in its MKULTRA program: other participants included Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg. Ken Kesey would become famous writing the book “One Flew of the Cuckoo’s Nest” on the relativity of madness in 1962, and would later form the Merry Pranksters in 1964, spreading bountiful, no questions asked, LSD to campuses across America.

Bateson, husband of renown cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, also played a prominent role in the curriculum of the Esalen Institute which had direct ties to the Tavistock Institute which we will see shortly.

There never was an organic impetus to organise a “Gathering of the Tribes”. Rather, it was micromanaged from the very start by Tavistock and the CIA, using the very techniques that the Frankfurt School, William Sargant and Aldous Huxley et al. very publicly discussed several years before.

Both Aldous and Gerald Heard played central roles in developing the Human Potential Movement (HPM) to which the Esalen Institute is recognised as officially launching.

The founders of the Esalen Institute, Richard Price and Michael Murphy, got the idea for Esalen’s core raisons d’être largely from Aldous’ lecture on “Human Potentialities” in 1960, at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. In this lecture, Huxley had challenged the budding students to figure out ways to tap into the full potential of humankind that had become latent over the centuries. In his lecture, Aldous discusses how it would be a good idea if an institution could launch a program to research methods for actualizing “human potentialities”, along the lines of his Brave New World, to be studied, evaluated, and put to use by society. Murphy and Price were enthralled.

In 1961, Murphy and Price would visit Gerald Heard who would continue where Aldous left off on the discussion of human potentialities.

The Esalen Institute, founded in 1962, held their first series of seminars, which they called “The Human Potentialities”. It included a seminar entitled “Drug Induced Mysticism”. The institute was staffed with LSD 25 researchers, and drugs circulated through-out the seminars. It launched what became known as “The Human Potential Movement”.

The idea was how to take hold of one’s self-evolution.

In 1956, psychiatrist R.D. Laing would train on a grant at the Tavistock Clinic in London, where he remained until 1964.

In a 1967 pamphlet published by the Esalen Institute titled “Where It’s At,” it is written on pg 38:

“Richard Price, co-founder of Esalen, is working with R.D. Laing of London’s Tavistock Clinic on a proposal to establish a Blowout Center at Big Sur, where a small, selected group of psychotics will be treated as persons on voyages of discovery and allowed to go through their psychoses. It appears that the nonparanoid, acute schizophrenic break is relatively short and is followed by a re-integrative process, so that the individual returns from his ‘trip’ with a higher IQ than at the beginning. We hope to find new ways to make such breaks valuable, function-heightening experiences.”

Thus, the inducing of schizophrenic breaks was considered a “function-heightening experience,” or so the poor sops were told. The key to reaching maximum human potential was through the induction of madness, the fragmentation of the mind through schizophrenic breaks, with the promise that one would have a higher IQ at the end of the whole affair.

Thus, whether you like it or not, the relevance of the Esalen Institute’s “revisioning of madness,” and Laing as the Crusader for the promotion of the clinically insane, needs to be acknowledged as having been entirely spear-headed by the Tavistock Institute, and clearly, not for our benefit.

The reality is that the revolutionary alternative to the practice of mainstream psychology, that was sold to the masses by cult figures like R.D. Laing, was entirely controlled and shaped by the Tavistock Institute, to which MKULTRA is a branch.

Thus, the Esalen Institute was also a continuation of the sort of horrifying psychiatric theories and practices that people were trying to escape from. It was like your psychiatric ward had just had a make-over and everything was expected to be different now since there were painted flowers on the wall.

This becomes very clear when one looks at the type of research that was being published and promoted by the Esalen Center for Theory and Research (CTR), such as the disturbing work of Lauretta Bender (who has links to MKULTRA) using LSD and electroshock therapy on hospitalized “disturbed children”, Dr. Ewen Cameron who worked with MKULTRA also using LSD and electroshock therapy on his patients, and whose victims later sued the CIA, B.F. Skinner known for his “modern operant conditioning chambers” aka “Skinner Box” which there is reason to believe has also been used on children which can be found promoted by the Esalen CTR here and here. Esalen did not even shy away from the infamous Dr. Evil Louis Joylon West who largely headed the MKULTRA torture project.

Notable past guest teachers and shapers of ideology and curriculum at the Esalen Institute, include: Gregory Bateson, Albert Hofmann (the creator of LSD at Sandoz Laboratories), Aldous Huxley, R.D. Laing, Abraham Maslow, Humphry Osmond, Fritz Perls (pioneer of NLP), Virginia Satir (pioneer of NLP), B.F. Skinner, Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder (one of the organisers of “A Gathering of Tribes), Arnold J. Toynbee and Alan Watts.

Virginia Satir would become the Director of Training for the Esalen Institute.

Aldous’ hypnopaedia concept is directly linked to neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) which became a core research subject at the Esalen Institute. NLP focuses on how to increase suggestibility within an individual and a crowd, such that they can receive a desired message or belief. It had a lot of overlap with Skinner’s Box experiment, as well as William Sargant’s work.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder created neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) in the 1970s. In 1975 they published a book titled “The Structure of Magic,” of which there are two volumes, intended to be a codification of the therapeutic techniques of Perls and Satir.

In the book, Bandler and Grinder claim that NLP has magic-like qualities which allow for an individual to change their model or map of “reality.” Since no objective reality exists, they assert, one can simply choose the form of reality one wishes to experience, the reality one wishes to embody. NLP techniques are used to change how an individual’s neuronal pathway responds or behaves in accordance to a specific stimulus. If enough change occurs, it is claimed that it can transform the entire personality, or create co-existing alternative personalities.

In “The Structure of Magic,” the NLP techniques are compared to “magical incantations,” and allows for a reframing of that individual’s world. The book includes chapters such as “Becoming a Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and “The Final Incantation.” (Recall Alice Bailey’s book “Rays and the Initiations,” discussed earlier.)

In 2008, Bandler wrote “A Guide to TRANCE-formation.”

Steve Andreas, a student of Bandler and Grinder wrote “Virginia Satir: The Patterns of Her Magic.”

Needless to say, we can see how such techniques if effective, could be misused, not just on the masses but on the so-called “elite,” which Esalen clearly caters to.

Recall, even Aldous’ “Alpha Pluses” of the Brave New World needed a controller…there were only about twelve members of the Mustapha Mond status and then there was whatever was to be found past that veil. All the rest; the Deltas, Epsilons, Betas, Alphas and Alpha Pluses were all tightly controlled, micro-managed really, and were not free to escape from the existential parameters chosen for them. No one, not even an Alpha Plus, as seen with the case of Bernard Marx, were free to choose a different course than what had already been chosen for them.

Although there are positive applications of NLP which have helped many people, within the context of this Tavistock-driven process, NLP was/is literally an attempt to reprogram the mind as if it were a circuit board. [Note: Gregory Bateson was the Cybernetics guru at the Esalen Institute.]

Timothy Leary, at the time a young professor of psychology at Harvard who headed the Harvard Psilocybin Project (with Aldous Huxley on its founding board) from 1960-62 until he was fired, was recruited by Aldous to help shape the “Ultimate Revolution” and lead the charge of the counterculture insurgency, to which Leary described in his book “Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era,”:

“We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.”

Leary would give the CIA full credit for starting and initiating “the entire consciousness movement, counterculture events of the 1960s” by flooding LSD into college campuses across the country and investing millions in LSD research programs. In the video, Leary looks like he is doing an ad campaign for the CIA, “buy their product, it worked for me”. (Leary would fittingly attempt to become a stand up comic in his washed up years, demoted from his prominent courtier status to that of a mere jester, if only people could have seen him for the fool he was much earlier.)

On PBS’s Late Night America, Timothy Leary commented:

“I’ve been an admirer of Aleister Crowley. I think that I’m carrying on much of the work that he started over a hundred years ago … He was in favor of finding yourself, and ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ under love. It was a very powerful statement. I’m sorry he isn’t around now to appreciate the glories he started.”

“Then you think there is no God?” [asked the Savage] “No, I think there quite probably is one.” [answered Mustapha Mond] “Then why [are you doing all of this]?…How does [God] manifest himself now?” [asked the Savage] “Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren’t there at all.” [answered Mustapha Mond] “That’s your fault.” [retorted the Savage] “Call it the fault of civilization.” [responded Mustapha Mond]

– Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”

The author can be reached at https://cynthiachung.substack.com/

 Noies

(1) David King Dunaway, “Huxley in Hollywood,” 1989, pg 147
(2) Ibid, pg 159
(3) Ibid, pg 251
(4) Ibid, pg 328
(5) William Sargant “The Battle for the Mind”
(6) Huxley in Hollywood pg 325
(7) Ibid, pg 303
(8) Ibid, pg 335
(9) Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World”

In Woke World, you can be cancelled not for what you said, but for what left-wing people think you said. It happened to Don McNeil, and now it has happened to Mandalorian actress Gina Carano. Excerpt:

In the wake of Gina Carano’s controversial social media posts, Lucasfilm has released a statement Wednesday night, with a spokesperson saying “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Carano played bounty hunter Cara Dune on the first two seasons Lucasfilm and Disney+’s The Mandalorian, and it looked like we’d be seeing more of her. It appears not.

The actress shared a TikTok post comparing the current divided political climate in the U.S. to Nazi Germany.

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views,” she wrote.

Her point was that Nazism didn’t come from nowhere. It was the culmination of a long campaign of demonizing Jews, one that pre-dated the Nazis. I first became aware of this at an exhibit on display at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, back in the year 2000. The exhibit showed how the German media began, in the early 20th century, to portray the German people as a body threatened by parasites. This coincided with the rise of eugenic thought in German (and, note well, American) medical and scientific circles. The Nazis built on what the German public had already been taught to believe. Gina Carano is absolutely correct to say that the Holocaust was prepared by a long campaign of demonization. Though I agree that it’s a shaky analogy — hating people for their race or religion is different from hating them for their ideas — her point is basically sound.

And for that, her career is over. Nobody in Hollywood will hire her now.

Contrast that to Krystina Arielle, a black woman recently hired as host of a Star Wars show, who has a history of aggressive racialist social media posting. For example:

And:

You know what? I find that kind of racist trash talk objectionable, but for the most part, I really don’t care what kind of obnoxious opinions a celebrity holds. We have to try to be tolerant, even of stupid people.

When Arielle was criticized for her neoracism, Star Wars stood by her:

At Lucasfilm and Disney, there is a double standard for white actors and black actors.

Pointing this out doesn’t do any good. If they were liberals, they would see the double standard, and change their ways. But they’re not liberals. They are bigots for the Left.

What can we do? I see that there are a number of conservatives on social media announcing that they are cancelling Disney Plus in solidarity with Gina Carano. What else?

Ben Shapiro has a good broadcast today about the Carano mess. He points out that millions of people — even some liberals — are afraid of cancel culture coming for them. People can relate to what happened to Carano. Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, says he doesn’t generally like Holocaust comparisons, and says that Carano’s was “overwrought,” but in no way a fireable offense. Watch:

Guess what Shapiro found on the Twitter feed of Pedro Pascal, a woke co-star of Carano’s? This, from 2018:

So: it is fine for a woke Star Wars star to cite the Holocaust if he’s using the comparison to criticize Trump, but it is a fireable offense for a non-woke Star Wars star to cite the Holocaust if she’s doing so to criticize political demonization from the Left.

In his show, Ben Shapiro rightly says that there is a powerful troika of Media-Democratic Party-Corporations that define and institutionalize woke doctrines. This is the Empire. Time for a Rebel Alliance to fight them. Trump is obviously not the Luke Skywalker we need. But we need a Luke Skywalker.

theamericanconservative.com

The Second World War brought the true flowering of the USA’s soft power; from the cargo cults of Melanesia to the cargo cults of Europe, GIs brought the dream to everyone. The USA won the war in a way that no other power did – it emerged immensely stronger and richer into a world in which its natural competitors had been impoverished. At Bretton Woods and San Francisco it shaped the new world to a degree that no other power could. And, understandably, it shaped it to its own benefit, quite convinced that it had every right to do so as the victor and exemplar of the better future. Only the USSR and its sphere grumpily disagreed.

These were the glory times of American soft power. I often think of the movie Roman Holiday in which the American reporter is civilised, polite, doesn’t take advantage of her but gives her confined life a moment of fun and freedom. The best kind of propaganda. (And, interestingly, one of the screenwriters had been blacklisted. Which gives another layer to this intensely pro-American movie, doesn’t it?)

To a friend who grew up in England before and during the Second World War, everything about the USA was exciting. That was soft power in action: bright new future. I would argue that American soft power stood on four pillars: the attractiveness and excitement of its popular culture, its reputation for efficiency, rule of law and the “American Dream”. Every American could expect that his children would be better off – better off in every respect: healthier, longer-lived, better educated, happier, richer – than he was. Some of this was image and propaganda but enough of it was true to make people believe. The wrappings of freedom, wealth and excitement made the package almost irresistible.

The USA owed a great deal of its pre-eminence to sheer luck. Sitting on immense natural resources far from enemies, almost all of its wars were wars of choice and usually wars against greatly inferior forces. But, as Stephen Walt argues, its long run of luck may be ending. “The result was a brief unipolar moment when the United States faced no serious rivals and both politicians and pundits convinced themselves that America had found the magic formula for success in an increasingly globalized world”. Walt is also dispirited about the American reputation for competence which he believes to have been severely damaged by COVID-19. One man’s opinion, to be sure, but he’s not alone. COVID-19 has greatly injured the USA’s and the West’s reputation for efficiency: no better illustration can be given than comparing the confident expectation of October 2019 that the USA and the UK could best handle a pandemic with what actually happened. A big blow to the soft power assumption that the USA and the West were the places where things functioned properly.

One of the biggest casualties has been the promise of the “American Dream”. One graph alone blows this pillar to bits. Until about 1972 wages and productivity were linked – everybody was getting richer together. Since then, the curves have diverged: productivity keeps rising, wages are flat. That’s not what was supposed to happen: the rising tide was supposed to float all boats, not just a few super yachts. The richest one percent owned six times as much as the bottom fifty percent in 1989, now it’s 15 times as much. More significantly, the 50%-90% have seen their share drop seven and a half percentage points. No, your children won’t be better off than you are; and probably not healthier or longer-lived either.

James DeLong discusses the erosion of another soft power pillar with his analysis of Amazon’s decision to deplatform Parler. His conclusion is:

a friend in the investment community likes to remind me that America has a big competitive advantage in the form of the rule of law, or “the insiders aren’t allowed to rob you blind!”. Amazon has decided to prove him wrong.

In the U.S., and the West in general, you are supposed to know where you are – you’re not subject to the ephemeral whims of a tyrant, as in less lawful regimes: transactions are grounded in law and transparent procedure. Perhaps DeLong is making too much out of something small here, but I don’t think he is. We’ve already seen the boasted principle of innocent until proven guilty disappear the moment Navalniy decides to accuse Putin of something; in the revenge of the present U.S. Administration we will see more arbitrary tyranny justified by exaggerated exigencies. If 6 January was a new Pearl Harbor, extraordinary reactions will be said to be justified. But this is becoming the Western norm: where exactly is the rule of law with Meng in Canada, Sacoulis and Assange in the UK, or Butina in the USA? Will more lawfare against Trump strengthen the image of stability and rule of law?

Neither will the 2020 U.S. election and its consequences advance the American reputation of democratic leadership. Some cheerleaders of “American leadership” like Richard N Haass are quite despondent:

No one in the world is likely to see, respect, fear, or depend on us in the same way again. If the post-American era has a start date, it is almost certainly today [6 January].

Consider the image that Biden’s inauguration sent. Rather than using the COVID excuse to plan a modest ceremony, the full panoply was undertaken. But with no supporters and with soldiers everywhere: note the motorcade pompously passing only people paid to or ordered to attend. It looked like the enthronement of a dictator after a coup. Especially now that the opposition is being censored (deplatformed, as they call it); re-labelled as “domestic terrorists“, possibly under the direction of the arch-enemy Putin; “extremists” must be removed from the U.S. military; the Enemy is already inside Congress. Fence-in the Capitol. The soft power claim of the USA to be the citadel of freedom has taken a hit and will take more.

American movies were one of the vehicles of soft power. Consider, for example, 1939’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington in which a straightforward American, James Stewart, successfully overcomes a corrupt Washington with decency and determination. Many Americans, especially Senators, didn’t get it and railed against the movie – but Spain, Italy, Germany and the USSR understood that it was a powerfully pro-American movie and banned it. Its message was that, even corrupt, the USA is better. Frank Capra made a number of movies about ordinary Americans prevailing with their Everyman decency. A very important part of soft power broadcasting decency and freedom against a background of, to much of the rest of the world, an inconceivable prosperity enjoyed by the ordinary citizen. But in today’s Hollywood’s movies there are no more decent Americans showing the way, just comic book automatons blowing each other up. No message there and no soft power either. If, as this piece wonders, China is Hollywood’s future – it’s already the largest market – then why would you need Hollywood at all? There’s no American soft power in Godzilla vs Kong.

Popular culture, competence, justice and values and the dream of betterment may have been the pillars on which the USA’s soft power was based, but the ground upon which those stood was success. Success made the others attractive; success is the most powerful attraction. The West is losing its aura of success – endless wars, divisive politics, COVID failure, financial crises, debt. And ever more desperate attempts to hold power against ever bolder dissent. It’s just beginning. And not just the USA, the West doesn’t present well any more: protests in Amsterdam, London, Berlin; a year of gillets jaunes in France. The world is watching. Not efficient, not attractive, not law-based. Not successful.

As for success, I recommend this enumeration of China’s achievements. One after another of first or second in numerous categories. And it’s all happened in the last two or three decades. What will we see in the next two or three? That is success. That is what used to happen in the USA. But it doesn’t any more. According to numbers provided by the World Bank, the levels of extreme poverty declined significantly in the world (2000-2017), quite dramatically in China (2010-2016), significantly in Russia (2000-2010) but actually increased in the USA from 2000-2016. “Deaths of despair” are not success. Soft power will inevitable follow as other countries – probably not the West, it’s true – try to imitate China’s stunning success. To a large extent, the West is living on its capital while China is increasing its.

In retrospect, the recent Davos Forum may turn out to be an inflection moment: Putin’s speech was a blunt statement that what he foresaw at Munich in 2007 has come to pass – the patent failure of the “Washington Consensus” and unilateralism. Xi Jinping echoed it. Even Merkel promised neutrality between China and the USA.

Soft power is packing up and getting ready to move house: success attracts, failure repels.

I first became aware of Oliver Stone when in 1986 I was watching his film Salvador with an audience of left-wing Santa Barbarians. They were enjoying this madcap cinematic indictment of Uncle Sam’s imperialist crimes in Central America—until a scene in which the rebel forces, riding to town like a Marxist cavalry in the righteous cause of The People, began executing the unenlightened. Then the boos rang down.

Who is this guy, I wondered. My curiosity was whetted further when the P.C. reviewer in the Los Angeles Herald denounced Stone’s screenplays for earlier films: “Movies like Midnight Express, Scarface, and Year of the Dragon are such grand-scale xenophobic fever-dreams that they almost demand to be remade into operas, complete with belching smoke and lurid lighting and crimson-suited devils scurrying out of the wings to pitchfork lily-white Mother America.”

Ah, a left-wing America Firster!

Not quite, as his subsequent work and his entertaining new memoir, Chasing the Light, illumine, but Oliver Stone, our most political major filmmaker, evinces a rowdily heterodox vision shaped by the unusual quartet of Jim Morrison, Sam Peckinpah, Frank Capra, and Jean-Luc Godard.

What do you call a man who joins the Merchant Marine on a whim, runs up big pro football gambling debts, and takes the Old Right view of FDR’s foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?

I’d call him an American.

Stone was a rich kid, the son of an FDR-hating Jewish Republican who had served on Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force staff and a French Catholic party girl. He attended the Hill School, played on the tennis team, was devastated by his parents’ divorce, and then went seriously off script.

Avid for experiences, Stone dropped out of Yale, taught in a Catholic school in Taiwan, and volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He came home with a Bronze Star, shrapnel in his ass, and a taste for “powerful Vietnamese weed.”

Stone’s politics hadn’t changed all that much, though. He had supported Barry Goldwater in 1964 and would vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980. In later years he became more explicitly libertarian, expressing support for Ron Paul and making a film about Edward Snowden.

At root, Oliver Stone is a patriot who despises the American Empire for corrupting his country. JFK, his fantasia on the Deep State, echoes Dwight Eisenhower’s warning that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by “the military-industrial complex.”

Platoon and Salvador bespeak an old-fangled American anti-interventionism in an age when that tendency, once the default position of ordinary Americans, is a virtual thoughtcrime.

Lost innocence is as common in Stone’s films as splattered blood. In Midnight Express, the Turkish prison movie to end all Turkish prison movies, protagonist Billy Hayes is a Long Island college kid just trying to make a few bucks by smuggling two kilos of hashish to sell to his friends. Heck, it’s no different than being the guy who runs out to pick up the pizza and beer at halftime! (The real Hayes, as Stone later learned, was on his fourth smuggling run and was about as innocent as Brad Davis, the deeply troubled actor who played him.)

When his sentence is stretched from four to 30 years, Billy explodes in a Stone-penned courtroom rant that belongs in the xenophobe’s hall of fame: “For a nation of pigs it sure is funny you don’t eat ’em … I hate you, I hate your nation, and I hate your people.”

Yikes! As the husband of an Armenian I’m not overly sensitive to slights against the Turkish nation, but this was a tad intemperate. But so was the left-wing French newspaper Liberation, which reviled Stone as “a madman of the Right.”

A pithier America First line from Stone’s pen came in Year of the Dragon (1985), when a New York City cop (Mickey Rourke) responds to a Chinese gangster who is describing his culture’s ancient tolerance of gambling and extortion: “This is America you’re living in and it’s 200 years old, so you’d better get your clocks fixed.”

Stone’s co-writer on Year of the Dragon was Michael Cimino, whose Oscar-winning epic The Deer Hunter was unusual for its sympathetic treatment of small-town working-class men whose church is central to their lives. Critic Pauline Kael sneered at The Deer Hunter’s “traditional isolationist message: Asia should be left to the Asians, and we should stay where we belong, but if we have to be over there we’ll show how tough we are.” A Trumpian message, on Trump’s better days. Cimino blew up his career with the sprawling Heaven’s Gate, a commercial disaster that snuffed his long-dreamt-of goal of filming Ayn Rand’s novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

Liberal Hollywood, eh?

theamericanconservative.com

The former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, has certainly made better judgment calls in his career than the one he made on July 7 of this year.

Following a spoof interview with Maria Bakalova, a Bulgarian actress who plays a conservative journalist in the latest instalment of Baron Cohen’s ‘Borat’ series, Bakalova uses her feminine charms to lure Giuliani into a hotel room where he is briefly filmed with his hand down his pants while prostrate on a bed. Not the best visuals to say the least. At this point, Borat enters the scene, screaming: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.” (the actress is 24 years old, but never mind). Giuliani, meanwhile, explained that he was merely caught in the act of removing the microphone that he had used to conduct the interview.

The Giuliani scene in Borat is a huge nothing. Those who lied about it should be sued. He was tucking in his shirt. Even if he wasn’t, he’s an unmarried man invited to a grown woman’s bedroom. There is no scandal here at all. You shameless lying scumbags

pic.twitter.com/KVwInfEGPV

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 23, 2020

If Cohen’s comedy routine with Giuliani seemed strangely familiar, it’s because he used a slightly different version of it years earlier on yet another God-fearing conservative, Ron Paul. Cohen, playing the part of a gay Austrian fashion commentator named ‘Bruno,’ tricked the congressman from Texas into an interview he believed would be on economics. In the course of the discussion, however, a planned power outage gives Cohen the opportunity to lead Paul into a backroom while the technicians sort out the ‘glitch’. Here, ‘Bruno’ lights some candles and attempts to make a pass at Paul, who immediately storms out of the room with his team. This is what Sacha Baron Cohen calls ‘humor,’ which almost always comes at the expense of flyover country White folk. Nothing hateful about that, right?

After all, according to many left-wing ‘progressives’, it’s perfectly acceptable to attack Republicans, most of whom are closet White supremacists and bigots anyways. Yet how can that logic be supported when the Ku Klux Klan, for example, America’s premier hate group, got much of its original membership straight from the ranks of the Democratic Party? But I digress.

Just days before the Giuliani set up, Cohen had crashed a right-wing event in the state of Washington while posing as a xenophobic country singer, enticing the crowd to sing along to lyrics about former President Barack Obama, national health expert Anthony Fauci, and other assorted “mask wearers” getting injected with the “Wuhan flu.” When it quickly became apparent to the local organizers of the event that they were the target of an elaborate prank, hired security guards accompanying Baron Cohen reportedly refused to let them pull the plug on the performance. Nothing like being the butt end of a joke practically at gunpoint, right?

In another particular scene, Cohen, once again playing the part of Borat, gets himself invited as a special guest at the Pima County Republican Club. In his speech before the members, Cohen begins by requesting that everyone stand for 10 minutes (not 10 seconds, as the emcee had politely requested) to pay respect to some imaginary massacre that he said occurred in his “native Kazakhstan (for the record, Sacha Baron Cohen was born in Israel and resides in Britain).”

The ‘joke’ may have gone over a bit better had the majority of the standing audience not been of senior citizen age when standing for any length of time can be excruciating. Apparently that never dawned on Cohen, however, who even made the group start over when he said someone “made a noise.” Hilarious! So what exactly was Cohen attempting to prove by this puerile prank, and many others like it? Was it that conservative Americans are so naïve that they would obediently stand to commemorate the death of unknown people killed in some foreign massacre because they were asked to? This sort of gut-wrenching ‘humor’ has a funny way of making Cohen the real butt end of his jokes.

The strange comedic timing behind Cohen’s routines

Beyond the comic value of Cohen’s work, which I would rank as less than negligible, the ‘comic timing’ of his attacks on Republicans seems to go beyond mere coincidence.

Consider the previously mentioned ‘prank’ on Ron Paul, which was filmed in early 2008. Was it just coincidence that Cohen attempted to get Paul involved in a very compromising situation at the very same time the House representative from Texas was seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency? Moreover, Paul had authored the 2009 bestselling book entitled, End the Fed, a compassionate argument for terminating America’s complicated relationship with the Federal Reserve System and its “massive role in manipulating money to our economic ruin,” as Paul writes on page one. And who could ever forget the way Paul made former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke squirm under fierce congressional questioning about runaway Fed spending? Clearly, Ron Paul, who was vilified when he was not outright ignored by most media channels, presented a real threat to the establishment, and in that regard it is at least worthy of mentioning that Cohen decided to target such a statesman.

The very same thing could be said about Rudy Giuliani. Here is a major Trump ally being subjected to a Borat stunt in what is arguably the most consequential election cycle in U.S. history. But more importantly, the former mayor of New York City is sitting on a veritable treasure trove of Hunter Biden emails and photographs, which the mainstream media and Big Tech companies are going out of their way to disappear. Once again, incredible comedic timing from Sacha Baron Cohen.

Incidentally, Trump himself in 2003 sat for an interview with Cohen, then in the character of ‘Ali G,’ but the discussion ended very fast.

Asked about the scene, Trump said, “I don’t know what happened. But years ago, you know, he tried to scam me. And I was the only one who said no way. That’s a phony guy. And I don’t find him funny. I don’t know anything about him other than he tried to scam me. He came in as a BBC – British broadcasting anchor.”

Trump concluded, “To me, he was a creep.”

While it is hard to say how many people share Trump’s opinion about the English actor, it would be difficult to argue that Sacha Baron Cohen does not have a big dog in the U.S. political scene. That much was clear during a speech the comedian gave before an assembly of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), where, it should be noted, he did not attempt to make a fool of his hosts by asking them to stand for 10 minutes in commemoration of some fictional Kazakh massacre.

Instead, Cohen spoke on the subject of social media freedoms, but not in some valiant effort to make them greater, as one might expect a public person would desire, but rather to crackdown on free speech.

Here is part of Cohen’s speech, delivered on Nov. 21, 2019:

“I’m speaking up today because I believe that our pluralistic democracies are on a precipice and that the next twelve months, and the role of social media, could be determinant. British voters will go to the polls while online conspiracists promote the despicable theory of “great replacement” that white Christians are being deliberately replaced by Muslim immigrants. Americans will vote for president while trolls and bots perpetuate the disgusting lie of a “Hispanic invasion.” And after years of YouTube videos calling climate change a “hoax,” the United States is on track, a year from now, to formally withdraw from the Paris Accords.”

Cohen labeled all of this as a “sewer of bigotry and vile conspiracy theories that threatens democracy and our planet—this cannot possibly be what the creators of the internet had in mind.”

Whether coincidental or not, Cohen’s calls to “monitor” the internet from those dastardly people on the other side of the political aisle who propagate the wrong ‘conspiracy theories,’ has come to fruition faster than anyone could have imagined, as the New York Post, which suffered a massive censorship operation at the hands of the ‘Silicon Six’ (who Cohen identified as “Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sundar Pichai at Google, at its parent company Alphabet, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Brin’s ex-sister-in-law, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube and Jack Dorsey at Twitter”), could certainly testify to.

So who is Sacha Baron Cohen, and why do his comedy sketches always focus on the same group of individuals – the sworn arch-enemies of liberals, the conservatives – and at the most critical moments in U.S. political history?

Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks with award-winning screenwriter and director Oliver Stone about his memoir, “Chasing the Light”.

Anya Parampil and Oliver Stone discuss the legendary screenwriter and director’s experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War; his films, including “Platoon” and “Scarface”; his work on Latin America; and his views on the demise of Hollywood.

ANYA PARAMPIL: Oliver Stone, welcome to Red Lines. I know I speak on behalf of the entire Grayzone team when I say we’re very excited to host you.

OLIVER STONE: Thank you. I love Grazyone. I think it does some great work and, yeah, not too…not enough people see it, so…

ANYA PARAMPIL: Well, we appreciate those comments, and your work has definitely inspired some of our journalism. So, let’s just get right into it.

You’ve just released Chasing the Light. I’ve got it right here. It’s your memoir looking back at writing and directing Platoon, Scarface, Salvador, Midnight Express.

A major theme in your memoir —and I believe expressed through the protagonists in many of your films such as Richard Boyle in Salvador, Chris Taylor in Platoon, and even Tony Montana in Scarface —is an initial belief or desire to believe in the American Dream and America’s superficial ideals, which is eventually contradicted by their individual experiences.

You, in fact, open your memoir by reflecting on your time on the 4th of July in 1976, as you’re watching a fireworks display in New York City. And you write, quote, “I wanted to believe like them, the million people around me, but I didn’t feel it. I felt the awe, but also the profound terror. Because I’d been here before. On a night like this, I’d seen the most spectacular fireworks of all—the real thing.” That’s a reference to your time you spent as a soldier in Vietnam. You say, “So much power, so much death in one place at one time. Never to be forgotten.” How did the Vietnam War impact your view of the United States?

OLIVER STONE: A lot. A lot. I mean, I was not politically evolved. I grew up in a conservative Republican family in New York. My father was a stockbroker, my mother was a French girl he married in World War II and brought home to the US, and my view of America was still evolving in 1976, when the book opens. I’m 30 years old, I’m depressed and broke because I’ve been writing a lot of screenplays and nothing’s happened. I’m married, not going well and, in fact, my marriage is ending at that point. So, out of those depths…I’m suggesting in the book that out of those depths came this feeling that I could write another screenplay about, actually, my own experience in Vietnam, which had occurred from 1967-8, when I’d been over there eight years before this day. Why? Perhaps it was the fireworks, you know. There was so much fireworks that night in New York, it was…you remember the tall ships…aw, you’re too young. But the tall ships…there was 200 vessels of all shapes and sizes from every country in the world, practically, and fireworks were going off. And the day was spectacular, and the night was all fireworks. And I think there might have been a million people backed into Lower Manhattan. It was a lot, and there was an excitement in the air because Jimmy Carter was coming to town and the Democratic Convention was about to happen the next week.

So, I just remember all that fever, that excitement, that change, as I pointed out. And there was a change. Carter did represent in ’76 a huge feeling of we’re getting away from the Nixon/Ford era; we’re going to go into a new feeling. There’ll be more prosperity, more money in people’s pockets, more sex. Very much a feeling of being 30. On the other hand, I was going against that feeling by also feeling that my hopes were dashed. I was struggling and lost. It’s a strange feeling.

But anyway, out of those fireworks that night, I think may have come this memory [that] had been buried in me about that night in Vietnam, January 1, 1968, when I’d been in an all-night battle, from when dark came on around nine o’clock; it went to about six in the morning, five in the morning, all night. It never stopped. It was a huge attack on us. I was in the 25th Infantry. It was called Firebase Pace at the time, or…I’m sorry, Firebase Burt, but I call it Suoi Cut, because that’s the name of the village that was nearby, Suoi Cut. People will remember that battle forever. I think we were hit by a, I guess, a regiment of North Vietnamese, and in the morning…but it’s a strange battle the way I describe it. You have to read the book to understand. We killed about four to five hundred of them, and they…about 25 of us were killed and about 150 wounded. So, it was quite an all-night battle and…but I was, as I said, at the end of that battle I had not seen one enemy. I had not fired my rifle. All I’d been doing…I had been moved from one position to another, all night, never saw an enemy, never saw but heard about it all. It was all going through the radio, and it was as if I was protected that night. The truth was…

ANYA PARAMPIL: It certainly seems that way. Yeah, and the way that you describe it in the book.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say. Nothing is what it seems. And the only thing that happened was that I got concussed. I was blown into the air and blacked out by a beehive round from our own tanks, which is typical of Vietnam because we had a lot of friendly-fire casualties. And that is the basis for remembering the past and bringing it up, because Platoon grew…I wrote Platoon very quickly in that time period.

My mother’s [mom, my] grandmother in France had also died, and I go back to France to see her funeral. Jeez, she’s laid out on the bed, she’s…as they did in France in those days, it’s a custom. And, you know, you attend to the dead, you talk to the dead, you communicate with them before they’re buried. And it was a very powerful scene that evolves, where I try speaking to my grandmother, she speaks to me. I said, “You know, it’s time for me to get really serious if I’m going to go on with this dream that I have to make a movie or not.” And she’s telling me, basically, that I should go on, but I should really be more serious about it than I am.

And at the age of 30 things changed. It’s bizarre because that Platoon script that I wrote was optioned pretty quickly by a major Hollywood producer and led…one thing led to the other. And right away I was signed up to do this new script about Midnight Express, so that was really the beginning of my career. And by the age of 33 I had gotten an Academy Award. It went pretty fast. And then I had some reversals of fortune and, basically, by…but the book ends on Chapter 10 when I’m…it’s quite an up-and-down story. There’s a lot of roller coasters here, and it ends with my making two films in a row, Salvador and Platoon in…at the age of 38, 39 and 40. And I, as you know, it’s just one thing leads to the other, and both films put me back on top.

ANYA PARAMPIL: Yeah, “On Top of The World,” I believe is the name of that chapter. And I’ll ask you more about Platoon specifically, but I don’t think people would realize that you actually volunteered for the draft as a young man. You said you wanted to, quote, “be like everybody else, an anonymous infantryman, cannon fodder, down there in the muck with the masses.” How did that time, your experience down there in the muck with the masses, later, how was it reflected in your filmmaking? Even when you’re telling the stories of very powerful people?

OLIVER STONE: Well, in many ways, that’s sort of what it is. I…you see, I had grown up in a sheltered society, I went to boarding school, I went to Yale University and dropped out. I wasn’t happy. There was a lot of problems, and my parents got a very tumultuous divorce, and it upset me because I didn’t understand anything that was going on at the age of 15.

So, the first 15 years were pretty…were a dream, and you said earlier the superficiality of the American Dream. I’m not sure I would call it that, but it was a dream, and after that I went on my own. I…there was a whole…I talk about going out to Asia, becoming a teacher. I went to the Merchant Marine. I traveled all over Asia. Then I wrote a book, a confessional book, about…as a 19-year-old boy. It was published finally in 1997. But so, I’d been through a lot and gone back to school and dropped out again, trying to adjust to society. I couldn’t adjust to East Coast society. There was something…my father’s world was closed to me. I didn’t feel comfortable. I didn’t like all the competition, frankly. It was too competitive, constantly competitive. And I had what you call “burnout.” They didn’t call it that in those days. I really was burned out, and I went off and I said, look, I’m thinking about myself too much. It’s about time I got real, like, in keeping with, you know, what is reality? You don’t know when you’re 17. You don’t know if you exist. You’re not sure about your identity. That’s why they [youth] have a lot of problems now as well as then. And so, I had to find myself, as they say. And I wasn’t sure.

So, going after the Army kind of threw it away. I said, okay, it’s up to God. I believed in a god at that point, and I said, you know, let the…I’ll throw the dice, you know. If I’m meant to come back from this war, I’ll come back. If not, I accept it. And I was rather fatalistic when I went in, and I wanted Vietnam and I wanted infantry. I didn’t want to fuck around and try to be an officer or anything like that. I just wanted to see what it was like at the bottom of the barrel. And out of that came, if you see my films you…I think you see that a lot of underdogs are the heroes in these films. And I think that’s become a theme in my life, that the people who are down under sometimes are the most heroic people, the most genuine people, and it’s been a battle between underdog and overdog, so to speak, in a lot of my movies.

ANYA PARAMPIL: Yeah, I think you even managed to get people to sympathize with someone like Tony Montana, who on the surface is a criminal drug dealer in Miami, but you kind of feel for him in a way. And I’ll ask again more about Scarface later. But sticking to Vietnam for a moment, you write about the bond you formed with black soldiers during your time in Vietnam, saying they taught you, quote, “a feeling for real love, the love that exists between human beings, and that’s the most important thing any soldier can keep in war—his humanity. Without it, we’re beasts.” I’m wondering, in what ways do you think race relations among average soldiers in Vietnam complemented or contradicted the experience of the United States at the time. You were actually in Vietnam in 1968, the year MLK and RFK were assassinated, leading to extreme political unrest.

OLIVER STONE: That’s a very…that’s a key question and a good one, because this was written, by the way, this was written, the book was written…this area was written before Black Lives Matter. So, I wasn’t trailing on this. My experience in Vietnam was the people who I was the most comfortable with, the most friendly were the black soldiers in my platoons, and they used to hang out in the…when we went to the rear, we’d hang out, smoke dope and listen to music and talk —and dance, too. If you saw Platoon, there was a dance scene in it. You know, men dancing together. This was…it was a more relaxed and almost feminine, at times, relationship, and that’s very important because war is so dry and hard and deadening to the mind that I think everybody who goes over into that situation changes.

And there was a lot of racism, yes. Not…it was against the Vietnamese. And one of the great themes of the war was our trashing of the civilian population. Now, that happened constantly, because I think a lot of the soldiers were racist against…they hated the Vietnamese. Now, I didn’t feel that the black soldiers hated them as much. Of course, there were different people. There’s some black soldiers [who] did, but most didn’t. And so many white people, white soldiers liked them, too, but many hated them. There were a lot of soldiers who were uneducated. They were from the south, they were tough people, and they kept thinking that the civilians were helping the enemy. Of course, that’s an ambiguous issue because, well, you know, we were fighting a people that were essentially seeking peace and their freedom from overlords and oppressors.
So, it was a complicated war, and I get into that in Platoon with the…when Barnes, one of the sergeants, kills the villagers and is brought up on a war crime for it by the other sergeant, Elias. The point of that is that we were fighting among ourselves inside each platoon. I was in three combat platoons, three different ones, different places, too. So, I felt this problem growing through September ’67, I felt it growing into ’68, and it worsened after King was killed in April ’68. It was the whole…and then Johnson, of course, quit the war, said he was not going to run again. And that was a signal that tripped off everything, that it was just a war that we were going to just try to survive in. Nobody wanted to die for this cause, even…it was, “Who would be the last American to die in Vietnam?”, became a kind of a constant.

But the black soldiers saved me in a sense because I needed some respite from it. I needed to get away from it, and in that whole world of…in the rear of music, there was love, there was a…there was a brotherhood, a bond between soldiers that would grow up, and it’s a strange bond. Never thought it would happen because I had no experience with black people before in my existence in New York, except fear in the streets of New York. So, you have to understand, it was a big thing for me, and I developed that theme in Platoon. I fell in love with this way of life. I came back, yeah, I was smoking dope, I was, you know, you can talk all you want. I’d listen to the music. I was talking like a black man. My father was furious, you know. It was a change in personality, but it was an opening up to new ways of life. Very important to me.

ANYA PARAMPIL: You referenced something in your book called “the lie of our culture.” That’s what you refer to, saying, it’s “the root of our failure.” You write, quote, “The hypocrisy—and more, corruption—sickened me then and now, which is one of the reasons why I got into so much trouble later on, criticizing our way of life —because we lie to ourselves, and we’ve confused the ordinary citizen who worries that terrorists are hiding in his barbecue pit, or that Russia is subverting ‘our democracy’ with insidious forms of hybrid warfare, or Chinese economics are eating our lunch with their chopsticks.” And I’m wondering, what do you…how would you describe that lie, the lie of our culture? And who is responsible for telling it?

OLIVER STONE: I’m addressing this issue up to where the book ends, 1986, because obviously my ideas expand as I get older. But at that time there was only…there were three, I said there were three lies that haunted me when I came out of Vietnam. And I couldn’t even articulate it like I’m doing now, at that time. I just was numb, and I was alienated. But three things were apparent.
One, I talked about friendly fire. Friendly fire is when you are on the same…the soldiers are on the same side, and Americans kill them [their own]…kill others [American soldiers].

Now, this is a very sensitive subject because parents don’t know that many of their children have been killed that way, and they would be horrified. The Pentagon would…buries this information as much as possible. The friendly fire statistics are much higher than they say, by my experience. They were…in the jungle, you don’t see very well. It’s very complicated, these fire fights. And people behind you open fire and they don’t know where you are and so forth, and then there’s a whole business with the artillery coming in, and they come in tight, and sometimes they miss and they have the wrong coordinates. I showed that in Platoon. And there’s also the air, the helicopters and sometimes the planes that are dropping bombs. That’s very tough stuff. And sometimes they drop them real close, real close, as they did that night of January 1, ’68.

So, people get hurt. I was wounded twice. I believe the first time I was wounded by a grenade thrown by a fellow soldier, who was an idiot. But anyway, he threw the grenade stupidly, I believed. I can’t prove it. But I just sense that that was what it was. And I think a lot more people are getting hurt by their own troops than you know. I estimated in the book, 15 to 20 percent. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of people, you…but officially, you know, it’s in the after-action reports; they never write that up.
In fact, I had a scene like that in Born on the Fourth of July with Ron Kovic, [where he] is sure he shot his own man. When he reports it to his commander, the commander dismisses it because he doesn’t want to deal with it. And it haunts Kovic until the moment he’s shot. It’s an important theme, and it’s very…it’s not talked about. And I think it’s true also in Afghanistan and Iraq, very much so. In fact, that famous football player who went over there…

ANYA PARAMPIL: Pat Ti…

OLIVER STONE: …was killed…Pat, what?

ANYA PARAMPIL: Pat Tillman.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, Pat Tillman, who played for the Arizona Cardinals, was killed by friendly fire. But they wouldn’t report it at first. It was all mucked up. A lot of that goes on. So, believe me.

The second lie was trashing civilians, killing civilians. Oh. We were in so many villages. We were…we’d split between jungle and village. We would go into the villages, yeah, we would investigate for arms and rice supplies, everything. We had to know what was going on. And we’d find things. And sometimes we wouldn’t find things, which would lead to frustration. Sometimes you’re losing men in the jungle to mines, booby traps, this, that. You come to a village; you take out your frustration. I saw a few incidents that were pretty raw, and I talk about that in the book. And I talk about myself almost crossing the line. I didn’t cross the line, but I almost did, because you could get really upset.

By example—and we didn’t know about it then—but the My Lai Massacre in March of ’68 is all about that. In fact, when you get into the My Lai Massacre—I tried to make a movie about it, but it fell apart because it was a tough subject for people. It was in My Lai, these…there were several platoons that went into a series of villages in that province, and they had bad information. The information came from the CIA, who had just tortured a few people, and they gave them faulty information telling them that they would be at such-and-such NVA (North Vietnamese regiment) in the villages that day near My Lai. And they went in thinking they were seeing the enemy. They weren’t. They were…not one enemy bullet was fired at the soldiers. Not one. That’s what the Army investigation revealed. The only…the Army investigated itself honestly, but then the report was, of course, smothered, and all the…the guy who led the report, General [William R.] Peers was…he’s a hero of mine, he tried to bust…he indicted 25 people, all the way to the top of the division. He indicted the general of the division. In fact, it goes beyond the division. It goes to the CIA guy who was providing information to the general.

It’s such an ugly story that no wonder [Lt. William] Calley is the only guy that got busted. I mean, they get…they let everybody off the hook. But that is…here you kill 500 plus civilians in cold blood in this village, and they were slaughtered in the most brutal way, when you get into the details. It’s…that’s the worst example I know, but it was going on on a small scale everywhere, I believe. Everywhere. People were knocking off Vietnamese. Jeez, because they were another race or whatever. They were, to many of us, they were “gooks.” They were not human beings. That happens. That’s the second lie.

The third lie is the biggest one of all, is that we’re winning the war, which was bullshit from the beginning. We were never winning the war. We thought maybe we were winning the war, but we were doing everything wrong in the briefing room, in our tactics, strategy, and in our reporting. I talk about [General William] Westmoreland coming out to our battle and taking the wrong conclusions from it. Three weeks later, we had the… [crosstalk] I’m sorry?

ANYA PARAMPIL: He was complaining about your haircuts.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, well, I wasn’t there, but I heard that story, that our uniforms were not together, we’re not…we’re not bloused and all that. But we were not…we were a ragged-looking troop. We’d been in the field so long.

But the point was the strategists were not thinking about what the Vietnamese were really doing. They were worried about Khe Sanh, which was not…which was a red herring. They were really…the enemy was aiming for Saigon. They were going to cut the country at the capital, and they almost did. But the point was that we were lying about the whole war to the American people. We were inflating the body counts, inflating them enormously, and at one point in the war they were saying the Viet Cong, the NVA, are going to run out of people. They never did. As many as we were killing, of course, they would count civilians as NVA, all kinds of dirty tricks.

People were there at the upper classes to get promoted. Officers were in the field to get promoted. They’d go out when they had to. Some of the master sergeants too. It was…people knew that it was a paycheck. If you were an older, experienced soldier from World War II and Korea, you knew the score. You’d stay out of the field as much as possible but get your combat pay, get every extra bonus you can get, go to the PX. PX is a gold mine. It’s like Las Vegas. You can hit the jackpot. You buy stuff at the PX, you resell it. All kinds of games.

I mean, we were moving cars over there. We were doing…there was a tremendous amount of value we sent to Vietnam that disappeared. It went into the South Vietnamese Army pockets. It went into…eventually it ended up in this…in the NVA pockets, even our weaponry. It was an amazing racket, a huge racket.

You have to imagine a Las Vegas being sent to Vietnam, all that money, all those base camps, all those helicopters, five thousand of them got shot down, plus several…another two thousand, I believe, Vietnamese helicopters, South Vietnamese. So, we had Bell Helicopters making a fortune, Brown & Root is making a fortune building base camps. It was a racket from beginning to end. It was a lie. And to fight communism. Although as we know it wasn’t…it wasn’t communism that threatened our…it was an independence revolution fought by the Vietnamese for centuries against the French, and against the Chinese, too. They just didn’t want to be a colony anymore, and we could not get out of that mindset.

So those three lies are what I talked about, and that haunted me after the war. But it took me a time, it took me a while to come around to it. But they’re at the basis. I know how government’s official stories lie. And you have to think about that in terms of where we are now with the Iraq wars and the Afghani war. I mean, you saw the report, I think, in December of last year. The Afghani [Afghanistan] Papers came out. They were featured, actually, in The Washington Post. I couldn’t believe that! And it goes back, it traces all the misreporting that happened from Afghanistan, and the objectives and the timeline and the reality. We never faced the reality that we would never get out of there alive. It was a quagmire.

ANYA PARAMPIL: And then when it…right when it seems like it may end, a dubious story claiming that Russians are paying the Taliban to kill US soldiers surfaces, and any chance of withdrawal seems sabotaged, which I personally think was actually something President Trump did genuinely want to follow through on.

One entertaining moment in the book is when you discuss your acceptance speech for best screenwriting at the Golden Globes for Midnight Express. You use the moment to try and denounce the law-and-order era of Nixon and Hollywood’s complicity in promoting it. It wasn’t received well. You were actually…you talked about being booed off stage by your colleagues in attendance, but you add, quote, “Hollywood at that time was actually far less hysterical and more tolerant than what it’s become.” What did you mean by that? How has Hollywood changed since even that time?

OLIVER STONE: Well, first, there are two things in this issue. One, was I was an early bird on that, maybe too early. I hated the cop shows I was seeing. I turned them on, and they would always be the same theme: bad guys or drugs, sometimes more often he was black or Hispanic, but they get carted off to jail. The cops were the detectives, were doing their job. It was sold to us that drugs were bad, the drug war was necessary, on television constantly. They made money on it, a lot of money, all these shows, repetitive shows.

And I really… I was in the room at that night with the producers, and they were getting awards for making these shows. And I just thought it was hypocritical because it was easy to blame Turkey for their harsh drug laws, but we had forced Turkey into those laws because we had tried to interdict their poppy growth. It’s a whole dirty story; you can tie their poppy growth to Afghanistan, which is an amazing story, but that’s not the space for it here.

The drug war was corrupt from beginning to end. There was never an honesty about it. And. also, why did you have the drug war? Why is America lecturing other countries on how to do things and interfering in their affairs, when we…our problem is here. We’re the demand factor. We want the drugs, and the question comes up of legalization of drugs, too. These issues were in my head back then, and I was trying to kind of…unfortunately I hadn’t written the speech and I was loaded, I was drunk. I also had smoked…snorted some cocaine that night. It was a wild time in Hollywood in the late 70s, and I couldn’t get my tongue around my thoughts. So, I got up on stage, and I won this award for the screenplay of Midnight Express, and I screwed it up and I got booed off the stage. But I was a frustrated young man that way, because I wanted to get this stuff out and, like, the movie Midnight Express was being misunderstood by so many people, especially critics who were saying it was so over-violent and over-, you know, zealous and anti-Turkish. It wasn’t intended that way, but my message was lost.

Now, as the other issue which you mentioned which is Hollywood, yeah, it was more tolerant in those days. It was the 70s. There was more of everything around. It wasn’t a televised event, among other things. So now I guess it is changed a lot. I mean, the law…people are much more intolerant of other people’s behavior, they’re jumping on every word somebody says, we’re oversensitive about mistakes and there’s…it’s not as much fun as it used to be. I think it’s just bigger and more corporate…more money, and, you know, now we have AT&T, we have all these corporations moving in. It’s just moved into another phase, and it’s mostly about television now.

ANYA PARAMPIL: Yeah, yeah, I’ll ask you more about that later. But you say you made up for that speech at the Golden Globes when you wrote the monologue delivered by Al Pacino as Tony Montana in Scarface, when he denounces Miami high society and tells them they actually need a bad guy like him, and that they’ll never get a bad guy like him again.

Al Pacino as Tony Montana, in Scarface: You’re not good. You just know how to hide, all right. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth, even when I lie. So, say good night to the bad guy, come on! The last time you’re gonna see a bad guy like this again, let me tell you.

OLIVER STONE: That’s when I just…that’s what I was trying to say. You’ve got to pick out these villains. I mean, Tony ultimately was respected by the audience because he was a free man. He was the man. He had the guts to say who he was, which nobody else did. He was not a hypocrite. And I admired him for that. He was a free man. And if you watch the movie closely, the one thing he does that’s positive and leads to his downfall, is he refuses to kill the assassin who’s about to blow up a character based on Orlando Letelier, the Chilean diplomat who was killed in Washington DC in 1976.

Al Pacino as Tony Montana, in Scarface: Made you feel good to kill a mother and her kids, huh? Made you feel big, you big man. Well, fuck you! What do you think I am? Do you think I killed two kids and a woman? Fuck that! I don’t need that shit in my life. Do that, motherfucker!

ANYA PARAMPIL: He refuses to follow through on the assassination because his wife and children are present. So, this is a way when you start to see more humanity in Tony Montana, especially compared with the other men he’s working with.
You say in the book, though, that the Cuban exile community actually succeeded in throwing your crew out of Miami during the filming of Scarface. What more can you tell us about that?

OLIVER STONE: Oh, it’s just that I’ve had problems with the Cuban exiles ever since they…they have really been in my soup, in anybody’s soup. You cannot suggest one progressive idea in that community, and they go nuts. It’s true about all exiles. It’s true about the Vietnamese community in Orange County. They were very tough on people like Le Ly Hayslip, who wrote the book I did, Heaven & Earth. They don’t want any of their Vietnamese saying that, you know, that Ho Chi Minh was a good guy. You have to…people who move to other countries become the worst of the accusers. The Iranians, too, in Los Angeles, you know, they always…they say, “That country.” Or even Russians, they say, “The Russians.” You understand what happens. You always love the country of America because it’s free, gives you the new break, and then you have to blast the old…the old Europe, you know, like Donald Rumsfeld called it, or blast the Cu…they never stopped on Cuba. Cubans are very hot-headed. They hated Castro. I mean, they would…I don’t know, it just turned into a hate fest out of Orwell. I mean, America has lost its mind on Castro. We’ve had…how many years has this embargo been going on? It’s insane. Everybody in Europe thinks it’s a joke and thinks…even at the UN it’s like, why is America so stubborn about it? And that’s a good question, and I think America’s stubbornness about…we give solace, we help…we give sanctuary to terrorists, we know Cuban terrorists are on our property who go there to Cuba and kill people, kill civilians, blow up airliners. We give them sanctuary.

ANYA PARAMPIL: Certainly.

OLIVER STONE: And that goes, by the way, it goes for Salvador, it goes for the Contador groups, it goes for Argentinians, it goes for everybody who tor…every torturer who lives in this country, they come to this country because they stash their money here and they come here to live. There’s a lot of them, from all the South American countries and Central American countries.

ANYA PARAMPIL: That’s certainly…

OLIVER STONE: Salvadoran, known leaders of death squads are here. In fact, we had a lot to do with the Salvadoran death squads because we trained them from six…I forgot their names. Madonna? Medrano? [Gen. Jose Alberto Medrano]. Yeah, in ’67, we brought the Salvadoran military to Vietnam to study our techniques torturing Vietnamese so they could bring them back to Salvador. And those people, a lot of those people were involved in the Salvadoran Civil War, and they killed quite a few labor leaders, reformers. Tortured them. Sad story.

ANYA PARAMPIL: And then that even blows back to the United States today, when media…sensationalist media or politicians complain about violence in the gang community, that’s really blowback from our policy in El Salvador, where we trained many of these people and it trickled down, came back here.
People might not realize that out of all of your films that you write about in the book, Platoon was actually the most difficult to get finally made. It was passed up repeatedly, and you were working on it forever. You write about how MGM actually didn’t want the film because Henry Kissinger, as well as Reagan’s secretary of state Alexander Haig, sat on the company’s board. How pervasive is that kind of political control in Hollywood, even today?

OLIVER STONE: I can’t prove that. That’s my…I say very clearly in the book, this is my feeling at the time, because that movie was no risk at that price. They cut the budget down. Mr. [Dino] De Laurentiis was going to produce it with me and Michael Cimino, and we were…for about $3 million at that point. We cut the budget way down, which is very hard to do. I mean, it should have really cost six, cut it to three, and I was about to start it, and in the Philippines, we’d planned it all out. I had to cast it and everything. It was ’83, 1983. And all of a sudden, MGM, which was the distributor for all of Dino’s films—and he was making risky films with David Lynch; the Blue Velvet film was being distributed by them. So, there was this acceptance at that point of the video revolution. There was a new video…video was getting hot and people were making money off of it, so they would take sometimes a risk on a film like Blue Velvet and certainly Platoon. It was no problem for Dino. But they wouldn’t put up a $3 million…a measly $3 million to distribute the film. Now, you never can find out why they won’t, but you…they always say no. But I know that the head of the MGM studio was either fronting, saying no, because he was blaming it on the board, the board doesn’t want to do it. He didn’t say who, but who’s on the board? You know. And whether he was lying in the first place, I don’t know. He could have been, like, he didn’t even want to take it to the board. I don’t know, you never know why they say no. But I heard a lot of no’s in my time. It was very frustrating.

You see, because, again, they were making a fortune off Sylvester Stallone stuff. He was going back to Vietnam, you remember, to save MIAs, the missing prisoners. There was a few hundred of them, and he was saving them and for…in other words he was refighting the war, making America look like heroes and the Vietnamese looking like thieving scoundrels. So…and Chuck Norris joined that brigade and was making his version of that.

So, Vietnam had not been very well-depicted in American films, and I think Platoon was one of the first ones that was realistic about what was going on in the war. The first. That’s why it was successful. But it was made against the popular concept of what they thought would be popular. In fact, the fact that it broke through in ’86 so suddenly—and it was so popular, you realize that this film raced around the world. It made a lot of money in America, $136 million. That’s a huge amount for that time. This was the third largest gross in the country for that year, and it was a realistic film that couldn’t…it was not geared for women, it was not geared for younger children. But yet, women came in the third week. They started to come in droves. And then young kids would get in, even at 14 they’d sneak in. So, the film—and not only in America but everywhere, every country had a tremendous success with it. It was unbelievable. There was some yearning for truth. And it happened in my life once. And I, you know, and it’s happened a few times, actually, but never on such a big scale.

ANYA PARAMPIL: One of my favorite films of yours is Salvador, starring James Woods. Back in the 1980s you were skewing USAID for its hand in promoting regime change projects and war in Central America and were very interested in the clandestine activities of spooks in the region. How did you develop that perspective on the region, and how has it lasted for you through today?

OLIVER STONE: Well, I took a trip there with Richard Boyle. Now, Richard’s an interesting pariah of a journalist. He’d been…he’s covered Vietnam, he covered Ireland, he’d been in Beirut. He always went for the wars. He went for the most dangerous assignments. And he’d spent some time in Salvador during the 1980 period, when that war was intense, at its most intense civil war. And he knew the region, so he took me down there. I went to five countries with him, and sure enough, you know.

I’d been in Vietnam in ’65 as a teacher. I’d seen the growth of the US community there. I saw the spooks, the guys who work in intelligence, the guys who sometimes wear uniforms, sometimes not. They were all over the place. And then the soldiers come in. They came in about June of ’65, into Saigon. So, I saw the beginning of a war. And then when I went back, I saw the real thing.

What happened was, the same thing was going on when Reagan, if you remember, Ronald Reagan wanted to destroy the revolution in Nicaragua. He thought it was a communist front and that they would cross…he literally said they could be crossing the Rio Grande any day from Nicaragua, which is insane. But he had that power to and he sent money illegally to the Contras, who were a terrorist group that were infiltrating Nicaragua and killing, blowing up hospitals, doing anything to destroy the revolution, cutting telephones wires down. It was an ugly, ugly war. Many civilians were killed.

He also was mining the harbor in Managua, which the World Court [International Court of Justice (ICJ)] condemned him for. Anything to destroy this regime. And he was doing it illegally because Congress did not pass the Boland Amendment and did not want him doing this.

But he did it, underneath the rug. And how did he do it? One of the ways was he sold weapons to Iran—which became the Iran-Contra scandal—to the Iranian government, who he believes was supposed to be a national security threat, too. And then he would take…he took the money from the Iranians and split it. Took…gave 50 percent of it to the Contras through his Oliver North scheme. It was a dirty, dirty, dirty operation. And he would have gone down for it, I’m sure. It was a treasonous behavior. Illegal. Wholly illegal. Reagan would have been impeached in a second if the Washington press corps hated him as much as Nixon. But they didn’t. Katharine Graham and The Washington Post did not want to have another Watergate. This is, quote, she was quoted as saying, “We can’t afford…the country cannot afford another Watergate.” Which is nonsense because it was worse…it was a worse scandal than Watergate.

ANYA PARAMPIL: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

OLIVER STONE: George HW Bush was involved heavily and knew all about it but got off the hook with that one.

It was… and anyway, so I was there and saw all this going on, and I felt it was going to happen. I knew this was going to be another Vietnam, and there was going to be a dirty war, too, because Nicaragua was not going to give up. They were tough fighters. So, I was in Honduras, among other places. I could see they built up Salvador. You could see the buildup. They would… they were cheating on the number of troops just to avoid Congress, you know. And in the streets of Honduras you felt the vibe, that we’re going into Nicaragua. Thank god the CIA blew it when one of their pilots got shot out of the…on a cargo flight over…got shot down and revealed everything, like typical CIA screw-up from…it just happened several times in our history, actually. Indonesia, it happened.

And that became a scandal, and Reagan had to change his whole policy. He had to back off. First of all, they were going to impeach him, but he didn’t want that. So that was…he had to deny everything. And the support for the war in Nicaragua vanished during that period, when Platoon came out in October, started to happen in October ’86. And I think if it hadn’t happened, I think there would have been another Vietnam down there.

ANYA PARAMPIL: That’s a scary thought.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, the hatred for any revolutionary movement in South America or Central America is intense. I mean, we saw they removed the leader of…they’re going after Venezuela, horribly, you know, every day. It’s just…I hope to god it doesn’t blow. But they got the Bolivian leader, they got the Ecuadorian leader, they got the Paraguay leader, they got the Brazilian…I mean, they’ve done a great countercoup recently against the leftist revolution in South America. I covered that on in my documentaries.

ANYA PARAMPIL: And that’s exactly what I wanted to ask you about, because you did travel to South America and profiled a number of left-wing leaders, from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, the Kirchners in Argentina, Correa in Ecuador, Castro in Cuba, Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Fernando Lugo in Paraguay. And the reason I list them all is to make that exact point you just brought up, which is that, unfortunately, only the governments of Venezuela and Cuba have remained revolutionary to this day, thanks to these coups and lawfare campaigns waged by the US government. So, I’m just wondering, why did you decide to make that film? Because it really…it had an impact on me, and I found it so interesting to see these leaders demonized in US media to be walking the streets freely among their people in a way that US presidents would never be able to do.

Oliver Stone in South of the Border: Who is Hugo Chavez? Some believe he is the enemy.

CNN clip: He’s more dangerous than Bin Laden, and the effects of Chavez’s war against America could eclipse those of 9/11.

Oliver Stone: Some believe he is the answer. But no matter what you believe, in South America he is just the beginning.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, my problem is I like underdogs, and it’s cost me because I’ve always gone for that. I just don’t like bullies, and I’ve hated them all my life. And that’s what we are. The underdogs have had very little chance, and they’re struggling, scraping out these revolutions. Reform is so difficult down there because they have so many…such an upper-class system that discriminates against people of color, discriminates against poor people, and you see it everywhere. And land reform is one of the hardest things to pull off, and that’s, as we know from Castro in Cuba, he…they still hate him for that, that he changed the equation. And, of course, Chavez, too, he changed the equation enormously. He brought out of extreme poverty a huge population, and they’ve never forgiven him for that.

So, actually these films that I’ve done have not…are not profitable. The United States’ average citizen doesn’t care about South America. It’s treated like an overgrown weed in the backyard for us. We never think about these people, but this is what we’re doing in our backyard, as if we owned the place. It’s one of the saddest stories of my lifetime that I’ve seen, it just…and my Salvador film was not that successful at first, only because of Platoon that it did carry; it was ignored. Same thing for South of the Border, Comandante, the two major documentaries I made. It’s been hard to do those subjects, very hard.

ANYA PARAMPIL: Yeah, but I do think you’ve made a difference in making the public care more about the region, so I appreciate that.
I wanted to close by asking you to…go ahead.

OLIVER STONE: I’m sorry, I just wanted to say that the name of the Chavez film was South of the Border, and I had interviews with eight presidents as I went around. It was an amazing sweep, a new social movement that was sweeping South America.

ANYA PARAMPIL: Yeah, it was a beautiful film. And it was amazing. It was an amazing time to think that all of those people were in power. And it’s really heartbreaking to see where some of those countries have since ended up.

But I wanted to close by just asking you to talk about Hollywood, because your former professor at NYU and fellow filmmaker Martin Scorsese has caught attention for pointing out that the blockbusters coming out of Hollywood as of late have lost their sense as an art form, really, and he expresses real sadness over the fact that companies such as Netflix and Hulu as well as superhero movies and franchises seem to dominate the industry. Do you share his sentiment, and how do we get Hollywood back?

OLIVER STONE: Don’t ask me. I’m a pariah in the business, I suppose. I just don’t understand…I agree with him. It’s, you know, first of all we have to get theaters back. Right now, with COVID there’s no theaters, so there’s no even standard to go…there’s no movies until there are theaters. Because movies are collective experience, and you hope for the best when you have a collective experience, that other people have joined in and you have that sense of bonding whether it’s a comedy or a drama film. You feel it, an audience, it runs through the audience’s spine. That’s missing. Watching a film at home on a screen, even on a large screen, is not the same thing, unless you invite 100 people into your living room.

So, it’s difficult. When they do come back, the theaters, if they do, which I think they will, it’ll still be the same problem. It’ll be blockbusters because the kids go, and that’s…they want to see fantasy and big action. But the human dramas, which are often smaller in scale, are going to be more difficult to get through the system. It’s a tough problem, and it’s an art form that’s kind of disappearing, as all art forms do in some way or another. They get, you know, they get repurposed and, you know, there was a run on classical art, and there’s a new kind of filmmaking that will replace the old films. But I still love the old films. I mean, we have created in 100 years in the world, we’ve created a new enormous treasure of cinema, great stories that people don’t even know. I mean, they could sit at home and watch these movies they don’t even heard of, and they would be entertained. But that’s gone. It’s like fads have to…what is it, you know, what is time, but the new things come into being and sometimes they’re not as good, but they’re considered to be popular.

ANYA PARAMPIL: Yeah, yeah, in reading your book I definitely started to miss going to the movies. Just this…the feeling that you described just now. And also considering what you’ve just said, which is that films were very different, I think, when you were making the ones that you’ve written about in this book, and now we just don’t get the same level of quality, I feel. And the obsession with, like, made for TV Netflix, that kind of thing, I think we are losing an appreciation for these films. So, I would hope that viewers get your book, read it, and then also spend some time going back and watching old films. It’s a great way to spend quarantine. It’s definitely what I’ve been trying to do while stuck at home, and maybe your book will inspire people to look back at some of your work and a lot of the other films and directors that you speak about. Because they just stand the test of time.

OLIVER STONE: Also, another thing you could think about, I think, it’s very evident, is since 2001 the degree of patriotism of the films supporting the United States is evident. The Netflix world don’t really tolerate intense criticism. You have to check this out, and you’ll…very few films are honestly critical of the…call it the military or the foreign policy structure in this country, as my films were; they’re not being made. And there’s a reason. Either it’s self-censorship or because you just can’t get on…you can’t get a streaming service to back it. This is a serious problem.

ANYA PARAMPIL: It is, and I guess it’s in some ways up to the consumers to really demand a break with what we’ve got and show that we still have an appreciation for what used to be done. Because I think that’s the point of film, right? Is to…what you were doing, with criticizing the war in Vietnam or casting a light on just US society in general. I think that’s why we watch film. And so, I appreciate you making so much time for me this afternoon. And thank you for writing this book. And again, I hope viewers will read it and watch some old films.

OLIVER STONE: I hope so, too. Thank you very much.

thegrayzone.com

There’s a sickness that comes with the certainty of those who view the world in so black and white, so good and bad, so us versus them terms, that killing is often a morally defensible act. More so, such killing often goes beyond just simple self defense, to a level of retributive necessity, a preventive act that makes the act of killing practically an act of altruism. “If I hadn’t killed the bad guy, the bad guy would have killed other people” so the reasoning goes. The myth of redemptive violence, is clearly espoused and expressed in our explanations of American history: we had to kill the British to be free; in America’s majority Christian religion: Jesus had to die in the most painful way possible, on the cross, for mankind to be saved; and in the United State’s greatest popular culture: Luke had to destroy the Death Star to save the galaxy…

Such redemptive violence fails to exist in the real world, and in the individual life experiences of those involved, on both sides of the killing. Even now readers will say “what about Hitler?” It seems silly to have to remind Americans that Hitler did not spring from a historical vacuum, that history and Adolf Hitler did not start in 1933, but that rather Hitler, the Nazis and the Second World War, were a consequence and continuation of the violence and the killing of the First World War and that is the lesson of both wars.* However, Hitler and the Second World War, in the years and decades after its end, and the deaths of over 50 million people, became the casus belli for massive armaments, tens of thousands of world-ending nuclear weapons, proxy wars, and bombings, invasions and occupations that killed, wounded, poisoned, psychologically scarred, and left homeless tens and tens of millions of people world-wide. With each successive threat, perceived or real, the United States government imagined, concocted, and faced, the imagery of Hitler, Nazis and a morally simplistic, but well accepted description of an enemy that personified Evil, and allowed Americans to be defined as Good, was presented to the American public as a justification for war, neo-colonialism, obscene weapons budgets, economic inequality, and the many other trappings of Empire.

This straight forward, binary explanation for why the United States funds and wages war at levels beyond all others on the planet appeals to our basest tribal instincts and satisfies our emotional need to have a resident purpose: someone of whom to be afraid, someone to protect against, and someone whom to seek out and carry our revenge. Not only does this forced mass understanding of the world as Us vs the Other work well for the Pentagon’s funding, recruiting and its wars, but it is a mainstay of Hollywood and the US entertainment industry. This cheap and easy story telling, which of course can be found in tales going back to cave paintings of primitive man vs beast, allows the audience to identify with the violent, yet well-intentioned, protagonist and lets them see the hero in themselves as the actors vanquish evil, restore order and justice, and make the future safe. As the audience leaves the theater they know that is how they would act if faced with the same existential and moral threat as the characters in the movie.

Such Pentagon and Hollywood storytelling, again focusing on the myth of redemptive violence, begins as soon as children watch cartoons, which often use excessive violence to achieve order and justice, or are taken to their first military air show or 4^th of July parade. This exploitation by the Pentagon and Hollywood of children, teenagers and the adult public leads us to a militarized society where we spend over a trillion dollars a year on war, while we currently kill people in more than a dozen separate countries. To the individual American though, particularly for many that enlist, this is often a simple exercise of right versus wrong, worldly responsibility versus neglectful appeasement, and Good versus Evil, ie. the underpinnings of American Exceptionalism.

If such morally superior beliefs by the average hyper-militarized American were grounded in factual or historical experience, were exposed to critical thought, logic or examination, or were tested by actual exposure or contact with people of other cultures and lands, such due diligence would cause the foundations of US Manichean existence to rot, crumple and collapse. This moral dissonance may certainly be the root cause of why 20 veterans a day are killing themselves and why America’s youngest male veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are killing themselves at a rate 6 times higher than other young men their age.

Guilt, produced by the actions or inactions of the soldier in combat, may be worsened by the heightened sense of moral action and position so many Americans take into combat with them. When the reality of the wars, particularly the lies of the wars, the perfidiousness of their leaders, and the moral ambiguity of their own individual purpose and actions become a part of their conscious self, such guilt can cause a collapse of the self many veterans cannot survive. The importance of guilt, exacerbated by the destruction of a previously held moral self-believe system, as the primary driver in combat veteran suicides has been well known now for decades, with the VA reporting in 1990 the best predicator of veteran suicide was combat related guilt and, more recently, the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah in 2015 assessing that 22 of 23 studies that examined the relationship between guilt, combat, suicide and the act of killing found a solid and undeniable relationship.

But, even as this moral certainty in war devastates the individual when it comes undone, it dovetails nicely in two of the United States greatest industries and exports: war and Hollywood.

Right away, at the movie industry’s founding, the US military was heavily involved in the business of Hollywood and in ensuring Americans had an understanding of American history and society, and the world, as befitted the American military and government. Most notably, in those early days, soldiers from West Point were involved with the production of D.W. Griffith’s infamous 1915 racist glorification of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War, The Birth of a Nation; a film whose historical re-telling of the moral clash of good and bad, in literal black and white terms, still reverberates today.

Hollywood soon got to prove its loyalty and utility to contemporary war making. During the First World War, a youthful, but earnest Hollywood pledged its support to the propaganda and recruiting efforts of the war as the Motion Picture News announced: “[E]very individual at work in this industry” has promised to provide “slides, film leaders and trailers, posters…to spread that propaganda so necessary to the immediate mobilization [sic] of the country’s great resources.”

After the war, cooperation between Hollywood and the military deepened, culminating in 1927 in a soon to become standard Pentagon and Hollywood transactional relationship. Hundreds of US military pilots, planes, and over 3,000 infantry men were provided to make the World War I film, Wings. Wings was a massive success and became the first recipient of the Best Picture Award at the inaugural Academy Awards in 1927. Cooperation between Hollywood and the US government continued into World War II, with President Franklin Roosevelt calling the movie industry a “necessary and beneficial part of the war effort.” Some of this cooperation between Hollywood and the US government in “the good war” is just now being understood, as Greg Mitchell explained to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now on the recent 75^th Anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.

More than 90 years later, and as documented by Matthew Alford and Thomas Secker in their book, National Security Cinema, the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency have actively taken an editorial, production and creative role in thousands of movies and TV shows; Alford and Secker list the Pentagon alone having played a role in 813 movies and 1,133 TV shows (as of 2016). Many times the role played by the military went well beyond simply providing the tanks or helicopters needed to add to the realism of the film, as the Pentagon and the CIA have, through established contracts with the movie studios, final say over the script, including rewriting lines of dialogue, deleting scenes not in line with the military or CIA’s narrative or adding in scenes helpful to the image, politics and recruitment drives of the United States generals and spies.

This relationship, one of “mutual exploitation” as the Department of Defense’s chief liaison with Hollywood, Phil Strub, describes it, allows unelected American military and intelligence leaders to not just censor current films, but future films, causing studios, financiers, producers, directors and writers, i.e. a large percentage of Hollywood, to endeavor to keep the military and CIA happy in order to make sure the studios get the support they need from Uncle Sam when it is time to film the next block-buster, super-hero, action-adventure or war movie. Not only does the Pentagon provide the equipment, but also by using real-life soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in the movie or TV show, Hollywood saves millions of dollars on unionized labor. These savings are enormous, and are not to be dismissed, especially when the high cost of computer generated images (CGI) are understood. Take, for example, the 2013 Tom Hanks drama Captain Phillips: by utilizing all the Pentagon had to offer in terms of ships, aircraft and sailors, in lieu of CGI and union labor, the producers of Captain Phillips may have saved as much as $50 million by using US military support. There is also no dismissing either the importance to the studio of using actual military equipment when it comes to the authenticity and realism of the movie scenes and action – audiences can tell the difference.

The results of such a morally-redacted transactional relationship between Hollywood and the military allow for the Pentagon to profit just as much as the studios’ bank accounts. The need to control the narrative over not just war making, but over American society and military culture, is all important to the generals and admirals. So, in exchange for the equipment and service members it provides to Hollywood, the Pentagon doesn’t just influence movie and TV storylines, it controls them. References to issues such as military suicide and rape are kept out of the movies, even though they are epidemic and endemic within the Armed Services. Movies based on classic, important and prescient novels like 1984 or The Quiet American have their endings, in their film adaptations, luridly changed in order to meet US government thematic and propaganda efforts. These propaganda efforts are directed towards the American public more than anyone else, and, along with government run media are now legal: Thanks Obama!

If studios want to make a film or TV show critical of the US military or CIA, and the Pentagon and Langley are the ones that determine if a film or show is critical, than the studios must remember that access for future films, typically their biggest box office hits, to the US government’s largesse may be jeopardized. David Sirota clearly demonstrated this in 2011 when he repeated these two quotes in a Washington Post op-ed:

“Strub described the approval process to Variety in 1994: “The main criteria we use is. . .how could the proposed production benefit the military. . .could it help in recruiting [and] is it in sync with present policy?” Robert Anderson, the Navy’s Hollywood point person, put it even more clearly to PBS in 2006: “If you want full cooperation from the Navy, we have a considerable amount of power, because it’s our ships, it’s our cooperation, and until the script is in a form that we can approve, then the production doesn’t go forward.”

It’s worth noting that not only do Hollywood producers get access to the equipment and the money saving personnel, but they also may receive access to those at the top of the military and CIA with the secrets and the behind the scenes tales that lead to the block-buster tales of patriotic and morally-simple heroism that audiences love.

It thus makes sense then that an award winning producer like Kathryn Bigelow would make the following, absurdly obsequious, statement prior to producing Zero Dark Thirty, her film on the killing of Osama bin Laden:

“Our upcoming film project… integrates the collective efforts of three administrations, including those of Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, as well as the cooperative strategies and implementation by the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, the dangerous work of finding the world’s most wanted man was carried out by individuals in the military and intelligence communities who put their lives at risk for the greater good without regard for political affiliation. This was an American triumph, both heroic and nonpartisan, and there is no basis to suggest that our film will represent this enormous victory otherwise.”

It doesn’t take too much to understand then how Bigelow, and her production partner Mark Boal, received top secret classified briefings from the CIA and how Zero Dark Thirty then went on to parrot, quite falsely, the use of torture as a tool that successfully led to locating bin Laden after a decade of failure. Such a false narrative on torture, albeit one cloaked under the near-holy robe of moral necessity in the never ending Manichean Global War on Terror, is a necessary and just lie for the leaders of the CIA as they seek not only to excuse past crimes, but exonerate current ones. Seemingly a plurality, if not a majority, of Americans understand their history and the context of world events via entertainment media, helped along now by social media. This is a public relations success most governments, religions and institutions could never imagine, let alone realize. Surely other nations and entities have utilized theater for propaganda purposes, take for example the spectacle of the Roman Triumph. However, I am hard pressed to identify any other media industries and nations that have so equally benefitted one another while so wounding the values and knowledge of their respective populations.

The films those who are selling war as a product gladly and willingly sponsor, like the The Transformers, Avengers, and X-Men franchises, are comic book tales of good versus evil, movies that explain the urgent necessity in utilizing brutal violence against “the enemy”. The reality of violence, the consequences of never-ending revenge cycles, or the psychological and psychiatric of impact of killing are rarely shown or discussed, because that would be counter to the purpose. As Sirota noted in 2011, and a statistic the Pentagon was probably well aware of before then, young men who were shown recruiting ads for the army in connection with super-hero films were 25% more likely to enlist. It is well understood as well how the Pentagon is using video games to recruit; cheers to Representative Alexadria Ocasio-Cortez and others who recently tried to provide some oversight to the military’s use of advertising in video games. Like a special feature produced by the Army that tied into the 2016 film Independence Day, the Pentagon’s use of advertising in interactive video games allows military recruiters to capture the details and information of children as young as 12 years old.

It is easy to note that the films the military doesn’t like and won’t cooperate with are those that, to combat veterans like myself and others, seem to tell the truths of war. Movies like Catch-22, M.A.S.H., Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Thin Red Line, Three Kings and The Deer Hunter are some of the films that were denied support from the Pentagon because they don’t positively exhibit “the military ethos”. However, these films are perhaps the best war films Hollywood has produced. What they do, and this is anathema to Mr. Strub and the generals at the Pentagon, is to exhibit the horror, the absurdity and the moral indifference of war and killing, and, at times, aghast, they even show the humanity of the enemy.

These are the things so many combat veterans know very well in their lives post-war and post-killing. The Deer Hunter’s wedding scene, where a youthful Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken and John Savage attempt to celebrate a Green Beret who is silently and agonizingly drinking away the Vietnam War by himself, is, to me, perhaps the best film summarization of war. Persistently asked by the gung-ho young men who can’t wait to go to war and kill for themselves what the war is like, the Green Beret will only reply with the words “Fuck it”. As the young men’s dismay, incomprehension and anger grow to this blasphemy against the goodness and purpose of American war, the Green Beret medicates, numbs, and punishes himself with alcohol. Such a scene is not the kind of scene that provides the moral assuredness and certainty of US war and killing our generals want the American people to buy and consume, but it is the sentiment and action that combat veterans will tell you is truthful.

Moral certainty is not connected to truth however, perhaps they are antagonistic to one another. Moral certainty is connected though to the waging of war and killing, and the waging of war and killing is connected to media and entertainment profits. Hollywood and the Pentagon are not only symbiotic, they are the composite products of a US Empire that survives through the continual application of warfare, both against foreign populations and its own people (the utility of police and crime movies/TV shows is integral to promoting and sustaining the American public’s support for a massive, pervasive and ultra-violent police, surveillance and incarceration state).

Without Hollywood to inform and educate young people and their families to the dangers and horrors of the world, the military would be hard pressed to fill its ranks, meanwhile without the support of a military larger than the rest of the world’s militaries combined, Hollywood would not just find it difficult to produce its films and shows profitably, it may even struggle to sell tickets, streaming subscriptions and commercials. The two Leviathans don’t only support one another, they reinforce the existence of one another, as the power, justice and necessity of redemptive violence underlies the basic narratives of the US military’s purpose and Hollywood’s story-telling. That this comes at a profane and bloody price totaling in countless millions of souls is of no consequence to the men and women for whom the war-making narratives support, sustain and nurture an Empire and an industry that total in the trillions of dollars annually. Killing is not just good business, it is good theater.

The Pentagon and CIA, by subsidizing those in Hollywood that go along with it and punishing those that don’t, create and sustain the reality of a dangerous and hostile world, one in which violence is necessary to be a force for good, to protect and uphold the civilized world. Hollywood, eager for the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billion of dollars, in subsidies annually, material and labor support from the US government, and keen to keep alive good versus evil storytelling, is a happy partner to the Pentagon, the CIA and the US government.

Not even a pandemic that has killed more Americans then every war in the last 75 years combined begets the moral authority possessed by American Empire and its myth of redemptive violence. There is incredible argumentation and divisiveness, even some apathy, in Congress about how to protect the American people from a real threat such as coronavirus, and almost no support for any real measures to protect Americans from the very real existential threats of climate change or nuclear warfare, let alone the continuing consequences of economic inequality. However, there is mass consensus in Congress, including a majority of Democrats, who annually, with certainty, vote for increased US war spending and the continuation of the US’ unending wars against black and brown people in the Muslim world.

No dictator or monarch, regime or republic has ever had the means to condition, if not brainwash, its public into complicity and to ensure the compliance of its political system in support of its naked imperial ambitions, against imagined enemies, in the manner in which the US Empire benefits from Hollywood. Of course, this is only just one element within a capitalist and imperialist structure in which various near-monopolies cooperate to benefit one another at the expense of people and planet, but this is the relationship that reaches into our homes, teaches our children, and ministers, so very effectively, the belief and cause of American Exceptionalism in its many bloody forms.

*For reasons of space I will just mention WWI, although the origins of and reasons for both world wars far predate the 20^th century.

counterpunch.org

What makes this so sickening is not that these memorials are untrue, but rather that it is these same MSM/Hollywood forces that are the heirs to the fascist McCarthyite machine which Kirk Douglass and his close network of collaborators fought so courageously against during their lives.

Hollywood and the CIA Today

In recent decades, barring a few exceptions, Hollywood (just like much of the mainstream media) has become a branch of the CIA and broader military industrial complex. While fake news agencies as CNN spin false facts to the intellects of mushy-minded Americans, Hollywood prepares the fertile soil for those false seeds to grow by shaping the hearts and imagination in their victims through the important hypnotic power of storytelling. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, Red Sparrow and Bitter Harvest are just a few of the most popular propaganda films which portray Russians as the nefarious villains of the earth and heroically elevate the CIA to patriotic heights.

Hacked emails from Sony pictures published on WikiLeaks provided a smoking gun when it was revealed that the Obama administration had courted Hollywood execs to the task of promoting films to “counter Russian narratives” and all of this in the midst of a renewed Cold War terror which has led to attacks on Chinese scholars in America and an attempted coup against a sitting U.S. President.

YET, just as Hollywood can serve as a force of great evil, Kirk Douglas and his small network of collaborators demonstrated that it could equally serve as a force of great good. This is because films exhibiting a spirit of honesty and courage can bypass the gatekeepers of intellect and strike at the inner being of the audience rendering a people, under certain circumstances better patriots of their nation and citizens of the world.

This brings us to the important question of “what truly made Kirk Douglas and his small but influential network of collaborators so important during such a dark period of World history during the peak of the Cold War?”

Ending the Blacklist: Douglas and Trumbo

The above quote from a CNN memorial cited Douglas’s efforts to end the Hollywood Blacklist. For those who are not aware, the blacklist was the name given to the “untouchables” of Hollywood. Those writers, directors and producers who courageously refused to cooperate with the fascist hearings of the House on Un-American Activities run under the dictatorial leadership of Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. By the end of the hearings, hundreds of careers were destroyed and examples were made of ten leading writers led by the great Dalton Trumbo- who were not only given prison sentences for defending the U.S. Constitution, but who became un-hirable for years after their release. Not only this, but anyone caught employing them were threatened with similar penalties.

In spite of that grim reality many of them continued to work under pseudonyms with Trumbo even winning two uncredited academy awards during the 1950s (Roman Holiday and the Brave One).

During this dark period, a network of brave film makers formed who worked very closely together for 20 years which centered around Trumbo, Kirk Douglas, David Miller, John Frankenheimer, Stanley Kramer, Burt Lancaster and producer Edward Lewis. Many of the films produced by these men not only carried stories which shook the foundations of the newly reorganized deep state, but also strove to awaken the moral sensibilities of Americans whose complacency had permitted the creation of a new Pax Americana abroad, and racist police state within.

Kirk Douglas responded to this early on by forming his own studio called Bryna Productions which created the anti-war classic Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960).

Paths of Glory told the true story of the unjust execution of several French soldiers who refused to obey a suicide mission during WW1 and provided a strong statement against irrational wars but also arbitrary political power run amok.

Set in 72 BC, Spartacus told the true story of a Thracian slave who led a two year freedom struggle against Rome and spoke directly to the civil rights movement in America and fight against imperialism more broadly.

What gave Spartacus its strategic potency to end the Blacklist was due to the fact that it was written by the leading untouchable “commie-lover” of America… Dalton Trumbo. Kirk Douglas’ last minute decision to use Trumbo’s real name was more of a risk than most people realize, and in later years, Douglas described this period:

“The choices were hard. The consequences were painful and very real. During the blacklist, I had friends who went into exile when no one would hire them; actors who committed suicide in despair … I was threatened that using a Blacklisted writer for Spartacus — my friend Dalton Trumbo — would mark me as a ‘Commie-lover’ and end my career. There are times when one has to stand up for principle. I am so proud of my fellow actors who use their public influence to speak out against injustice. At 98 years old, I have learned one lesson from history: It very often repeats itself. I hope that Trumbo, a fine film, will remind all of us that the Blacklist was a terrible time in our country, but that we must learn from it so that it will never happen again.”

When the newly-elected president John Kennedy and his brother Robert crossed anti-Communist picket lines to first attend the film, and then endorsed it loudly, the foundations of the Blacklist were destroyed and the edifice of 15 years of terror came crashing down.

Kennedy’s Murder and Trumbo’s Revenge

Kennedy’s death in 1963 sent America into a spiral of despair, drugs and insanity. Films like Frankenheimber’s Manchurian Candidate (1962), and 7 Days in May (1964) attempted to shed light on the deep state takeover of America but it was too late. During the 1960s, Douglas, Ed Lewis, Trumbo and Frankenheimber continued to work closely together on films like Lonely are the Brave, Town without Pity, the Fixer, Last Sunset, Seconds, The Train, Devil’s Disciple, Johny Got His Gun, the Horsemen and more. Sadly, the cultural rot had set in too deeply and nothing came as close to the artistry of the dense 1957-1964 period of creative resistance.

One little known film stands out quite a bit however, and since so little is known of this small masterpiece, a word must be said now.

Ten years after Kennedy’s murder, Trumbo, Edward Lewis, David Miller, Mark Lane and Garry Horrowitz created a film which could be called “Trumbo’s last stand”. This film was called Executive Action (1973) and starred Kirk Douglas’ long-time collaborator Burt Lancaster as a leading coordinator of the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.  Edward Lewis, who had also produced Spartacus with Douglas earlier, spearheaded this film which tells the story of a cabal of oligarchs who arrange the murder of John Kennedy using three teams of professional mercenaries (former CIA men fired after the Bay of Pigs fiasco). This incredibly well-researched storyline infused fiction with powerful facts and was based upon the work of Mark Lane- a close friend of the Kennedys, NY State Attorney, and civil rights activist (the only legislator to be arrested as a Freedom rider fighting segregation).

During a powerful dialogue between James Farrington (Lancaster) and the leader of the cabal Robert Foster (played by Robert Ryan), the gauntlet is dropped, as the true reason is given for the need to Kennedy in chilling detail: Global Depopulation.

Here Farrington is told by Foster:

“The real problem is this James. In two decades there will be seven billion human beings on this planet. Most of them brown, yellow or black. All of them hungry. All of them determined to love. They’ll swarm out of their breeding grounds into Europe and North America… Hence, Vietnam. An all-out effort there will give us control of south Asia for decades to come. And with proper planning, we can reduce the population to 550 million by the end of the century. I know… I’ve seen the data.”

James: “We sound rather like Gods reading the Doomsday book don’t we?”

Foster: “Well, someone has to do it. Not only will the nations affected be better off. But the techniques developed there can be used to reduce our own excess population: blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, poverty prone whites, and so forth”.

Although the film was pulled from most American theaters, it still stands as one of the most direct and chilling refutations of the lone-gunman narrative and is also the only film this author is aware of which showcases the deeper neo-Malthusian agenda underlying the murder of Kennedy which feared the optimistic vision he had threatened to create as outlined in my previous paper “Remembering JFK’s Vision for the Future that Should Have Been”.

The oligarchs attempting to play God in today’s world, just as their predecessors who oversaw JFK’s murder know that hunger, war and disease are not the natural state of humanity, but simply means of checking population growth.

It is worth keeping in mind that those same media and Hollywood outlets mourning Douglas’ passing are the perpetrators of this Malthusian legacy, and are deathly afraid of a renewal of JFK’s legacy under a revived space program to establish permanent human colonies on the Moon and Mars as well as establish cooperative relations with Russia and China which provides humanity its last, best chance to end the oligarchy’s pandemic of wars, disease and hunger forever.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Frank Capra (1897-1991) stands as one of the most brilliant directors/producers of the 20^th Century, and sadly also one of the least understood- known at best for the film It’s a Wonderful Life played every year as a Christmas tradition, or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Unbeknownst to even many film connoisseurs today, Capra was not only a pre-eminent cultural warrior who took every opportunity to expose fascist movements during the 1930’s and 1940’s but also fought to provide a positive principled understanding of the divinity mankind’s higher nature in all his works. When asked to put into words what motivated him to create movies he said:

“My films must let every man, woman, and child know that God loves them, that I love them, and that peace and salvation will become a reality only when they all learn to love each other”

During World War II, Capra’s Why We Fight series was one of the most important educational tools used to shape the hearts and minds of the American population towards the strategic nature and purpose of the war against the fascist machine which had received much of its support from financiers in the Anglo-American establishment. In America, these groups were masquerading as “patriots” under the American Liberty League promoting America’s neutrality in that conflict. It was an open secret that these groups preferred to let Hitler and Mussolini usher in a new order which they saw as a wonderful opportunity to rule the world, and it was to these groups that FDR declared famously “they who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order”. The President knew of what he spoke as he had declared open war on these American fascists from 1932 onward.

Capra not only struggled to revive Roosevelt’s mission to end poverty, hunger and war after the war ended, but also struggled against the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) which was created in 1949 to shape the new era of art, music and cinema in the post war age as weapons against communism. The CCF had spared no time in purging Hollywood of all “FDR patriots” under the FBI-steered witch hunt known as Mcarthyism on the one hand while promoting a new culture of banality on the other pouring millions of dollars into mind deadening film scripts conducive to an age of white collar consumerism. This CIA/CCF agenda was recognized by only a few leading film directors as a spiritual virus that had to be stopped at all costs.

Other film makers at the time that stood against this corruption included Robert Kennedy’s close friend John Frankenheimer, and Director Stanley Kramer, whose film Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) still stands alone as one of the most potent artistic exposures of the western support for eugenics and fascism.

Frankenheimer’s 7 Days in May (1964) showcased the real-life planned coup to overthrow JFK which had been arranged by the Military’s Joint Chiefs under the helm of Anglophile General Lyman Lemnitzer in 1962 after Kennedy rejected the General’s plans for Operations Northwoods. (1)

Capra’s approach to combating this virus during the years of Cold War terror took a different path to that chosen by Frankenheimer and Kramer. Rather than exposing the rot directly, Capra focused on uplifting the image of mankind by channeling all his efforts on science documentaries for children which he felt would have the most long term benefit to humanity.

Capra had been a target of the House on Un-American Activities due to his friendship with many blacklisted film makers, and watched as Hollywood was purged of those key individuals who acted as its conscience when Hollwood’s role as a tool of patriotism or fascism was still undetermined. Just as the political world was being re-shaped to a new post-moral world order, so too was Hollywood, and as historian Micheal Medved stated, “Capra refused to adjust to the cynicism of the new order.”

Capra’s documentary The Strange Case of Cosmic Rays illustrates his powerful technique that sought to unite science and art through a reverence for God’s creation which is in many ways as cutting edge today as it was 60 years ago.

Capra’s Greatest Films for this Holiday Season

After watching the brilliant It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) which not only exposed the crushing schemes of Wall Street financiers who sought to ruin local productive businesses/commercial banks but also awoke a higher sentiment of transformative love in the hearts of the audience, I would highly recommend watching his lesser known, yet equally powerful pieces You Can’t Take it With You (1938), Meet John Doe (1941) and State of the Union (1949). Taken alongside Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), these films act as incredible Schillerian masterpieces which express the best potential for the moral use of cinema as a tool to both spiritually and politically ennoble a nation’s citizenry.

Capra dedicated himself to John F. Kennedy’s challenge to embark upon a new age of “open-system” collaboration around un-ending discoveries in space, producing his last film “Rendez-vous in Space” in 1964. Spliced with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony which set Schiller’s immortal poem Ode to Joy to music celebrating humanity’s eventual emergence into an age of reason, Capra had his narrator end with the powerful words: “The Sun still lights up and gives life to our planet, but only the mind of man can light up, and give meaning to the light of the universe.”

Even though darkness clouds the path to that better future towards which world citizens like Frank Capra dedicated their lives, the light that they knew was there is getting stronger by the day. So take the time to welcome the year 2020 by adding some spiritual kindling onto your flame and let Capra’s intention come alive again.

Happy Holidays to all.

(1) Frankenheimer, who also directed the Manchurian Candidate was close friends with Bobby Kennedy and producing the latter’s campaign ads for the 1968 presidential bid

Many have already noticed: The U.S. really, really doesn’t feel like the world leader, or even as a ‘first world country’. Of course, I write that sarcastically, as I detest expressions like ‘first world’, and the ‘third world’. But readers know what I mean.

Bridges, subways, inner cities, everything is crumbling, falling apart. When I used to live in New York City, more than two decades ago, returning from Japan was shocking: the US felt like a poor, deprived country, full of problems, misery, of confused and depressed people, homeless individuals; in short – desperados. Now, I feel the same when I land in the US after spending some time in China.

And it gets much worse. What the West used to accuse the Soviet Union of is now actually clearly detectable in the United States and the United Kingdom themselves: surveillance is at every step these days; in New York, London, Sydney, and even in the countryside. Every move a person makes, every purchase, every computer click, is registered somewhere, somehow. And this monitoring is, mostly, not even illegal.

Speech is controlled by political correctness. Someone behind the scenes decides what is acceptable and what is not, what is desirable or not, and even what is permissible. You make one ‘mistake’ and you are out; from the teaching positions at the universities, or from the media outlets.

In such conditions, humor cannot thrive, and satire dies. It is not unlike religious fundamentalism: you get destroyed if you ‘offend’. In such circumstances, writers cannot write ground-breaking novels, because true novels offend by definition, and always push the boundaries. As a result, almost nobody reads novels anymore.

Only toothless, ‘controlled humor’ is permitted. No punches can be administered intuitively. Everything has to be calculated in advance. No ‘outrageous’ political fiction can pass the ‘invisible censorship’ in the West (and so, novels as a form have almost died). Those who read in Russian or Chinese languages know perfectly well that the fiction in Russia and China is much more provocative and avant-garde.

In the West, poetry has died, too. And so has philosophy, which has been reduced to a boring, stale and indigestible academic discipline.

While Hollywood and the mass media keep producing, relentlessly, all sorts of highly insulting and stereotypical racist junk (mainly against the Chinese, Russians, Arabs, Latinos and others), great writers and filmmakers who want to ridicule the Western regime and its structure have already been silenced. You can only humiliate non-Westerners in a way that is approved (again: somewhere, somehow), but God forbid, you dare to criticize the pro-Western elites who are ruining their countries on behalf of London and Washington, in the Gulf, Southeast Asia or Africa – that would be ‘patronizing’ and ‘racist’. A great arrangement for the Empire and its servants, isn’t it?

We all know what has happened to Julian Assange, and to Edward Snowden. In the West, people are disappearing, getting arrested, censored. Millions are losing jobs: in the media, publishing houses, and in the film studios. The Cold War era appears to be relatively ‘tolerant’, compared to what is taking place now.

Social media constantly represses ‘uncomfortable’ individuals, ‘unacceptable’ media outlets, and too ‘unorthodox’ thoughts.

Travel has become a boot camp. This is where they break you. Move through the Western airports and you will encounter the vulgar, insulting ‘securistan’. Now, you are not just expected to pull down your pants if ordered, or take off your shoes, or throw away all your bottles containing liquids: you are expected to smile, to grin brightly, like an idiot. You are supposed to show how eager, how cooperative you are: to answer loudly, looking straight into the eyes of your tormentors. If you get humiliated, still, be polite. If you want to fly, show that you are enjoying this stupid and useless humiliation, administered for one and only reason: to break you, to make you pathetic and submissive. To teach you where you really belong. Or else. Or else! We all know what will happen if you refuse to ‘cooperate’.

* * *

Now, ‘they’ will use double-speak to let you know that all this is for your own good. It will not be pronounced, but you would be made to sense it: ‘you are being protected from those horrible Third World monsters, madmen, perverts.’ And, of course, from Putin, from the Chinese Communists, from the butcher Maduro, from Assad, or from the Iranian Shi’a fanatics.

The regime is fighting for you, it cares for you, it is protecting you.

Sure, if you live in the UK or the US, the chances are that you are deep in debt, depressed and with no prospects for the future. Maybe your children are hungry, maybe, in the US, you cannot afford the medical care. Most likely, you cannot afford housing in your own city. Perhaps you are forced to have two or three jobs.

But at least you know that your ‘wise leaders’ in the White House, Congress, Pentagon and security agencies are working day and night, protecting you from countless conspiracies, from vicious attacks from abroad, and from those evil Chinese and Russians, who are busy building progressive and egalitarian societies.

Lucky you!

* * *

Except: something does not add up here.

For years and decades you were told how free you were. And how oppressed, unfree, those against whom you are being protected, are.

You were told how rich you are and how miserable “the others” were.

To stop those deprived and deranged hordes, some serious measures had to be applied. A right-wing death-squad in some Central American or Southeast Asian country had to be trained in US military camps; a thoroughly absolutist and corrupt monarch had to be supported and pampered; a military fascist coup had to be arranged. Millions raped, tens of thousands of corpses. Not pretty at all, but you know… necessary. For your own good, North American or European citizens; for your own good…. Even for the good of the country that we designated for our ‘liberation’.

Few dissidents in the West have been protesting, for decades. No one has been paying much attention to them. Most of them became ‘unemployable’, and were silenced through misery and the inability to pay their basic bills.

But suddenly…

What happened, suddenly? Because something really happened…

* * *

The Empire got tired of plundering the non-Western parts of the world, exclusively.

Well-conditioned, brainwashed and scared, the Western public began to get treated with the same spite as people in the plundered and miserable parts of the world. Well, not yet, not exactly. There are still some essential differences, but the trend is definitely there.

The Western public cannot do too much to protect itself, really. The regime knows everything about everybody: it spies on every citizen: where he or she walks, what he or she eats, drives, flies, watches, consumes, reads. There are no secrets, anymore.

You are an atheist? No need to ‘confess’. You are confessing every minute, with each and every computer click, by pressing the remote control button, or by shopping on Amazon.

Is Big Brother watching? Oh no; now there is much more detailed surveillance. Big Brother is watching, recording and analyzing.

General Pinochet of Chile used to brag that without his knowledge, no leaf could ever move. The old, fascist scumbag was bragging; exaggerating. On the other hand, Western rulers say nothing, but they clearly know what they are doing. Without their knowledge, nothing moves and nobody moves.

Arriving from China, from Russia or Cuba, the first thing that strikes me is how disciplined, obedient and scared, the Europeans and North Americans really are. They subconsciously know that they are being controlled and cannot do anything about it.

When trains get delayed or cancelled, they sheepishly murmur half-audible curses. Their medical benefits get reduced; they accept, or quietly commit suicide. Their public infrastructure crumbles; they say nothing, remembering the ‘good old days’.

Why is it that I feel hope, I laugh with the people, in Mexico City, Johannesburg or Beijing? Why is there so much warmth in the geographically cold cities of Vladivostok or Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka? Why are the people of London, Paris, Long Angeles looking so concerned, so depressed?

Some historically poor countries are on the rise. And the people there show appreciation for every tiny improvement. Nothing is more beautiful than optimism.

The West has fought the so-called “third world” for many, long decades; oppressing it, tormenting it, looting it, violating its people. It prevented them from choosing their own governments. Now it has gone overboard: it is attempting to control and to oppress the entire world, including its own citizens.

As various countries all over the world are getting back onto their feet, resisting pressure from Washington, London, Paris and Berlin, people in the West are increasingly getting treated by their governments with the spite that used to be reserved exclusively for the “under-developed nations” (yes, another disgusting expression).

Clearly, the West has “learnt from itself”.

While countries like Russia, China, Vietnam, Mexico, Iran and others are surging forward, many previously rich colonialist and neo-colonialist empires are now beginning to resemble the “Third World”.

These days, it is very sad being a writer in New York City or in London. Just as it is frightening to be poor. Or being different. All over the world, the roles are being reversed.

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