Matt Damon
Film Mafia
[2009 Jan] Ben
Affleck, Rwanda, and Corporate Sustained Catastrophe
by Keith Harmon Snow Since 2001, actress Angelina
Jolie has been UNHCR’s ‘Goodwill Ambassador,’ a role that took her to eastern
Congo in 2003 and 2004. Jolie traveled in eastern Congo with intelligence
insider and International Crisis Group agent John Prendergast, who is aligned
with a growing army of ‘Save Darfur’ cloned organizations that deploy
state-of-the-art media technologies to undermine and co-opt any true grass roots
movement to legitimately empower African people. Jolie
also starred as a ‘selfless’ hero working as a UNHCR official in Hollywood’s
Beyond Borders, a film that peddles the necessity of mixing Central
Intelligence Agency gun-running operations with humanitarian missions—because it
is ostensibly for the ‘right’ cause: Western sponsored covert interventions.
Hollywood stars from the film
Ocean’s Thirteen formed another ‘humanitarian’ organization that inevitably
throws celebrity raised funds at the western structural violence and white power
economies focused on sustaining disaster in Africa. The governing board of Not
On Our Watch includes Ocean’s Thirteen stars George Clooney, Brad Pitt,
Don Cheadle, and Matt Damon—Ben Affleck’s buddy ‘Will’ from the film Good
Will Hunting—and producers Jerry Weintraub and David Pressman.
Clooney recently joined John
Prendergast, a U.S. National Security apparatus insider, and Hollywood producer
David Pressman to pen a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, opining all the
usual trite platitudes—but absent a single recommendation of substance—about how
President Obama can help Congo. Prendergast, who is billed as a ‘leading
American human rights activist’, has previously boasted of traveling around
Sudan and Central Africa with President Paul Kagame, and he is named as one of
the early architects of the RPA coup d’etat in Rwanda.
The entire exercise of appointing
and fronting Hollywood celebrities as United Nations ‘Messengers for Peace’ and
‘Goodwill Ambassadors’ is a further means by which the establishment whitewashes
the war-making and plunder of multinational corporations, and the individuals
responsible for carnage the world over, and to more deeply institutionalize the
structural violence. Described as ‘helping to shine light on the world’s trouble
spots’, celebrity actorvism is more like a cop shining a bright light in your
eyes so that you are disoriented, confused and blinded.
