By Evan Long, on September 6th, 2010% Barrie Zwicker’s “The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw” is a nice overview of the reasons to doubt the official story of the 9/11 attacks. Here is some additional information on Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission and a member of the Clinton-Bush transition team. It should also be noted that 1998, the year that Zelikow’s “Catastrophic Terrorism” was published, was also the year that the neocons’ Project for the New American Century group was beginning its push on Bill Clinton to attack Iraq and essentially begin the so-called “War on Terror” at that time. [END] Permalink: The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw
By Evan Long, on August 30th, 2010% “Enemy Image” is a history of the American media’s presentation of U. S. wars and the U. S. government and military’s fight to control that presentation, beginning with Vietnam and moving on through the 2003 war in Iraq. While early newsreels, with their patriotic narrative overdubs, presented a polished and sterile image of heroic troops bravely fighting like a well-oiled machine, the relatively unregulated television journalism of the later 1960s showed the common soldier up-close and personal, without the touch-ups of Hollywood. Although the film has a curious lack of mention of the late ’90s war in eastern Europe, it does a good job of comparing the Vietnam era to the much more heavily controlled time from the 1980s to today. “Everybody just wants to go home and go to school. [...] The whole thing stinks.” – U. S. soldier in Vietnam [END] Permalink: Enemy Image
By Evan Long, on August 25th, 2010% This German documentary gives an intimate view into the lives of U. S. soldiers in Iraq. Firefights, sniper attacks, all manners of violence are presented here in true documentary fashion. The first Gulf War began in 1991, a decade of sanctions which killed more people than the bombing of Hiroshima followed, and now a bigger war continues to drag on and on, year after year. What will be the end of the United States’ war in Iraq? [END] Permalink: Iraq: The Continuous War
By Evan Long, on August 18th, 2010% Here, the CBC walks us through some of the many flaws in the casus belli that led to the U. S. military and the private mercenary firms that they contracted to aid them, and to share in the loot, both foreign and domestic, entering Iraq with the intention of overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003. While some attention is given here to reporter Seymour Hirsch’s take on the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a “neoconservative” think-tank who have been credited as the authors of the plans for the war, as a group of utopian idealists, it ought to be considered that the PNAC plans revolve around the astoundingly violent concept of “full spectrum dominance” by the U. S. worldwide which includes even the will to deny other nations the use of outer space. Theirs is literally a proposal of world conquest. “Former” CIA operative Robert Baer also adds what should be the already obvious fact that there is “no evidence” that Saddam Hussein had any links to the 9/11 attacks, perhaps to imply the “Afghanistan-war-good, Iraq-war-bad” line of argument which has been taken up by many members of the Democratic Party. However, there is also questionable evidence at best that “Al Qaeda,” however that term may be defined, was linked in any way to the 9/11 attacks, itself, as FBI publicity chief Rex Tomb has told reporters that there is, quote, “ no hard evidence” even that Osama bin Laden, when it gets right down to it, was responsible for 9/11. The current state of the Afghanistan war, ostensibly being fought against these same “Al Qaeda” terrorists, now nine years on with no end in sight and almost no “progress” of any kind by any definition having been made, except, perhaps, in the financial sense for those “in the club,” ought to speak to the intentions of those who originated these claims in the first place. [END] Permalink: Lies of the Iraq War
By Evan Long, on August 16th, 2010% “The Ground Truth” documents the stories of American soldiers who have been involved in the war in Iraq and their experiences both at abroad and after their return from the Middle East. They discuss the indoctrination and personality restructuring they experienced upon entering the military, beginning with the deceptive enticements of the recruitment table on through the suffering of combat and finally in the shattered lives they lead after their tours are over. [END] Permalink: The Ground Truth: The Human Cost of War
By Evan Long, on July 30th, 2010% “The Corporation” is one of the best criticial overviews of the modern industrial corporation to date. Businesses fashioned in the model of a corporation have been granted legal personhood in the United States under the Fourteenth Amendment and all of the Constitutional rights which go along with that. Multinational corporations, operating across borders in what this film argues is a pathological manner, has had intense impacts on global ecology and society. From efforts to privatize Bolivia’s rainwater to sweatshop labor in China, “The Corporation” takes a look at the many consequences of the corporate directive to earn maximum profit with no inherent regard for anything else. [END] Permalink: The Corporation
By Evan Long, on July 21st, 2010%  Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, is simply a must-read. While more widely known and certainly important social and human commentaries such as Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World have received the lion’s share of attention among dystopian literature enthusiasts for their surreal, almost fantastic depictions of totalitarian super-states, It Can’t Happen Here, out of print for years but republished in 1993 and now available for free on-line, paints a starkly realistic portrait of a political seizure of the United States by fascists. Several European governments had come under fascist regimes at the time of the novel’s writing and Lewis, with his keen grasp of American politics, was able in It Can’t Happen Here to create a convincing narrative of such a series of events taking place in the U. S. Indeed, the reactionary incrementalism which has made itself felt since about the time of Nixon and especially during the George W. Bush presidency has borne more than a passing resemblance to Lewis’ detailed and accurate vision. In 2010, the worst may be behind us or it may still lie ahead. In any case, this brilliantly prescient work can serve for us as a potent aid to reflection and also to action on the political, economic and social crises we are facing. As Lewis’ thoughtful protagonist, fictional Vermonter Doremus Jessup, notes from his flea-ridden bunk in a “Corpo” (corporatist) concentration camp, It Can’t Happen Here‘s fascists were able to have their way mainly because those who believed in American democracy did not do enough to halt its destruction. [END] Permalink: It Can’t Happen Here
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