VAUNTING
AND FEAR
The
intended moral of it all was summed up in Newsweek
by James Wire, an 82 year-old Pearl Harbor survivor, who
thinks the Pearl Harbor movie is "'great' because
it's a warning: 'Americans have become complacent. They
think it can't happen now. But it can." A state of advanced
paranoia is the natural condition of every Empire: it
is the price we pay for our imperial preeminence, "a curious
and characteristic emotional weakness of Empire," as Garet
Garrett put it, which amounts to "a complex of vaunting
and fear."
PERPETUAL
TERROR
In
short, we must live in a state of perpetual terror, or
else the War Party (Hollywood division) isn't doing its
job. "Terrorism" lurks in every airport, a ghostly specter
haunting the conscience of the nation. At any moment,
foreign Furies could unleash their terrible vengeance:
a cyber-attack, a "rogue nation" missile attack, yet another
Pearl Harbor-style "sneak" attack that we had every reason
to anticipate but somehow didn't. Fear must be our permanent
state, it must infuse the very air we breathe, and to
that end Hollywood is more than complicit.
"GET
ME RE-WRITE!"
A
recent
news story on the making of Pearl Harbor notes
that "if Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle comes across as particularly
heroic in the new war epic Pearl Harbor, the credit
goes as much to the behind-the-scenes influence of the
Pentagon as to the vision of Hollywood filmmakers." These
days, when someone in some big producer's office barks
"get me rewrite!" he's likely to be put through to the
Pentagon: "In exchange for providing Hollywood with military
advice," reports the Associated Press, "personnel and
awesome equipment for movies and TV shows, the Pentagon
gets an advance look at scripts and has a chance to negotiate
changes." Conservatives want to get rid of the National
Endowment for the Arts, but this is the kind of government-sponsored
and controlled "art" that they are no doubt willing to
countenance – precisely because it has much more
effect on the national psyche than the artsy-fartsy nude
photography of the late Robert
Mapplethorpe.
PLAYING
BY THE RULES
Will
the Pentagon open up a whole new department devoted to
"advising" Hollywood on how best to whip up the American
public into a frothy-mouthed war frenzy? Don't be naïve:
they've
already done it. It's called the Film Liaison Office,
and it's headed up by Philip
Strub, whose title is "Special Assistant for Audiovisual":
aside from that, every branch of the military has a special
Los Angeles office that does little but give its "input"
into Tinseltown. As John Lovett, a consultant on military
matters to filmmakers, puts it: "If you want to use the
military's toys, you've got to play by their rules. That's
how it's done." But what are their rules, exactly?
DOOLITTLE'S
TRANSFORMATION
It
seems that Lt. Col. Doolittle, the character played by
Alec
Baldwin, wasn't heroic enough for the Pentagon's taste:
but that was easily fixed. Jack
Green, of the Naval Historical Center, who was on
location for eight weeks of filming – standing guard,
as it were, for the Pentagon – demanded changes in
the script, and got them. Instead of being portrayed as
"a boorish, oafish type of fellow" (there you go, Alec
– typecast again!), Doolittle says he "persuaded"
the film's director, Michael
Bay, to give Doolittle/Baldwin a more sympathetic
portrayal. "Doolittle was rewritten and made a little
bit more of the real hero he was," says Green triumphantly.
In this marriage of art and militarism, there is a clear
division of labor: the Pentagon comes up with the "toys"
and rewrites the script as necessary, while Hollywood
provides the actors, the glitz, the special effects –
and, oh yes, reaps the enormous profits.
SEAL
OF APPROVAL
We
are routinely told that the Pentagon's collaboration with
Hollywood costs the US taxpayer nothing, since movie producers
"reimburse" the government: but the price of having access
to the facilities and equipment of the US military is
really incalculable – and no doubt worth far more
than any movie producer could afford. This week, the
US Navy will turn over the biggest ship in its Pacific
fleet, the nuclear-powered USS
John C. Stennis, to Disney for the all-out, over-the-top
premiere of Pearl Harbor. According to Reuters,
"Disney reportedly is spending $5 million to hold the
special event for 2,000 invited guests including Navy
brass, Washington politicians and Hollywood studio executives."
Of course, not all producers are so favored: the makers
of Apocalypse
Now, naturally, had no cooperation from the US
government, whose imprimatur is reserved for productions
that have the official seal of approval.
CREATING
HISTORY
Director
Michael Bay explicitly ruled out in advance any treatment
of the "conspiracy theories" that have been swirling around
the attack on Pearl Harbor for 60 years. "We're not going
to get into any of that," said Bay, and his public relations
team is adamant that this is "a love story," not a retelling
of history, with the Japanese attack serving only as backdrop
to some tiresome love triangle. It's a love story, all
right, for what it underscores is the story of Hollywood's
love affair with Power, its slavish devotion to the lies
and cover-ups of officialdom, its whorish desire to let
itself be used. For what is happening here, with Pearl
Harbor, and the flood of imitators, is not so much
re-writing history as creating it out of whole
cloth.
A
VIOLENT DECEPTION
In
copy that could have been written by the movie's producers,
Evan Thomas,
writing in Newsweek, burbles that Pearl
Harbor seeks to portray America's loss of innocence,
a Sunday morning in paradise ripped apart by violent deception.
Americans are fascinated by the grandeur and heroism of
World War II in part because modern life seems relatively
tame and safe today." It was a "violent deception," all
right, when FDR deliberately and knowingly kept the information
he had on his desk from the Pearl Harbor commanders, Admiral
Husband Kimmel and General
Walter Short (who were court-martialed for "dereliction
of duty" but have since been exonerated
by act of Congress).
CONSPIRACY
THEORIES
Newsweek,
which devoted a lot of pages to the glossy lies being
put over by this movie, not only tries to lay the blame
at Kimmel's doorstep, in spite of the official exoneration,
but also approves of the producers' decision to steer
clear of "conspiracy theories," i.e. the truth. Thomas
pontificates:
"The
movie wisely ignores long-held conspiracy theories that
President Roosevelt provoked or allowed the Japanese attack
to justify going to war. Determined to help Britain fight
back against the totalitarian Axis powers, Roosevelt was
eager to bestir an isolationist public. Some historians
have tried to show that Roosevelt knew from broken Japanese
codes and other clues that an attack was imminent, yet
did nothing. But it is 'inconceivable,' writes historian
Doris Kearns Goodwin, 'that Roosevelt, who loved the Navy
with a passion, would have intentionally sacrificed the
heart of his fleet, much less the lives of 3,500 American
sailors and soldiers, without lifting a finger to reduce
the risk.'"
WILL
NO ONE RID OF US THIS WOMAN?
Will
God, in His mercy, please spare us the omnipresent
Doris
Kearns Goodwin? Whenever the official, sanitized,
liberal internationalist version of history needs to be
reinforced, there is the spreading rictus-grin of Goodwin,
happily extolling the preternatural wisdom of our rulers,
and unconditionally praising the divine beneficence of
the all-powerful American state. But how does Goodwin
explain FDR's comments to his own advisors regarding the
series of US provocations leading up to Pearl Harbor,
the "pop-up" maneuvers of the US Navy within or near Japanese
territorial waters? According to war secretary Henry L.
Stimson's war diary, FDR said: "I just want them to keep
popping up here and there and keep the Japs guessing.
I don't mind losing one or two cruisers, but do not take
a chance on losing five or six." Apparently FDR's passion
for the Navy was rivaled only by his passion for getting
us into the war.
LIARS
ON THE DEFENSIVE
This
diary entry is cited by Robert B. Stinnett in his blockbuster
book, Day
of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor
(just out in paperback), which blows the lid off the Pearl
Harbor myth, and it is, in large part, against Stinnett's
book that Thomas's Waspy disdain for "conspiracy theories"
is directed (though of course he would never give credit
where credit is due, and mention the book: that would
amount to a plug). Yet the apologists for the official
"sneak attack" scenario have been pushed back to their
last line of defense by Stinnett's powerful book, and
are now reduced to admitting that, yes, we had intercepted
messages that indicated Japan's warlike intent, but, somehow,
they didn't get through to the proper authorities in time,
or so Thomas absurdly expects us to believe: "In Washington,"
he avers,
"as
the movie shows with scenes of a fictional code-breaker,
the War Department was able to read Japan's diplomatic
cable traffic. On the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor,
Washington knew that Japan was readying to break off peace
negotiations. But a warning telegram from Gen. George
C. Marshall, Army chief of staff, was delayed by bad luck
and red tape and delivered to Kimmel five hours after
the attack had begun."
THE
TRUTH IS OUT
"Bad
luck" my eye! The story of how General
George C. Marshall took so long to transmit the official
information – instead of picking up the scrambler
phone and getting on the line with Kimmel and Short, he
sent his war warning via Western Union! –
is one of the more outrageous threads in this labyrinthine
story of deception, but naturally Thomas doesn't deign
to go into any of that. He furthermore ignores the rest
of the evidence presented in Stinnett's book, and the
thousands of pages of documents released through the Freedom
of Information Act, which show that between November 5
and December 2, 1941, the Japanese commanders – who
did not know we had broken their code – filled the
airwaves with quite explicit messages indicating the date,
time, and place of the Pearl Harbor attack. As Stinnett
puts it in the Afterword to the paperback edition of his
book:
"Based
on these transmissions, President Roosevelt and General
George C. Marshall predicted war with Japan would begin
the first week of December. We would know even more about
what FDR and his chief advisors thought, but the Japanese
radio messages remain incomplete, still cloaked in American
censorship. . . . Nevertheless, the major secrets of Pearl
Harbor are at last out in the open. After years of denial,
the truth is clear: we knew."
A
MOVIE THAT WON'T GET MADE
The
Pentagon, Evan Thomas, and Doris Kearns Goodwin are certainly
not interested in the truth about Pearl Harbor, and it's
only natural that they should jump back in horror at the
mere suggestion that we were set up for war by our own
rulers. But why, with the truth already out there, is
Hollywood going along with this elaborate charade? After
all, on artistic grounds alone, Day of Deceit runs
rings around the "official" (lying) version. I mean, here
you have all the elements of drama: deception, power,
commitment, betrayal, all acted out against the backdrop
of looming war – a war the President knew was coming,
down to the day and the hour. Lights! Camera! Action!
ANDREW
SULLIVAN, CRAVEN EUNUCH?
Gee,
how is it that I just know such a movie will never
be made? Of course, they could make a movie version of
Gore
Vidal's The Golden Age, which dramatizes FDR's
deadly deception, but, again, I'm wondering if this is
even a possibility in the epicenter of evil in the world,
otherwise known as Hollywood. In
any case, the smear campaign against Vidal is sure
to accelerate. How do I know this? Well, that bellwether
of the conventional wisdom, Andrew Sullivan, recently
compared Vidal to David
Irving: can a comparison with Hitler be far behind?
Irving, hisses Sullivan, is "the English Gore Vidal":
like Vidal, "[he] is a brilliant man whose mind has
warped into bile. Like Vidal's hatred for Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, Irving's loathing for Winston Churchill is
simply perverse." Irving denies the Holocaust, and Vidal
denies the divinity of FDR: to the clueless Sullivan,
no doubt a little groggy from taking his AIDS meds, this
shows they are brothers under the skin. What it really
shows, of course, is that Sullivan is a real class-A bitch:
he speaks of Vidal's "bile," but his own is eating away
whatever intellectual integrity he once had. Sullivan,
you'll remember, is the guy who, likening himself to George
Orwell, portrays himself as the scourge of politically
correct cant. What a joke! He is nothing but a hypocrite,
whose smug self-righteousness cloaks his true role as
one of the most craven kow-towing eunuchs at the imperial
court.
ROLE
REVERSAL
Okay,
yes I did get a number of emails about my sudden
reversal on the Andrew Sullivan Question. In my "Bookmarks"
column a couple of weeks ago I recommended his site and
even opined that he might be developing in a libertarian
direction. I still think this is true in a sense, only
now I would put quotation marks around the word "libertarian"
– and add the proviso that, if you mean the kind
of "libertarian" who thinks pot should be legalized, profits
aren't all bad, and political correctness sometimes
goes too far, but never questions the founding
myths of the American Empire, then he's a "libertarian"
all right. Of course, there are far all too many of these
types around – as
noted in my last column – and as readers of Reason
magazine are all too aware. However, this is really too
depressing to contemplate much longer than is necessary,
and so we'll move right along to a recommendation I know
I'm not going to be sorry for.
ANTI-STATE.COM
ROCKS!
I'm
talking about anti-state.com,
the rip-roaring website started by Jeremy Sapienza, of
LRC (LewRockwell.com)
fame. What can I say but that anti-state.com is a kind
of psychedelicized LRC. The mindset of this site is succinctly
summed up by the editor in his description of one of the
articles: "Bob Murphy tokes up and tells us why so many
people seem so stupid," and just so we don't get confused
about the political stance taken by anti-state.com, we
have this description of Karen DeCoster's "I Ride With
Hitler": "Karen DeCoster tells us why carpooling and mass
transit are social manipulations driven by the evil State's
lust for power." This is the hardcore stuff, guys
and gals: Sapienza's gang of anarcho-troublemakers may
be familiar to longtime fans of LRC, but here they're
. . . well, a little wilder. You're going to love anti-state.com,
I just know it. The
inaugural edition features a 2,500-word excerpt from my
book manuscript on the gay rights movement, The
Ideology of Desire: The Tyranny and Absurdity of Gay Identity
Politics – and please smile when I tell
you that this is something you won't want to miss!
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