BARBIE & OPPENHEIMER Are Both Sophisticated Propaganda Vehicles

I can hear you saying, "I get that OPPENHEIMER could be soft propaganda for nuclear weapons use but BARBIE??" And I'm right there with you -- because not everything that comes out of Hollywood is propaganda for the U.S. empire's war machine.

Unless it is.

Bear with me while I notice that 

a) BARBIE is stirring up controversy over a map that is glimpsed showing a nine-dash line delineating areas in the South China Sea right off the coast of China and 

b) U.S. client countries like the Philippines are lining up to ban BARBIE because they object to where the line is.

Here's the non-fanciful map that NPR (National Pentagon Radio) served up in early July to accompany their article linked above:

Here's another map I saw this morning that may have some relevance here:

Pew Research map shows unfavorable views of China are rather uneven worldwide and furthermore suggests that propaganda works. The highest percent of those viewing China unfavorably are in U.S. client states Australia and Japan, followed by U.S. client state Sweden, followed by the U.S. itself.

Heck, even false stories about the Barbie movie are helping to fan the flames of the map controversy.

It's evil, but I have to admire the empire's narrative management strategies.

As for OPPENHEIMER? Don't get me started. While sheepdogs for the Democratic Party insist the movie is required viewing and sure to turn anyone anti-nuclear, sharper analysts reach different conclusions. 

From indigenous activists Klee Benally and Leona Morgan:

To glorify such deadly science and technology as a dramatic character study, is to spit in the face of hundreds of thousands of corpses and survivors scattered throughout the history of the so-called Atomic age.

Think of it this way, for every minute that passes during the film’s 3-hour run time, more than 1,100 citizens in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki died due to Oppenheimer’s weapon of mass destruction. This doesn’t account for those downwind of nuclear tests who were exposed to radioactive fallout (some are protesting screenings), it doesn’t account for those poisoned by uranium mines, it doesn’t account for those killed during nuclear power plant melt-downs, it doesn’t account for those in the Marshall Islands who are forever poisoned.

Of course the real power of propaganda is directing our attention, both away from inconvenient truths and toward a version of reality that benefits the powerful.

I'll leave you with this example from popular culture aimed at young kids: 

This is  from a picture book for children, Diary of a Spider, published in 2011 by Scholastic. I could do an entire blog post on that corporate entity's penetration of U.S. public schools with turn key book fairs that sell a myriad of pro-military and pro-empire books. 

Soft propaganda starts early and it never sleeps. 

Tale Of Two Broken Accords: Oslo And Minsk

"Tens of thousands of Italians marched through Rome on Saturday calling for peace in Ukraine and urging Italy to stop sending weapons" © Stefano Ronchini / ipa-agency.ne/Stefano Ronchini / ipa-agency.net  Source: MSN

Many people understand that war is hell. That's why they clamor for negotiated settlements that move belligerents back from the battlefield and set them on a path to reconciliation.

The Oslo Accords established a two-state solution to Israel's violent occupation of Palestinian homelands and at the time was hailed as a major achievement.

Then came facts on the ground for the last several decades. 

It would by now be virtually impossible to create a State of Palestine that was not hopelessly Balkanized into tiny, unconnected territories. At the time of Oslo, many expressed doubt and believed that only a truly democratic one-state solution could work. (Full disclosure: I'm in that camp.)

The insanely belligerent and corrupt Israeli PM Netanyahu has won the recent elections and stands poised to bring even more violence and suffering to the long-occupied Palestinians.  And Israel is a nuclear weapons nation. With lots of nuclear threats and innuendoes being thrown around these days, it's important to keep that in mind.

So we can expect to see a continuation of Israel's attacks on Palestinians in blockaded Gaza

My grandparent’s and his brother’s land that provide for over 20 families was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes this morning in #Gaza pic.twitter.com/eeIAJxRkGl

— Asmaa AbuMezied (@AAbumezied) November 4, 2022

https://twitter.com/AAbumezied/status/1588449241743384576

in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank

Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) is responding to emerging critical health needs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, resulting from escalating violence characterised by repeated Israeli military raids on Palestinian towns and cities, routine use of https://t.co/y13Gp1mqpA

— it is #Palestine, nothing else (@JamalKhanfer) November 4, 2022

 

https://twitter.com/JamalKhanfer/status/1588587107605532679

and Israel bombing Syria and Lebanon, other nations altogether.

The Minsk II agreement established a game plan for resolving civil war in Ukraine.

Tens of thousands of civilians and combatants had been killed by missile strikes and more hands-on violence from militias operating freely in the Donbas border region with Russia following a 2014 CIA-sponsored coup in Kyiv. Years later, Ukraine's President Zelensky was elected on a platform promising to implement Minsk and end the death toll. Then the neo-Nazis enabled by the U.S. and NATO got to him. I suspect he was threatened with assasination unless he signed on to his country serving as the killing grounds for proxy war to weaken Russia. 

One wonders why nations sign on to accords and then immediately show no intention of fulfilling them?

It could be a stalling tactic to temporarily reduce international pressure to de-escalate.

Or it could be a case where those who signed on are ousted either by coup or elections, and succeeded by those with a lust for war.

Or maybe diplomatic efforts like accords are doomed in the face of the profit motive provided by modern industrialized killing?

Workers hold the key to stopping wars no matter what the motives of those waging them. 

An international general strike would make wars literally impossible.

I pray we are seeing signs of this developing, especially in Europe where the economic impact of the war on Russia via Ukraine has been most intense. Certainly we are seeing signs of alarm from rulers enacting laws that actually criminalize gathering.

Giorgia Meloni's government establishes a new crime that includes a 6-year prison sentence if 50 people gather together, putting in danger safety or public health. Disguised as an anti-rave party rule, it aims to repress freedom, protests and dissent in today’s polarized Italy.

— Francesca Bria (@francesca_bria) November 1, 2022

https://twitter.com/francesca_bria/status/1587481003962015746

Okay, so don't gather. Stay inside and refuse to work helping the war machine grind on. Mutual aid could not only make this strategy survivable but also strengthen solidarity among the people. Build it on the foundation of a shared desire to not be burned to a crisp by wars escalated via nuclear weapons.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: The Nuclear Option

What we need: universal health care and urgent action on climate crisis.

What we get: a Democratic Party supported gargantuan Pentagon budget bill (and all the climate harm that goes along with it)

plus propaganda implying that nuclear war is survivable.

Link if embedded video doesn't work for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-5d7V4Sbqk

This message is from NYC Emergency Management, "not The Onion." It would be virtually impossible to parody something that is already this ridiculous.

Pretending that the nuclear option is a viable option is galloping ahead of our species' ability to survive. 

Part of this strategy is pretending that the nuclear option is survivable.

The claims in this video would not have been true in Hiroshima or Nagasaki 50 years ago, and they're even more false today. Today's nuclear weapons, which our corporate overlords have gone on building while people went without health care, are vastly more powerful than the old school versions. 

Meanwhile, sabre rattling at other nuclear powers is ramping up steadily.

Does it really matter which branch of the corporate duopoly is in power? 

Slouching Toward Nuclear War, Let Us Pause To Consider Hiroshima

Illustration from the picture book Barefoot Gen by Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa

I had just finished reading John Pilger's searing essay "How the world may end" on the U.S. slouching toward nuclear war in 2017 when I realized it is the anniversary of the first nuclear weapon use by my warmongering country. I had also just finished Caitlin Johnstone's call to arms to resist a sure-to-be-nuclear WWIII, "Serious question: have you done everything in your power to prevent this?"

In response I am reposting a previous blog entry on this infamous date in history:

Biggest Lie Ever Told By The U.S. Government: The "Necessity" of Hiroshima

From Barefoot Gen, graphic novel about Hiroshima by Keiji Nakazawa, author and illustrator (Hadashi no Gen).

August 6 is the date that my Japanese neighbors in the 1980's remembered from WWII. When my oldest child, a U.S. citizen, was born in Tokyo on December 7, Pearl Harbor day, I remarked on the irony to a college-educated Japanese friend. She replied, "What's Pearl Harbor?" 

On August 6, 1945 the US dropped the first nuclear weapon on the city of Hiroshima. This event, plus the bombing of the city of Nagasaki a few days later with a different kind of atomic bomb, was always sold to the U.S. public as having been "necessary" to end WWII without a invasion of the Japanese mainland that was sure to cost the lives of many in the U.S. military. But the Japanese were already negotiating to surrender, and knew the war was lost for them. 

Some have speculated the U.S. went ahead anyway in order to both test the weapons, and intimidate their WWII ally the U.S.S.R. in a spectacular kick-off to what would become the Cold War. The U.S. government to this day strives to intimidate Russia with weapons and propaganda.

U.S. citizens knew that some kind of catastrophic weapon had been deployed, and that the Japanese emperor soon surrendered, but it wasn't until John Hersey's long piece in the New Yorker in August, 1946 that many learned the gruesome details. Even then, the protracted suffering from radiation poisoning of the surviving hibakusha (a term that had to be coined) was largely unknown.

My own grandfather, drafted into WWII, was among the first U.S. troops to enter Nagasaki after the bomb. Despite pestering by his daughter (my mother), he would never talk about it.

Now we watch in horror as the Fukushima nuclear power plant continues to spew radiation into the atmosphere and groundwater, and attempts to clean it or contain it prove futile. Just last month, five years into the disaster, Dr. Shigeru Mita published an open letter stating his opinion that, due to radiation levels all over the city, Tokyo itself can no longer be safely inhabited.

We of the baby boom generation have lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation our entire lives. We've watched in horror as nuclear weapons and energy have proliferated, despite the best efforts of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Protocol and many other efforts to have humans swear off nuclear before it is too late for everybody. The U.S. continues to use depleted uranium in its weapons, and anti-nuclear activist Cecile Pineda has argued convincingly that nuclear war is already underway.

When young people find out about the disaster in Hiroshima, they ask an essential question: Why did the U.S. drop an atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima? I think this propaganda film made by the Army about Okinawa is a succinct explanation of the overall strategy, though it leaves out the build-up to Pearl Harbor engendered by blocking oil shipments to rapacious Imperial Japan.


My friends in Tokyo saw Japanese as the victims, not the aggressors, in WWII. Their analysis of history was that a cabal of businessmen and highly ranked government officials conspired to drag Japan into building an empire in the region, profiting mightily, while the people paid the price. Japanese starved their way through the war and then suffered conscripted labor and fire bombing of many of their cities even before nuclear disaster struck. 

This informs the outpouring of resistance to suspending Article 9 of Japan's Constitution, paving the way for a return to aggressive militarism. No longer content to use Japan as a site of military installations, the U.S. "pivot to Asia" entails pressuring the Japanese government -- against the will of most of its people -- to return to building up armaments and armies of its own.

In our time Japanese have been leaders in the movement to ban all nuclear weapons -- and, increasingly, the ill-fated attempt to harness nuclear power as an energy source. 

Today, my thoughts and prayers are with 日本.