Masopher's Mind » culture

Culture: The Apocalypse

Masopher — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:32:39 +0000

Now that the movie 2012 is over and done with, here come a few post apocalyptic movies. The first one is vampire apocalypse or Daybreakers. Mankind is now fully addicted to a sweet liquid that improves their lives. Some are trying to resist the urge to use it and some revel in the fact that they can. The liquid is now running out and those that indulge too much are becoming ravenous and desperate. Armies are organized to pillage the third world looking for the last drops of it but the levels are now dangerously low. Fights are breaking out and civil law is decaying as the need for the life giving liquid run out. Oil? No Blood. Matrix meets 28 days later this movie is not, and the actors could consider this one of their lowest points.

The second one is hope apocalypse or The Road. It is a good guy and his son struggling through a post apocalyptic world looking for a better life safe from the bad guys (cannibals). It’s a stark and well acted film but not so much a story as it is a bad situation which the actors must act their way out of. “Are we ever going to be bad guys daddy?” “Are we gonna be good guys no matter what?” Something bad happened and the world fell apart, now nothing grows and everything dies and those left behind scavenge and turn to eating the flesh of others. Violent shakes result from consuming the flesh of your brothers. The film is lonely and frightening until the father dies and the boy discovers that they were never really alone had they learned to trust others.

The third one is knowledge apocalypse or Book of Eli. It features a world wrecked by the last war which, as THE LAST WAR might, used nuclear weapons which tore the Earth’s protective covering off exposing us all to the real terror, the cosmos and harsh rays of the sun. Mankind struggles to put itself back together but find itself missing one key feature, the wisdom of the bible. Other holy books were there but King James’ version of the ordering of the cosmos and right way to live was needed to complete the collection. One faction wanted it to institute control, the other faction just wanted it to pop in amongst the other great tomes. Here too cannibals existed in numbers, but mankind hadn’t managed to obliterate every other creature and had maintained a sense of purpose and cohesion.

The Mayans had a very keen insight on the cosmos. Something is ending in 2012 but it won’t be the end civilization, just the end of a cycle which restarts the very next second.

Mankind doesn’t get off that easy. The Earth, evolution, civilizations even revolutions are long slow and drawn out. Historians and teleological philosophers tend to add convenient start and end points to the progression of time but historians and philosophers don’t have the impediment or facts and reality to consider. Often it is science and pioneers that discover boundaries and the lack of.

The comforting thing about post apocalyptic movies is that we recognize that like the Earth, time isn’t flat. End-of-the-world-ists should have recognized that the roundness of the clock facilitates the time going all the way to twelve and then after that instead of slipping into a magical world, time goes back to one. Even for those that choose to extend the day to 24 hours to avoid confusing 4 in the morning and 4 in the noon, the day alas comes to an end at 24 without apocalyptic repercussions, smoothly transitioning to 01:00 of the next day.

The world is transitioning from one thing to the next though. The empires of Europe and the middle east drifted into history, Japan went from Asian giant to gadget loving post modern, the soviets rose and fell, and the last remaining empire now faces an slow, choking end, coughing on its own exhaust and labouring under a heavy mix of ideologies and idealisms without proportionate leadership. It may or may not bow out gracefully to the rise of an empire of old and out it will go but even this illustrates the cyclical nature of everything.

CIA activity in publishing and media

Masopher — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:47:49 +0000

The CIA like many intelligence agencies not only gather intelligence but proactively prevent situations which cause a threat to the national agenda. Just as China has a firewall that protects its citizens from the cultural influences of western agents, Western agencies also create cultural firewalls which prevent or, even better, neutralize the influences of thinking that would ultimately lead to the weakening of the position held by the leaders and direction dictated by its founders.

But at the same time the direction of the founders of the United States is one of enlightenment. Individuals are welcome to learn the truth if only they actively strive to learn it.

Interesting and old article about some of the CIA’s dabbling in publishing and media.

Published on Saturday, March 18, 2000 in the New York Times

How the Central Intelligence Agency Played Dirty Tricks With Our Culture

by Laurence Zuckerman

Many people remember reading George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” in high school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it “impossible to say which was which.”
That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film’s secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.
The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell’s pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to “Animal Farm” from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.
Rewriting the end of “Animal Farm” is just one example of the often absurd lengths to which the C.I.A. went, as recounted in a new book, “The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters” (The New Press) by Frances Stonor Saunders, a British journalist. Published in Britain last summer, the book will appear here next month.
Much of what Ms. Stonor Saunders writes about, including the C.I.A.’s covert sponsorship of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom and the British opinion magazine Encounter, was exposed in the late 1960’s, generating a wave of indignation. But by combing through archives and unpublished manuscripts and interviewing several of the principal actors, Ms. Stonor Saunders has uncovered many new details and gives the most comprehensive account yet of the agency’s activities between 1947 and 1967.
This picture of the C.I.A.’s secret war of ideas has cameo appearances by scores of intellectual celebrities like the critics Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling, the poets Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott and the novelists James Michener and Mary McCarthy, all of whom directly or indirectly benefited from the C.I.A.’s largesse. There are also bundles of cash that were funneled through C.I.A. fronts and several hilarious schemes that resemble a “Spy vs. Spy” cartoon more than a serious defense against Communism.
Traveling first class all the way, the C.I.A. and its counterparts in other Western European nations sponsored art exhibitions, intellectual conferences, concerts and magazines to press their larger anti-Soviet agenda. Ms. Stonor Saunders provides ample evidence, for example, that the editors at Encounter and other agency-sponsored magazines were ordered not to publish articles directly critical of Washington’s foreign policy. She also shows how the C.I.A. bankrolled some of the earliest exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting outside of the United States to counter the Socialist Realism being advanced by Moscow.
In one memorable episode, the British Foreign Office subsidized the distribution of 50,000 copies of “Darkness at Noon,” Arthur Koestler’s anti-Communist classic. But at the same time, the French Communist Party ordered its operatives to buy up every copy of the book. Koestler received a windfall in royalties courtesy of his Communist adversaries.
As it turns out, “Animal Farm” was not the only instance of the C.I.A.’s dabbling in Hollywood. Ms. Stonor Saunders reports that one operative who was a producer and talent agent slipped affluent-looking African-Americans into several films as extras to try to counter Soviet criticism of the American race problem.
The agency also changed the ending of the movie version of “1984,” disregarding Orwell’s specific instructions that the story not be altered. In the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is entirely defeated by the nightmarish totalitarian regime. In the very last line, Orwell writes of Winston, “He loved Big Brother.” In the movie, Winston and his lover, Julia, are gunned down after Winston defiantly shouts: “Down with Big Brother!”
Such changes came from the agency’s obsession with snuffing out a notion then popular among many European intellectuals: that East and West were morally equivalent. But instead of illustrating the differences between the two competing systems by taking the high road, the agency justified its covert activities by referring to the unethical tactics of the Soviets.
“If the other side can use ideas that are camouflaged as being local rather than Soviet-supported or -stimulated, then we ought to be able to use ideas camouflaged as local ideas,” Tom Braden, who ran the C.I.A.’s covert cultural division in the early 1950’s, explained years later. (In one of the book’s many amusing codas, Mr. Braden goes on in the 1980’s to become the leftist foil to Patrick Buchanan on the CNN program “Crossfire.”)
The cultural cold war began in postwar Europe, with the fraying of the wartime alliance between Washington and Moscow. Officials in the West believed they had to counter Soviet propaganda and undermine the wide sympathy for Communism in France and Italy.
An odd alliance was struck between the C.I.A. leaders, most of them wealthy Ivy League veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services and a corps of largely Jewish ex-Communists who had broken with Moscow to become virulently anti-Communist. Acting as intermediaries between the agency and the intellectual community were three colorful agents who included Vladimir Nabokov’s much less talented cousin, Nicholas, a composer.
The C.I.A. recognized from the beginning that it could not openly sponsor artists and intellectuals in Europe because there was so much anti-American feeling there. Instead, it decided to woo intellectuals out of the Soviet orbit by secretly promoting a non-Communist left of democratic socialists disillusioned with Moscow.
Ms. Stonor Saunders describes how the C.I.A. cleverly skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan to finance its activities, funneling the money through fake philanthropies it created or real ones like the Ford Foundation.
“We couldn’t spend it all,” Gilbert Greenway, a former C.I.A. agent, recalled. “There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing.”
When some of the C.I.A.’s activities were exposed in the late 1960’s, many artists and intellectuals claimed ignorance. But Ms. Stonor Saunders makes a strong case that several people, including the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the poet Stephen Spender, who was co-editor of Encounter, knew about the C.I.A.’s role.
“She has made it very difficult now to deny that some of these things happened,” said Norman Birnbaum, a professor at the Georgetown University Law School who was a university professor in Europe in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. “And she has placed a lot of people living and dead in embarrassing situations.”
Still unresolved is what impact the campaign had and whether it was worth it. Some of the participants, like Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr., who was in the O.S.S. and knew about some of the C.I.A.’s cultural activities, argue that the agency’s role was benign, even necessary. Compared with the coups the C.I.A. sponsored in Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere, he said, its support of the arts was some of its best work. “It enabled people to publish what they already believed,” he added. “It didn’t change anyone’s course of action or thought.”
But Diana Josselson, whose husband, Michael, ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, told Ms. Stonor Saunders that there were real human costs among those around the world who innocently cooperated with the agency’s front organizations only to be tarred with a C.I.A. affiliation when the truth came out. The author and other critics argue that by using government money covertly to promote such American ideals as democracy and freedom of expression, the agency ultimately stepped on its own message.
“Obviously it was an error, and a rather serious error, to allow intellectuals to be subsidized by the government,” said Alan Brinkley, a history professor at Columbia University. “And when it was revealed, it did undermine their credibility seriously.”

Iran’s drug problem.

Masopher — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:38:43 +0000

Masopher has always indicated that Iran should have been consulted in both Iraqi and Afghan campaigns. It is no great stretch of imagination that Iran becomes the net winner of Americas wars on both sides of the Persian pariah. With American Troops and radicals dying Iran is literally eating the cake of security and enjoying the rise of its relative regional strength with only the impotent Israeli threat and notional Saudi counterbalance to hinder its ascent. While it is true Israel could exercise a rumoured nuclear option and it is true that the house of Saud has bought more weapons than Europe, Weapons are only good for war and Iran is not at war with any of these. Only Saddam’s Iraq and the USA remained a threat to Iran but a Shia led state and an erstwhile occupied America means that only a suicidal and imbalanced Jerusalem and a panic stricken Riyadh can quash Iran’s ambition. Jerusalem is not suicidal nor is it imbalanced and Riyadh is in no panic. Israel’s strength (bombing convoys in Syria and unguarded facilities in Iraq) is good in striking at the hidden but its weakness is striking at the most obvious. Any attack on Iran would draw the region into war and end in the obliteration of the Jewish state. The Saudis will not attack a fellow Islamic nation either with its integrity so heavily scrutinized by elements within its own borders.
How it seems to be falling out, is that Iran will be consulted on Afghanistan. Yes there are Iranian spies in Afghanistan, and yes there are a lot of suitably hawkish and misinformed generals in the Obama administration and yes there is a Jewish lobby and friendship at stake, but the truth is Iran wants a peaceful drug free nation to its east. Iran provided vital information to the Bush Administration when the Taliban was beaten the first time and by precedent Iran will assist the Obama administration in beating the Taliban again. Tehran will try to get one up on the US but this is no different from the advantages and submissions required by the administration. Tehran will put its foot in its mouth. 30 years of isolation and Russian influence does that to a country. But there will be no monumental collapse of regime in Iran, no dramatic fall of some wall. Iran is addicted to misery however. Being the sometimes sulky, sometimes roaring Persians has been a role 30 years in the making. With Sunni, Taliban and Jewish threats on all sides Iran probably likes to feel like the poor persecuted Persians. The Taliban are funded by the worlds opium and heroin addiction, by smuggling and peddling drugs to Iranian, European and American users the radicals in Afghanistan-Pakistan earn money to run Madrassas, compensate the families of suicide bombers and buy black market weapons and ammunition. Iran is a vital land route to the west via Turkey. The more dope that the Taliban push, the more AK’s IUDs and poor Afghans can be bought. Iran’s has a drug problems. It is addiction to pain and pain killer it is addicted to being the fringes of global society. Iran’s drug problem needs to be solved.