If you work in Hollywood and want villains for your latest production you need look no further than Russians. Iranians will do too of course. How about the Chinese, the Yellow Peril?
You will no doubt be too young to remember the arch-villain Fu Manchu, the Chinese evil genius. He was invented by author Sax Rohmer who wrote 14 novels featuring him.
‘The image of Orientals invading Western nations became the foundation of Rohmer's commercial success, being able to sell 20 million copies in his lifetime.’ (Wikipedia)
Dr Fu Manchu was played by a total of ten actors over a period of eighty three years, from 1924 to 2007, the last actor playing him (so far) being Nicholas Cage. There’s nothing quite like an evil foreigner or foreigners to achieve viewer motivation by depicting an unpleasant and easily feared and despised ‘other’.
It is always important to Hollywood that no redeeming features are seen in their villains, or if some apparently human attribute is indeed shown that it be exposed as just another devious attempt to trick the hero. Modern script writers are not quite so keen to depict their charcaters in the total black and white characteristics of yesteryear. Some attempt at nuance is required but strictly the minimum while every other feature of dark motivations, untrustworthiness, cunning, trickery and a sadistic love of despotism is played for all it is worth.
This still works... even in these times of a more sophisticated viewership.
Take two multi-part series originating in the USA in recent years, 'Homeland’ and 'House of Cards’. In both series Iranians and Russians are depicted as outlined above. The characters portrayed as deeply unsympathetic especially so by comparison with the parts of our American heroes who, although flawed, are depicted as so much more ethical and moral than their villainous counterparts.
These character assassinations are necessary to instill the maximum drama and suspense into the mix of course. The good guys must be seen to be so and the bad guys must be seen to be very bad indeed. How could it work for an audience expecting this, primed by a thousand other productions that are created with the same emotional expectations built-in?
But is it truly ethical to tar entire nationalities with this same ultra-wide brush? Is it really too much of a stretch to enter certain proclivities of a deeper and darker nature into this scenario? I am talking of real life rather than fiction. Of whole races and nations being spoken of in the same way as Hollywood scriptwriters do with impunity. No one ever heard Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering or Joseph Goebbels say a single positive word about the Jews, did they? Those speeches had one purpose and one purpose only, to demonize globally and generally and reduce the status of those people to the point where they were regarded as a threat worthy of extermination.
Is it really so very different? Especially the productions named above which in case you havn’t seen them linger for episode after episode on the iniquity of Iranians and Russians and just how devious and malign they are, posed as the worst kind of untrustworthy and vile creatures that the world would be so much better off without.
Sub-humans anyone?
The world of fiction needs its villains, the bad guys, those they used to boo and hiss at in the early days of cinema and who now viewers are encouraged to mentally curl a lip at and take in the sub-text of entertainment conditioning in far from a subliminal way.
What then of the world of facts? TV news and your daily paper (if you still take one or read one online) how do they differ from all of the above, if at all? When was the last time you watched or read something positive about either Iran or Russia, about Iranians or Russians? Was there even a first time?
Are the channels of entertainment much different than those of fact in this respect? It doesn’t take much calculation to determine the extent of the flow of negative news concerning these nations or their populations. A nanosecond mental inspection of anyone living in the western world will reveal myriad, almost daily negative reports. The conditioning could not possibly be more clear. And all this from the so-called “free press”. It’s free alright, totally free to be as biased and free from balance as it wishes. Right of reply is virtually non-existent. Right of reply would almost grant that these people are normal human beings and that must not under any circumstances be allowed to be the perception of western audiences.
Thus you will not hear from Assad of Syria, from any of the Iranian heads of state, not from Vladimir Putin and not from any representatives of all three. This how the “free press” works in the West as compared with what we are led to believe is a censored press and media in the East.
The ones you will hear of and often are such as The White Helmets who operate within areas of Syria controlled by those local elites and those in the West have funded and who, at various times certain western politicians have had a ‘slip of the tongue’ about and revealed that they are no better than the terrorists they purport to fight. You will hear story after story about Alexei Navalny in Russia about how he is a hard done-by protestor who cannot get a fair hearing and who is ruthlessly suppressed. But nothing will you hear of the racist names he has called certain immigrant populations within Russia.
What can we call the completely one-sided reporting on Iran and Russia when there is zero overview or effort to provide balance or counter-argument but instead a constant flow of undiluted negativity? Is it an exaggeration to call it fake news? If it is skewed, obviously manipulated toward a postulated worst case showing Iranians or Russians in the worst possible light can it really be termed news at all? I would argue it veers so far into being a deeply and intentionally misleading description that it can only be described as I have inferred it to be, fake news.
When you know that your mass media will report exactly what you want in the way that you want it reported then another valuable option opens up for you. The audience is already primed by the one-sided reports, documentaries, books and magazines, the latter complete with garish portraits of the “demons” leading the nations you find yourself at war with. The next step is to feed the flames of emotion you have kindled so there is never any risk that they will subside and die down. The theater of war is already within your control regarding you are playing to, you have just what you need, a captive audience.
Imagine the temptation. You know your narratives will be channeled where you want them to be. You know there will be no provision for any counter-argument within the mainstream. Your intelligence people have already been showing just how proficient they are regarding psychological operations designed to confuse and confound enemies. The next step is merely to expand already existing programs with an expeditious false flag event every now and then.
What could be easier? After all, you decided after 9/11 that nothing was more important than defeating all those you frame as enemies, no methodology was to be left off the table. Moral and ethical laws were to be no hindrance. If using terrorists as proxies worked so be it. If torture proved effective then there was no way it could be refrained from. Black sites. Rendition. Assassination. Stories that included believable lies... merely standard operating procedure. Deception as a primary weapon during warfare... no question, absolutely.
It is a very short step to the most useful of all the many deceptions regularly carried out to win a war, a powerful means of affecting the emotions of millions, used sparingly if the circumstances demanded, a false flag event. There is nothing quite like them for getting the 'International Community’ on board and the most prestigious groups pontificating and pointing fingers in precisely the direction you want.
Every western NGO will get right on board. Every human rights agency. And of course every western politician of note along with every editor across the entire suite of western mainstream media and press office. The chorus that sings along to the current false flag theme tune is immense and hugely effective. What you hear a thousand times and from every quarter by those who talk to you from all those elite sources including CNN and the BBC must surely be true, no?
And as Kurt Vonnegut memorably wrote at the end of each chapter of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five‘:
‘So it goes’.
And goes and goes and goes.
Fiction. False Flags and Fake News.
All swirl in a diet of propaganda soup the western world swims in on a daily basis.
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