The moral depravity into which the US is sinking
is shown by American Sniper glorifying the exploits of a racist killer
receiving six Oscar nominations, whereas ‘Selma’ depicting Martin Luther
King’s struggle against racism has been largely ignored.
American Sniper is directed by Clint Eastwood, and tells the
story of Chris Kyle, a US Navy Seal who served four tours of duty
in Iraq as a sniper credited with 160 confirmed “kills”, and
earning him the dubious honor of being lauded the most lethal
sniper in US military history.
Played by Bradley Cooper, in the movie Kyle is an all-American
hero, a Texas cowboy who joins the military out of a sense of
patriotism and a yearning for purpose and direction in his life.
Throughout the ‘uber-tough’ selection process, Kyle is a bastion
of stoicism and determination, willing to bear any amount of pain
and hardship for the honor of being able to serve his country as
a Navy Seal – America’s equivalent of the Samurai.
The personal struggle he endures as a result of what he
experiences and does in Iraq is not motivated by any regrets over
the people he kills, including women and children, but on his
failure to kill more and thereby save the lives of American
soldiers as they go about the business of tearing the country
apart, city by city, block by block, and house by house.
If American Sniper wins one Oscar, never mind the six it’s been
nominated for, when this annual extravaganza of movie pomp and
ceremony unfolds in Hollywood on February 22, it will not only
represent an endorsement of US exceptionalism, but worse it will
be an insult to the Iraqi people. In the movie they are depicted
as a dehumanized mass of savages – occupying the same role as the
Indians in John Wayne Western movies of old – responsible for
their own suffering and the devastation of their country, which
the white man is in the process of civilizing.
Anything resembling balance and perspective is sacrificed in
American Sniper to the more pressing needs of US propaganda,
which holds that the guys who served in Iraq were the very best
of America, men who went through hell in order to protect the
freedoms and way of life of their fellow countrymen at home. It
is the cult of the soldier writ large, men who in the words of
Kyle (Bradley Cooper) in the movie “just want to get the bad
guys.”
The ”bad guys” are, as mentioned, the Iraqis. In fact if you had
just arrived in the movie theatre from another planet, you would
be left in no doubt from the movie’s opening scene that Iraq had
invaded and occupied America rather than the other way round.
Unsurprisingly, the real Chris Kyle was not as depicted by Clint
Eastwood and played by Bradley Cooper. In his autobiography, upon
which the movie is supposedly based, Kyle writes, “
I hate the
damn savages. I couldn’t give a flying f**k about the
Iraqis.”
It is clear that the movie’s director, Clint Eastwood, when faced
with the choice between depicting the truth and the myth, decided
to go with the myth.
But it should come as no surprise, given that the peddling of
such myths is the very currency of Hollywood. Over many decades
the US movie industry has proved itself one of the most potent
weapons in the armory of US imperialism, helping to project a
myth of an America, defined by lofty attributes of courage,
freedom, and democracy.
As the myth has it, these values, and with them America itself,
are continually under threat from the forces of evil and darkness
that lurk outwith and often times within. The mountain of lies
told in service to this myth has only been exceeded by the
mountain of dead bodies on the basis of it – victims of the
carnage and mayhem unleashed around the world by Washington.
Chris Kyle was not the warrior or hero portrayed in American
Sniper. He was in fact a racist killer for whom the only good
Iraqi was a dead Iraqi. He killed men, women, and children, just
as his comrades did during the course of a brutal and barbaric
war of aggression waged by the richest country in the world
against one of the poorest.
They say that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. In
the hands of a movie director with millions of dollars and the
backing of a movie studio at its disposal, it is far more
dangerous than that. It is a potent weapon deployed against its
victims, denying them their right to even be considered victims,
exalting in the process, when it comes to Hollywood, those who
murder and massacre in the name of America.
With this in mind, it is perhaps fitting that Chris Kyle was shot
and killed by a former Marine at a shooting range in Texas in
2013. “
Man was born into barbarism,” Martin Luther King
said, “
when killing his fellow man was a normal condition
ofexistence.”
Read more: Hollywood uses ‘American Sniper’ to destroy history & create myth — RT Op-Edge
