In that story I posted this comment after discovering a very interesting connection between the propaganda employed by Himmler and today’s American neo-con war-mongers. First is the debunking of the premise of the movie, and next is a trick called ‘inversion of pity’.
Since then and the recent Paris attacks, and Middle Eastern refugees fleeing their war torn countries, the demonization of whole populations and the call to war is getting louder and less rational. Donald Trump and his republican base of voters is evidence of this war vibe .?.symptom — imo
One of the many lies:
In the movie’s first scene, Cooper faces a moral dilemma that never happened in real life:
Garett and I agreed that even if that boy was a civilian, nothing would have happened to Cooper for shooting him. Both of us were trained to take detailed notes with the understanding that if something went wrong, it would be corrected in the report.
Americans were responsible for thousands of Iraqi deaths and almost none were held accountable.
excerpt from tonight's Night Owl
- emphasis added
This is a review written prior to the movie itself
The audience is prompted to empathize with the anguished and reluctant sniper, who is caught in a horrible dilemma.
For that dilemma to exist, the sniper would have to face irreconcilable moral absolutes. That is not the case here: Neither he nor the troops he is protecting had any right to be where they were, and the Iraqis in that neighborhood — including the child — had every right to use any means at their disposal to force the invaders to leave.
And I do care about the lies, not necessarily Kyle's personal lies but the larger lies.
“It was my duty to shoot, and I don’t regret it,” Kyle insisted, describing the woman as “blinded by evil” because she “just wanted Americans dead” for reasons he apparently couldn’t understand, or wouldn’t acknowledge. “My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman’s twisted soul.”
Unfiltered nationalistic bigotry of that variety plays well with the Fox News demographic, but it makes for problematic cinema.
One of the hurdles for the propagandist: overcoming bigotry for the non-Fox “New’s” audience; making it okay for the audience to agree that it was the soldiers “duty to shoot” the people of less “worth”
This tactic “the inversion of pity” is key to the success of war propaganda
As Hannah Ahrendt might say, we’ve seen this movie before.
“What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (`a great task that occurs once in two thousand years’), which must therefore be difficult to bear,” wrote Ahrendt in her study Eichmann in Jerusalem, referring to the SS. “This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did….”
The problem confronted by the National Socialist State’s hired killers, Ahrendt continued, “was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering.
Here is the core of the propaganda to get over the natural instinct to abhor causing suffering — the trick
The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self.
So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say:
What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!”
Thx MB