A comparison of truth with 3 new movies

THE EXPRESSION, “FAKE NEWS”, has been a headline stealer in recent months. Let’s face it, is there any news which isn’t fake — fake in many senses? For example, fake in the actual content, fake in the way that it’s reported, fake in the propaganda bias behind it, fake in terms of the reduction of serious matters to a mere soundbite. Most of the mainstream media outlets are owned by a very few conglomerates which are controlled by the power-elite. Anyone who does not realise that today is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land — a realm which has a larger population than most of the countries you could name put together! 😊 So, the fact that most mainstream media news is based on fakery should not be a surprise. Even many who know these things still sit gawping at their televisions and newspapers (especially today, on Sunday, when fake papers come fat!).

However, I would also tag the phrase “Fake News” to a great many so-called “alternative news sources” today, especially those which lay claim to being part of the “Truth Movement”. I see much blatant propaganda and falsifying of information in those channels too, which is slavishly lapped up by the loony conspiracy-theory brigade (who will believe anything if it is presented to them as “a conspiracy”, e.g. the flat earth nonsense). This world is full of conspiracies — genuine ones — which are brought into disrepute by so many alternative news sites peddling unsubstantiated rumours, speculation and hearsay as if they were fact. This should not surprise us, given that intelligence networks employ shills to infiltrate, or even initiate, “alternative” news channels. People often ask me to recommend some but there are very few that I would endorse.

I’ve written a number of articles about fake news before; but how about fake films? Contrary to what many believe, the film “industry” doesn’t present the public with art or even entertainment, but with seductive distractions mingled with subliminal conditioning. (There are a few exceptions, but these are mostly “indie” films and one or two do slip through the net in Hollywood). Many films serve to desensitise you to extreme violence (how many overblown fights, grisly murders and rapes do you witness each evening?), or fill your head with images of ridiculous battles for hours (e.g. the interminable Lord of the Rings series), or subject you to infantile schoolboy magic (e.g. Harry Potter [yawn]), or groom you to desire penetration by a vampire (e.g. the cringeworthy Twilight Saga series and hundreds more series [double-yawn]), or convince you to believe in “superheroes” (greatest moment was when Ben Affleck as Batman was asked by The Flash, “What’s your superpower again?” and he replied “I’m rich!” 😊 ), or try to fill you with feely-good schmaltz which always ends in a huge CELEBRATION at the end (fake beyond fake). Oh man! It’s all soooo predictable and boring. But that doesn’t stop these films from grabbing so many by “the short and curlies”, filling their heads with patent nonsense. However, the film “industry” is at its finest (in terms of mass conditioning and bullshit) when it comes to biopics, which allegedly depict the lives of actual human beings. There are three in particular doing the rounds right now. “Darkest Hour” (Winston Churchill), “The Greatest Showman” (P.T. Barnum) and “The Post” (Katherine Graham), which I will examine in this short piece.

In “Darkest Hour” (which contains so much terrible acting!), there are a number of historical anomalies (as articles by historians in reputable journals have shown). One scene in particular is a complete fabrication — yet it is probably the one in the film which suckers most people emotionally. I’m referring to the scene in the underground tube, when Churchill allegedly “goes native” and mixes with the (multi-diverse) working-class people of 1940 to gauge their opinions about whether or not to go to war with Germany. Frankly, it’s ridiculous and stands out like a sore thumb as an extreme case of “artistic” license. But it should buff-up the patriotic cockles of many hearts. 😊

“Darkest Hour” is nowhere near as fictional as “The Greatest Showman” in its alleged depiction of the 19th century US entrepreneur, P.T. Barnum. Firstly, Barnum was sixty years old when he began his circus, whereas he is played in the film by a much younger Hugh Jackman (for obvious reasons). The characters of Phillip Carlyle (played by teenage heartthrob, Zac Ephron) and Anne Wheeler (played by Zendaya) are completely fictional. In a film which is patently designed to inculcate people to “celebrate diversity”, the inclusion of a fictional 19th century interracial relationship is an obviously PR-based 21st century strategy. Another fiction in the film is Barnum’s alleged love obsession towards the Swedish soprano, Jenny Lind. The film portrays her leaving the show because Barnum rejected her, but that is also a complete fiction. She actually left the show because she was tired of Barnum’s PR style. She was a good woman who donated all the proceeds (a LOT of money) she received from Barnum to an educational charity in her home country. In reality, Barnum formed what used to be impolitely termed as a “freak-show” for his monetary gain. Essentially, he exploited people with physical disabilities and abnormal traits so as to line his own pockets. That is far closer to the truth than the way he is portrayed in this film. The portrayal of Barnum in the film as being a passionate advocate or even a guru of tolerance and acceptance is also a complete fiction rooted in 21st century politically-correct propaganda rather than historical reality. If you like your feelgood factor artificially boosted by fakeness and propaganda, then this is the film for you.

When we come to the film, “The Post”, the propaganda machine has really cranked up into overdrive. So I’m going to crank into overdrive too! 😀 Here we see Washington Post owner, Katherine Graham (played by Meryl Streep) and Editor Ben Bradlee (played by Tom Hanks). The film purports to show how the paper anguished over publishing “The Pentagon Papers”, secret documents which dealt with the Vietnam war. The film makes it all about the Washington Post when, in fact, the New York Times had already published them beforehand and this was the Post climbing onto the bandwagon to get itself on the map. The truth is that newspapers can only ever publish such items because they have been permitted to or expressly commissioned to by the power-elite. The Washington Post is a CIA paper through and through (with the New York Times a close second). The film, “The Post”, is a vehicle for Streep and Hanks to “lord it” as Hollywood royalty in their element. There are also a number of historical inaccuracies in the film. I am no fan of Nixon but really he is totally misrepresented in the film. The Vietnam war is often solely associated with Nixon but the truth is that it was started and run during the offices of Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson long before Nixon arrived on the presidential scene. Furthermore, Nixon never banned the Washington Post from the White House, as is falsely portrayed in the film, “The Post”, which plainly wanted to create a Trump-like bogeyman and make out as if Nixon was the villain of the piece, which he wasn’t. (The deliberate associations with Trump have been noted by many critics and observers of the film).

Ask yourself these questions: How often does one see government or military corruption properly exposed in the mainstream media? How often does one learn about what is really going on in the world from a mainstream media outlet? One generally finds in the mainstream media a plethora of disinformation, dilution and diversionary articles. Do people in the USA imagine that they have a free press? Consider this quotation: “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month”. (For those who don’t know the phrase, a “call-girl” is a prostitute). Now that comes from the mouth of a CIA operative in discussion with Philip Graham, former owner of the Washington Post and husband of Katherine Graham, about the availability and prices of journalists who were willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories in the mainstream media.You don’t hear that being said in the film, “The Post”! [This is revealed on p.131 in the superb book “Katherine The Great: Katherine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire,” by Deborah Davis (Acacia Press, 1991). For an excellent review of this book, see the article “All the Publisher’s Men: A suppressed book about Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham is on sale again” by Daniel Brandt, originally published in “The National Reporter”, Fall edition 1987, and reproduced at http://www.namebase.net/davis.html ]. It is Deborah Davis’ book that people should be reading rather than the power-elite propaganda film, “The Post”. Even Katherine Graham’s husband himself, Philip, had been an intelligence operative in the 1940s in the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS (Special Branch section) and he continued to have strong connections with the CIA throughout his life. [The above book by Deborah Davis gives information on this. See also http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKdavisD.htm ]. The Washington Post itself has long been a central bastion of CIA propaganda and disinformation. Even the Post’s former executive editor, Ben Bradlee (played by Tom Hanks in the film, “The Post”), has a proven CIA background [see http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKdavisD.htm and the above book, “Katherine the Great” for evidence of this]. Furthermore, the Washington Post’s celebrated role in exposing the Watergate incident was nothing to do with remarkable investigative reporting but was instead a classic CIA scam. Bob Woodward — one of the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story (alluded to at the end of the film, “The Post”) — was himself a former “communications officer in the U.S. Navy” (a buzz phrase for a Naval Intelligence operative) with little journalistic experience prior to his appointment at the Washington Post. Woodward’s intelligence operative background has been almost completely ignored in the media, which is extraordinary in view of the fact that he was “presiding over the code room of the chief of naval operations in Washington, with access to, among other things, Henry Kissinger’s secret cable traffic in 1970” [see http://www.davidcogswell.com/MediaRoulette/WoodwardBush.html ]. As is rightly observed elsewhere:

“Woodward worked ‘as communications watch officer at the Pentagon in 1970, which led him to act as a courier between the military and the White House. His work brought him into close contact with General Alexander Haig, who worked for the National Security Council and whom he frequently briefed. Operating in this environment had much more to do with his future evolution as a journalist than anything else, including his work on exposing Watergate’” [see http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bob_Woodward ].

Woodward and Bernstein’s so-called “Deep Throat” revelations about Watergate were simply the printing of CIA-fed material designed to bring down Nixon without having to get involved in another messy JFK-style assassination. [Read Jim Hougan, “Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA”, Random House, 1984, for details of this. Hougan is the former Washington editor of Harpers magazine. His other book “Spooks, The Haunting of America: The Private Use of Secret Agents”, William Morrow, 1978, is also very informative in terms of the subject matter under discussion here]. Woodward — now assistant managing editor of the Washington Post — is still a prototype disinformation agent for the CIA/Pentagon to this very day. Woodward’s book, the sycophantic fluff piece, “Bush at War” (Simon & Schuster, 2002), is a classic example of his role as a lackey “tea boy” gopher disinformation propaganda reporter for the power elite. [For copious evidence of the credentials (or, rather, non-credentials) of Woodward and his sidekick, Carl Bernstein, read Adrian Havill, “Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein”, Birch Lane Press, 1993].

What a scandal it is that this degree of manipulation and control has been able to wield such a stranglehold over the mass of people by the media across the world. Is it any wonder that independent journalists and thinkers would be eliminated in such a world (as indeed they are, which I have covered in another article, “The Sword’s Fear of the Pen”)? Woodward is still doing the lecture tour circuit as a “hero” of an American “free” press. [For an example of this see https://www.bigspeak.com/speakers/bob-woodward ]. Over and again, we see the wrong people feted as heroes and heroines in this world, while the real heroes and heroines are ridiculed, vilified, defamed and often snuffed out of existence through assassination.

Although the intelligence agencies of this world pose as protective organisations upholding national security, in reality they are engaged in a planned programme of propaganda, manipulation, mind-control, terrorism, and assassination to further the ends of the power elite. The control of the world’s media has been a major element in the success of this programme. [If you want to know more about the suppression of heroic investigative journalism, read the essential Kristina Borjesson (Ed.), “Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press”, Prometheus Books, 2002. See also the article “Operation Mockingbird — The Subversion Of America’s Free Press By The CIA”, which can be found at the link http://www.rense.com/politics6/mockingbird.htm . See also “Journalism and the CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer” by Daniel Brandt at http://www.namebase.net/news17.html ].

It is fascinating to learn that in the 1950s the CIA bought the film rights to George Orwell’s “Animal farm” from his widow before the author was hardly cold in his grave so that they could rework the ending. [see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/how-cia-brought-animal-farm-to-the-screen/ ]. This was expressly against Orwell’s stipulations. It was arranged by CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, who later achieved notoriety for his role in the Watergate scandal. The CIA then went on to change the ending of the film version of Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, also in the 1950s. In the book, Winston Smith, is utterly defeated by the totalitarian regime. In the very last words of the book, Orwell writes about Winston: ”He loved Big Brother.” However, in the CIA-altered movie ending, Winston and his lover, Julia, are shot down after Winston defiantly shouts: “Down with Big Brother!” (This version of “1984”, with that falsified ending, was eventually removed from circulation by the Orwell Estate after distribution rights ended). Orwell’s realistically pessimistic ending was altered by the CIA to make it look as if he hadn’t been defeated after all. The CIA disliked the fact that both East and West were often portrayed as equally morally-bankrupt and wanted to engineer the arts and literature to reflect the West as being morally superior. [All this cultural engineering, and there was a lot of it, is recorded in the revealing book by Frances Stonor Saunders, “The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters”, New Press, 2000. This is another essential book if one wants to be educated about the manipulation of films, culture and the art world by the intelligence “community”]. Such blatant cultural engineering could have come straight out of the plot of one of Orwell’s own novels!

Everything I’ve written in this article can be fact-checked by you, the reader of these words, if you have the stomach to admit that your world is based on fakery every bit as much as the news and the films. Fake news. Fake films. Fake world. What is it that fake news and fake films have in common? They both serve people with what they want to hear. They pander to the mass-mind with the lowest common denominator of patent fantasies. This is just one of the reasons that we live in a fake world. For fakery is what mostpeople want — fake food, fake relationships, fake media, fake movies, fake economy, fake authority, fake equalities, fake people, fake sex, fake smiles, fake selves, Fakebook! If only people would discover what they need rather than what they want, the world would then be transformed overnight. Let’s get real!

© 2018, Alan Morrison / The Diakrisis Project. All Rights Reserved. 
 
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]