{"id":17618,"date":"2012-02-27T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2012-02-27T12:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=17618"},"modified":"2012-02-25T14:51:13","modified_gmt":"2012-02-25T14:51:13","slug":"forgetting-the-past-one-military-movie-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2012\/02\/forgetting-the-past-one-military-movie-at-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Forgetting the Past, One Military Movie at a Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the entertainment industry gets in bed with the Pentagon, censorship is inevitable.<\/em><\/p>\n

When philosopher George Santayana said, \u201cThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,\u201d he meant it as an admonition\u2013not as an endorsement of mass amnesia or historical revision. This should be obvious.<\/p>\n

Yet those operating at the shadowy intersection of the Pentagon and Hollywood either don\u2019t understand\u2013or, more likely, refuse to understand\u2013the thrust of the aphorism. Instead, with this week\u2019s release of a much-awaited film, Santayana\u2019s omen has been transformed into a public mission statement for a burgeoning Military-Entertainment Complex.<\/p>\n

Since 1986\u2019s Top Gun<\/em> rekindled the Pentagon-Hollywood relationship from its post-Vietnam doldrums, the collusion between the military and the entertainment industry has become a blockbuster con, generating huge benefits for both participants\u2013and swindling the American public in the process.<\/p>\n

The scheme is simple: The Pentagon allows studios to use military hardware and bases at a discounted, taxpayer-subsidized rate. In exchange, filmmakers must submit their scripts to the Pentagon for line edits. Not surprisingly, those edits often redact criticism of military policy, revise depictions of historical failures, and generally omit anything else that might make audiences wonder if our current defense policy is repeating past mistakes.<\/p>\n

If a studio doesn\u2019t agree to the edits, then it loses access to the martial equipment, and typically, the film is terminated. If, by contrast, filmmakers agree to the edits, access is granted, and the film gets made at a cut-rate price to the studio. Except in the credits\u2019 fine print, the audience is never told about the censorship.<\/p>\n

The predictable result is a glut of movies that both celebrate U.S. military policy and whitewash the checkered history of military adventurism\u2013and relatively few major movies questioning that policy and that adventurism.<\/p>\n

No doubt as a system of stealth coercion, the arrangement has been wildly effective. But with America now questioning the efficacy of constant invasions and the morality of never-ending occupations, the Pentagon is getting worried and thus intensifying its agitprop to ever more manipulative extremes. Last year, for example, it cemented its first full sponsorship of a major film, X-Men: First Class<\/em>, integrating the movie into recruitment ads. It\u2019s now going even further, fully financing its own feature-length film, Act of Valor,<\/em> appearing in theaters nationwide starting February 24.<\/p>\n

Casting active-duty SEALs, the film is ostensibly about a mission to neutralize terrorists. But as one of the filmmakers let slip this week, its heroic portrayals and triumphs are really designed to once again make us forget the past.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d like to see the legacy of Vietnam put to bed,\u201d said Act of Valor<\/em> filmmaker Mike \u201cMouse\u201d McCoy in an interview with the Huffington Post. \u201cIt was a really bad time in American history, absolutely, but it\u2019s time to sort of forget that and forget those sensibilities and don\u2019t associate our troops and our men and women to that conflict anymore, and time to really open our eyes to say, \u2018What\u2019s going on in this world? What are our men and women in uniform really doing right now for us?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s true that America\u2019s recent wars are not exactly the same as the Vietnam War, a stunning new report in Armed Forces Journal proves there are troubling similarities we could learn from. With history\u2019s lessons in mind, we might learn to refrain from involving ourselves in foreign quagmires because the human costs are too high. We might also learn that some conflicts have no military solution at all.<\/p>\n

But such lessons run counter to a Pentagon focused on perpetually repeating a military-centric past, so those lessons are being deliberately obscured. That\u2019s indeed a triumph of the Military-Entertainment Complex, but it\u2019s a Pyrrhic victory for America \u2013 one that guarantees Santayana\u2019s warning goes unheeded.<\/p>\n

___________________<\/p>\n

David Sirota, an In These Times senior editor and syndicated columnist, is a bestselling author whose book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now\u2014Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything was released in 2011. Sirota, whose previous books include The Uprising and Hostile Takeover, hosts the morning show on AM760 in Denver. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 inthesetimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the entertainment industry gets in bed with the Pentagon, censorship is inevitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}