Published on Thursday, January 11, 2001 in the
Independent / UK
Watch out! America's Unleashing Its Depleted
Imagination
by Mark Steel
2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.
The trick with propaganda is to make it look neutral and
scientific. At school we were once
shown a film about nuclear power in which a chirpy
narrator chuckled that radiation is "all
around us ^ in the air, on televisions. Everywhere". I
can't remember exactly, but I think
there followed the voice of an old woman saying "but I
heard it might be dangerous" and the
narrator replying "huh huh, you know, even the bomb
dropped on Hiroshima contained less
radiation than the average tin of shoe polish".
That way, propaganda can be one of those things, like
police corruption, that is often
assumed to have been dreadful 20 years ago but doesn't
happen any more. So we can
shake our heads at the way black people used to be
portrayed in Hollywood, when they
were only allowed to be maids with lines like "Oh there
you go again Miss Sophie, offering
us freedom an' equality an' all. Why, us simple but
cheerful negro folk ain't got time to go
a-votin' and a-ridin' in streetcars, we's too busy
cookin' and playin' the trumpet".
But today's Hollywood is just as ideological, as America
pretends it's always been fanatical
about civil rights. So in The Patriot, set in the
American War of Independence, and even in
Spielberg's Amistad, white America is liberal and lovely
and appalled that discrimination
could take place. Which makes you wonder who organised
all that slavery. There must have
been one un-enlightened plantation owner, before the FBI
arrested him and placed him on a
race-awareness course.
We can laugh at the Cold War mania of The Green Berets
or Rocky pummelling a Russian.
But Hollywood has just released a film called Thirteen
Days, about the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis, described by critics as "145 minutes of Kennedy
hero-worship" and "hideously
inaccurate." One of the reasons is that Fidel Castro
isn't mentioned at all.
This is a new twist to Hollywood propaganda. No longer
is the opposition evil and cowardly;
it doesn't exist. In the remake of The Great Escape, the
Steve McQueen character will
announce his plan for a tunnel, and the others will say:
"Well, seeing there are no Germans,
we could just walk out the door."
Which is a shame, because a film about America's real
behaviour during the crisis would
make fine entertainment. Their attitude could be
summarised by the CIA file that stated
"Che Guevara is fairly intellectual for a Latino".
Unlike Americans, of course, who are all
geniuses like Ronald Reagan and George W Bush and would
never believe in anything
unintellectual such as creationism or astrology or WWF
wrestling.
The head of Cuban state security documented 612 plots by
the Americans against Castro,
including exploding sea-shells, powder to make his beard
fall out and giving him a present of
a poisoned diving suit. Which makes you wonder whether
American foreign policy was
directed by the wily coyote, under the impression that
Castro was the road runner.
All this, including the farcical invasion of the Bay of
Pigs, took place with Kennedy's
blessing. Then, during the "13 days" of the crisis, the
British ambassador, David Ormsby
Gore, went for dinner with the Kennedys, later saying:
"Jackie felt that the President needed
a relaxed evening, so talk of Cuba or missiles was
taboo."
So as the world tottered on the verge of annihilation,
he couldn't discuss the matter because
his wife had said: "All I've heard from you is Cuba Cuba
Cuba all week long. Well you're not
spoiling dinner with your silly missiles. Men,
honestly."
And while America went berserk about Russian missiles
aimed at American cities, they
had missiles in Italy and Turkey aimed at Russian
cities. Although these could only
produce American fallout which, as we know from the
information films is no more harmful
than a spring onion. But none of that will be portrayed
in the new film. Instead we'll probably
see Khrushchev helping Kennedy to search for the
missiles, which have been sent to Cuba
by a typhoon manufactured in an underground cave by
Saddam Hussein, who is heroically
captured by Martin Luther King.
Now, supposedly, we live in a new world, without evil
empires, requiring a new post-Cold
War propaganda. We're supposed to believe the West rules
by friendliness.
Up to now this has been the American and British way of
dealing with the worries about
depleted uranium. We would never land anything that was
dangerous on a place we were
trying to protect. There's probably a training film
warning soldiers that, if they get any on
their hands, they ought to give them a jolly good wipe
with a J-Cloth before handling
vegetables. Perhaps they show a film of George Robertson
proving how safe it is by feeding
a depleted-uranium burger to his daughter.
But just as before, they knew all along they were
bluffing. For example, I don't suppose that,
when Tony Blair felt something land on his back, he
thought: "I do hope that's only depleted
uranium and not a bloomin' tomato, as those things can
be an absolute swine to wash out."
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