The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda | Hacker News Reader

The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

worldbeyondwar.org

173 pointsmyshpa164 comments

I wonder if "Contagion" was propaganda. It really made me believe that if a SARS pandemic ever happened, a bunch of incredibly competent scientists and government agents would swoop in and save us all.

The "Olympus Has Fallen" series also made me believe that if a mob ever stepped foot on the White House lawn, a bunch of auto turrets would pop up and gun them all down.

The last few years has shown that the world is run by a bunch of jokers, no different than me. That's comforting in some ways, horrifying in others, and sadly has ruined the illusion of some of my favorite movies.

Contagion got things pretty much spot-on. Conspiracy theorists with fake cures, political officials who fight mitigation measures, contact tracing, panic buying, at-home substitutes for school events, fairly rapid vaccine development and the initial scarcity of it.

The major difference was the mortality rate; the movie's virus killed something like 25%. One of the odd difficulties with COVID is it's deadly enough (especially pre-vaccine) to make a serious pile of excess deaths on a population-level scale, but low enough people can just get used to it.

Contagion also compressed time quite a bit because it’s a movie meant to entertain. It couldn’t show the long months of research, development and testing that actual science requires. Still a great movie.

Fun fact: I worked in the office building where they filmed the CDC scenes (spoiler: it’s not and never was the CDCs real office), was kinda cool to walk the halls and enter the clean room they used.

It wasn’t too bad, the movie spanned 4 months from outbreak to vaccine. Pfizer’s Covid trial started 5 months after outbreak. If Covid was killing 20% like the virus in the movie, we could have matched or beaten the movie timeline.

Good point.

Although if we do have a pandemic with 20% mortality rates I feel like we would experience societal collapse in a much larger scale than in the movie. Much larger as in: we can’t finish developing a vaccine because world order is severely degraded.

Thank goodness COVID's mortality rates for nonsmokers aged 18-50 without diabetes were 2-3 orders of magnitude lower than that.

And mortality rates in children was even lower. I think that really helped cool things down. And even then, we all know how crazy things got.

Right, I think it is fascinating that basically the whole world decided to wait for the trials to finish. If death rate had been higher I'm sure some countries would have just started vaccinating and hoping for the best.

The inaccurate part of the movie is that all that stuff worked. In real life, what "ended" the pandemic was a combination of mother nature and the human willingness to accept a lost cause and move on.

And an effective vaccine, as far as death and severe illness is concerned.

https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/new-study-shows-fewer-p...

> The findings, based on data across 2,558 counties in 48 US states, show that counties with high vaccine coverage had a more than 80% reduction in death rates compared with largely unvaccinated counties.

Definitely a big win, but 80% reduction means it prevented fewer than half of the vulnerable from death, when the hope had been much closer to preventing virtually all deaths. Those are not pandemic ending numbers, certainly not to those who espouse a zero COVID strategy.

> 80% reduction means it prevented fewer than half of the vulnerable from death

What are you trying to say here? That math doesn't make sense to me at all. Pretty clearly the reduction in deaths comes primarily from... those who would have been vulnerable to dying.

We're going to need to determine the cause of the unexplained spike in recent all-cause mortality before we can have any sort of meaningful conversation about the risk/benefit analysis of the covid vaccination program.

What's even more alarming is that this increases in all-cause deaths were present in the vaccine clinical study data. The vaccine group had fewer covid deaths but had significantly more overall deaths that the non vaccine control group.

Citations needed, this is sounding like some 5g microchip conspiracy nonsense.

https://aaronsiri.substack.com/p/pfizers-clinical-trial-had-...

One would expect more deaths in the placebo group from all the people who died of covid. Which makes the data even more striking.

Well I poked around, I’m not sure exactly what you’re seeing. One would expect more covid deaths in the placebo, and that is the case. Most of the deaths in both groups are indeed unrelated to Covid at all. You can see exact cause of death for all participants here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2021/07/28/202...

I suspect the number your focusing on is the 4 cardiac arrest deaths. At a glance it seems 4x higher than the one reported placebo death. But the number is 4 vs 1 for over 20k people. Why not instead focus on placebo group having 2 vs 0 myocardial infarction? The reason why not is that dying is noisy business, and things like cardiac arrest have a pretty high baseline, and this is such a small sample the variance is likely noise.

Perhaps you could present a proper statistical analysis to convince otherwise? Something similar to the methodology for determining Covid vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing Covid deaths. After all, the data is all there. I didn’t see anything resembling such an analysis in your linked source. Just the confused ramblings of someone nontechnical, clearly out of their depth in reading a fairly basic research paper.

The issue isn't the possible noise in non-covid deaths. It's this rather bold statement:

"None of these deaths were considered related to BNT162b2 by investigators"

How would they know? What investigators and what criteria? If there was a 20% increase in seemingly-unrelated deaths, would it be detected? These are the questions that Pfizer should have explained but instead we just got this one pithy sentence. Also remember, this is industry with a history of fraud and criminality. GSK was fined billions for covering up heart deaths in a diabetes treatment only a few years earlier and Pfizer is up on the list too. Our FDA needed to be our advocates and a lot of people feel let down seeing this rubber-stamped.

I don't believe that is true.

It was at first but we're at the point now where that's been dropped too. Here in Spain I haven't even been able to get it anymore in the last year and a half. I've had COVID twice, one time recently, and it was mild. Same with everyone else. Last week in the Netherlands there was nobody even in the ICU anymore in the whole country with it.

Even without the vaccine we would have got here but it would have taken longer and cost more lives.

Are you deliberately ignoring vaccination? I genuinely can't tell if I'm being trolled into a conspiracy argument or not. But just in case:

The vaccines turned an extremely dangerous pandemic into a tolerable-if-still-worrisome endemic disease. This lancet paper represents a pretty good consensus belief that vaccines saved 14M lives. Our "willingness to accept a lost cause" was informed heavily by the justfied belief that it wouldn't kill us.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Basically, yeah. "All that stuff worked".

> The vaccines turned an extremely dangerous pandemic into a tolerable-if-still-worrisome endemic disease.

Effective vaccinations were pretty much limited to the first world countries. Third world countries either did not have access to vaccines or used subpar ones like russia's sputnik. I would like to see a scientific study comparing the duration of pandemic in vaccinated vs non-vaccinated countries. It would be apples to oranges comparison but there are be some interesting insights to learn.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/05/04/9925440...

It says that most Haitians are young (see the population pyramid for example to get an idea how young) and were not affected much by the virus and they don't care (about their old) that much because they have their own difficulty to stay alive and not starving.

But it for sure affected them https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CDRT.IN?location...

>This lancet paper represents a pretty good consensus belief

The paper represents an effort to support a particular hypothesis using curve-fitting. The Bible represents a "pretty good consensus belief".

And the most important thing: the Ukraine - Russia war that took over the media's short attention span.

> The inaccurate part of the movie is that all that stuff worked. In real life, what "ended" the pandemic was a combination of mother nature and the human willingness to accept a lost cause and move on.

The war in Ukraine and the market correction in Nov '21 helped to divert attention from the immense amount of coverage that COVID otherwise got. In fact, Ukraine was doing tracing and the QR code vaccination passports (per EU standards) in the Fall of '21 and it's infection rates and deaths only increased in the Winter due to low vaccination rates [0].

Then the invasion happened and no one cared and all the grifting from things like VC juicing of stocks like Zoom, Peleton, retail getting locked out and losing GME gains etc... also got swept under the rug as intrest rates were on the rise and cost of living rised with it and Putin became the reason for all of it and not the immense amount of fiscal policy repercussions of Quantitative easing, ZIRP and immense spending on all of these fake measures to contain COVID.

Putin is a bastard and a despot and deserves all the ire and hopefully a swift death for the inhumane things in this senseless war, but it also gave the West pre-text to divert the ills of society's occurring since at least 2008 an over-simplified narrative to convince the masses with the abomination of the war footage from Western outlets and get it to be the new normal.

0: https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraine-capital-tightens-lockd...

Not to mention the long term effects, such as increased risk of diabetes, heart problems and neurodegenerative conditions. Plus a bunch of other symptoms which get labeled as long covid.

These are not enough to make people afraid of catching the virus. The effects are not immediate and humans are bad at long-term risk assessment. See climate change or smoking as examples.

  > the world is run by a bunch of jokers, no different than me

Your (our) lack of audacity is the only difference.

This is actually the difference between a hacker trying to save the world and someone on his rear end complaining about how the world is.

When I learned this at the age of 20 that I am an adult now and no one can say any longer I am too young, my persona shifted from "tell me what to do" to a "i already know what to do but go ahead and tell me why i shouldn't"

Cost and risk are a major factor in how things are dealt with. Ebola mobilizes different responses than most diseases and so kills fewer people. Armed gunmen regularly attack the pentagon so it’s well defend against lone gunmen.

The vast majority of government buildings aren’t well protected because they don’t need to be.

"They Live (1988)" has seemed oddly relevant over the years.

WORK 8 HOURS

SLEEP 8 HOURS

PLAY 8 HOURS

Perennially relevant.

> the world is run by a bunch of jokers

That's what they'd like you to believe. They know exactly what they are doing.

One of the classic and unmistakable hallmarks of a fool is that they think they know what they are doing.

And in this case, they always seem to get more wealthy and come out ahead no matter what.

Ahead of what? They die too just like everybody else.

Ahead on virtually any measure of material or social success, and they further consolidate their advantages by functioning multi-generationally, which means that no, they don't die quite like everybody else.

See for example: the Bush dynasty vs the typical "successful" American family. Do you know anyone benefiting from their great-grandfather's Nazi money, plus their grandfather's CIA/oil cartel black ops + presidency + Carlyle group influence trading, plus their father's presidency (and yet-to-be-proven criminal fuckery)? I don't.

Thanks for reminding me to grab the tinfoil hat!

The comment you're replying to is technically correct, but completely misses the point.

You would have had to make a cogent point for me to have missed it.

I think their point was more philosophical. They can be rich, but they'll never be happy sort of a thing.

Don't forget the They Live glasses!

It's all provable beyond doubt if you'd like to see.

> a bunch of incredibly competent scientists ... would swoop in and save us all

And they did.

The realization that incompetence rules in surplus times and nobody rules in undersupply times is most horrifying. We (society) really fall apart rather quickly when push comes to shove.

Which is why to construct society up keeping constructs like social networks + Panopticon or a knowledge storage like youtube are quite the achievement.

"The loan was followed in 1948 by a free grant of $2.3 billion from the Marshall Plan, with no repayment. In exchange, French cinemas would replace the numerical quota with a "screen quota". This meant that French cinemas were required to show French-made films for four weeks out of every thirteen and leave the other nine weeks of every quarter open to free competition, namely from American films.[5]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum%E2%80%93Byrnes_agreement

Wow that's insane. If China did that same thing today, we would be up in arms.

Spain has quotas for regional languages too, this made Netflix had to produce on those languages.

Governments keep doing this, it's just bad if the one doing it is also the -global- leader of right now...

Random article talking about this https://www.catalannews.com/culture/item/spain-s-netflix-law...

Perhaps the Chinese government funded this very article?

Insane? Really? There is nothing wrong with defending your language and the artistic industry. They've got also some similar quotas for the song in French on the radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law.

Its promoting making bad movies and song though. Let the world compete

Not everyone is so eager to dissolve their national identities and turn their countries into economic platforms for the world to compete on.

> Its promoting making bad movies and song though. Let the world compete

You should see Holywood movies. /s

Up in arms against the French protectionism for their second-largest industry or the American "bribe" to relax it, in order to benefit their own industry and better spread their ideology?

If china opened up their theaters to normal american movies? Right now they only allow heavily censored and de-westernized movies. Things have to be heavily re-edited for the chinese audience, which isn't strictly bad, but the kind of things that get edited out are unfortunate

For China it is not surprising to censor "normal american movies", but it should not be forgotten that even some western countries like UK have heavily censored many "normal american movies" for several decades, before relaxing the censorship rules.

In IMDB, at the "Alternate versions" sections, many cases of censored versions are described, and the British censorship rules were especially ridiculous.

It's not so much "de-westernized" as it is "sanitized for The Party". The details really matter here, because when it comes to censorship it's much less about "East vs West" and more about "The Party" vs "all others".

Censorship is bad wheter is done by "the party" or by "democracies" or by companies.

We would be up in arms because the propaganda would tells us to be up in arms. It's remarkable how our feelings towards each other and to foreign countries are entirely shaped by propaganda.

Anyone here old enough to remember freedom fries?

> "* signed May 28, 1946, by the Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and representatives of the French government Léon Blum and, especially, Jean Monnet*"

I am not surprised. Jean Monnet worked as an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

French law defines a whole "media chronology" where a movie can only be shown in theaters the first x months, then it can only be leased for the next x months, then released in disc, etc...

Why is that? I assume that's in a no-later-than sense, with later tiers being added on and not replacing earlier ones.

If not, wouldn't that make second-run films or pulling under-performers from screens earlier illegal?

Oh yeah my bad I explained it poorly.

The next steps doesn't prevent the ones before.

But about under performers, it has an exception for movies that did under a specific amount of entries, for them the timeline is shorter but still there : you can pull it out of theaters the day right after the release, but you'll still need to wait a (shorter) time to release it on disc.

This law made Disney release (at least one) movie only on Disney+ in France, bypassing theaters.

I'm curious: for how many people is this news? For those more inquiring you should look into the Smith-Mundt Act, which makes it illegal for the US Government to directly propagandize the American people; it was effectively repealed in 2012.

Thanks Obama. :)

Is there a difference between propaganda and false information? This is a practical question. If they say “propaganda” but in practice simply plant false information, is that still in scope?

Actually propaganda is quite often very not false information. That's the whole point. You take a kernel of truth and surround it with false pretenses and warped context to make something that is one way seem completely different. That kernel of truth is absolutely essential for your sycophants to use to beat everyone else over the head with, pushing that the legitimacy of this one bit of truth legitimizes the rest of the bullshit.

my take: propaganda is engineered to distort a view, perhaps to advantage. 'false information' is used to throw others through a loop or get them to investigate false leads, thus slowing/tangling them.

most propaganda has an obvious assumption/take included with it; "China is taking our work, so hate China." "While our troops are fighting for freedom against Evil Dictator in Etcistan."

most false information has an open premise ; "could be aliens. how do you know the world isn't flat, have you seen it? she could be a lizard person.."

but to be clear : both are used by governments to enact methods of power and control.

> Is there a difference between propaganda and false information?

Yes, not all propaganda is false. Propaganda uses both truth and lies freely, choosing whichever is most convenient for the narrative being promoted. Often propaganda tells you things which are true, while simply omitting other truths. Propaganda also uses statements which are neither true nor false, e.g. subjective value claims.

From the other angle, not all false information is propaganda. This statement is false: My hair is red. That's false, but it's not propaganda. Propaganda and false information are overlapping sets, but neither is a strict subset of the other.

> Is there a difference between propaganda and false information?

Yes.

Propaganda is information you are told that is crafted to inculcate a particular belief, whether or not the information and/or belief are true. (Derived from the old latin name of the institution in the Vatican bureaucracy responsible for spreading the faith, propaganda fidei.)

All advertising and persuasive speech is propaganda. Some of it uses true information, and some of it is intended to spread true beliefs.

False information is information which isn’t true, no matter what the purpose of it being presented to you is.

Does this supposed distinction matter to the CIA? What are their limits when approaching this potentially black-and-white boundary?

I mean, aren't PSAs (Public Service Announcements) propaganda?

It wasn't repealed, it was amended[0] to allow the US AGM (formerly BBG) to broadcast in the US - in other words, VOA, RFE/RL, RFA, etc. Still pretty easy to look out for.

[0]https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736...

> which makes it illegal for the US Government to directly propagandize the American people

That was never a problem. All american propaganda outlets are sponsored by NGOs.

The main advantage is that propaganda suddenly looks like your local news.

Someday, I hope, the general US voting public will get past this propaganda and become aware that they are an unwitting cog in a wheel of war and destruction across the world. We have been repeatedly lied to about how, when, and why the US engages in war, coups, and other violent actions disguised as "intelligence activities." These are powers the Constitution attempted to restrict to the people (e.g. congress), and not the executive branch.

One example, not many people know that Obama's administration unilaterally executed a 16 year old US citizen by drone. No trial, no rights, just killed by the CIA and military because his dad was a very bad guy. Trump did the same to his little sister years later.

Source: https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-o...

I don't know why this seems so strange. Throughout history, every leading nation has done this. The US is just the most recent version. The British empire, the Romans, the Persians are just examples of the precedent. The US has just dropped language like empire and replaced with humanitarian

I simply can't take a source like this seriously.

Am I denying that the government has interest in and lobbies for friendly content portrayals? No.

Will I get information about it from charged up ideologue who clearly has a strong slant against the US government/military. No.

It's effectively random blog tier credibility.

Have to agree, though I thought it was common knowledge (at least in circles such as this) that the U.S.A. government does this? Didn't they admit as much long ago?

The sources exist:

The book, $13:

https://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Cinema-Government-H...

The article about the book:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/27/nsec-f27.html

"Using the Freedom of Information Act, the authors gained access to files that exposed the extent of government censorship in films between 1911 and 2017. The DOD (Department of Defense, or Pentagon) provided military equipment and “advice,” and even allowed members of the military to make appearances, in exchange for some degree of control over the content of 814 films.

The authors continue, “If we include the 1,133 TV titles in our count, the number of screen entertainment products supported by the DOD leaps to 1,947. If we are to include the individual episodes for each title on long-running shows like 24, Homeland, and NCIS, as well as the influence of other major organisations like the FBI, CIA and White House then it becomes clear that the national security state has supported thousands of products.”"

The movie discussed in the title article, streaming $4.75:

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theatersofwar

You do know that "communist" artists in Hollywood were spied on, harassed and even blacklisted? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist

Former Navy SEAL who's a technical advisor to Hollywood is worried about politicians interfering with the Pentagon's ability to continue to shape movies into effective propaganda over tensions with China:

> The Green amendment misunderstands film distribution in China, and more important, it misses the U.S. military’s long and productive relationship with Hollywood.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/opinion/contributors/chin...

In the early 90's my moms friend group was passing around this VHS where a guy who claimed to be ex military nervously explained that a lot of hollywood production was the government easing secrets it knew and legally had to disclose to the public so it would put them into hollywood movies. Things like spy stuff or aliens.

I have no idea how I'd ever find the source or original of that. Would be interesting to see if the internet knows.

In those same groups that made those VHS tapes, there's a theory on the name Hollywood itself. The wand that Merlin used to cast spells was made from holly. This was a core part of their evidence that the movie industry is meant to keep the populace under the spell of their illusions, or some such logic

Sadly, I have way too much familiarity with these VHS tapes and 'zines and radio programs. Once the internet took off, it was like gasoline on a fire for the spreading of this stuff.

Are they archived somewhere for viewing? I wonder because I was too young to really understand it much and it'd actually help me sort out part of my childhood.

I will not be a part of willfully spreading that information. If you're that interested, it's not hard to find

Yeah to be clear I do not see it as "Information" as in factual accounts, but more like "information" like these kinds of movies existed, those people made such claims (perhaps without evidence). Kind of like a police report can say "So and so alleges X" .

Anyways if they're not hard to find I'll have to dig some more.

honestly, it's called Reddit

I don't know your personal convictions, and I don't really care -- but I do want to say that the archival and preservation of such things is a wholly different thing than disseminating the materials for actual consumption and education; i'm glad that folks didn't take the same approach to saving the remnants of propaganda and materials from past wars otherwise we would have no solid examples by which to use in building an intellectual defense against this kind of strategy.

Which is precisely why I will never link to Greek mythology.

I couldn't find any, but eBay seems to have a lot of weird VHS tapes for sale.

Wilcox named his property Hollywood in 1887, long before movies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood,_Los_Angeles#History

I don't know why you're trying to bring reasoning and logic into a conspiracy conversation. A bigger waste of oxygen, I'm not familiar.

After the end of the vietnam war, the pentagon embarked on a deliberate program of propaganda as the attitude towards the military was at an all time low. This has only only involved hollywood (Apocalypse Now was filmed in the Philippines with Philippine military gear because the Pentagon wanted script control) but also professional sports, who get billions a year from the pentagon these days.

I understand that (and why) the military's reputation was at a nadir, but they have gone too far in the opposite direction. Even in WWII when people depended on the military for what they thought was an existential battle, the general attitude was one of SNAFU, i.e. "sure, it's incompetent and fucked up but it's the best we've got so let's try to make it work". A healthier attitude.

My family had a friend who was an officer in the Marines. In the Vietnam war he was one of the people who went in and burned villages, you know the bad stuff. When Apocalypse Now came out he got a copy on Beta-max, brought it over and insisted all his friends watch it. He said it was the only movie that really captured the insanity of that war.

Hum, I don't know, FMJ does a pretty good job too I think.

True, but almost a decade late for the family friend to make his point and not mentioned in the parent comment...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney's_World_War_II_pro...

It’s probably safe to assume literally all mainstream media is propaganda

Agreed. My father is a full on MAGA hat wearing hater of the “liberal media” which I find to be a laughable phrase. The mainstream media in this country is controlled by what? Three or four corporations that have a massive incentive to keep things just the way they are. That they would present any sort of liberal viewpoint that’s more than skin deep is utter fantasy.

Three or four companies owned by companies that also own pharmaceutical and weapons companies among others so everything is tailored to protect the shareholders and you lose any semblance of real journalism.

This effects not only the movies we see, but also influences which movies get made in the first place. There's little telling what kind of anti-war movies we might have gotten, which withered on the vine because producers knew it wouldn't be possible to make the movie on a reasonable budget to the standard audiences have come to expect (e.g. real aircraft instead of mediocre scale models or CGI.)

Try making an anti-Navy response to Top Gun; you won't get access to real fighter jets so your movie is doomed to look like second-rate shit, while simultaneously requiring a huge special effects budget to even get close. Bigger budget for an inferior product is a recipe for a commercial failure, so it just doesn't happen.

right, the shrinking of overton window is the real win here for 'them'.

Yet another "conspiracy theory" that turned out to be true.

Good point, I'm going to believe all conspiracy theories from now on.

There are three types of people circling around conspiracy theories.

1) Literate people who care about history and know that industry does what's best for profit at all costs.

2) People who don't read much looking for a hobby.

3) Liberals hoping to pass off their empty skepticism as allegiance to the mainstream.

> The term 'conspiracy theory' was itself a product on CIA influence operations in this country, specifically intended to squash interest in the assassination of JFK.

The ol' "conspiracy theory conspiracy": https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-conspiracy-theory-jfk-...

Thanks for the correction. I think it would have been better for me to say that counter-intelligence operations in the country have long intentionally colored inconvenient facts as wild conjecture, regardless of their historical foundation.

I found this telling.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy+the...

that's such a silly conclusion though, and really a perfect AP piece. It discredits people while saying nothing.

It doesn't matter if the phrase existed before hand, it very obviously blew-up during the JFK event.[0]

It could entirely well be that the DoD didn't invent the phrase, but it's pretty obvious that it very quickly became a part of the public verbage during heavy interest in the JFK event -- that trend could have easily been the indicator of work towards the discrediting of both the term and those that had too much curiosity towards things they shouldn't question.

[0]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy+the...

Before the JFK assassination, 'conspiracy theory' literally meant a theory about a criminal conspiracy. In the case of the JFK assassination, all theories that were counter to the official lone-wolf theory were conspiracy theories, theories about multiple people being involved in the assassination are categorically conspiracy theories while a lone-wolf theory involves no conspiring. Due to this, the term 'conspiracy theory' shifted to mean any theory that was counter to the official narrative.

For instance, all theories about 9/11 are conspiracy theories in the literal sense. Even in the official 9/11 Commission Report theory, a bunch of men conspired to hijack airplanes on the same day and crash them into buildings. That's literally a theory about a conspiracy. But in the new meaning, this is not a conspiracy theory because it's the government's officially endorsed theory.

Whether the CIA induced this verbal judo deliberately is another question. I'm inclined to think they didn't. I think it was a natural language shift, albeit one that has been harmful to society.

I know what it means better than most. I also know that it's application as a means of establishing liberal identity as opposed to basic historical facts is a long time feature of our empire. Liberals punch down at leftists. Someone questions the motives of our empire and invariably some liberal eager to establish their mainstream credibility shows up to argue with skeptics and side with industry.

God damn. I guess we see RFK Jr future.

Have you read CIA 1035 960?

https://archive.org/details/CIADOC1035960/mode/1up

I have now. This document shows that the CIA was trying to counter conspiracy theories about JFK's assassination (of course they were), but it doesn't seem to provide evidence for the CIA deliberately shifting the meaning of 'conspiracy theory'.

This part got an audible "Heh" out of me though: "Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy." Robert Kennedy was murdered one year after this document was written, while running for president. Suppose he secretly doubted the Warren Commission's report (as has been claimed by some of the people close to him, but disputed by others), becoming president would have given him a uniquely privileged position from which to assail it.

"It doesn't seem to provide evidence for the CIA deliberately shifting the meaning of 'conspiracy theory'."

No one (the public) had heard that term before the CIA got US media writing propaganda pieces to disparage inquiry into the assassination. It wasn't about the theories. It was about defining a group of theorists and creating ways to dismiss them. That continues to this day in yearly exercises of establishing mainstream credibility where young "journalists" help us all understand the broken psychology of people who want the world to be scary.

Honestly, if you have ever tried hard to advance a line of thought that's dangerious to the establishment you'd maybe be personally familiar, as I am, with the smell of counter-intelligence. But I can't cite a web link that would make that credible. And you've already learned to discredit anyone calling themselve a truther.

It worked. I'm saying it worked because it works on me. No amount of facts or scope or wisdom makes mainstream friends of mine more open to reality. Reality is scary. Disagreeing with the 'news' is scary. But US industry gatekeeps history and I refuse to be naive.

I think you've missed the "good point" entirely.

I didnt realize this until I went to a film festival in another country and saw war movies about conflicts the US eventually was involved in, but during time periods before or after and heros and protagonists from other countries in the war.

It was a mixture of noticing how Hollywood has barely any of this, and the awkwardness of rooting for the hero. Just a juvenile cognitive dissonance being overwritten.

I remember listening to this on citations pod couple of years ago. https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-hollywood-and-...

they also had a similar coverage of Copaganda in media: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-the-growing-pu...

btw this has been going on for a while. I recently finished an excellent compilation of Vietnam war realities & lies in a book called 'kill anything that moves' & its basically the same propaganda machine reshaping public perception for its benefits.

Original title:

The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies into Super Effective Propaganda

Relevant articles:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-hollywood-became-the-unof...

How Hollywood became the unofficial propaganda arm of the U.S. military

https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2022...

New documentary scrutinizes Pentagon-Hollywood relationship — but is it propaganda?

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129369

The Historical Roots of CIA-Hollywood Propaganda

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/26/top-gun-for-hir...

Top Gun for hire: why Hollywood is the US military’s best wingman

https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...

How a Hollywood star lobbies the EU for more surveillance

The European Union debates a new law that could force platforms to scan all private messages for signs of child abuse. Its most prominent advocate is the actor Ashton Kutcher.

Discussed in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835933

One of the co-producers of Theaters of War, Tom Secker, has a podcast called ClandesTime where he explores FOIA'd documents from the various entertainment liasion offices run by the DoD, FBI etc. Well worth a follow and listen if this is your kind of thing:

https://www.spyculture.com/podcasts/

War is probably not possible without propaganda. Wars are strategic, but people generally won't participate in mass killing or property destruction without an (invented or exaggerated) ethical justification.

The most significant cause of global insecurity are myths like good, evil, ethicality and fairness between nations, etc.

My hope is that tracking resources and making them more abundant and distributing first-party true information uniformly might help. But I don't think there will be any "real" global security without a fully integrated political framework.

Selfishness, resource limitations, poorly distributed information about resources, dated technology, racism, and myths like I mentioned above are blockers for integration.

Maybe the crux of it is that war IS the way we do geopolitical integration. If that is the case, then one fantasy alternative might be for the leaders to fight it out instead of whole societies tearing each other apart instead.

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will -- Joseph Goebbels

What if the propaganda gets set up to keep us always in war?

I always wondered if those countless military/intelligence shows like 24, Jack Ryan etc were sponsored as propaganda.

They always show off the US intelligence services as the good guys, in unrealistically cool nightclub style offices. But the story is always the same 'anything goes to defeat the bad guys'. Which is exactly the attitude of those services as exposed by Snowden.

Sometimes I wonder if they're trying to bend our mindset to make us believe these things are necessary. They make for mildly interesting entertainment but I always wondered if there's more behind it like the article says.

wait till you find out why they were so keen to spread the idea of America fighting against the Nazis in all those movies and shows;

it was so you didn't question who had established the Nazis from the very beginning, who had been funding them all the way to 1942 and beyond, who had secretly supported key Nazi evasion of post war justice, and the covert funding, establishment and maintenance of fascist and neo Nazis paramilitary groups and structures across Europe and the world ever since. the Military propaganda was the cover to keep Dulles and Bush and the rest of the Nazis in good public standing.

> The military has written policies on what it approves and disapproves. It disapproves depictions of failures and crimes, which eliminates much of reality. It rejects films about veteran suicide, racism in the military, sexual harassment and assault in the military

Regardless of the articles truth related to the military, I do think Hollywood _in general_ has a problem depicting failure, crime, relationships, intimacy, and other complex topics with any basis in reality.

Black and white approval/disapproval policies only make this worse by throwing out subtleties in the interplay between some of these topics.

The problem though is how it imparts a warped view on the viewer. We value the themes learned (sometimes not _a lot_ of value, but enough) but assigning _any_ value to them is dangerous because they are so far away from true lived experience. We're always only given a quick, simplistic overview of things causing us to Dunning-Kruger so many concepts causing us to reinforce societal norms we wouldn't have otherwise.

Ayn Rand Wrote a Guide for Hollywood on How to Make Pro-Capitalist Movies. https://gizmodo.com/ayn-rand-wrote-a-guide-for-hollywood-on-... Link to copy of the book. http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/screenguideamericans.pd...

The last section on "Don't smear political institutions" is ever more relevant today.

See Also: Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op?

https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/

All mainstream aliens movies till the end of cold war, and many now, are about how anyone foreign is a great and must be preemptively neutralized.

I wonder how much of this is following the crowd, and how much of it is shaping it?

Of course they did, I’m kinda surprised this is news. However the ongoing invasion of ukraine kinda showed everybody that western nations are not just “duped” into following USA, they actually want it - its an alinement of values not of convenience.

Read a very good analysis of this from the acoup blog - https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coa...

Which kinda suggest that things would have moved in a similar direction even without the efforts of USA to shape public opinion.

And to be fair the way they went about it in europe was incredibly conscience, given the position of power they had.

Yeah, the big difference compared to a certain former superpower is that the US seems to be well capable of recognizing a win/win as a victory, not as a tie bordering on defeat.

Yes and everything else. "Walt Disney shaped 20+ Hollywood Films into Super Effective Marvel Ads"

US military has its fingers in Marvel to. Captain America, Iron Man, and Captain Marvel all used military assets in exchange for looking good

This must be the left wing media everyone is always talking about.

Remember in the 1980s when movies were good? Can we go back to that?

In all sincerity: so what? And I have a few reasons for that reaction, only one of which is empty whataboutism (so I’ll get that one out of the way first).

1. Do the citizens of this he democratic west imagine that our adversaries don’t engage in propaganda? Please, get real. Not saying two wrongs make a right, but unilateral disarmament in the battle for hearts and minds doesn’t seem particularly prudent either.

2. This particular article is scattershot to the point of being incoherent. Also, it’s funny when it criticizes “Clear and Present Danger” for not being true to reality … when … it’s a move based … on a novel. Uhhhh.

3. The article talks about the movies that have resisted military influence and assumes they are better for it, but what about the stories that were improved by military influence? For a variety of obvious reasons, war and the battlefield is pretty fertile ground for human storytelling. It’s natural that these stories get told. It isn’t inevitably and automatically a bad thing if the military has an influence on how these stories are told.

"what about the stories that were improved by military influence?"

This is the best thing I have read this week thus far, and will probably haunt me for the rest of my week.

When I was looking at "Triumph of the Will" with film classes I taught, there was a certain beauty in that horror. The story it tells is definitely less unsettling than the reality it presents.

If this content-free nonsense isn't Russia-funded, I'll eat my hat.

You need Russia to pay money to tell you the obvious things everyone already knew? Sounds like a pretty bad use of their money. Feels like meddling in the elections would yield a better ROI.

Similar things have been said about the rise of FSP games. I’ve heard the military basically created FPS games for their combat simulators. They also pushed or gave money to developers to popularize FPS games.

FPS=first person shooter.

I've never heard this argument ever for FPS games - the history of the FPS is extremely well documented. The earliest FPS games are frankly far too basic to be of much use for military training.

Indeed, the market demand for Doom was basically pre existing. There was a sort of assumption this was what people wanted and what was preventing it to that point was the technology.

I am not sure you see too many situations like that. Spotting them in advance is much harder than hindsight.

> "The earliest FPS games are frankly far too basic to be of much use for military training."

That didn't stop them from trying to use Doom to train "military thinking" and "exercise and develop their decision making abilities": https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019...

Related: Human silhouette targets at firing ranges, low fidelity as they are, were developed to reduce inhibitions against shooting people. They are used by police and military for this purpose and probably work.

That doesn't sound true, but they did make one of the best shooters (America's Army) and released it for free as an advertisement basically.

It was really amazing how good America's Army was. When I got it, I was expecting a cheesy propaganda piece cobbled together to barely work, but it was actually a great and very fun shooter.

It's almost the plot to The Last Starfighter...

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