Hiện nay, guồng máy tuyên truyền thông tin của Âu Mỹ đang ồ ạt tấn công nền dân trí trên mọi bình diện. Từ những khu vực như FaceBook, Tweeter, Youtube , T.V v.v cho đến màn ảnh lớn. Phim "Người Mỹ Bắn Sẻ" American Sniper " đang gây tranh luận và đang được đưa vào giải Oscar để xiển dương chiến tranh và bạo lực.Đạo diễn phim là tài tử cực hũu với những phim Cao Bồi của thập niên 70s, hiện nay cũng là đạo diễn nổi tiếng Clint Eastwood, đã dựa theo một tác phẩm tự truyện của một cụu đặc nhiệm lính Mỹ từng tham chiến tại Iraq, Chris Kyle. Tác phẩm này đã bị những cụu quân nhân khác vặch mặt là hư cấu thêm thắt, trong đó có cựu sĩ quan đặc nhiệm Seal, cựu thống đốc bang Minesota Jesse Ventura kiện Chris Kyle ra tòa và thắng kiện hơn triệu Mỹ kim. Chris Kyle sau đó vì lý do cãi nhau không rõ, theo tin chính qui, đã bị một cựu quân nhân khác bắn chết nơi xạ trường.
Thế nhưng sau khi quyển "truyện" về người bắn sẻ này được đạo diễn Clint Eastwood dựng phim, đã gây tranh luận và, theo thông tin mới nhất, được nhà nước Mỹ, báo chí chính qui Mỹ, ca ngợi là "điển hình mẫu mực" của nước Mỹ.
Không chỉ tác giả Jay Stephenson đã vạch trần tác phẩm "tự thuật" của Chris Kyle là hư cấu lừa dối, mà còn lên án chính xác nó chủ trương xiển dương tàn bạo như thánh hóa một tượng thần "ngoại đạo" của đám Ky Tô Giáo hiếu chiến Chris Kyle: Pagan Idol for Warmongering Christians, hoặc tác giả Sophia A. McClennen của tờ Salon.com gọi phim này là "Một dối trá lớn nhất, một sợ hãi hoang tưởng của Clint Eastwood "“American Sniper's” biggest lie. Chưa kể nhiều phê bình khác, mà ngay nhà bình luận chính trị nổi tiếng Gerald Celente cũng phải mạnh tay gọi tên đích danh của nó: Nước Mỹ: Một Tập Đoàn Sát Nhân.
Vấn đề nó không chỉ là một sản phẩm nghệ thuật giải trí, mà nó đang được nhà nước Mỹ và hệ thống chính qui nhà nước dùng để xiển dương chủ nghĩa nhà nước. Đệ nhất phu nhân Mỹ cũng được trưng dụng nhập cuộc, M. Obama tuyên bố tính anh hùng của kẻ sát nhân trẻ em và đàn bà rằng đây là “Quyết định đạo lý phức tạp mà quân đội được trao phó... sự cân nhắc giữa tình yêu gia đình với tình yêu tổ quốc"(The complicated moral decisions they [troops] are tasked with … the balancing of love of family with love of country.) trong khi những phim xây dựng hòa bình nhân bản giữa con người như Hành Trình Trăm Bước : The Hundred-Foot Journey, hoặc như phim tài liệu vạch trần sự thật về kỹ nghệ ĐƯỜNG và bọn kỹ nghệ thể dục đã lừa dân Mỹ và cả thế giới vào những căn bệnh làm giầu cho tập đoàn như Tiểu Đường (diabetes) như thế nào;
Documentary FEDUP 2014
Fed.Up.2014 from Twinning Media BV on Vimeo.
Hoặc như phim tài liệu về tiến trình vượt thoát làm công dân tố cáo của Edward Snowden, CITIZENFOUR Câu Chuyện về Lòng Can Đảm Thể Hiện Lương Tâm, phải tự mình lặng lẽ gắng sức chen chân để trình chiếu đến quần chúng.
Cả một hệ thống ngụy biện được tận dụng để ca tụng vinh danh giết người "vì mệnh lệnh", cả guồng máy chính trị và dân sự của Mỹ điên cuồng tự vả vào mồm chính người Mỹ nói chung và nhà nước Mỹ nói riêng, khi chính họ đã từng lập luận ngược lại khi đồng ký tên thành lập Tòa Án Tội Phạm Chiến Tranh để xử tội phạm Đức Quốc Xã..
“Mọi cá nhân đều có những bổn phận quốc tế vượt trên trách nhiệm tuân lệnh quốc gia. Vì thế những cá nhân công dân có bổn phận phải vi phạm luật quốc gia để ngăn chặn những tội ác chống hòa bình và nhân bản xảy ra” The principle declared at Nuremberg in 1945: “Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”
Thế nhưng nước Mỹ, xã hội Mỹ đã biến dạng, biến dạng tàn bạo ngay cả sau khi có một sự kiện chấn động lương tâm khi anh thượng sĩ Hugh Thompson, Jr. can trường chỉa mũi súng vào "đồng đội", sẵn sàng "phản quốc" để làm trách vụ thiêng liêng của lương tâm Con Người với nhân loại năm 1968.
Người dân Mỹ hôm nay xiển dương, ca tụng "Kẻ Bắn Sẻ" là hệ quả đương nhiên của một tiến trình, một kế hoặch đã được định sẵn cho những phản ứng định trước. Nó "đương nhiên" như người Mỹ gào thét phất cờ, hát quốc ca hàng năm vào dịp "Super Bowl". Vì xã hội Mỹ đã được nhà nước Mỹ, nền báo chí chính qui, dẫn dắt xuống cấp từng bậc trong gần 100 năm qua với bao nhiêu là cuộc chiến bằng những màn 'GIẢ ĐỊCH" CHO NHỮNG KẺ THÙ KHÔNG TƯỞNG; và quân đội của Mỹ, như tất cả các loại quân đội chính qui, lại chính là cặn bã của tiến trình xuống cấp này.
Bỉnh bút nổi danh, Justin Raimondo nhận định sự xuống cấp này rằng sự kiện giết người như thể thao và như "bổn phận với tổ quốc" này phản ảnh nước Mỹ, xã hội Mỹ của ông ta là một xứ sở băng hoại đạo lý (depraved nation), nơi mà những kẻ tồi bại thấp kém nhất ào ạt tham gia quân đội, để được tự do bắn giết, hành hạ, hiếp dâm cho thỏa chí (What it tells me is that America is a depraved nation, a country where the very worst-of-the-worst flock to join the military, free to kill and maim and rape to their heart’s content.)
Và hôm nay, đầu năm 2015 của thiên niên kỷ mới, nhà nước Mỹ đã hoàn toàn trở thành một tập đoàn sát nhân, khủng bố công khai, như trong bài "Ai là Những Kẻ Khủng Bố" Who Are the 'Terrorists'? by Justin Raimondo Justin Raimondo từng kết luận tiên tri trước khi phim "Kẻ Bắn Sẻ" ra đời:
Tôi có cảm giác nặng nề chúng ta sẽ con nhìn thấy nhiều màn kinh dị của Mỹ hơn nữa dưới chiêu bài "chống khủng bố", trong khi chúng ta hành xử phát tiết những thích thú bạo ngược của chúng ta khắp thế giới. Khi những sự việc đồi bại đi ngược lại tính liêm sỉ và đạo lý con người này khiến thế giới nôn mửa đối với những kẻ gây tội ác, thì có lẽ một ngày nào đó chúng ta đang lùng kiếm những tên "khủng bố" đâu đó quanh một cái gương- và nhìn thấy chính là chúng ta ,vì đó là những kẻ mà chúng ta đã trở thành. (I have the sinking feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of this American horror show, while – under the pretext of “fighting terrorism” – we act out our sadistic fantasies all over the world. As these outrages against human decency and morality provoke worldwide revulsion at the perpetrators, perhaps one day we’ll go looking for “terrorists” in the vicinity of a mirror – and see ourselves for what we’ve become)
Ông Gerald Celente qui kết về sự đón nhận nồng nhiệt của dân Mỹ, sự xiển dương của Nhà nước báo chín Mỹ với giải Oscar đề nghị cho phim American Sniper, rằng nếu như người lính chỉ có biết bổn phận tuân lệnh như những người máy những lệnh giết nguòi, giết thường dân phụ nữ, trẻ em vô tội như tại Mỹ Lai, 500 ngàn trẻ em tại Iraq v.v là "bổn phận yêu nước" "vì quốc gia", thì chính nhà nước chính phủ Mỹ chính là" kẻ sát nhân bắn sẻ" (Chris Kyle did his patriotic duty. He obeyed orders, followed the words and carried out the tasks issued from the White House. The fish rots from the head down. The American Government is the American Sniper.)
Hay nói cho chính xác, định chế nhà nước và cái lý thuyết vì "quyền lợi quốc gia" hay "tổ quốc trên hết" chính là những lò sát sinh, những căn cứ đào tạo của những tên đồ tể lớn nhỏ. Và có lẽ phải dụng ngôn chơi chữ một cách mỉa mai nhất là Nhà nước Chính Phủ và guồng máy quân đội của nó chính là một tôn giáo tà thần cực ác của loài người: ác quán mãn doanh độc tôn đại thế giáo!
4-2-2015
NKPTC
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TB:
Khi vừa viết xong bài này định đi ngủ, hộp thư báo nhận được bài viết của bỉnh bút danh tiếng Chris Hedges, viết cách đây hai tuần (Jan 25, 2015) nhan đề "Giết những tên Trùm Khăn cho Jesu" (Killing Ragheads for Jesus)(Đúng ngôn ngữ bán khai của đám ngụy ngục- thật ra dịch sát phải là "Giết những đứa trùm giẻ rách cho chúa Jesu).
Bài viết nhận định rất chi tiết. Chris Hedges tái tạo hình ảnh tâm tư của nhân vật Kyle chính trong phim, nhân vật Kyle thật ngoài đời và ngay chính tâm tư hàm ý cùa đạo diễn Clint Eastwood- tất cả thể hiện rõ khả năng "đặt hàng" của giới chính trị cầm quyền đúng theo phản ứng đã định sẵn (reflective control) cho quần chúng Mỹ. Chris Hedges trích dẫn từng cảnh trong phim, từng câu đối thoại, phối hợp với những câu tâm ý trong tác phẩm tự truyện của Kyle nhân vật chính. Tất cả là một tiến trình phản ứng có điều kiện xếp đặt hư cấu để khích động một định kiến đố kị, được sắp xếp cho tiến trình biến một thanh niên khả năng lịch thiệp dễ mến thành một tên đồ tể sách súng đi trả thù.. những người vô tội vô can.
Chris Hedges kết luận thật chuẩn xác không khác Justine Raimomndo, nhưng thấu suốt toàn diện hơn : "Tất cả những đối thủ là vô thần và không phải là người. "Người Mỹ Bắn Sẻ" phục vụ một căn bệnh sâu đậm đang chuyển rầm rì xuyên thấu xã hội chúng ta. Nó suy tôn niềm tin nguy hiểm rằng chúng ta có thể phục hồi sự quân bình của chúng ta và sự huy hoàng đã mất của chúng ta bằng cách theo đuổi một nền Phát Xít Mỹ (All opponents are godless and subhuman. “American Sniper” caters to a deep sickness rippling through our society. It holds up the dangerous belief that we can recover our equilibrium and our lost glory by embracing an American fascism) Killing Ragheads for Jesus
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NGUỒN và THAM KHẢO
Gerald Celente — America: Murder, Inc.
Guest Column — Gerald Celente — America: Murder, Inc.
In this article Gerald Celente sums up American culture as revealed by the movie “American Sniper.” The culture of the “exceptional people” is barbaric, murderous, perverse.
Be a “Proud American.” We hate, blindly. We murder, blindly, whether on the streets of Ferguson, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Somolia, Ukraine. Wherever there are people to be killed, we are there, doing the job. It is the American way.
American Sniper: A Model American
By Gerald Celente
Publisher, Trends Journal
The votes are in and the decision is overwhelmingly clear. Chris Kyle—the Navy SEAL portrayed in the blockbuster movie purported killer of some 200 Iraqis during four tours of duty—is the people’s choice.
From record ticket sales to major media accolades, from the halls of Congress to the White House, the nation has spoken: “American Sniper” is all-American. Chris Kyle—the most lethal killer in U.S. military history, a true hero, a brave warrior—has been anointed as a role model for all that America has come to stand for.
“American Sniper has the look of a bona fide cultural phenomenon!” said Brandon Griggs of CNN. And as Michelle Obama contends, “… for all those folks in America who don’t have these kinds of opportunities [to meet veterans and military families personally] films and TV are often the best way to share those stories.”
Speaking at a film industry event, Ms. Obama said the movie stressed, “The complicated moral decisions they [troops] are tasked with … the balancing of love of family with love of country.”
For Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the essence of his “love of country” lay in obeying his commander in chief and living up to Washington’s “moral decisions.” As the movie has it, when the Twin Towers were brought down on 9/11, off to war Kyle marched. This take-no-prisoners Texan dutifully followed the orders of the tough-talking faux-Texan George W. Bush to get those “evil doers.”
Bush’s simplistic and transparently shallow bravado about bringing ‘em in “dead or alive,” a comforting scenario made plausible by nearly a century of Hollywood Westerns, once again played out perfectly in Hollywood’s “American Sniper.” In a nation where politics has become show business for ugly people, the mindset of America’s first lady made perfect sense; film and TV’s dumbed-down, glossed over, whitewashed versions of hard facts served as the perfect substitutes for harsh reality and the solid truth.
Perhaps Ms. Obama had found a soft spot in her heart for Mr. Kyle because he closely reflects the words and deeds of her husband. In his book, American Sniper, Kyle wrote that killing is “fun,” something he “loved.” In the book “DoubleDown,” authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann wrote that President Obama bragged that he’s “really good at killing people” while discussing drone strikes with his staff.
If not exactly presidential material, Kyle certainly has what it takes to be second in command. In his memoir, he wrote “We wanted people to know, we’re here and we want to f$#@ with you … we will kill you…”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, in his response to the recently released report on CIA torture, said he was proud of his role in creating the gruesome interrogation program that included water boarding and rectal feeding. Did he have any regrets for what he ordered? “No … absolutely not … and I’d do it again in a minute,” Cheney said.
Indeed, if Kyle were alive he would certainly be a force to be reckoned with in the 2016 race for the White House. While it would be difficult to trump Hillary Clinton’s giggling glee over the murder of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, (“We came, we saw … he died,”) in a war that she personally pushed for, Kyle’s statement that he “… couldn’t give a flying f%@# about the Iraqis. I loved killing bad guys. … I loved what I did. I still do … it was fun,” comes very close.
The American Sniper is a model American. And the American model is immorality. George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condaleeza Rice, Susan Rice, Samantha Powers … the list of perpetrators goes on. And so does the list of their crimes: slaughtering millions by waging wars based of false information, overthrowing sovereign governments based on lies, killing innocents and “suspects in drone strikes” without regard to international law and with no personal regret for their roles in fostering the mass murders. Like Chris Kyle, each of them speak proudly of their actions and express not a hint of sorrow.
Most Americans have forgotten about former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who defended Bill Clinton’s sanctions against Iraq on a 60 Minutes segment. When the show’s host, Lesley Stahl, asked her “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean that’s more children than died in Hiroshima … is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “we think the price is worth it.”
“We,” she says, as if it truly included “us.” So speak the moralizing madmen and madwomen—sociopaths and psychopaths—who pontificate from their positions of high office, telling the rest of us what we must believe and who should be killed next.
Chris Kyle did his patriotic duty. He obeyed orders, followed the words and carried out the tasks issued from the White House. The fish rots from the head down. The American Government is the American Sniper.
Gerald Celente is the founder and director of the Trends Research Institute in Kingston, N.Y., and publisher of the Trends Journal and Trendsresearch.com.
Chris Kyle: Pagan Idol for Warmongering Christians
February 3, 2015
“But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas and destroy Jesus. The governor answered and said unto them, Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you? They said, Barabbas.” – Matthew 27:20-21
In the year following the Bush administration’s illegal and unjust war in Iraq, debate raged among media elites and the country at large regarding a biblical film depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ broke box office records and remains the highest grossing R rated film in history. The movie was released nearly two months after the capture of Saddam Hussein and prior to a vastly changed Iraqi landscape that would eventually eradicate a Christian population nearly four times the number held prior to a war cheered by conservative Christians here at home.
Fast forward nearly a decade later and America is once again on the brink of another ground war in Iraq and a new R rated movie is smashing records at the box office, but this time it’s about a glorified warrior said to have more kills than any other sniper in American History.
“American Sniper isn’t just a hit, it’s on its way to a colossal box-office return,” penned National Review’s David French in celebration of a profanity laced movie that glorifies violence. No longer are conservatives decrying Hollywood’s immoral role in America’s culture wars; along with television shows like 24 and movies like Zero Dark Thirty that promote torture, Clint Eastwood’s war porn biopic has Christians and neoconservatives siding with an evil industry they’ve been criticizing for years.
Reviling the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, the mythical creation of Chris Kyle’s life as portrayed by Bradley Cooper is as fabled a tale as the weapons of mass destruction lies told in the lead up to the Iraq war. Since the country’s faith in politicians is at an all time low, gone are the days of infallible presidents who can lie the country into war. Instead, a farm boy from Texas turned Navy SEAL has been cast as the great war messiah whose story can lead the American sheep to once again support and cheer present and future wars. Released after the U.S. government commenced bombing Iraq and during the lead up to the war promoting Superbowl event, the timing could not be more perfect.
Aside from the 160 confirmed kills (confirmed by the never to be trusted U.S. government), Kyle’s real story is much different from the movie portrayal. When the American Sniper book was published, it was mostly promoted via his viscous slander upon the character of former Navy SEAL and vocal anti-war proponent Jesse Ventura. Fox News and “Christians” such as Glenn Beck allowed Kyle to bear false witness against Ventura with his lie that he punched the former governor out at another veteran’s wake for saying his Navy SEAL team “deserved to lose a few” in Iraq. Ventura took Kyle’s estate to court for libel, and after he won his suit, even the mainstream media criticized Kyle for the Ventura lie and a slew of other made up stories, including a claim that he shot dead dozens of looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Despite the false and repeated smears against Ventura, the deadliest sniper’s Christian cheerleaders refused to admit wrong even after the libel case was won in court. In fact, they piled on even more smears.
The proclaimed Christian Glenn Beck, who called Ventura a “scumbag” based on Kyle’s lies, doubled down on his Ventura criticism while never admitting that he was wrong for giving the lie airtime in the first place. Since Kyle was sadly killed by another veteran at a gun range before he could testify in court, the war friendly right was able to use his death to portray the former governor as heartlessly taking money from a distraught widow even though the publisher’s insurance company was on the hook for the $1.8 million awarded in the case.
Once the movie was released, Kyle’s fictional story and death turned him into a pagan god conservative Christians could idolize; detractors not on board with the nation’s newfound blood lust were to be excommunicated for daring to blaspheme the Iraq war’s gun toting Moloch.
In addition to Kyle’s critics like Ron Paul and Ventura, the Hollywood director Michal Moore and actor Seth Rogen learned how easy it is to be cast down as heretics for not appreciating the Leviathan state’s holy script.
“My comment about the movie was not meant to have any political implications,” Rogen said in an effort to water down a previous tweet comparing the American Sniper movie to a Nazi propaganda film.”Any political meaning was ascribed to my comment by news commentary.”
Moore also had to walk back a tweet questioning Kyle’s bravery.
Similar to the way conservative Christians like to portray Muslims as fanatics who overreact to criticism of the Prophet Muhammad, any criticism of the Prophet Kyle’s legacy is met with brazen hysteria. Nowadays, conservative Christians typically turn the other cheek to real blasphemy against Christ, but criticism of the war messiah shall not be tolerated.
In the wake of Kyle criticism, the “born again Christian” Sarah Palin even took a break from her sacrilegious applause lines mocking the Christian baptism and drunken family brawls to take a picture of herself holding up a sign telling Michael Moore “F*** You.” Much like the Constitution conservatives like to hang their hat on, biblical rules against using profanity, taking the lord’s name in vain, and even murder, get tossed out the window once war comes into the picture. As Chris Hedges recently wrote: “The innate barbarity that war and violence breed is justified by a saccharine sentimentality about the nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that blesses its armed crusaders. “
Hedges words could easily describe the Kyle worship on Fox News that was exemplified by commentator Todd Starnes, who said : “I suspect Jesus would tell that God-fearing, red-blooded American sniper, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant for dispatching another Godless jihadist to the lake of fire. ’”
With so much war talk coming from those claiming to be Christians, it’s no wonder the world’s largest religion is in decline. Even the atheist Bill Maher recently observed the gross inconsistency of those proclaiming to worship the Prince of Peace while celebrating the violence Kyle’s life promotes through the American Sniper film.
The sad irony is that the war Kyle fought in actually served to eradicate the Christian population in Iraq, as noted earlier. But even more ironic is the fact that Kyle is no longer alive because of that war and the false Christian jingoism that led up to it. His life was brought to an end by another war veteran suffering from.
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Killing Ragheads for Jesus
Posted on Jan 25, 2015
By Chris Hedges“American Sniper” lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates. These passions, if realized, will extinguish what is left of our now-anemic open society.
The movie opens with a father and his young son hunting a deer. The boy shoots the animal, drops his rifle and runs to see his kill.
“Get back here,” his father yells. “You don’t ever leave your rifle in the dirt.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy answers.
“That was a helluva shot, son,” the father says. “You got a gift. You gonna make a fine hunter some day.” The camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white Christians—blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen movie—are listening to a sermon about God’s plan for American Christians. The film’s title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be called upon by God to use his “gift” to kill evildoers. The scene shifts to the Kyle family dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang: “There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe evil doesn’t exist in the world. And if it ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then you got predators.”
The camera cuts to a schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy.
“They use violence to prey on people,” the father goes on. “They’re the wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any sheep in this family.”
The father lashes his belt against the dining room table.
“I will whup your ass if you turn into a wolf,” he says to his two sons. “We protect our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little brother, you have my permission to finish it.”
There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. They prefer drinking beer and watching football to reading a book. And when they get into power—they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine—their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. “American Sniper,” like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States’ dark malaise.
“The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting back against us in the very first place,” said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism within the U.S. military. “It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the fabric of Chris Kyle’s personal and primal justification mantra of ‘God-Country-Family.’ It is nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter.”
Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian chauvinism, or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic “Christian” America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and the Army Special Forces.
The evildoers don’t take long to make an appearance in the film. This happens when television—the only way the movie’s characters get news—announces the 1998 truck bombings of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in which hundreds of people were killed. Chris, now grown, and his brother, aspiring rodeo riders, watch the news reports with outrage. Ted Koppel talks on the screen about a “war” against the United States.
“Look what they did to us,” Chris whispers.
He heads down to the recruiter to sign up to be a Navy SEAL. We get the usual boot camp scenes of green recruits subjected to punishing ordeals to make them become real men. In a bar scene, an aspiring SEAL has painted a target on his back and comrades throw darts into his skin. What little individuality these recruits have—and they don’t appear to have much—is sucked out of them until they are part of the military mass. They are unquestioningly obedient to authority, which means, of course, they are sheep.
We get a love story too. Chris meets Taya in a bar. They do shots. The movie slips, as it often does, into clichéd dialogue.
She tells him Navy SEALs are “arrogant, self-centered pricks who think you can lie and cheat and do whatever the fuck you want. I’d never date a SEAL.”
“Why would you say I’m self-centered?” Kyle asks. “I’d lay down my life for my country.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the greatest country on earth and I’d do everything I can to protect it,” he says.
She drinks too much. She vomits. He is gallant. He helps her home. They fall in love. Taya is later shown watching television. She yells to Chris in the next room.
“Oh, my God, Chris,” she says.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“No!” she yells.
Then we hear the television announcer: “You see the first plane coming in at what looks like the east side. …”
The movie opens with a father and his young son hunting a deer. The boy shoots the animal, drops his rifle and runs to see his kill.
“Get back here,” his father yells. “You don’t ever leave your rifle in the dirt.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy answers.
“That was a helluva shot, son,” the father says. “You got a gift. You gonna make a fine hunter some day.” The camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white Christians—blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen movie—are listening to a sermon about God’s plan for American Christians. The film’s title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be called upon by God to use his “gift” to kill evildoers. The scene shifts to the Kyle family dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang: “There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe evil doesn’t exist in the world. And if it ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then you got predators.”
The camera cuts to a schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy.
“They use violence to prey on people,” the father goes on. “They’re the wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any sheep in this family.”
The father lashes his belt against the dining room table.
“I will whup your ass if you turn into a wolf,” he says to his two sons. “We protect our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little brother, you have my permission to finish it.”
There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. They prefer drinking beer and watching football to reading a book. And when they get into power—they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine—their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. “American Sniper,” like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States’ dark malaise.
“The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting back against us in the very first place,” said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism within the U.S. military. “It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the fabric of Chris Kyle’s personal and primal justification mantra of ‘God-Country-Family.’ It is nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter.”
Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian chauvinism, or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic “Christian” America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and the Army Special Forces.
The evildoers don’t take long to make an appearance in the film. This happens when television—the only way the movie’s characters get news—announces the 1998 truck bombings of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in which hundreds of people were killed. Chris, now grown, and his brother, aspiring rodeo riders, watch the news reports with outrage. Ted Koppel talks on the screen about a “war” against the United States.
“Look what they did to us,” Chris whispers.
He heads down to the recruiter to sign up to be a Navy SEAL. We get the usual boot camp scenes of green recruits subjected to punishing ordeals to make them become real men. In a bar scene, an aspiring SEAL has painted a target on his back and comrades throw darts into his skin. What little individuality these recruits have—and they don’t appear to have much—is sucked out of them until they are part of the military mass. They are unquestioningly obedient to authority, which means, of course, they are sheep.
We get a love story too. Chris meets Taya in a bar. They do shots. The movie slips, as it often does, into clichéd dialogue.
She tells him Navy SEALs are “arrogant, self-centered pricks who think you can lie and cheat and do whatever the fuck you want. I’d never date a SEAL.”
“Why would you say I’m self-centered?” Kyle asks. “I’d lay down my life for my country.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the greatest country on earth and I’d do everything I can to protect it,” he says.
She drinks too much. She vomits. He is gallant. He helps her home. They fall in love. Taya is later shown watching television. She yells to Chris in the next room.
“Oh, my God, Chris,” she says.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“No!” she yells.
Then we hear the television announcer: “You see the first plane coming in at what looks like the east side. …”
Chris and Taya watch in horror. Ominous music fills the movie’s soundtrack. The evildoers have asked for it. Kyle will go to Iraq to extract vengeance. He will go to fight in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, a country that columnist Thomas Friedman once said we attacked “because we could.” The historical record and the reality of the Middle East don’t matter. Muslims are Muslims. And Muslims are evildoers or, as Kyle calls them, “savages.” Evildoers have to be eradicated.
Chris and Taya marry. He wears his gold Navy SEAL trident on the white shirt under his tuxedo at the wedding. His SEAL comrades are at the ceremony.
“Just got the call, boys—it’s on,” an officer says at the wedding reception.
The Navy SEALs cheer. They drink. And then we switch to Fallujah. It is Tour One. Kyle, now a sniper, is told Fallujah is “the new Wild West.” This may be the only accurate analogy in the film, given the genocide we carried out against Native Americans. He hears about an enemy sniper who can do “head shots from 500 yards out. They call him Mustafa. He was in the Olympics.”
Kyle’s first kill is a boy who is handed an anti-tank grenade by a young woman in a black chador. The woman, who expresses no emotion over the boy’s death, picks up the grenade after the boy is shot and moves toward U.S. Marines on patrol. Kyle kills her too. And here we have the template for the film and Kyle’s best-selling autobiography, “American Sniper.” Mothers and sisters in Iraq don’t love their sons or their brothers. Iraqi women breed to make little suicide bombers. Children are miniature Osama bin Ladens. Not one of the Muslim evildoers can be trusted—man, woman or child. They are beasts. They are shown in the film identifying U.S. positions to insurgents on their cellphones, hiding weapons under trapdoors in their floors, planting improvised explosive devices in roads or strapping explosives onto themselves in order to be suicide bombers. They are devoid of human qualities. “There was a kid who barely had any hair on his balls,” Kyle says nonchalantly after shooting the child and the woman. He is resting on his cot with a big Texas flag behind him on the wall. “Mother gives him a grenade, sends him out there to kill Marines.”
Enter The Butcher—a fictional Iraqi character created for the film. Here we get the most evil of the evildoers. He is dressed in a long black leather jacket and dispatches his victims with an electric drill. He mutilates children—we see a child’s arm he amputated. A local sheik offers to betray The Butcher for $100,000. The Butcher kills the sheik. He murders the sheik’s small son in front of his mother with his electric drill. The Butcher shouts: “You talk to them, you die with them.”
Kyle moves on to Tour Two after time at home with Taya, whose chief role in the film is to complain through tears and expletives about her husband being away. Kyle says before he leaves: “They’re savages. Babe, they’re fuckin’ savages.”
He and his fellow platoon members spray-paint the white skull of the Punisher from Marvel Comics on their vehicles, body armor, weapons and helmets. The motto they paint in a circle around the skull reads: “Despite what your momma told you … violence does solve problems.”
“And we spray-painted it on every building and walls we could,” Kyle wrote in his memoir, “American Sniper.” “We wanted people to know, we’re here and we want to fuck with you. …You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us because we will kill you, motherfucker.”
The book is even more disturbing than the film. In the film Kyle is a reluctant warrior, one forced to do his duty. In the book he relishes killing and war. He is consumed by hatred of all Iraqis. He is intoxicated by violence. He is credited with 160 confirmed kills, but he notes that to be confirmed a kill had to be witnessed, “so if I shot someone in the stomach and he managed to crawl around where we couldn’t see him before he bled out he didn’t count.”
Kyle insisted that every person he shot deserved to die. His inability to be self-reflective allowed him to deny the fact that during the U.S. occupation many, many innocent Iraqis were killed, including some shot by snipers. Snipers are used primarily to sow terror and fear among enemy combatants. And in his denial of reality, something former slaveholders and former Nazis perfected to an art after overseeing their own atrocities, Kyle was able to cling to childish myth rather than examine the darkness of his own soul and his contribution to the war crimes we carried out in Iraq. He justified his killing with a cloying sentimentality about his family, his Christian faith, his fellow SEALs and his nation. But sentimentality is not love. It is not empathy. It is, at its core, about self-pity and self-adulation. That the film, like the book, swings between cruelty and sentimentality is not accidental.
“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel,” James Baldwin reminded us. “The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”
“Savage, despicable evil,” Kyle wrote of those he was killing from rooftops and windows. “That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages.’… I only wish I had killed more.” At another point he writes: “I loved killing bad guys. … I loved what I did. I still do … it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.” He labels Iraqis “fanatics” and writes “they hated us because we weren’t Muslims.” He claims “the fanatics we fought valued nothing but their twisted interpretation of religion.”
“I never once fought for the Iraqis,” he wrote of our Iraqi allies. “I could give a flying fuck about them.”
He killed an Iraqi teenager he claimed was an insurgent. He watched as the boy’s mother found his body, tore her clothes and wept. He was unmoved.
He wrote: “If you loved them [the sons], you should have kept them away from the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let them try and kill us—what did you think would happen to them?”
“People back home [in the U.S.], people who haven’t been in war, at least not that war, sometimes don’t seem to understand how the troops in Iraq acted,” he went on. “They’re surprised—shocked—to discover we often joked about death, about things we saw.” He was investigated by the Army for killing an unarmed civilian. According to his memoir, Kyle, who viewed all Iraqis as the enemy, told an Army colonel: “I don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.” The investigation went nowhere.
Kyle was given the nickname “Legend.” He got a tattoo of a Crusader cross on his arm. “I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting,” he wrote. “I always will.” Following a day of sniping, after killing perhaps as many as six people, he would go back to his barracks to spent his time smoking Cuban Romeo y Julieta No. 3 cigars and “playing video games, watching porn and working out.” On leave, something omitted in the movie, he was frequently arrested for drunken bar fights. He dismissed politicians, hated the press and disdained superior officers, exalting only the comradeship of warriors. His memoir glorifies white, “Christian” supremacy and war. It is an angry tirade directed against anyone who questions the military’s elite, professional killers.
“For some reason, a lot of people back home—not all people—didn’t accept that we were at war,” he wrote. “They didn’t accept that war means death, violent death, most times. A lot of people, not just politicians, wanted to impose ridiculous fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behavior that no human being could maintain.”
The enemy sniper Mustafa, portrayed in the film as if he was a serial killer, fatally wounds Kyle’s comrade Ryan “Biggles” Job. In the movie Kyle returns to Iraq—his fourth tour—to extract revenge for Biggles’ death. This final tour, at least in the film, centered on the killing of The Butcher and the enemy sniper, also a fictional character. As it focuses on the dramatic duel between hero Kyle and villain Mustafa the movie becomes ridiculously cartoonish.
Kyle gets Mustafa in his sights and pulls the trigger. The bullet is shown leaving the rifle in slow motion. “Do it for Biggles,” someone says. The enemy sniper’s head turns into a puff of blood.
“Biggles would be proud of you,” a soldier says. “You did it, man.”
His final tour over, Kyle leaves the Navy. As a civilian he struggles with the demons of war and becomes, at least in the film, a model father and husband and works with veterans who were maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He trades his combat boots for cowboy boots.
The real-life Kyle, as the film was in production, was shot dead at a shooting range near Dallas on Feb. 2, 2013, along with a friend, Chad Littlefield. A former Marine, Eddie Ray Routh, who had been suffering from PTSD and severe psychological episodes, allegedly killed the two men and then stole Kyle’s pickup truck. Routh will go on trial next month. The film ends with scenes of Kyle’s funeral procession—thousands lined the roads waving flags—and the memorial service at the Dallas Cowboys’ home stadium. It shows fellow SEALs pounding their tridents into the top of his coffin, a custom for fallen comrades. Kyle was shot in the back and the back of his head. Like so many people he dispatched, he never saw his killer when the fatal shots were fired.
The culture of war banishes the capacity for pity. It glorifies self-sacrifice and death. It sees pain, ritual humiliation and violence as part of an initiation into manhood. Brutal hazing, as Kyle noted in his book, was an integral part of becoming a Navy SEAL. New SEALs would be held down and choked by senior members of the platoon until they passed out. The culture of war idealizes only the warrior. It belittles those who do not exhibit the warrior’s “manly” virtues. It places a premium on obedience and loyalty. It punishes those who engage in independent thought and demands total conformity. It elevates cruelty and killing to a virtue. This culture, once it infects wider society, destroys all that makes the heights of human civilization and democracy possible. The capacity for empathy, the cultivation of wisdom and understanding, the tolerance and respect for difference and even love are ruthlessly crushed. The innate barbarity that war and violence breed is justified by a saccharine sentimentality about the nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that blesses its armed crusaders. This sentimentality, as Baldwin wrote, masks a terrifying numbness. It fosters an unchecked narcissism. Facts and historical truths, when they do not fit into the mythic vision of the nation and the tribe, are discarded. Dissent becomes treason. All opponents are godless and subhuman. “American Sniper” caters to a deep sickness rippling through our society. It holds up the dangerous belief that we can recover our equilibrium and our lost glory by embracing an American fascism.
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