There seems to be a basic law that says:
As media gets more expensive and inaccessible,
its intellectual and political diversity decreases.
The lack of diversity at the expensive end - radio, TV and cinema
- is disgraceful
compared with the richness and diversity of intellectual
and political voices
at the cheaper end - the Internet and print.
We can rank media from the most
to the least
intellectual
and political diversity:
The Internet - The most diversity of all media.
All views can be read in great detail.
You can read directly, for example, from the
U.S. military,
the
Project for the New American Century,
or the
Israeli military.
You don't need to read a journalist's spin,
or selective quotes.
And of course you can read directly from their opponents as well,
including directly from Islamist websites
and directly from foreign tyrannical government websites.
Print (books, newspapers, periodicals) -
Less diversity than the Internet -
at least in terms of what you can access
unless you are sitting in a national library.
Only something like a national library
contains similar diversity to the Internet
- a bookshop doesn't.
Neither does any one periodical.
But still there is a reasonable
amount of diversity in print in a country like Ireland, say.
Many of the views on this website can be found
periodically in print in Ireland somewhere,
though in much smaller numbers than online.
It costs little for a basically liberal-left newspaper
to add the occasional neo-con column, for example.
It can be easily ignored by their readers -
whereas the cost on radio or TV is much higher
since it takes up time.
Cinema - The least diversity of all media.
There is almost no
political diversity in cinema in the world.
The extreme lack of political diversity in American cinema, TV and music.
Politicial donations to the 2008 US presidential election.
From opensecrets.org.
What movie, for example, celebrates America's victory in the Cold War in 1989?
The western victory in 1989
is possibly
the most important event in world history since
the western victory in 1945,
and yet no movie celebrates it or the people like Reagan and Thatcher
who made it happen.
Instead we get boring, narrow-minded crap like
The Reagans
(see review).
Why can no one make a movie about Reagan's and America's stunning victory in 1989?
Apart from the Holocaust,
movies tend to avoid the topic of democide altogether.
100 million people died in communist democide in the 20th century,
but movies are not interested.
What movies are there about
the Soviet democide?
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
and
The Way Back
were good
but didn't really depict the full horror of the democide of men, women and children
all across Russia.
We need a movie to show:
(1) the North Vietnam communist democide,
(2) the American left's betrayal of the military and the people of Vietnam,
(3) the disaster that happened after America abandoned the Vietnamese,
and (4) the fact that Vietnam is still a
dictatorship
today.
30 to 40 years later, and we're still waiting for the first proper political movie about Vietnam
and Cambodia.
At this rate of going, don't expect a proper movie about the War on Islamism before 2030.
Red Dusk:
It's time Hollywood gave up its love affair with communism
by Bridget Johnson
- "What feature films have showed the true nature of communism?
...
I'll bet the big studio execs have never thought
- or cared - to do a big-screen adaptation of "The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,"
by Stephane Courtois, et al."
Hollywood Heroism:
A to-do list for George Clooney and his brave crowd
- A brilliant article by Mark Goldblatt
on the movies that Hollywood will never make.
Such as a movie about
the Hatuel family.
He mocks the supposed "bravery" of Hollywood.
"True, none of these films would likely be a runway box-office hit.
But that shouldn't matter to a courageous artist like George Clooney."
Other topics I have never seen a film about:
What movie has ever been made from
the British or unionist point of view in the Northern Ireland Troubles?
What movie has ever been made from
the British or unionist point of view in pre-1922 Ireland?
10 Cinematic Clichés That Must Die!
rounds up some of the more boring cliches that appear again and again in Hollywood,
and that prevent it from making more diverse types of movies.
The cliches include:
The Crazed Soldier / Vet
The Evil Christian
The Stupid Dad
The Magical Minority
The Traditionalist Hypocrite
Evil Republicans
Wise Trashy People
Andrew Klavan on the kind of movies that Hollywood never makes, including: The Surge, Oliver Stone's film about a lonely Bush's brave decision to stand firm against the media
and the defeatists like
Barack Obama, and press on to victory in Iraq.
Journey from the Fall (2006).
Vietnamese with English subtitles.
A movie about the North Vietnam communist democide.
Why in 40 years has Hollywood never made a Vietnam movie about this topic?
As I say, cinema is the least
intellectually and politically diverse of all media.
A very narrow range of political thought gets made into movies,
and as a result, movies simply do not address
a large number of topics.
War? What War? Why Hollywood is ignoring the biggest story of the day
(also here)
by Jonathan V. Last, October 10, 2003
- on Hollywood's inability to make a movie about the War on Islamism.
We will have to wait decades before Hollywood
catches up with the present.
- "In 50 years, when this war is over,
there will be movies about the war on terror
and they will show that the bad guys were the bad guys
and that the Islamofascists did want to take over
the world."
- Until then, we will have to watch movies about other topics.
Mark Steyn:
Time for some serious art about war , June 6, 2004
-
"We've been in the new war now for almost three years, and
.. Hollywood has absolutely nothing to say on the subject,
except for a couple of Michael Moore crockumentaries.
...
Something has gone badly wrong when (with the exception of a few country songs)
our popular culture visibly recoils from the biggest event of our time."
On The Day After Tomorrow's destruction of
New York's Chrysler Building:
"it's the reductio ad absurdum
of the lengths Hollywood's willing to go to avoid
saying a word about the fellows who actually did bring down a New York landmark".
"Even when some hapless studio exec accidentally options a property that happens to have
Islamist terrorists in it - like ..
"The Sum Of All Fears"
the first thing they do is change the enemy to German neo-Nazis. Imagine it's 1943, you're in a script meeting
about "Casablanca", and Jack Warner says, "I like it. But do the bad guys have to be Germans?""
America's "Mission Impossible", July 28, 2004
- on the movies and reality.
"on a day when every big-name Federal agency flopped spectacularly,
a random sample of US citizens aboard that fourth plane,
Flight 93,
responded more swiftly and effectively to the threat than the entire US government.
They did behave like action stars and, if Hollywood weren't a bunch of counter-tribalist
Michael Moorons, they'd have made a blockbuster movie about them by now."
Look Who Isn't Talking
- Bridget Johnson, November 24, 2004,
on the silence of Hollywood.
"The war on terror is a Tinsel Town taboo, even though a Hollywood Reporter poll
showed that roughly two-thirds of filmgoers surveyed would pay to see a film on the topic."
Terrorist denial
(or via here)
by Greg Crosby, April 22, 2005
- "The fact is, Hollywood does not want to make movies about Arab terrorists,
or the Iraq war, or radical Islam's jihad against the western world.
...
If you're waiting for Hollywood to make some old fashioned patriotic movies
like they did in the 40's concerning today's enemies, you've got a long wait. Ain't gonna happen.
No, they'll continue to make patriotic period pictures of good ol' World War II,
because it's safe to hate Nazis, but not today's wars with today's enemies."
"Hollywood's box office has hit the skids, and the entertainment media are in overdrive
trying to explain why. The most obvious explanation for box office malaise is consistently overlooked:
Hollywood's ruling liberal elites keep going out of their way to offend half their audience."
"post-Sept. 11, no studio movie has been made supporting America's war on terrorism,
or denouncing Islamic terrorism."
She also has a fascinating list of pro-war movie ideas that have been rejected
by the studios.
"I .. want to apologize to these troops for my profession not having made
even one motion picture about any of the heroic American fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This country is fighting a war, Hollywood. You may think this war is unwise, waged under mistaken,
or even false, pretenses. ... But even the men and women of Hollywood must recognize that
America is fighting the worst people of our time, people who hurt every group Hollywood claims to care about
- minorities, women, gays - people who engage in the sins Hollywood most professes to oppose
- intolerance and violence - far more than anyone else on the planet."
"In another era, when what many have labeled "the greatest generation" fought the German Nazis
and the Japanese fascists, Hollywood made movie after movie depicting that great war and our great warriors.
And Hollywood showed freedom's enemies as the cruel and vicious people they were.
We have not produced one film yet depicting this war in positive terms
or one depicting this generation's enemies of freedom as the cruel and vicious people they are."
"In the history of our time as told by the movies, the war on terror largely does not exist.
Which is passing strange, you know. Because the war on terror is
the history of our time."
"at the movies, all we're getting is home-front angst and the occasional "Syriana,"
in which "moderate" Islam is thwarted by evil American interests.
But the notion that this war is about our moral failings is comfort fantasy, pure and simple.
It soothes us with the false idea that, if we but mend ourselves, the scary people will leave us alone.
The real world is both darker than that and lighted brighter in places by surprising fires of nobility.
It's darker because our enemies were not created by the peccadilloes of free people
and will not melt away before a moral perfection that we, in any case, can never achieve.
It's brighter because there are heroes like the FBI,
the military and the cop on the corner who will give up everything,
even their lives, to stop these madmen.
That kind of rousing story seems tailor-made for films.
So why aren't they telling it?"
"Which is a shame. It's a shame for so powerful an art form to become irrelevant because we can't find a way to dramatize the central event of our time. It's a shame that we live under the tireless protection of lawmen and warriors and don't pay tribute to them. And purely in artistic terms, it's a shame that so many great stories are just waiting to be told and we're not telling them."
Andrew Breitbart, September 24, 2007:
"Hollywood acting as a collective voice stakes out an anti-victory position on the current war in Iraq, continuing its deplorable 40-year streak of working against the United States' strategic objectives at a time of war. Congratulations to every heroic studio exec and heroin-addled reality star for being ahead of -- and helping to move -- the polls. While you and your celluloid comrades bravely brandish "dissent is patriotic" bumper stickers on your Prius (after Pilates), the system that you uphold has endemically rooted out voices that dissent from your dissent. ...
Free speech is a two way street, but in "patriotic" L.A. -- where pro-victory voices are reflexively ridiculed, cold-shouldered and made pariahs of on the party circuit -- the other side of the argument is rarely, if ever, made."
James Lileks:
"Just tell the story as it happened that day [9/11] and people would cram the theaters by the millions.
...
It's like it's 1943, and Hollywood turns down a Pearl Harbor movie in favor of the gripping account of a Washington bureaucrat who warned FDR that the oil embargo would needlessly anger Japan. The attack on Hawaii would take up five minutes - and even then it would be a shot of the hero listening to the radio with an expression of stoic anguish. If only they'd listened."
"in the past six years, the movie industry has produced exactly zero major motion pictures dedicated to lionizing American soldiers fighting on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan.
...
More big-budget movies featuring Islamist villains were released in the 1990s than in the seven years since 9/11, and apart from docudramas like United 93, last fall's The Kingdom - released to hand-wringing over its supposed jingoism - was the first major studio release to feature Muslim terrorists since 1998's
The Siege."
He is amusing about the daft
Bourne series:
"We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead.
...
Matt Damon's Bourne marries the efficiency of James Bond to the politics of Noam Chomsky."
On actually meeting the brave and smart U.S. troops:
"So where are
the dupes, the abusers, the kill-crazy crackpots
who populate the armed forces in Hollywood's ideology-driven depictions of the War on Terror? There are some somewhere, I'm sure. A small city's worth of Americans are deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some are bound to go bad. But to tell only their stories amounts to a despicable slander-by-omission. These guys are the real guys. That Vietnam-era army of rueful, ill-educated draftees caught up in a conflict that they can't comprehend is gone. This is a force of professional warriors, every single one of whom enlisted or reenlisted after 9/11, fully aware of what he was signing up for. Each has his complaints about the military, the war, and American foreign policy - who wouldn't? But I met none who doubted that they were the spearhead of a force for good, a nation striving to do what was right in the world."
A brilliant point about Hollywood's lack of realism:
"You could watch the most sentimental patriotic war film from the forties or fifties, he said, and get a more accurate picture of who these soldiers are than you get from more "realistic" Hollywood movies today."
About the encouragement Hollywood gives to the enemy:
"Leftist movies portraying our troops as reprobates and fools may not make it to the wilds of Nuristan. But you can bet they make it to the headquarters of our enemies and give them encouragement, not to mention ideas. They make our soldiers' mission harder and increase the danger to their lives. And here's a funny thing some people in LA may not understand about those lives: they're real. Commander Perez and Rory and First Sergeant Mitchell and all the rest - they're not characters played by actors. They're real Americans who left real parents and wives and children at home and opted to fight our enemies in dangerous places far away.
I don't think De Palma
and Robert Redford
and Paul Haggis
are bad men.
They're certainly entitled to believe what they want. But when they make these movies during wartime, when they endanger these soldiers and their mission, I think they're doing something bad - something wicked, really. They are aiding and abetting the enemy's Information Operations. And they ought to stop."
Never Forget .. How Leftist Hollywood Betrayed Post-9/11 America, by John Nolte, 11 Sept 2010.
On the contrast between Hollywood in WW2 supporting the war effort
and Hollywood today opposing it.
"In the darkest days of the War on Terror and during the worst of it in Iraq when our soldiers and Marines and the Iraqi people could've used any help they could get, the anti-American Leftists who currently infest the film-making community sided with our enemy through the production of one propaganda piece of moral equivalence after another; a celluloid flood of dishonest, divisive and morally illiterate films
...
we can only hope that the appeasers who make up today's Vichy Hollywood live long enough to see the history they are on the wrong side of forever document them as the disgraceful cowards they are.".
Is Hollywood dam finally breaking on terrorist-themed film productions?, Christian Toto, 13 June 2011.
"After the horrors of 9/11 one thing seemed clear. Hollywood had a new enemy for a generation of film goers to hate.
The Al Qaeda madmen could fuel countless stories of heroism and danger without anyone complaining about stereotyping or other PC concerns.
Except it didn't happen."
He wonders if finally, under Obama, and after the killing of Bin Laden, this will change.
Bollywood
Bollywood has made a few movies that touch on Islamic terror.
They tend to be a bit inaccessible (subtitles, very long films, musicals, culture gap, etc.).
I have yet to see any of these, so can't say what they are like.
As I say above,
TV is more diverse than cinema.
TV has been covering the war since 9/11.
It's cinema's lack of diversity I'm criticising here.
In Defense of '24' by Emilio Karim Dabul (a Syrian Muslim Arab-American), February 7, 2007.
He defends it showing an
Islamist nuclear attack on California:
"Most of the terrorists represented in "24" through the years have been Arab Muslims.
Why?
Well, probably because most terrorists today are, in fact, Arab Muslims.
As a descendant of Syrian Muslims, I am very well aware that the majority of Muslims
world-wide are peaceful, hard working, and law abiding.
That still does not change the fact that the greatest terrorist threat to the U.S.
today comes not from the ETA, the IRA, etc., but from one group: Islamic terrorists.
And this is what makes "24" a compelling drama every week.
Instead of pretending Islamic terrorists don't exist,
the show presents frighteningly real worst-case scenarios perpetrated by Osama bin Laden's followers. So CAIR thinks it's over the top for the terrorists in "24" to blow up Los Angeles with a nuke? Please, if bin Laden and his crew had nukes, most of us would be way too dead to argue over such points."
He's great on journalists' credulity about "moderate"
Muslim groups:
"the next time a journalist decides to report on Arab-American concerns about shows like "24,"
maybe he could actually talk to someone other than
CAIR and the Muslim Public Affairs Council,
and seek out Arab-Americans with a different point of view. We actually do exist."
The mass murderer Osama Bin Laden
gets finished off in Afghanistan in South Park's
"Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants"
(2001).
Not until 2012,
11 years after South Park,
did we get a single Hollywood movie supporting the American military fight
against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
An epic production.
Actually shows where Al-Qaeda came from.
They did not grow in response to Bush.
They grew in the 1990s
in response to Clinton.
Also shows how Clinton failed to deal with them,
and left them as a problem for his successor.
Bill Clinton, Feb 2012, blames jihad in Nigeria on ... poverty!
"You can't just have this level of inequality persist. That's what's fueling all this stuff."
Maybe the fact that he never understood
the root cause of jihad
was a big factor in the path to 9/11.
The blocking of
The Path to 9/11.
The excellent
Israeli TV series
Fauda
(2015 on)
shows an Israeli counter-terrorism unit's fight against Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank.
The Israelis are the good guys,
but it shows the Palestinian terrorists as interesting and human.
Deluded and immoral, but human.
The TV series
Tehran
(2020)
looks good.
Have not seen it yet.
This is a cracking read.
In tragic slow motion over many decades,
the USA becomes not only an Islamic-left
(and then just an Islamic) tyranny,
but one that acts to stamp out freedom elsewhere.
Islamic-left USA
and other ruined countries like Islamic France
not only destroy their own freedom and prosperity, but they also
go to war against the surviving free peoples of Eastern Europe
and parts of North America.
Ironically, in the book,
left-wing Islamist-friendly ideas lead to
more not less war
(in fact, endless war),
more not less terrorism,
and
more not less religious hatred and racism.
This book would make a terrific movie.
But no one in Hollywood has the bravery to make it.
This is a brutal story, well-written.
Islamists nuke London, Boston and LA, killing 5 million.
The reaction is terrifying for anyone who believes in liberal values.
In the US, leftists are assassinated.
Islam is declared a political movement and banned.
All Muslims are expelled.
The UK expels all Muslims to France.
Then the US nukes the entire Islamic world, killing 800 million.
No trace of Mecca survives.
Islam's future homeland becomes continental Europe, which falls to brutal Islamist rule.
The US becomes terrifyingly violent in its war against all Muslims everywhere.
Truly liberal values are more or less extinct on earth.
This book would also make a terrific movie,
if anyone in Hollywood had the bravery to make it.
Tim Johnston
quotes a great passage (at the end of Ch.19)
where American immigration won't let in a European leftie
fleeing Islamic Europe.
He shows her old photos of herself on anti-American demos:
"I'm sorry to have to say it this way but ...you're diseased, you see .. politically diseased. You're in the process of losing your own homeland. You brought it on yourselves and it's become irreversible now.
...
Why should we accept into our country people with a history of destroying the country they live in?
...
Europe abandoned its future for a short period of comfort in the present and you ..
you personally .. encouraged this.
...
Why should we let you take away our future?"
He also refuses to admit her daughter:
"you raised her and she probably carries the same political disease you do."
This is a strange book.
It depicts an aggressive invasion of Britain and Europe
by a unified Arab world.
It is gripping enough, but the politics are a bit odd.
America is bizarrely indifferent
to the destruction of half of the free world.
The Arab world unites into a military Islamofascist superpower,
and yet America and Europe don't care until Europe is invaded.
Britain and France are invaded by a foreign tyranny that wishes to destroy them,
and yet they do not launch their nukes.
(What are they for if not this?)
America does not help stop the invasion of Britain and Europe.
Israel disarms in the face of the rising Islamofascist power.
That's unbelievable enough, but, even more unbelievably,
the Jews are not massacred.
Finally, the Arab armies are professional, disciplined
and brilliant at high-speed, high-tech warfare.
Whereas in real life Arab armies have been fairly hopeless at modern warfare.
The Arab soldiers in the book do not ring true.
They are simply classic Nazi or Soviet soldiers
dressed up in a thin, unconvincing Arab veneer.
The author has very odd politics for a "counter-jihad" guy.
He is bizarrely hostile to Bush and the neo-conservatives.
He is strangely hostile to the Iraq War.
He is also strangely hostile to Israel.
In the book, versions of the
Area 51 conspiracies
and the
9/11 conspiracies
are actually true!
In summary, it is a strange book.
The action scenes are good. But the author's politics seem naive and poorly thought out,
in contrast to someone who has thought deeply about these issues like Glen Reinsford.
I found this too boring and abandoned it.
The whole thing is about the struggle of
one Islamic bloke and his allies with another Islamic bloke and his allies.
Every character supports an Islamic state.
There are no characters you care about in the whole book.
And endless, endless prayers and foot washing to send you to sleep.
There aren't much geopolitics,
and what geopolitics there are are completely ludicrous.
Sins of the Assassin
is more of the same.
The hero fights for an Islamic regime, and we are meant to support him!
The movie
Independence Day
(1996),
directed by Roland Emmerich,
unwittingly demonstrates Hollywood's bias.
In the movie,
the hero President (making the great speech above) is a fighter pilot
(very much unlike the Democrat President in 1996, Bill Clinton).
But it's all fake.
The film doesn't really admire tough guys who attack humanity's enemies.
It's all just an act.
When an actual fighter pilot, the Republican George W. Bush, became
President in 2000, people like Emmerich
hated him and mocked him.
Bush attacked and destroyed two of the worst regimes on earth in 2001 and 2003,
but
Emmerich declined to make a sequel to Independence Day
precisely because Bush was President.
"I didn't want to make that movie during the Bush years."
And finally, when a cynical,
unheroic, appeasing,
unmilitary man, Barack Obama,
became President in 2008,
Emmerich
now wants to make a sequel!
Why?
Because Obama is a Democrat.
What he made in the end was the dumb-as-a-post Obama-worshipping movie
White House Down (2013).
