The Pentagon and China's Propaganda Wars (Expanded Edition)
/Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 14 seconds
The Pentagon and China are waging a propaganda war against their own people, and the greedy globalists of corporate Hollywood are happy to help
Hollywood won’t choose between the totalitarian Sauron of China and the authoritarian Darth Vader of the U.S. military, but instead will support both evils, and the people of the world and the art of cinema will suffer greatly because of it.
There is currently a propaganda war being waged by China and the U.S. military where both want to control Hollywood, and therefore the minds of their citizenry, for their own nefarious means.
Not surprisingly, like whores at a battlefield brothel, the morally ambiguous harlots of Hollywood are trying to profit by servicing both combatants.
PEN America, a group championing free expression, recently released an exhaustive report detailing how China has taken control over Hollywood.
The report states, “The Chinese government, under Xi Jinping especially, has heavily emphasized its desire to ensure that Hollywood filmmakers—to use their preferred phrase—“tell China’s story well.”
China strictly controls films released in their market, which is soon to become the largest box office in the world, and Hollywood wants in on that lucrative action, so they appease their Chinese overlords by obeying censorial demands, like whitewashing a Tibetan character from Marvel’s Dr. Strange, and strenuously self-censoring, like cancelling a planned sequel to World War Z.
The whitewashing of a Tibetan character from Dr. Strange is particularly interesting as that became the outrage of the moment back in 2016 when the movie was released. Many activists and journalists howled at the inherent racism of casting a white woman (Tilda Swinton) in a role that was an Asian man in the source material. Interestingly enough, Disney (who owns Marvel) stayed entirely silent throughout the controversy. The PEN America report shows that the reason for the whitewashing was that China wouldn’t allow a Tibetan portrayed on screen, so Disney dutifully complied in an attempt to get the film in the Chinese market. Disney also kept its mouth shut as to why it engaged in whitewashing in order to cover up its appeasement to Chinese demands.
Disney genuflecting to China should come as no surprise. In 1998, Disney’s then CEO, Michael Eisner, met with Premier Zhu Rongji to talk about Disney’s desired expansion into China and the 1997 Martin Scorsese biography of the Dalai Lama it produced, Kundun, which infuriated the Chinese government.
The loathsome Eisner said of Kundun, “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it,” Eisner then groveled further, “Here I want to apologize, and in the future we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening.”
In the two decades since then, Chinese power has only grown and Hollywood has only become more and more weak kneed and reflexively compliant.
This Orwellian sentiment of controlled storytelling to fit a government-approved narrative is not limited to the communists of China though. The U.S. military has long had a very fruitful arrangement with Hollywood where they exchange free military equipment, expertise, personnel and locations in exchange for ultimate control over scripts.
Capt. Russell Coons, Director of Navy Office of Information West, sounded like Xi Jinping when he described Pentagon expectations while cooperating with a movie, “We’re not going to support a program that…presents us in a compromising way.”
PEN America notes this Pentagon propaganda program, “…the United States government has benefitted from, encouraged, and at times even directed Hollywood filmmaking as an exercise in soft power.”
But then disingenuously dismisses it, “But this governmental influence does not bring to bear a heavy-handed system of institutionalized censorship, as Beijing’s does.”
That is an absurd contention as the Pentagon picks movies based on a studio’s willingness to conform to its rigidly pro-military narrative standard, which is, in function if not form, just like China picking which Hollywood movies it allows to run in its country based on their adherence to a pro-China criteria.
Regardless, the reality is if Hollywood can financially benefit by acquiescing to the Pentagon and/or China’s demands, it certainly will.
In response to China’s Hollywood propaganda, Sen. Ted Cruz proposed the egregiously titled Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity and Protecting Talkies Act, or SCRIPT Act.
Cruz’s bill aims to kneecap Hollywood studios by withholding access to U.S. government support – the Pentagon propaganda program, if they alter their movies to appease Chinese censors.
Of course, SCRIPT will never go anywhere as the Motion Picture Association of America will aggressively lobby to get the whole thing scuttled to keep both Chinese and Pentagon money flowing to La La Land.
On the bright side, the SCRIPT Act has at least frightened the propagandists in the Pentagon and Hollywood enough that they are now openly touting their shadowy alliance.
For example, The Military Times recently ran a jaw dropping op-ed by Jim Lechner shamelessly espousing Hollywood’s Pentagon propaganda.
Lechner admits, “…limits on the cooperation with skilled storytellers at the American movie companies would significantly degrade the ability of the U.S. government to tell its own story…”
Lechner then boasts, “…over the decades, Hollywood has provided one of the most powerfully positive images of our military. No Pentagon-based press relations operation could come close to what Hollywood has achieved through its films.”
Over the last three decades, the Pentagon-Hollywood alliance has drastically altered American’s perception of the military and successfully neutered filmmakers as artists and truth-tellers.
For example, in the 70’s and 80’s Francis Ford-Coppola, Stanley Kubrick and Oliver Stone, made great anti-war films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, that explored the dark side of American militarism and empire.
That type of artistic and intellectually challenging anti-war movie went on the endangered species list in 1986 when the Pentagon collaborated on the making of the blockbuster Top Gun, and has since become extinct, which is why we haven’t had any great movies detailing the heinous fiascoes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Oliver Stone spoke about how he had wanted for decades to make a movie about the My Lai Massacre but was unable to get a studio on board for funding. Stone did not explicitly state this, but the implication was clear, the Pentagon’s propaganda program not only assists pro-military movies, but intimidates studios into avoiding films that are anti-war or highlight military misdeeds.
Ironically, Top Gun has become not only a symbol of the Pentagon’s propaganda prowess, but of China’s as well. In the poster for the sequel due out this year, Tom Cruise’s Maverick is still wearing his signature leather jacket, but in order to appease Chinese censors, gone from its back are the prominent Japanese and Taiwanese flags from the original.
The modern golden era of Hollywood films exploring the darker side of China peaked in 1997 with Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner. China’s swift and severe reaction to those films and the studios and production companies that made them, was extremely effective as it has resulted in studios strangling any truthful artistic exploration of Chinese themes and stories in order to avoid alienating the Chinese Communist Party and potentially missing out on the ever expanding Chinese box office.
As a cinephile and a truth-seeker, I want to see films made by true artists that chronicle the dramatically potent moral and ethical atrocities of both America and China. The plethora of post 9-11 American evils (surveillance, torture, Iraq, Afghanistan) and the brutal Chinese atrocities against the Uighers, Tibetans and members of the Falun Gong, are fertile cinematic ground. But sadly…thanks to Hollywood’s insidious, incessant and insatiable greed, none of those important stories will ever be told on the big screen.
The reality is that the propaganda war is already over and the authoritarian and totalitarian corporatists, globalists and militarists of Hollywood, Washington and Beijing, have handily won…and we the people, and the art of cinema, have lost.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020