Chalmers Johnson: 'Charlie Wilson's War' A Truly Dangerous Piece Of Pro-War Propaganda

http://www.alternet.org/story/73010/

Tom Hank's Charlie Wilson Movie: An Imperialist Comedy

By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com. Posted January 8, 2008.

Charlie Wilson's War is a truly dangerous piece of pro-war propaganda from Hollywood.

I have some personal knowledge of Congressmen like Charlie Wilson (D-2nd District, Texas, 1973-1996) because, for close to twenty years, my representative in the 50th Congressional District of California was Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now serving an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence for soliciting and receiving bribes from defense contractors. Wilson and Cunningham held exactly the same plummy committee assignments in the House of Representatives -- the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee plus the Intelligence Oversight Committee -- from which they could dole out large sums of public money with little or no input from their colleagues or constituents.

Both men flagrantly abused their positions -- but with radically different consequences. Cunningham went to jail because he was too stupid to know how to game the system -- retire and become a lobbyist -- whereas Wilson received the Central Intelligence Agency Clandestine Service's first "honored colleague" award ever given to an outsider and went on to become a $360,000 per annum lobbyist for Pakistan.

In a secret ceremony at CIA headquarters on June 9, 1993, James Woolsey, Bill Clinton's first Director of Central Intelligence and one of the agency's least competent chiefs in its checkered history, said: "The defeat and breakup of the Soviet empire is one of the great events of world history. There were many heroes in this battle, but to Charlie Wilson must go a special recognition." One important part of that recognition, studiously avoided by the CIA and most subsequent American writers on the subject, is that Wilson's activities in Afghanistan led directly to a chain of blowback that culminated in the attacks of September 11, 2001 and led to the United States' current status as the most hated nation on Earth.

On May 25, 2003, (the same month George W. Bush stood on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln under a White-House-prepared "Mission Accomplished" banner and proclaimed "major combat operations" at an end in Iraq), I published a review in the Los Angeles Times of the book that provides the data for the film Charlie Wilson's War. The original edition of the book carried the subtitle, "The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History -- the Arming of the Mujahideen." The 2007 paperbound edition was subtitled, "The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times." Neither the claim that the Afghan operations were covert nor that they changed history is precisely true.

In my review of the book, I wrote,


MORE

for the morning crowd.

...was positive, and played up the blowback, "it came back to bite us in the butt" angle:



I might go see it if it hits the Budget Cinema, but I won't go out of my way to do that. (Always had a weakness for Julia Roberts, and some of the bathtub scenes sound like they could be fun.)

...Tomdispatch -- Great website.

Tom Hanks acted as if he is doing a patriotic duty by performing Charlie Wilson's character, fighting against the "godless communists."

More from the article:

(snip)

An imperialist comedy

Which brings us back to the movie and its reception in the US. (It has been banned in Afghanistan.) One of the severe side effects of imperialism in its advanced stages seems to be that it rots the brains of the imperialists. They start believing that they are the bearers of civilization, the bringers of light to "primitives" and "savages" (largely so identified because of their resistance to being "liberated" by us), the carriers of science and modernity to backward peoples, beacons and guides for citizens of the "underdeveloped world".

Such attitudes are normally accompanied by a racist ideology that proclaims the intrinsic superiority and right to rule of "white" Caucasians. Innumerable European colonialists saw the hand of God in Charles Darwin's discovery of evolution, so long as it was understood that He had programmed the outcome of evolution in favor of late Victorian Englishmen. (For an excellent short book on this subject, check out Sven Lindquist's Exterminate All the Brutes.)

(snip)

The tendency of imperialism to rot the brains of imperialists is particularly on display in the recent spate of articles and reviews in mainstream American newspapers about the film. For reasons not entirely clear, an overwhelming majority of reviewers concluded that Charlie Wilson's War is a "feel-good comedy" (Lou Lumenick in the New York Post), a "high-living, hard-partying jihad" (A O Scott in the New York Times), "a sharp-edged, wickedly funny comedy" (Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times). Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post wrote of "Mike Nichols' laff-a-minute chronicle of the congressman's crusade to ram funding through the House Appropriations Committee to supply arms to the Afghan mujahideen"; while, in a piece entitled "Sex! Drugs! (and Maybe a Little War)," Richard L Berke in the New York Times offered this stamp of approval: "You can make a movie that is relevant and intelligent - and palatable to a mass audience - if its political pills are sugar-coated."

(snip)

The handful of truly critical reviews have come mostly from blogs and little-known Hollywood fanzines - with one major exception, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times. In an essay subtitled "Charlie Wilson's War celebrates events that came back to haunt Americans," Turan called the film "an unintentionally sobering narrative of American shouldn't-have" and added that it was "glib rather than witty, one of those films that comes off as being more pleased with itself than it has a right to be".

My own view is that if Charlie Wilson's War is a comedy, it's the kind that goes over well with a roomful of louts in a college fraternity house. Simply put, it is imperialist propaganda and the tragedy is that four-and-a-half years after we invaded Iraq and destroyed it, such dangerously misleading nonsense is still being offered to a gullible public. The most accurate review so far is James Rocchi's summing-up for Cinematical: "Charlie Wilson's War isn't just bad history; it feels even more malign, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia."

when me and my Friends walked out after the movie, we were impressed by how it ended. They clearly pointed out how we ended up fucking it up.

Wilsons quote at the end of the movie:
"These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world... and then we fucked up the endgame. "

Dead on in my opinion.

a guy who helped us arm the Afghans, which may have killed off the Soviet Union, but we all know what else it did?"

I couldn't figure out how Charlie Wilson was being held up as a pure unambiguous hero in this movie.

K&R

There's a very prominent disclaimer at the beginning of the flick:

The stunts depicted in this movie are inherently dangerous and done by highly trained professionals. Do not attempt them at home or you will probably grievously injure yourself and/or leave an ugly corpse.

to be exposed.
Short term expediency always has a long term cost.

movie. Was it propaganda that will influence the innocent who want to be entertained thinking they are seeing real history? Or, will folks see it and do more research because they have questions from watching the movie. :shrug: I have not seen it...but know people who did who believed the movie ..thinking Wilson was a funny character.

No movie is dangerous. No press report is dangerous. No play is dangerous. No piece of art is dangerous.

We're not talking first amendment/freedom of speech here. We're talking about rewriting history, covering up the crimes of the past, and trivializing one of the most pivotal sets of events in terms of getting us into our current mess. That plus presenting it all in the form of light romantic comedy, so it won't be too closely examined.

And yes, that is dangerous -- and saying so doesn't make me a fascist.

Not at all dangerous, unless you are a fascist who would call propaganda films like JFK, All the President's Men or Redacted dangerous.

If anything, it's a film about why we should not trade arms - because we then tend to forget about those we helped, and they get pissed, and turn our weapons and knowledge back on us (see 11, September). You have to put the film into perspective with contemporary Afghanistan and contemporary Jihad. Things have greatly shifted since the Soviets left Afghanistan, and we are the ones who have ultimately suffered...

is misplaced. The US Govt. ignored Afghanistan after the Soviets pulled out. No help with reconstruction for that war torn country was largely responsible for the rise of the Taliban & al Q, as were other factors.