A US propaganda movie

Top Gun (1986)
Director: Tom Scott

I never really had the chance to view this movie when it came around in the mid80s. My wife and her friends went gaga watching a topless and muscular Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer on that one. I think that was the reason they thought the film was darn good.

Viewing it now after acquiring the wisdom conferred by the School of Hard Knocks of Life, it is quite as plain as day. The movie is nothing more than a US propaganda tool deployed by Hollywood to showcase the might of the world's policeman to the rest of the capitalistic world. It was like Rambo singlehandedly ending the Afghan War in Rambo3. It was a time when the world was convinced that Americans were saviours with altruistic intentions. 

There is not much of a story here. It is more like a prospectus to showcase how an elite select group of US Marines are handpicked to compete in a fighter jet dogfight tactical competition. 

All through, I was squeezing my brain, trying to fathom the purpose of their whole exercise. It reminded me of 'Mortal Combat' and 'Street Fighter' or even 'Grand Theft Auto' where there were no rules and no holds barred. The idea of young elite fighter pilots competing all out, risking their lives for the coveted plaque, was diabolical. 

A little background search reveals much more than meets the eye. During the Vietnam War, the US Army found that despite possessing primitive equipment, their enemy was a tough nut to crack. The Vietnamese had built an effective air-to-air missile and anti-aircraft gun-based defence system with their small number of modern jets. The Americans relied on missiles and technology. The Americans soon realised the importance of fighter vs fighter or dogfighting tactics. The US Navy Fighter Weapons School was later established. This movie was filmed at the Naval Air Station in Miramar, California. 

We know who the intended villains are. Who else uses MiG fighter planes?

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Can truth be stranger than fiction?

Body Of Lies (2008)

The talk about this film came about after the recent catastrophes in Christchurch and Colombo. What started of possibly the work of a lone wolf disillusioned wacko or deviant religious groups may actually be hiding the deep-rooted tentacles of international psyops.

In the case of Christchurch shooting in a mosque, it may not just the work of a lone wolf going on a shooting spree because he cannot stand what he sees around him, but cannot do it in his home because of tight gun laws but in New Zealand instead. He may be just a pawn in a greater chess game involving players at very high levels via remote control.

And the bombing of the churches in Sri Lanka is not just due to vengeance to the Christchurch mishap. A disgruntled Sri Lankan Muslim did not suddenly decide to be a human bomb to settle a score. Investigations slowly reveal that the perpetrators originate outside the country and gleam in joy seeing the devastation, creating anarchy and benefitting financially by fueling the feud.

Everyone has a theory to explain why each thing happens. Every narration seems to have its own gravitas. The problem of verisimilitude (truthlikeness) is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory.

This 2008 espionage film shows how politics is manipulated by the powers that be. The rich and powerful convince the masses through their narration. Set in the Middle East, CIA uses their intelligence and undercover agents to infiltrate, manipulate and assassinate people at will just to keep the American interest in check. Democracy, freedom and justice have nothing to do with it. History has proven that what we thought as creative writing may be just a reflection of what happens on the ground.

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An old scribbling...

All it takes is for someone to snoop around to look for another destination. A place where people lead an idyllic life living in symbiosis with the elements of nature, with the divine forces as their guiding light. Venture capitalists move in. They show them the carrot and the lure of what money can do to enrich their 'impoverished' lives. They influence the elders who steamroll all oppositions who want to maintain the status quo. The general public thinks the opposers are just spoiled sports, reminiscing the old times, living in the past and not moving with times. The time to live, the new kids on the block say is now, and they do not want to be left behind.

So builds a frenzy, to join the bandwagon to draw sightseers to see what they had to offer. The natives were willing to play dance monkey to the tune of the first world revellers. Slowly, the natives' lives change. Their age-old tradition of caring for humanity rather than worldly materialistic things is but a thing of the past. Rituals and prayers are only for display like a caged animal in a zoo or a museum piece. Hey, it draws the crowd, and it pays for 'modernity' and 'development'. They all want to move forward in life, what to go one step ahead of what our forefathers left them. The world is changing, and they have a lot of catching up to do! They want modern education, modern amenities, industrialisation and avert the laborious unproductive ways of their fathers. They want to catch up with the rest of the world.

"For how long are they going to be cocooned on their so-called glorious past?" they ask.

Just like that modernity embraced the society.

Fast forward. What they see now is their people in the same helplessness. The only difference is that it had become worse with the introduction of greed as the primary armamentarium to prosper. Gone are the community spirit and need to live for continuity of the clan. They, instead, have become chess pieces in the game of the rich. Their way of life has become a hedonistic indulgence of the affluent to spread their beliefs as if they are too stupid to understand Nature and to live to respect it. The 'bearers of miracles' give them things under the pretext of bringing them out of the yoke of ignorance but time has shown that their shrewdness. See how many of theirs have been disillusioned with 'progress' and joined blindly to chase the mirage? There must be some wisdom in the words of the forefathers!

 https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

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Shanthi by Ashanthi?

The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives

Zbigniew Brzezinski (1997)

Everybody wants peace on Earth. The political leaders wish for peace in their land. Believers of all faiths, without fail, include in their daily prayers call for eternal peace on Earth. We all know this type of bliss, smiling from ear to ear without an iota of worry in their minds, stays only as a figment of our imaginations.

Like in the narration of Kali and the state of the world, life is a constant battle without the weak and the mighty. It is a continual flux of turn of tides of the interplay between the powerful crumbling down to become weak and the downtrodden rising from the ashes. Empires may crumble, and slaves may turn emperors.

This book is the perspective of President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor. Written in 1997, when the USA was the lone superpower, Russia and China were weak, and Islamic Jihadism was unheard of, some of the strategies that made a lot of sense then seem inappropriate now. Even Brzezinski seem to change his viewpoint.

From time immemorial, big kingdoms underwent the same fait accomplis. The Persians, Romans, Chinese, Russian all grew too big, immersed in imperial power and subsequently break apart due to internal fatigue, decay, hedonism, loss of central control and military creativity.

After the WW2, it was basically a power play between the Communist and the Capitalists. The Soviet Union was on one side, together with the Eastern Block of Europe and China, who had issues with Big Brother Russia, versus America as the leader of the free world. Strategic partnerships were built by America with countries in the so-called 'buffer zones' to curtail each others' advancement and their spread of influence. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, China, which all the while been the underdeveloped poor communist cousin of the Soviet Union had awoken from its slumber. There was a need to monitor their prowess and keep them under the US radar. Germany and France help to maintain equilibrium in Europe. The Japanese, whose wings were clipped after their WW2 fiasco, is now at the mercy of the US and the world at large. The newly liberated East European countries ranging from Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and the Baltic nations make another wall of defence just in case the mighty Russians, under the leadership of Putin, who yearn for the glory days of Soviet Union decide to dominate the world. At the back of these, the main agenda is the control of oil lines across the middle of Eurasia.

Eurasia which makes up more than two-thirds of the land mass of Earth draws the attention of all world power as most of the world population, economic and natural resources are found. In the author's opinion, for the USA to stay as the lone super-power of the world, it is crucial no other challenger dominates Eurasia.

Like a Chess Master, American places all the pieces in essential places, all with vital reasons with the ultimate goal of winning the board game. In that process, necessary sacrifices had to be made.

/http://www.hangthebankers.com/zbigniew-brzezinskis-grand-chessboard-plan-failing/

Expendable for the greater good?

Stealing a Nation (2004)

Written and Directed by John Pilger

Before the mysterious disappearance of the flight MH370, never had I heard of the existence of a military base in the Indian Ocean named Diego Garcia. With the power of the web, we now know so many things about this piece of coral island, out in the middle of nowhere, in the Chagos Archipelago with Diego Garcia as the main island and its neighbours are Mauritius and Seychelles.

Some time now, the story of the imposition of inhumane displacement of its indigenous inhabitants of the isle by imperial superpowers, namely Britain and America had hit the headlines in the UK and Mauritius.

Around 1965, the British foreign office clandestinely falsified a document stating that the Chagos Archipelago was an uninhabited piece of land only occupied by seagulls. They did this to justify the selling  of this island, which they had held since the 19th century, to the US in exchange for modern military equipment. The US, in turn, desperately needed it as a surveillance post to perform their duty as the de facto policeman of the world. Diego Garcia had been the base from where attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan were carried out.

The population of the Chagos islands were systemically chased out of their ancestral lands, where they had lived for more than a century. The Chagossians were originally brought in as slaves and indentured labourer but became freemen after slavery was outlawed.  To purge the island of its people, in the mid-1970s, they were almost forcefully dragged out of the quarters and transported like criminals in ships in appalling states to be kept as prisoners in Seychelles and later in Mauritius.

Their descendants, in the turn of the century, sued the British foreign office and won the right to return to the Chagos Islands in the year 2000. Unfortunately, the political bureaucracy had unnecessarily imposed hurdle after hurdle to their desire. It appears like nobody respects the court decision. Even the Queen of England had been hurled in by the British leaders to pass a decree to this end.

When reporters interviewed past politicians of the whole fiasco of brutal treatment of the poor natives by the imperial powers, leaders from both side of the Atlantic defend their actions, citing that the decisions were the best given the situation and need of the climate of political then.

http://johnpilger.com/videos/stealing-a-nation