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CounterPunch
December
5, 2002
American Journal:
Hollywood's
9 Billion Dead (And Just One Baby); Carl Pope, Take This Pack
and Shove It; More on Hitchens, Corn and Cooper; Kissinger and
the Great Beast: 666
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
The Death
Factory, and Hollywood's One Baby
Today, Thursday December 5, my friend
and CounterPuncher Dr Pete Livingston is filing suit in Federal
Court seeking declaratory relief to uphold his right to distribute
the documentary "Over 9 Billion Dead Served". The feature-length
film, a passionate anti-war commentary, is almost entirely comprised
of clips from the 25 biggest box office movies. Pete contends
that his film is protected by the Fair Use Doctrine. Fair Use
Doctrine, is designed to protect the use of copyrighted material
without permission for the purposes of criticism and education.
Livingston's company, Not the Enemy Media,
is currently being blocked by legal threats from Fox Entertainment
Group, Columbia, and Universal Studios. Film companies have denied
Livingston permission to use even a single frame of their material.
Universal went so far as to demand that Pete tear apart his documentary
and remove the portions of their material.
The lawyers representing Livingston are
a feisty and competent bunch: Bill Simpich, Tesfaye Tsadik, and
Jim Wheaton. Bill Simpich says, "This film gives the filmmakers'
lenses a 180 degree spin and exposes them as creators of the
mindset that leads Americans to war. There is no better evidence
of this than the footage itself. Nothing less will do".
"This all began", Livingstone
explains, "as an empirical examination of feature films,
but it soon became clear that the examples and issues presented
in these films could not be believably addressed using words
in a book or in articles. The imagery of these films are often
amazing and horrifying in ways that requires the transformative
use of the original (copyrighted) material to convey. Literally,
you've got to see it to believe it. We believe that under the
First Amendment and the rules of the fair use doctrine, that
this analysis is permitted and that the events like the shooting
at Columbine, the September 11th attacks, and the subsequent
war in Afghanistan demand it."
The documentary indicates that in these
movies, Hollywood filmmakers have illustrated the mass murder
of over nine billion people. In the same movies, only one baby
was born (and survived). Livingston claims these movies have
drawn on various stereotypes, including blacks and Arabs, to
make killing not only tolerable, but often amusing. "Many
of the studios that made these films take exception to my use
of the images. They want to cash in on death, dying, and remorseless
murder, but they don't want to take any responsibility for what
they've done. My position is that the cost of exploiting the
corporate welfare afforded by copyright ought to be self-exposure
to unlimited criticism using the copyrighted material. If the
studios don't like covering that token non-cost, maybe they shouldn't
indulge in the use of stereotypes to capitalize on the fanciful
slaughter of billions of innocent people in the first place.
Contacts: Pete Livingston, Ph.D. Voice:
510.236.3309
Web: NotTheEnemy.com
Bill Simpich (pm only) Voice: 510.444.0226
Fax: 510.444.1704.
Take This Pack
and Shove It
The Sierra Club is threatening to disband
a Utah chapter whose leaders are speaking out against the U.S.
threat of invading Iraq. They are this defying a decision by
the timid leaders of the Club to avoid a formal stance on the
war issue. The board members of the Sierra Club's 175-member
Glen Canyon chapter in southern Utah says their views reflect
those of most of the 700,000 members. They point that in 1981
the Sierra Club adopted a resolution opposing war in general
because of its environmental consequences. ''War is not healthy
for children and other living things,'' Dan Kent, secretary of
the Sierra Club's Glen Canyon Group, said in a recent statement.
''It is the ultimate act of environmental destruction.... For
the board to compel our silence plays right into Bush's mad world,
where a nation of police, prisons, bombs, bunkers is better than
lowering oneself to diplomacy to save lives.''
Carl Pope, the Sierra Club's executive
director, is threatening to remove the Utah activists from their
regional ruling board and disband their group.
Here's a vivid response to the Sierra
Club gauleiters, from Emily Jan, defending the position of the
Glen Canyon group:
Dear Mr. Pope and fellow board members,
I am a Sierra Club member from Oakland, California and Moab,
Utah. I am writing to say that I am beyond appalled at the recent
course of events concerning the Glen Canyon Group, and am most
seriously considering retracting my own membership and support.
Since when does the Sierra Club operate as a fascist state? And
openly so? You are 'inclined' to file a BOLT action against John,
Patrick, Tori and Dan? They did not Breach any kind of Leadership
Trust. It is precisely for the reason that they HAVE the courage
to stand up and speak out against the gag rule of their cowardly
"superiors" which makes them EXACTLY that: Leaders.
Whom we can Trust. Which is something this country desperately
needs...
"I come from the city which is proud
to call Congresswoman Barbara Lee one of our own. Like the Glen
Canyon Group leaders, she was in the extreme minority, the one
alone amongst all her peers in Congress who had the courage to
stand up to George W.'s hysterical clamour for war after 9/11.
We cheered her on then, as I cheer on the Glen Canyon Group now.
Bully for them, for being the only ones who had the courage and
insight to stand up and be counted, for I deeply suspect that
if you actually did bother to make the count, there would be
more of your loyal members on their side than you might think.
"If you do decide to "excommunicate"
these four Leaders, rest assured that this country will have
proof of your cowardice in the face of truth, your valuing political
connivings and corporate ties over the good of the people and
the cause you represent, and perhaps worst of all, your deadly
lack of vision. And, you can most assuredly take my membership,
previous support, black backpack and all, and stuff it.
Cordially yours,
Emily Jan
artist and environmentalist
Oakland, California Moab, Utah.
Hitchens, Corn and
Cooper:
More Yelps from the Running Dogs
A recent response in The Nation's letters
columns by Christopher Hitchens to criticisms of him by Katha
Pollitt in that same journal contained the following sentence:
"Just watching the sluggish stream sliding by in the past
few months, I have seen the editor of CounterPunch, one of our
fellow columnists, reprint a vicious and paranoid and subliterate
screed, explicitly associating Jew power with the destruction
of the World Trade Center."
On October 3 CounterPunch, whose coeditors
are Jeffrey St. Clair and myself, ran here on this website a
piece by Kurt Nimmo about the uproar over Amiri Baraka's poem
about September 11, and the efforts of the ADL to get Baraka
dislodged from his position as poet laureate of New Jersey. You
can find Nimmo's useful piece at www.counterpunch.org/nimmo1003.html.
Since most newspapers (with the exception
of the Newark Star-Ledger, which printed the entire poem) didn't
bother to share with their readers what Baraka actually wrote,
we also put up Baraka's poem
(. He subsequently sent us his indignant, detailed response to
the ADL's charges of anti-Semitism, which we also posted on our
site (www.counterpunch.org/baraka1007.html).
Actually, I strongly doubt whether Hitchens
ever looked at our web page, since he told me the last time I
saw him that his Internet skills are confined to reading his
e-mail. I also doubt he's ever read Baraka's poem, or his subsequent
defense, both of which are well worth studying and far less deserving
of the charges of subliteracy, viciousness and paranoia than
much of what Hitchens puts out these days. The phrase "Jew
power," by the way, is Hitchens's, not Baraka's.
I would have thought that Hitchens, a
man who once defended David Irving's First Amendment rights,
would have thought twice about those sentences in his answer
to Pollitt, so carefully designed to tarnish me and CounterPunch
with the charge of abetting anti-Semitism. I can easily imagine
his howls if I decried him as an apologist for Irving or noted
the writer Edward Jay Epstein's recollections of Hitchens asserting
in 1995 that "no evidence of German mass murder had ever
been found," without adding any context.
A few weeks ago I strongly criticized
David Corn and Marc Cooper for their attacks on the recent peace
demonstrators in DC and the Bay Area as being dupes of the Workers
World Party. So far as Corn was concerned, I wasn't harsh enough.
I read a transcript the other day of Corn's recent session on
The O'Reilly Factor, where he cooperated with pathetic eagerness
when O'Reilly invited him to denounce the peace movement and
people like Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon as dupes and cat's-paws.
To me, Corn seemed to have assigned himself, without much self-awareness,
a toehold on the shelf alongside such epic snitches and Namers
of Names as Harvey Matusow.
Maybe it's this lack of awareness about
the moral timbre of what he writes and says that causes Corn
to be so upset about my description of his book as "not
unsympathetic" to Shackley. He thinks I was being weasel-worded.
In fact, I was trying to throttle back my view that the book
is a disgusting effort, truly creepy in its detached, passionless
tempo of narration about a terrible man stained from head to
toe with blood. I recently reread the chapter on Shackley's tour
as CIA station chief in Vietnam and find no reason to change
my assessment.
Cooper yaps like a terrier in a badger's
den on discovering that I decried the Workers World Party for
Marxism-Leninism-Bonkerism back in 1990. In a letter to the Nation
he gives the impression he himself was responsible for this triumph
of excavation, which is odd since, earlier, the press critic
Mark Hand had the courtesy to send along to CounterPunch precisely
the same stuff I wrote, along with his agreeable commentary which
he put up on his site.
It's certainly true that in late 1990
I was harsh about the WWP's line and since there was a choice
of two big marches, I urged antiwar demonstrators to attend the
other march. I have news for Cooper. In 1990 Iraq had invaded
Kuwait, and I had many arguments about the appropriateness of
a UN-sanctioned response with people in the antiwar movement,
including an exchange with Michael Ratner right here in these
correspondence columns, disputing his view that criticisms of
Iraq should not be on the agenda of the progressive community
amid Bush I's build-up to war. There were two large demos planned,
and since I reckoned there was no chance they would unify, I
urged my preference.
Here we are in 2002, with the UN a wholly
owned US subsidiary (as I should have conceded to myself and
others a lot more than I did in 1990) abetting an imperial onslaught
as brazen and lawless as any colonizing sortie of the nineteenth
century. In the urgent task of organizing antiwar demonstrations,
the WWP has worked capably in building up coalitions. The group's
core Bonkerism is probably undiminished, but I don't think that's
the issue, and I don't see Cooper, Corn and Gitlin doing anything
more serious in organizing peace rallies than advertising their
own political respectability in the mainstream press.
Kissinger and the
Great Beast
Meanwhile a more prominent American was
also having his credentials severely scrutinized, by the New
York Times. On Friday, November 29, the New York Times lashed
out at Henry Kissinger's selection by George Bush as the director
of a comprehensive examination of the government's failure to
prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.
After a dutiful bow to Kissinger's "keen
intellect and vast experience in national security matters"
the NYT toasted him as a power-mad money-grubber with far too
keen an eye for the main chance to be a dispassionate watchdog
for the public interest. In Times-speak this translates thus:
"Unfortunately, his affinity for power and the commercial
interests he has cultivated since leaving government may make
him less than the staunchly independent figure that is needed
for this critical post." "There can be no place",
thundered the Times "for the kind of political calculation
and court flattery that Mr. Kissinger practiced so assiduously
during his tenure as Richard Nixon's national security adviser
and secretary of state. Nor is there any tolerance for the kind
of cynicism that Mr. Kissinger applied to the prosecution of
the Vietnam War."
The editorial insisted that Kissinger
sever "all ties to Kissinger Associates", and then
had a poke at Senator George Mitchell, nominated by the Democrats
to serve as the vice chairman on Kissinger's investigative commission.
"Mitchell , the Times sneered, "is not known for rocking
established institutions."
Of course the mere notion that Kissinger
will rock any sort of boat is preposterous. His prime function
will be to protect the White House from any damaging revelations
of what Bush had been told, and when he was told it, in the run-up
to 9/11.
For a far more exciting, albeit somewhat
eccentric assessment of Kissinger I recommend the speculations
of Dr Leonard Horowitz, who roosts in Sandpoint, a lush little
community in western Idaho, when he runs an outfit called Tetrahedron.
Horowitz claims to have decrypted a centuries-old alphanumeric
code currently used by British and American intelligence agencies
and to have discovered "a foreboding fact" while analyzing
the code-the words "Kissinger" and "Vaccination"
both decipher to "666," the infamous "mark of
the beast."
In his 1998 book "Emerging Viruses:
AIDS & Ebola- Nature, Accident or Intentional?" (Tetrahedron
Press, 1998), Horowitz claims that Kissinger, "through his
chain of command, directed members of the National Academy of
Sciences-National Research Council to advise U.S. Army officials
to develop immune suppressive "synthetic biological agents"
descriptively and functionally identical to HIV/AIDS and the
Ebola virus."
And how did HIV and Ebola viruses break
out of their military medical labs? Horowitz suggests that
"through the Merck pharmaceutical company, a major U.S.
biological weapons contractor whose president, George W. Merck,
directed America's entire biological weapons industry, contaminated
chimpanzees were used during the early 1970s to develop the earliest
experimental hepatitis B vaccines given to gay men in New York
City and Blacks in central Africa. This says Horowitz, was the
precise vaccination that triggered the AIDS pandemic."
I'm a little disappointed by the tentative
nature of Horowitz's next phrase: "No doubt Merck's chief
advisor, Dr. Kissinger, would have approved of this AIDS outcome
given his enthusiasm for his National Special Security Memorandum
200, ordered just before these vaccinations began, that called
for massive Third World depopulation especially targeting Black
Africans." What's a weaselly "no doubt" doing
in a story of this importance?
Dr. Horowitz sweeps on: "it is not
likely an accident that the names 'Merck' and 'Bush' both decipher
to '300' using the same code. This is consistent with the "Committee
of 300" and its powerful influence over global politics
and governmental policies. It is, likewise, no "coincidence"
that Kissinger, the only modern day political leader whose name
deciphers to '666,' with his 'special services' record at the
CFR, became a top advisor to the Merck pharmaceutical company-the
world's leading vaccine maker-with the word 'vaccination' also
resolving to '666'".
"Now that we have some of their
secret codes," Dr. Horowitz concludes, "it is possible
to perform statistical analyses, the scientific method of determining
correlation (coefficients) for testing associations-in this case
co-conspirators in a global conspiracy. When this is done, the
outcome proves a genocidal theory beyond our worst nightmares."
My only disappointment was that Horowitz
isn't somehow wedge the Illuminati into his story, or the Templars.
A conspiracy theory without these elements isn't all that it
might be.
Many years ago my father visited the
secretary of a British society that used certain measurements
in the Grand Pyramid in Egypt to predict the future. After running
through the basic mathematical drill the secretary murmured that
in his estimation the predictive power of the Grand Pyramid was
over-estimated. Scenting a possible recantation my father pressed
him. What sort of "over-estimation" he asked. "Well,"
said the secretary, many people believe that the calculations
to make current predictions based on the pyramid can be done
"in five minutes". Not so. "Serious predictions
involve math that requires "at least three weeks to complete."
Nuts are never more impressive than when
admitting just a measure of uncertainty into the precision of
their mad interpretations.
And yes, the same can be said of economic
forecasters.
Yesterday's
Features
Paul de Rooij
Ted Honderich:
a Philosopher in the Trenches
Adam Engel
A Very
Brady Homeland
Harold Pinter
The Bush
/ Blair Gang:
"A Monster of Obscene and Grotesque Proportions"
Jeremy Scahill
No Fly
Zones Over Iraq:
Washington's Undeclared War on "Saddam's Victims"
Charlotte Kates
Tension
on Campus:
A Call to Silence
Anita Ramasastry
FISA's End Run Around the 4th Amendment
Mark Hand
The Washington Post Smears Finkelstein
Ralph Nader
Make the Banks Insure Themselves
Robert Fisk
Being Set Up for a War on Iraq
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
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December 1,
2002
Alexander
Cockburn
American
Journal
Gabriel Kolko
Another
Century of War?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes & Lies: The Attack on the Liberty Revisited
Steve Perry
Spank
the Democrats
M. Shahid
Alam
A Predatory
Orientalism
Kurt Nimmo
The Murder
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Ali Abunimah
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The
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In Defense
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The Apocalyptic
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Eminem's
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On the Lam
from Uncle Sam
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Bowling
for Columbine
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Piss Off,
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The Grassroots
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This
Mad, Limitless War
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Genocide!
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"Likud
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Turkeys
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