So, thefirst documentary I watched at the Tri Continental Film Festival 2008 was War Made Easy. A documentary about America’s foreign policy and the complicity of the media in promoting the policies. I didn’t learn many new things, but it was interesting to see the evidence for what I already knew.
War Made Easy looks at wars that America has been involved in from Vietnam through to the war in Iraq. It shows how each time the government lied in order to justify their actions and how the media went along with the lies without taking the time to investigate and uncover the truth. People who had dissenting views were shut down. An example is The Phil Donahue show, because he was anti the war, his show was cancelled even though it had some of the highest rankings. Because the people have been brainwashed by the propaganda of the media, the same thing happens to people on the street when they voice anti war opinions, they are labelled as unpatriotic.
After the war is under way, some of the lies are uncovered and the media berates themselves for not verifying what they were told. This is supposed to show how ‘unbiased’ they are. Unfortunately, it’s a little too late for all the people who then die in the war. This new idea of sending reporters with the soldiers to report from the front line was a masterstroke. There is no way those reporters can be at all objective and the public gets to see only what happens when you launch bombs and shoot guns, but they never see the pain and suffering that happens when those bombs and bullets hit their targets.
A perfect propaganda system, using all the modern tools at its disposal. Freedom is an illusion and democracy is an illusion.
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