Propaganda of Our Fathers

I haven’t seen Flags of Our Fathers, and I can guarantee you I never will. It’s a piece of propagandistic trash. Does Clint Eastwood have no shame? Another movie about WWII? Fine, tens of thousands of Americans, Canadians, Brits, and others gave their lives to put a stop to a worldwide threat to the overrated institutions of democracy and all that other stuff. We get it.

No, I won’t ever see the movie. But I have seen the commercial a few times, and I’m outraged. So should you be. We’re supposed to believe that one simple picture — the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima — inspired a nation to get behind our troops in WWII? One picture suggested to America that we were winning, thereby galvanizing our morale, which helped our men and women defeat a worldwide danger to human rights? One picture? Is that all it takes?

First of all, it’s a cheap victory if we needed the aid of a picture of our marines hoisting a flag. This is like Barry Bonds using steroids — he doesn’t deserve his records, we didn’t deserve to end Nazism and Japanese imperialism.

Second of all, what is Eastwood really trying to say here? Is the implication that the mainstream media should occasionally acknowledge our positive steps in Iraq? That if they did so, our troops might be in a better position to win, because they wouldn’t have to constantly hear that the vast majority of us no longer seems to believe in what they’re doing?

No way. The media shouldn’t be bullied into this. The media is there to make sure we never consider the bigger picture, that we never consider anything more complicated than the fact that when there’s a war going on, bad things happen.

I’m no fan of the media, because they’re all pro-Bush lapdogs, but I must admit, just as I was with Katrina, I’m impressed with and thankful for their wonderfully mal-focused coverage of the war. You can always count on the media to follow (and irresponsibly exaggerate) nothing but the blood and guts, no matter how one-dimensional a strategy it is.

It is self-evident that America shouldn’t be in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s imperative that all Americans are convinced of this. So it’s good that most don’t know that significant areas of Iraq have been completely handed off to Iraqi security forces. It’s good that most don’t know that there’s only a handful of very chaotic regions that are anywhere close to resembling a civil war. It’s good that most don’t know that, contrary to the immoral three-month Battle of Normandy in which Allied forces lost approximately 17% of their soldiers “liberating” Europe, the immoral three-and-a-half-year campaign to “liberate” Iraq has cost America approximately 2% of its entire force.

And it’s good that, because the media focuses on little other than the worst of Iraq, people still think of Iraq as the bad war, Afghanistan as the good war, even though at this point there is hardly any difference between the two campaigns: Both are immoral battles against those who are fighting for freedom from the oppression of an open, elected representative government.

Hell no, it is not the media’s job to tell us anything positive about our wars. Flags of Our Fathers is nothing more than the usual Hollywood Bush-loving war propaganda that we see time and time again. For even hinting that the media might be able to do some good and help us win our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Clint Eastwood should be ashamed of himself.