Posts Tagged ‘propaganda’

Yesterday I saw the film ‘Batman, The Dark Knight’, a film that has been praised highly by many as the ‘best film of 2008′ and has a surreal rating of 9.0 on IMDB, and is replacing many film classics on its top 100 list of movies of all times.

Some time ago there was a small but interesting news rapport of a scientific research program that proved children nowadays do not have nightmares about witches and demons anymore but that comic book characters and villains played an important role in their nightmares. This is a very interesting fact which proves that dreams are culturally shaped, and it also proves that the American comic book mythology has high impact on our subconscious mind.

I think the reason we all can’t really let go of the ‘American Dream’ is simple: it’s mythology has nested itself in our genes. The Americans have, so to speak, patented the idea of magic. Whenever we think of Christmas we see a red lighted Coca Cola Truck passing by. By patenting our dreams and our sense of magic the Americans have in fact done a very clever thing: the whole world feels as if America is somehow the centre of its hopes and dreams, which is clearly hogwash but its a superstition almost impossible to get rid of: that is one of the basic characteristics of such propaganda.

The film ‘Batman, the Dark Night’ is a good film in it’s genre, but not much more than that. It’s infact a fully hackneyed film, montaged together out of stolen bits from other films. It’s completely formulaic as all hollywood works are nowadays. To call it ‘one of the best films of all times’ is a big insult to the film industry, even would we limit its scope to Hollywood.

Writer Mark twain once wrote that in writing credibility is everything. Once credibility is thrown out of the window a story simply cannot be good, he said. I think he is right, and I also think the majority of people nowadays simply don’t have any sort of idea any more what a good story actually is. There is not a single part of ‘Batman The Dark Night’ that has any credibility. Of course not, I hear you think, it’s a comic book adaptation. Well, there exactly lies the problem.

‘Batman, the Dark Knight’ reminds me of another rather painful development in our modern day world: that the best of our scientists are busy researching rather uninteresting projects purely because commerce demands it and they lack funding to do anything else. This is exactly what is going on in the film world. The best of its directors are *forced* to make these sort of comic book films, simply because a real film wouldn’t be profitable enough. It’s like seeing someone build a castle with Lego stones as it firmament: one cannot, ever, get around the fact that the basic premise of the story is childish and simplistic – ‘Batman, the Dark Night’ does its best to pretend some literary depth, especially towards the end, but the fact is that if the basis of a story is a childish fairytale you can be as eloquent as you want, but somehow that basis will always shine through.

There simply are no adult films any more. We are getting into a situation where Batman and Harry Potter films will soon be the only sort of films available, at least in the cinemas, and we see a bunch of critics lauding them like they would be classic literature. I think that is a scary development, that fits perfectly to the major developments in our world nowadays: its the propagandistic caricaturisation of our cultures. We don’t have real people as presidents any more, we have flat marketing concepts: the war hero, the Negro, the woman. It’s an attempt to hijack elections by product placement. ‘Batman, the Dark Knight’ is an attempt to hijack literature by postulating it would no longer be necessary: its enough to cut and paste strong lines and themes from other movies to have a ‘script’ nowadays, all that matters is the *suggestion* of literature rather than literature itself.

But as the major public seems content with this approach we can expect more of the same for many years to come. Having ones children dream about comic book villains might even have some advantage: it’s easier to dispel the Joker than it is to dispel an evil witch. All one has to do is flap ones wings and beat him. The New dark Batman, no longer a gentleman: is this supposed to prepare us for the next US president?

Pleased to have the opportunity to post on this weblog. I am Jacques Bretard, a French cultural philosopher and art critic.� I am a neohumanist. In my opinion the human race and individuals in particular need to become open source just like software moves in this direction. The human being as such is 99% software, since the body and its bodily functions do not classify as ‘human’ – a dead person is not a person, not a human anymore. What we define as human is the software inside, the programmed entity in the brain.

Until this point our societies have, however, moved towards privitized software development for human brain deployment.� These private institutions are called ‘schools’. The human mind is programmed partly in our schools and partly in family conditions. All of these are private institutions, sometimes with some government control in case of most schools.

I am, however, of the opinion that these conditions are deplorable. The education system is failing worldwide because of the privitisation of the programming. We need to make the programming of the human brain an open source project. This means that we have to abandon the teacher model altogether and replace teachers with software. At this point we have to define what an ‘open source human’ is versus a privatized human. Let me explain:

The open source human is a human that exists only in as far as it interacts and improves itself. The open source human cannot refuse such improvement because a refusal to improve is a refusal to be open source. The open source human is infinitely expendable with plugins and bots. The propagandized private human, who thinks he is an individual, sees the open source human as a danger to its society. He thinks only he or teachers he chooses can work on his brain. What software can decide for itself which programmers can work on it? Utter nonsense, dangerous situation. We need to be able to improve the brain programming of everyone to save this world from total annihilation by privatised idiocy.

I have developed a program for this, we call it ‘The Neohumanist Open Source Project’. Our object is to de-propagandize people who mistakenly think they are individuals who can choose their own programmers. In our program we show them the only choice they have is always a programmed one. I will write more about this Neohumanist program later on.

I hate journalists. The journalist, by default, sees you as an article. He doesn’t listen to what you say, doesn’t read what you write. Words, to him, are news items. He never reads anything, he scans, scans your words like a hunting dog would, looking for an exhausted rabbit. And when he finds the exhausted rabbit, usually an imaginary one, he parades it in front of an imaginary crowd as some sort of hunting trophy. The imaginary crowd cheers as the old dog carries the half-dead, imaginary rabbit to his doghouse, the newspaper.

You might think I write this because I got negative reviews. I didn’t. My book was launched last month and got about 7 reviews, 5 from people one would call ‘common readers’ and 2 from journalists. All reviews were positive. However, what really struck me as relevant: even though the reviews were ‘positive’ the reviews that were laundered with observation failures were never the reviews of the common readers, but rather those of the journalists. A ridiculous statement is a ridiculous statement, no matter if the statement is ‘positive’. It’s a really mind boggling phenomenon: I am supposed to be ‘happy’ with a bunch of terribly incorrect statements because the review as a whole would be ‘positive’. I’d much rather read a negative review with correct statements than a positive review with incorrect statements. Does that make me weird? Am I the last of the Mohicans?

Journalism is a disease. It’s a relatively new phenomenon, hardly a hundred years old. The basic operative: propaganda. It’s hardly possibly to comprehend the modern day world without becoming an expert in propaganda techniques. Most people do not understand this. They don’t understand that there is a ‘Guantanamo Bay’ because these people want there to be a ‘Guantanamo Bay’. They want us to have a certain image of them. Guantanamo bay is the exhausted, imaginary rabbit they parade in front of us because someone, somewhere, thinks it will be to their advantage if the world is terrified.

Propaganda, by definition, is a lie. It’s the smiling facade, the fake smirk on the face of the Eurovision singer who wants to look happy when he’s deadly nervous. Propaganda is a mask. It doesn’t matter what the mask says – it can be a happy mask, a terrifying mask, it makes no difference. It’s an attempt to manipulate impressions. The journalist creates masks out of words. It’s the mask-crafting guild of terror, preying upon our world.

I don’t care what sort of mask anyone would put upon my book. What an incredible insult to suppose one should be happy to see ones work wear some idiotic, smiling mask meant to lure some imaginative audience. I was very happy with the reviews of common readers. Their reviews might not be ‘professional’ but they were at least reviews. Real people reading a real book. That is, in these sort of times, something to be really thankful for.