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We are living in Brazil. The future as foretold by
Terry Gilliam’s 1985 rich and multi-layered film masterpiece
Brazil is upon us. First released fifteen years ago,
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was astonishingly accurate in
forecasting political trends. In a
previous essay,
I examined the film as a critique of socialist central planning. In
this piece, I will discuss how Brazil portends Bush’s War
on Terror.
The world of Brazil shows a totalitarian
society in which freedom has been forfeited for a false promise of
protection from terrorist attacks. Gilliam shows how the threat of
terrorism is manipulated by the state as a means of political
control over the population. The threat of terror is created by the
internal security police in order to generate public acceptance of
totalitarian police powers.
Gilliam’s exposition raises some important
questions: Is the terror created by the power of the state in the
alleged pursuit of terrorism worse than the terrorism itself? And
are they really any different?
The ministers of state in Brazil have
succeeded in creating a society organized around a continuous
response to the threat of terrorism. Random bombings occur
regularly. The protagonist Sam and his mother must go through a
security check in order to enter a restaurant. And then during their
meal a large explosion blows out the back of the dining room; they
continue eating while bodies are dragged away.
As in modern America, there is some doubt about
whether Brazil’s "War on Terrorism" is really working. At the
opening of the film Minister Helpmann, the Deputy Minister of
information (the internal security agency), appears on TV
immediately after a bombing takes place:
INTERVIEWER: Do you think that the government is
winning the battle against terrorists?
HELPMANN: Oh yes. Our morale is much higher than
theirs, we're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them
out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I'd say
they're nearly out of the game.
INTERVIEWER: But the bombing campaign is now in
its thirteenth year.
HELPMANN: Beginner's luck.
Now in the US, we are told by the Bush
administration that the war on terrorism will become a more or less
permanent state of affairs.
U.S. war may last decades
Military pushed to think broadly
By KAREN MASTERSON
WASHINGTON – The U.S. war on terrorism may rage
for decades and has forced Pentagon strategists to think more
broadly than they've had to since World War II, a top military
official said Sunday.
"The fact that it could last several years, or
many years, or maybe our lifetimes would not surprise me," Gen.
Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said
Sunday on ABC's This Week.
The film has been reissued on DVD with commentary by
the director in which he states that it was his intention to convey
that there were so many government plants, double agents, agents
provocateurs, moles, infiltrators, etc. that at some point even
the government did not know for sure whether there were any real
terrorists or whether all of the terror was fabricated by the police
as part of their anti-terror campaign.
In a conversation between Sam and Ministry of
Information office Jack Lint, Lint reveals how he – as a key member
of the internal security department – understands the events that
are taking place:
SAM: You don't really think Tuttle and the girl
are in league?
JACK: I do. Goodbye.
SAM: It could all be coincidental.
JACK: There are no coincidences, Sam.
Everything's connected, all along the line. Cause and effect.
That's the beauty of it. Our job is to trace the connections and
reveal them. This whole Buttle/Tuttle confusion was obviously
planned from the inside.
As the audience of the film, we know that the
Tuttle/Buttle confusion was caused by a computer error within the
department, and that "the girl" (Jill Layton) became involved as a
concerned citizen trying to investigate a wrongful arrest. The irony
here is that a random chain of events kicked off by the Ministry’s
own error is seen from inside ministry as further evidence of a
terrorist conspiracy.
Revisionist historians have suggested that many wars
and other events are staged or at least allowed to happen and then
used by the government to manipulate public opinion in the direction
that they want it to go.
Michael Ruppert has provided voluminous research
suggesting that the US intelligence agencies had foreknowledge of
the 9/11 attacks and chose to allow them to occur, much the way that
Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor and did not prevent it.
And there is the tradition of US enemies having once been funded by
US intelligence agencies.
Bin Laden comes home to roost
His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 1998 – At the CIA, it happens
often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this
is the term that describes an agent, an operative or an
operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our
new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback.
And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the
Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow.
[…]
What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify
(in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was
nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the
Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary
conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s
occupation.
[…]
Yet the CIA, concerned about the factionalism of
Afghanistan made famous by Rudyard Kipling, found that Arab
zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to "read"
than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might
well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least
were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along
with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan,
Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle
East, became the "reliable" partners of the CIA in its war
against Moscow.
Brazil shows a world of meek and helpless people,
devoid of any artistic or aesthetic pleasure. There are two heroes
in the film: Tuttle, the renegade heating repair engineer, and Jill
Layton, a woman who takes it upon herself to fight the wrongful
arrest of her neighbor’s husband. The protagonist, Sam, is a happy
cog in the great machine, content to waste away his life shuffling
papers within a vast bureaucracy.
Social life is dominated by suspicion and fear. And
who is behind this?
INTERVIEWER: Deputy minister, what do you
believe is behind this recent increase in terrorist bombings?
HELPMANN: Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority
of people seems to have forgotten certain good old fashioned
virtues. They just can't stand seeing the other fellow win. If
these people would just play the game, they’d get a lot more out
of life.
Compare this to
President Bush's Address on Terrorism to Congress:
Americans are asking, ''Why do they hate us?''
They hate what they see right here in this
chamber, a democratically elected government. Their leaders are
self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion,
our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and
disagree with each other.
The utter irony of this is that Bush and Helpmann
depict terrorism as primarily a sort of arrested emotional
development by those who did not learn in grade school to be good
losers. The little boy who took his ball and went home became a
terrorist when he grew up. This rhetorical tactic forestalls any
inquiry into the religious or political movements that the
terrorists might be seeking to advance or whether they have any real
case against the American foreign policy. An irony here is that the
moral virtue claimed by both Bush and Helpmann is undermined by
their own terror game.
The use of propaganda is another tactic used by
totalitarian regimes to generate support for their program. In
Brazil as in Orwell’s
1984, this takes the form of euphemisms.
KURTZMAN: I've tried that! Population Census
have got him down as dormanted, the Central Collective
Storehouse computer has got him down as deleted, and the
Information Retrieval have got him down as inoperative, Security
has him down as excised, Admin have him down as completed.
SAM: Hang on…he’s dead.
KURTZMANN: Dead?
Besides being used to hide unpleasant meanings,
euphemisms are also used to portray falsehood as truth. The sinister
internal security division is darkly named the Ministry of
Information Retrieval. They "retrieve" information from citizens
by torture. In a visual motif reminiscent of Soviet era propaganda,
posters with banal slogans appear on buildings and in offices. In
case you can’t read them all as they go by during the film, I have
copied them from the excellent
Brazil
FAQ:
- "Be Safe: Be Suspicious"
- "Suspicion Breeds Confidence"
- "Trust in haste, Regret at leisure"
- "Don't suspect a friend, report him"
- "Who can you trust?"
This is not so different from modern America. In
case some American suspects a friend of theirs, Bush will make it
possible for you to report him:
Operation TIPS Trips Up?
August 8, 2002
(CBS) In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President
Bush laid groundwork for "Operation TIPS," a program which would
organize a volunteer army of citizen lookouts to report
"suspicious" activities to the federal government.
Under "Operation TIPS," transportation workers,
utility crews and letter carriers could sign up to snoop on
members of their communities. Attorney General Ashcroft argued
such vigilance could thwart terrorists, CBS News Correspondent
Bob Orr reports.
"You have the ability of people who have a
regular perception, who understand what's out of order here,
what's different here, and maybe something needs to be looked
into," Ashcroft said.
The plot of Brazil is driven by a series of
accounting errors that are initiated when the Ministry of
Information arrests and tortures the wrong man. The arrest scene is
a terrifying exhibition of police state tactics: several
black-garbed troopers simultaneously burst through the walls and
doors of the Buttle’s apartment. They are followed a paper-pushing
official who reads the banal statement of arrest to Mr. Buttle as he
is about to be dragged off in a canvas sack and tortured to death:
OFFICIAL: I hereby inform you under powers
entrusted to me under Section 47, Paragraph 7 of Council Order
Number 438476, that Mr Buttle, Archibald, residing at 412 North
Tower, Shangri La Towers, has been invited to assist the
Ministry of Information with certain enquiries…
The accounting problems stem from the wrongful
arrest of Mr. Buttle because they charge torture victims for the
cost of their own torture. These charges are necessary for
efficiency, according to the Deputy Minister.1
INTERVIEWER: And the cost of it [i.e. the
Ministry’s campaign] all, Deputy Minister? Seven percent of the
gross national product…
HELPMANN: I understand this concern on behalf of
the taxpayers. People want value for money. And that’s why we
always insist on the principle of Information Retrieval Charges.
It's absolutely right and fair that those found guilty should
pay for their periods of detention and the Information Retrieval
Procedures used in their interrogation.
Later, when the Sam is arrested for a long list of
crimes and brought back to Information Retrieval for processing, the
Ministry even offers him a consumer financing plan to that they
provide to help torture victims bear the cost:
OFFICIAL C: Now, either you plead guilty to say,
seven or eight of these charges, which'll bring the costs down
to within your reach, or you can borrow a sum to be negotiated,
from us, at very competitive rates.
OFFICIAL D: We can offer you something at say,
eleven and a half per cent, over thirty years. But you will have
to buy insurance to qualify for his scheme.
This type of plan brings to mind Paul Craig Roberts’
critique of current US judicial proceedings in which people are
charged with a long list of related offences for a single crime then
encouraged to plea bargain by pleading guilty to only one of them.
Also, compare Sam’s travails to a trial balloon that was floated by
the Bush administration:
Officials consider tapping Iraqi oil to pay war
costs
Some in Bush administration consider oil funds to be 'spoils of
war'
WASHINGTON – Bush administration officials are
seriously considering proposals that the United States tap
Iraq's oil to help pay the cost of a military occupation, a move
that likely would prove highly inflammatory in an Arab world
already suspicious of U.S. motives.
In another amazing parallel, the interior spaces of
the rooms in Brazil are overrun with ugly meandering heating ducts.
And as US citizens we are told to stock up on duct tape.
How could a film produced fifteen years ago have
foreseen these developments in such remarkable detail? Perhaps
because they are not new: they are recurring patterns in the way
that states use and manufacture the threat of warfare in order to
control their own citizens. State power tends to grow during wars
because citizens become more willing to trade liberty for the
security that states are willing to promise them. But when a war
ends, the pendulum swings back at least partially. So why not
manufacture a permanent state of war during which freedoms can be
indefinitely suspended? Gilliam was writing history as well as
foretelling the future. By creatively retelling the past as a work
of fiction about the future, he exposes the totalitarian impulse.
From
Lewrockwell.com/
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