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Showing Original Post only (View all)Chris Hedges: 'American Sniper' Caters to a Deep Sickness Rippling Through Society [View all]
http://www.alternet.org/culture/chris-hedges-american-sniper-caters-deep-sickness-rippling-through-societyChris Hedges: 'American Sniper' Caters to a Deep Sickness Rippling Through Society
$200 million in box office receipts is a measure of how messed up this country is.
American Sniper lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. societythe gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a Christian nation to exterminate the lesser breeds of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates. These passions, if realized, will extinguish what is left of our now-anemic open society.
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The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting back against us in the very first place, said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism within the U.S. military. It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the fabric of Chris Kyles personal and primal justification mantra of God-Country-Family. It is nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter.
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The book is even more disturbing than the film. In the film Kyle is a reluctant warrior, one forced to do his duty. In the book he relishes killing and war. He is consumed by hatred of all Iraqis. He is intoxicated by violence. He is credited with 160 confirmed kills, but he notes that to be confirmed a kill had to be witnessed, so if I shot someone in the stomach and he managed to crawl around where we couldnt see him before he bled out he didnt count.
Kyle insisted that every person he shot deserved to die. His inability to be self-reflective allowed him to deny the fact that during the U.S. occupation many, many innocent Iraqis were killed, including some shot by snipers. Snipers are used primarily to sow terror and fear among enemy combatants. And in his denial of reality, something former slaveholders and former Nazis perfected to an art after overseeing their own atrocities, Kyle was able to cling to childish myth rather than examine the darkness of his own soul and his contribution to the war crimes we carried out in Iraq. He justified his killing with a cloying sentimentality about his family, his Christian faith, his fellow SEALs and his nation. But sentimentality is not love. It is not empathy. It is, at its core, about self-pity and self-adulation. That the film, like the book, swings between cruelty and sentimentality is not accidental.
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Chris Hedges: 'American Sniper' Caters to a Deep Sickness Rippling Through Society [View all]
Hissyspit
Jan 2015
OP
A variety of opinions are quite wonderful. Absurd and foolish opinions are, well... absurd and fooli
LanternWaste
Jan 2015
#29
I think you missed the point. Mr. Hedges isn't claiming the movie is the cause of anything.
rhett o rick
Jan 2015
#8
I forgot about 24....your right those were some scary times. I couldn't believe the popularity of
yeoman6987
Jan 2015
#25
What really bugs me about this movie: It glorifies Bush's never ending war for profit
Initech
Jan 2015
#4
Asshole film about psycho soldier, fighting unnecassary war, started by another asshole
Stephen Retired
Jan 2015
#15