“Let Your Life Be A Friction To Stop The Machine” (Class War Films, 2012)
It’s a modestly made film – just a series of linked visual stills of cartoons, film snippets, paintings and other media, all tied together with voice-over narration – but this is a devastating alternative history of the United States since its founding, one that rips up the myths of the country’s founding and the values the US was founded on, and exposes the seedy truth behind the events, ideologies and trends that shaped the nation and made it what it is today. The film begins by saying boldly that Americans have been brainwashed for 240 years at least with a mythology and narrative created and maintained by a financial elite that has profited handsomely from the sweat and labour of the American people and which kept them all weak, divided and enslaved by various means political, economic and cultural. The country was founded upon the invasion of a continent, the genocide of its rightful owners and the enslavement of millions of others from another continent. The country was born out of lies and hypocrisy and survives through lies and hypocrisy. Whew, what a premise!
It’s best to watch the film all the way through while listening to and absorbing the narrative a couple of times at least as what the film says about the America of the past and the America it has become today will stun most people in the West. The myth of American exceptionalism, of American Manifest Destiny, together with the belief Americans had in their society and culture’s innate goodness and progressiveness blinded people to the awful crimes they committed upon the aboriginal peoples, the Africans and others brought to America as slaves or indentured labour and eventually peoples abroad, firstly in Cuba, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, then Latin America and Japan, and currently the whole wide world. These crimes continued through two major world wars, then a period of stand-offs between the US and the Soviet Union known as the Cold War and right through the 1990s to the present, in which the US is now waging wars against supposed Islamic terrorists like al Qa’eda, ISIS and Boko Haram throughout western Asia and much of Africa. Behind the more overt crimes such as illegal invasions and occupations of other countries, overthrowing legitimate governments with so-called colour revolutions and encouraging ongoing violence and chaos, are covert crimes of massive looting of natural resources (especially energy resources), environmental pollution and destruction of local cultures, histories and institutions.
We come to the America of the present: a nation mired in political corruption that stinks to high heaven; a nation where the middle class has collapsed under the combined pressures of a debt-based financial system, an economic ideology whose idolisation of profit has led to job flight and unemployment, and cultural nostrums that fault individuals for catastrophes not of their own making; and a nation that avoids dealing with major problems by resorting to fantasy, violence, conquest or war against its own citizens or other countries. Institutions and values that emphasised cooperative effort to improve people’s lives have been debased and hounded into extinction. Resources that once were owned communally and shared equally have been privatised and commodified, and sold to the highest bidder. If you find all this too much to take in, the narration collapses it into two general trends: the use of police state methods and cultural brainwashing to shore up the mythology, and the resort to overseas military adventures (all of which end in disaster) to spread the mythology and at the same time grab other nations’ territories and resources.
America, whether it is the actual United States or the US plus its satrapies in North America, Europe and other parts of the world, anywhere that has imported American culture lock, stock and barrel since 1945, has become a degraded and impoverished entity whose future is dark, bleak … and dead. The driving forces behind this Great Reversion have been the West’s political / financial / corporate elites who have controlled its major institutions, both government and private alike. (At this point, the only criticism I would make about the film’s narrative is that it identifies the financial elites as the drivers behind the myth of American uniqueness and stops there. The reality may very well be that the financial elites themselves may be as much pawns of another layer of hidden power as governments and corporations themselves are pawns of Wall Street and the City of London.) The tragedy is that for all the deceptions and lies, the myths of America that the elites have promoted have been so seductive and appealing that they have become part of people’s individual identities, so to condemn and spurn them is effectively to condemn and spurn oneself.
The narrative though isn’t without hope though it does not offer any solutions. That is as it should be, because it does not claim to have the definitive answer to defeating the hydra-headed monster that has been the Anglo-American empire. Any solution offered could be subverted by the empire itself, as it has done to past instances of protest, civil disobedience and revolution. Responses to it must be individual and creative: they can involve helping others or alerting people to the ways in which the system is crushing them so they can help themselves. For some people, disengaging from the empire and its seductions, and setting out on their own individual and / or collective paths, may be all that’s needed; other people can help to safeguard them from the empire.
So wherever we all are, whatever we are doing or what stage we are at in our lives, let’s now determine our lives to be a friction to stop the Machine.