En Passant

They’re a sickening fest of American imperialism and involve brain dead battalions chanting democracy and justice and delivering neither but justifying murder and mayhem. They are great actors, wrapping themselves in the flag and prepared to go all the way for the ultimate prize.

That is why Afghan President Hamid Karzai is throwing US special forces troops, the torture troops as he calls them, out of Wardak Province within 2 weeks.

Since the end of the barbarity that was capitalism’s second world war, the killing machine that is US imperialism has murdered tens of millions or unleashed the forces that have done so. Two million dead in Vietnam, millions in Cambodia, Laos and more recently Iraq and Afghanistan to name just a few of the countries the US has invaded since the end of the second world war.

That doesn’t count countries like Chile where the US back brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet when he seized power on September 11, 1973 and killed thousands of leftists in the first week of his dictatorship or Indonesia where the Suharto coup in 1965, backed by the US, killed half a million ‘communists’ and ten years late, again with US support, invaded East Timor, killing during its occupation until 1999 up to 200,000 East Timorese.

Nor does it include US supported dictators and the death and destruction they have unleashed.

How many died when the CIA engineered a coup in Iran in 1953 to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mossadeq whose only crime had been to nationalise the oil industry for the benefit of his people. They reinstated the Shah and he let loose over time his brutal secret police, all with the support of the US.

US society is not immune from its own brutality as the war on terror morphs into the possibility of drone attacks on American citizens in the US.  Bradley Manning rots in a military jail, untried for over 1000 days, for the ‘crime’ of releasing the truth about US barbarism around the globe.

There are more African American men in jail now than were slaves at the time of the Civil War. Formal equality isn’t matched by real equality as the ranks of the poor are dominated by African-Americans.

The relationship between art and capitalist society is complex but every Oscar movie is a celebration in some way of capitalism and in many cases US imperialism. Even those with criticisms and critiques show the 21st Century imagining of the common sense and decency of good liberal players like Lincoln rather than any deep understanding of the class struggle, or in this case the struggle for liberation by slaves and the rest of US society.

It is often the good man in history story that is nominated or wins, and the overwhelmingly rich white old men who vote for the big awards reflect their own social position in choosing the winners.

Seth Macfarlane’s misogynist presentation highlighted just one of the systemic problems that this rich man’s and woman’s celebration represents.

The Oscars are the revolutionary guards of US film gathering to award themselves prizes for the defence of the revolution, in this case US imperialism, or the idea of US imperialism, translated to the screen.