Sick: Director Brian De Palma makes film sliming our troops as a way to protest the war
First, many thanks to Jules for inviting me to guest blog here, and for the warm reception I received from his regular commenters. It’s been a real treat blogging alongside some of the blogosphere’s finest, and hopefully I’ll get the opportunity to do so again the next time Jules decides to take a hiatus from his tavern responsibilities. Jules, hope I didn’t leave too much of a mess! To you, Dissident Frogman (whose most recent post touched on a topic I’m about to discuss), I leave my lightly perfumed lavendar scarf which I’d be honored to have you wear on your arm around France as my champion. Just don’t wear it the next time you come to America, though. You might have quite few people look at you funny ;) Until we meet again, mon ami …
Now, on to the story. Via Reuters:
VENICE (Reuters) – A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family stunned the Venice festival, with shocking images that left some viewers in tears.
“Redacted”, by U.S. director Brian De Palma, is one of at least eight American films on the war in Iraq due for release in the next few months and the first of two movies on the conflict screening in Venice’s main competition.
Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it is a harrowing indictment of the conflict and spares the audience no brutality to get its message across.
And this isn’t the first time he’s tried to broadbrush all of our military over the despicable actions of a few:
De Palma, 66, whose “Casualties of War” in 1989 told a similar tale of abuse by American soldiers in Vietnam, makes no secret of the goal he is hoping to achieve with the film’s images, all based on real material he found on the Internet.
That goal?
“The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people,” he told reporters after a press screening.
“The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war,” he said.
It should come as no great surprise that some parts of this trashing of our men and women in uniform were “fictionalized” – but, of course, there’s a reason for that:
Halfway between documentary and fiction, “Redacted” draws on soldiers’ home-made war videos, blogs and journals and footage posted on YouTube, reflecting changes in the way the media cover the war.
“In Vietnam, when we saw the images and the sorrow of the people we were traumatizing and killing, we saw the soldiers wounded and brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war,” De Palma said.
“It’s all out there on the Internet, you can find it if you look for it, but it’s not in the major media. The media is now really part of the corporate establishment,” he said.
The film’s title refers to how, according to De Palma, mainstream American newspapers and television channels are failing to tell the true story of the war by keeping the most graphic images of the conflict away from public opinion.
“When I went out to find the pictures, I said (to the media) give me the pictures you can’t publish,” he said, adding that because of legal dangers he too had to “edit” the material.
“Everything that is in the movie is based on something I found that actually happened. But once I had put it in the script I would get a note from a lawyer saying you can’t use that because it’s real and we may get sued,” De Palma said.
“So I was forced to fictionalize things that were actually real.”
Riiiight.
The film, shot in Jordan with a little known cast, ends with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians killed and their faces blacked out for legal reasons.
“I think that’s terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people,” De Palma said.
“The great irony about Redacted is that it was redacted.”
For the last four years we’re been hearing nonstop accusations about how our troops are supposedly nothing but illiterate, heartless, lawless thugs who rape, pillage, and murder on whim – oftentimes from the mediots, and more often than not from the likes of prominent members of Congress who ‘claim’ to support the troops like Rep. John Murtha, Senator John Kerry – in an encore performance of his role in “supporting” the troops during Vietnam, Dick Durbin, Ted Kennedy, and Charlie Rangel (all comments of which have been published by an all-too willing anti-war press), yet De Palma wants to claim that the mainstream media is part of the “corporate establishment”?
Apparently this Hollyweirdo missed the last train to Cluesville.
If De Palma was really interested in getting the “truth” out about our mission in Iraq, the truth the mainstream media doesn’t saturate their airwaves, bandwidth, and print outlets with, he’d make a movie about the many heroes not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan and elsewhere, heroes like:
- Marine pilot Maj. William Cheserak
- Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham – RIP
- Navy medic Chris Walsh – RIP
- Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael A. Monsoor – RIP
- Capt. Andrew Del Gaudio, commander of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment
- Sgt. 1st Class Juanita Wilson
… and the many, many other fine men and women who do our nation proud and serve with distinction and honor, as profiled at Blackfive, and many other wonderful milblogs out there that exist to tell you the stories about our, military and their accomplishments and heroism – sboth of which are done sometimes at the expense of making the ultimate sacrifice, stories our mainstream media passes over in favor of the more sensationalistic ones like Abu Ghraib.
But, as is the norm with the morally depraved far left as represented in this instance by Hollywood, the “truth” is as they define it and in this case, the “truth” for them is that our troops are no better -in fact, they are “worse” – than the type of brutal thugs who ruthlessly attacked America on 9-11, murdering 3,000 innoncents, innocents like 29 year-old newlywed Peter Edward Mardikian, who walked into the WTC that morning for a meeting in Windows on the World, not knowing he’d never see his college sweetheart bride again.
De Palma has taken the self-loathing that is deeply embedded into the liberal psyche and turned it into an art form. That he would not only make this film, but market it to a foreign audience, should tell you where his sympathies reside. Dr. Rusty Shackleford writes in response:
Our side condemns and prosecutes the same actions our enemies celebrate, and yet Leftists like De Palma equivocate between the two and are okay with our enemies winning?
The only thing wrong with that sentence is the fact that there’s a question mark at the end of it.
Does this mean I’m questioning Brian De Palma’s “patriotism”? Absolutely, positively, hell yeah, damn straight I am.
Cross-posted at the Sister Toldjah blog.
Topics: Iraq, military, moronocy
Posted by Sister Toldjah at 2:05 pm Comments (29) on Friday, August 31, 2007
29 Responses to “Sick: Director Brian De Palma makes film sliming our troops as a way to protest the war”
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August 31st, 2007 at 2:27 pm
I cannot think of a polite way of describing De Palma!!
August 31st, 2007 at 2:47 pm
As posted below in thread It’s Time (this time with correction, in name spelling)
De Palma. I can just imagine where he uses it.
August 31st, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Man, while reading De Palma’s comments, you can just see the smug self-righteousness oozing out of that creature. Makes me want to smack the ‘tard with an entrenching tool.
August 31st, 2007 at 3:24 pm
I must have missed De Palma’s documentary of Saddam’s rape rooms and human shredder machines in action. Oh and the one about Islam-o-thugs blowing up little girls on their way to school, or the one about enticing kids into an area with candy in order to detonate a bomb , or the one about cutting the heads off reporters and aid workers, or, or….
Actually, I have seen those documentaries. But DePalma didn’t have anything to do with making them. He is only interested in countering them with his own brand of sick moral equivalence.
He’s not anti-war. He’s on the other side. Because if he was not on the other side, how would his actions be any different?
August 31st, 2007 at 3:28 pm
The worst part is, this gutless traitor believes he is on the side of the angels because he’ll never have to face the repercussions of what he is doing.
August 31st, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Really weird that you don’t name Pat Tillman as one of the heroes. It’s like he’s erased from the conservative memory banks once you find out he thought the Iraq war was a crock.
August 31st, 2007 at 4:23 pm
“Really weird that you don’t name Pat Tillman as one of the heroes.”
It apparently didn’t cross your mind that the list could be far from exhaustive. Or you just didn’t understand both the subject and point of the post.
Thankfully, there’s far more heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan than could be practically named in a blog post – but that’s just a secondary topic in the issue at hand.
Maybe you’re nit-picking because you find it hard to address the real issue? If that’s so, I’m sure you’ll love de Palma’s last flick.
August 31st, 2007 at 4:37 pm
M. Grenouille,
It’s bizarre – even in your rebuttal, you can’t acknowledge Tillman as a hero. Really weird.
As to the primary topic, I know better than to get between you guys and your precious two minute sessions:
He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even – so it was occasionally rumoured – in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
August 31st, 2007 at 4:52 pm
corndog:
What has Pat Tilman got to do with this? I don’t know that anyone has said he is not a hero. I know the left has used his death to smear the US Army. In fact I think a lot of folks on the left are ok with the fact that he is dead because he is more useful to them. After all, he was an American soldier and as we all know, they are baby killers and rapists. Right?
There are friendly fire deaths in every war and if this was WW2 you would never have even known the circumstances of Tilman’s death, he would have been just another casualty. But because he died in a friendly fire incident people like you can use it and so you do. As if you really gave a damn. BTW, it took about 3 months for the Army to release the information that Tilman was a victim of friendly fire, that is not much of a cover up.
Now back to the subject at hand, it should be remembered that if people like corndog had his way Saddam would still have rapists on the payroll and Uday would still be beheading women and sticking their heads on spikes as a warning to others. Nice people.
August 31st, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Sigh. Let me repeat what I said about Pat Tillman back in April just for the record:
My opinion still holds true today. I didn’t mention Pat Tillman on my heroes list because he’s one of the few who got tons of coverage in the media, before, and even more so after his death. And, as Dissident Frogman mentioned (merci, ami!), there are in actuality tons more people who should be on that list, but it’s too many to mention in one post. I wanted my focus to be on examples of those whose good deeds should have been on the front pages of every paper in the country, but who instead have been maligned, along with every other honorable member of our armed forces, by ungrateful jerks like Brian De Palma and other Bush-hating liberals whose thinking mirrors his warped worldview.
And I won’t kid myself into thinking the left actually thinks Pat Tillman is a hero. As I’ve written at my blog before, the only military heroes to the left are “veterans” like John Kerry who turn their backs on their fellow soldiers, who think war is ‘evil’ and that the US is an imperialist power – especially under Republican administrations, yada yada. The only reason the left ever gave a hoot about Tillman was *not* to pay tribute to his heroic service, but instead to use the circumstances surrounding his death to pin a cover-up conspiracy on the President. In the end, it’s always about “getting Bush.” More than anything else, that is Priority One to the far left.
And now that they know Tillman supposedly thought the Iraq war was wrong, he has become sort of a “hero” to them for that stance, even though I’d bet that if he were alive today and see some of the blanket comments people on your side of the aisle make about his fellow soldiers serving in Iraq, he’d cringe in disgust, just like any other decent, honorable human being not blinded by hatred would.
It’s sick. With Tillman, as with so many other troop deaths, the left has and continues to use their deaths as an anti-war propaganda tool. “Troops are killed in war! We must leave!” And yet they have the nerve to whine when a two second shot of a flag-draped 9-11 coffin is used in a campaign ad.
Unreal.
August 31st, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Terrye,
I notice that, not only will you still not call Pat Tillman a hero – you won’t even spell his name right. Simply amazing.
As to the “subject at hand”: The dictator of Uzbekistan boils his enemies to death. Nice people. Has the U.S. invaded that country? No, last year, we gave it $500 million in aid.
There are 37 dictators in the world who are guilty of horrible acts of human violence. If we are in the business of invading each of those countries, we’re going out of business real fast, sport.
August 31st, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Monsieur Chien,
“It’s bizarre – even in your rebuttal, you can’t acknowledge Tillman as a hero. Really weird.”
Pat Tilman was a hero. A heroic hero. Heroically filled with heroism. Up the wazoo.
There. Those persistent sensations of weirdness and bizarreness you’ve twice described, should dissipate or attenuate shortly – although temporarily I’m afraid.
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The author of this comment has worked to ensure that all information is accurate at the time of original publication and consistent with general psychiatric and medical standards, and that information concerning drug dosages, schedules, and routes of administration is accurate at the time of original publication and consistent with standards set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the general medical community. As medical research and practice continue to advance, however, therapeutic standards may change. Moreover, specific situations may require a specific therapeutic response not included herein. Application of this information in a particular situation remains the professional responsibility of the practitioner. Also, for these reasons and because human and mechanical errors sometimes occur, we recommend that corndog follows the advice of physicians directly involved in his care or the care of a member of his family. the dissident frogman’s Rapid Psychiatric Response, Inc., assumes no liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in information in this comment.
August 31st, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Damoiselle Toldjah:
“(merci, ami!)”
My.unmitigated.pleasure.
August 31st, 2007 at 5:17 pm
DF says: “Pat Tilman was a hero. A heroic hero. Heroically filled with heroism. Up the wazoo. There. Those persistent sensations of weirdness and bizarreness you’ve twice described, should dissipate or attenuate shortly – although temporarily I’m afraid.”
Dude. Once again, it’s Tillman. With two TT’s. But good to see you respect him.
Thanks for the update, Sister Tojah, I must have missed your post back in April on account of, well, I don’t read your blog.
August 31st, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Ok ‘dog, now I’m real confused. Are we supposed to invade all countries where bad things go on, or none at all cuz we’re just as bad as they are, or only those deemed politically correct?
For example, very bad things are going on in Darfur, they have oil. It would seem to be the ultimate right wing bombfest. Yet apparently Bush can curb his insatiable appetite for oil there.
A common lib bumper sticker says “Free Tibet”. Do they mean it? If Bob Gates said “hell yes, 10th Mountain Division, go free Tibet”, would he receive the righteous approbation of the Left? It would appear so considering Wilson got 60,000 killed in only 8 months of combat over a telegram and the fact that some of his rich friends got torpedoed on a pleasure cruise in a war zone. FDR invaded French Morocco after Pearl Harbor. Truman went to Korea when there was no threat to us. JFK tried to interdict Communists in Cuba and Vietnam and created the Green Berets and the SEALs to fight insurgencies, again no discernable threat, and LBJ notably ramped up one of those events to historic Cold War proportions. Clinton went to Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Haiti, countries who couldn’t project offensive military power past their own capitols. So I’m fuzzy on this whole good bad thing.
From where I sit it seems to be that the Dems are only against war if they aren’t running it.
August 31st, 2007 at 5:54 pm
In fact I think a lot of folks on the left are ok with the fact that he is dead because he is more useful to them.
Folks, lefties were CELEBRATING Tillman’s death as the time. I see no reason as to why that part of the political spectrum might have changed their minds:
Dude. Once again, it’s Tillman. With two TT’s. But good to see you respect him.
A couple of things, corndog.
Even when you are being an idiot (and there are times when you are not being an idiot), you tend to be an idiot about rational points. Needling people about a dead soldier, regardless of how he died, and then shifting the goalposts to a spelling problem when you get the response you desired, is trolling approaching the level of THE ALPHTARD™. Not that I expect any better, but I thought I should point out that slippery slope you’re dancing on.
Second,…….”With two TT’s”? I think you meant “With two l’s”. If I went with “two TT’s”, that would be “TiTTTTman”, instead of “Tillman”. I point this out merely because, well, I like you, corndog, and I don’t care to see you make a fool of yourself.
The idiot part, of course, is entirely your problem.
August 31st, 2007 at 6:12 pm
VC,
This question is just beautiful, and kills me: “A common lib bumper sticker says “Free Tibet”. Do they mean it? If Bob Gates said “hell yes, 10th Mountain Division, go free Tibet”, would he receive the righteous approbation of the Left?:
Really good question.
I can’t speak for the Birkenstock crowd. For myself, though, it seems like we need to take action only where it serves our own direct interest, not our distant ideals or wishful thinking. Sometimes that interest can be world or regional peace (so that would make sense of our time in WWI, in Bosnia, which was spreading out of control, the first Gulf War, and maybe Korea).
Sometimes we can start out with those interests in mind, and as things go on, it becomes clear that those interests are better served if we pull out (Vietnam). And sometimes, it was just stupid that we went in the first place.
Two historic, non-pointed questions for you: Wasn’t it Bush I who got us into Somalia in the first place? And didn’t the US go iinto South Korea pursuant to a UN mandate?
August 31st, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Understandable. But in the future, it might be a good idea to ask someone their opinion, rather than assume it and state it as fact, as you did here:
Glad I was able to help clear up your confusion.
August 31st, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Jeffy and Sistah,
Jeez, my misspelling was throwing it back, and you take it to be a repeat of the thing I’m complaining about? Come on. But ok, Jeffy, I plead guilty to a little bonafide trolling and will pay my fine.
But Sister? No, you haven’t cleared up the confusion. You see, according to you, if I think we should pull out of Iraq and never should have gone in there in the first place, then, according to you, I’m helping al Qaeda. (And yes, I very much can find such things on your blog, as I have now looked). The thing of it is, Sister, Pat Tillman thought the same thing. So, according to you, Pat Tillman was actually helping al Qaeda.
Thus, according to you, he would hardly be heroic, now would he?
August 31st, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Link?
August 31st, 2007 at 7:28 pm
Accepted as non-pointed ‘dog.
Yes, I believe it was Bush who got us into Somalia in the first place. And I believe the only reason was to feed people. I could be wrong, and I could be missing some grand conspiracy.
Truman did go to Korea at the behest of the the UN. Was that OK?
My point in bringing up musty old wars is to demonstrate that for 90 years, the Left side of the spectrum has taken us to war every time they got a whiff of cordite, but at least since 1968 they have cried bloody murder when the right has even rattled a sword (cf Reagan putting Pershings in Europe or telling Gorby to tear down the wall). I am sincerely trying to understand the distinction. My family has fought in this country’s Democrat led wars from 1918 and I am trying to find out why this Republican led one is so wrong in their eyes.
August 31st, 2007 at 8:48 pm
It’s just charming.
De Palma saw an opportunity to make a film.
“When I read about the Mahmudiyah incident in Iraq 2006 – five US soldiers raped a local girl, killed her and her family and later tried to disguise it as an insurgent attack – I knew I had a story.”
It’s about his ego and making “the film”.
Someone else to boycott.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Corndog:
Spelling? You are actually so petty you yammer about spelling. Tillman is a hero and you are a ungrateful little moron. Happy now?
August 31st, 2007 at 10:58 pm
BTW, Tillman would not have joined the military if he was an American hating little pacifist and he died in Afghanistan, the good war. Not Iraq.
September 2nd, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Vanguard,
The reason a Republican led war is wrong in the eyes of almost all Democrats is that it is Republican led. With rare exceptions Democrats have put their partisan selfishness above the good of the country since 1968. They have also moved far to the left since then, with the McGovernite spiritual descendents of Henry Wallace taking over the party in 1972. The Democratic Party is now full of people who think the wrong side won the Cold War, who think the USA is the fount and origin of evil in the world, and who think that Communism never got a proper chance to show its superiority, moral and economic, to nasty old capitalism. So naturally they are against anything the US might do.
As for Corndog saying that the US should take action when it serves our direct interests, that is what the Iraq Campaign is for. Our interest is to put down the jihadi terrorists and the best long term way to do that is to pit our big idea, liberty and prosperity in the modern world, against the jihadis’ big idea of a worldwide Islamic Caliphate where Muslims will swagger around lording it over the wretched dhimmis in exchange for vicious thugs ruling over them (see how the Al Qaeda types rule the places they attempt to govern, like Fallujah and Baqubah). We have to have a big idea to fight against their big idea, and Iraq gives us the best place in the Middle East to do it. If we do not defeat the jihadis there any alternative strategies will be a lot messier, a lot bloodier, and considerably more problematic.
There was also the subsidiary interest of preventing an enemy of the USA, Saddam Husayn, from developing nukes. The Duelfer Report showed that he was ready to resume his nuke program as soon as the heat of the crumbling sanctions arrangement was off. Within a few years, possibly by now, he’d have them. Saddam was so reckless a man, so greedy for increased power and wealth, that he started two wars to steal other peoples’ oil even without having nukes. What would he, or his psychopathic spawn, have done once he had nukes? Well, now we will never have to worry about that problem at least.
September 2nd, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Terrye,
The leftists are against the Afghan Campaign as well as the Iraq Campaign. They just aren’t as loud-mouthed about it right now, but they were protesting against it from before the first American boots were on the ground there, in September 2001. That was International A.N.S.W.E.R. and its chums. Most of the Dems have not got round to taking up the “US out of occupied Afghanistan” cause yet, but they will if they succeed in doing down the Iraq Campaign.
September 3rd, 2007 at 2:32 pm
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