The Military-Entertainment-Complex: What is that?

https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Militainment-Inc-Transcript.pdf

Dr. Roger Stahl in Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION

The consume of war or military actions in an Entertaining way, connected to an massive
collaboration between the Pentagon and the entertainment industries. (Media Education, Interview,

Dr. Roger Stahl, Chapter 2: SPECTACLE

Culturally, we’ve reached a point where war blends seamlessly into the entertainment landscape.

The Sage where War is an axiomatic natural part of our consumption

“Since War has become such a Spectacular Event, it is fitting that the 2003 invasion of Iraq began
with a movie trailer”
Watcher of those movies do not get addressed as citizens, but rather as “audience members at the
big show” -> its all entertainment (intention)

Chapter 3: CLEAN WAR

This war without victims, without bodies, and without suffering is the war we have become used to.
This war is easy to watch on the couch with a bag of chips. This war is, above all, clean. The clean war
has been a long time in the making extending back to Vietnam, the fist “television war.” -> Top Gun

T´This began the search for sophisticated methods to control wartime imagery in order to placate the
home front.

Create conditions by which war appears short, abstract, sanitised and even aesthetically beautiful.
Minimise any sense of death: of soldiers or civilians.

The language used to describe the clean war is as antiseptic as the pictures. Bombings are “air
strikes.” A future bombsite is a “target of opportunity.” Unarmed areas are “soft targets.” Civilians
are “collateral damage.” Destruction is always “surgical.”

The guiding metaphor by which we talk about this new clean looking war is, not surprisingly, a clean-
up job.

DAN RATHER [CBS News Clip]: Secretary of State Colin Powell called the fugitive dictator, and I quote,
“a piece of trash waiting to be collected by U.S. forces hunting him.”

Another powerful metaphor that accompanies the clean war is that of the hunt.

Like the clean-up job, the hunting metaphor casts the business of killing humans into something
more palatable. Abstracting the war into a hunt for a few game animals gives us a very selective view
of what is at stake, but it does make war TV friendly.

DAN RATHER [CBS News Clip]: U.S. forces hunting for Saddam Hussein have new leads.

DR. ROGER STAHL: The clean war so dominates the screen that we actually need to be reminded that
when bombs fall, people die. After all, there is a small chance that we may be exposed to images of
human suffering that slip through the cracks. If this were to happen and we didn’t have warnings like
this one from Dan Rather, we might not know what to think.
DAN RATHER [CBS News Clip]: That the leadership of the United States feels it’s very important for
people to understand and that is, quote, “Americans ought to be prepared for loss of life”, which is to
say, must be prepared for loss of life; loss of the lives of our own fighting men and women, as well as
those of the British and Australians who are (inaudible), and the loss of life inside Iraq. Does it need
to be said?
DR. ROGER STAHL: Strangely, it does.

CHAPTER 4: TECHNO-FETISHISM

JOHN ELLIOT [MSNBC News Clip]: You see the crewmembers lining up there. These are the sea
knights here, these are the transport helicopters...
DR. ROGER STAHL: The message was clear enough: the proper attitude to take toward these
machines of destruction is not somberness but delight.

This obsession with weapons of war has a name: techno- fetishism. Weapons appear to take on a
magical aura. They become centerpieces in a cult of worship.

CHAPTER 5: DEMONIZATION (of Saddam Hussain)

In order for the Iraq war movie to be properly dramatic, it needed to construct a proper villain.
Saddam Hussein, with his well known record of dictatorial rule and mass murder, made this an easy
task. But the picture of Hussein drawn by the dominant news media was highly selective. One crucial
fact remained invisible. During the 1980’s, the period of his worst human rights violations, Hussein
was a close U.S. ally.
Billions of dollars of U.S. military aid – including chemical and biological weapons - helped keep
Hussein’s minority Baathist party in power. This fact was obvious to many Iraqi immigrants living in
the U.S., but it was a part of the story left out for American audiences.

In 1990, Hussein disobeyed his American benefactors and invaded Kuwait. Thus began the long term
effort to replace him, perhaps with someone as politically useful as the old Hussein. In a rare instance
of historical reflection, Peter Jennings reminisced about this radical shift.

But this important fact was notably absent in the lead up to the 2003 U.S. overthrow of the Iraqi
government. This allowed the symbolic process known as “demonization” to begin in full. This
process transformed Saddam Hussein from a local thug to public enemy number one in order to
mobilize support for the impending invasion. The first step in this process was the reduction of the
war to a conflict between one good guy and one bad guy. This was often accomplished graphically by
The analogy was most fully realized by the spectacular felling of the Saddam statue.

Thus, Hussein and Al Qaeda merged into one.

There was one challenge to logic back in the U.S., however. In August of 2004, a full 70% of the U.S.
population believed that Iraq had a part in carrying out the 9/11 attacks. This in spite of the famous
9/11 Commission Report, which announced just a month earlier with much publicity that there was
no connection between the Iraq and Al Qaeda. Still in 2006, a Zogby poll found that 85% of troops
serving in Iraq believed the US mission was in retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11. It remains a
mystery as to where the troops and the majority of the U.S. population received this erroneous
information.

PRESIDENT BUSH [News Conference July 17, 2004]: Well, the reason I keep insisting that there was a
relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda was because there was a relationship between
Iraq and Al Qaeda.
PRESIDENT BUSH [News Conference August 21, 2006]: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of
our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East. They were... What did Iraq
have to do with what?
JOURNALIST: The attack on the World Trade Center.
PRESIDENT BUSH [News Conference August 21, 2006]: Nothing! Nobody’s
ever suggested that the attack of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.

When U.S. troops finally captured Hussein, animal metaphors dominated the Iraq war movie. Hussein
was pulled from a “spider hole.” Cartoonists portrayed him as a rat, as vermin flushed out of hiding.
The narrative was clear. The clean war was getting the job done.

Rather than asking whether these objects are authentic, we should ask why they suddenly take
center stage. Why the singular fascination with the personal lives of these leaders – even to the
exclusion of more relevant debates about the wisdom of military action? The answer to this question
may lie in patterns of demonization – patterns that make the Iraq war movie look like one scene in a
much longer epic.

From the DOD: https://www.defense.gov/News/Inside-DOD/Blog/Article/2062735/how-why-the-

dod-works-with-hollywood/

Two-folded intention: to accurately depict military stories and make sure sensitive information isn’t
disclosed
While Hollywood is paid to tell a compelling story that will make money, the DoD is looking to tell an
accurate story

While Hollywood is paid to tell a compelling story that will make

money, the DoD is looking to tell an accurate story. 
(U.S. Department of Defense, article by Katie Lange)

Political impact of DOD through the liaison to the cinema:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10509208.2015.1086614

The Hollywood liaison office of the U.S. DOD has long pursued an extensive, highly politicised policy
of self-promotion and revisionism through popular cinema

Rewrite scripts to control historical narratives and political agendas

These actions are not, despite the claims of the DOD, just rooted in the need to improve the
authenticity and public understanding, or even to aid in recruitment goals.
(Matthew Alford The Political Impact of the DOD on Hollywood Cinema, Routledge)

The U.S. military’s Hollywood connection: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-aug-

21-la-ca-military-movies-20110821-story.html

Filmmakers gain access to equipment, locations, personnel and information that lend their
productions authenticity, while the armed forces get some measure of control over how they‘re
depicted

Important not only for recruiting but also for guiding the behaviour of current troops and appealing
to the U.S. taxpayers who foot the bills.

Sgt. Cy Sibounma, a motor transport chief waiting in line for the Camp Pendleton “Warrior” screening
who has completed two tours of duty in Afghanistan, said Hollywood movies fail to accurately show
the temperament of those in uniform.
“Hollywood feature films have served as the most significant medium to argue for the military” –
Lawrence H. Said, author of “Guts & Glory: The making of the American Military Image in Film”.

“There are these enduring stereotypes, Jungian archetypes and they often show up in uniform in
movies and TV shows. One of the things that comes up all the time is … to be a hero, you have to
defy the rules of your organisation because they’re not good. And you also have to do it as a loner.
Going an your own and recklessly prevailing seems to be a very popular way of portraying people and
of course totally antithetical to the military ethos. Just about everything we do, the whole notion of
teamwork is kind of fundamental” said Phil Strub, director of entertainment media at the Defense
Department.

“You can get the haircut right, the boots, but you can’t emulate a Marine,” Sgt. Cy Sibounma, a motor
transport chief waiting in line for the Camp Pendleton Said. “It’s the intagible things that movies get
wrong, the character, what’s inside.”
(“The U.S. military’s Hollywood connection” by Rebecca Keegan, Los Angeles Times)

What the Torture Report Reaveals About “Zero Dark Thirty”, by Eliana Dockterman:
https://time.com/3627694/torture-report-zero-dark-thirty/

PROPAGANDA:
What is Propaganda: Youtube, Big Think: What is Propaganda| Jason Stanley | Explain It Like I‘m
Smart by Big Think
Propaganda is ubiquitous and every one uses propaganda. It’s a kind of communication that makes a
case for a goal, bypassing reason. So what it does is, it‘s a method to urge you to mobilise toward
something while concealing from you things, that you reasonably should think, should consider.
We have these irrational biases and what propaganda does is, it takes notions like freedom, integrity,
and it weds them to these irrational biases

„Operation Iraqi Freedom“ is what the Iraq War was called. Why was killing hundreds and hundreds
of thousands of Iraqis called Operation Iraqi Freedom? Because the idea was somehow, freedom is
what Americans do. If we‘re doing it, It must be freedom.

German NSDAP Propaganda just before beginning the WWII:

https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/lehrgang.htm
The Film Work of the Party
The Radio Work of the NSDAP

The propaganda films that saved Walt Disney’s cartoon empire:

https://qz.com/quartzy/1332008/the-propaganda-films-that-saved-
walt-disneys-cartoon-empire
Disneys third animated film, Fantasia, was meant to “change the history of motion pictures”—but
ended up nearly bankrupting the studio. 

But the war would also offer Disney a lifeline. The US government, recognizing the value of the
studio’s emotive visual storytelling techniques, contracted Disney to produce 32 animated shorts.
They took animation beyond pure entertainment, using it as a medium to influence and
persuade.

But it was during the war that they honed disseminating complex information to the general public
through animated entertainment.

As part of their government contract, Disney produced patriotic propaganda films aimed at getting
Americans behind the war effort. Der Fuehrer’s Face pushed war bonds; in The New Spirit, Donald
Duck encouraged tax-paying. Education for Death took a more serious tone, depicting a young boy
indoctrinated into Nazi ideology, with “no seed of laughter, hope, tolerance, or mercy.”

As part of their government contract, Disney produced patriotic

propaganda films aimed at getting Americans behind the war effort. Der
Fuehrer’s Face pushed war bonds; in The New Spirit, Donald Duck
encouraged tax-paying. Education for Death took a more serious tone,
depicting a young boy indoctrinated into Nazi ideology, with “no seed of
laughter, hope, tolerance, or mercy.”

In 1942, Walt Disney read Alexander P de Seversky’s Victory Through Air

Power, which made a case for the use of long-range bombers by American
forces.

Donald Duck: The Spirit of ‘43

Taxes to beat to earth the evil destroyer of freedom and peace
Taxes will keep democracy on the march

Donald Duck: Der Fuehrer’s Face

Simplicissimus:
Dr. Stahl “A complete revitalisation of, both the narrative of what the military is all about, kind of
dispensed of the imigary of vietnam and repaced it with clean imigaray of tom cruse in an F-14”

Showstopper Censored are the subjects of: “racism, sexism in the military,, sexual assault but also
alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, depression and other mental health issues that are constantly
plaguingAAA our veterans”

Death causes in the military:

30.177 veterans committing suicide
7.057 dying in a armed conflict

2018: 20.500 victims of sexual assault (with 2,3 mil. active soldiers)
31,2% of all black soldiers in the military maintains, being discriminated or bullied

The military converting the script into their favour and concealing the reality:
NCIS (the “NCIS” became the world’s most-watched show) [Mashable 2015]
In one NCIS episode about sexual assault
“25 years later, how ‘Top Gun’ made America love
war” by David Sirota:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/25-years-later-
remembering-how-top-gun-changed-americas-feelings-about-war/2011/08/15/
gIQAU6qJgJ_story.html?noredirect=on

The 1986 movie, starring Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis, was the template for
a new Military-Entertainment Complex. 

During production, the Pentagon worked hand-in-hand with the filmmakers,

reportedly charging Paramount Pictures just $1.8 million for the use of its
warplanes and aircraft carriers. But that taxpayer-subsidized discount came at
a price — the filmmakers were required to submit their script to Pentagon
brass for meticulous line edits aimed at casting the military in the most
positive light.

Strub described the approval process to Variety in 1994: “The main criteria we
use is . . . how could the proposed production benefit the military . . . could it
help in recruiting [and] is it in sync with present policy?”

Robert Anderson, the Navy’s Hollywood point person, put it even more clearly
to PBS in 2006: “If you want full cooperation from the Navy, we have a
considerable amount of power, because it’s our ships, it’s our cooperation, and
until the script is in a form that we can approve, then the production doesn’t go
forward.”

The result is an entertainment culture rigged to produce relatively few antiwar

movies and dozens of blockbusters that glorify the military.

audiences are rarely aware that they may be watching government-subsidized

propaganda

look at how the U.S. government uses taxpayer resources to suffuse popular
culture with militarism.

“Tequila, Painted Peals, and Parada — how the CIA Helped Produce
‘Zero Dark Thirty’” by Jason Leopold and Ky Henderson:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xw3ypa/tequila-painted-pearls-and-prada-how-the-cia-helped-
produce-zero-dark-thirty

Documents obtained exclusively by VICE News detail how closely CIA officers worked with filmmakers
Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal as they made their movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Arrangement of the Facharbeit: The influence of the MEC on the hollywood industrie and their
Intention and how it impact on the watcher of the movies

1. Introduction:
a. Thesis/ hypothesis: The influece of the MEC in our allday situation
b.
2. Main part:
a. Propaganda (History, Now -> into MEC)
b. MEC
i. small definition by the DOD (following the refutation)
ii. MEC History with example, first time…
iii. MEC definition
iv. MEC influence (Showstopper in NCIS, Reality, influences earlier vs. now,
clean war, demonization -> iraq movie)
v. MEC example (torture as grey-zone)
c. (Analysis of a Movie, looking at the role of the military)
3. Ending:

Simpli:
1. Einleitung
2. History of war-propaganda (Disney Donald Duck)
3. Hollywood propaganda now (Pentagon-Hollywood Angebot -> Miliainment)
4. MEC History (Vietnam -> keinen Bock mehr auf war -> Top Gun)
5. MEC definition
6. MEC einfluss
a. What Showstopper vs. Reality
b. Beispiel NCIS von showstoppern and influence
c. Arten des einflusses
d. Mogadischu
e. Torture as moral gray-zone
7. Hollywood wird mit Steuern bezahlt
8. MEC influence now (sci-fi, fantasy
9. Meaning of influence MEC

- Interesse am Studienfach (nur oberflächlich Geld status oder wirkliches interesse ich brenne
dafür)
- Eignung fürs Studienfach (OSA-portal.de, Studiencheck)
- Interesse an wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten (Facharbeit)