“Embodied by a slurring Brando, a famously addled Hollywood insider-outsider, Kurtz is less a meditation on American imperialism gone wrong than on the sort of strange prophets that crystalized in the ‘70s — in other words, he is first and foremost a cult leader. The glimpse of Manson’s face on Chef’s newspaper is a clue here, though Brando’s implacable presence reminds me more of Adi Da, from his Garbage and the Goddess phase, and Jim Jones, who dispatched his own children in the jungles of Guyana less than a year before the film debuted.”
Just want to suggest that US miltarism and all versions of imperialism, along with the bizarre ideas and practices that fuel it, is itself a cult, in fact one of the most powerful cults of magic transformation/rebirth through blood sacrifice ever propagated. It is hard to see anything Jim Jones did that LBJ, Mcnamara, Kissinger and Nixon didn’t do hundreds of times over. The fact that the cult of mass killing endures is nowhere more evident than our latest blood bath in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Manson was as American as those who did the massacre at Wounded Knee.Trying to make distinctions between the cultic criminal activities of a state and of the smaller local iterations of cults of violence seems to me an invitation to self deception. It turns real children burning with napalm or spattered with the blood of drone-killed relatives into statistics and polemics. What is freedom for and what does it mean if we can not declare ourselves at least free enough to refuse to be a hired killer?
I hear where you are coming from but I think it is important to distinguish the personal scale of religious "cults", with specific authoritarian leaders and cults of personality, and the much broader, more impersonal, more systematic and technocratic dimension of modern war regimes. While the latter do deploy and rely on personality cults sometimes -- fascism in the 30s -- things are even more important on a deep state-systemic level that remains, sometimes hidden away, even when the personalities disappear, even when the sides change -- so that Nazis become good upstanding US scientists and industrialists following WWII. This is not the case for religious cults, unless they manage to congeal into more established religions. The reason the brass hate Kurtz is that he is no longer under their systems spell, he sees through their organized lie, and has reverted to a more archaic and pure cult of personality--an old god that must be sacrificed.
The more I learn about the history of warfare and violence, the more my thoughts about these things grow complicated but also even more disgusted. One thing I have come to understand is just how relatively recent the sort of "total war" that marks the 20th century is, compared to earlier modes of battle where violence was relatively much more contained, and that relatively small losses were often sufficient to change or end a campaign. Of course this is not universal -- the Mongols would slaughter whole cities down to the child. But with modern methods, especially the indiscriminate nature of modern air war, enormous powers of mass and non-combatant slaughter are released at the same time that the "meaningfulness" of those deaths decreases in terms of their capacity to end war. Its a particularly hellish devils bargain, and it makes me angry and sad.
I always appreciate your willingness to take on these kinds of topics and allow discourse. I definitely understand there is a difference in the direct seductiveness and certainly the independent direction of a small cult leader. But I see parallels that point in my mind to similar tactics and processes on the part of what I call state cults of violence compared to other cultic structures. As soon as you move from actual defense of common homeland to aggression against people who did not attack you, a cultic belief becomes necessary. In WW2 the military studied how effective training was in getting the citizen soldiers that were the bulk of fighters to shoot to kill. It was stunningly low ( like 30%). Most soldiers couldn't do it. They were willing to risk their lives for real self defense but had a hard time becoming killers. It is one of the more hopeful pieces of evidence about human nature. When you think of it Vietnam should have been a much harder sell, but the military and country had changed after years of cold war paranoia. The military training also deliberately changed, much harsher, much more macho/misogynist, much more racist, but also drawing on a media culture drenched in gun worship. The leaders were literally insane with paranoia and willing to lie endlessly. Willing to go to any lengths to turn French colonial rule into our colonial rule. Ad heroin, pot, LSD, and jungle strangeness and pretty soon your local cult captain has US soldiers doing the My Lai massacre. Another aspect of the small cult leader is the two-faced hypocrisy, the cult members live poor while he gets rich, the members called to sexual purity while he is a sexual predator. Military colonialism in Vietnam was career opportunities for officers, heroin trafficking money for the CIA, lavish corruption for our chosen puppets but Agent Orange, Napalm and bombs for the land and people. My argument would be that in abandoning completely the core constitutional requirement that war be declared by congress, US politics, centered ever more around economic and military might became a cult of personality in which law and moral precept continues to diminish while image, no matter how blatantly false, as long as it is clothed in patriotic mumbo jumbo and military spending has made us what we are now.
One thing is pretty clear about where we are now is that there is a tremendous wr over what
Hi Joseph. Thanks for elaborating. I understand now more where you are coming from, especially in the clarification of that "something more" that is necessary to not fight enemies on your own soil or enemies who did not attack directly. I found your discussion of the impoverished "two-faced hypocrisy" of the situation particularly embittering, and I hadn't made that connection to the second-class citizenship that so many cult followers willingly embrace as a sign of the greatest of their leaders. It does seem however that the sort of hallucinated/quasi-mythic "othering" that allows such more-than-personal violence against different groups has been stitched into human conflict for quite a while, now immensely worsened through technological power and mass mobilization of forces, including the military-industrial-entertainment complex, of which Apocalypse Now is both a critique and, in a weirder way, a symptom.
I read a particularly ominous piece recently about Eric Schmidt and the always present but now intensifying marriage of Silicon Valley and the Pentagon in terms of using AI to maintain the US global dominance against Russia and China. [https://www.mintpressnews.com/eric-schmidt-cashes-in-artificial-intelligence-arms-race/278513/ ] The military-media-state's mixture of paranoia, fear, and self-serving corruption is terrifying in light of AI amplification. Would that the US was the only weaponized Sky Net in the picture, because then we could imagine a real change happening with a change in America alone. I dunno about that. One does not have to be a paranoid hawk to find a future-facing China or Russia deeply unnerving, especially on the algorithmic battlefield. Looks like a most wicked problem to me.
Oh my brother! We really must chat soon!
Da Free Kurtz is waiting for us...
“Embodied by a slurring Brando, a famously addled Hollywood insider-outsider, Kurtz is less a meditation on American imperialism gone wrong than on the sort of strange prophets that crystalized in the ‘70s — in other words, he is first and foremost a cult leader. The glimpse of Manson’s face on Chef’s newspaper is a clue here, though Brando’s implacable presence reminds me more of Adi Da, from his Garbage and the Goddess phase, and Jim Jones, who dispatched his own children in the jungles of Guyana less than a year before the film debuted.”
Just want to suggest that US miltarism and all versions of imperialism, along with the bizarre ideas and practices that fuel it, is itself a cult, in fact one of the most powerful cults of magic transformation/rebirth through blood sacrifice ever propagated. It is hard to see anything Jim Jones did that LBJ, Mcnamara, Kissinger and Nixon didn’t do hundreds of times over. The fact that the cult of mass killing endures is nowhere more evident than our latest blood bath in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Manson was as American as those who did the massacre at Wounded Knee.Trying to make distinctions between the cultic criminal activities of a state and of the smaller local iterations of cults of violence seems to me an invitation to self deception. It turns real children burning with napalm or spattered with the blood of drone-killed relatives into statistics and polemics. What is freedom for and what does it mean if we can not declare ourselves at least free enough to refuse to be a hired killer?
I hear where you are coming from but I think it is important to distinguish the personal scale of religious "cults", with specific authoritarian leaders and cults of personality, and the much broader, more impersonal, more systematic and technocratic dimension of modern war regimes. While the latter do deploy and rely on personality cults sometimes -- fascism in the 30s -- things are even more important on a deep state-systemic level that remains, sometimes hidden away, even when the personalities disappear, even when the sides change -- so that Nazis become good upstanding US scientists and industrialists following WWII. This is not the case for religious cults, unless they manage to congeal into more established religions. The reason the brass hate Kurtz is that he is no longer under their systems spell, he sees through their organized lie, and has reverted to a more archaic and pure cult of personality--an old god that must be sacrificed.
The more I learn about the history of warfare and violence, the more my thoughts about these things grow complicated but also even more disgusted. One thing I have come to understand is just how relatively recent the sort of "total war" that marks the 20th century is, compared to earlier modes of battle where violence was relatively much more contained, and that relatively small losses were often sufficient to change or end a campaign. Of course this is not universal -- the Mongols would slaughter whole cities down to the child. But with modern methods, especially the indiscriminate nature of modern air war, enormous powers of mass and non-combatant slaughter are released at the same time that the "meaningfulness" of those deaths decreases in terms of their capacity to end war. Its a particularly hellish devils bargain, and it makes me angry and sad.
I always appreciate your willingness to take on these kinds of topics and allow discourse. I definitely understand there is a difference in the direct seductiveness and certainly the independent direction of a small cult leader. But I see parallels that point in my mind to similar tactics and processes on the part of what I call state cults of violence compared to other cultic structures. As soon as you move from actual defense of common homeland to aggression against people who did not attack you, a cultic belief becomes necessary. In WW2 the military studied how effective training was in getting the citizen soldiers that were the bulk of fighters to shoot to kill. It was stunningly low ( like 30%). Most soldiers couldn't do it. They were willing to risk their lives for real self defense but had a hard time becoming killers. It is one of the more hopeful pieces of evidence about human nature. When you think of it Vietnam should have been a much harder sell, but the military and country had changed after years of cold war paranoia. The military training also deliberately changed, much harsher, much more macho/misogynist, much more racist, but also drawing on a media culture drenched in gun worship. The leaders were literally insane with paranoia and willing to lie endlessly. Willing to go to any lengths to turn French colonial rule into our colonial rule. Ad heroin, pot, LSD, and jungle strangeness and pretty soon your local cult captain has US soldiers doing the My Lai massacre. Another aspect of the small cult leader is the two-faced hypocrisy, the cult members live poor while he gets rich, the members called to sexual purity while he is a sexual predator. Military colonialism in Vietnam was career opportunities for officers, heroin trafficking money for the CIA, lavish corruption for our chosen puppets but Agent Orange, Napalm and bombs for the land and people. My argument would be that in abandoning completely the core constitutional requirement that war be declared by congress, US politics, centered ever more around economic and military might became a cult of personality in which law and moral precept continues to diminish while image, no matter how blatantly false, as long as it is clothed in patriotic mumbo jumbo and military spending has made us what we are now.
One thing is pretty clear about where we are now is that there is a tremendous wr over what
Hi Joseph. Thanks for elaborating. I understand now more where you are coming from, especially in the clarification of that "something more" that is necessary to not fight enemies on your own soil or enemies who did not attack directly. I found your discussion of the impoverished "two-faced hypocrisy" of the situation particularly embittering, and I hadn't made that connection to the second-class citizenship that so many cult followers willingly embrace as a sign of the greatest of their leaders. It does seem however that the sort of hallucinated/quasi-mythic "othering" that allows such more-than-personal violence against different groups has been stitched into human conflict for quite a while, now immensely worsened through technological power and mass mobilization of forces, including the military-industrial-entertainment complex, of which Apocalypse Now is both a critique and, in a weirder way, a symptom.
I read a particularly ominous piece recently about Eric Schmidt and the always present but now intensifying marriage of Silicon Valley and the Pentagon in terms of using AI to maintain the US global dominance against Russia and China. [https://www.mintpressnews.com/eric-schmidt-cashes-in-artificial-intelligence-arms-race/278513/ ] The military-media-state's mixture of paranoia, fear, and self-serving corruption is terrifying in light of AI amplification. Would that the US was the only weaponized Sky Net in the picture, because then we could imagine a real change happening with a change in America alone. I dunno about that. One does not have to be a paranoid hawk to find a future-facing China or Russia deeply unnerving, especially on the algorithmic battlefield. Looks like a most wicked problem to me.