#MovieMonday – Warmongering at Cannes

This is why we live in a world at war. Because this is the state of the world’s so-called intellectual avant-garde. Over at Breitbart.com, it’s perhaps unsurprising that they are reporting the following story as “ripples of the Arab Spring” being felt at the Cannes Film Festival, but this is in fact a story about the ripples of contemporary Western military interventionism, just the latest episode in a long serial of pointless, destructive imperialism and exploitation. Pseudo-intellectual filmmakers at Cannes aren’t the first to conflate the two in order to borrow some global sympathy and support from the Arab Spring, and hawk more war under the guise of humanitarianism.

Enough of my analysis; here’s the story:

‘The ripples of the Arab Spring are being felt in summery Cannes, where films from Egypt and Syria, as well as a passionate documentary about the overthrow of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, are being screened alongside the latest features from the world’s heavyweight directors.

On Friday the festival lineup included “The Oath of Tobruk,” a highly personal insiders’ account of the uprising by writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who was accompanied to a photo call by masked Libyan fighters.

In the film, made with photographer Marc Roussel, Levy gives a robust defense of Western military intervention in Libya _ and calls for the world to do the same in Syria, where the regime of President Bashar Assad has been fighting an uprising for more than a year.Levy _ often known simply as BHL _ is a leading public intellectual in France, where he is known for his impassioned political interventions, dapper dress and mane of salt-and-pepper hair.

The movie is revealing about the background to the Libyan conflict, as Levy’s bulging contacts book delivers interviews with Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron and U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, as well as with members of Libya’s new political and military leadership.

Levy was pivotal in persuading Sarkozy, then France’s president, to back air strikes to aid the Libyan rebels, a decision taken up by Cameron, the British leader, and later by President Barack Obama.’

So this French intellectual just loves the NATO-led intervention in Libya which at least the United States had to violate its own Constitution in order to participate in, and which came to the aid, not of fleeing, massacred victims in need of humanitarian intervention, but an active violent rebellion in a country’s civil war, and all so coincidentally after Gaddafi had been working to create a pan-African, gold-backed currency that would have threatened the US Dollar’s monetary hegemony (i.e. exploitation of the poor to make the rich richer), and as a little geopolitical frosting on the top, China and the East lost millions in direct foreign investment in the country and Africa has become a satellite of the Western military-monetary machine.

Not only does this French, movie-making intellectual love the war in Libya, he was “pivotal” in persuading French President Sarkozy to engage in it and he longs for another war just like it in Syria! Would anyone else think it’s odd for a writer at Breitbart.com, a bastion of right-wing conservatism, to write in such tones of open admiration for a French intellectual filmmaker? It just doesn’t make sense right? The author is veritably impressed with Levy’s “bulging” contacts book that includes war-mongering globalists like Hillary Clinton (again, why should the right-winger be impressed that the Frenchman has the Democrat’s digits?).

Drop everything you think you know about movies and about the people who make them. The mythology of a liberal, “peacenik” bias in Hollywood, in France, and among the intellectual elite is just that– a myth. There are all too many admirers of war and imperialism in all three groups of people. Hollywood loves a good war-glorifying blood and guts movie. War isn’t glorious, and those who fight it know better. France too, is not as timid as Americans perceive it. During my five weeks there last year, I was amazed at how conservative the French are as a people. Conservative in the worst way I can use that word. And as for intellectuals… the condition of so many of those claiming the title has been dire for decades now. They as much as anyone, are awed by power and captivated by war, and as self-professed intellectuals, they have the brainpower to rationalize and justify atrocities that the less cerebral, but more sensible person would not.

This is what those who love freedom and peace are up against. We live in a world where even people like artistic French movie-makers love war and agitate for more of it. It’s time for the talented, the creative, the men and women of intellect to stand up and oppose those who claim the mantle of intellectualism, but use their minds to serve the men and women of muscle, the wielders and purveyors of power and violent repression. To put their minds at the service of the militant is not intellectual, but anti-intellectual, a concession of the mind to the brute force of barbarians. Lovers of peace and freedom are the true intellectuals.

Its time for us to step up, speak out, and make art.

And don’t forget to visit our official website to learn more about the Silver Circle Movie:http://SilverCircleMovie.com