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by Juan Santos

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is not a mere adventure tale, it’s not just another excruciatingly brutal portrayal of apocalyptic violence for its own sake, and the Village Voice is dead wrong when it says that unlike Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto is “unburdened by nationalist or religious piety,”— that it's “pure, amoral sensationalism.”

Despite its extreme brutality Apocalypto isn’t just Gibson’s latest snuff film with a religious theme. The film is a morality play, and there are only two things one needs to remember to get a hint of the ugly moral intent behind Mel Gibson’s depiction of the Maya.

The first is that, despite Gibson’s vile portrayal of the Maya as a macabre cult of deranged killers straight out of Apocalypse Now!, there is no evidence that the Mayan people ever practiced widespread human sacrifice, and they certainly didn’t target the innocent hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists Gibson chooses to portray as the victims of a Mayan death cult.

Gibson knows better. He studied the terrain in depth and had no practical limit to the funds he could expend on research. His portrayal is a conscious lie, one he uses to justify the premise that the Mayan city states collapsed because they deserved to collapse, and that they deserved to be replaced by a “superior” culture in the genocide known as the Conquest.

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within," is how Gibson puts it. In other words the Conquest was not genocide but a moral comeuppance; the civilization didn’t fall, in the final analysis, from climate change or inadvertent soil depletion or even war – it was conquered in god’s wrath against the forces of evil. And Gibson’s made sure you see the ancient Maya as a force of profound evil.

Here’s a taste of the standards Gibson used in conjuring his image of the Maya. The LA Times quotes production designer Tom Sanders:

"We had an archeologist, Dr. Richard Hansen, onboard," said Sanders. "It was really fun to say, 'Is there any proof they didn't do this?' When he said, 'There is no proof they didn't do that,' that gives you some license to play.” And “play” they did. Rex Reed calls the racist portrayal of the Maya Gibson’s “huge cast of spear-carriers from the Oom-Gawah-Bwana School of Dramatic Art.”

In a stunning interview with Chris Garcia of the Austin American Statesman, Julia Guernsey, an expert on Mayan culture at the University of Texas says of Gibson’s agenda, "’We got the Jews last time (in 'The Passion of the Christ'), now we'll get the Maya.’ And to highlight that point there's a lot of really offensive racial stereotyping. They're shown as these extremely barbaric people, when in fact, the Maya were a very sophisticated culture… I hate it. I despise it. I think it's despicable. It's offensive to Maya people. It's offensive to those of us who try to teach cultural sensitivity…”

The other hint you might need to remember is this. No matter what happens in this film, the Spanish don’t show up at the end, at the collapse of the Mayan civilization, to “save” anything at all.

Hundreds of years would pass between the collapse of the Mayan city states and the American Holocaust. For the sake of empire the Spanish would sacrifice 95% of the population in Mexico, a horror they would achieve in a mere 100 years. Hitler’s holocaust, with its 20 million dead, pales: the Conquest of the Americas by Europe would claim 100 million lives. There is no more savage genocide in the history of civilization.

But if you’re looking for savagery, the holocaust against the Mayan people doesn’t stop there. The most recent wave ended a mere decade ago. A quarter of a million innocent Maya were slaughtered in Guatemala by a death squad regime backed by the Gibson’s cohorts on the Christian Right, including Ronald Reagan and apocalyptic fanatics like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. It’s called “The Silent Holocaust” by those who know of it.

The Maya have suffered a modern apocalypse more brutal than anything in Gibson’s sadistic imagination, more brutal than even he would dare bring to the screen. It’s a tale he would refuse: its demons aren’t “savage” Mayans in horror movie drag, they’re Christian death squads backed by fundamentalist leaders using old school Spanish methods. A British anti-war organization writes:

”Working methodically across the Mayan region, the army and its paramilitary teams, including 'civil patrols' of forcibly conscripted local men, attacked 626 villages. Each community was rounded up, or seized when gathered already for a celebration or a market day. The villagers, if they didn't escape to become hunted refugees, were then brutally murdered; others were forced to watch, and sometimes to take part. Buildings were vandalised and demolished, and a 'scorched earth' policy applied: the killers destroyed crops, slaughtered livestock, fouled water supplies, and violated sacred places and cultural symbols.

”Children were often beaten against walls, or thrown alive into pits where the bodies of adults were later thrown; they were also tortured and raped. Victims of all ages often had their limbs amputated, or were impaled and left to die slowly. Others were doused in petrol and set alight, or disemboweled while still alive. Yet others were shot repeatedly, or tortured and shut up alone to die in pain. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open. Women were routinely raped while being tortured. Women - now widows - who lived could scarcely survive the trauma: The presence of sexual violence in the social memory of the communities has become a source of collective shame.”

Gibson hasn’t told the story of the hunted refugees fleeing Christian death squads a decade ago. His ancient hunters are nothing more than figments of his imagination, racist stereotypes of ancient Mayans who existed nowhere but in his own delirium tremens. They are his own demons chasing his imaginary hero / victim / alter ego, Jaguar Paw, through a “savage” jungle.

The framework of the story is deeply embedded in Gibson’s extreme right wing religious and political views. He casts Mayan priests and leaders as demonically malevolent at a time when interest is growing world wide in Mayan politics – the Zapatistas – and in Mayan spirituality and prophecy. The subtext of the film and its social context involve the Mayan prophecies of the end of an age of destruction, and the beginning of another around 2012 C.E., an age that can lead to harmony between humanity and the Earth.

The biblical counter-vision is of a righteous world destruction carried out by a vengeful god who destroys all living creatures, a vision embedded in the Apocalypse of Saint John, the Book of Revelations, which was the inspiration for the film’s title.

The Maya who survived the killing in Guatemala and elsewhere kept their spiritual traditions alive - including their prophecies of the end of this age - despite 500 years of intensive efforts to eradicate them. Right wing Christians see hell-driven New Age plots at every turn, and understand attacking other culture’s spiritual traditions not as cultural genocide but as legitimate “spiritual warfare” at a time of approaching apocalypse.

Gibson brought Apocalypto to life on the propaganda front of a spiritual war, a deadly serious culture war between those who would protect and defend the Earth’s ability to live and those on the Christian Right who want to “bring on” Armageddon.

The stakes are the future of life on planet Earth in a time when the industrial civilization of the West is seen by many as on the brink of collapse and when the world’s most respected scientists see Earth as on the verge of ecological destruction, a sentiment that is deeply shared by the living Mayan wisdom keepers whose indigenous spiritual tradition Gibson has chosen to paint as evil.

The survivors of the most recent wave of genocide haven’t seen Apocalypto yet – no Maya has, not even those who had the bit parts Gibson reserved for them, or who worked as extras and maids.

One can’t help but wonder how Apocalypto will play to Guatemalan audiences, but one thing is a sure bet: Mayans will be deeply disturbed to see their culture portrayed as a madhouse of killing, while those who supported the death squad regime of the Christian fascist Efraín Ríos Montt will take solace: their view of the Maya as subhuman will be “justified” by the film, and so will their genocidal reign of terror.

Racist stereotypes, after all, serve one function and one function only – they serve as a story, a script that justifies the use of violence against a targeted group, whether the weapons of the oppressor are the sword and cannon, the gas chamber, the M16, a lynch mob’s rope, or a camera.

One viewer understood and embraced Gibson’s intent in its entirety, saying Apocalypto:

“Pretty much precisely describes the whole point of the civilizations of such “noble savages” as the Mayans, if you ask us. There isn’t one, there wasn’t one, and there never will be one. Those bloodthirsty mongrels and many others before and after them were brutal, savage, cruel and entirely without redeeming qualities, and the best thing that ever happened to this planet was when they were wiped out, never to be heard of again.

In fact, we owe the Spanish Conquistadores an eternal debt of gratitude for having wiped that blood-curdlingly bestial, brutal blight upon humanity off the face of the planet because, had they not done it, we would have had to do so ourselves.”

The son of a Holocaust denier, Gibson defended his father in a 2004 interview, and, in the wake of his recent drunken tirades against Jews, Gibson can ill afford charges of propagating racism against Indians. The film’s PR campaign has carefully skirted potential opposition and negative exposure. Despite that effort Mayan activists who’ve seen nothing more than the film’s trailer denounced the film the day before it opened.

Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation, said "Gibson replays, in glorious, big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact needed, rescue."

The Indians who’ve seen the film itself have been a carefully chosen crew; Apocalypto, for all its epic pretensions, premiered in an Oklahoma casino, and certainly not for an audience of American Indian Movement activists. The initial Latino audience was chosen just as carefully. A Beverly Hills-based PR man arranged screenings of the film for the Los Angeles Latin Business Association – not for Mexican and Central American migrants who know the Maya, not for indigenous minded Chican@s, and certainly not for LA’s substantial community of Mayan refugees.

The Latin Business Association obligingly gave Gibson their "Visionary” Award. But it’s too late for Gibson to hide behind such contrived “honors.” Even the LA Times pointedly noted, “ it's one thing to acknowledge a work's… merits and quite another to proclaim Gibson a ‘visionary,’ especially at a time when the immigration debate has reminded Latinos that virulent racism is only a few drinks away.”

Genocide is even closer than that. Ask the Spanish. Ask the death squads. Ask Mel, behind the camera or a behind small glass. It’s just a shot away.

http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/2006/12/apocalypto-cinematic-logic-of-genocide.html

ce399 comment:

Revisiting Apocalypto through Avatar

The complete extermination of the “people of the land” (on planet Earth) is inevitable says James Cameron in “Avatar”

Media Blackout on Black Masks

Coverage of indigenous liberation movements is, for the most part, strictly verboten in neoliberal globalist media "discourse." Reporting is problematic because these movements are not as easily demonized for propaganda purposes as are their highly infiltrated “Islamist” [construct] brethren. Self defense posture mixed with bric-a-brac radical socialist-anarchist participatory democratic principles and syncretic spirituality make unappealing copy for the sanguine globalist media.

Hence, through the post-humanist back door – this version of “his-tory” – comes Mr.Gibson with yet another Pentagon infomerical at the behest of his paymasters at Fox (CIA asset Murdoch) and Disney (Nazi sympathizer Walt). That, intuitively understood, is the entire patriarchal one-eyed point of Apocalypto.

For most viewers these – other – aspects shall remain ghosts of what-never-was. Suppression of historical memory adds further psionic weight to “controlled demolition” collapse. Gibbon’s son (Gibson) wants to destroy western civilisation as well – but for all the “wrong” reasons: a certain inverted primitivism of the elite is involved.

The eugenicist / transhumanists desire more genocide - the eating it fills them with light (Sin City)- a continued “destructive joussiance..” of the “people of the land” in order to more easily facilitate the creation of multiple synthetic spider-woman’s webs (using one small modual of this..synthetic web..right now). “People of the land” talk too much- [without saying a word] – they leak “state secrets.” That’s a very big problem for Fox and W alt, who want the sheep to remain constipated by continually feeding them abominable “choco laxatives” until they burst.

Some people just want to watch the word burn..(Dark Knight)...As the World Burns...as it should be rightly called is a long-running American daytime soap opera.

Who in their right mind is “like” going to “spend” the rest of their life dissecting horrifically over complicated, bizarre, and nonsensical distortions of every simple principle?

Juan Santos passed away on Jan. 22, 2009

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29 March 2010

The "Overpopulation" Meme and Mayan Genocide

Para Todos Todo. Nada Para Nosotros.

Overpopulation is a false meme. It's a false front for eugenics and the extermination of populations deemed 'unfit' to live in the fascist machine world. ie indigenous people in Columbia or Darfur or anywhere else on the earth where there exists a synthetically created 'humanitarian crisis.' - Dead Joe 2009

With growing movements against imperialism, including peasant unions, students, workers, guerrillas and Indians, a substantial part of the "aid" included military training, weapons, and equipment. US Special Forces troopers were not only in Southeast Asia, they were also quite busy in Central America, training death squads and directing massacres. As part of an overall counter-insurgency campaign, the militarization alone precipitated an upward spiral of violence. In Guatemala alone, between 1966-68, some 8,000 people were slaughtered by Guatemalan soldiers under the direction of US Green Beret advisors; US pilots flew US planes on bombing missions. Paramilitary groups/death squads hunted down "subversives" in collaboration with the government, military, multinationals, and land-owners [43]. The main targets of this campaign, dubbed "Operation Guatemala", were the Mayan peoples.

Another aspect of the counter-insurgency plans was that of population control. Primarily the focus of US state-funding, the Agency for International Development (AID) was established in 1961. Using the false pretext of an "over-population problem" being the cause of mass poverty and starvation -- instead of imperialism -- population control came to be championed as the most important dilemma facing the "modern world". Under the guise of "family planning", AID began funding for a wide-range of public and private organizations, foundations, and churches who provided training, equipment, and clinics for birth control programs. Between 1968 and 1972, "funds earmarked for population programs through legislation and obligated by AID amounted to more than $250 million" [44]. South America received the largest percentage of this funding. Besides educational material, birth control pills, IUDs, and other pharmaceuticals developed by a profitable gene and biotechnology industry in the imperialist centres, the main thrust of population control remains sterilization. Between 1965-71, an estimated 1 million women in Brazil had been sterilized [45]. In Puerto Rico, 34% of all women of child-bearing age had been sterilized by 1965 [46]. Between 1963-65, more than 40,000 women in Colombia had been sterilized [47]. In contrast to these programs in the "Third World", the imperialist centres see restrictions on abortion and struggles for women's reproductive choice. But even here there is a double standard for non-European women:

"Lee Brightman, United Native Americans President, estimates that of the Native population of 800,000 (in the US), as many as 42% of the women of childbearing age and 10% of the men...have been sterilized... The first official inquiry into the sterilization of Native women...by Dr. Connie Uri...reported that 25,000 Indian women had been permanently sterilized within Indian Health Services facilities alone through 1975...

"According to a 1970 fertilization study, 20% of married Black women had been sterilized, almost three times the percentage of white married women. There was a 180% rise in the number of sterilizations performed during 1972-73 in New York City municipal hospitals which serve predominantly Puerto Rican neighbourhoods" [48].

Similar results were found in Inuit communities in the Northwest Territories. Clearly, "overpopulation" is not an issue in North America, nor is it in South or Central America. Rather, it is a method for reducing specific portions of the population who would organize against their oppression and who have no place in the schemes of capital. In other words, "It is more effective to kill guerrillas in the womb".

http://www.dickshovel.com/500.html

American Holocaust The Conquest of the New World by David Stannard

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/History/American_Holocaust.html

Related Archives:

Tragedy! The United States is Created

Barbara Marx Hubbard, New Age Global Genocide and Unity Church

"Over Population" is a DEADLY HOAX

Global Transhumanist Anschluss

Pseudo Operations and Counterinsurgency (pdf file)

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25 March 2010

Bolivian General who Captured "Che" Questioned in Evo Morales Assassination PLot

The retired general who captured legendary revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara was summoned Friday by Bolivian authorities investigating an alleged plot against President Evo Morales.

Former Gen. Gary Prado allegedly exchanged "ultrasecret" encrypted e-mail with Eduardo Rozsa, a Bolivian-born Hungarian who was slain in an April 2009 raid by an elite police unit.

Authorities allege that Rozsa and two other men killed — an Irishman and an ethnic Hungarian from Romania — were involved in a conspiracy to create a separatist right-wing militia in the eastern, opposition-dominated state of Santa Cruz.

Morales said when they were killed that a plot to assassinate him had been foiled.

Prado denied having any connection with an anti-government conspiracy and said he would refuse to travel from his home in Santa Cruz, the state capital, to La Paz for questioning.

He told Fides radio Friday that his only contact with Rosza came when Rosza asked for an interview, saying he was a foreign journalist.

"What 'ultrasecret' communication did I have with Rosza, other than that interview? None," Prado said. "I did not have anything to do with that group."

Also summoned was Prado's son, who carries the same name and is running for mayor of Santa Cruz. He said the allegations were worse than a "bad soap opera."

Bolivians will elect mayors and governors across the country April 4, when the immensely popular Morales hopes to consolidate power with gains in the eastern lowlands.

Wealthy ranchers and agro-businessmen in the east oppose Morales' policy of seizing fallow lands and giving them to poor peasants from Bolivia's long-suppressed indigenous majority.

Prosecutor Marcelo Soza did not say whether authorities had been able to decrypt the e-mails he said were exchanged by the elder Prado and Rozsa, a journalist-adventurer who fought for Croatia after Yugoslavia dissolved.

Prado did not deny knowing Rozsa, who he said had approached him to inquire about his involvement in the 1967 capture of Guevara. The Argentine hero of the Cuban revolution was trying to foment an uprising in Bolivia and was later executed.

Prado, then an army captain, commanded the patrol that captured him.

The Rozsa case has major political overtones. The Morales government contends prominent opposition leaders in Santa Cruz were involved.

One of them, Branko Marinkovic, was implicated this week by a former close associate who told prosecutors Marinkovic helped fund Rozsa's group.

The accusation prompted Marinkovic, the son of Croatian immigrants, to slip out of the country. Marinkovic's lawyer denies his client's involvement in the alleged conspiracy.

Shortly after Morales' December re-election, the government confiscated land from Marinkovic.

http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2010/03/bolivian-ex-general-who-captured-che.html

Posted at 13:18 in Evo Morales | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Dummies of Life

A house built on the soil of American constructions supports no ghosts or long inhabiting phantasms. The spirit welcomed by the dwelling of our forefathers resembled, as do many ghosts, humanly contours. Thus they found something already human there.

America, on the contrary, seems neither uplifted by good ghosts nor intimate with their apparel but pocked merely by dummies of life, empty, indifferent things, hollowed out from ancestral paths, Geistlessly.

...

The injection of the schizophrenicizing poison, the object-induced catatonia named by the dummies of life renders the American intrusion particularly painful. The object-character of technological dominion spreads itself over the earth ever more ruthlessly, quickly and completely, observes Heidegger.

The Telephone Book. Technology, Schizophrenia, Electronic Speech. Avital Ronell.

Sexiest Mannequin of the Year!

Guides to the Electropolis: Toward a Spectral Critique of the Media by Allen Meek

Posted at 12:27 in "Humans" are EXTINCT, Avital Ronell, Dummies of Life | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

24 March 2010

Oscar Romero: Estamos con Usted

Así matamos a monseñor Romero

El mayor D´Aubuisson fue parte de la conspiración para asesinar a monseñor Romero, aunque el tirador lo puso un hijo del ex presidente Molina, dice el capitán Álvaro Saravia. 30 años después, él y otros de los involucrados reconstruyen aquellos días de tráfico de armas, de cocaína y de secuestros. Caído en desgracia, Saravia ha sido repartidor de pizzas, vendedor de carros usados y lavador de narcodinero. Ahora arde en el infierno que ayudó a prender aquellos días cuando matar "comunistas" era un deporte.

http://www.elfaro.net/es/201003/noticias/1403/

Salvador's wealthy elites controlled the armed forces and the notorious 'death squads' - hired thugs who tortured, raped and murdered anyone who showed the slightest opposition to the system. Trade unionists, innocent peasants, community activists, their friends and families were killed by the thousands. Corpses were buried in shallow graves, dumped onto street corners and tossed into garbage dumps. By 1980 more than 3,000 people a month were being murdered. In March 1993 the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador concluded that the responsibility for the killings of thousands of Salvadorean civilians lay with senior military officers in an army which was strongly backed by Washington.

Archbishop Romero spoke out loudly against these injustices. He pleaded with US to stop military aid which he said was financing the military and the death squads. In his weekly radio sermons he told the oligarchy to halt the killing, using his position to challenge the 'unjust economic structures' which he saw as the root causes of the conflict.

And in a country where the peasants were seen as subhuman, he preached that the poor themselves must take power: The world of the poor teaches us that liberation will arrive only when the poor are not simply on the receiving end of handouts from governments or from churches, but when they themselves are the masters and protagonists of their own struggle for liberation.'

This effrontery did not sit well with the oligarchy. Repeated death threats were issued against the Archbishop - to no avail. Shortly before his murder he said: 'I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me I will rise again in the people of El Salvador... if God accepts the sacrifice of my life, then may my blood be the seed of liberty and a sign that hope will soon become a reality.'

On the Sunday before his murder, in the old cathedral in the heart of the capital, Romero again denounced the military violence. In a rising voice, breaking with emotion, he called on ordinary soldiers to side with the people, to ignore the orders of their superiors. honour through the streets of San Salvador.

'Brothers, you are from the same people, you kill your fellow peasant... No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God... In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering people I ask you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression.'

The 1993 UN Commission concluded that ARENA party founder and US favourite Roberto D'Aubuisson 'gave the order to assassinate the Archbishop and gave precise instructions to members of his security service, acting as a death squad, to organize and supervise the assassination'.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Heroes/Oscar%20_Romero.html

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22 March 2010

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Video)

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20 March 2010

Towards a 21st Century Fascism with Markos "Daily Kos" Zúñiga and Aldous Huxley (mp3 file)

Kos_Zuniga_20060602

Huxley_1962_Edit 1

Compare these two speeches. Total running time: approx 10 mins for both. "Other methods" for world "stability". 1984 for the "bad guys" and Brave New World for the "good guys."

Posted at 20:36 in Amy Goodman, CIA, Conspiracy Theory, Controlled Opposition, Daily Kos, Dave Neiwert , Left Gatekeepers, Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga, Naomi Klein, US Cultural Imperialism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

18 March 2010

Roots of Zionist Eugenics: "Anti-Semitism" by German Jews

But unlike their East European counterparts, the [Jewish] Germans clung to their original national identity, and were economically more established. Moreover, many German Jews believed that they [East European Jews] were so-call Hofjuden, or country Jews, and that coreligionists from Poland and Russia were “uncivilized” and embarrassing. The bias was best summarized in a June 1894, German-American Jewish newspaper, the Hebrew Standard which declared that the totally acclimated American Jew is closer to “Christian sentiment around him than to the Judaism of these miserable darkened Hebrews.”

Edwin Black. The Transfer Agreement. Chapter One.

Related Archives:

A History of Zionist Eugenic Policies in Israel

Israeli Relations with Apartheid South Africa

Zionist Ethnic Bio-Warfare Against Arabs (Village Voice 1999)

The Eugenics Wars

New COINTELPRO Campaign Directed at Arabs, Muslims and South East Asians (2005)

Nazi and Zionist Eugenics

Posted at 12:09 in Eugenics, Zionism, Zionist Eugenics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)