“Let me tell how the world works”, one of the opening lies (lines) of the new film Act of Valor (which I am re-naming Act of Propaganda), is said by a square jawed man who we are told is a “real” Navy Seal and therefore somehow should be revered and respected solely because he is in fact a “real” Navy Seal, which of course means to me and anybody slightly awake, that he is a “real” murderer who has perpetrated acts of genocide against innocent wombyn, children and elders across the globe in indigenous communities with impunity.
There are so many reasons why this movie is not only an insult to our collective intelligence but an act of violence to our logic, our spirits, our children and our minds.
From Top Gun to The Green Berets, the US military Industrial Complex has been pumping millions of dollars into the hands of “Hollywood” producers to ensure the depiction and/or inclusion of military characters, scenes, story-lines, artillery, or plots for purely propaganda purposes. And similarly it has been common knowledge for years that if you show even a glimpse of some part of the military industrial complex in your film you will receive a phat pay-off to the tune of several hundred thousands of blood stained Amerikkkan dollaz.
What is truly frightening especially for conscious parents and teachers of young people is the blatant lie of this movie. This is a Navy Seals training film, complete with “black-ops” and other murderous tactics used by the hegemony filled soldiers known as Army, Navy and Marines. And we are led to believe that this narrative-less movie is an actual movie. So now I’m not sure what’s worse, the fact that so many people are asleep and can be so easily duped by this flagrant act of propaganda or that thousands more young people will be sucked into the myth that Navy Seals are “courageous” and exciting and relevant rather than dangerous murderers who are agents of the deadly empire known as Amerikkka!
Full disclosure, I did not pay one cent of my meager blood-stained amerikkkan dollaz to see this horrible movie. I will not. But that doesn’t mean I stay silent. Especially if you work with/be wit young peoples like I do everyday, they get commercials of this movie drilled to them on Xfinity, Cartoon Network and the internet through games, so tell them what you think about the lies of the military industrial complex and how it preys on poor peoples of color, how this “movie” is a tool of that machine and how they can resist it. And then if you feeling your ovaries, stand up as I did, in a corporate movie theatre which my ghetto self is prone to be found at, inhaling corporate and non-corporate movies as a form of relaxation whenever we can scrape together the over-priced ticket fee, and call out to all in attendance-something to the tune of, “this is a lie, this is racist propaganda, this should be called Act of Genocide!