A Film About Brainwashing That Brainwashes

I recently went to see "The Manchurian Candidate" which is probably the best and most disturbing movie of its genre that I have seen since Mel Gibson in "Conspiracy Theory". This morning I was going through various news sites I visit daily and found this article which is rather interesting. Anybody have any ideas on this subject? Arab propaganda or a different perspective? I must say that after seeing the movie I was scared shirtless of the Arabs although I knew they weren't supposed to be the "baddies". In fact I still have nightmares about those arab scenes.

www.arabnews.com...

'WASHINGTON, 14 August 2004 — In December of 2003, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) got a tip through Arab-American actors in Hollywood that a new version of the 1962 movie classic, “The Manchurian Candidate”, was being produced.

They were told that, although the Communist Chinese were the villains in the first movie and they brainwashed American soldiers serving in the Korean War of the 1950s, the new villains in the 2004 version were to be “Arabs and Muslims” who would do the brainwashing of American troops.

ADC together with The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) wrote a letter to the CEO of Paramount Pictures, Sherry Lansing, who was doing the film, with a copy to Jonathan Demme, the director of the movie questioning this issue, and asking that Arabs and Muslims not be further stereotyped in this manner.

They never received a written reply, but were later called by a publicity person for Paramount and assured that though the backdrop for the film was the first Gulf War in Kuwait and Iraq, the villain was to be “a large multinational corporation” which didn’t have Arabs and Muslims involved.

That movie has now come out and the overt villain is, in fact, a large multinational corporation named “Manchurian Global”, However, Jonathan Demme was recently quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as stating that the paranoia central to the plot is not about the Communists but,” the Palestinians, Saudi Arabia, touch-screen voting,” etc. We are being “brainwashed” in a movie about “brainwashing”.

The Manchurian Candidate is now one of the top grossing movies in the United States and being seen by millions of Americans. During the movie, in the background of the main dialogue are a series of talk radio shows, flashy news graphics and news crawls coming across the bottom of television screens.

And the background chatter being conveyed through these subliminal messages usually is about dastardly acts by Palestinians, Saudi Arabia and any other Arab/Muslim bad guy that can be depicted. Though “Manchurian Global” might be the explicit villain in the film, Saudi Arabia and its Arab/Muslim collaborators are implicitly the real villains. Jonathan Demme said it very well."









[edit on 8-9-2004 by Mynaeris]