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Obsession Review
by Tivana April 21, 2007

The Conservative movie Obsession fans the flames of war.

Have you seen the right wing propaganda film Obsession? It is a propaganda piece to promote the war on terror. You can watch a 9 minute trailer for the movie on youtube.com here.

The movie is well made. The movie is convincing and my concern is it has the ability to sway public opinion about an urgent need to confront a militaristic ideology that is earnest in its quest to destroy our American way of life. Every war needs an enemy and Bush has been saying all along that we are fighting not an army but an ideology. The hazard with fighting an ideology is ideas and their effects are hard to determine, harder to battle. Ideas are difficult to put a finger on, easy to blame, impossible to pull the trigger and put a bullet through. Ideas show up as customs embedded in a culture.

Throughout history an invading culture exterminates the cultures of its victims as a means to kill an ideology or ideas. At this point in history we are witnessing the cost of the war on terror upon our own culture. At times it is hard to tell who is losing this war as we watch the extermination of American culture beginning with extinguishing the flame of freedom in our Constitution. Freedom, what a silly idea, say the sheeple.

Ideas, ideologies, find their way into our lives through thoughts and their vehicles of delivery: lectures, books, movies, speeches, even clothing. In our local schools they banned students from wearing gang colors to class. The reason being the colors promote the ideas and customs of gangs and the school board did not want to promote gang ideas in our schools.

The challenge we face as a society, as human beings is in finding new strategies for dealing with competing ideas. The current war on terror cannot go along its present path and still have an America or freedom, or prosperity, and definitely there will be no peace. The conservative approach promoted in this movie is the age old military solution. But this war calls for new solutions beyond the wasteful militaristic one.

If humans are to put an end to war before war puts an end to humanity, humans have to embrace the ways one deals with competing ideas through: diplomacy, fair trade treaties, through cultural exchange and interactivities, and through true humanitarian aid (works both ways, giving and accepting). There are thousands of time proven methods to wage peace that fend off the threat of a radical ideology.

But when war is the only way to reach reconciliation then you are doomed to failure because you will waging war means you will have to give up what you are fighting for, like your freedom. Remember this is not the Revolutionary war, this is not World War II. This is a new war where the enemy is an ideology contrary to our own.

The producers of this movie go beyond describing an ideology and they try to put a face on the enemy. It shows tens of thousands of Muslims in far away countries goose stepping in long parades and doing the 1930's Nazi salute. By putting a face on the enemy this somehow makes it alright to wage war. It seems to also make the excuse to forfeit your values as human beings. Americans lose every time someone is tortured in our name, every time someone is detained without an arrest or a trial, every time a civilian is killed by one of our bullets.

The US is currently going down the road prescribed in the Bush Doctrine, laid out for all to read in the Project For a New American Century (PNAC). In so many ways it is an illegal and immoral path deemed so by every legal justice system in the world and every righteous human in the world. There is no way in my mind to defend the use of White Phospherous, a chemical weapon of mass destruction, on sleeping civilians. This form of collective punishment cannot be justified as a way to fight an ideology, no matter how heinous or threatening the enemy might be.

To me this is war by hysteria as the producers fan a bonfire of fear in the minds of an unsuspecting people. People, Americans, like you and I, who just want peace, prosperity, and freedom; none of which are attainable by military means.

The producers call themselves HonestReporting.com - http://www.honestreporting.com/

This is my honesty, my truth,
Peace, over and out,
Michael Tivana

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