RUSSO AND ONWARDS: HISTORY LESSONS IN NEW FILM
Print format

From: Indigo S.
Date: Saturday, December 2, 2006, 5:02 PM
Subject: Russo and Onwards: History Lessons In New Film
ID: 254973

A new documentary is being made and Alex Cox extends the lessons and 
warnings we have heard from Aaron Russo.

I received this from an independent news source.

This is a very important article and it outlines the significance of 
what we have learned through reviewing The Manifest Destiny and 
current world events. We can see that there is a plan that has been 
consistently enacted, elaborated and refined, by every administration 
for many generations and that even the allies of the United States are 
on the "hit list" for invasion and takeover. 

Rumsfeld may be gone, but as we are reminded here, Robert Gates has 
been a part of covert operations and plans to conquer the world, for 
decades. His book, titled "From The Shadows",( how appropriate !) 
describes the level of connivance that went on when he was head of 
the CIA under George Bush senior, that continues to this day. 

The reminders of the alliance between the United States and Germany 
is chilling . I quote it here; 

"there were no similar plans for a possible war with Nazi Germany - a 
nation that one might think posed a greater potential threat than 
America's close allies Britain, Canada and Mexico. But there's 
nothing strange about this; it simply underlines the elitist economic 
interests that have remained the driving force behind US foreign 
policy for generations. 

The war plans were to cripple potential economic rivals and to seize 
the natural resources of Mexico and Canada. Germany was viewed 
entirely as an ally by the US military, and thus, one assumes, by the 
American oligarchy: the Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Duponts - not 
to mention a very minor US oligarch named Prescott Bush, whose firms 
had extensive dealings with the Nazis, even after America had entered 
the war. The moral here is that a nation as powerful as the United 
States didn't - and doesn't - need allies. It has vassal states, 
instead. Step forward my own dear Britain!" 

I would add that what we are hearing about an American defeat and 
failure in Iraq is a deception fed to us by the government controlled 
media. Everything is going exactly as planned and is a precise 
replica of plans made many decades ago for the invasion of Mexico. 

How do we respond to such insanity ? 

Alice Walker had a great idea. We Stand Up, Unite, Find Our Voices 
and Shout, "Stop" ! 

Where Are The Women is filled with insight and possible choices that 
are ours to make. 

We have everything to gain...and if we fail to act...everything to 
lose. 

C.M.
Women Of The Blue Rose

All-Day Permanent Red: Alex Cox and the Long March of American 
Militarism

By Chris Floyd t r u t h o u t | UK Correspondent 
 I. Echoes From the Past and Future

 The images look familiar, even comforting in a way, steeped in 
the heroic black-and-white tints of classic movies and World War II 
newsreels. Unshaven, wisecracking GIs slogging gamely through urban 
combat. Tanks crawling over broken walls, past burned-out buildings. 
Quick cut to the skies: lumbering bombers releasing their payloads 
over sprawling cities, while fighters dart in and out around them and 
black clouds of ack-ack explode with sudden menace. A brief sweep of 
the enemy dead, frozen in their final agonies across a churned-up 
field. Then a long line of refugees, plodding along the edge of a 
highway while American troop trucks, jeeps, and half-tracks roar past 
them in the opposite direction.

 But there's something slightly wrong, something askew in the 
pictures. The shop signs in that ruined city - they're all in 
English. The road signs in that shot of the highway are in Spanish. 
And those refugees aren't white German burghers or French villagers; 
they're ... brown, like Mexicans, maybe. And look, the fighters 
swooping in to strafe our bombers - they've got maple leafs painted 
on their fuselages. And there, amongst the enemy dead, a corpse still 
clutching his battalion's flag: a Union Jack.

 This is the kind of cognitive dissonance evoked by a new 
screenplay from renowned director Alex Cox: "Our War Against Canada." 
The British-born Cox - long resident in the United States - is 
planning a three-part, 90-minute documentary on the all-too-true 
story of serious American plans to wage war against Canada, Mexico 
and Great Britain in the years before World War II. These detailed 
schemes are filled with "echoes from the future," in Pasternak's apt 
phrase: eerie prefigurements and deep-rooted patterns that have been 
played out - in reality, not just on paper - over and over down 
through the decades, and now confront us once again, most starkly and 
horribly, in Iraq.

 "War Plan Red" dealt with a proposed war against Great Britain, 
then considered America's chief rival for economic dominance in the 
world. The 1935 plan envisioned major strikes on UK interests around 
the world, with the primary focus on nearby Canada, which was to be 
subjected to a full-scale invasion and occupation, with aerial 
bombing of cities, massed infantry and armor attacks - and the use of 
poison gas. The capture of Canada's vast mineral wealth was another 
goal of the attack. How serious was this plan? Serious enough to be 
the object of the largest war games in US history up to that time: 
50,000 troops on a detailed dry run of the cross-border assault.

 "War Plan Green" was a similar plan drawn up for an attack on 
Mexico. This was to be a "regime change" operation designed to seize 
oil fields and protect US economic interests if an unfriendly 
government sought to challenge American hegemony. The plan began with 
economic sanctions to soften up the recalcitrant Mexicans, followed 
by the concoction of a suitable pretext for "defensive" military 
action. After a blitzkrieg assault on Mexico City, the regime would 
then be handed over to local collaborators, with an American-
trained "national army" to keep the populace in line.

 There is a general misconception that the US military has always 
turned out plans like these to cover almost every possible 
contingency, every country; thus you're bound to run across off-the-
wall scenarios, such as an invasion of Canada, that would never be 
implemented. But this is just a myth. In fact, war plans at this 
level of detail are never drawn up unless there are very serious 
policy considerations behind them. For example, the now-advanced 
plans for an airstrike on Iran are not simply contingency exercises 
churned out by Pentagon analysts, they were ordered directly by 
George W. Bush, as were the pre-war plans for the Iraq invasion.

 As Cox notes in the documentary's conclusion: "These war plans 
tell us some disturbing things about the world's last superpower - 
about America's attitude toward its allies, about the motivation 
behind its lofty sentiments, and its inexplicable acts of terrorism 
and war." Like some grand cinematic mashup, the film will force past 
and present into a strange, disturbing harmony whose resonances will 
almost certainly, tragically, echo far into the future.

 II. Follow the Money

 Alex Cox is something of a mashup himself - director, writer, 
actor, a unique combination of artistic integrity and political 
insight rarely seen in the cinematic world. His widely varied, multi-
leveled work - encompassing everything from early Eighties "cult" 
hits like "Repo Man" and "Sid and Nancy" to the more recent 
surrealist "Three Businessmen" and his mind-bending, Liverpudlian 
update of "The Revenger's Tragedy" - is characterized by an 
unflagging sense of subversion: overturning, undermining, examining, 
recasting the dominant paradigms of power and convention. Far outside 
the Hollywood mainstream, based in rural Oregon with his wife and 
creative/business partner, screenwriter Tod Davies, Cox's reputation 
draws an array of top talent to his projects, including Derek Jacobi, 
Joe Strummer, Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, Ed Harris, Elvis 
Costello, Eddie Izzard and many others.

 In recent years, Cox has also been directing documentaries on 
such diverse subjects as Japanese film icon Akira Kurosawa and the 
Seventies soft-porn "Emmanuelle" phenomenon - the latter made for 
British TV. It's unlikely that "Our War Against Canada" will be 
backed by the corporatist American networks anytime soon, but Cox was 
keen to talk about the project in an email exchange as he was 
scouting film locations around the American West for his next feature.

 Cox said the idea for the documentary sprang from an article by 
Floyd Rudmin in Counterpunch earlier this year. "I read it, and was 
fascinated," said Cox. "Rudmin's conclusion - that the US military's 
plan for the invasion of Mexico was the same as the invasion plan for 
Iraq (cause chaos, set up an ineffective puppet government, and 
create permanent military bases among the oil fields) - is stunning 
in its simplicity and its conviction. It suggests that the Iraq war, 
far from being a failure or a misadventure, is going exactly the way 
its authors planned. A documentary film - if anyone sees it - can 
bring that information to a wider audience."

 The film also drives home another telling point: that there were 
no similar plans for a possible war with Nazi Germany - a nation that 
one might think posed a greater potential threat than America's close 
allies Britain, Canada and Mexico. But there's nothing strange about 
this to Cox; it simply underlines the elitist economic interests that 
have remained the driving force behind US foreign policy for 
generations.

 "The war plans were to cripple potential economic rivals and to 
seize the natural resources of Mexico and Canada. Germany was viewed 
entirely as an ally by the US military, and thus, one assumes, by the 
American oligarchy: the Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Duponts - not 
to mention a very minor US oligarch named Prescott Bush, whose firms 
had extensive dealings with the Nazis, even after America had entered 
the war. The moral here is that a nation as powerful as the United 
States didn't - and doesn't - need allies. It has vassal states, 
instead. Step forward my own dear Britain!"

 And the American media have been eagerly complicit in masking the 
true nature of this corporatist agenda, Cox noted. "The Washington 
Post ran an article based on Rudmin's research into the war plans at 
the National Archives. As Rudmin pointed out, there was a code name 
for Germany: Black. But the Post reporter outright lied, pretending 
there was also a 'War Plan Black.' There wasn't. There were too many 
American corporations - IBM, Ford, DuPont, Standard Oil - doing 
business with the Nazis to permit such possibilities. So apparently 
it's the Washington Post's job to reverse the truth, via scurrilous, 
lazy fudges."

 The plans didn't stop at aggressive war and economic terrorism, 
however. They also envisioned internment camps for British and 
Canadian nationals in the States, along with homegrown "pacifists" 
and other troublemakers. Nor did they draw the line at conventional 
weaponry; as noted, WMD attacks of poison gas were part of the 
scenario. Here too, Cox sees disturbing continuities.

 "I suppose all countries were guilty of this," he noted of the 
WMD plans. "Both sides used it in the First World War. Churchill 
viewed poison gas as an excellent option, as I recall. Mussolini used 
it in North Africa. Today most civilized nations eschew gas, germ 
warfare, and landmines (though not the US on the latter) - but there 
are no international prohibitions against napalm, white phosphorus, 
depleted uranium, or cluster bombs: equally insidious weapons, even 
crueler than the phosgene and mustard gas they've replaced."

 As for the planned concentration camps - which were actualized 
less than a decade later, in the internment of Japanese-Americans -
 "there were such plans in the Eighties too, at the time of the 
Nicaraguan and Salvadoran civil wars - Rex-84 and other mass-roundups 
planned by Ollie North," said Cox. "But all that stuff gets forgotten 
very quickly - just as Clinton and Gore's support of the Contra 
terrorists, or Jimmy Carter's creation of the Islamic extremist army 
in Afghanistan - vanishes quickly from the 'official' record."

 Indeed, such inconvenient truths reveal another salient fact 
about America's corporatist militarism, from "War Plan Red" 
to "Operation Iraqi Freedom," said Cox: its bipartisan 
nature. "That's why the American electorate gets a choice of two oil-
related warmongers like Gore and Bush," he said. "It's easy and lazy 
to pretend that Kerry or Clinton would have done things differently. 
But a million Iraqi children died on Clinton's watch - a price that 
Madeline Albright said was perfectly acceptable."

 Confirmation of this joint responsibility for decades of 
murderous mischief comes from an unexpected source: Robert Gates, the 
new Secretary of Defense for Bush Junior (and ex-CIA chief for Bush 
Senior). "Robert Gates wrote a book called From the Shadows in which 
he said that, having served in six administrations, Democrat and 
Republican, he saw no difference between the parties' foreign 
policies," Cox said. "Carter created the Afghan terror network and 
the Contras. Bush and Reagan just enhanced them. And FDR signed off 
on the invasion of Mexico and Canada. Gates is part of that small 
intelligence-related crew which has dominated US politics since the 
JFK assassination: people who keep showing up in different guises. 
John Dimitri Negroponte is another. Rumsfeld another. Gates knows his 
stuff."

 "We - as sentient citizens or individuals - need to get past the 
idea that a choice of two almost-identical parties will fix things," 
Cox went on. "Both parties in the US - like the Tories, New Labour, 
and the Liberal Democrats in England - represent the needs and 
desires of the oligarchy and the big corporations. There is no 
difference between any of them. As long as they control oil in the 
Middle East, water resources in Bolivia, and uranium on the Navajo 
reservation, they're happy. The only solution is another party. And 
that, for me - based on what I've seen in England and Scotland - is 
the Greens."

 At the same time, Cox is fully aware of the fickleness of 
political factions - even the most "progressive" ones. One of his 
most striking films, "Walker," was a darkly comic look at a 19th 
century American intervention in Nicaragua. He shot the film in 
Nicaragua itself, with the cooperation of the Sandinista government, 
in 1987, at the height of the Contra terrorist war. The Sandinistas 
returned to power this month with Daniel Ortega's presidential 
victory. But Cox sees little to celebrate in this political sequel.

 "I can't rejoice at all in Ortega's victory, despite the energy 
and time I put into supporting the Sandinistas - including giving 
them millions of Universal Picture's dollars. Ortega has made too 
many compromises with the oligarchy and the Catholic Church. He has 
discredited the party and the movement. The weekend before his 
election victory, a young woman died in a Managua hospital because a 
doctor was afraid to give her a therapeutic abortion. What does 
anyone have to celebrate in Nicaragua?"

 Still, Cox keeps moving, seeking out new ways to "inoculate the 
world with disillusionment," as Henry Miller once described the role 
of the artist. "Our War Against Canada" is part of that effort. "Paul 
Lewis, who was Dennis Hopper's producer, said that films should be 
punishment inflicted on people looking to be entertained. I subscribe 
to that philosophy," Cox said, then added: "Unfortunately, we were 
thinking about an improving punishment, rather than the current crop 
of Hollywood films."