Rambo in Black and White

Rambo is a near-legendary hero created by Hollywood in the 1960s to be a more modern manifestation of the American cowboy, who awarded himself a rare medal made from the bones of American Indians after white men occupied their land and exterminated them. Despite the victory of the Vietnamese in their protracted war against the United States, a victory due to perseverance, courage and the media’s role in exposing the crimes of the invaders, the shadows of that hero continues to flicker on screen. Because these invaders tortured their victims when they could, the white man stole an American Indian legend and gave the name “thunderbird” to an American luxury car, even though this bird, to the victim, had been an omen of deliverance that appeared on the horizon as the moment of victory approached.

During the preemptive wars started by America in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was necessary for Rambo to return, but in a different form—sometimes as a Marine, sometimes an American officer who received the highest honors of the war, though in fact he had not taken part in it and had not set foot on Iraqi or Afghan soil.

No sooner had the American president announced that the special forces of the American army had snared bin Laden in Pakistan than the movies hurried to remake Rambo, this time presenting him as a universal hero who saves humanity from terrorism. The Oscar-award winning director Catherine Bigelow found bin Laden’s dramatic killing to be exemplary material for a long American film about the life of bin Laden and the fate he came to—not just his death, but also the sinking of his corpse in the waters of the Gulf!

Naturally, as long as films continue to produce flawed images like these, there will be an absence of objectivity and balance, where there is no equivalence between the richest, most powerful and most brutal state in the world and the men, women and children hunted in the mountains, plains and swamps of Asia.

The American media’s portrayal of Obama’s victory over terrorism suggests to the world that World War III occupied less than a single hour, and ended with the defeat of a new enemy substituted for the Soviet Union before it dissolved. This in itself is a fundamental flaw in understanding. As Samuel Huntington, who proposed the “clash of civilizations” thesis, said, America has become proficient in inventing enemies, and sometimes in inventing heroes, as a writer in the New York Times commented after the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s killing!

We know that America’s happy ending for the Cold War left the U.S. with a feeling of emptiness that it needed to fill—and so that Washington could continue to play tennis with a steel ball and no net.

A normal person may not do more than simply watch films in search of entertainment, so when directors like Catherine Bigelow depicts America, of course Rambo’s abilities are doubled and a decade of time may be stuffed into three-quarters of an hour, so as to tell everyone that something the whole world was incapable of achieving was accomplished, not by the white man or the “WASP,” but at the hands of brown-skinned men.

Artists and film critics have already examined Hollywood’s methods of propagandizing and the way it creates heroes, but some of them have paid the price. After he upset Zionist circles, for example, Marlon Brando’s picture was distributed with the nose covered by a swastika – and he was the artist who refused to accept an Oscar in defense, as he said, of what honor remained!