Oliver Stone et les USA du crépuscule

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Oliver Stone et les USA du crépuscule

Barack Obama est-il “un loup déguisé en mouton” et tentant de rassurer, en la trompant bien entendu, la bergerie ? Il reste que, dans la bergerie, à mesurer le nombre d’articles crépusculaires sur les USA (voir le 28 décembre 2012), on commence à juger que le loup porte vraiment sa défroque et qu’il est bien insuffisant pour imposer un ordre martial, discrétionnaire, voire totalitaire, comme un vulgaire Orwell, pour sauver la boutique.

Russia Today propose, ce 28 décembre 2012, une interview d’Oliver Stone, le metteur en scène, et de Peter Kuznick, l’historien. Les deux hommes ont co-produit une série télévisée historique, The Untold History of the United States, basée sur l’idée du “What If ?” (“Que se serait-il passé si…?”). (Voir, par exemple, le Washington Times du 12 novembre 2012.). Stone, grande personnalité médiatique d’Hollywood, avec beaucoup de films très politiques à son actif, est intéressant parce qu’il est un critique quasi “dissident” de la situation politique US, mais avec des variations. Sous GW Bush, il était évidemment opposant du président US mais il tint à affirmer son patriotisme à propos de 9/11, avec un film consacré à l’événement. Partisan de Barack Obama, puis déçu par Barack Obama, il s’est à nouveau plutôt radicalisé, avec son soutien affirmé, visible, avec des films et des apparitions officielles, à Cuba, à Hugo Chavez et au Venezuela. Kuznick partage à peu près les opinions de Stone mais il semble penser qu’Obama est “récupérable” et pourrait faire quelque chose d’important, dans le sens antiSystème, durant son second mandat. Cette idée n’est guère partagée par Stone, sinon, disons, pour “demander à voir”…

Nous donnons plusieurs extraits importants de cette interview.

• Dans cette partie, on discute surtout la politique d’Obama, notamment par rapport à celle de GW Bush. Les deux hommes sont d’accord pour reconnaître que la politique d’Obama est non seulemernt la continuation, mais l’aggravation de la politique de GW Bush. C’est l’idée que nous avons souvent exprimée, notamment dans notre article sur la politique-Système. Il s’agit d’observer que la fameuse “politique de l’idéologie et de l’instinct” est passée, avec Obama, en mode-turbo, c’est-à-dire qu’elle est pire autant dans la forme que sur le fond. Les deux hommes examinent les actes du président US, particulièrement iniques lorsqu’il s’agit des restrictions des libertés publiques et de la surveillance des citoiyens, de la “guerre des drones”, de l’illégalité constante de sa politique. Malgré tout cela, Kuznick affirme effectivement qu’Obama pourrait s’avérer, comme il dit, “salvable”, et pouvant lancer des actes et initiatives intéressants durant son second terme… Certes, il serait temps qu’il s’y mette car, pour cette hypothèse, il faut aller vite, très vite, et ne pas trop réfléchir, notamment aux conséquences négatives en cas d’échec.

Russia Today : «It took both of you almost five years to produce this series. And in it you have a chapter called Obama: Management of a Wounded Empire. You give a harsh critique of the Obama administration. What in your eyes has been the most troubling aspect of his presidency, Oliver?

Oliver Stone : «I think under the disguise of sheep’s clothing he has been a wolf. That because of the nightmare of the Bush presidency that preceded him, people forgave him a lot. He was a great hope for change. The color of his skin, the upbringing, the internationalism, the globalism, seemed all evident. And he is an intelligent man. He has taken all the Bush changes he basically put them into the establishment, he has codified them. That is what is sad. So we are going into the second administration that is living outside the law and does not respect the law and foundations of our system and he is a constitutional lawyer, you know. Without the law, it is the law of the jungle. Nuremburg existed for a reason and there was a reason to have trials, there is a reason for due process – ‘habeas corpus’ as they call it in the United States.

Russia Today : «Do you agree Peter?»

Peter Kuznick : «I agree, if you look at his domestic policy, he did not break with the Bush administration’s policies. If you look at his transparency – he claimed to be the transparency president when he was running for office. There has not been transparency. We have been actually classifying more documents under Obama than we did under Bush. All previous presidents between 1970 and 2008 indicted three people total under Espionage Act. Obama has already indicted six people under the Espionage Act. The surveillance has not stopped, the incarceration without bringing people to trial has not stopped. So those policies have continued.

»Then there are war policies, militarization policies. We are maintaining that. We are fighting wars now in Yemen, Afghanistan, we are keeping troops in Afghanistan. We have not cut back the things that we all found so odious about the Bush administration and Obama added some of his own. The drones policy – Obama had more drone attack in the first eight months than Bush had his entire presidency. And these have very dubious international legality.»

Oliver Stone : «Peter was hopeful that the in the second term there will be some more flexibility, we hope so. But, there is a system in place, which is enormous – the Pentagon system.»

• Naturellement, on en arrive à la description de l’Amérique d’Obama, cette sorte de monstre orwellien, encombré d’obsessions et obsédée par la surveillance de ses citoyens, – jusqu’à dire, fort justement, fort judicieusement et beaucoup plus profondément, selon Stone, que les USA en sont arrivés à “se surveiller eux-mêmes”, au fond à être à leurs yeux leur premier suspect d’ils ne savent pas très bien quoi, – «But the truth is that we are all ultimately watching ourselves. It is an Orwellian state.» Suivent chiffres et détails de cet immense entité policière, ou auto-policière, submergée elle-même par la masse d’informations sur les citoyens, de surveillance, des messages interceptés (1,7 milliard par jour), avec un appareil de sécurité et de surveillance comptant jusqu’à un million de personnes disposant de la security clearance… Cette monstruosité constituant la recette pour l’inefficacité absolue, la paralysie, l’impuissance, sous le flot d’informations, de soupçons, absolument inutilisable d’une façon cohérente et accentuant, multipliant encore l’auto-paranoïa du Système.

Russia Today : «You also cover Pearl Harbor, which of course led to the internment of Japanese American citizens. I do not think a lot of people acknowledge that once again underreported aspect of really what that meant. When you look at the surveillance grid in America today it almost seems like it is an open-air internment camp, where they do not need to intern people anymore because we have this grid set up in place. What do you guys think about that?»

Peter Kuznick : «The US government now intercepts more than 1.7 billion messages a day from American citizens. That is email, telephone calls, other forms of communication. Can you imagine: 1.7 billion? We’ve got this apparatus set up now with hundreds of thousands of people, over a million of people with top security clearances in this kind of nightmarish state, this 1984 kind of state.»

Oliver Stone : «One million top security clearances. That is a pretty heavy number. In other words, we are living in a fish pond and I think the sad part is that the younger people accept that. They are used to the invasion. And that is true, how can we follow the lives of everybody? But the truth is that we are all ultimately watching ourselves. It is an Orwellian state. It might not be oppressive on the surface, but there is no place to hide. Some part of you is going to end up in the database somewhere.»

Peter Kuznick : «And it can be oppressive on the surface. One of the things we feared after 9/11 was that if there was a second serious attack like 9/11 then the constitution would be gone. The crackdown would be so outrageous at that point. And there is still this obsessive fear. The US fears things, we fear the rest of the world. We spend as much money on our military security intelligence as the rest of the world combined. Do we have enemies that we feel so threatened by? Do we really need this anymore? Is this what our priorities should be? No we think not, we want to turn that around.»

Russia Today : «The evisceration of the rule of law, especially the National Defense Authorization Act, which eradicates due process – our basic fundamental freedom in this country. I wanted to bring up another interesting point that really struck me in the film series, which are the kamikaze pilots. They were brave, that was the bravest act that you could do and then I can’t help but think of suicide bombers today and Bill Maher, he goes out and loses his show for saying these people are brave. And you have people like Ron Paul get up there and talk about blowback as a reality and he is ridiculed. How did we get here, where the discourse is just so tongued down when we can’t even acknowledge the truths such as that?»

Oliver Stone : «Primitive of course. There has been a blind worship of the military and patriotism. I strongly believe in the strong military, but to defend our country, not to invade other countries and to conquer the world. I think there is a huge difference that has been forgotten: morality. Once you take the laws away, as Einstein once said famously, the country does not obey its laws, the laws would be disrespected. So it seems that the fundamental morality has been lost on us somewhere on the way recently and now it is what is effective. Can we kill Bin Laden without having to bring him to trial, can we just get it done? And that ‘get it down’ mentality justifies the ends and that is where countries go wrong, and people go wrong. All of our lives are moral equations. Does the end justify the means? No, it never did.»

• Autre sujet abordé : les nouvelles générations et leur perception de la situation, si elles ont vraiment la perceptions qu’il s’agit d’une situation exceptionnelle. Les réponses sont pour le moins dubitatives, prudentes, etc. Il faut admettre évidemment que l’actuelle génération de la jeunesse est complètement formée pour n’avoir aucun besoin de références, d’esprits critiques, de vues intégrées et générales de la situation, pour éviter toute approche contestatrice du modèle existant. Mais il n’est pas assuré que la réussite complète d'une telle démarche soit possible. Certains signes (le mouvement Occupy) ont montré cette difficulté pour l’appareil de tenir à distance de la réalité du monde les nouvelles générations. Il ne nous semble pas qu’il s’agisse de vertus particulières, ou de capacités de résistance particulières de ces jeunes générations, mais des énormes difficultés et des contradictions du Système lui-même, qui le rendent particulièrement insupportable et vulnérable. Dès qu’un homme est capable d’exprimer cela clairement, il obtient un succès considérable auprès des jeunes comme ce fut le cas de Ron Paul.

Russia Today : «If both of you are to make a film about this generation right now, what is one facet that you think is the most underreported or misrepresented?»

Oliver Stone : «I don’t know about the younger generation, I have three children. I think it is an eternal story in some degree. People no matter what have a similar morality and consciousness, patterns re-emerge again and again. The young men and young women want to make their way into the world. And it is not that far off from what we went through. So I believe in cyclical history and I think my children are going through what I and my father and mother went through. I always look for those patterns first beyond the superficiality.»

Peter Kuznick : «I find that my students care very passionately about what is going on in the world. They are all doing lots of volunteer work. But what I find in this generation, like Oliver’s and my generation, is that they treat the symptoms. They are not asking the questions about the root cause of all of these problems. They care, they try to change things, but it is more superficial.

»What we are challenging them to do is look at the patterns. Look at what has happened from the 1890s all the way through to today. Look at the consistency of the wars, interventions, the military expenditures, the paranoia, they fear of outsiders, the oppression. And get it to the root, what is making the system as a whole sick in a certain ways and how can we root out those deeper causes.

»Now that we understand that, we can begin to change that. The Occupy movement did some of that there have been times in the 1930s, 1970-80s, 1960s when people were challenging on that scale. We want the country to begin thinking about these big questions again. What is our past, how did we get here, what are the possibilities for the future, what have we done wrong and what can we get right?»

Russia Today : «Do you think these superficialities in the conventional wisdom that we hear are perpetuated to keep us in a perpetual state of war?»

Peter Kuznick : «I don’t know if it is quite so deliberate, but that seems to be the effect – dumbing down the population to the point where they cannot think critically and then you can pull anything over their eyes. They have a five-minute attention span and a five-minute memory of what happened in the past. We are saying learn your history, study it and think about what the alternatives are, think in utopian ways how different the world could be, how better it could be if we start to organize it rationally in the interest of people, not in the interest of profit, not in the interest of Wall Street, not in the interest of military, in the interest of our common humanity, the six billion of us who occupy this planet.»

Oliver Stone : «The model of the series of The World at War, which was made by the BBC in the 1970s about WWII. Ours are 10 feature films, cut with care, an hour each, pure narration, music, and sometimes clips of films that make our point or don’t make our point. Either way we try to keep it flowing like a young person could enjoy it like a movie, I am glad you did.»


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