Hollywood has impeccably documented man’s cruelty to man in the 20th Century.

—–

As we begin the second decade of the 21st century with Sudan at the brink of a return to civil war and genocide, I’m reminded of a “Great Crime” at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Armenian genocide foreshadowed all other crimes which took place in the 20th Century: indiscriminate killing, the wholesale massacre of men, women and children, forced deportations, the systematic destruction of a population based on ethnicity, organized killing in the service of ideology. The Armenian genocide, the “Great Crime,” was the first milestone on the road into a century of genocide, democide, and war.

January 9, 2011 will be remembered as an important milestone in the 21st Century. If the planned date for a referendum on independence for Southern Sudan becomes a return to war and mass slaughter and enslavement of defenseless refugees, women and children, we have to ask what hope we have for our century.

Will the indiscriminate killing of women and children, wholesale massacres, forced deportations, systematic destruction of populations based on ethnicity, organized killing in the service of ideology become a part of Southern Sudan’s history or a part of all of our future?

With the referendum days away, Khartoum has upped the ante and begun bombarding refugees from the air and is attacking helpless civilians with HIND helicopters. The attacks are being aimed at voter registration points and are designed to incite fear and panic to disrupt the referendum. Over 15,000 Southern-Sudanese have been displaced by the most recent attacks and are in desperate need of aid. Thankfully groups like Persecution Project Foundation (PPF) are on location to provide help.

The Human-Rights Education and Relief Organization (HERO) has teamed up with actor and producer Eduardo Verasegui (founder of Manto de Guadalupe foundation) in effort to aid The Persecution Project Foundation in their life saving work in Darfur and Southern Sudan.

As a few small NGO’s battle in the most remote and dangerous parts of the world to care for the displaced refugees, only one voice has managed to capture the world’s attention– George Clooney. Since 2005 Clooney has made repeated visits to Sudan and brought worldwide attention to the situation in Darfur and Southern Sudan.

Celebrities are often told to shut up and sing, but I am grateful to Clooney and Verastegui for risking their lives to leverage their celebrity status

To which I say, “Stop—you’re both wrong!”

This, in a nutshell, is the message of the new documentary about me and my work that opens nationwide on Nov. 12. It’s called “Cool It” and, yes, the title is meant to be clever. The idea is that we do need to cool down the planet, but in order to do it sensibly we first need to cool it ourselves. That is, we need to dispense with both the anti-scientific denialism and the Al Gore-ish fear-mongering. Instead, what we should be doing is facing facts—and responding to them not with rhetoric but with smarter, more rational policies.

The first fact we need to acknowledge is the reality of global warming. Like it or not, the data is abundantly clear that man-made greenhouse gases have been building up in the atmosphere for decades if not centuries, with the result that global temperatures are rising. Yes, the “Climate-gate” emails and the disclosure of funny business at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change exposed some deeply disturbing academic chicanery and prejudice at some supposedly prestigious institutions. However, these revelations did nothing to undermine the fundamental scientific basis of global warming. What they did call into question were many of the more extreme predictions about global warming’s likely impact—such as the idea that all the Himalayan glaciers were about to disappear (they’re not) or that half the Amazon rain forest would soon be destroyed (not likely).

Of course, these extreme predictions are at the heart of the mainstream environmental movement’s position on climate policy. And this brings us to another set of facts we need to face: that while global warming is real, it is not quite the imminent catastrophe so many climate activists would have us believe. There may be some truth to the notion that in order to get people to focus on a problem, you need to scare the pants off them. But while worst-case scenarios may be a great way to get the public’s attention, they are a terrible basis for making public policy. If you believe that the southwest U.S. is about to become another dustbowl (as Paul Krugman has insisted) or that Greenland and Antarctica are on the verge of becoming huge piles of slush (as Al Gore would have us believe), of course you’re going to argue that we should do everything we can to eliminate carbon emissions as quickly as possible—even if that means amazingly costly and ineffective government policies.

And make no mistake about it—the kind of carbon cuts called for in the Kyoto Protocols and the European Union’s recently adopted 20/20 policy (under which carbon emissions are supposed to be cut to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020) are hardly a recipe for success. Not only would they rob us of trillions of dollars worth of economic output—the EU effort alone would cost an estimated $250 billion a year in lost GDP—but they would do astonishingly little to solve global warming. According to the DICE climate-economic model, if the EU plan were to be implemented every year for the next 90 years, the resulting reduction in temperatures would be too small to measure. (To be precise, the figure is a miniscule 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit.)

The good news is that there is another, better way to deal with global warming—a cure that is most assuredly not worse than the disease. As I have noted elsewhere, the big problem with the Al Gore approach to global warming is that it ignores the fact that despite all the hopeful talk about solar, wind, and other green energy technologies, we are still overwhelmingly dependent for our energy needs on carbon-emitting fuels like coal and oil. Why? Because coal and oil are far cheaper and more efficient energy sources than the alternatives. For two decades now, we have been putting the cart before the horse, pretending we could cut carbon emissions now (by taxing them) and solve the efficiency problem later. Unfortunately, this makes neither economic nor political sense. What we should be doing isn’t trying to make carbon-emitting fuels too expensive to use, but rather figuring out how to make green energy cheaper. If we could do that, we wouldn’t have to force (or subsidize) anyone to stop burning coal and oil. Everyone, including the Chinese and the Indians, would shift to the cheaper and cleaner alternatives.

This of course is a big if. But it’s not impossible. As the Breakthrough Institute has pointed out, we didn’t promote the digital revolution by taxing slide rules or restricting the supply of typewriters. We did it by investing massively in R&D. We could—and should—do the same with green energy technology. As we point out in “Cool It,” devoting roughly $100 billion a year to green energy R&D would likely produce the kind of game-changing breakthroughs needed to fuel a carbon-free future. Not only would this be a much less expensive fix than trying to cut carbon emissions directly, it would also reduce global warming far more quickly.

So why aren’t we doing this? I blame polarization. What’s keeping us from getting anywhere is the lack of any middle ground in the climate debate. As far as the alarmists are concerned, you either believe global warming poses an imminent threat to our continued existence or you are a denier. Deniers can be just as bad: in their view, if you don’t believe global warming is a nefarious hoax, you must be an empty-headed “warmist.” It’s time to retire the old shibboleths of both left and right—and stop branding anyone who dares question them a crackpot or worse.

Tackling global warming smartly is not (or at least it shouldn’t be) a political issue. Being smart is something we ought to be able to find bipartisan agreement on. For the politically conservative, the attraction of this approach is that it is a clear-headed, fiscally responsible response – and one that would actually fix the problem it is meant to solve.

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: State of the Union Address, President Obama, President Bush, Paul Krugman, United Nations, Himalayan Glaciers, Bob Woodward, New York Times, Roman Polanski, Childhood Obesity, and Coachella Music Festival.

So with that knowledge I happily accepted the invitation and jetted off for a week in Amsterdam with my co–producer, agent and publicist.  It wasn’t quite “Entourage,” but for our purposes it worked.

To truly understand the atmosphere of a film festival, you have to understand the bubble that is the film festival generally, and documentary film festival in particular. This is not to pass judgment on it, but rather to simply point out the fact that they live in an inviolable envelope of political homogeneity and when something shakes their world view the tremors are felt throughout the festival. That is exactly what we did.

But IDFA is no normal film festival.  Upon arrival, I felt as though I had entered the epicenter of secular, liberal, pseudo-intellectual Europe.  Because we were the only political film that took a centrist political approach in our movie, we were marked men from the start, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

IDFA is a massive affair that had thousands of films submitted for consideration and tens of thousands of attendees discussing and debating the merits of the films that they had just screened among the cafes, restaurants and sidewalks of Amsterdam. The heart of the city during those ten days beats to the cadence of the festival.  It truly is an experience to behold for any film lover and, for a filmmaker with a film in the festival, it is an experience unlike any that I have experienced before.

Despite IDFA’s size – more than 300 films were screened – there was a palpable buzz surrounding our movie, and the interest level on the street leading up to our first screening was measurable.  I came across individual after individual pouring over their film festival guide, and, looking over their shoulders, almost all had circled U.N. Me.

The first of our sold out screenings took place at Pathé de Munt, a large, modern theater located in the heart of Amsterdam only a couple streets away from Rembrandt Square. Though we had test screened U.N. Me for hundreds of people throughout the United States, across political, age and religious demographics, the situation we found ourselves in that rainy night in Amsterdam was a radical departure. 

As the curtains were drawn and the doors closed on our premiere screening, I was genuinely surprised, shocked even, that a film critical of the United Nations, a traditional darling of European doves, would be in such high demand.  Not a single seat remained unfilled.  Still as the lights went down, I held my breath.

Despite screening across widely varied demographics, clear trends emerged in our audiences.  The film plays well across the board, and does not tend to be viewed through the prism of our country’s partisan political landscape; that is to say moviegoers don’t identify it as being decidedly conservative or liberal, just a truthful, hilarious and harrowing broadside against the United Nations’ veneer of respectability.

But this was a European film festival audience.  While a couple people did storm out during the movie in a huff, nearly everyone stayed, watched and laughed.  As the credits appeared, we received a respectful ovation, but certainly not an enthusiastic one.

–

The Q&A took place immediately after the credits finished rolling the first question was emblematic of the rest of the evening. It began with a very angry man standing up and accusing me of being an American puppet and willfully ignoring the globe’s most egregious abusers of human rights.  He then sat down obviously pleased with himself, with a pretentious smirk on his face.  When I asked the man to name the countries to which he was referring, he boldly and without a hint of irony, named the United States and Israel.  He was then showered with shouts and howls from some in the crowd, while the shouters, received counter shouts defending the questioner, and so it went the rest of the evening.  In this particular screening I found the theater sharply divided on their opinions of the movie.  Half seemed to really love the movie and the other half found the movie repulsive.  The critical questions we got were evenly divided, with half of them being engageable and thought-provoking criticisms, which I enjoyed answering.  The other half were odious, blathering rants dripping with anti-American hatred and tinged with anti-Semitism, which I enjoyed even more. After the Q&A that night and every night after each screening, much of the audience followed me and my co-producer outside the theater and continued the questions well into the night.  The next screening was, oddly, completely different than the previous one.  After the screening concluded, we received thunderous applause, taking me by complete surprise.  Every question that we got was positive and usually began with the comment “Thank you for making this movie.” 

The rest of the screenings were similarly and deliciously unpredictable.  

During our week in Amsterdam, we spent a good part of each day doing media interviews.  My publicist set up a corner of a hotel lobby for us and we would do hours of interviews with print, radio and television journalists from across the globe, including a Sharia-compliant journalist from Iranian state media.  In all honesty, it was one of my favorite interviews.  He was tough, but surprisingly fair and kept looking at me strangely every time I ordered another whiskey.  In truth most of the interviews and the questions we were asked were strikingly similar to each other and I felt that the whole process became extremely rote (thus the need for libations).  There were several notable exceptions, including a piece from the extremely influential publication, Indiewire. While I didn’t love his photography, I really loved his review.

One of the only truly troubling experiences at IDFA was the almost institutional hatred of Israel.  This sentiment cut across the filmmakers, participants and even the IDFA leadership.   Prior to my arrival in Amsterdam, IDFA invited me to participate in a debate regarding Israel.  I eagerly agreed, knowing that I would probably be the only participant in the festival that would have the gall to defend the Jewish state.  A few days before the scheduled debate, I was pulled from participating.  They replaced me with a liberal, Israeli director, who for the most part, agreed with the person ostensibly taking the opposite position. While they refused to give me a straight answer on why they pulled me, it seems pretty clear that they did not realize when they invited me that I was a supporter of Israel. 

The entire festival was really an incredible trip into a world that had been totally foreign to me not too long ago. As a former investment banker, who had never even dipped his toe into the film world, this was indeed a strange and fascinating world that only reinforced the fact that I had made the right decision by quitting my job to take on this project. To take my movie into IDFA and the many other festivals that we have and are attending around the world is an electric experience and, I have a feeling, only a taste of what is to come.  

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Such a time of profoundly important Judeo-Christian sacredness, with our pride in its significance increasingly muzzled by “Progressively political correctness”, should and, I believe, will be honored more deeply because of the inferential shame our New World Order leadership would like to immerse it in.

Apparently, and for the entire history of America, its Judeo-Christian roots have been, in the eyes of Progressives, one of our nation’s incessant problems, and the main reason the United States has found it impossible to join the … uh … “community of nations”.

“Is this another diatribe, another imbecilic slap at the United Nations, Mr. Moriarty?!”

Yes … among other shots at the Progressive certainty over the apparently incontestable New World Order.

The Copenhagen Climate Summit and the American mainstream press make it sound like “It’s all wrapped up!”

Hmmm … not so fast!

I know that my old television series, Law and Order, with the invaluable help of that insidiously low key, Marxist agent provocateur named Rene Balcer, is a perfect example of the Obama Nation’s farewell to anything but “cultural equality” as an increasingly militant, Progressive demand. However, I think the likes of Dick Wolf, Barack Obama and George Soros are counting their chickens before they hatch.

The United States fought and won a World War with three tyrannies … simultaneously – Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan – a nightmare that actually dragged the nation out of its first Great Depression.

“Warmongers!!”

Right … now, however, the combined forces of Far left America, neo-Soviet Russia, Red China and a worldwide, Islamic Jihad – are threatening the entire Judeo-Christian civilization of not only all of Europe but the two American continents as well. The New World Order wants the Western Hemisphere wrapped up and delivered … with a Public Option Health Care Bill, by Christmas.

Delivered to George Soros and CC’d to President Obama before the New Year!

“George Soros?!”

Yes … this is a reminder of who still holds one of the purse strings within not only the Obama Nation’s Game Plan … but that of neo-Soviet Vladimir Putin as well.

“George Soros, eh?”

Yup.

If anyone is sitting on top of the Whole New World Order, it’s George Soros.

Hmmm, again!

“What’s that got to do with Christmas?”

Everything.

Not Soros, nor Obama nor the likes of Rene Balcer really want anything to do with celebrations that impede the speed of a fully Progressive, increasingly Marxist New World Order.

“What about Dick Wolf?”

He’s along for the ride. He is also what his Progressive friends think of as a “safe gambler”.

The Wolf’s riding the Rhone now, the Deep Red Horse of either a New World Order tyranny or apocalypse. The Progressive Wolf Pack surrounding him won’t let him off the ride … ever! If he jumps, they’ll eat him alive!

The 2009 Law and Order is nothing more than a shamelessly arrogant, propaganda arm for the Obama Nation and its profoundly seminal importance for the Progressive aim of dragging the United States of America into the New World Order … kicking and screaming, if need be.

Of course, leading all that “kicking and screaming” is the dauntless Glenn Beck!

Just days after I buttoned up my own enterstageright.com editorial, Senator Reid prepares us for our second civil war, after I ended it with threats of impeachment.

Glenn Beck was exposing the potentially “high crime” – the “misdemeanors” are already bleeding from the graft, blackmail and corruption within President Obama’s Czarified and, I believe, highly unconstitutional advisory staff – the impeachable offence of threatening our national security in order to bully a fellow Democrat into voting for the Complete Obama/Reid/Pelosi Health Care Bill.

Hmmmm, indeed!!

This isn’t Bill Clinton caught in a Tiger Woods dilemma!

This Chicago-style muscle which the Obama administration has been putting upon many Congressmen and Congresswomen, coupled with what I believe will be found  indisputably unconstitutional, the Cap and Trade Bill, these acts of reckless disregard for the Constitution are treading dangerously into impeachable offenses.

However, with a Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress?

Must we wait?

Or will the growing schism within the Democratic Party, that between the True Progressives and the Blue Dogs, widen to at least the width of the very Potomac River which our First President rode across to defeat taxation without representation.

With, as I say, the Obama Nation riding on the high horse of a Rhone Progressive Tyranny, the likes of Soros, Obama and, yes, my former producer, Dick Wolf, may very well ride off the “precipice” which President Obama spoke of so affirmatively the other day … but which will turn out to be the classic, old “precipice of disaster we all fear.

In this case, we needn’t fear it. The Law and Order of the Obama Nation, however, might end up falling off that cliff … all by itself!

In light of that possibility, I wish my readers the Happiest of New Years and the Merriest of Christmases!!

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: Gitmo Terrorists, President Obama, Stimulus Package, United Nations, Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, Nobel Peace Prize, Ashton Kutcher, Obama Cardboard Cutout, Sarah Palin, Rachel Maddow, and Madonna.

Now Kidman, like many Hollywood stars who want to prove that they’re more than just pretty faces, is involved in A Cause. Like Meryl Streep’s concern about healthy produce and Heather Graham for ObamaCare, Kidman wants to Save Something. To that end, she is the goodwill ambassador for the UN Development Fund for Women, known as UNIFEM and in that capacity, recently testified before Congress to plead for more support for the program (read: cold, hard cash).

The big story that came out of that appearance was Kidman’s concession that the film industry might play a role in violence toward women by portraying them as weak. That may be true, but it’s a topic for another day.

 Kidman’s desire to help women in need is admirable. But she might want to consider an outlet other than the UN to do this good work.

The UN is not only one of the most corrupt and inept organizations in the world, but one with highly questionable values. Here’s a sampling of the UN in action:

• UN Agency Calls for Teaching Children 5-8 Years of Age about Masturbation
• Congo observers slaughtered after 6 days of unanswered pleas to UN for rescue
• Worldwide Taxes Come One Step Closer
• Committee: UN Allowed ‘Corrupt Behavior’ in Oil-for-Food Program

And this is the organization that tries to tell everyone else what’s what? The one that do-gooders like Kidman want so desperately to be a part of because it’s “respected?”

But perhaps one of the most egregious stories to come out of the fetid cesspool that is the UN is this one:

With the United Nations already under fire for the Oil-for-Food mega-scandal and other corruption, sensational allegations of rampant sexual exploitation and rape of young girls and women by the U.N.’s so-called “peacekeepers” and civilian staffers in the Congo is dragging the global body’s reputation to an all-time low.

In a new report referring to the widespread sex scandal as “the U.N.’s Abu Ghraib,” the London Times provides some specific examples, including:

• A French U.N. logistics expert in the Congo shot pornographic movies in his home, in which he had converted his bedroom into a photo studio for videotaping his sexual abuse of young girls. When police raided his home, the man was allegedly about to rape a 12-year-old girl sent to him in a law enforcement sting operation. As the Times reported, a senior Congolese police officer confirmed the bed was surrounded by large mirrors on three sides, with a remote control camera on the fourth side.
• U.N. officials are worried that the scandal. which already has nettedd 150 allegations of sex crimes by U.N. staffers, will explode if the pornographic videos and photos, now on sale in the Congo, becoming public. “It would be a pretty big problem for the U.N. if these pictures come out,” one senior official told the Times.
• Two Russian pilots paid young girls with jars of mayonnaise and jam to have sex with them, the report adds.
• U.N. “peacekeepers” from Morocco based in Kisangani – a secluded town on the Congo River – are notorious for impregnating local women and girls. In March, an international group probing the scandal found 82 women and girls had been made pregnant by Moroccan U.N. staffers and 59 others by Uruguayan staffers. One U.N. soldier accused of rape was apparently hidden in the barracks for a year. Congo’s Minister of Defense Maj.-Gen. Jean Pierre Ondekane told a top U.N. official that all U.N. “peacekeepers” in Kisangani would be remember for would be “for running after little girls,” the Times reported. 
• And at least two U.N. officials – a Ukrainian and a Canadian – have been forced to leave the African nation after getting local women pregnant.

Most of the sexual abuse and exploitation, says the report, involves trading sex for money, food or jobs. However, some victims say they were raped, but later given food or money to make the incident appear to have been consensual – “rape disguised as prostitution.”

Nice. And the abuse wasn’t limited to the Congo:

The United Nation’s “sex-for-food” scandal continues to spread. As the human rights group Save the Children documents in a new report, U.N. peacekeepers in the war-torn, refugee-rich Liberia have been accused of selling food for sex from girls as young as 8. They are the latest victims in a growing tragedy that includes girls from Burundi, Ivory Coast, East Timor, Congo, Cambodia and Bosnia, proving correct a prediction made last year by the assistant secretary-general at the United Nations for peacekeeping operations. “We think this will look worse before it begins to look better,” she said last May after efforts to investigate peacekeepers in Congo had fallen short.

The report found abuse at all age levels from 8 to 18, though the victims older than 12 were identified as being “regularly involved in ’selling sex’.” But “all of the respondents clearly stated that they felt that the scale of the problem affected over half of the girls in their locations,” the report said.

How much has changed since these scandals were unearthed? I have no idea. But if libs have no trouble continuing to vilify the Catholic Church for its sex scandals years after their exposure and the Church’s attempt to finally do something about them, I have no problem continuing to vilify the UN for its disgustingly dirty laundry. Especially when that organization tends to see itself as the world’s moral arbiter, and demands plenty of money for its continued corrupt existence from nations it constantly lectures on matters of morality and fairness - like the US.

Until the UN cleans house, that organization’s lecturing and moralizing should be taken with a very large grain of salt.

Then there’s the small matter of UNIFEM of Canada honoring Louise Frechette, former Deputy Secretary of the United Nations. What’s the problem, you ask? Well, there seems to have been “a systematic attempt by the Deputy Secretary-General, Canadian Louise Frechette, to block results of audits into the Oil-for-Food program from the Security Council”.

What a great organization!

It’s nice that Nicole Kidman wants to help women around the world. I wish her well in her efforts. But she should give as much care and research to the organizations with which she affiliates herself as she would to a role in a movie.

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, U.S. Dollar, Cy Young Award, CNN, Obama Health Care Plan, Al Gore, United Nations, Norway, Wal-Mart, and Secretariat.

Dear   BARACK OBAMA  :

Congratulations! On behalf of the selection committee, I am pleased to announce that you have been named a 2009 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, in recognition of your tireless efforts to   STRENGTHEN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AND COOPERATION    .

I am also pleased to tell you that as a winner, you have been pre-approved for membership in the Nobel Peace Player’s Club, offering exclusive money-saving benefits available only to laureates like you. Please take a few minutes to look over the enclosed enrollment materials. At only $299.95 per year, I’m sure you’ll agree that membership is a bargain at twice the price! Here are just some of the benefits you’ll receive:

• A handsome 14-karat gold membership crest badge to display proudly on the grille of your limousine or official state aircraft
• A framed, hand-calligraphed certificate (add $19.95 for gold leaf)
• Special discount shopping bargains for for you and your family
• Great travel packages to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro
• Listing in “Who’s Who of Global Salvation” ($49.95 per copy)
• Great coupons for Olive Garden, P.F. Chang’s, Six Flags Theme Parks, and more!

Plus, you’ll receive the exclusive Nobel Peace Player’s Club GoldCard entitling you to discount air travel and 5-star hotel accommodations from Kyoto to Darfur. But don’t take our word for it! Listen to these testimonials from some of our current members:

“My career as an international peace activist means lots of air travel — and dealing with pushy Zionists and rude natives. With my Nobel Peace Player’s Club GoldCard, I finally get the respect I deserve – and it makes getting through Gaza airport security a snap!”
– Jimmy Carter, 2002 Laureate

“Whether we’re patrolling the Congo, Sudan, or Bosnia, one thing’s for sure — chicks can’t resist a Nobel Peace Prize Player!”
– United Nations Peacekeeping Forces, 1988 Winners

“My Players Club GoldCard lets me treat my friends and family to great perks.”
– Kofi Annan, 2001 Laureate

“I’m a take-action kind of guy. Whenever I fly to Tehran or Pyongyang, the first thing I pack is my Players GoldCard.”
– Mohamed ElBaradei (2005)

“I have to write a lot of honorary doctorate acceptance speeches, and writer’s block can be a problem. With the Player’s GoldCard I got great discounts at TermPapersLab.com!”
– Rigoberta Menchu (1992)

“The Player’s Club GoldCard is recognized everywhere — even in hell! I redeemed my Players GoldPoints at Club Satan for an exciting eternity of getting pounded up the ass. Thanks, NobelCo!”
– Yasser Arafat (1994)

“Don’t miss the boat like I did, comrade! I forgot to enroll, and now I’m spending eternity pounding Yasser Arafat up the ass.”
– Le Duc Tho (1973)

So what are you waiting for,    BARACK OBAMA  ? Enroll today and start enjoying the privileges of membership. Enroll today, and we’ll throw in a deluxe leather bound CIA intelligence report worth $1000!

Sincerely,

Ůmläut Ťïldëqvist, Chairman
The Nobel Peace Player’s Club Selection Committee

Originally launched in 1963 as a male version of the Barbie doll, GI Joe’s creators intended for the “action figures” to be a tribute to the armed services (prototypes included “Rocky,” the Army soldier, “Skip,” the sailor, and “Ace,” the pilot). GI Joe wore WWII or Korean War issue uniforms.  For the next five years, GI Joes (including black GI Joe figures in particular areas) would dominate the market. 

During the Vietnam era, Hasbro, GI Joe’s maker and distributor, decided to tone down the action figure’s military theme as a result of the Vietnam War. Instead, Hasbro shifted the marketing to “Adventure Team,” which included turning GI Joes into superheroes and having them fight “The Intruders: Strong Men from Another World.” 

With the coming of Reagan, GI Joe regained his footing. Hasbro began marketing the product again as “GI Joe: A Real American Hero.” The action figure even spawned a successful TV series, which touted GI Joe as “the code name for America’s daring, highly trained special mission force. Its purpose: to defend freedom against Cobra, a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world.” 

Fast forward twenty years. Hollywood, always eager to capitalize on already-lucrative marketing, is ready to release its version of GI Joe: GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.  And the creators of the movie are marketing it specifically to the so-called NASCAR crowd. Says Paramount Vice Chairman Rob Moore, “Our starting point for this movie is not Hollywood and Manhattan but rather mid-America.” 

Or not. Director Stephen Sommers, wary of international audiences, says that GI Joe will be in the mold of the Adventure Team 1970s. “This is not a George Bush movie,” Sommers explains.  “[I]t’s an Obama world. Right from the writing stage we said to ourselves, this can’t be about beefy guys on steroids who all met each other in the Vietnam War, but an elite organization that’s made up of the best of the best from around the world.” 

So GI Joe isn’t a Real American Hero – he’s a UN peacekeeper. This is reminiscent of the determinedly unpatriotic Superman Returns, which deliberately refused to state that Superman was fighting for “truth, justice and the American way.” Even GI Joe is now subject to the dictates of political correctness. We wouldn’t want Europeans thinking that we idolize the men and women of the American military. That would be uncouth. 

This is a reflection of Hollywood’s read on the Obama Administration. When Hollywood tackled GI Joe back in the 1980s, it focused on the GI Joes as Americans through and through – undoubtedly, a stance impacted by the renewed patriotism of the Reagan Administration. But with Obama, it’s different – we’re supposed to think of American soldiers as pieces in a larger coalition. GI Joe is supposed to be GI Hans, GI Vladimir, and GI Cho.  

GI Joe may be a good movie. It may not.  But if the creators’ intentions are reflected in the film, there’s little doubt it won’t be an American movie.