From torture to telecommunication

Teaser #2 for my SECRET INTERNET FILM.

Been doing some more research and thinking about possibly making my SECRET INTERNET FILM — about a technology that was developed to wage a war on communism and which is now being used to wage a war on us. I was looking at some footage from the Vietnam War era. It was during the Vietnam War that the actual tech that became the internet was developed. The Pentagon was developing computer/networking tools for anti-commie counterinsurgency and anti-commie air defense to kill people…and these same tools would be privatized by corporate America a few decades later and rebranded as a technology of freedom and personal liberation. Anyway, digging around the archives, I found some really depressing testimony from some young vets talking about all the atrocities they participated in during the war…how they routinely saw American soldiers and South Vietnamese allies raping, dismembering, mutilating, torturing people. This was all done in the name of freedom and democracy, and it was all intertwined with the development of the tech that I’m using to write this and that you’re using to read what I wrote. Here’s a clip of one US Army recruit named Dave describing what happened when his platoon handed over some POWs to the South Korea’s Marines, their allies:

…we were sweeping through the area and that we couldn't take we couldn't take care of any POWs. So I imagine instead of killing them, we handed them over to the Marines. Well we were still in the area, when the Marines started tying them down to the ground, they tied their hands to the ground. They spread eagle them. They, uh, they raped them. They raped all four. There was like maybe 10 or 20, uh, Rock Marines involved. They, um, tortured them. They sliced off their breasts. They, uh, took machetes and cut off parts of their fingers and things like this.

And, um, when that was over, they took the, uh, on all four. They took pop-up flares, which are, uh, it’s an aluminum canister you hit with your hand. It'll shoot maybe 100 to 200ft in the air. They stuck them up their, uh, vaginas, all four of them. And they blew the tops of their heads off.

Sticking pop-up flares in a woman’s vagina to blow her head off? What a nightmare. It’s the kind of fun I imagine Frank in Blue Velvet would be into if he was out in the field fighting for democracy.

When I see things like this, I recall the outrage that circulated here in America about what happened when Russia occupied Bucha. Americans convinced themselves that the atrocities uncovered there proved that the Russians were uniquely evil. No civilized nation on Earth would do anything like that! Well, yeah... Define civilized. The testimony also made me think of the whole “why is America backing Israel” argument… Well, this country has done and backed a lot of mass murder. Just in Vietnam alone, the number of deaths went into the millions — many of them as gruesome as the ones described by Dave.

The one thing I will say that’s good about America is that it is more pluralistic than many other societies — the culture is more decentralized and there are tiny democratic pockets here and there, and people are generally allowed to vent and organize to some degree. Does this freedom to vent make this society any less murderous? Probably not. I was born in the Soviet Union, a society that was supposed to be much more authoritarian than the United States. And yet it was the technocrats of the United States that dreamed of universal surveillance machines — a utopian nightmare, really…out of which the internet was born. A democratic society created the most powerful technology of surveillance and political control the world has ever known, one that has been adopted and used to prop up power by every functioning state in the world. That a democratic society created this tech seems paradoxical. But it might not be. It reminds me of the early pioneers of public relations — people like Edward Bernays — who openly talked about the need to manage the masses. They quite openly talked about how a democratic system necessitated the development of sophisticated technologies that gave the elite dictatorial power over society and yet hid that power behind democratic institutions. That a democratic society developed an entrenched authoritarian technology is not paradoxical — maybe just dialectical?

Anyway, here’s the second teaser I cut for a future film that is yet to be made. (You can watch the first one here.) It’s for subscribers only. Not sure if I’m ready to share this with the world yet.