Jacqueline Luqman on the U.S. State Controlling Hollywood

Editor’s Note: This report was originally published by Antiwar.com.

CBS News retracted a documentary it briefly released on August 7 after pressure from the Ukrainian government. The original documentary (watch it here) CBS put out examined the flow of military aid to Ukraine and quoted someone familiar with the process who said in April that only 30 percent of the arms were making it to the frontline.

We removed a tweet promoting our recent doc, "Arming Ukraine," which quoted the founder of the nonprofit Blue-Yellow, Jonas Ohman's assessment in late April that only around 30% of aid was reaching the front lines in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/EgA96BrD9O

— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 8, 2022

“All of this stuff goes across the border, and then something happens, kind of like 30 percent of it reaches its final destination,” said Jonas Ohman, the founder of Blue-Yellow, a Lithuania-based organization that CBS said has been meeting with and supplying frontline units with aid in Ukraine since the start of the war in the Donbas in 2014. “30-40 percent, that’s my estimation,” Ohman said.

After the documentary sparked outrage from the Ukrainian government, it was removed from the internet by CBS. In an editor’s note, CBS said it changed the article that was published with the documentary and that the documentary itself was being “updated.”

The editor’s note also insisted that Ohman has said the delivery of weapons in Ukraine has “significantly improved” since he filmed with CBS back in April, although he didn’t offer a new estimate on the percentage of arms being delivered.

The editor’s note also said that the Ukrainian government noted U.S. defense attaché Brig. Gen. Garrick M. Harmon arrived in Kyiv in August for “arms control and monitoring.” Defense attachés are military officers stationed at U.S. embassies that represent the Pentagon’s interests in the country. Previously, it was unclear if there was any sort of military presence at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv after it reopened in May.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the retraction by CBS was not enough and called for an investigation into the documentary. “Welcome first step, but it is not enough … There should be an internal investigation into who enabled this and why,” he wrote on Twitter.

In the documentary, Ohman described the corruption and bureaucracy that he has to work around to deliver aid to Ukraine. “There are like power lords, oligarchs, political players,” he said. “The system itself, it’s like, ‘We are the armed forces of Ukraine. If security forces want it, well, the Americans gave it to us.’ It’s kind of like power games all day long, and so eventually people need the stuff, and they go to us.”

Other reporting has shown that there is virtually no oversight for the billions of dollars in weapons that the United States and its allies are pouring into Ukraine. CNN reported in April that the United States has “almost zero” ability to track the weapons it is sending once they enter Ukraine. One source briefed on U.S. intelligence described it as dropping the arms into a “big black hole.”

Black political organizations and other anti-imperialist groups condemned the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) raiding early Friday morning the properties of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and its solidarity organization in Saint Louis, Missouri, and in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

Based on the description, APSP appears to be one of several unidentified groups and people implicated in a 25-page indictment of a Russian national, Aleksandr Ionov. The Moscow-based founder of the nonprofit Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR) has been accused of attempting to influence U.S.-based groups to turn against the United States and work in favor of Russia.

“Anyone who opposes U.S. imperialism or who has made common cause internationally is endangered,” Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Margaret Kimberley wrote on Facebook. “Not surprising that a Black organization is the first on their hit list.”

The raid began at 5 a.m. July 29 at the Saint Louis home of APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela and his wife and APSP Deputy Chair, Ona Zené Yeshitela.

Yeshitela said in a Facebook livestream later that day that the APSP was targeted for its support of Russia during the military operation the country has been undertaking in Ukraine since February 24.

Among several allegations, the FBI accused Ionov’s group of paying U.S. activists to attend two conferences in Russia. It also said Ionov helped a group conduct a tour in the United States to drum up support for a petition charging the U.S. government with committing genocide against African descendants. Yeshitela admitted meeting with Ionov twice in Russia.

“Suddenly, we’re supposed to become tools, like Black people don’t have minds of our own to find out what our reality is and who’s responsible for it,” Yeshitela said in the livestream. “It’s white people doing self-criticism and uniting to give money. That’s where the money is coming from, Uncle Sam.”

‘Crisis’ of U.S. Imperialism

Yeshitela said while the United States was targeting Black activists, it has failed diplomatically.

“They’re doing this, in part, because not a single African country—not even neocolonial sycophants—want to unite with the United States and the United Nations in terms of how they are targeting Russia in this Ukraine-Russia question,” he said, referring to the economic sanctions slapped on Russia after it entered Ukraine in February. When Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky recently held a virtual meeting with African countries, 93 percent of heads of state did not attend, despite Western pressure.

“This exposes the crisis the United States, that U.S. imperialism, is in,” said APSP Director of Agitation and Propaganda Akilé Anai in a livestreamed press conference in Saint Petersburg. Anai said FBI agents lured her outside her home early Friday morning, saying her car had been broken into. Upon opening her car, they forced her to hand over her devices, she said.

Yeshitela, 80, said he and Ona were awoken Friday morning to the sound of a voice blaring through a megaphone outside their home, asking them to come outside with their hands up. Flashbang grenades were set off throughout the working-class Saint Louis neighborhood, Yeshitela added. He also said a drone almost hit Ona’s face after she opened the home’s front door. Law enforcement agents lately have deployed drones into buildings to conduct a visual search before agents enter.

Yeshitela said FBI agents handcuffed the couple and forced them to sit on the street curb while agents scoured their home. “They indicated they had a search warrant related to the indictment,” he said. The FBI freed the couple after several hours, but not without confiscating from their home all of their devices, such as computers and phones, according to Yeshitela’s livestreamed account.

The FBI was unavailable as of press time.

Black Scare, Red Scare

Black activists have long denounced the U.S. government’s anti-communist rhetoric going back to the early 20th century, saying such calls to take down communists really have translated into attempts to dismantle Black liberation movements and other liberation movements in the United States.

“In reality, what anti-communism/anti-Marxism does is to transform anything counter-hegemonic or non-conforming into subversion, foreignness, or disloyalty by punishing it as communist, communist inspired, or communist infiltrated and therefore illegal, illicit or criminal,” said Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly in a recent talk.

Burden-Stelly, an associate professor of African-American Studies at Wayne State University, has written a soon-to-be-released book, Black Scare, Red Scare (2023). It attempts to document how the U.S. government’s anti-communist policies repress Black and other oppressed people for organizing for their liberation. This, she has said, helps to protect what she calls “racial capitalism,” in which the most degrading labor is forced upon increasingly exploited racialized groups.

U.S. Government’s ‘Hysterical Response’

Black political groups denounced large segments of the U.S. political left for believing Black activists are stooges of Russia, or the former Soviet Union.

“We agree that APSP doesn’t have to apologize for fighting for justice for all oppressed and particularly African People like our ancestors Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Black Panther Party who were spied on, jailed and assassinated for standing up for the freedom and justice for African People worldwide,” said the central committee of Pan-Africanist organization All-African People’s Revolutionary Party in a statement issued Saturday.

Activists like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., who were called communists, were assassinated. Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, who advocated for the unification of Africa under Pan-Africanism and the end of European colonialism in Africa, was briefly imprisoned in Atlanta for what some consider the politically motivated charge of mail fraud. Trinidad and Tobago-born U.S.-based communist Claudia Jones—after whom Toward Freedom‘s summer editorial internship was named—was deported to the United Kingdom for her activism.

“We believe this repression to be a hysterical response to the United States’ loss of legitimacy in the context of the deepening crisis of capitalism and U.S. global hegemony,” said the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP)’s Coordinating Committee in a statement released Saturday. “The unleashing of policing and counterintelligence forces domestically and increased militarism and warmongering abroad in the name of national security are the only avenues left to the U.S. ruling class that is engulfed in an irreversible economic crisis. They represent the hallmarks of a naked fascism that the U.S. ruling class appears to be increasingly committed to in order to maintain the rule of capital.”

Then BAP added a warning in its statement.

“While it is APSP today, it will ultimately be the rest of us tomorrow. Resistance is our only option.”

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.

Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers.

“Don’t Look Up” uses satire to magnify the outrageous responses of fictional U.S. politicians, media, corporations and the population to a fictional comet that is about to collide with Earth and wipe out all life. But the film’s depiction isn’t too far from reality, considering how the real-life U.S. government has failed to address climate change, which could cost all of us our lives.

Leonardo DiCaprio effectively plays astronomist “Dr. Randall Mindy,” mentoring younger female doctoral student “Kate Dibiasky,” played by Jennifer Lawrence. Mindy is portrayed as a typically dull and bland scientist type, with a dull and bland wife and family life. This reflects the stereotype of scientists being boring and uninteresting, and helps to set up for the drastic change Mindy undergoes later in the film when he is exposed to the limelight.

Dibiasky on the other hand is the stereotypical hip, loner Geek Girl, rapping along with Wu Tang Clan’s “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthin’ Ta F’ Wit,” while she scours the stars in her school’s observatory and discovers the comet. But, as brilliant as she is, Dibiasky is portrayed as socially awkward and unsophisticated, with a demeanor that is actually direct, especially considering the circumstances, but is characterized as sullen and snarky, and used against her later in the film.

As the scientists’ discovery is brought to the attention of the president of the United States, played with wacky deviousness by Meryl Streep, their warnings are dismissed and spun in ridiculous ways. But when we consider how real-life politicians approach policy—and even science—not from a people-centered approach, but with a primary focus on polling and elections, the scenes depicting the president with her advisors and cabinet members aren’t so ridiculous after all.

The film also takes a very pointed jab at the media; vapid morning talk shows, in particular. Even those that are allegedly political, with their focus on keeping the banter and topics light, rather than focusing on whatever existential crisis humanity is facing, and there are lots of them, but in this case the impending extinction-level collision of a comet with Earth. But print media is not spared, as the lack of journalistic integrity is critiqued when a major print newspaper also goes with the narrative that polls well, rather than the truth of the story leaked to them that the talk news shows and the government ignored.

The stereotype of the sex-crazed, airhead talk-show personality is played boozily by Cate Blanchette, throwing herself at the (arguably) sexy male scientist, Mindy, while insisting that the serious Dibiasky never return to the show. But, in truth, too many female television personalities do play the role of the pretty, bleached-blond giggler anchoring “news” shows that millions watch every day, without delivering an ounce of real, truthful news about any of the issues that impact those people’s lives. And the film presents the misinformation those regular people receive from politicians and the media effectively in rabid “Don’t Look Up” advocates convinced that the comet is a tool being used by “them” to make people live in fear.

Meanwhile, Tyler Perry portrays Blanchette’s male co-anchor. He plays just as much of an airhead as his female colleague, refusing to deal with the seriousness of the comet, but he does so with a strain of vindictiveness as he makes jokes about the comet destroying his ex-wife’s house. I think there’s something to be said for the lengths some Black people will go to maintain the status quo, even when the lives of others are at stake and they know it. Particularly in the media.

Even citizen activism is touched on in the movie, with the fervent efforts to educate and inform people are drowned out by powerful politicians, the media and the military. And even celebrity advocacy is skewered for the feel-good-but-oftentimes-vanity project that it usually is.

Corporations are not spared in this pointed satire, as a creepy/robotic/absentminded professor/evil genius-like tech company CEO with a cult-like following named Peter Isherwell—played by English actor Mark Rylance—floats a truly diabolical idea to the president on how to deal with the comet. Isherwell’s company, BASH Cellular, is an obvious portrayal of the tech behemoths Apple, Google and Facebook have become. BASH is so ubiquitous, the fictional tech company is able to detect people’s moods and present them with visual content to help them feel better. That isn’t out of the realm of reality, because who doesn’t enjoy a great cat video right now? I sure do. But that the government capitulated to him isn’t ridiculous at all in light of the current corporate control of the real-life U.S. government, and viewers should not miss the film’s condemnation of the illogical, insane, life-threatening capitalist greed in the whole plan. What people may miss is the implied imperialism when the fictional U.S. government breaks a treaty with China, India and Russia, and the coincidental (not at all) mysterious (not at all) disaster that befalls the aforementioned countries’ plan.

It is true that the film is co-written by David Sirota, former-Clintonite-turned-progressive. But Sirota and his crew are spot on with much of the political commentary. Where it misses is the film is very… Eurocentric, with only a lone Indigenous dancer near the end, which might signify the people nobody listened to. But I’m not quite sure. That scene honestly seemed like an afterthought. 

Otherwise, “Don’t Look Up” is a funny film because the responses of the fictional politicians, media figures and regular folks are so utterly and breathtakingly ridiculous and portrayed so well by the cast. But I think it also is a horror movie because we know every depiction of the real-life people and institutions those actors play is absolutely true.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and on Facebook; and co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary.”