News Analysis

Fred Weir

H... is the scene: The year is 1998,
| and all of North America is under occupation
) by Soviet and “United Nations”’ troops, who
conquered it a decade before following a
successful nuclear war. The United States
lies crushed, impoverished, oppressed.
America was, it turns out, betrayed by
weak-kneed liberals and treasonable ‘‘pro-
8ressives’’, who sapped its elemental fron-

lier fibre and thus opened the door to alien
invaders.

Here is the scene: The year is 1998,
and all of North America is under occu-
pation by Soviet and ‘‘ United Nations”’
troops, who conquered it a decade be-
fore following a successful limited nu-
Clear war. The United States lies
Crushed, impoverished, oppressed.
America was, it turns out, betrayed by
weak-kneed liberals and treasonable

progressives’’, who sapped its elemen-
tal frontier fibre and thus opened the door
to alien invaders.

This is the essential plotline of Ameri-
ka, a 13-part ABC mini-series which just
Might be, at $44-million (Cdn.), the most
_ €Xpensive television movie ever made.
_ Called by its creators ‘‘a film about
_ America, a film about freedom’’ it was,
_ Ironically, largely shot on locations
_ around Toronto, Canada. Described by
_ Many on the Left, and by those who are
| Tepelled by the Cold War as
| “McCarthyesque, anti-Soviet pro-
| Paganda’’, Amerika has created a storm
_ of controversy which is not likely to
_ abate even after the mini-series has been
) aired this. February.

Propaganda Masterwork

“‘T would describe Amerika as a prop-
aganda masterwork, in the form of soap
Opera,’ says Toronto media critic Barry
Zwicker. ‘A such, I think it’s extremely
dangerous because as far as it is com-
Pelling viewing on the soap opera level, it
May also be effective propaganda on the
Political level.”’

Amerika’ s script reveals a
_lurgid story line, laced with
_ Sado-masochistic sex,

‘ betrayal, brutality and
_ vengeance.

—————

A reading of America’s script reveals a
urgid story line, laced with sado-maso-
Chistic sex, betrayal, brutality and ven-
8eance. Standard soap-opera fare. Yet
Woven throughout this tale is a clear
Political agenda which seems designed to
appeal to the emotional prejudices of

‘S. viewers, to validate and reinforce
© most reactionary beliefs of Middle
Merica.

‘Amerika was born of the right-wing
Teaction against the TV movie The Day
ifter, which ABC ran three years ago,”
Says Zwicker. “The Day After was a mild,
Smokey the Bear’ treatment of the

€rmath of a nuclear war, a warning
at atomic holocaust could be a bad
Xperience.”’
“ae few days before The Day After was
Own, a column appeared in the Los
5 Beles Herald-Examiner, by one Ben
tein, a former Nixon speech writer,

which complained that the film played
into the hands of Soviet propaganda, and
suggested that Hollywood should make a
film ‘‘about why the people of the United
States face such a dreadful risk’’ as nu-
clear war. ‘“‘They might make a movie
about what life in the United States
would be like if we lived under Soviet
domination,’ wrote Stein.

“This is the essential premise of the
U.S. right-wing,”’ says Zwicker. ‘‘It is
best summarized in the expression
‘better dead than red’. The Ben Stein
column is now admitted to have been the
intellectual springboard for the produc-
tion of Amerika. The message is simple,
and Stein put it succinctly when he
wrote: ‘today many Americans simply
do not know what communism is, why it
is different from the way we live in
America, and why it would be the worst
catastrophe of all history if we stopped
fighting against it.’

“I think that is a tremendously accu-
rate statement about the fundamental
premise of the right-wing and, I regret to
say, the fundamental premise of Ameri-
can society too,”’ says Zwicker. ‘‘It’s the
religion of anti-communism. It’s the per-
petual enemy syndrome. It’s the fear of
the outsider raised to the most potent
level. It is all pervasive. And this is the
fundamental premise of Amerika’.

Political Agenda

Amerika is a story which takes place in
1998, a cautionary future history. One of
those, ‘if you’re not careful such and
such will happen’ yarns that we’re all
familiar with. An examination of the
script shows that this is the film’s central
feature and most probably its raison
d'etre: .

e Amerika portrays the USSR in un-
mitigated Reaganesque terms as a ruth-
less, expansionist power which by 1998,

thanks to the weakness and indecisive- ~

ness of the USA, has pretty much suc-
ceeded in conquering the world.
Soviets are depicted as brutal and usu-

, ally unthinking servants of the evil pow-

er. They use nuclear weapons without
hesitation. One Soviet general in the film
muses about finding ‘‘the final-solution to
the American problem,” perhaps by
‘‘missile attack on four or five American
cities.”

In familiar Cold War terms, the
Soviets are shown as bringing poverty
and deprivation everywhere they go.
(Ironically, part of Amerika was shot in
Tecumseh, Nebraska, a small town in
the heart of the. economically blighted
American mid-west. ABC chose it be-
cause the boarded-up, depleted main
street already pretty much looked the
part desired for post-invasion Amerika).

e Amerika also sneers at all ideas of
international unity and co-operation. By
depicting the United Nations as a tool of
Soviet conquest, and U.N: ‘‘peacekeep-
ing’’ troops as the forces that occupy the
U.S., it makes a mockery of the genuine
potential for global unity that is em-
bodied in the United Nations. In this re-
spect, the film accedes uncritically to the
Reagan administration’s program of
downgrading and ultimately disbanding
the world body.

e Amerika falsifies history. At one
point in the script, a teacher is shown
lecturing a classroom of school children
on American history before the Soviet
conquest. The kids are being indoctri-

nated with the ‘party line’, and they re-
cite their lessons: ‘‘When Americans
conquered the country, they killed In-
dians who had been living on the land
peacefully for thousands of years,” one
child intones. ‘‘Everything was run by
big companies. People who came into the
country were forced to work on building
railroads or in sweatshops or in steel
mills or coal mines for almost nothing . . .
while the bosses were rich and lived in
big houses with servants.”’

The key, Orwellian trick in Amerika is
that it represents these ideas as vile
‘commie propaganda’ whereas they are,
in fact, accurately stated aspects of U.S.
history.

e Amerika ridicules and attacks the
progressive ideas of the peace move-
ment, trade unions, women, environ-
mentalists, the United Nations, liberals
and civil rights advocates. It casts them
all in the role of Soviet dupes, purveyors
of enemy propaganda, who sapped the
strength and will of the USA and left it
open to conquest.

It casts progressives in the
role of Soviet dupes,
purveyors of enemy
propaganda, who sapped
the strength and will of the
USA and left it open to
conquest.

This side of Amerika’s political prog-
ram reveals the film as viscerally anti-
intellectual as well. ‘‘It relies very heav-
ily on abstractions like ‘freedom’,

3.99

‘democracy’ and, in fact, ‘America’,

’ says Zwicker. ‘‘These are high abstrac-

tions. I maintain stoutly that insofar as
we use high abstractions we cripple our
intellectual processes horribly. Because
all high abstractions fail. They are all
simplistic, if not overly simplistic. In
Amerika, the invocation of words like
“‘liberty”’ and ‘‘democracy”’ is as far as
the analysis goes. That’s no different
from the worst demagogue’s political
speech.”

Amerika is Panglossian
Amerika, says Zwicker, ‘‘is per-
meated with the premises of the Right.
It’s incredibly well crafted as a pro-
paganda masterwork. Let us not under-
estimate the intelligence and the talent
that has gone into this script. Because we

‘ don’t like it, let us not disparage the po-

tential power of it.”

Much of its effectiveness derives from
the technique of ‘future history’, notes
Zwicker. ‘‘The essential trick of it is this:
that it takes place in the future and there-
fore all references to the past in it are, in
fact, references to now. Amerika’s view-

ers, to the extent which they are engaged
with the story, are going to be doing the
flashbacking themselves.

““When the script says — as it does at
one point — that ‘back in the good old
days you could get hamburgers in
America. Now we all have to eat soya-
burgers because the Russians’ are in
charge and everything’s poor and run-
down’, at one and the same time such a
passage does the following:

a) It reconfirms for the viewers their

_ already present belief that communism

doesn’t work, that everything is dull and
drab if not, indeed, poverty-stricken
under Soviet-style socialism. _

b) Ittells everybody that, “‘hey, you’re
really lucky, right now, that America is
exactly what it is. Under Reagan, with
private enterprise, hamburgers,
commercialism, a bloated defence
budget, and everything.” It’s an implicit
vote of confiderce for everything that the
USA now is.

“TI think this is called Panglossian. Dr.
Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide uses the
line *‘All is for the best in this best of all
possible worlds’”’. This, says Zwicker,
accurately sums up the message that
Amerika will give viewers concerning
present day realities in Reagan’s Ameri-
ca.

Finally, notes Zwicker, there are the
appeals to the future, for Americans to
adopt the right-wing political program in
order to prevent the nightmare of
Amerika from coming true.

“The call of Amerika,’’ he says, ‘‘is
one of renewed dedication, renewed
blind’ devotion to American patriotism.
It’s an appeal to people not to fight with
each other in America. It’s a claim that
there are no competing class or other
antagonistic interests in America. It’s a
condemnation of those who would
criticize or dissent as very, very immor-
al, treacherous people. That is the mes-
sage of Amerika.”

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, JANUARY 28, 1987 e 5