John Weeks | The Libertarian Institute

Top Gun: Maverick and Participatory Propaganda

by John Weeks | Jul 11, 2022 | Featured Articles

Top Gun: Maverick is a brilliant film. Any film that can elicit the praise of Ben Shapiro, Willie Geist and Russell Brand, receive a five-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival and make over $1 billion is, as the Stalinists would say, “objectively” brilliant. Moviegoers and film critics are loving it. Unfortunately, for those of us opposed to militarism, empire and genocide, Top Gun: Maverick is not just a fun summer sequel to 1986’s Top Gun. It is also a preeminent cultural product of participatory fascism. Participatory Fascism Robert Higgs popularized the concept of...

The War in Ukraine and the ‘Star Wars Effect’

by John Weeks | May 10, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The American media’s Ukraine narrative is a vast deception that functions as a reassuring fantasy. The facts on the ground in Ukraine have overwhelmed the narrative being deployed in the West, but the American media simply ignores those facts. The effect is to placate the American people in service to the American state. The American state has learned well the lessons of Hollywood. The blockbuster film Star Wars (1977) allowed the American people, disillusioned from the recent defeat in Vietnam, to project onto and root for a victorious rebel insurgency. The state-driven media presentation...

Never Forget the Propaganda: New 9/11 Documentaries Reinforce Old Narratives

by John Weeks | Nov 2, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

There’s a moment in the documentary 9/11: Inside The President’s War Room in which former FBI agent James Kallstrom says, “It’s a day that 50 years from now our children will be taught about.” One can certainly imagine a future historian at the School of Interplanetary Communications giving a lecture about the al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001. The most efficient and intellectually honest pedagogical strategy would be to assign the class Scott Horton’s books Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan and Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, and then lecture...