John Weeks

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...

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John focuses on the application of “Corporate Agent Theory” to the State. He argues that, despite their lack of phenomenal consciousness, states have their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Above all, states desire war.