Hollywood’s Reach — and Limits

From The Occidental Observer, September 12, 2009

When a set of beliefs becomes a society’s accepted morality, portrayals of good and evil often take stock forms. I’m younger than the majority of people who will read this, but even I am shocked with how much multiculturalism has replaced the old Ten Commandments morality as the basis of what it’s necessary to believe to be a civilized human. Anti-racism has largely filled the moral vacuum created by secularism and denationalization. Even American “patriots” have adopted a “more multi-cultural than thou” attitude to justifying their allegiances to the nation and traditional symbols like the flag. (just read any George Bush speech defending his Middle East policy).

Today, youths get their values from TV and movies. The reach of the American media truly is global. Tomislav Sunic writes in Homo americanus that “the belated version of Homo americanus appears often unnerving to American visitors in Europe in search of an elusive ‘true’ Frenchman, German, or a Dutchman.” Recently while in Russia I became one of those Americans unnerved. I went to the theater hoping to get a sample of Russian cinema. All the movies playing were dubbed American films.

When non-Americans do produce their own movies, too often the themes they take come straight from the discourse of American race relations. The crimes and poverty of an oppressed minority are blamed on an indifferent or even malevolent majority. . . . Read the whole article.