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Hijacking Catastrophe review
:. Director: Jeremy Earp & Sut Jhally
:. Genre: Documentary
:. Running Time: 1:08
:. Year: 2004
:. Country: USA
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As George W. Bush is reelected for a second term as President of the United States, examining the foreign policy that has led to two major wars in the face of another four years is more crucial than ever. As is the need to work towards a policy that is multilateral and less isolationist.
Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp of the Media Education Foundation have crafted a sobering, powerful documentary of American foreign policy in the new millennium that has been in the works for over twenty years. The opening quotation is ominous: it's about how leaders in a country can make people do what they want. "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked," stated Hermann Goring during the Nuremburg Trials. Foreign policy has been a PR campaign whose primary focal point has been the manipulation of fear in the media and it's worked successfully for this Administration, enough votes were counted solely based on this need to conquer "terrorism" without looking at the failures of the war in Iraq, let alone that a preemptive strike there ingeniously based on the threat of Al Qaeda
in fact had no basis.
If you've seen Fahrenheit 911, this film goes deeper and offers more proof in the form of documentation and interviews with those who have a bird's eye view of policy in action. Julian Bond narrates the film and people such as Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a Pentagon whistleblower; Scott Ritter, former Chief UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq; and Jackson Katz, the founder of the Mentors in Violence Prevention for the US Marine Corps. Insightful comments by Noam Chomsky, Jody Williams and the founders of Global Exchange offer acute observations. With Russia out of the picture, this has been the decisive moment to establish world domination, suggests Norman Mailer.
A strength of the documentary is that the filmmakers are careful, like Michael Moore, not to just interview liberals. But balance provides credibility, and in the case of Hijacking Catastrophe, much more weight is given to their careful work than Moore's infomercial against the Bush administration. This should not be earth-shattering news, but in the wake of thinly disguised warmongers like Fox News and also channels in the mainstream media that adore using flashy computer graphics versus the carnage of war, one sees how far things have gone: the media now traffics opinion and not facts. And these opinions manipulate the viewer's sense of security incessantly.
One of the more fascinating aspects of the documentary is the analysis of how the neoconservative "Wolfowitz Doctrine" moved from the radical neoconservative right wing think tanks to official American foreign policy in the world and was used to design the invasion of Iraq. It's all there, on paper and outlined.
For those moved by Fahrenheit 911, Hijacking Catastrophe offers more in terms of what this foreign policy means and where it's headed rather than on President Bush. For those unconvinced by some of Moore's propaganda, this documentary will provide more substantiation of facts. In either case, if you're worried about our civil liberties being curtailed, watch this film.
Anji Milanovic
 Documentary Reviews: 1998 - 2011
Documentary Reviews: 2012 - present
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