by Nathan Smith

Pop quiz: are the people who make movies your friends or enemies?

Most of you would answer this correctly if it were asked in a neutral environment, like a conference room. You understand that Hollywood is run by enemies who are happy to finance movies they know will bomb terribly, so long as they can be used to control a narrative. But, apparently, many of you still fail the test every time it appears in the wild.

The test I’m talking about is the movie Citizen Vigilante. You’ve no doubt heard of it. The movie was made by a garden-variety filmmaker, no one special. It’s about a (white) man who goes around punishing and sometimes killing immigrants who have broken the law. The movie was banned in Germany but was then picked up by Elon Musk, who suggested it was a timely and important story.

But if you agreed with Musk, you failed the test. Propaganda doesn’t stop being propaganda just because you like it. Even if you know the propaganda and how it works, it will still affect you if you want it to. That’s why you must be extremely careful when consuming any media, especially the things that look like they’re “for you,” because they certainly are. Just not in the way you expect.

I could analyse this dynamic from many angles because propaganda is a topic I know well. But in the interest of limited column inches and your precious time, I’ll focus on one aspect: how movies become political containment.

Containment has a distinct and consistent meaning, which is simply: those in power give the appearance of handing the people what they want in order to stay in power. This concept is not difficult, confusing or controversial. Any modern regime is maintained less by brute force than by an unrelenting, enormously sophisticated and massively effective campaign to contain political and cultural activity within narrow boundaries.

The most memorable example of containment was Constantine’s use of Christianity as a political tool to unite Rome, when that new religion was still operating as a subversive force. Constantine’s actions neatly defused Christianity’s subversive message while also strengthening Rome by merging the church with state power. Containment doesn’t need to be big and flashy. Most of the time, it appears as false binaries: Labour or National (but don’t ask if democracy is a good system).

In 20XX, containment is mostly in the rhetorical/media messaging component of what is a wider counter-insurgency operation conducted by the global regime. For the last 100 years or so, the overall strategy of those in power has been focused on one goal: stop Europeans from coalescing. In pursuit of this goal, the current regime fought the largest and bloodiest war in human history, and it hasn’t slowed down since 1945.

In fact, the war on European political independence only shifted up a few levels. Modern warfare is not waged with conventional weapons, but rather through “spin,” which is to say, through the manipulation of media. Modern warfare is best understood as doing war things but not calling them war. What most people consider “war” is anything that goes “boom.” But the real warfare is opening your borders, undermining your culture and brainwashing your children into thinking they’re the bad guys.

So, to recap, there is an overt (meaning, not hidden) containment operation by the global regime to ensure that European people cannot coalesce politically. All policies – from immigration to climate change, transgenderism to digital IDs, central banks to offshoring jobs – are the result of that single goal. This containment is well-funded and taken seriously by everyone involved. None of this is hypothetical. It is all written down in government white papers and is part of countless NGO strategies.

Now, at this point, you might be thinking, “Well, isn’t it good then that a movie explicitly shows a European man pushing back against this horrible agenda?” And you’d assume this was a decent point.

But let’s test your Media Literacy 101.

When you watch a movie, does your brain know it’s not real? Careful now. I realise we tell ourselves that movies are fake. But have you ever quoted a movie line in the middle of a conversation and had the other person look at you funny? Have you ever had bacon and eggs for breakfast? Take your phone out and scroll through photos of yourself. How many times are you shown leaning on something, like a wall or a doorframe?

That last example is interesting. Did you know that Soviet intelligence during the Cold War generally knew when a person was an American because Americans were always leaning on things? Other cultures (before globalisation) didn’t lean on things. Why were Americans always leaning on things? Because that’s what movie stars like James Dean or Jimmy Stewart did, and people tend to unconsciously copy what they see. Why do we copy the mannerisms of fake movie stars? Because our brains can’t tell the difference.

One of the key discoveries in 20th-century psychology was that images on a screen are treated by the brain as real, lived experiences. That’s why you feel fear when the monster appears, or a tingle when a sex scene starts. Your forebrain knows it’s not real, but your hindbrain is filing it away as “a real memory.” Try as you like, the forebrain cannot control the hindbrain. And the regime knows this.

As such, you live in the most propagandised society in history. You’ve seen more kids get bullied on TV than in real life, watched more weddings than you’ve attended, mourned over more characters than people, seen more people be killed than the best soldier and had more relationship flings than Casanova. Your mind recorded it all as real. Propaganda erases real memory by creating false memories.

In the movie The Matrix, part of the training for the main character, Neo, involves learning to fight. But he never goes to the gym or the dojo. Instead, he lies in a chair, plugged into a computer program that downloads kung fu, karate and drunken boxing directly into his brain. He “learns” all these fighting arts without needing to physically practice them. Since all lessons the body learns are stored in the brain anyway, the Matrix software bypasses the body and goes straight to the brain. That’s what movies are doing to your brain. You learn how to work, how to want, how to desire, how to hate, how to love, without ever needing to physically act out any of these experiences. They are downloaded directly into your brain.

This is what the German government missed when it decided to ban Citizen Vigilante. The government knows the political temperature in Europe is rising, especially in Germany. Normal Europeans – brainwashed as they are – have started to notice they are being replaced by generally unassimilable and violent immigrants. Because of this, young male Europeans are beginning to see themselves as a group. They are starting to coalesce. Obviously, the corrupt German government doesn’t want this to happen.

The logic behind banning Citizen Vigilante was the rational fear that European men might enjoy a film that taps into their deep, unspoken desire to fight back against the immigrant invaders. They don’t want a young European male on the screen buying a gun and a cool trench coat to deal with the problem personally.

But while the German government worries that viewers will think, “That’s what I want to do,” containment propaganda means their brains will actually think, “That’s what I’ve already done.” The forebrain watches a movie, but the hindbrain absorbs a fake memory. When you watch a character who looks like you on the screen fight back against immigrants, your brain thinks “something has been done.” Therefore, you don’t need to do anything. That’s the containment.

Sure, there might be a few copycats who decide to act out what they see. After all, as with non-Americans leaning on things, the main purpose of propaganda is to get you to do something. But almost always, that instruction is to do nothing. To accept, to submit. Propaganda doesn’t care what you believe so long as you do it from behind a screen, sitting on a chair, like Neo. That’s why movies like this are extremely effective containment propaganda. If your brain thinks something has been done about violent immigrants, then the body does nothing. And that’s the entire point.

They’ve been at war with your mind longer than you’ve been alive.

Originally published on The Good Oil.