AMERICAN Sniper, a biographical film based on the life of SEAL sniper Christopher Scott Kyle, has been received with mixed feelings.
On opening, the film raked in a record US$105 million in American cinemas.
According to the Pentagon, Christopher Kyle is the top sniper in American history with over 160 kills.
Kyle grew up in Odessa, Texas, where his father taught him to hunt which led to his love for collecting guns until 9/11 when he finds his purpose as a Navy SEAL.
In Iraq, Kyle was nicknamed ‘al Shaitan’ meaning the ‘devil’ for his ruthless kills that involved massacring women and children.
In the autobiography American Sniper’s first kill was a woman, who walked into the street with a grenade in her hand as the Marines attacked her village.
Kyle killed her with a single shot.
“I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting,” says Kyle.
“Savage, despicable, evil that’s what we were fighting in Iraq.
“That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy savages.
“There was really no other way to describe what we encountered there.”
Despite later admissions by the government that the war was a farce, still the American public chants praises for cold blooded killers like Kyle.
This is not without the public endorsement of CNN’s Brandon Griggs who comments, “American Sniper has the look of a bona fide cultural phenomenon!”
The film merely exhibits the one truth that Hollywood is the American government’s propaganda tool.
The first ever movie to be screened at the White House was The Birth of a Nation produced in 1915 which was presented to President Woodrow Wilson.
The film depicted the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as heroic figures out to preserve white America from savage black men out to rape white women.
There was a huge turnout at theatres as white movie watchers flocked in their numbers never mind the explicit racism which propelled the resurrection of the KKK and recruitment of new members.
Several war movies soon followed where they depicted the enemy as evil, savage and celebrated his death.
Despite chants of freedom and democracy, the ‘enemy’s’ perspective is never brought into account and all the audience is reminded as in the case of American Sniper is that white life is more important than that of the dark pigmented enemy.
The movies depicted Vietnamese, Chinese, Russians, Iranians as the bad guys deserving whatever punishment meted to them by the white American hero.
In fact, Hollywood has pushed forward stereotypes throughout the world, the bad Russians with an unintelligible accent, the West African child-soldier turned rebel-soldier-cum-rapist and the terrorist Muslim among many others.
In all these scenarios, the American is the hero that saves the day and the white woman.
This mentality is evident in American Sniper where Kyle depicts himself as going to the war to protect his wife from ‘savages’.
The producer of the movie, Clint Eastwood and fans have said the movie is apolitical although it does not narrow on Kyle’s obvious post traumatic disorders that see him staring at nothing for long periods of time.
In fact Kyle only comes alive when it is during the war, but withdraws into a shell at home and in society.
The film focuses less on him as a veteran in need of help, but rather on his killings during his tours.
The idea of the movie is to make him a hero and justify the presence and occupation of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The women and children killed by these American monsters are inconsequential.
Amnesty International investigated nearly a dozen instances of mass killings by NATO and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) that took place between 2009 and 2013 in Afghanstan.
“Evidence of possible war crimes and unlawful killings has seemingly been ignored,” the report said.
An Iraq war veteran in 2010 was brought before the courts for raping and killing a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing her parents and sister saying he didn’t think of Iraq civilians as humans.
American Sniper reminds one of Rhodesian narratives that glorify black massacres like the November 1977 Chimoio and Nyadzonia attack in August 1976.
To this day, the Rhodesians claim their genocide was justified.
American Sniper ends with the death of Chris Kyle who is shot by another veteran at a shooting range.
He is mourned by most of America with flags flying at half-mast lining up the streets and gets a hero’s farewell.
His end is some kind of poetic justice.
The gun that he used to end so many lives ended his too.