CHRIS HEDGES : PETER JACKSON'S CARTOON WAR

Chris Hedges: Peter Jackson is peddling war pornography with a modern sheen.

Pulitzer Prize  winning journalist Chris Hedges has described Peter Jackson's World War 1 film They Shall Not Grow Old as old war porn with a modern sheen.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNING journalist Chris Hedges has launched a scathing attack on Peter Jackson's World War I film, They Shall Not Grow Old. The film, which employs state-of-the art technology to colourise and enhance grainy black and white archival footage, is described by Hedges as 'war pornography'.

"We glimpse dead bodies, but there are no long camera shots of the slow agony of those dying of horrific wounds. Sanitised images like these are war pornography. That they are no longer jerky and grainy and have been colorized in 3D merely gives old war porn a modern sheen," writes Hedges.

Noting that the film was made in conjunction with the British Imperial Museum, Hedges comments that They Shall Not Grow Old  has '..no interest in portraying the dark reality of war'.

"War may be savage, brutal and hard, but it is also, according to the myth, ennobling, heroic and selfless. You can believe this drivel only if you have never been in combat, which is what allows Jackson to modernize a cartoon version of war."

Hedges writes that Jackson's presents a sanitised version of history which omits such details as the 'colossal stupidity of the British generals' that sent hundreds of thousands of working class men to their deaths. He suggests that Peter Jackson offers little more than a ruling class version of history.

"It is fortunate all the participants in the war are dead. They would find the film another example of the monstrous lie that denied their reality, ignored or minimized their suffering and never held the militarists, careerists, profiteers and imbeciles who prosecuted the war accountable. War is the raison d’être of technological society. It unleashes demons. And those who profit from these demons, then and now, work hard to keep them hidden.'

Chris Hedges contributed to The New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. He is the author of several books including Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009); Death of the Liberal Class (2010); Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012),

Hedges spent nearly nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, West Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. In 2016 he attacked American social democratic politics for embracing neoliberalism which, he argued, resulted in a dysfunctional democracy and the rise of Donald Trump.

You can read Chris Hedges entire article here.