What it's like to KILL (video)

Editors, Wisdom Quarterly with Joshua Oppenheimer (SCPR, TheLipTV, VICE)

The Look of Silence by Joshua Oppenheimer, Werner Herzog, Errol Morris

Uh, mm, OK, maybe we did

Wisdom Quarterly reporters were in the field to interview Joshua Oppenheimer last night at the Hammer Museum last night. They uncovered the remarkable story of the making of three films. The first to be made was "The Globalization Tapes," the documentary that inspired Oppenheimer to make first "The Look of Silence then "The Act of Killing." He released the latter first.

The Vatican, Inc. backs Big Business (AP)

It all began with corporate American (Goodyear, etc.) abuses in formerly Buddhist and Hindu now Muslim and Capitalist Indonesia. Workers in a modern-day slavery scenario were being killed prematurely due to pesticides they were forced to use on the plantation. When they complained, rather than taking out the culprit chemical, the corporate big wigs decided to hire paramilitary thugs and police to go in and beat workers. This was followed by mass arrests then an "anti-communist" campaign.


(Senyap) Fullmovie is available to all Indonesians; for English subtitles see YouTube

How can an LLC be to blame?

Everyone who complained or was a landless-farmer or was an intellectual was labelled "communist" and was subject to arrest by the military and execution by neighbors in militias with the help of the military. It was ordinary citizens doing the killing because the military did not want to earn a reputation for mass atrocities. This was bragged about in the US and world media, mentioning what a boon it was to business and how "communism" was being handily defeated in Southeast Asia.

Church and State = Empire

Those killings -- gory, in the jungle, inspired by the CIA and its operatives, and reminiscent of the mass executions visited upon Cambodia's "killing fields," Laotian innocents also dubbed "communists" and "communist sympathizers," Vietnamese rice farmers standing in the way of US Empire, and countless other countries all the way down to the present US-instigated murders in Afghanistan, always built on an honorable and patriotic pretext, always engaged in with the help of corrupted officials in those countries, and always with the backing of our CIA and other clandestine agencies -- have become the stuff of legend. The legends are real.

Republicans and Democrats both!

Oppenheimer is well aware of American complicity and backing for all of these crimes, for although these two movies and the one that preceded it are confessions of the living perpetrators and fearful victims and their families, the real instigators -- the US "military-industrial complex," that is, partners in the marriage of state power and private industry -- the instigators need their own movie. Alas, they are too old now, most of them passed away (the Dulles Brothers, etc.). But the culture that motivated them is alive and well and growing. We are in more wars, committing more atrocities with no end in sight.

• AUDIO: Powerful follow-up to Oppenheimer's Oscar-nominated "Act of Killing" (AirTalk, SCPR)

The source of inner-peace is US.

Who is doing the killing? American militants and the people they train to oppress, torture, and kill.

Why are they killing? It supports American and multinational corporations, war profiteers, and the surveillance state apparatus (NSA, NSC, CIA, FBI, DARPA, ALEC, etc. with ALEC perhaps being the worst thanks to the devious work and tentacles of the Koch Brothers as well as tech companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and other names we take for granted, leaving us holding the bag: we are partners with the killers). What's it like to kill?
 

THE ACT OF KILLING, the 2013 documentary about the US-instigated genocide in Indonesia and still unchecked abuses of power by a military-ruled government, has achieved international recognition. Its 2016 companion is THE LOOK OF SILENCE. They are some of the most haunting films of all time. They were made at the same time. In fact, The Look of Silence was the first to be finished. LipTV discusses the filming and social factors surrounding the genocide, impact, and making of the film (featuring footage) with director Joshua Oppenheimer on this full-length BYOD interview.

• VIDEO: LipTV interview with Joshua Oppenheimer
• Rapist US cop Daniel Holtzclaw sentenced to two centuries+ in prison [because he is only half-white and therefore not immune to prosecution like full-white officers] but lawyers still hope to get him off

GUEST: Oppenheimer worked for over a decade with Indonesian death squads, government-supported militias, and their victims to explore the relationship between political violence. Educated at Harvard and Central St. Martins School, London, his award-winning films include THE GLOBALIZATION TAPES (2003, co-directed with Christine Cynn), THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE (1998, Gold Hugo, Chicago Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival), THESE PLACES WE'VE LEARNED TO CALL HOME (1996, Gold Spire, San Francisco Film Festival), and numerous shorts. Oppenheimer lives abroad and is Senior Researcher on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council's Genocide and Genre project and has published widely on such. 

• Buddhism's Five Precepts say take not the life of any living being; furthermore, under "Right Livelihood" in the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path we find the injunction on any kind of "flesh trade," avoiding human trafficking (slavery) and animal butchering or raising for butchering. So abandon killing whatever the excuse made for doing it.
  

NEWFLASH: Nibiru is real, like the ancient Sumerians told us, and now science begins to admit it, too, in a very slow disclosure process just like Dr. Steven Greer and Wisdom Quarterly have been reporting:

Evidence for 9th planet in solar system, Caltech scientists say

(Marcia Dunn/AP) The findings are based on mathematical and computer modeling, but two Caltech researchers anticipate discovery of so-called Planet 9 via telescope within five years.
 

  

2015 hottest on Earth by wide margin: NOAA, NASA

Save earth from the Koch Brothers!

(Seth Borenstein/AP) The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and [the remnants of the Nazi Party that was brought to the U.S. in Project Paperclip to create our space program called] NASA announced today that 2015 was by far the hottest year in 136 years of record keeping. More

The Koch Brothers insists that we add allegedly to appease the climate deniers who do not think anything is wrong with out pollution levels, rate of forest destruction, burning of renewable-but-toxic fossil fuels (yes, the earth makes oil and it keeps make more, not rotting dinosaurs, just as the Nazis discovered and published many years ago; petroleum of carbon-based).

Although all planets in the solar system are warming, we are getting it worse because of what we allow business and government-backers of business to do to our environment and planet for the sake of immediate profits and what other sinister ends we can only imagine, like replacing earthlings with beings in need of homes and biodiversity after ruining their previous planets.