Snowden has been described as an accomplished player of a video game called “Tekken,” a fight game. In Language of Empire, I wrote about the use made of video-games by the military to desensitize adolescent males to violence and rehearse them in the mentality of the killers they will be trained to become.The US, of course, is not alone in using video games in this way. A recent piece in the Guardian describes the popularity of video-games among the world’s militaries.
That same piece describes the extent of US research into this new frontier of mind-control and brainwashing:
“By the late 1990s,” says Nick Turse, an American journalist, historian and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, “the [US] army was pouring tens of millions of dollars into a centre at the University of Southern California – the Institute of Creative Technologies – specifically to build partnerships with the gaming industry and Hollywood.”
It’s a toxic relationship in Turse’s opinion, since gaming leads to a reliance on remote-controlled warfare, and this in turn makes combat more palatable.”
Please note that by the late 1990s, the center of the US military’s partnership with Hollywood and the Gaming industry was Southern California. Please note that Ryuhana was established in 2002 ( accidentally wrote 2012 before) , next to the NSA in Fort Meade. Please note that after it folded up there in 2004, it moved to California.
ORIGINAL POST
In my previous blog post on Snowden, I pointed out that his career was essentially that of a spy and surveillance contractor, and not, as some at LRC have lamely tried to claim, that of a private-sector wunderkind.
The LRC claim was based solely on Snowden’s 2 year stint at a Japanese anime company.
However, as I noted in my previous blog, that company, Ryuhana, was sited next to the NSA when Snowden, whose parents were both in the service of the state, went to work for it. The chances are that Ryuhana had some kind of government connection, since comics have long been a venue for state propaganda.
And why not? Comic strips are read more widely than any kind of opinion editorial. If editorial writing and reporting is closely monitored by the state, why wouldn’t comic book writing?
Hollywood, after all, has long been used to control the mass mind and many obvious propaganda films like “V for Vendetta” have had their origin in comics of some kind or in graphic novels.
“How the Government Turned Comic Books Into Propaganda” (Reason, Feb 28, 2013) describes how the government went to great lengths to ensure that war cartoons were not too simplistic.
“Unlike government titles charged with turning sewage treatment processes or Social Security benefits into the stuff of page-turning drama, this title featured government work in all its two-fisted, action-packed glory, with page after page of machine-gun strafing, saber disembowelings, and other vividly rendered war-time carnage. Issues like this one also featured dozens of actual black-and-white photographs of Marines in combat—hanging out in foxholes, poking enemy dead with bayonets, carrying their wounded brethren on stretchers.
In Government Issue, Richard Graham notes that while many commercial newspaper comic strips featured content depicting the war, including depictions of “Nazis as Teutonic buffoons and the Japanese as blood-drooling torturers,” the Office of War Information worried that such depictions were “too simplistic and could lead to over overconfidence” because they portrayed “the enemy as lazy and posing little threat.”
Perhaps that’s why on the cover of this Marine-approved comic, Prime Minister Tojo is depicted as a lively eight-legged sea-monster.”
But comics have their uses not only in demonizing the enemy in war-time. They can also be used to “sell” a country to its allies.
A piece at Japan Today, August 9, 2010 analyzed the American use of Japanese comics as the American military’s new Okinawa strategy:
“The U.S. military has produced a four-part manga series in Japanese titled, “Our Alliance – A Lasting Partnership.” The BBC, Yahoo news and various other sources picked up the AFP story without any mention of the obvious – this is pure propaganda concocted for the sole purpose of brainwashing Japan’s youth into accepting the massive American military presence right in their backyard.
At a time where opposition to the 47,000 U.S. troops stationed in Okinawa and other parts of Japan has reach a tipping point, it seems the new U.S. strategy may be to simply outwait the more vocal older generations and instead focus on the younger generations who are already largely apathetic to such issues.
In the first issue of the comic (which can be seen at http://www.usfj.mil/manga), an American boy, Usa-kun (U.S.A.-kun), comes to Japan and befriends a Japanese girl called Arai Anzu (sounds like “Alliance when spoken by Japanese). He tells her he has come to defend her home because they
are “important friends.”“It’s good to have a friend you can rely on to go with you,” the little girl concludes.
Typical of modern reporting, the media articles merely regurgitate the press release given to them without adding any neutrality to the story, submitting obediently and serving as mouthpiece to the story’s “source” – which in this case was just a phone call with no apparent follow-up or questions challenging the motives of the manga.
Some gems spewed by U.S. forces’ propaganda office rep, Neil Fisher, include explanations on how the cute bunny-like characters “explore and learn about the U.S. military in Japan and its role in the U.S.-Japan alliance.” He nearly gives away his hand when he admits the U.S. chose manga because it’s “a very common way of communicating in Japan,” or “It is read as much if not more than newspapers” and “A lot of people love manga… Manga is a very light-hearted way to carry information.”
This isn’t the first time the U.S. has used comics to infiltrate the minds of Japanese children. In 2008, amid heavy opposition to an American nuclear powered aircraft carrier being permanently stationed at Yokosuka just south of Tokyo, the U.S. handed out 26,000 copies to children and young residents of a 200-page comic staring an American navy hero. The comic depicted the U.S. navy servicemen as ideal neighbors at a time when safety concerns over nuclear energy and crimes committed by Americans stationed in the area were in the spotlight”
Given this history, Snowden’s “Ryuhana,” situated as it was right next to the NSA (2002-2004) at Fort Meade, in Maryland, might well have been actively involved in state propaganda and Snowden’s stint there, far from being anomalous, his first work for the surveillance state.