The White House is using images from movies, video games and sports to “sell” its war in Iran to Americans
The White House's social media pages have published a series of videos that mix real explosions from the Iran war with action heroes from movies, video game footage and hard tackles from American football. The situation has drawn criticism for trivializing a real and deadly conflict, The Associated Press reports.
Sequences from “Braveheart,” “Superman,” “Top Gun,” “Breaking Bad” and “Iron Man.” All appear mounted between declassified footage attributed to the US and Israel's war with Iran.
Even the animated image of SpongeBob SquarePants is inserted into one of the clips, with him saying, “Do you want to see me do that again?”, between images of buildings, planes and vehicles destroyed by American bombs.
One of the explosive messages is accompanied by the text: “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” – the title of a Toby Keith war song released after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/2029307088808055083
The war in Iran, like a video game
This fiction-meets-reality product, created by the White House's aggressive social media team, crosses a wide range of cultural landmarks that resonate with young male audiences, including the video games “Call of Duty,” “Grand Theft Auto,” “Mortal Kombat” and “Halo.”
Two of the videos include tackles from the NFL and college football, as well as home runs from major league baseball. The sounds of hitting the ball with the bat are interspersed with explosions.
The videos are accompanied by threatening or aggressive music, including “Bonfire” by Childish Gambino, “Bazooka” by Miami XO and “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC. One of the White House messages described the video as “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY”, accompanied by emojis of flags and flames.
The Associated Press notes that the logic behind this strategy appears to be that this cinematic content is intended to attract as many people as possible to support the US-led war in Iran.
Two actors requested the removal of their images from the clips published by the White House
The Associated Press notes that never before has the White House created and distributed content of this type, drawing explicit parallels between aggressive moments in modern entertainment — a fatal hit in a video game, a tough tackle in American football, a spectacular home run — and images from the battlefield to amplify enthusiasm for war.
What's happening in the White House videos, which some are calling the “gamification” of war, has not been well received in certain circles.
Two actors whose work appears in the videos — Ben Stiller, who starred in the 2008 film “Tropic Thunder,” and Steve Downes, who voices Master Chief in the video game “Halo” — said the material was used without permission and asked for their images to be removed.
Stiller wrote on “X” that “I have no interest in being part of your propaganda machine” and that “war is not a movie.”
Downes described the videos as “disgusting and childish war pornography”. Neither the NFL nor Major League Baseball wanted to comment on the use of their images in the war videos.
Critics also from the Catholic Church
The discussion has also reached a high level in the US Catholic Church. Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, said he found it revolting to see a war that brought death and suffering being treated like a video game. Such an approach, he said, dishonors those who died, including the American military.
“Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it were just another piece of content that you flick through while waiting in line at the grocery store,” Cupich said in a statement released over the weekend. “But ultimately we lose our humanity when we get excited about the destructive power of our military,” he lamented.
Asked for comment, the White House did not say whether it would heed the requests of artists who said their work was used without permission.
“America's heroic warfighters are meeting or exceeding all of their objectives in Operation Epic Fury,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly.
“The mainstream media wants us to apologize for highlighting the incredible success of the United States military, but the White House will continue to show the many examples of Iran's ballistic missiles, its production facilities and its dream of a nuclear weapon being destroyed in real time,” she added.
