Never Forget...

Filmmaker Paul Greengrass (of "Bloody Sunday" and "The Bourne Supremacy") has a new film coming up for release, called "Flight 93" -- about the events of 9/11. The squeamish are already howling that the movie trailer should not be being shown, much less the film. That's it's too soon for such a film.

Personally I've been wondering what was taking Hollywood so long. It's been nearly five years, which is an eon in "Hollywood years".

Sure it's crass and commercial for Hollywood to profit from that horrific day. The same as it was for them to make a film about the battle of Midway as it happened, or about the events of December 7, 1941, only a year or so after it happened (that film won an Oscar, so I hear.)

I was listening to a recorded lecture of L. Ron Hubbard yesterday and heard one of the most cogent reasons ever expressed as to why people will do such horrific things. People are only willing to destroy others AFTER they have been convinced that they are no longer human: instead they are inhuman or subhuman "Japs", "Jerrys" and "Krauts", "Ruskies", "Ragheads" and "Sand Niggers", "unbelievers" and "infidels".

It takes a lot of propaganda and misinformation, and widespread inability to actually face and communicate with others, to make a whole people willing to destroy others. They won't do it if they can actually confront each other, if they are sure that each other exists.

The Japanese were told during WWII that Americans would actually eat them.

So real communication is the key. I beseech all of us to make the effort to communicate despite what may be believed about the "enemy". I believe that that which we are told that seeks to de-humanize someone else to us is meant to make us hate them, and it always contains lies.

Criminals commit crimes because there isn't anyone else but them, so none of their behavior, nothing they do has any consequence, because other people DO NOT EXIST for them. Not really. Show them that others exist, teach them to communicate with others, give them a basic moral code they can follow, and they reform. That's the basis of Criminon Program, operating in prisons around the world to reform and rehabilitate prisoners. It's the only effective rehabilitation program going. The penal system itself hasn't had any focus on rehabilitation for decades.

So this film has an opportunity to make human or to make inhuman the terrorists. I am dreadfully curious which road it will take.