Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 5:45 pm
HMW, on The French Connection- you're sort of right on this one, but your main intended point is wrong.
The French Connection movie is yet another film whose release was pre-dated by the publication of a best-selling book, of which you've indicated no awareness (as with such earlier "examples" of "keyword-jacked movies" such as Dr. Strangelove, and Three Days Of The Condor- do you ever bother to fact-check your assumptions?)
The French Connection is in fact a piece of Nixon-era Drug War agitprop that- while providing some amount of accurate detail and narrative- neatly bypassed the sort of thorny complexities and political implications discussed by Al McCoy in The Politcs Of Heroin, the Newsday staff investigative white paper The Heroin Trail, and Henrik Kruger's Great Heroin Coup. And the author, Robin Moore, is- in my opinion- almost certainly old-line CIA Covert Ops.
But that doesn't lead inevitably to the conclusion that The French Connection movie was put into production as part of an Operation Mockingbird plot, to bury Al McCoy's work.
I get tired of the "errors of presentism" that I so persistently observe cropping up in the attempts of would-be amateur historians, 30-40 years after the fact. Some of us were alive and old enough to have a sense of the Zeitgeist of the late 60s and early 70s.
Ironically, one of Moore's previous books, The Green Berets, alluded openly to such things as CIA links to the US Army Speciial Forces "Green Berets"- and to their resort to the opium trade. In fact, there's an entire chapter, entitled "Home To Nanette", that refers to the collaboration in Laos with the Hmong tribe ( alternative spelling "Meo", in Moore's book) in purchasing opium to finance the secret war against the Viet Minh (aka "Vietcong"- a label invented by the Americans.)
Granted, Moore referred to the trade in opium quite disceetly, as "poppy." This no doubt served the purpose of enabling most of the readers in Middle America who made it a best-selling roman a clef non-fiction~fiction book (well over 1 million copies sold) to refrain from the mental strain of figuring out exectly what Moore was talking about..they could just think to themselves "oh, they're selling poppy seeds", and move on to the battle scenes, and the hot-blooded romance between the married-but-so-far-from-homeGreen Beret TDY with the CIA, and his 1/2 French, 1/2 Hmong teenage mistress, Nanette...but the implication was there, for anyone who bothered to think about it- provided that they knew that the common poppy, Papaver somniferum, is the source of opium, not a very well-known fact at the time the book was released...
Moore's book was published in 1965.
Oh, how I could go on about the material in that book- and the movie made from it, which could in fact have been scripted somewhere in the Pentagon. If you've ever seen it, you know...
But really- isn't that to be expected?
And if the biggest "antiwar" war movies of the 1960s-early 1970s Vietnam-war era weren't made about Vietnam, but instead were set in previous American armed conflicts- MASH, about Korea, and Catch-22, about WW2- isn't that to be expected, as well? Successfully challenging or questioning the political and social status quo is a risky task that needs to be done obliquely...by definition, dissidents don't have the resources of the strong, to directly reinforce the message of the status quo, at their disposal.
The French Connection movie is yet another film whose release was pre-dated by the publication of a best-selling book, of which you've indicated no awareness (as with such earlier "examples" of "keyword-jacked movies" such as Dr. Strangelove, and Three Days Of The Condor- do you ever bother to fact-check your assumptions?)
The French Connection is in fact a piece of Nixon-era Drug War agitprop that- while providing some amount of accurate detail and narrative- neatly bypassed the sort of thorny complexities and political implications discussed by Al McCoy in The Politcs Of Heroin, the Newsday staff investigative white paper The Heroin Trail, and Henrik Kruger's Great Heroin Coup. And the author, Robin Moore, is- in my opinion- almost certainly old-line CIA Covert Ops.
But that doesn't lead inevitably to the conclusion that The French Connection movie was put into production as part of an Operation Mockingbird plot, to bury Al McCoy's work.
I get tired of the "errors of presentism" that I so persistently observe cropping up in the attempts of would-be amateur historians, 30-40 years after the fact. Some of us were alive and old enough to have a sense of the Zeitgeist of the late 60s and early 70s.
Ironically, one of Moore's previous books, The Green Berets, alluded openly to such things as CIA links to the US Army Speciial Forces "Green Berets"- and to their resort to the opium trade. In fact, there's an entire chapter, entitled "Home To Nanette", that refers to the collaboration in Laos with the Hmong tribe ( alternative spelling "Meo", in Moore's book) in purchasing opium to finance the secret war against the Viet Minh (aka "Vietcong"- a label invented by the Americans.)
Granted, Moore referred to the trade in opium quite disceetly, as "poppy." This no doubt served the purpose of enabling most of the readers in Middle America who made it a best-selling roman a clef non-fiction~fiction book (well over 1 million copies sold) to refrain from the mental strain of figuring out exectly what Moore was talking about..they could just think to themselves "oh, they're selling poppy seeds", and move on to the battle scenes, and the hot-blooded romance between the married-but-so-far-from-homeGreen Beret TDY with the CIA, and his 1/2 French, 1/2 Hmong teenage mistress, Nanette...but the implication was there, for anyone who bothered to think about it- provided that they knew that the common poppy, Papaver somniferum, is the source of opium, not a very well-known fact at the time the book was released...
Moore's book was published in 1965.
Oh, how I could go on about the material in that book- and the movie made from it, which could in fact have been scripted somewhere in the Pentagon. If you've ever seen it, you know...
But really- isn't that to be expected?
And if the biggest "antiwar" war movies of the 1960s-early 1970s Vietnam-war era weren't made about Vietnam, but instead were set in previous American armed conflicts- MASH, about Korea, and Catch-22, about WW2- isn't that to be expected, as well? Successfully challenging or questioning the political and social status quo is a risky task that needs to be done obliquely...by definition, dissidents don't have the resources of the strong, to directly reinforce the message of the status quo, at their disposal.