John Cusack movie takes on war profiteers
David Edwards and Chris Tackett
Published: Saturday March 29, 2008
John Cusack was on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and spoke about his upcoming film, War. Inc., which according to Cusack focuses on the military-industrial complex.
The film, says Cusack, differs from other films inspired by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because, it “has a much more absurdist take on [war].”
Cusack added, “some things are so vicious if you didn’t look at them through a different lens you couldn’t get out of bed. And certainly the war profiteering, immorality and illegality of this disastrous, free-market Utopian enterprise out there is certainly well-documented.”
While explaining that the film shares similar themes as those found in Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine, Cusack said, “the very core things that make up our government like wars or interrogation or border patrol, jailing, any of those types of things that you would think would be sacred things that would happen with the state are now being turned into for-profit enterprises. And if you want all these things to be, if you want corporate ethics to be our national interest, then you have the situation we’re in now. But right now, when you think that we’ve out sourced everything to interrogation, which means torture is a cost-plus enterprise, I think you can see a complete spiritual bankruptcy to this whole neo-con movement. It’s a nightmare beyond anything you can really imagine.”
Maher asked if these issues were just a result of a neo-conservative movement and Bush administration or evidence of a “rot in America itself that is a lot deeper.”
Cusack responded, “Yeah, I do think the issue goes deeper, a lot deeper.”
Adding later, “Some of these truths are so horrible you don’t want to think about that, but it’s just — I mean the gig’s up. If guys who are statesmen on CNN are also sitting on the board and are shareholders in some of the most profitable defense contractors in the world and they publicly make the case to go to war, got to war, then create a new market with the war, come back and speak evangelically about free markets that aren’t free, these aren’t particularly subtle fact and the stock prices jump 145% and their companies are awarded $2.3 billion contract. After a while you have to expose and shame and indict and hopefully convict the participants in this illegal immoral ideology.”
The full interview can be seen in the video below.
