Zeitgeist, the Movie

BOING BOING::Jay Kinney reviews Zeitgeist, the Movie

For the last couple of months, Boing Boing readers
have been emailing me about a two-hour documentary available on Google
Video called Zeitgeist, the Movie. I finally got around to viewing it.

In three parts, Zeitgeist (which
has no credits) attempts to show that 1) Christianity is rehashed pagan
sun-worship and is used by the rich and powerful to control people, 2)
the 9/11 tragedies were part of an elite conspiracy, and 3) ever since
World War I, the ultra-rich have been secretly manufacturing wars and
financial collapses to control the populace and to get richer and more
powerful.

I don’t know enough about politics, history, or religion to have a valid opinion of Zeitgeist but I was interested in getting a well-informed person’s assessment of
the documentary. I could think of no one better suited than Jay Kinney. He’s the publisher of Gnosis magazine, the author of several books on Western esoteric and occult traditions, and the author of The Masonic Enigma, “a journey of discovery into the real facts (and mysteries) of Masonry’s history and symbols.” He’s also an amazingly talented cartoonist, and contributed to The Whole Earth Review which is how I first learned about him. (His 1987 article, “If Software Companies Ran the Country,”
where he compares Al Capp’s Shmoos to infinitely-copyable software,
remains as fresh and powerful today as it did 20 years ago).

At my request, Jay watched the movie, and kindly wrote the following review for Boing Boing:

Zeiting the Geist

The latest bit of guerilla media to take the online universe by
storm is “Zeitgeist, the Movie.” Clocking in at close to
two hours’ length, and with over a million views on Google Video
since its June 26th “official” release, Zeitgeist
is a grabby, cranky, can’t-stop-watching-it documentary that
purports to tell the real truth about Christianity, 9/11, and the
International Bankers.

Exactly who is behind the video is unclear, although someone
with the moniker of “Peter J.” has posted an online letter
claiming credit and explaining Zeitgeist’s message to those who may have somehow failed to grasp the worldview that the video hammers home.

And what is that worldview, pray tell? Religions in general, and
Christianity in particular, are primarily systems of social control.
9/11 was an inside job and the destruction of the WTC twin towers and
building 7 were aided by controlled demolition. And finally,
International Bankers, through the Federal Reserve and the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR), control our money and our future, leading to,
ta da, the coming One World Government and the microchipping of
everyone.

Exactly how all this fits together is left to the
viewer’s imagination or, presumably, the film-maker’s hash
pipe. Are those who manipulate Christianity for control purposes in
cahoots with the Bankers, and were the Bankers in on the 9/11 caper? Zeitgeist
sidesteps such logical questions through the use of the all-purpose
term, “the elite,” a shadowy group of rich and powerful men
who want nothing more than to enslave humanity and reap block-buster
profits through the promotion of wars and financial crises.

For conspiracy buffs, this is all pretty standard fare, and,
indeed, aficionados of the genre will find little new in
“Zeitgeist.” The notions that most religions were
originally a kind of solar worship, and that the Jesus Christ story
recapitulated the mythos of numerous other “dying gods,”
were floating around in the late 1700s. Fittingly, the video features a
quote from Thomas Paine reducing Christianity to warmed-over sun
worship, which was a daring bit of religion-baiting 200 years ago,
albeit not so earth-shattering today.

The nefarious International Bankers meme has been propagating
itself since at least the mid-1800s and has long been a mainstay of
radical right-wing circles where it has often overlapped with
mutterings about Jewish cabals.

The 9/11 truth segment of the video is, of course, of much
more recent vintage, but, here too, it mostly repeats accusations that
have gotten widespread play in the uber-skeptic milieu.

Breaking new factual ground is not what Zeitgeist is
about, however. Rather, the video is a powerful and fast-acting dose of
agitprop, hawking its conclusions as givens. Unfortunately, like most
propaganda, it doesn’t play fair with its intended audience. At
times, while watching it, I felt like I was getting Malcolm
McDowell’s treatment in Clockwork Orange: eyes pried wide open while getting bombarded with quick-cut atrocity photos.

At other times, Zeitgeist engages in willful confusion
by showing TV screen shots of network or cable news with voice-overs
from unidentified people not associated with the news programs. If one
weren’t paying close attention, the effect would be to confer the
status and authority of TV news upon the words being spoken. Even when
quotes or sound bites are attributed to a source, there’s no way
to tell if they are quoted correctly or in context.

Late in the video, there’s a supposed quote from David
Rockefeller, which, if genuine, would be an astounding confession of
complicity in mass manipulation. But, of course, the quote is not
sourced or dated, which renders it useless. (The video’s website
does feature a Sources page, but a hodge-podge list of books, with no page numbers cited, is of little value for source verification.)

The over-all temper of the video is rather like the John Birch
Society on acid, with interludes by Harry Smith. Incongruously, after
spending nearly two hours trying to scare the bejeezis out of its
viewers, Zeitgeist ends on an oddly upbeat note, telling us
that Love — not Fear — is the answer, We are all One, and
featuring sound-bites from Ram Dass and Carl Sagan.

It’s a shame, really, that Zeitgeist is,
ultimately, such a mess. There are plenty of legitimate questions about
what transpired on 9/11, just as there are plenty of shady doings in
international finance or puzzling aspects of religious history, for
that matter. And what is coming down in the name of National Security
is truly unnerving. Yet, bundling them all together in disjointed
fashion does justice to none of them. Time and again, Zeitgeist maximizes emotional impact at the expense of a more reasoned weighing of evidence. But, perhaps that’s the intention.

I’ve often pondered about what it might take to snap
everyone out of the walking dream we collectively entered on 9/11/01.
Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall provided the emotional pivot for
the end of the Cold War, only a collective experience of an intensity
equal to that of 9/11 might jolt us awake as to what is really
happening in the corridors of power and certain undisclosed locations.

It’s my hunch that Zeitgeist is one attempt to
provide such a jolt, and it does indeed pack a certain punch. Too bad
it also runs off in three directions at once, and is so indiscriminate
in its sources and overly certain of its conclusions. Zeitgeist
may be powerful, but its power is tainted with some simplistic and
pernicious memes that have already received more propagation than they
deserve. The video’s producer does inform us that “It is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth . . .”

Indeed.