Adam Engel, a friend of mine, made this video at least ten years ago. It was a brief way of explaining the myths CIA officers create about themselves and, more importantly, the myths their ruling class patrons create about them, to promote unstated ruling class strategies and goals. I came to this understanding based on having interviewed well over 100 CIA officers by then. It’s the basis of any imperial personality.
Homer was as unreal as Moses with his “intuitive“ knowledge of Big Daddy, Adam, bad girl Eve, and The Patriarch, Abraham. Homer’s works (the works of many poets over centuries, starting back before the Bronze Age) were sanitized and assembled by Greek imperialist propagandists in Alexandria employed by the Greek ruling class as a spectacular way of blaming the gods for their patriarchal imperialism and bloodlust. As for Moses, he was created by enterprising Hebrew real estate agents based on generations of their well-paid scribes rewriting monotheistic myths (most from Egypt where there’s no record of the Hebrews ever having sojourned) so they could create and then blame their bloodlust on a durable, wrathful Him, the Big Daddy.
It’s all BS and Christopher Nolan, being an agent of The Spectacle, promotes it to the hilt. There are no monsters and no gods. There’s no God. The rulers have no conscience. Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths helps people understand.
The Odysseus movie is making everyone aware of the mythology, but as part of the Spectacle. It’s news for that reason and much of its meaning gets sucked into the consumer void. But Odysseus is much more, it’s an enduring lesson, as I try to explain in the video.
[Note from Jeff Kaye: As Doug’s bio at the Author’s Guild says, “Douglas Valentine is our most unflinching chronicler of the Central Intelligence Agency's bloody and sordid history.” His most recent published work is Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire (2023). He is the author of one of the most essential books on the Vietnam War, and the CIA more generally, The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam (1990), as well as The CIA as Organized Crime (2017), The Strength of the Pack (2009), The Strength of the Wolf (2004), and the novels, The Hotel Tacloban (1984), and TDY (2000). He has also published a book of poems, A Crow's Dream (2011); and was editor of the poetry anthology. With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century (2012). Check out his website at https://www.douglasvalentine.]
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