[P2P-F] Fwd: [Commoning] The Communism of Zeitgeist: Science or Science Fiction?

Fri Feb 4 16:20:36 CET 2011

Brave New World
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/57732/brave-new-world/

The Zeitgeist movement is the first Internet-based apocalyptic cult,
centered around a doomsday-proclaiming film and an ideology filled
with classic anti-Semitic tropes

By Michelle Goldberg | Feb 2, 2011 7:00 AM

A moment in Zeitgeist: Moving Forward.

Over the last two weeks, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward [1], the third in a
series of apocalyptic cult documentaries, has been screening around
the world, translated by devotees of the so-called Zeitgeist movement
into more than 30 languages. There were engagements in Buenos Aires
and Athens, Sarajevo and Tel Aviv, Mumbai and Tokyo, among hundreds of
other cities. In the United States, it showed at indie movie houses,
underground bookstores, public libraries, and universities from coast
to coast, including a five-day run at New York’s Tribeca Cinemas.

About 30 people turned out for a Wednesday evening showing in
Manhattan. After being greeted by earnest volunteers in Zeitgeist
T-shirts and given the chance to pick up pamphlets and newsletters
about the Zeitgeist movement—or TZM, as its acolytes call it—they sat
through a two-and-a-half-hour film, alternately frenetic and
soporific, explaining the necessary and imminent collapse of economies
based on money, the root of all the world’s sufferings. The film
prophesied the emergence of a superior “resource-based economy,” in
which decisions about the allocations of goods and services will be
made by computers free from corrupting “opinions.” Robots will do most
menial work, liberating people for more creative, humanistic pursuits,
and technological innovation will ensure abundance for all. The movie
ends with scenes of crowds worldwide surging into the streets and,
realizing that money is but an enslaving illusion, dumping their cash
in great piles in front of the now-impotent central banks. Amazingly,
only one person walked out.

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward is silly enough that at times I suspected it
was all a put-on, a sly satire about new-age techno-utopianism instead
of an example of it. But to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide,
the Zeitgeist movement is entirely serious. At times, it even seems
like the world’s first Internet-based cult, with members who parrot
the party line with cheerful, rote fidelity. In a phone conversation,
Brenton Eccles, a former member from Melbourne, described how his
involvement cut him off from reality. “It’s very, very, very
isolating,” says Eccles, who was part of the communications team in
the movement’s Australia branch. “You’re encouraged to kind of exit
the real world. There’s kind of this us-and-them attitude.” A few days
later, he sent me a document recanting most of his charges and
claiming that his conflicts with the organization had in fact been his
fault. This did not make it seem less cult-like.

There are lots of strange things about the Zeitgeist phenomenon, but
strangest is how it got started. It’s a global organization devoted to
a kind of sci-fi planetary communism, but it was sparked by a 2007
documentary [2] steeped in far-right, isolationist, and covertly
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The first Zeitgeist documentary
borrowed from the work of Eustace Mullins, Lyndon LaRouche, and
conspiracy-mad Austin radio host Alex Jones to rail against the cabal
of international bankers that purportedly rules the world. It was this
documentary that reportedly obsessed Jared L. Loughner, the disturbed
young man who allegedly shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Since the shooting, conservatives have latched on to the Zeitgeist
movement’s new-age side to argue that Loughner hailed from the left.
Others, myself included [3], have pointed out that the original
Zeitgeist film is full of fringe right-wing ideas that have migrated
toward the mainstream via the Tea Party. Zeitgeist warns, for example,
that the United States could soon be subsumed into a North American
Union as a precursor to the establishment of totalitarian one-world
government. Members of the Zeitgeist movement, not surprisingly,
reject any connection between the shooting and their ideology, even as
some of them welcome the new attention that it has brought their
ideas. “It’s ultimately a positive thing,” says Keith Embler, the
earnest aspiring actor who co-chairs the New York chapter. “It’s
press. And”—with the third documentary just released—“the timing
couldn’t be better.”

Meanwhile, the evolution of the movement itself remains obscure. How
did a modern gloss on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion inspire a
global organization of wide-eyed technophile environmentalists? What
is the Zeitgeist movement?

***

The documentary that started it all began as an art project. “The
original Zeitgeist was not a film, but a performance piece, which
consisted of a vaudevillian style multi-media event using recorded
music, live instruments and video,” the Zeitgeist website [4]
explains. The director, a young college dropout who goes by Peter
Joseph, his first and middle names, says he “tossed” it up online,
where it soon was getting hundreds of thousands, then millions, then
tens of millions of views on Google Videos. It has since been removed
from that site, but several people have posted it on YouTube, where
various versions have received millions of views each, and on Vimeo,
where it’s been seen almost 600,000 times in the last six months. DVDs
of the first two documentaries are also for sale online.

“The work was never designed as a film or even a documentary in a
traditional sense—it was designed as a creative, provoking,
emotionally driven expression, full of artistic extremity and heavily
stylized gestures,” the Zeitgeist website says. This might, however,
be a bit of a post-facto rationalization, meant to distance Joseph
from some of the reactionary ideas in his film. It certainly doesn’t
explain how the piece made the transition from performance art to
relatively coherent two-hour documentary.

The original Zeitgeist has a three-part structure, and if you just saw
the first third, you might think it came from the left. It begins by
arguing, using a characteristic mix of fact and invention, that
Christianity is a colossal fraud, a set of myths appropriated from
pagan sun cults for purposes of social control. Control is the film’s
real theme: All our politics and our institutions, it suggests, derive
from a conspiracy of international bankers who manipulate world events
for their own profits. The second part argues that Sept. 11 was an
inside job, engineered by these moneyed interests. Much of its footage
was taken directly from documentaries created by the far-right radio
host Alex Jones, whose work is devoted to exposing the global elite’s
plan for totalitarian one-world domination.

>From there, Zeitgeist launches into a pseudo-exposé of the
international monetary system, a theme that runs through both its
sequels. According to Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates
[5], a think tank that studies right-wing movements, much of it
derives from two books: The Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward
Griffin, a member of the John Birch Society, and Secrets of the
Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins. Mullins hated Jews, but his
references to Jews in the book are oblique. “It’s bait, written by one
of the world’s most notorious anti-Semites to lead people into that
analytical model,” says Berlet.

Zeitgeist works the same way. Though it says nothing about Jews, its
analysis mirrors classic anti-Semitic canards. Immediately after
footage of the twin towers falling, for example, the film features an
excerpt from a speech that Charles Lindbergh gave to an America First
group in 1941: “When hostilities commenced in Europe in 1939, it was
realized that the American people had no intention of entering the
war. But it was realized that this country could be enticed into the
war, in very much the same way that it was enticed into the last one.”
As his words play, headlines about Iraq float across the screen. “We
cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to
lead our country to destruction,” he concluded. Lindbergh, of course,
was talking about the Jews. Viewers attuned to anti-Semitic rhetoric
would naturally conclude that Joseph was, too.

After Joseph put Zeitgeist online, it quickly became an Internet
sensation. Clips appeared on the websites of Ron Paul supporters,
white nationalists, and, before long, some Tea Party groups.
Anarchists and anti-imperialists embraced it as well. Stories about it
appeared in newspapers worldwide. Some were admiring: South Africa’s
Cape Times compared it to An Inconvenient Truth. Even the debunkers
testified to its reach. An article in the Irish Times described [6]
the “massive interest” the documentary had attracted before lamenting,
“One really wishes Zeitgeist was a masterful pastiche of 21st-century
paranoia, a hilarious mockumentary to rival Spinal Tap.”

As Zeitgeist’s audience grew, people started asking Joseph what they
should do with his explosive information. He didn’t know what to tell
them. He supported Ron Paul, but he believed the system to be too
irredeemably corrupt for a political solution. That’s when he met
Jacque Fresco, a radical futurist and would-be secular prophet who has
been preparing for his moment in the limelight for more than five
decades.

Born to a Sephardic Jewish family in Harlem in 1917, Fresco moved to
Los Angeles after World War II. The journalist Lionel Rolfe, in his
memoir [7] of California bohemia, Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in
the Underground, wrote that in the early ’50s, “Fresco had a circle of
disciples who considered him next only to Albert Einstein, although
the friends and relatives of those disciples often thought Fresco was
a fraud and a charlatan.”

Back then, Fresco, a self-educated industrial designer, had already
developed his ideas about machines making traditional economics
irrelevant. In the 1970s, he moved to a compound in Venus, Fla., where
he and his partner, Roxanne Meadows, set about creating designs for
the cities—and civilization—of the future. They call their work The
Venus Project [8].

Joseph learned about the Venus Project when Fresco, having seen
Zeitgeist, sent him one of his books. For Joseph, Fresco’s highly
detailed vision of a world without money, a world where work itself is
largely unnecessary and human ills like greed and crime are obsolete,
was a revelation.

Soon, Joseph was devoting himself to spreading the word about Fresco
and The Venus Project. His second film, Zeitgeist: Addendum, starts in
much the same vein as the first, with an attack on the international
financial system. But then it shifts to a worshipful examination of
Fresco’s work, offering it as a solution to the ravages of the current
system. Joseph’s latest film, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, further
elaborates Fresco’s irenic vision of a “resource-based economy,” one
without poverty, inequality, or environmental strain.

***

The Zeitgeist movement emerged in 2008, after the release of the
second documentary, as chapters formed worldwide to figure out how to
prepare for immanent economic collapse and technological salvation.
Joseph never acknowledged his massive ideological shift from decrying
a one-world system to embracing it—he just powered through the
contradictions with an intense, weirdly mesmerizing self-confidence.
He seems entirely sure of his movement’s capacity to fundamentally
reshape human beings. In the first Zeitgeist newsletter, he explained
to a letter-writer why there would be no gluttony in a resource-based
economy. “[F]or a person to want ‘more’ than another is an
unsustainable, conflict invoking value which serves only a selfish
conditioning generated by the current cultural climate of ‘survival of
the fittest’ via the Market System of Competition,” he wrote. “TZM
seeks to remove this system, hence removing the distorted values that
coincide and are hence imposed and reinforced.”

Lots of right-wing fans of the original documentary have since
deserted Joseph, though not all—the Zeitgeist newsletter features an
essay by a former Ron Paul activist who described trying to get his
Tea Party group to embrace Fresco’s ideas. Meanwhile, new cadres of
progressive seekers have joined, going to meetings and throwing
themselves into the movement’s vibrant online community. At 96, the
bearded, impish Fresco suddenly has a large global following—last
year, he visited 18 countries on an international lecture tour.

Since 2009, the movement has celebrated Z-day in March, with chapters
worldwide putting on events. The New York Times covered [9] the
inaugural Z-Day gathering in Manhattan, which attracted a sold-out
crowd of around 900 to hear Joseph and Fresco speak. It was, wrote
reporter Alan Feuer, “as if Karl Marx and Carl Sagan had hired John
Lennon from his ‘Imagine’ days to do no less than redesign the
underlying structures of planetary life.” This year’s Z-Day will take
place on March 13, with a main event in London and local happenings
worldwide.

Most members, particularly the new ones, are probably unaware of the
Jew-baiting subtext of the documentary that launched their movement.
Many were genuinely baffled in 2009 when a German social networking
site, studiVZ, banned Zeitgeist groups because of their implicit
anti-Semitism. Others seem a bit embarrassed by the first Zeitgeist;
they’ll often say it’s “irrelevant”—one of TZM’s favorite
epithets—because it came out before the movement got started. But no
one is disavowing it, and so a growing global movement of tech-savvy
idealists continues to promote a work of far-right paranoia.

“I’m willing to accept that the filmmaker is a person who has a great
energy and tremendous ignorance who inadvertently replicated the Nazi
view of money manipulation,” says Berlet. “In which case he needs to
repudiate it.” That seems unlikely. In a video interview available
online, Joseph rails against his critics, “the self-appointed
guardians of the status quo.” The first Zeitgeist, he insists, “is
based on pre-existing information. There isn’t one thing in that film
that doesn’t come from a source.” True enough. The problem is what the
sources are.

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 6:31 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
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