THE swamp of moral depravity in which the US is sinking is illustrated by a film glorifying the exploits of a racist killer, American Sniper, receiving six Oscar nominations, while a film depicting the historic struggle against racism led by Martin Luther King, Selma, has received none.

American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood, tells the story of Chris Kyle, a US Navy Seal who served four tours of duty in Iraq as a sniper and was credited with 160 confirmed “kills,” earning him the dubious honour of being lauded the most lethal sniper in US military history. 

Played by Bradley Cooper, in the film Kyle is an all-American hero, a Texas cowboy who joins the military out of a sense of patriotism and a yearning for purpose and direction in his life. 

Throughout the uber-tough selection process, Kyle is a monument of stoicism and determination, willing to bear any amount of pain and hardship for the honour of being able to serve his country as a Navy Seal — the US equivalent of the samurai.

The personal struggle he endures as a result of what he experiences and does in Iraq is not motivated by any regrets over the people he kills, including women and children, but on his failure to kill more and thereby save the lives of US soldiers as they go about the business of tearing the country apart, city by city, block by block and house by house.

If American Sniper wins one Oscar, never mind the six its been nominated for, when this annual extravaganza of movie pomp and ceremony unfolds in Hollywood on February 22, it will not only represent an endorsement of US exceptionalism but, worse, it will be an insult to the Iraqi people. 

In the film they are depicted as a dehumanised mass of savages — occupying the same role as Native Americans in John Wayne Western films of old — responsible for their own suffering and the devastation of their country, which the white man is in the process of civilising. 

Anything resembling balance and perspective is sacrificed in American Sniper to the more pressing needs of US propaganda, which holds that the guys who served in Iraq were the very best of the US — men who went through hell in order to protect the freedoms and way of life of their fellow countrymen at home. 

It is the cult of the soldier writ large, men who in the words of Kyle in the film “just want to get the bad guys.”

The “bad guys” are, as mentioned, the Iraqis. In fact if you had just arrived at the cinema from another planet, you would be left in no doubt from the film’s opening scene that Iraq had invaded and occupied the US rather than the other way round. 

Unsurprisingly, the real Kyle was not as depicted by Eastwood and played by Cooper. 

In his autobiography, upon which the film is supposedly based, Kyle writes: “I hate the damn savages. I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis.”

It is clear that Eastwood, when faced with the choice between depicting the truth and the myth, decided to go with the myth. 

But this should come as no surprise, given that the peddling of such myths is the very currency of Hollywood. 

Over many decades the US film industry has proved itself one of the most potent weapons in the armoury of US imperialism, helping to project a myth of the US defined by lofty attributes of courage, freedom and democracy. 

As the myth has it, these values, and with them the US itself, are continually under threat from the forces of evil and darkness that lurk outwith and often times within. 

The mountain of lies told in service to this myth has only been exceeded by the mountain of dead bodies on the basis of it — victims of the carnage and mayhem unleashed around the world by Washington. 

Kyle was not the warrior or hero portrayed in American Sniper. He was in fact a racist killer for whom the only good Iraqi was a dead Iraqi. 

He killed men, women and children, just as his comrades did during the course of a brutal and barbaric war of aggression waged by the richest country in the world against one of the poorest. 

They say that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. In the hands of a director with millions of dollars and the backing of a film studio at its disposal, it is far more dangerous than that. 

It is a potent weapon deployed against its victims, denying them their right to even be considered victims, exalting in the process, when it comes to Hollywood, those who murder and massacre in the name of the US.

With this in mind, it is perhaps fitting that Kyle was shot and killed by a former marine at a shooting range in Texas in 2013. 

“Man was born into barbarism,” Martin Luther King said, “when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence.”