Russians and Muslims – Always The Bad Guys?

American and British movies and TV shows are the most watched broadcasts in the whole world and the reason is simple – they have big budgets, great actors and the single purpose to entertain us without forcing us to think a lot. The most exploited topic is always the battle between Good and Evil in various shapes, most recently – agencies against terrorists. In this line of thinking the favorite terrorists in the movie industry are always the Muslims and the Russians. The major culprit always belongs to an Arab or Chechen to Russian ethnic group. And this trend has it’s beginning long before 9/11 and Beslan, so the reason can not lie only in factology.

One major example for such a movie is “The Peacemaker”:

Cover of The Peacemaker (Widescreen Edition)

In this movie a US Army colonel and a civilian woman supervising him must track down stolen Russian nuclear weapons before they’re used by terrorists. The weapons were stolen by a Russian army highest officer who intends to sell the nuclear warheads to Serbian muslims. The story is very good, the movie is one of the greatest of the 20th century, filmed with taste and without unnecessary pomposity.

Another example is the long lasting BBC show “Spooks: MI-5″:

Brilliant TV show with brilliant actors, great story lines and depth of all characters. Every episode is dedicated to saving Britain from various threats to its people and national security. Sometimes the threats are very close to reality, and sometimes they’re too fictious. Nevertheless the show is unique. And in most of the story lines the major terrorist is a Muslim or a Russian.

There are, though, some cases where an Arab or a Russian is the good guy but at the best they are either informants or double agents which makes them play the “second violin” and again the US or the British agency is the good one in the big picture. In other cases there’s an American or a British citizen, who is usually a billionaire who sells state secrets, weapons, drugs or petrol deals to Arabs, which makes him a bad guy, but again “second in the chain”. The buyer is always the Big bad guy and is again, a Muslim. Or a Russian.

Why is this happenning? Is it possible, after all, that this is a response to the real Muslim and Chechen terrorist attacks around the world in the past century, or the Cold War never actually ended? Maybe none of us should go that deep looking for an answer.

Hollywood and the filming industry in general is a powerful machine, swallowing billions of dollars and pounds every year. For this money the machine is obliged to produce a mass entertainment tools through which people in the theaters can find relaxation from a tough day, answers to many questions or just soothing their guilty conscience. The best way to do that is to find a fictious culprit who may easily be turned into a real one. People pay for entertainment. People pay for others to find the quilty ones for them. Because no matter what happens to the world these days, it’s only us to be blamed. We choose the politicians that start the wars. We don’t oppose policies that is intended to suppress other nations in order to profit from oil and weapons. We just stay silent and watch movies.

There is a small group of people, however, who love independant movies where things are different. People pay to see these films because they want someone to make them think, not just to consolate their guilty conscience. Hopefully this industry will never die as lond as there are people more interested in the essence of our existence and prefer to use their heads than to blame other nations for their failures.