The latest trailer for Amazon Prime’s Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is a perfect illustration of Western double standards and hypocrisy over the global arms trade. As I predicted in an earlier article, the plotline centres on Venezuela and in all likelihood is going to be little more than regime change propaganda. The new trailer adds a few more details, which make the prospects for the new season even worse.
The series premieres in October and the promos explain:
After tracking a potentially suspicious shipment of illegal arms in the Venezuelan jungle, CIA Officer Jack Ryan heads down to South America to investigate. As Jack’s investigation threatens to uncover a far-reaching conspiracy, the President of Venezuela launches a counter-attack that hits home for Jack, leading him and his fellow operatives on a global mission spanning the United States, UK, Russia, and Venezuela to unravel the President’s nefarious plot and bring stability to a country on the brink of chaos.
The voice over for the teaser adds a few more details, as we hear John Krasinski (who plays our eponymous hero) saying:
What is the most major threat on the world stage?
Venezuela has the greatest resource of oil on the planet. So why is this country in the midst of one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history?
We then see an Venezuelan opposition leader talking to a crowd about betrayal, to rapturous applause, suggesting that it is entirely the corrupt Venezuelan’s government’s fault that there is a humanitarian crisis, and suggesting the popular support is in favour of the opposition. The promo then goes back to a voice over, and a conversation between a CIA higher-up and Jack Ryan:
Your concern is that the Russians are secretly selling weapons to Venezuela?
To which Ryan responds:
It would fit a pattern.
Following this exchange is a montage that is mostly the same as the first trailer, released some weeks ago, including an ambush on a vehicle convoy that seems to have been lifted wholesale from Clear and Present Danger.
Far more important than the series’ unoriginality, however, is its deceptions. Venezuela is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis but it is hardly one of the worst in human history. Compared to the millions of Syrians living in refugee camps in Turkey, or the seemingly never-ending problem of Palestinians having to flee their homeland, Venezuela’s issues are smaller in scope and scale. While I do have some problems with the Maduro government and many Venezuelans have legitimate grievances, much of this is caused by the non-stop economic warfare waged against Venezuelans by the US.
Ditto, fears about ‘the Russians’ secretly selling weapons to the Venezuelan government are ludicrous. Russia openly sells weapons to Venezuela and has done so for years, and last December deployed two nuclear-capable strategic bombers to the country. These aren’t state secrets – they are widely reported facts. But Jack Ryan relies on the audience’s ignorance of world affairs, and their well-stoked fears of anything involving Russia, to sell this crock of shit.
The most recent report by SIPRI (the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) shows that the US alone accounts for 34% of all the world’s arms sales, leaving Russia a fairly distant 2nd with 22%. Other major sellers of weapons include France, Germany, China, the UK, Israel and Spain.
So the Jack Ryan trailer is almost entirely deceitful, suggesting Russia’s open, public exporting of arms is the ‘most major threat on the world stage’ while the US’s 58% higher arms exports are not even worth mentioning, let alone the West’s near-total dominance of the global arms trade. The major customers for this trade include India – who are engaged in an ongoing struggle with Pakistan over territory and regional primacy – Saudi Arabia – who are possibly the worst government in the world and who are prosecuting a massive but largely ignored war in Yemen, ironically the setting for much of the first season of Jack Ryan – Egypt, the UAE and China.
So contrary to Jack Ryan‘s claims, it is the Western arms trade that poses the most major threat, to ordinary civilians in the Middle East and elsewhere, and the weapons deals between Russia and Venezuela are publicly known and openly acknowledged. But that wouldn’t make effective propaganda for this CIA-sponsored TV series, so reality has to be inverted in order to encourage and promote a CIA-friendly coup in Venezuela – a long-time aim and objective for the Agency and for the US foreign policy machine.
While I will, of course, be watching the new Jack Ryan and will be reviewing it in-depth, all the early signs are that it will be little more an advertisement for the CIA’s special activities division, and a promo for the US’s designs to take over one of the most oil-rich nations on the planet.