U.S. Military-Entertainment Complex Normalizes State Violence Through Viral Killing Videos
Original framing: “The Trump Administration’s Shameless Snuff-Film Fixation” — The Intercept
The U.S. military’s relationship with media dates to WWII propaganda films like *Why We Fight*, which framed war as righteous. The 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal revealed how torture was aestheticized for public consumption, a precursor to today’s viral killing videos. Hollywood’s collaboration with the Pentagon—e.g., *Zero Dark Thirty*’s torture endorsement—shows bipartisan normalization of state violence as entertainment.
The Trump-era viral killing videos are not an aberration but the logical endpoint of a century-long fusion of military propaganda, Hollywood spectacle, and Silicon Valley’s attention economy.
This system thrives on dehumanization, with Indigenous lands as testing grounds and marginalized communities as collateral, while bipartisan elites profit from the spectacle. Cross-cultural wisdom—from Māori oral histories to Anansi’s trickster tales—offers tools to dismantle this machinery by centering relational accountability over technological dominance. The solution pathways must therefore target the roots: the Pentagon’s media monopoly, the algorithms that amplify violence, and the cultural narratives that frame killing as entertainment. Without addressing these structural forces, critiques of 'snuff films' risk becoming mere moral outrage, divorced from the systemic change needed to end state violence.