(nog even alleen in Generic, sorry)
To avoid a sex scandal of the president eleven days before the election, the White House staff (Robert de Niro, Anne Heche) invents and “produces” a war against Albania that does not really exist, with the help of a major Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman). The movie shows that they are willing to do anything to clean the president’s image as well as the ease in which they can make the public believe that there is a war even if it does not exist.
Even if the story is fiction, it reflects a mindset that may very well exist in reality and it shows the state of the art of manipulation in 1997. If you then consider, that the actual state of the art is always far beyond what may be publicly displayed and that this technology has boosted in the last 25 years, one can only imagine the manipulation capacity nowadays.
This should be seriously taken in account when seeing the one-sided news of the last few years and weeks.
Some references to the movie
Curiously enough there have been quite some coincidences with real life and more surprisingly… after the movie was released in 1997. According to Wikipedia:
Wag the Dog was released one month before the outbreak of the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan by the Clinton administration in August 1998, which prompted the media to draw comparisons between the film and reality.
The comparison was also made in December 1998 when the administration initiated a bombing campaign of Iraq during Clinton’s impeachment trial over the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal.
It was made again in the spring of 1999 when the administration intervened in the Kosovo War and initiated a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, which coincidentally bordered Albania and contained ethnic Albanians.
More Wag the Dog (Ukraine and/or Zelensky) on Rumble:
https://rumble.com/vx79rp-wag-the-dog-in-ukraine-should-you-really-trust-your-tv-from-covid-to-war.html
https://rumble.com/vw5mle-wag-the-dog-ukraine-invasion.html