One last year in the sun for UK-US ‘special relationship’?

[unhappycamper]

http://rt.com/op-edge/uk-us-special-relationship-690/



One last year in the sun for UK-US ‘special relationship’?
Published time: February 25, 2014 16:05

~snip~

Billions of dollars to woo and 'do' the British

Perhaps Britain should feel flattered that the US chooses to spend so many millions of their hard-earned tax dollars courting British favor? The Italians now know of the millions the CIA spent in the 1960s and 1970s to stop them electing Communist governments. Yes, there are assassinations, but the overall mission is to let the idea that America is “nice” and even “cool” exude from every aspect of the arts, deliberately gently elbowing out local culture and homegrown creativity.

The US offensive, which has now all but wiped out British cinema, began in the 1960s. Michael Wakelin describes how US money bought influence in British cinema chains in his 1996 book about the Methodist mogul behind much of 20th Century British cinema – “J. Arthur Rank: The Man Behind the Gong.” That influence grew and Wakelin tells the tragic story of how these US-controlled chains gradually refused to show the British-made films Rank was producing, cutting off his revenue and gradually shutting him down. These nominally British cinemas were eventually showing exclusively Hollywood films. By the 1980s, British film studios at Pinewood and Shepperton were producing a declining number of almost exclusively US-funded and written films, albeit with English film crews and actors, and the British film industry was virtually dead.

US interference in UK culture reached such an extent in 1960 that a full-length feature film, starring Britain's most famous comedy actor of the day, Norman Wisdom, was unceremoniously “wiped.” The “offending” film, titled “There Was A Crooked Man,” featured Wisdom masquerading as an arrogant US general requisitioning British land for the US Air Force. The subject of US forces on British soil was deemed too sensitive even for comic treatment, and this classic film from the comic's golden years remains “missing, believed wiped” to this day.

The source of funding for these colossal cinema network takeovers may even have been, though few would have suspected at the time, the post WWII Bormann network. Former CBS News correspondent on the WWII Western front, Paul Manning, describes the genesis of the Bormann financiers in his 1980 book “Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile” who were fuelled by millions of dollars of Nazi loot, laundered by CIA chief Alan Dulles’ New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell.