Zeitgeist The Movie - Review

By Jonathan Andrews (with Alison Andrews)

Zeitgeist The Movie is the first in a series of three outstanding documentaries that have affected my life and understanding in so many ways. Since my childhood I knew that there was something not quite right about the way we do things.

With great sadness I would look at the poverty all around and wonder how it got to be this way. Even then I realised that my life would be about changing the very system that produced such conditions. Though, the options given to us at the time did not seem to be any better than the rest. Communism, socialism, capitalism and fascism are equally unattractive. They all produce the same conditions.

Majoring in Law and politics at University, I studied the theories of government and the nature of man, though none could appease my appetite for a solution. They all lacked something, whether in their explanations of what the problems are or the solutions they provided.

Zeitgeist The Movie - Zeitgeist Review

All Until I watched the zeitgeist films. No other book, professor, or journal could do for me what these three Zeitgeist films have done. They encapsulate the problems identified by an array of researchers and provide a meaningful and reasonable solution. This work is no easy task.

Peter Joseph has pulled it all together. The simple fact that he has done this is extraordinary. The way it has been done is perfect.

He could have written a book, but how many people these days read anything? And that is the point! It is aimed at the man on the street, not a political scientist. The films are made to create awareness of our situation without having to spend years ploughing through tertiary education to understand it.

There are three zeitgeist films: Zeitgeist The Movie, Zeitgeist Addendum and Zeitgeist Moving Forward. All three films will be reviewed here, starting with Zeitgeist The Movie.

Zeitgeist The Movie starts off dramatically with pulse quickening music and various images of war and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade centre in New York. The destruction of the World Trade Centre is focused on heavily during Zeitgeist The Movie. However, what Peter Joseph deals with first in Zeitgeist The Movie is our religious institutions.

Zeitgeist The Movie: Religion

Religion has dominated the course of our lives for the duration of our history. What Zeitgeist aims to express is this: what we have today is an updated and manipulated version of the same pagan beliefs man has had since the beginning of our species.

Early man looked to the stars for his mythical guidance. They are impressive, with the sun being the most important and thus being the centre of their study and imagination.

This is not an unreasonable explanation. Early man would naturally be quite obsessed and awestruck by the sun and the stars. It provides the basis of life on this planet. Today, we are aware of the scientific explanations for the movements of the sun and the stars, and how they affect our seasons. Early man made up myths to explain these movements and happenings. These myths eventually became religions.

The festivals and dates and stories within the various religions have some very similar characteristics. For instance, the Egyptian god Horus has the same basic life story as Jesus. So does the Greek god Attis, the Indian god Krishna, Dionysus and Mithra of Persia. They all were born of a virgin on 25 December, they had twelve disciples, they performed miracles, were crucified, remained dead for three days and then were resurrected.

Why did these gods all have such similar characteristics? The simple answer lies in the heavens. These gods have all been based on the sun.

The birth of these gods is a simple astrological phenomenon. On December 24, the three stars of Orion’s belt align with “Sirius” the star in the east. This row of stars points to where the sun will rise on December 25. Hence the three kings follow the star in the east to the birthplace of God.

Another point is that from the north, the sun slowly creeps south during winter (the time of death), the days getting shorter and shorter. Then on December 22 it seems to stop its southward movement in the astrological area of the Southern Cross. There the sun sits for three days until on the 25 December; it slowly makes it movement northwards again. This explains the death of the god on the cross and his rebirth on December 25.

Zeitgeist The Movie: Christianity has been plagiarised from various other religions.

The Roman Emperor Constantine did this officially because religion has a very obvious component, political control. And control they did. The Roman Catholic Church maintained a stranglehold on politics for the next two thousand years.

Religion ensures the complacency of the people who follow it. Political ends have been clothed in religious doctrine for years. It teaches its followers to submit to authority without question. Acts that would normally not be accepted are deemed all right in the name of religion. A population who readily accept things on faith alone will accept just about any explanation if it comes from the right source.

This brings us to the next part of Zeitgeist The Movie, the attacks on the Twin Towers in Manhattan.

Zeitgeist The Movie: Terrorism

Zeitgeist The Movie recaps the official story of the attack. The first issue dealt with is that there was supposedly no warning.

There were many warnings of an escalating attack. Countries around the world expressly warned the United States that a terrorist attack was imminent.

What is little known is that a U.S military base, forcibly established in the holy land of Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf war was considered an abomination by many Muslim fundamentalists.

It is not OK to be anywhere near Mecca if you are not of Islamic faith. The fact that a few thousand Christian Soldiers were walking on the land of Mohammed was a definite slap in the face for the Muslim people. The rebellious attacks started small and grew from there, culminating in the attack on the towers.

That being said, the contradictions in the explanations of the attacks are profound.

• Many of the men accused of flying the planes into the buildings are still alive and well today!
• The Towers themselves were designed to take the impact of MULTIPLE aircraft.
• The towers fell at freefall speed. This is impossible unless it was a controlled demolition
• The third building that collapsed in Manhattan, World Trade Centre 7, was never hit by any plane at all! It mysteriously set on fire and then simply crumbled. No steel structure has ever collapsed due to fire before or since.
• The plane that crashed into the pentagon was officially said to have vaporised. The six ton Rolls Royce engines made from tempered steel and titanium, powering the aircraft would not feel the 1500 degree heat that jet fuel burns at. How could they? They are designed to burn jet fuel in order to power the plane in the first place.
• Though the aircraft and its titanium engines supposedly vaporised, they were still able to identify finger prints...huh?
• The plane crash in Shanksville similarly disintegrated. No wreckage left at all. Just a few holes in the ground.
• Evidence of Thermite was found at the base of the buildings. Thermite is used for demolitions to burn through steel as if it was plastic.
• NORAD (North American Aerospace defence Command) usually responds to a situation like this in less than ten minutes. It took eighty minutes before fighter jets were even scrambled. They had a 100% success rate before 9/11.
• The U.S government stated that the information regarding the funding of the terrorist attacks was “of little consequence”
• The 9/11 commission published a unanimous report. This means that only information that was universally agreed upon within the commission was included in the report.

There are so many more contradictions and facts that are best described by Zeitgeist The Movie itself. Pictures do paint a thousand words.

It does not take too much to realise that there was something fishy about these attacks. The most omnipotent nation on earth does not get easily fooled by a group of men running around in a cave. If rogue forces within the U.S government did not orchestrate the attack, then they allowed it to happen. I am of the opinion that it was a mixture of both.

Zeitgeist The Movie: Why do war and destruction happen?

This comes to the question of why? Why would they allow an attack on their own people?

To answer this question we have to look at what has happened since then. Two wars have been waged. The Middle East has been firmly put under the thumb of the west. They will never leave the area... it is has been years since the invasion, yet the Americans are still there!

Now they are overthrowing all regimes in the area that aren’t ‘western friendly’. Gaddafi’s regime in Libya is gone, soon to follow will be Iran and many others. If resource rich states don’t play ball, they will be overthrown, and the new leaders will be very western friendly.

Human rights in the U.S have been curtailed completely. They can now arrest a person and search their private property without any proof of anything. The Patriot Act (what a name) basically strips away the rights of the U.S citizen. Sounds like the beginning of a police state.

In the world system as it is today, power is everything. There is no international body that ensures the safety of each state (the United Nations is nothing without its main contributors). Thus each state has to fend for itself. They do this by attaining power: economic and military. If they do not, then they will be subject to the whims of other states.
If you don’t win, you lose.

Zeitgeist The Movie: Fear

But there is another issue, this petty business of democracy. You have to convince your people before you go running into another part of the world. They have believed they are fighting for something; they must be scared before they allow their rights to be taken away, for their sons to die in a far off land.

Fear is instilled in the nation and then those in power can manipulate that fear to further their own ends.

We have become a population of the fearful. Finding sanctuary in our living rooms only, begging to be left alone there at least, handing off our rights as humans as if they were nothing. Do we really have anything to be afraid of? If we had no televisions or radios or any contact with anyone outside of where we lived, do you think we would have so much fear?

I think not. Most of our terror is as real as what our televisions make it.

Zeitgeist The Movie: The creation of an enemy

There must be a specific enemy before the people of a country allow their leaders to spend five hundred billion a year on defence and go gallivanting across the world.

But if your enemy is one country, then once that country is dealt with there is no more need to stay there and continue spending so much money on the military. But what if your enemy is a faceless individual who can pop up anywhere?

If your enemy never goes away, then you can manipulate the circumstances to do whatever you want, hence the terrorist, the handiest political tool since the invention of the microphone.

Zeitgeist The Movie: The Terrorist - The handiest political tool since the microphone!

After every regime change and after every war, massive contracts go out to various multinational corporations. Resource management, extraction rights, reconstruction and development, these are what the actual goals are. The U.S and its allies will go into another country and destroy it. Then they will allow their corporations to come along and take control of reconstruction and raw material extraction, all charged to the destroyed nation

Iraq was the perfect example. The Iraqi people are now saddled with national debt that is impossible to pay off. Thus instead of demanding the money, the invaders will make deals regarding oil etc.

Zeitgeist The Movie: The real puppet masters

Who is actually in control of our government? Are the men and woman we vote for the ones who pull the strings? Mass media would have you believe this, though the truth is a bit more complex. Zeitgeist The Movie investigates who really controls the money, for it is money that controls everything.

Zeitgeist The Movie: The American Revolution

According to many sources, including Benjamin Franklin, the main reason behind the American Revolution was that the English would not allow the colonies to use their own form of debt free currency.

England was forcing them to lend all their money from the central bank of England at interest, immediately putting the colonies in debt.

A central bank is a private institution that produces all a nations’ money. It does not just give this money out, it lends it out at interest. Thus, all the money in circulation in the colonies back then was in fact all owed back to the central bank of England.

The Americans did not want to be saddled with this debt that was intrinsic to the English money supply; they wanted their own debt free currency called the Greenback. When the king denied them this, it started the war.

Long story short, the U.S. achieved what it sought out to achieve, a debt free currency.

Zeitgeist The Movie: The Federal Reserve Act

By 1907, the international bankers got the upper hand once again. By sponsoring the campaigns of Woodrow Wilson and many other politicians, they managed to get the Federal Reserve Act passed.

This act basically reinstalled the debt ridden currency that the U.S. founding fathers fought against. Instead of the U.S. borrowing all its money from the central bank of England, it now borrowed money from the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. Contrary to what its name suggests this is a private institution.

The banks once again had the power, and now they used it to gain even more. By manipulating the financial industry and using the media to cause frenzy, this one group of people managed to cause the 1929 crash that sent the world into the most dismal depression ever seen.

Zeitgeist The Movie: Margin Loans

They did this by offering people something called a margin loan. This allowed a person to produce only ten percent of the value of the stocks he wanted to purchase, and trade the entire amount as if he had bought them entirely.

This was a very attractive situation. Everyman on the street was trying his hand at financial speculation. The only condition was that this loan could be recalled at any time by the lender.

So the bankers gave out these margin loans to whoever would take them. Men would come into movie theatres and promote them! The Americans were drawn in like moths to the light.

Once the bubble had grown sufficiently, the men upstairs called in the margin loans, and everyone who owed had to sell stock to pay back the loan. Once so many people start selling, the value goes down and in the resulting fear everyone starts selling, and thus the stock market crashed on black Thursday, sending the world into an economic depression.

The reason behind this is actually about power consolidation. When a market crashes like this, giant corporations can be bought up for spare change. Medium sized banks are brought to their knees by the mass withdrawals. While those who initiate the crash come out of it smiling like the Cheshire cat.

What does this mean for you? Does this affect your daily life?

Yes it does. The tax you pay does not all go to pay for social services and community development. It goes to pay back the central bank that lent out the money in the first place!

The government borrows money from the central bank and it pays them back too! From your taxes!

Zeitgeist The Movie: The Bankers and war

Peter Joseph takes the responsibility of the international bankers even further. He argues that war is one of the most profitable situations imaginable for a banker. War forces a nation to borrow even more money to finance the war effort.

The United States people did not want to enter the First World War. It had nothing to do with them!

The war was all about imperialism and blundered diplomacy. None of which really concerned the U.S. at all. They were just fine on their own.

But once war broke out the Bankers knew that massive power and profit could be attained if the U.S. entered the fracas. So they manufactured a situation where the U.S people would demand to fight.

There is documented evidence of written correspondence between Colonel Edward House (President Wilsons top advisor, with many ties to the banking cartel) and Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary of England) suggesting this tactic.

They sent a passenger ship full of Americans into German controlled waters, after the German embassy repeatedly told them that the safety of the ship could not be guaranteed if it entered a war zone.

The Germans went so far as to publish advertisements in the New York newspapers advising people not to board the ship as it was bound for a war zone!!

The Lusitania was sunk by a single torpedo from a German submarine. The American people were sufficiently outraged to enter the war.

Zeitgeist The Movie: The Second World War

The Second World War was another European war that the United States was not involved in.

Once again the bankers wanted in. But it was not enough to simply enter the war. It must appear as if the U.S. was forced to enter, by the actions of the axis powers alone.

What they needed was to be attacked. But no one wanted to attack them.

The axis powers were already fighting against both the English and the Russians and everyone else in between! Awakening another giant would not be an intelligent option for the Germans or the Japanese, and as history has shown us, intelligence has never been lacking in these two military forces, in their political leadership maybe, but not in the military. They had to be forced to attack.

They were forced. The American President at that time was Roosevelt. He came from a family of New York Bankers and did all he could to anger the Japanese, while publically claiming neutrality.

He halted Japanese imports of U.S petroleum, he froze all Japanese assets in America, and he provided financial and military aid to Japans enemies, both China and England. This is in direct contravention of international war rules.

Weeks before the attack, Australian intelligence warned the United States of a Japanese task force moving towards Pearl harbour. They did nothing. They let it happen.

Thus the U.S. was in the War.

And so Zeitgeist The Movie explains the rest of the wars fought by the United States. Financial interests are put in front of human life every time.

The men and woman we believe are doing their best for us are often doing their worst for us, or it may be they are simply convinced that the lives of the few can be sacrificed to further the interests of the many, it does not matter what they tell themselves so they can sleep at night, what matters is that Joe Public does the shit shovelling and the dying, while the elites decide what shit to shovel next.

Zeitgeist The Movie: Power is everything

The Zeitgeist video explains that the end game for our controlling elites is to manipulate us into allowing them to restrict our rights and finally consolidate the world into one centralised power.

This is halfway done already. Take a look at the European Union. Next is going to be an overhaul of the African Union, followed by a north American Union etc. Of course, this does not really have to happen that quickly, as the world is already one giant federation running under the same system.

Debt is used to coerce all nations into doing whatever the elites want. The standard operation is to force a country into debt, then offer loans under specific conditions.

Conditions such as opening up its borders to foreign corporations and investment, restricting the states involvement in the economy and privatising its national industries. Water, oil, power, whatever the state had control over, is sold off to multinationals at a fraction of their worth.

All profits from these industries are then extracted out of the host country and into the banks of the investors; nothing is really reinvested in the host country ever again. That is why the poor countries keep getting poorer!

The puppet government of the host nation is kept under the thumbs of the investors with the never ending debt. Fluctuating interest rates mean the loans are never repaid.

It is similar to a person who buys a house and a car on loan and thus is now compelled to work in a job they hate as they have to pay back the loan! Though the loan is never repaid because it is always being refinanced due to the person not being able to keep up the payments! It is a very sad situation.

Zeitgeist The Movie: Our invisible cage

Zeitgeist The Movie explains that we are born into this hamster cage and we spend our lives running on a spinning wheel - kept there through false fear, news and advertising.

Why do we watch T.V. in the first place? We have become convinced that what we see there is reality.

Look out the window; that is your reality. Unless there is something happening right in your field of vision then how much does it really mean?

Why would a reasonable person fear something that is happening on the other side of the world? If it is even happening at all!

Remember who you are. We are not the imagined people we watch on television. We are a species of sentient beings on planet earth, born with natural ability the same as all other beings.

Who are these people that run our lives? I do not know anyone in government, neither have I consented to anything they have decided for me. Therefore, what right do they have to tell me to do anything?

The main focus of the first in the series of Zeitgeist films is to get our attention. Get us on the edge of our seats, getting us angry. Angry that we are being treated like this. Angry that we are being killed like insects under the feet of the monsters of unbridled capitalism and power consolidation.

After watching the first film we are angry, we are downright fucking outraged. This is the first step.

GET ANGRY.

Watch Zeitgeist The Movie NOW for FREE!

To find out more about these amazing documentaries or download the full movies (for free) visit the website here: Zeitgeist Movies

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