Blather, rinse, repeat

Gulf of Tonkin has been known to be false for some time.

The film provides no evidence for the brief claim that US companies funded both sides of the Cold War, even indirectly. They then go off on a tangent about US RoE regarding North Vietnam, attempting to cast the confusing White House orders into the result of some great conspiracy. Reality on the ground more readily explains the result. The film here then goes into the typical lunacy associated with this disease, the idea that the US could easily have won the war if we had just taken the gloves off the bombing teams. The current consensus is that this is not true, that although we ran the war incompetently, simply upping the amount of explosives dropped on Vietnam would not have changed things. The film interprets the fact that we did not win the war as evidence that a conspiracy intervened, an act which assumes the US's godlike omnipotence in the field. Neil Sheehan and Stanley Karnow have both written excellent and accessible works on the subject. Normally this is the line I see from far-right hardliners, usually followed by them blaming the liberal media for our defeat.

They then seem to indicate that the civil war in Iraq is caused by the US, where every expert I know points out that it was an inevitability, which could hardly be contained, and has proved far more expensive to the occupiers, and far more detrimental to the international financial system.

And they jump over to entertainment, blaming this also on the grand conspiracy. The film does not understand the fact that people have never been particularly cerebral. Even in the "good old days" we were never engaging in philosophy as a mass effect, in the Middle Ages it was even worse. People want to be entertained, their happy being entertained and not having to think about the big problems. This doesn't require a huge government conspiracy, it simply requires people to be people. I never assume that people being human is a result of a massive conspiracy.

No evidence is given for the North American Union, nor any idea of how it can be accomplished. The entire thing seems to be based off of a document produced by an independent task force organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent organization, which is not even a formal part of the government, just a piece of the Washington sub-strata. At this point, pending direct divine intervention, there's no way that this is even plausible, or any evidence that we can find.

In conclusion, I have heard this before. The old one-world-government conspiracy, the dramatic predictions of a massive shift to a completely controlled world, the idea that tomorrow the huge big men in the sky are going to snap their fingers and turn everything into one world, is old hat. I have not seen anything particularly interesting about the theory before, and I don't see anything interesting about it now. The way it provides unsupported claims, and the way it reworks existing events, twisting them to make them fit a conspiracy theory with no firm ideology, and no firm base, discourages me from believing it.

It's a conspiracy theory. Not a very well done one. Not a very thorough one. I give it a six out of ten on the conspiracy theory scale - they should try harder if they want to be amusing.