Free Syrian Army Propaganda

Propaganda's hard to spot when you agree with it. Let's say, for example, that you're into democracy and everyone having an equal say in affairs of state. Well, that doesn't mean that films that give exclusive voice to the democratic side of a conflict aren't propaganda, it just means that they're propaganda that you agree with.

Matthew Van Dyke's Not Anymore is interviews Mowya, a Free Syrian Army commander, and Nour Kelze, a journalist embedded with Mowya's battalion (and who's sympathies clearly lie with Free Syrian Army.) It's safe to say that Not Anymore accurately reflects Mowya and Kelze's experiences in the Syrian Civil War. It would be disingenuous to claim that it paints an accurate picture of said war.

Trigger warning: Not Anymore contains footage of a slain soldiers getting shot and killed, and a bomb or mortar blast in a crowded square.

 

Van Dyke and co-producer Kelze have created a propaganda piece to appeal to American's sentiment that democracy as a universal good. It feels disingenuous for Van Dyke and Kelze to call themselves journalists in context of this film. In other productions, perhaps they are able to interview more than one commander of one battalion of one side of the chaotic Syrian Civil War and a reporter embedded with said battalion. Not Anymore, while well meaning, feels coercive in its one-sidedness.

However much the American audience may agree with the sentiments expressed in Not Anymore, it is misguided to think that this film educates one about the multifaceted civil war that is spilling across Syria's borders. Even as propaganda it's incomplete: it doesn't tell its intended audience what it would like them to do. Should we write to our congress people demanding immediate military intervention in Syria[1]? Should we donate to this, that or the other charity? In the context of Not Anymore, Van Dyke and Kelze oughtn't be considered journalists. "Activist filmmakers" is a more apt moniker, although even as such their work is incomplete.

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[1] Not Anymore was completed in 2013, before America's involvement in Syria in opposition to ISIL.