Shooting The Messenger
‘Light ‘em all up!’
‘Keep shootin’
‘Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards’
‘Nice’
It’s said that time heals, but does it really? Maybe it’s the forgetting, fogging of what was endured that doesn’t actually mend, but buries the murky concussed moments under a junkyard of subsequent car crash memories. Hidden, time crumpled situations just waiting to be further crushed into compact square boxes and neatly stacked away in state compressed history books. Chaos presented as order.
Given the state of the world in 2025, the actual concept of order has a sense of nostalgia about it. Remembering ‘fondly’ back to the days when governments actually mostly hid their atrocities from the masses, rather than jubilantly parade them round our screens every day for over two years on a genocidal extravaGaza world tour, while simultaneously telling us that an American children’s YouTuber educator is the epitome of evil. That’s who we should turning our bewildered PTSD ire to, bunny hopping Ms. Rachel was clearly the logical outcome of Hitler’s goose stepping ambitions.
It’s that tsunami memory pile up of the recent years of pandemics, massacres, wars and the dehumanisation of anything other than stock shares that make it feel like we all live inside a giant global metal bell that’s being smacked like a toddler’s saucepan drum kit. That incessant clanging is by design, if you can’t hear yourself think, you won’t be asking any questions.
And with all the noise, what should you even be asking? Maybe the best first step to a solution is to learn the truth?
American director Eugene Jarecki caught my attention back in 2012 with his outstanding documentary The House I Live In, exposing the true objectives of the supposed war on drugs by successive governments in the US. Given Eugene is the author of The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril, and the founder and executive director of The Eisenhower Project, a public policy group dedicated to promoting greater public understanding of the forces that shape U.S. foreign and defence policy, you can imagine the perspective he takes when diving into genuinely heroic levels of investigative journalism.
His exposures, detailing and ability to bring clarity to malevolent, highly complex situations is highly regarded, having rightly won numerous awards for his work over the years.
His most recent recognitions being the L’Œil d’or Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globe Prize for Documentary in 2025 for his latest film The Six Billion Dollar Man (2025). The focus of this latest project is none other than Julian Assange, one of the founders of WikiLeaks, who went on to become the number one most wanted target of multiple successive US presidents because he made the near fatal decision of holding truth to power. And hell hath no fury like a war machine scorned.
Assange’s ‘notoriety’ was well known to large sectors of society, not only for being at the helm of the truth printing machine that was WikiLeaks, a non-profit media organisation established in 2006 that became the global central hub for releasing classified information focused on the dark arts of the military and uni-party industrial complex.
There were also endless attempts to seed doubts about his character and objectives in the minds of the general population, sly wink and nudging the story away from massacres to salacious tabloid manufactured content, going base when the world wept for purity.
One might be approaching the documentary with the belief that this story is well known, but acting like one of their infamous log file dumps, it is here to truly set the record straight. What we were all sharing and believing was a narrative, not the reality.
Stories that were artificially constructed, manipulated and orchestrated by a mainstream media firing squad in conjunction with state operatives. Facing such a line-up, the outcome only ends one way.
The film is nothing short of staggering, jaw dropping and in the greatest way possible has the viewer question huge amounts of the tales we have been carrying around for years. Beliefs that are basically plot campaigns to besmirch, humiliate and ultimately annihilate the Aussie kid that is pointing at the naked (murderous) emperor/empire.
Hugely detailed with in-depth insights, contributions from highly respected fellow truth-sayers who have spent entire careers in investigative journalism, media, politics, law and security services, the slow build of highly analytical substance is genuinely something to behold. Individuals involved at every level, both in the support of Julian and WikiLeaks, but fascinatingly also operators employed or coerced into orchestrating his downfall, and potentially death.
Jarecki has also been given access to an unprecedented and somewhat definitive amount of additional archival footage and fingerprinted data that makes the forensic autopsy of the character assassination of Assange even more horrific. Especially when it is clearly shown who is steering the money and objectives behind it all, entities that are well known to anyone who is aware of US politics (especially their sponsors), which in turn whips global politics into submission.
Even just being reminded of the Iraq/Afghan War logs that WikiLeaks is synonymous with embarrasses you with just how much you have been made to forget. When there’s daily scenes of children being sniped in the head for sport, racially driven raids by state vigilantes, or the assassination of Venezuelan fishermen like it’s a computer game, it’s a basic mental safety mechanism of the human brain to bury yesterday’s Top Ten Atrocities, especially when there’s a new straight into No1 every day. Again, by design. Overwhelm, and neuter. Comply or die.
I’ve deliberately steered clear of the details that are patiently presented throughout this incredible film. It’s almost overwhelming, but not in a choking suppressive way, but the learning to breathe deeply again. You hadn’t realised just how much out of self preservation you had restricted your thinking, incessant shallow gasps, or prolonged holding of your breath to keep you in a suboptimal state.
The Six Billion Dollar Man smashes through the ice that was trying to drown you, and that air tastes amazing, life giving, rejuvenating, invigorating, inspiring.
You weren’t going mad, madness was steering you to allow it to achieve its sociopathic objectives that are unquestionably laid out before us.
It could be easy to have a sense of apathy given the level of corruption that is exposed, but the mere fact the film has been made is a flaming torch, the guiding light for hope, the defiance and sanity we need. There is a foregone conclusion if such behaviour is unaccountable. Seeing the documentary is an incredibly healthy resetting of one’s perspective.
As former National Security Agency intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden respectfully questions the viewer at one point, ‘When we have been lied to, would we rather not know?’ The solution is most definitely not found in ignoring it and hoping the problem goes away. That’s what they are relying on.
The objective is clear from Julien’s and the film’s perspective, ‘Learn, challenge, act now.’ Seeing it encapsulates all those actions, and you deserve the truth, and the better world for all that it builds.
9/10
The Six Billion Dollar Man is UK and Irish cinemas 19 December.