Video: Prince Charles, Ashwariya Rai endorse green propaganda

The image industry lives by two mutually contradictory thoughts. One, that images have enormous power to do good through inspiration or showing exemplary behavior. Two, that images have no power to foster evil or persuade anyone to do anything bad. Hence, on the one hand, we’ll have Hollywood stars producing “The More You Know” PSAs that preach some homily that meets the network’s FCC community responsibility requirements, while Hollywood figures quickly quash any notion that any film or image or video game has ever inspired any act of violence, self-harm or anything else that’s less than ideal.

Both thoughts obviously can’t be true: If images can inspire good, they can also inspire evil. And if they can’t inspire evil, they have no power to inspire good. And it’s obvious that the image industry knows which is true: If they didn’t believe that images influence behavior, they wouldn’t engage in propagandistic campaigns to use an entire movie industry to proselytyze on behalf of green politics.

Enter some outfit called Global Cool, and the UK’s Prince Charles, who obviously has too much time on his hands, and Bollywood.

London, England (BANG) – Britain’s Prince Charles has pledged his support for climate change movement Global Cool’s new partnership with Bollywood. The prince has given his royal seal of approval to the organization’s campaign to raise awareness of their global mission to convert a billion people into planet-saving “carbon citizens” in India with the help of the country’s thriving film industry.

The group have kicked off their crusade by advising organizers of this weekend’s International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) Awards, taking place in Yorkshire, England, on how to make the event carbon neutral in order to minimize damage to the planet.

Click on the image for the video. It’s mind-numbing, yet creepy.

If anything, they’re overestimating the influence of movies on personal behavior. Just ask Laurie David, Hollywood green evangelist who never lives what she preaches.

On the other hand, Global Cool has racked up a better public face than the aging, irrelevant Prince.

In preparing their Indian focussed messaging, the celebrity-backed campaign has welcomed and enjoyed ongoing support from some of the biggest names in Indian Cinema, including Amitabh Bachchan, John Abraham and Ashwariya Rai.

She’s probably be a little more persuasive than Charlie.

So Global Cool aims to “convert” all of India into carbon neutral living via public spokespeople, overt public relations and embedding its messages into Bollywood movies starring the likes of Ashwariya Rai.

That’s called propaganda. If she were alive today, Leni Reifenstahl could only stand slackjawed at the thought of having a whole movie industry at her disposal and a billion souls to win over and the world’s elite at her back. Watch for something similar to the Global Cool campaign to start coming out of Hollywood–the overt green messaging, not the covert messaging Hollywood has been blitzing the world with for a generation. Actors Josh Hartnett and Rosario Dawson are already on board. Others are sure to follow shortly.

(h/t Chris R.)

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