1. The Film Suggests the Iraq War Was In Response To 9/11: One way to get audiences to unambiguously support Kyle’s actions in the film is to believe he’s there to avenge the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The movie cuts from Kyle watching footage of the attacks to him serving in Iraq, implying there is some link between the two.
2. The Film Invents a Terrorist Sniper Who Works For Multiple Opposing Factions: Kyle’s primary antagonist in the film is a sniper named Mustafa. Mustafa is mentioned in a single paragraph in Kyle’s book, but the movie blows him up into an ever-present figure and Syrian Olympic medal winner who fights for both Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and the Shia Madhi army.
3. The Film Portrays Chris Kyle as Tormented By His Actions: Multiple scenes in the movie portray Kyle as haunted by his service. One of the film’s earliest reviews praised it for showing the “emotional torment of so many military men and women.” But that torment is completely absent from the book the film is based on. In the book, Kyle refers to everyone he fought as “savage, despicable” evil. He writes, “I only wish I had killed more.”
4. The Real Chris Kyle Made Up A Story About Killing Dozens of People In Post-Katrina New Orleans: Kyle claimed that he killed 30 people in the chaos of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, a story Louisiana writer Jarvis DeBerry calls “preposterous.” It shows the sort of mentality post-war Kyle had, but the claim doesn’t appear in the film.
5. The Real Chris Kyle Fabricated A Story About Killing Two Men Who Tried To Carjack Him In Texas: Kyle told numerous people a story about killing two alleged carjackers in Texas. Reporters tried repeatedly to verify this claim, but no evidence of it exists.
6. Chris Kyle Was Successfully Sued For Lying About the Former Governor of Minnesota:Kyle alleged that former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura defamed Navy SEALs and got into a fight with him at a local bar. Ventura successfully sued Kyle for the passage in his book, and a jury awarded him $1.845 million.
7. Chris Kyle’s Family Claimed He Donated His Book Proceeds To Veterans’ Charity, But He Kept Most Of The Profits: The National Review debunks the claim that all proceeds of his book went to veterans’ charities. Around 2 percent – $52,000 – went to the charities while the Kyles pocketed $3 million.
No comment on the above, since I don't know the show at all, but just as background since we're already linking back to WWII:
The word propaganda comes from the Latin propagare - which is also the root, obviously, of words like 'propagate'. The difference (to get technical for a moment) is that words ending with -ate come from the Latin past participle ("that which has been ---ed") and words ending with -andum/-anda from the gerundive ("that/those which must be ---ed"). The classic example in English is "agenda" - from Latin "agire", to act/enact/do, ie, "those things [singular would be agendum] which need to be done".
But it gets more interesting.
English gets a lot of its vocab from Latin, yes. But most of that happened in the Middle Ages (for legalistic and theological things) and the Early Modern period (when they were busy fetishising classical philosophy). Not propaganda. It's a relatively recent word in English, at least in the commonly accepted sense. There's a few occurrences of it before the twentieth century, but only in technical use, fairly rare, and not negative at all: just "that which should be spread".
In its current use? It dates back, in fact, to WWI.
1929 G. Seldes You can't print That! 427 The term propaganda has not the sinister meaning in Europe which it has acquired in America... In European business offices the word means advertising or boosting generally.
Well, that's nice and idealistic, G. Seldes. And more or less true, depending on your degree of cynicism. But what seems to have happened is that, in the lead-up to WWI, a group of prominent British writers - including Rudyard Kipling - were recruited by the war effort to boost common morale. Make sure people's spirits were kept up. Write for the papers, for the radios, make sure people were thinking and feeling the right things. Getting the right information out there. And we shall, completely without irony, call this campaign propaganda. All completely necessary for national unity and national spirit, nothing sinister at all.
... Until afterwards. Until people start looking back.
Until, in fact, many years later, when enough people are cynical about government-controlled messages and government-disseminated emotions that, upon hearing the word propaganda, they think not "my country right or wrong" but "they're trying to control me".
The word propaganda, in short, is a story of how our relationship with government and war changed between WWI and later wars. And when I say "our", I don't just mean America, and I don't just mean England. The English language reaches wider than that, and so does the culture of disillusionment.
