Film Review – Radio Free

Theroux’s Film on Israel’s Violent Settlers Was a Mirror

Jonathan Cook — Tue, 13 May 2025 15:56:49 +0000

For once, the BBC aired a documentary showing Israeli society’s dark underbelly. The backlash is not because Louis Theroux got it wrong. It’s because his film tells us far too much about ourselves

Louis Theroux explains in a commentary published by the Guardian on 10 May why the backlash to his recent film about violent, Israeli state-backed settlers misses the point.

His critics say he is unfairly presenting a few marginal “crazies” in Israeli society, who rampage across the West Bank to drive out the native Palestinian population, as significant and influential.

That’s exactly what they are, Theroux responds.

Settler leader Daniella Weiss, who Theroux spent much time following and interviewing, “enjoys enormous clout within the Israeli cabinet and … has the protection of the army in her project of settler expansionism”.

He quotes Haaretz journalist Etan Nechin in noting that the setters’ “representatives are literally sitting in the government and control everything from the police to treasury”.

Theroux makes a further point about why it is important to focus on the settlers and understand what they really represent.

“A film about extreme West Bank settlers isn’t simply about a region of the Middle East. It’s also about ‘us’,” he writes in the Guardian.

He adds: “The urgency here is that West Bank settlers are a bellwether for where society may be going in countries across the west… Around the same time that the documentary aired, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is a settler, was being hosted at [Donald Trump’s] Mar-a-Lago.”

There has been a backlash to Theroux’s documentary – just as there is continuing support for Israel, even as it commits what the International Court of Justice deems a “plausible genocide” – precisely because those extremists are “us”.

The gun-toting, stone-throwing, orchard-burning, house-torching settlers are from Texas, London and Paris. And so are many of the soldiers – some of them volunteers from western countries – who are currently slaughtering and enforcing the starvation of children in Gaza.

It is “us” watching this genocide unfold in slow-motion and shrugging our shoulders, or both-sidesing the stream of constant Israeli crimes on our screens. It is “us” still sending weapons to make the genocide possible. It is “us” decrying the protesters marching against the genocide, against the starvation of babies, as “antisemites”, “haters” and “supporters of terrorism”.

Israel’s crimes didn’t begin 19 months ago. They date back a century or more. They began with Britain’s sponsorship of an exclusive Jewish enclave imposed on the Middle East – a colonising state-to-be that was always going to require the containment and ultimately the expulsion, or extermination, of the native, Palestinian population.

That process had nothing more to do with “Jewish control” then than it does now. After all, it was an arch anti-semite, Arthur Balfour – Lord Balfour – who wrote the infamous Balfour Declaration in 1917 promising a Jewish state on the Palestinians’ homeland. He was supported by the entire British cabinet – apart from Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish government minister, who rightly lamented Britain’s support for a Jewish state in Palestine as evidence of his countrymen’s enduring antisemitism.

Why were Balfour and the other government ministers so keen to have “the Jews” in the Middle East?

Religious reasons played a part, to be sure. But more important were all-too practical, foreign policy objectives.

First because, like other governments driven by ethno-nationalist sentiment that was then running riot in European capitals, the British government preferred that “a Jewish state”, dependent on Britain, would project its interests as a British colony in the oil-rich Middle East.

If Britain didn’t seek to promote and harness a European Jewish presence in the region first – to weaponise those Jews against “the natives” – France or Germany might do so instead.

It was a race between European powers for regional control. Though ultimately, of course, they were beaten to the finishing line by the United States, which has been Israel’s main patron since the founding of a so-called “Jewish state” through the mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in 1948.

The crimes Israel carries out today were engineered – made inevitable – by the decisions western powers took from the early twentieth century onwards.

Which is why Theroux is right that we in the West are responsible for Israel’s actions in a way that is entirely untrue of Burma or China or Russia.

Israel’s supporters want us looking away from Israel’s crimes to Burma’s, China’s or Russia’s precisely because Israel is “us”. Its state terrorism is ours.

If the Israel fortress colony falls, so the fear goes, the West’s system of colonial power projection – those 800-plus military bases the US has stationed around the world in its bid for “global full-spectrum dominance” – will begin to unravel with it.

Israel is still secretly viewed by the West – by “us” – as it was by the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, 130 years ago: as “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”.

Those cheerleading Israel’s genocide, or staying complicity silent, are the ideological inheritors of Lord Balfour and his ugly racism.

Either they wish for “the Jews” to complete the takeover of historic Palestine – exterminating or ethnically cleansing what is left of “the natives” – as a public flexing of “our” muscle, as a demonstration of who controls the world, of what awaits anyone who defies “our” might.

Or they have been so brainwashed by a fearmongering western narrative that the world is divided into two – and only the western half is actually civilised – that the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children and the starvation of a million more seems a reasonable, even moral, response to the state of the world.

Yes, the West’s Jewish populations have been more easily sold on this preposterous notion because, given their history of western persecution, they are more easily persuaded to live in a state of permanent fear, they are more readily convinced by establishment narratives that there are exceptional reasons to support this genocide.

But “our” leaders are no less in thrall to this kind of perverse logic. They gain their positions only after they have been fully initiated into an institutionalised system of power that requires fealty to western – chiefly US – projection of dominance across the globe.

Whatever Starmer’s personal feelings (assuming he has any), the fact is he is not wrong in proclaiming that his government is in no position to impose a sales ban on the components for F-35 fighter jets, the ones dropping bombs on Gaza’s population to level their homes and shred their children.

As his government implicitly acknowledges, the West’s system of arms production is necessarily so tightly integrated that no one, apart from the central hub of empire headquartered in the US, is in a position to change course. The West’s arms industries, just like its financial industries, are simply too big to fail.

Britain is locked in to producing F-35 components not specifically because Israel needs them, but because the West – because the US – needs them for its projection of power, for its continuing control of resources, for its global dominance – or, in the British government’s bogus rhetoric, to safeguard “Nato security” and “international peace”.

Were Starmer to dare to refuse, it would be no different from some local, small-time mafia boss telling the Don in Washington to take a hike. The British prime minister knows his fate would be straight out of a Sopranos script.

This too is the reason why he has been secretly shipping weapons to Israel for use in Gaza – more than 8,500 items – in violation of the promise he made to the British public last year that the shipments had stopped.

While Starmer has to placate those in his party who cannot stomach being complicit in genocide, he also has to keep the Don happy. And the Don is far more dangerous than either Starmer’s party or the British parliament.

Theroux’s film, The Settlers, is a vanishingly rare example of popular documentary-making showing Israeli society’s dark underbelly. The backlash is not because his thesis is wrong. It is because it tells us far too much about ourselves.

The post Theroux’s Film on Israel’s Violent Settlers Was a Mirror first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

Sci-fi Antidote for the Age of Genocide

Eric Walberg — Mon, 05 May 2025 14:11:00 +0000

Are you overwhelmed by Israel, Trump, starvation, drones, hypersonic monstrosities, doubling our ‘defense’ budget, reducing people to things, bloodlust? Did I mention ISRAEL?

I turn to sci fi when the world looks/ feels super bleak. Mickey7 is a 2022 science fiction novel by Edward Ashton with a sequel, Antimatter Blues, and a film adaptation, Mickey 17, directed by Bong Joon-ho. As with any really good novel-film, you should start with a nice hardback in a comfortable chair and launch yourself into the cosmos, let your imagination do the travelling. The many metaphors behind it are too savory to waste on a rushed, cut-to-the-bone glossy visual spectacle. The special effects are best conjured in your mind in this page-turner with multiple meanings.

The eponymous Mickey7 is a cyborg, the expendable member of a beachhead colony on an alien world. He fell down a deep hole in the snowy, rocky planet Neflheim and was left for dead by his supposed best human friend Berto, though his human true-love Nasha wanted to volunteer to save him. But he failed to die. A huge creeper – a native (nephilim?) – shepherds him out of the tunnel, though by the time he returned to the colony, there was already a Mickey8 being ‘born’ out of primordial soup, a reconstruction of him, a kind of super 3D-bioprint. This latest technology requires supercomputers and huge amounts of energy, but with the harnessing of antimatter, energy is limitless and such a creation is possible.

Sounds great, but this process was used by a psychopath, Manikova, in the past, on the terraformed Eden II, to make multiple clones of himself and, well, the whole process was shutdown and then refashioned to be used only to assist colonization of other planets. One ‘expendable’ would accompany each colony to be used to test the atmosphere, land, water for toxins and other suicidal missions and if he dies horribly, he would be reconstituted.

Who would want to do that? Criminals, but also volunteers who would imagine themselves as living a kind of eternal life. As long as they were nice, heroic and obedient. If not, they would, well, you get the picture. Not so eternal.

It’s a delightful tale of essentially identical twins, thinking alike, rivals, playing the usual twin games of fooling your lover with your twin taking your place, leading to jealousy and then a threesome (with yourself!). You laugh, and ponder lots of philosophical and war&peace issues:

*The ship of Theseus paradox: if you repair the ship over time, or just rebuild it from scratch, is it still the ship? Are Mickey7&8 sharing one consciousness, one soul? When an expendable takes a trip to the tank, he’s just doing in one go what his body would naturally do over the course of time anyway. As long as memory is preserved, he hasn’t really died. Kant’s phenomenology means we can never really know the nous of the phenomenon, i.e., there’s no answer. The Natalist religion that arose after the initial psychopath scare proclaims ‘one human one soul’, with capital punishment for any violation. I.e., the question doesn’t/shouldn’t arise.

*A corollary paradox: Does a threesome with your double and his/your lover make you a ‘perv’?

*When he’s facing death for the 8th time, he tells Nasha not to watch. No, I’ll be there. Dying … even if it’s temporary, you shouldn’t have to do it with nobody around for company.

*The hero is portrayed as a venal selfish coward, a traitor. Sound like hasbara about Hamas guerrilla fights? Living in tunnels that the colonizers can’t seem to penetrate, and fear? The protagonist(s) wearing suicide antimatter vests in the tunnels to kill the enemy/themselves. Israeli commandos destroying Hamas in their tunnels? Later, when faced with execution, Nasha says, This colony wasn’t chartered as a theocracy. You can’t just burn us at the stake.

*A man has conspired with the enemy in a time of war. There is no greater crime./ What about genocide? It wasn’t conspiring with the enemy that led us to abandon old Earth.

*The creepers are communal intelligence. The Marshall thinks that they are at war because the creepers killed a few humans. The idea that dissecting a few ancillaries would be considered an act of aggression is beyond them. They are just parts of the whole, not intelligent things themselves. I realized reading this that Nature is communal. There are no individuals except as fractal bits of the whole. This is a principle throughout Nature. If a few humans die, so what? The human race goes on. We have lost this vital understanding of Nature. We only exist communally.

*Don’t kill the messenger. When Mickey7 refuses to commit genocide against the natives, Netanyahu (sorry, the Marshall) wants first to just kill him, but Mickey7 is now the only emissary, mediator with the native creepers, the only one they trust. Netanyahu (sorry!) assumes they are just Amalek, not really Jewish (sorry, human) so it is fine to kill them all and terraform Niflheim. Mickey7 realized they were sentient, as they magnanimously saved him. They read his mind and realized he was not their enemy, that he trusted them, so while Mickey8 was getting ready to kill them all in their tunnel with an antimatter bomb, they killed him and let Mickey7 return to mediate with Netanyahu (I’m not going to keep apologizing, though to be fair to Netanyahu, Trump fits the bill equally.).

*The tunnels are immune to carpet bombing – low tech defensive technology – keeping the natives safe from the colonists/Zionists.

*Antimatter WMDs hover over the novel, a silver bullet but extremely dangerous. We may not have the high ground anymore, but we still have an insane amount of power available. Sound familiar? When Netanyahu/the Marshall doesn’t kill Mickey7&8 immediately, Mickey 7 cracks, Don’t get too excited, Eight. I’m pretty sure this is a temporary reprieve. Poor Gazans at this very moment!

*It’s a truism that every new technological advancement has been applied first to advance the interests of the horny. The printing press? Some Bibles, mostly porn. Antibiotics? Perfect for treating STIs. The second area of course is war.

*The best colonizing effort was on a planet with sentient, shy tree-dwelling cephalopods (octopuses) who were not even noticed by colonizers for two decades, so the colonizers were not primed to face a lethal enemy by then and a common language and modus vivendi was achieved. These natives were so attuned to their environment that they didn’t need fire, killing, agriculture, war – all the things that made humans so toxic. (Read: Palestinians as the shy natives, but Muslims in general, who lived peacefully in the Ottoman caliphate and never developed lethal industrial technology, vs European countries, obsessed with war and world conquest.) Sadly, no analogy with resolving the Palestine-Israel standoff today.

Ashton mulled over these provocative themes for years, rewriting his 2022 novel from an earlier short story, but it’s as if he’s writing it today. Genocide of natives by venal colonizers, tunnels as refuge, runaway greenhouse effect, Earth abandoned. It is cathartic to read a vision of how it is possible to escape the nightmare world that US-Israel is creating and live in peace and harmony with natives. It’s very difficult, and can only come after heart-wrenching suffering.

The post Sci-fi Antidote for the Age of Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

Jewish Settler-Colonialists

Kim Petersen — Fri, 02 May 2025 15:57:15 +0000

The straightforward responses in the documentary The Settlers by Louis Theroux will not surprise anyone who has kept abreast of the long-running Zionist plan to create facts-on-the-ground in Palestine. What is surprising is that this documentary was produced and broadcast by the BBC, a broadcaster that is usually inimical to Palestinian suffering. The documentary (currently viewable at Rumble.com) has been noticed. [Editor’s Note: The documentary has been blown away already. And Rumble has posted no explanation. See 404 notice below.]

Zionist-triggered Western censorship at its best.

The Independent considers The Settlers to be a “masterpiece.”

The Middle East Eye hails the documentary as “an unflinching look at the Israelis [sic] intent on stealing the West Bank.”

The Islam Channel praises Theroux for “highlight[ing] the horrifying influence of the illegal Israeli settler movement.”

The title of the Spectator’s review was rather enigmatic: “How come the only Palestinians Louis Theroux met were non-violent sweeties?” The Spectator granted, “In a program called The Settlers, it’s perhaps fair enough that the focus should be so squarely on these people and their intransigence.”

And what about the documentary’s title?

Dictionary.com defines settler innocuously as “a person who settles in a new region or colony.” Is this the proper appellation? Others would argue that the term settler-colonialist is more accurate. The Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School states, “Settler colonialism can be defined as a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population.”

The documentary begins with the lanky, bespectacled Theroux asking a settler whether they are “deep inside the Palestinian territories”? The settler-colonialist Ari Abramowitz objected, calling it “the heart of Judea.” He further objected to a “jihadist Palestinian state” being located in the heart of Israel.

Abramowitz is forthright in saying he aspires to win territory from Palestinians.

The settler-colonialists are described as “religionist nationalists.” A young Jewish woman Ovi says, “I believe Gaza is ours … The Bible says this place was given to the Jews. This place is ours.”

Throughout the documentary, the Zionist goal is clear: to remove Palestinians and repopulate the land with Jews.

Theroux spends much time interviewing Daniella Weiss, the “godmother of the settler movement,” an unabashed Zionist, who claimed: “We do for governments what they cannot do for themselves… Netanyahu is very happy at what we do but he cannot say it.”

Gaza fits what Netanyahu cannot say, Weiss states the goal of “the practical idea of establishing Jewish settlements in the entire Gaza Strip. We very much encourage and enable the population in Gaza to go to other countries. You will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs disappear from Gaza. They lost their right to stay in this holy place.”

But Jews are not a pure monolith. Theroux interviews a protesting Israeli man who says, “The question is: what kind of country do we want to be? Do we want to be a colonizing country or do we want to be a country that at least offers peace and wants to live in peace with Palestinians?”

What can Gazans expect if settler-colonialists create outposts in Gaza? The documentary examines the situation in the West Bank where outposts are set up to expand and become communities with the aim of becoming recognized as settlements by the Israeli government. These outposts and settlements are under the protection of the Israeli military.

The Texan-raised Abramowitz denies Palestinians exist. When pressed by Theroux on this, Abramowitz replies, “They are Arabs.”

The illegality of settlements is disregarded by Abramowitz. This is echoed by Weiss who shrugs off the commission of war crimes as a “lighter felony.”

Such Zionist views point to the impunity of settler colonialists in dealing with the indigenous Palestinians. One common war crime is preventing Palestinian farmers from harvesting their produce, particularly olives. Israeli soldiers will arrive, demand identification, and send the farmers away from their land. And if a farmer is lucky, he will still be alive after the encounter.

The filmmaker spoke of an “ideology of superiority of one group over another.” This even has rabbinical support.

Rabbi Dove Leor said, “To my mind, there was never peace with these [Palestinian] savages. There is no peace and never will be…. This land belongs only to the people of Israel. All of Gaza, all of Lebanon should be cleansed of these ‘camel riders.’”

To accomplish the disappearance of Palestinians, Weiss advocates using “the magic system of Zionism” to take over the land and repopulate it with Jews. “This will bring light instead of darkness,” says Weiss.

Issa Amrou, a Palestinian activist, guides Theroux around occupied Hebron and explains the life of Palestinians under occupation. The system of encouraging Palestinians to leave is through fear of the Israeli soldiers, checkpoints, closing Palestinian businesses, making life intolerable, and fragmentation of Palestinian towns, leading to Jews taking more land.

Near the end of the documentary, Theroux speaks again with the Texan-cum-settler-colonialist Abramowitz who makes known his feelings for Palestinians: “I don’t have tremendous compassion for a society that has an unquenchable genocidal, theological, bloodlust. It’s like a death cult.”

Says Abramowitz, “I reject the real premise that these people [Palestinians] are actually a real nation for a lot of reasons.”

“We know the righteousness of our cause. That’s what it means to be a Hebrew, what it means to be a Jew…”

The Israeli government’s recognition of the Evyatar settlement in the lands of the Palestinian town of Beita spurred a celebration, and Weiss arrived to speak to a jubilating crowd.

Theroux catches up with the settler-colonial godmother after her speech to the festive gathering. He asks what is wrong with a two-state solution?

Says Weiss, “We want to have a Jewish state based on Jewish rules, on Jewish values. It is not a relationship of neighbors.”

“Why not?” asks Theroux.

“Because we are two nations.” At least Weiss admits to there being a Palestinian nation.

Weiss makes clear that her overarching aim is Aliyah, bringing more settler-colonialists to the land. She does not think about the Palestinians because she is a Jew.

Theroux says, “That seems sociopathic.”

Weiss rejects this, saying, “It is normal.”

In the settler-colonialist Zionist mindset, othering is normal.

*****

People who care about humans elsewhere and are unfamiliar or uninformed about the plight of Palestinians ought to watch The Settlers and become familiar and informed. Theroux probably presents the situation as close to the line as one could hope to have broadcast. Through the narrative, the viewer will hear that there is anti-Palestinian racism and violence against them, but the discussion will not be graphic, and visually the violence is downplayed.

The post Jewish Settler-Colonialists first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Lessons from The Shoes of the Fisherman

Philip A. Faruggio — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 18:53:59 +0000

Everyone this Easter and Passover season should watch Michael Anderson’s 1968 film The Shoes of the Fisherman. Matter of fact just tune into the last 10 minutes. You will see the new Russian Pope, played by Anthony Quinn, telling his followers and the world how to solve the crucial risk of WW3. The Chinese were dying from a horrific famine that impelled their leaders to have no choice but to plan to invade neighboring countries for resources. The new Pope, having visited with the leaders of China and the Soviet Union, gave an order on the day of his coronation. He quoted from the bible:

” And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and though I have all faith and can move mountains, and have not charity… I am nothing!”

He then announced that the Church would sell all of its real estate holdings and all of its possessions to feed the Chinese people and others throughout the world who were malnourished.

How long has it been since those politicians who represent this nation have heeded those words? How long have we seen the Super Rich, who really run our empire, never put into practice what that Pope meant? America, since FDR’s New Deal, has been run by what the gangsters call the D&D ( Deaf and Dumb)? Deaf to the travails of us working stiffs and indigent, and dumb to what is necessary. As this Easter and Passover season comes upon us, the hypocrites bow and scrape at the altars of injustice and intolerance. It is time for we the mass of citizens shake our fists and find suitable replacements. A ten minute tour of a supermarket will meet good, decent leaders to be. The truck driver, the schoolteacher, the sales clerk, the nurse and urgent care doc, all with the caring and charity of that Pope from the film.

The post Lessons from The Shoes of the Fisherman first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Philip A. Faruggio.

Adolescence: A Gradual Awakening to the Modern World

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 14:43:32 +0000

Adolescence (2025) is a new British crime drama series written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, and directed by Philip Barantini.

It is a murder story centred on a 13-year-old schoolboy Jamie Miller who is arrested and accused of knifing to death a female classmate the previous night. Jamie protests his innocence to his dad, Eddie Miller, a man who is shocked and bewildered by the sudden events he is swept up in.

Jamie is initially held for questioning at the police station but is then sent to a Secure Training Centre while awaiting trial. Police investigations at Jamie’s school, his friends and family, reveal his bitterness and pent-up anger at bullying focused on him via social media.

The series looks at the case from different perspectives: police investigations, lengthy psychologist interviews, and finally Jamie’s parents’ barely concealed, distraught reaction.

A disturbing aspect of the bullying was the use of the term ‘incel’ [involuntary celibate] for a 13-year-old schoolboy.

Jamie reveals a complex set of emotions during his interviews ranging from denial, to not caring one way or the other, to “furious outbursts, an accidental confession, displays of learned entitlement, and pent-up anger”.

The formal qualities of the series are in the use of documentary techniques and a realist style to the point of giving the impression of a camera switched on all the time recording the actions of those investigating, discussing, interviewing, and commenting on the case. This is achieved through using one continuous take for each episode, a method that gives a dynamic, active feel to a story which is largely static with long scenes of discussion, conversation, and interview.

It is a style that intensifies the realism of each episode. However, a heightened realism also implies a more unquestioning ‘truth’. The truth is taken for granted as truth and becomes familiar and more likely to be accepted.

For example, the series starts with a type of British SWAT team that rams the Miller’s front door open very early in the morning as the family is just getting up for breakfast. Such teams in the USA and the UK are generally used in dealing with hostage situations, armed criminals, and counter-terrorism operations, not in arresting a 13-year-old boy accused of a knifing. This over-the-top police operation is presented as normal and acceptable given the general kid-glove treatment Jamie is given in the police station post-arrest. For the state this is a kind of Trojan Horse that makes such operations more generally accepted and acceptable.

In Episode 3 there is a long dialogue of an interview between Jamie and Briony, a forensic psychologist whose role is “the application of scientific knowledge and methods (in relation to psychology) to assist in answering legal questions that may arise in criminal, civil, contractual, or other judicial proceedings.”

A narcissistic element to Jamie’s personality emerges, which sees him almost enjoying the attention of Briony. However, as Jamie slowly comes to understand that Briony’s role is to elicit information and not be his ‘friend’, he demands Briony to tell him if she likes him or not as he is led out after several outbursts.

Jamie gradually moves away from his entitled, aggressive behaviour as the seriousness and reality of the situation dawns on him. He initially denied he had anything to do with the victim or her murder, even directly to his dad’s face, believing he could simply lie his way out of the situation without much stress to him or his family. However, as evidence builds up there are cracks in the facade and Jamie is finally forced to accept reality and grow up. Jamie’s final dialogue over the phone with his dad is a very different, more mature Jamie, as he announces his plans to accept responsibility and change his plea.

The last scene sees Jamie’s dad in grief as he looks around his child’s bedroom and stares at Jamie’s toys, contemplating the sudden end of a short childhood.

Adolescence is a series that attempts to give some idea of the effect of social media in schools today and show the potential tragic consequences of bullying online. The audience is just as bewildered as Jamie’s dad [except for pupils who understand the hieroglyphics of emoticon symbology immediately] and we are taken for a roller-coaster ride through the modern world of digital natives who seem resigned to their digital fates in the same way that the polytheistic pagans of yore believed themselves the playthings of the callous gods.

Adolescence is creating a media stir as parents are confronted with the possible consequences of their own inertia or lack of questioning, or even power, in the face of these incredibly powerful miniature tools that they themselves have put into their children’s hands. The ensuing discussions should at least bring some sober thinking to the debates on digitisation.

The post Adolescence: A Gradual Awakening to the Modern World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

In Pulling the Gaza Documentary, the BBC is Failing Palestinian Children

Sylvia Monkhouse — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 09:52:49 +0000

Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone is a harrowing account of life in Gaza as seen through the eyes of Palestinian children. It provides a rare window into young lives devastated by months of relentless bombings, displacements, and unspeakable horrors.

It aired on 17 February on BBC Two, but was swiftly removed from iPlayer four days later, following fierce lobbying from pro-Israel voices. The reasons given for its removal? Well, they simply don’t add up.

The main objection was that the father of Abdullah, the 13-year-old narrator, is the deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s Hamas-run government. But like it or not, it’s a fact of life in Gaza that almost anyone living there will have some connection to Hamas. Hamas runs the government, so anyone working in an official capacity must also work with Hamas. Not only that, but Abdullah’s father is hardly a “terrorist leader” as was claimed. He is a technocrat, in a role concerned with agriculture, not politics or military, who even studied at UK universities.

Other objections included the risk of payments potentially funding Hamas. But as Hoyo Films and now the boy himself have confirmed, Abdullah was paid a very small sum via his sister’s bank account which was used to cover basic living expenses. And the complaints around the use of antisemitic language have been rebuffed by many – including Jewish Voice for Labour. The word ‘“Yehudi” is simply Arabic for “Israeli,” and is used by Jewish Israeli journalist Yuval Abrahamto to describe himself in the Oscar-winning film No Other Land.

Crucially, absolutely nothing in the film has been found to be factually inaccurate.

The film received five stars in the Guardian and the Times, which described it as “exceptional”. It’s an outstanding, powerful film and a crucial piece of journalism. Since international journalists are banned from Gaza, there are scant opportunities to witness Gazan children’s stories. This film gave us a small insight and humanised Palestinian children.

Why then, is an innocent child, the victim of unimaginable suffering, put under such intense scrutiny as to whether or not they should be allowed to tell their story?

Consider the source

When you consider the source of the complaints, you can’t help but feel like the humanisation of Palestinians was precisely the problem.

Spearheading the campaign to have the documentary removed from public view was Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK. Throughout her political career, Hotovely has gone out of her way to dehumanise Palestinians, accusing them of being “thieves of history” who have no heritage, and calling the Nakba – the violent mass displacement of Palestinians – “an Arab lie.” More recently, she claimed there was “no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza.

Despite strong counterprotests from a far greater number of people wanting the documentary to stay put – including over 1,000 industry professionals and more than 600 British Jews – the BBC bowed to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby, and dutifully took the documentary down.

That’s why I decided to start a petition, calling on the BBC to reconsider its decision, and allow Palestinian children their right to be heard. The petition quickly gained lots of support and now has over 25,000 signatures.

Failing Palestinian children

Not long after I started the petition, it emerged that Abdullah, the film’s 13-year-old narrator, has experienced harassment as a result of the kickback against the film, and now fears for his life. “I did not agree to the risk of me being targeted in any way”, he said. And “[if] anything happens to me, the BBC is responsible for it.”

Putting children’s safety and mental wellbeing at risk is not only blatantly wrong, but is in breach of the BBC’s own guidelines on safeguarding young people. Sadly, Abdullah’s was not an isolated case.

In a recent interview with the Independent, former BBC newsreader Karishma Patel explained her reason for quitting the BBC: its longstanding refusal to show the full extent to which Irael is harming Palestinian children. She recalls how she begged the BBC to cover five-year-old Hind Rajab’s story while she was still alive, trapped inside a car with her murdered relatives. The BBC chose not to, only naming her after she was killed, and not even making clear in the headline who had done it. “The BBC failed Hind,” says Patel. “And it has failed Palestinian children again in pulling the [Gaza] documentary.”

I’ve just written to Tim Davie, Controller-General of the BBC, to draw his attention to the huge number of people who want the documentary to be reinstated, and why the reasons put forward to justify its removal simply do not add up. I told him, “Anyone who is offended by a child sharing their lived experiences of survival can choose not to watch it. But do not deny innocent children – who have experienced unimaginable grief and loss – the right to tell their stories.” You can read my full letter here.

Let’s see if he responds. The BBC didn’t bother reaching out to Abdullah to apologise to him after they pulled the film. So I’m not holding out too much hope.

The post In Pulling the Gaza Documentary, the BBC is Failing Palestinian Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sylvia Monkhouse.

Masterpieces of Contemporary American Cinema: Neoliberalism through the Looking Glass

David Penner — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:54:36 +0000

As transpired in Weimar Germany, cataclysmic times invariably induce great suffering, yet they can also serve as inspiration for poignant and moving works of art. What follows is a discussion of six works of insightful and intellectually nuanced contemporary American cinema which explore this distressing age in all its viciousness and depravity, while engaging the anguish of the individual struggling to survive amidst a maelstrom of unprecedented corporate pillage and political and socio-economic chaos.

While I have tried to limit them as much as possible, these reviews may contain spoilers.

The East, directed by Zal Batmanglij; starring Brit Marling, Alexander Skarsgård, and Elliot Page (2013)

The East tells the gripping story of Jane, a young woman (played by Brit Marling) who is employed at a private intelligence company, and who is awarded the sought-after assignment of infiltrating a radical environmental organization called The East. Like many Americans who have “good jobs,” Jane is zealously devoted to her career and devoid of a moral compass. Her unbridled ambition is on full display when Jane is told by her boyfriend that she’s still a winner to him if she doesn’t get this coveted commission (the details of which are unbeknownst to him), to which she responds, “I’m only a winner if I get it.”

When Jane infiltrates the group, which she is able to do because of her youth and because of certain strategies she employs to gain the group’s trust, she realizes that she is unable to intellectually counter any of their arguments regarding ecological degradation caused by unfettered corporate power. Indeed, Jane is a conformist, and like many highly credentialed Americans has never learned to think for herself. This raises the possibility of her potentially becoming a double agent.

The environmentalists are exquisitely cast, and the leaders of the group possess remarkable depth. They are also well educated, having come from privileged families and having attended elite schools. Their dilemma is that they have managed to retain firm moral convictions making them unemployable.

In a more democratic and civilized society, the leaders of The East would likely hold positions of power and influence. Instead, they live as outcasts. The time Jane spends with the radical collective forces her to reexamine her preconceived understanding of success. Is true success possible without principles and ideals?

The two worlds Jane navigates, the ruthless corporate world of violence and skulduggery and an America enraged at corporate malfeasance, shake the foundation of her identity and sense of reality. The East’s methods for combatting corporate villainy – actions they call “jams” – are extreme and of dubious legality, further straining the protagonist’s sense of right and wrong. What happens to the rule of law when what is legal and what is moral no longer coincide?

Having never spent time around articulate people who value honor over money (in stark contrast with her pitiless boss and hard-driving colleagues), the time Jane spends with the collective catapults her into an existential crisis where her value system is upended and she is forced to make extremely difficult and life-altering choices.

Wendy and Lucy, directed by Kelly Reichardt; starring Michelle Williams (2008)

No film in the post-New Deal era embodies the tragic destruction of the American working class more than Wendy and Lucy. In this harsh world millions have been left without jobs, health insurance; or in the case of the film’s protagonist, Wendy, even a family member to crash with.

Caught up in a tempest of economic devastation, Wendy is left with nothing except a few hundred dollars, a jalopy which serves both as makeshift home and means of transportation, and her beloved dog Lucy – her only companion.

The grave circumstances of her situation are tragic and soulful cinema viewers will all feel a deep sense of compassion for her increasingly dire situation. As she passes through flyover country the lack of communities and economic life almost resemble that of a post-apocalyptic tale. Deindustrialization, the outsourcing and offshoring of countless jobs, and the financialization of the economy have cut millions of Americans adrift, of whom our suffering protagonist is one.

Wendy and Lucy is the antithesis of mass market Hollywood cinema where everyone seems to magically have friends and money. Wendy’s brother-in-law and an elderly security guard she meets feel pity for her plight, yet they are also “strapped” and are in no meaningful position to assist her.

How many trillions of dollars have been spent on wars, cannibalistic proxies, and on maintaining hundreds of bases around the world while destitute Americans drown in a sea of oligarchic avarice?

Having heard that there is work there, Wendy is headed to Alaska. Yet when her car breaks down and events threaten to separate her from Lucy her poverty, loneliness, and despair become almost unbearable. Instead of job opportunities, friends, and family she is enveloped by a shroud of silence.

Margin Call, directed by JC Chandor; starring Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore and Zachary Quinto (2011)

Perhaps the best movie ever made about Wall Street, Margin Call tells the story of the financial crash of 2008. The story, which unfolds over a 24-hour period, revolves around a powerful Wall Street investment bank, and one of the key motifs of the film is not only how these demonic corporations treat their fellow Americans, but how they treat their own workers.

When an entry-level analyst is covertly handed a flash drive by his recently fired boss, he discovers that the firm is in danger of going bankrupt due to having invested too heavily in unstable mortgage-backed securities whose value is rapidly deteriorating. He alerts his superiors and senior management calls an emergency meeting in the dead of night. The firm’s CEO (brought to life in an unforgettable performance by Jeremy Irons), whose helicopter makes a dramatic landing on the roof of their skyscraper, reminds everyone that his motto is, “Be first, be smarter, or cheat.” Only concerned with self-preservation, he is prepared to do virtually anything to prevent the firm from going under, and this rabid tribalism supersedes loyalty to one’s country and even to the financial services industry itself whose fellow vultures they are preparing to swindle.

The firm is infested with sociopaths like New York City garbage is crawling with cockroaches. At one point a young analyst is found crying in the bathroom after being notified that he will shortly be let go, and one of the senior managers indifferently takes note of his distress while simultaneously shaving with a cold-blooded hauteur and likely pondering ways to unload “The biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism” (to quote their CEO). Here, apart from one’s ability to generate significant profits, human life has no value. There are only “winners” and “losers,” and the “winners” are the ones that continue to make the big bucks.

No less disturbing are instances where employees are not allowed to quit, such as one Kafkaesque situation where the firm sends its people scouring the bars of lower Manhattan to try and find the recently laid off and now distraught head of risk management, who they learn has important insights into how they ended up in this disastrous situation in the first place, yet who was cruelly fired after nineteen years of devoted service with even his phone being shut off. Despite his wife informing the firm that her husband doesn’t want to speak to them, he is eventually located and forced to return to work when threats are made to revoke his severance package.

There is a scene where one of the senior managers played by Kevin Spacey comes out of his office applauding after a huge number of the firm’s employees were just laid off. Participating in this death cult ritual, his obsequious subordinates mimic his behavior. Speaking of those recently sacked, he says, “They were good at their jobs. You were better.”

Spacey’s character is later treated in a similar fashion when he returns to his former home to bury his dog (whom he evidently cares for far more than the small business owners undoubtedly run into the ground by his firm), only to be told by his ex-wife that, “You don’t live here anymore,” and that, “The alarm is on so don’t try to break in.” In a mirroring of how he has long treated his employees, his wife has replaced him with another husband.

Margin Call vividly portrays a diseased America that is at war with the world and at war with itself.

Martha Marcy May Marlene, directed by Sean Durkin; starring Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, and John Hawkes (2011)

Dying societies invariably become a field of lost souls, and no soul is more lost than the protagonist of Martha Marcy May Marlene, a profound examination into how a disintegrating society can facilitate the rise of cults that prey on, ensnare, and entrap vulnerable human beings. The lead character, Martha, is renamed Marcy May by the cult leader (who is reminiscent of Charles Manson), while Marlene is the name female cult members use when answering the phone and following a script designed to attract new followers.

In a neoliberal America where people increasingly no longer identify themselves as Americans but by their profession, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, Martha no longer has any idea who she is, thereby offering easy prey to the cult. All the ties that may have once bound her to an American history or a personal history have been severed, making her as impressionable as a small child.

Part of the cult’s seductive nature is how it makes use of a vaguely anti-capitalist language. However, its raison d’être is ultimately to annihilate all vestiges of privacy and individuality, resulting in a violent and authoritarian existence for the cult’s members who are taught to share their clothes, their beds; and ultimately, their bodies. The protagonist has many names, and yet no name. For her lack of a cultural value system has dissolved her sense of self.

Initiation into the cult is done by drugging a young woman so that she can be raped by the cult leader, yet the protagonist is told that this is actually a good thing, revealing a Tartarean world where ethics are amorphous and reality is something that can be invented. (To quote Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”)

Martha represents millions of young Americans who grow up without a loving family, a real community, and are denied a proper humanities education. Indeed, she is a shell of a human being, a cultural amnesiac devoid of reason, a sense of the past, and a sense of the sacred.

The only place Martha can seek refuge is with her sister and brother-in-law, shallow people concerned only with money and accumulating possessions. Their crass consumerism and indifference to serious socio-economic problems is cultlike in and of itself, offering Martha no clear way to escape from this existential crisis she finds herself in.

The harrowing tale unfolds in a disjointed and fragmented manner, which mirrors the fragmented psyche of the suffering protagonist – and in many ways, of American society itself.

The Girlfriend Experience, directed by Steven Soderbergh; starring Sasha Grey, Chris Santos, and Philip Eytan (2009)

Steven Soderbergh’s thought-provoking film The Girlfriend Experience (not to be confused with the mini-series) takes us on a journey through another dark circle of this second Gilded Age, where sexual relations have been rendered largely transactional and thereby stripped of tenderness and romance.

Chelsea (Sasha Grey), the film’s protagonist, works as a high-end prostitute for an affluent Manhattan clientele, while her boyfriend is employed as an honest athletic trainer earning a small fraction of what she makes – an all too common paradox, yet one which also serves as a metaphor for how incomes are typically doled out in 21st century America.

In this nihilistic culture that places profit-making over all other considerations, the protagonist has come to believe that one’s sex partner is no different than one’s tennis partner, and that her life as a prostitute for jet-setters will lead to freedom and liberation.

Chelsea worships wealth and will do anything to be with those who have it. In a country where the masses are saddled with trillions of dollars of household debt while a small group of plutocrats enjoy unbridled power, there is virtually no moral barrier she won’t violate in order to spend time with the mega rich, even if it means becoming their plaything and forgoing all traces of dignity.

The film raises disturbing questions about the nature of a hyper-privatized America and its impact on social relations. If a society ceases to hold anything sacred, is it still a real society? Is it possible to retain one’s humanity when one regards people as mere commodities to be used and then discarded? Due to its adoration of materialism and emotionless sexual encounters, is contemporary Western feminism compatible with love?

Chelsea’s hapless and no less delusional boyfriend initially approves of her degenerate lifestyle, and only insists that she doesn’t go on any trips with her “clients,” which, during one heated quarrel, she condemns as “selfish.” Like his wayward would-be lover, he has been taught by the media and education system that his girlfriend can work as a prostitute and that this somehow won’t inevitably destroy their relationship.

The Girlfriend Experience depicts a dystopia where people are incessantly using one another for material gain and real communities have been eradicated under a deathly hand of relentless exploitation, job destruction, and hyper-consumerism which for many Americans have swept away all traces of trust and love.

Michael Clayton, directed by Tony Gilroy; starring Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, and George Clooney (2007)

There is a riveting scene in Michael Clayton that unfolds in a lower Manhattan neighborhood I know all too well, where Arthur Edens (in a role masterfully executed by Tom Wilkinson), one of his law firm’s lead litigators, is berating Michael Clayton (George Clooney) for continuing to blindly follow their firm’s orders, to which a defensive Clayton says, “I’m not the enemy.” To which Arthur replies, “Then who are you?” Michael Clayton is a story about a society drowning in corporate savagery and two men who are consciously or subconsciously trying to reclaim their humanity.

Arthur represents U-North, an agricultural corporation that has polluted the environment with a carcinogenic weed killer. The problem – at least for his law firm and the corporation they are defending – is that Arthur knows that he has squandered years of his life defending diabolical corporations and, wracked with guilt, has decided that he is tired of fighting on the side of these dastardly forces. To the amazement of his colleagues, one day he suddenly snaps and goes rogue, turning on U-North, which his law firm has been hired to defend in a multibillion dollar class action lawsuit. While initially exasperated, Michael can’t help but be influenced by his friend’s strange behavior, and his amoral ethos is challenged.

Of great significance are the unhappy private lives of Michael, Arthur (who lives alone in an enormous dimly lit Soho loft), and the loyal corporate soldier Karen Crowder (performed chillingly by Tilda Swinton), all of whom make significant six figure salaries yet live lonely lives devoid of meaning and a sense of purpose.

Michael Clayton underscores the catch-22 that many Americans find themselves in, where those who are able to break out of the ignominious cycle of debt slavery and modern serfdom often do so by selling their souls and relinquishing all semblance of morality and freedom of speech, while many of those who have “made it” don’t have time to think about anything other than their extremely demanding jobs which devour every waking moment. Leaving this information bubble by exploring alternative news sources in an attempt to search for answers to these troubling times can lead to thinking, thinking can lead to posting heretical thoughts, which in turn can only lead to being ostracized from elite circles, unemployment, and death – professional, or even literal. And so it pays not to think.

In one haunting scene Clayton is driving in a rural area in upstate New York when he suddenly exits his car to approach three mysterious and strikingly beautiful horses. Like the inversion of the three witches in Macbeth, the animals seem to be calling on him to abandon a life of ambition and to return to a simpler and more humane existence devoid of materialism, dissembling, and relentless competition. The mysticism and primordial timelessness of this moment mesmerize the mind of a man who has lost his way in a brutal world, and serve as a clarion call to reclaim a life that is more dignified and honorable before it is too late.

The post Masterpieces of Contemporary American Cinema: Neoliberalism through the Looking Glass first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Penner.

New BBC Documentary “The Road to 7th October” is an Utter Travesty

Jonathan Cook — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 15:50:45 +0000

There has been a prolonged furore over the BBC’s craven decision to ban a documentary on life in Gaza under Israel’s bombs after it incensed Israel and its lobbyists by, uniquely, humanising the enclave’s children.

The English-speaking child narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah, who became the all-too-visible pretext for pulling the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone because his father is a technocrat in the enclave’s Hamas government, hit back last week.

He warned that the BBC had betrayed him and Gaza’s other children, and that the state broadcaster would be responsible were anything to happen to him

His fears are well-founded, given that Israel has a long track record of executing those with the most tenuous of connections to Hamas – as well as the enclave’s children, often with small, armed drones that swarm through its airspace.

The noisy clamour over How to Survive a Warzone has dominated headlines, overshadowing another new BBC documentary on Gaza – this one a three-part, blockbuster series on the history of Israel and Palestine – that has received none of the controversy.

And for good reason.

Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, whose final episode airs this Monday, is such a travesty, so discredited by the very historical events it promises to explain, that it earns a glowing, five-star review from the Guardian.

It “speaks to everyone that matters”, the liberal daily gushes. And that’s precisely the problem.

What we get, as a result, is the very worst in BBC establishment TV: talking heads reading from the same implausibly simplistic script, edited and curated to present western officials and their allies in the most sympathetic light possible.

Which is no mean feat, given the subject matter: nearly eight decades of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, dispossession, military occupation and siege of the Palestinian people, supported by the United States.

But this documentary series on the region’s history should be far more controversial than the film about Gaza’s children. Because this one breathes life back into a racist western narrative – one that made the genocide in Gaza possible, and justifies Israel’s return this month to using mass starvation as a weapon of war against the Palestinian people.

‘Honest broker’ fiction

The Road to 7th October presents an all-too-familiar story.

The Palestinians are divided geographically and ideologically – how or why is never properly grappled with – between the incompetent, corrupt leadership of Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, and the militant, terrorist leadership of Hamas in Gaza.

Israel tries various peace initiatives under leaders Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. These failures propel the more hardline Benjamin Netanyahu to power.

The United States is the star of the show, of course. Its officials tell a story of Washington desperately trying to bring together the two parties, Israel and Fatah (the third party, Hamas, is intentionally sidelined), but finds itself constantly hamstrung by bad luck and the intransigence of those involved.

Yes, you read that right. This documentary really does resurrect the Washington as “honest broker” fiction – a myth that was supposed to have been laid to rest a quarter of a century ago, after the Oslo accords collapsed.

The film-makers are so lost to the reality in Israel and Palestine that they imagine they can credibly keep Washington perched on a pedestal even after we have all spent the past 16 months watching, first, President Biden arm Israel’s “plausible” genocide in Gaza, killing many tens of thousands of Palestinians, and then President Trump formulate an illegal plan to ethnically cleanse the enclave of its surviving Palestinian population to develop it as a luxury “waterfront property”.

A viewing of a short, Trump-endorsed, AI-generated promo video for a glitzy, Palestinian-free “Trump Gaza”, built on the crushed bodies of the enclave’s children, should be enough to dispel any remaining illusions about Washington’s neutrality on the matter.

Enduring mystery

This documentary, like its BBC predecessors – most notably on Russia and Ukraine, and the implosion of Yugoslavia – excels at offering a detailed examination of tree bark without ever stepping back far enough to see the shape of the forest.

The words “apartheid”, “siege” and “colonialism” – the main lenses through which one can explain what has been happening to the Palestinian people for a century or more – do not figure at all.

There is a single allusion to the events of 1948, when a self-declared Jewish state was violently founded as a colonial project on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.

Or as the documentary delicately puts it: “Millions of their people [the Palestinians] had been made refugees by decades of conflict.”

As ever, when the plight of the Palestinians is discussed, the passive voice is put to sterling use. Millions of Palestinians were accidentally ethnically cleansed, it seems. Who was responsible is a mystery.

In fact, most of Gaza’s population are descended from Palestinian families expelled by the newly declared state of Israel from their homes in 1948. They were penned up in a tiny piece of land by European colonisers in the same manner as earlier generations of European colonisers confined the Native Americans to reservations.

Even when the term “occupation” appears, as it does on the odd occasion, it is presented as some vague, unexamined, security-related problem the US, Israel and the Fatah leadership are engaged in trying to fix.

The settlements are mentioned too, but only as the backdrop to land-for-peace calculations that never come to fruition as the basis for an elusive “peace”.

In other words, this is the reheating of a phoney tale that Israel and the US have been trying to sell to western publics for many decades.

It was holed well below the water line last year by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court in the world. It ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem was illegal, that Israeli rule over the Palestinians was a form of apartheid, and that its illegal settlements needed to be dismantled immediately.

That is the forest all the documentary’s furious bark-studying is designed to avoid.

Path to genocide

The makers of Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October choose to begin their time line on an obscure date: 19 August 2003, when a Palestinian suicide bomber blows up a bus in Jerusalem, killing 23 Israelis.

Why then?

The programme, despite its title, is not really about the “Palestinians”. Note that the BBC dares not refer to “Palestine”.

The true focus is on Hamas and its rise to power in Gaza, as viewed chiefly by the other parties: the US, Israel and Fatah.

Starting the story in 2003 with a bus bombing, the programme can navigate “The Road to 7^thOctober” in ways that assist the self-serving narratives those other parties wish to tell.

On the Palestinian side, the story opens with a terror attack. On Israel’s side, it opens with Sharon deciding, in response, to dismantle the illegal settlements in Gaza and withdraw Israeli troops from the enclave.

This entirely arbitrary date allows the programme makers to create an entirely misleading narrative arc: of Israel supposedly ending the occupation and trying to make peace, while being met with ever greater terrorism from Hamas, culminating in the 7 October attack.

In short, it perpetuates the long-standing colonial narrative – contrary to all evidence – of Israel as the good guys, and the Palestinians as the bad guys.

In an alternate universe, the BBC might have offered us a far more informative, relevant documentary called Israel and Palestine: The Path to Genocide.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for that one to air.

Dystopian movie

In fact, Sharon’s so-called Disengagement Plan of 2005 had nothing to do with ending the occupation or peace-making. It was a trap laid for the Palestinians.

The disengagement did not end the occupation of Gaza, as the ICJ noted in its ruling last year. It simply reformulated it.

Israeli soldiers pulled back to the perimeter of the enclave – what Israeli and US officials like to falsely term its “borders” – where Israel had previously established a highly fortified wall with armed watchtowers.

Stationed along this perimeter, the Israeli army instituted an oppressive Medieval-style siege, blockading access to Gaza by land, sea and air. The enclave was monitored 24/7 with drones patrolling the skies.

Even before Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 and came to power in Gaza, the tiny coastal strip of land looked like it was the backdrop for a dystopian Hollywood movie.

But after Hamas’ victory, as the talking heads cheerily explain, the gloves really came off. What that meant in practice is not spelled out – and for good reason.

The Israeli army put Gaza on “rations”, carefully counting the calories entering the enclave to create widespread hunger and malnutrition, especially among Gaza’s children.

The Israeli official behind the scheme explained the reasoning at the time: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

That official – Dov Weisglass, Olmert’s main adviser – is one of the central talking heads in episode one. And yet strangely, he is never asked about Gaza’s “diet”.

‘Die more quietly’

Stephen Hadley, George W Bush’s deputy national security adviser, claims – unchallenged – that Sharon’s disengagement was “a downpayment on a Palestinian state. … They [the Palestinians] would have an opportunity to build and show the world that they were ready to live side by side in peace with Israel”.

Israel’s real goal, all too evident then and impossible to ignore now, was something else entirely.

Yes, withdrawing from Gaza allowed Israel to falsely claim the occupation in Gaza had ended and focus instead on the colonisation of the West Bank, as the documentary briefly grants.

Yes, it split geographically the main territories forming the basis of a future Palestinian state and encouraged irreconciliable leaderships in each – divide and rule on steroids.

But even more importantly, by making Gaza effectively a giant concentration camp, blockaded on all sides, Israel ensured that the accommodationists of Fatah would lose credibility in the enclave and militant resistance movements led by Hamas would gain ascendancy.

That was the trap.

Hamas, and the people of Gaza, were denied any legitimacy so long as they insisted on a right – enshrined in international law – to resist their occupation and besiegement by Israel.

It was a message – a warning – directed at Fatah and the West Bank too. Resistance is futile. Keep your heads down or you’ll be next.

Which is exactly the lesson Abbas learnt, soon characterising his security forces’ collusion with the Israeli occupation as “sacred”.

For Gaza, the US notion of living in “peace alongside Israel” meant surviving just barely and quietly, inside their cage, accepting the diet Olmert and Weisglass had put them on.

Making any noise – such as by firing rockets out of the concentration camp, or massing at the heavily armed walls of their cage in protest – was terrorism. Die more quietly, Israel and the international community demanded.

Perversely, much of episiode one is dedicated to US officals spinning their conspiracy to foil the results of the 2006 Palestinian election, won by Hamas, as democracy promotion.

They demanded Hamas give up armed resistance or the 2 million people of Gaza, half of them children, would face a continuing blockade and starvation diet – that is, illegal collective punishment.

Or as Robert Danin, a US State Department official, puts it, the plan was “either Hamas would reform and become a legitimate political party or it would remain isolated”. Not just Hamas isolated, but all of Gaza. Die more quietly.

The hope, he adds, was that by immiserating the population “Gazans would throw off the yoke of Hamas” – that is, accept their fate to live as little more than “human animals” in an Israeli-run zoo.

‘Mowing the lawn’

Hamas, both its proto-army and its proto-government, learnt ways to adapt.

It built tunnels under the enclave’s one, short border with Egypt to resist Israel’s siege by trading with the neighbouring population in Sinai and keeping the local economy just barely afloat.

It fired primitive rockets, which rarely killed anyone in Israel, but achieved other goals.

The rocket fire created a sense of fear in Israeli communities near Gaza, which Hamas occasionally managed to leverage for minor concessions from Israel, such as an easing of the blockade – but only when Israel didn’t prefer, as it usually did, to respond with more violence.

The rockets also prevented Gaza and its suffering from disappearing completely from international news coverage – the “Die more quietly” agenda pursued by Israel – even if the price was that the western media could denounce Hamas even more noisily as terrorists.

And the rockets offered a strategic alternative – armed resistance, its nature shaped by Hamas’ confinement in the Gaza concentration camp – to Fatah’s quietist, behind-the-scenes diplomacy seeking negotiations that were never forthcoming.

Finally, confronted with the permanent illegitimacy trap set for it by Israel and the US, Hamas approved in 2018 mass, civil disobedience protests at the perimeter fence of the concentration camp it was supposedly “ruling”.

Israel, backed by the US, responded with increased structural violence to all these forms of resistance.

In the last two programmes, Israeli and US officials set out the challenges and technical solutions they came up with to prevent their victims from breaking out of their “isolation” – the concentration camp that Gaza had been turned into.

Underground barriers were installed to make tunnelling more difficult.

Rocket fire was met with bouts of “mowing the lawn” – that is, carpet-bombing Gaza, indifferent to the Palestinian death toll.

And thousands of the ordinary Palestinians who massed for months on end at the perimeter fence in protest were either executed or shot in the knee by Israeli snipers.

Or as the documentary’s narrator characterises it: “At the border with Israel, protesters clashed with Israeli forces, and dozens of Palestinians were killed.”

Blink, and you might miss it.

Nothing learnt

Only by looking beneath the surface of this facile documentary can be found a meaningful answer to the question of what led to the attack on 7 October.

Israel’s strategy of “isolation” – the blockade and diet – compounded by intermittent episodes of “mowing the lawn” was always doomed to failure. Predictably, the Palestinians’ desire to end their imprisonment in a concentration camp could not be so easily subdued.

The human impulse for freedom and for the right to live with dignity kept surfacing.

Ultimately, it would culminate in the 7 October attack. Like most breakouts from barbaric systems of oppression, including slave revolts in the pre-civil rights US, Hamas’ operation ended up mirroring many of the crimes and atrocities inflicted by the oppressor.

Israel and the US, of course, learnt nothing. They have responded since with intensified, even more obscene levels of violence – so grave that the world’s highest court has put Israel on trial for genocide.

Obscured by The Road to 7th October is the reality that Israel has always viewed the Palestinians as “human animals”. It just needed the right moment to sell that script to western publics, so that genocide could be recast as self-defence.

The 7^th October attack offered the cover story Israel needed. And the western media, most especially the BBC, played a vital part in amplifying that genocide-justifying narrative through its dehumanisation of the Palestinian people.

Its one break with that policy – its humanising portrait of Gaza’s children in How to Survive a Warzone – caused an uproar that has echoed for weeks and seen the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, dragged before a parliamentary committee.

But in truth, we ought to be appalled that this is the only attempt the BBC has made, after 17 months of genocide, to present an intimate view of life for the people of Gaza, especially its children, under Israel’s bombs. The state broadcaster only dared doing so after stripping away the politics of Gaza’s story, reducing decades of the Palestinian people’s oppression by Israel to a largely author-less “humanitarian crisis”.

Not only is the programme never likely to see the light of day again on the BBC but, after all this commotion, the corporation is unlikely ever again to commission a similarly humanising programme about the Palestinian people.

There is a good reason why there has been no comparable clamour for the BBC to pull Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October.

The historical and political context offered by the documentary does nothing to challenge a decades-old, bogus narrative on Israel and Palestine – one that has long helped conceal Israel’s turning of Gaza into a concentration camp, one that made something like the 7 October breakout almost inevitable, and one that legitimised months of genocide.

The Road to 7th October seeks to rehabilitate a narrative that should be entirely discredited by now.

In doing so, the BBC is assisting Israel in reviving a political climate in which the genocide in Gaza can resume, with Netanyahu re-instituting mass starvation as a weapon of war and spreading Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations to the West Bank.

We don’t need more official narratives about the most misrepresented “conflict” in history. We need journalistic courage and integrity. Don’t look to the BBC for either.

The post New BBC Documentary “The Road to 7th October” is an Utter Travesty first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

The Monsters Aren’t Just in History Books

Jonathan Cook — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 15:15:54 +0000

Walter Salles’ new film on the disappearances of regime critics in 1970s Brazil is a powerful reminder that the ghouls who defend the slaughter in Gaza are biding their time.

Walter Salles’ new film I’m Still Here, is a moving, true-story, Oscar-nominated portrait of a middle-class, leftwing family in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s struggling to come to terms with the father’s disappearance – 25 years later confirmed as murder – by the Brazilian military dictatorship.

The mother and a teenage daughter spend time inside a regime torture camp too, before being released.

What struck me powerfully in the film was the endless supply of compliant regime officials who impassively, conscientiously carried out the abuse of men, women and children.

It was a reminder that plenty of these people live among us – and that they have been doing very little to hide who they are over the past 16 months.

They are the politicians mangling language and international law by terming as “self-defence” the collective punishment of the people of Gaza through carpet bombing and starvation – crimes against humanity.

They are the police officers raiding people’s homes, and detaining and arresting independent journalists and human rights activists, including Jewish ones, for protesting the slaughter in Gaza.

They are the establishment journalists pretending the carnage inflicted on the people of Gaza is just another routine news story, less important than the death of an elderly actor, or the latest outburst from serial misogynist Andrew Tate.

And, more than anything, they are the army of ordinary people on social media:

Mocking the families of children shredded by US-supplied bombs;
Reciting endless claims of “Gazawood” (Gaza-Hollywood), as if the levelling of the tiny territory, visible from outer space, is a fiction and that the only victims are Hamas fighters;
Defending as a legitimate legal procedure the abduction of hundreds of doctors and nurses from Gaza’s hospitals into “detention camps” where torture, sexual abuse and rape are routine;
Justifying the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals – leaving premature babies, pregnant women, the sick and the elderly to die – on the basis of entirely unsubstantiated, and self-serving, Israeli government claims that each is a Hamas “command and control centre”;
Cheering the erasure of the only documentary on Gaza humanising its children because the father of the 13-year-old narrator is a scientist appointed by the Hamas government to oversee what was the agricultural sector before Israel destroyed all the enclave’s vegetation.

These people live among us. They grow more confident by the day.

And one day, if we don’t fight them now, they will be putting a hood over our head to take us to a secret location.

They will be across the desk, asking us the same questions over and over again, making us pore over photo albums to find faces we recognise, people we can inform on.

They will lead us to dirty cells, where there is a hard shelf for a bed, no blanket to keep us warm, no chance to shower, a hole in the ground for a toilet, and one meal to sustain us through the day.

They will escort us silently through long dark corridors to a room where they will be waiting for us.

There will be a chair in the centre of an empty room. They will nod for us to sit down. And then it will begin.

The post The Monsters Aren’t Just in History Books first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

Victoria, Poldark, and Brexit Cultural Nationalism

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:11:46 +0000

The recent drama, Victoria (2016-2019) on Netflix based on the life of Queen Victoria is an elaborate, well-made and well-acted series, all the better to convince one of the authenticity of its content.

Victoria was presented as a young queen who was always concerned with the interests of not only her adoring public but with the staff who worked in her palace.

However, this all starts to break down in an episode that dealt with the horrors of the Great Hunger raging in Ireland in 1847.

Victoria

Image: Victoria ITV Intertitle

In this episode, “Faith, Hope & Charity” [S2E6], Victoria is depicted as being very concerned about the plight of the Irish:

“The truth is, ma’am, the population of Ireland has grown beyond its natural limits. It would be immoral of us to interfere in what is an inevitable period of self-regulation.

[Victoria] Self-regulation?

I don’t know if you are familiar with the works of Malthus, ma’am, this is exactly the sort of situation he predicted. Population growth always outstrips food production, with inevitable results.

[Victoria] I think I should like to visit Ireland. I feel I need to see the situation for myself.”

“Victoria, I can see how much you care about the situation in Ireland, but we have to remind ourselves that charity begins at home.”

“I had some papers for the Queen from the Prime Minister.

I should go, there is a debate on the Irish question.

Yes, the Queen talks about nothing else.”

“[Victoria] Thank you, Mr Trevelyan. You may leave us. I will not stand by while the Irish die of hunger! I cannot have it on my conscience.”

The episode started with the repetition of the old saw that the starvation was caused by the lack of food due to the potato blight:

“What a gloomy sermon. I found it rather thought-provoking. How pestilence and plague is part of God’s will. What can be gloomier than that? I’ve seen potato fields in my parish where every plant is black, my lord. And when they dig the tubers up they are quite putrid.” (Victoria (2016-2019) “Faith, Hope & Charity” [S2E6])

However, according to historian Christine Kinealy, the founding director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University:

“There is no evidence that she [Victoria] had any real compassion for the Irish people in any way […] We know that really she had no interest in Ireland and so to imagine she wanted to do more doesn’t really ring true […] In her very long reign, she only visited Ireland four times and one of those times was 1849 when the famine was still raging but coming to an end. At that point, she didn’t do anything, so it’s hard to imagine that what they’re portraying is really based on fact.”

Furthermore, the monarchy prevented others from donating more to the cause than the queen so as not to embarrass the Queen’s mediocre efforts.

And there was not much sympathy from the aristocracy either, according to the Duke Of Cambridge, (January 1846):

“Rotten potatoes and seaweed, or even grass, properly mixed, afforded a very wholesome and nutritious food. All knew that Irishmen could live upon anything and there was plenty of grass in the field though the potato crop should fail.”

Rioters in Dungarvan attempt to break into a bakery; the poor could not afford to buy what food was available. (The Pictorial Times, 1846).

Yet much could have been done by the British ruling class to alleviate the suffering which caused one million to die and a further million to emigrate. In earlier times British policy was different:

“During the subsistence crisis of 1799-1800, the government had placed a temporary embargo on the export of potatoes from Ireland. […] Similar intervention and market regulation occurred in Britain. For example, following the poor grain harvest in 1773, the bounty on wheat exports was removed in an attempt to keep grain in the country. […] At the same time, local and central governments throughout Europe were responding to food shortages in their own countries by closing their ports as a short-term expedient. The Dutch government also repealed their Corn Laws in 1846 in an attempt to facilitate the import of cheap grain.” [1]

In this case early government attempts to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which followed a laissez-faire economic doctrine. As a result, the export of food from Ireland continued unabated:

‘Black 47’: The Irish Famine of 1847

“It is generally accepted that by the 1840s, Ireland had become the granary of Britain, supplying the grain-hungry British market sufficient to feed two million people annually. At the same time, large quantities of other merchandise were exported from Ireland. In the twelve month period following the second failure of the potato crop, exports from Ireland included horses and ponies (over 4,000), bones, lard, animal skins, honey, tongues, rags, shoes, soap, glue and seed. […] In 1847 alone, the worst year of the Famine, almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the major ports of Britain, that is, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London.” [2]

The Irish nationalist, John Mitchel, summed the whole situation up neatly when he wrote in 1861: “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.”

Far from helping the victims of the famine, Victoria was perceived very differently in Ireland:

“In a scathing article titled “The Famine Queen,” [Maud] Gonne [(1866–1953) Irish republican revolutionary, suffragette and actress] accused Queen Victoria of failing to help “the survivors of sixty years of organized famine.” Although quickly banned by the British authorities, the article’s damning nickname for Queen Victoria stuck. The queen found herself shouldering some of the blame for the approximately one million deaths.”

In England, Victoria’s popularity was tempered by eight assassination attempts on her life. On Thursday, 19 May 1849, William Hamilton, a 22-years-old, orphaned, unemployed Irish bricklayer, “fired a pistol at the Queen Victoria, as she drove, yet again, down Constitution hill toward Buckingham Palace. Hamilton had to immigrate from Ireland to London in the 1840s at the onset of the Irish Famine/Great Hunger.”

William Hamilton shooting at Queen Victoria

The Monarchy Rebranded

The attempt to portray Victoria in a positive light in the Victoria (2016-2019) series could be seen as a modern version of the rebranding of the British monarchy in the nineteenth century when British society was perceived to be under threat from its own peasantry and working class à la French revolution taking place across the channel. According to David Cannadine in ‘The British Monarchy, c. 1820-1977’, in the early nineteenth century the press was hostile to the monarchy and the public were more interested in heroes like Nelson or Wellington whose funerals surpassed those of former kings in ‘splendour and popularity’.[3] In general, royal occasions were marred by laughter, gossiping, drunkenness, and general disrespect. Cannadine writes:

“Even as late as 1879 the commons once more debated Dunning’s famous motion ‘that the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’. If continuing royal power made grand royal ceremonial unacceptable, then renewed royal unpopularity made it impossible. For the public character and reputation of successful generations of the royal family during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century meant that they were almost without exception viewed with indifference or hostility.” [4]

By the end of the nineteenth century Britain had become mainly an “urban, industrial, mass society, with class loyalties and class conflicts set in a genuinely national framework for the first time.” [5]

Thus, the change for the monarchy or Victoria in particular, from obscure and isolated leaders of the wealthy to becoming a matriarchal figure for the whole British nation, became increasingly necessary and urgent. [6]

The hostility of the press towards the monarchy ended and the yellow press was expanded.

The church changed its attitude towards the monarchy and took monarchical ceremonies very seriously, increasing the theatrical aspects exponentially:

“In 1887 and again in 1897, the officiating clergy at Victoria’s jubilee services dressed in copes and colored stoles, a novel and picturesque innovation. And, as with the secular side of royal ritual, the motive was in part a wish to appeal to the working-classes. As E. W. Benson, archbishop of Canterbury, noted after the Golden Jubilee, ‘days afterwards, everyone feels that the socialist movement has had a check.’ [7]

The monarchy was redrawn as ‘a unifying symbol of permanence and national community’. This process was continued over the decades to the elaborate coronation of Elizabeth II up to the beginnings of the Brexit campaign. Over the last ten years cultural nationalism has become more evident in the amount of films and TV/online series produced that emphasise the glories of the national community in the face of external adversity, such as The Last Kingdom (2015-2022) Dunkirk (2017), 1917 (2019), etc.

Poldark

“Do you believe we are masters of ourselves, or merely dance like puppets on strings having the illusion of independence?” —Winston Graham, Jeremy Poldark

A very different approach can be seen in another British series, Poldark (2015). The series was based on a set of novels by Winston Graham who wrote the first Poldark novel in 1945 and the last one in 2002. The BBC made a series based on the novels for television from 1975 to 1977 with Robin Ellis in the lead role. The new Poldark (2015) series starred the Irish actor, Aidan Turner (with Robin Ellis returning to play Reverend Halse).

Ross Poldark is a veteran of the British army who returns from the American Revolutionary War to his landed estate in Cornwall. He finds that his father has died and Poldark has to rebuild the estate which is now in ruins. He marries his maid Demelza and they work hard with the local people to establish a vibrant local economy. However, many problems beset them as the mines do not deliver up much copper and he takes on a lot of starving miners and farm hands to try and alleviate the local economic and agricultural crises.

Poldark has no liking for the local elites and aristocrats and sides with the poor:

“They disgust me, my own class. Not all of them, but… most.”

Poldark is an Enlightenment man who reads Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and fights against injustices forced on the local people by the upper classes. When he eventually becomes an MP, Poldark campaigns for the abolition of slavery. As Adrian Pabst writes:

“A revulsion against wilful injustice, not mere income inequality, drives Ross in his crusade against the abuse of power and privilege. Instead of wallowing in a culture of victimhood, Poldark believes in sacrifice, service and solidarity with the dispossessed. He waits neither for the visible hand of the state nor for the invisible hand of the market, but promotes self-government and democratically governing institutions of mutual assistance. Specifically Poldark helps to set up workers’ co-operatives in which members have power and can share in the sacrifices, risks and, indeed, rewards.”

The underlying politics of Poldark is possibly due to the influence of the Labour government post-war politics on Winston Graham, as Labour had served in a wartime coalition and then won “a majority in the 1945 election. Clement Attlee’s government enacted extensive nationalisation and established the modern welfare state and National Health Service before losing power in 1951.”

This was duly noted by Jack Adrian in his obituary of Winston Graham written in 2003:

“There is more than just a tinge of incipient socialism in Poldark’s views and actions, which are mirrored on a much larger, even heroic, scale across the English Channel, where revolution, which will directly affect the Cornish fisher-folk, is breaking out. All this chimed in perfectly with the recent coming to power of a reforming Labour government under Clement Attlee.”

While this is not exactly revolutionary socialism, it is not the class conciliatory politics we see in Victoria and much of the products of British cultural nationalism. As far as mainstream media goes Poldark’s revulsion of his own class is about as radical a thought we are ever going to hear or see.

The constant popularization of the monarchy by the mass media (for example: The Madness of King George (1994), To Kill a King (2003), Whatever Love Means (2005), The Young Victoria (2009), The King’s Speech (2010), William & Kate: The Movie(2011), Diana (2013), The Crown (2016–2023), Mary Queen of Scots (2018), The King (2019), etc.) leads to a very skewed view of British history, not to mention the exclusion of British working class history and politics.

Famine sculpture in Dublin

By its nature the promotion of a broad national family led by the monarchy is the politics of an ethnic group that includes all classes.

The nature of class struggle, on the other hand, is the recognition of differing and contradictory interests of the different classes in that ethnic group/society. The use of culture to present the nation as one united family under King/Queen and God hides the brutal fact that the ongoing crises caused by right-wing economic and geopolitical agendas are generally borne by one class, and it’s not the rich one. While shows like Victoria and Poldark give us some insights into British society in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries, the limitations of the mainstream media mean that the stories of those who tried to radically change the economic and political system itself remain excluded and untold.

Endnotes

[1] Christine Kinealy ‘Food Exports from Ireland 1846-47’ History Ireland Spring 1997.

[2] Christine Kinealy ‘Food Exports from Ireland 1846-47’ History Ireland Spring 1997.

[3] David Cannadine in ‘The British Monarchy, c. 1820-1977’ in The Invention of Tradition (Canto Classics) 2012 by Eric Hobsbawn p116.

[4] David Cannadine in ‘The British Monarchy, c. 1820-1977’ in The Invention of Tradition (Canto Classics) 2012 by Eric Hobsbawn p109.

[5] David Cannadine in ‘The British Monarchy, c. 1820-1977’ in The Invention of Tradition (Canto Classics) 2012 by Eric Hobsbawn p122.

[6] David Cannadine in ‘The British Monarchy, c. 1820-1977’ in The Invention of Tradition (Canto Classics) 2012 by Eric Hobsbawn p122.

[7] David Cannadine in ‘The British Monarchy, c. 1820-1977’ in The Invention of Tradition (Canto Classics) 2012 by Eric Hobsbawn p131/132.

The post Victoria, Poldark, and Brexit Cultural Nationalism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

The Bonhoeffer Movie and Immigrant Rights

Ted Glick — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 15:12:24 +0000

The church is the church only when it exists for others. To make a start, it should give away all its property to those in need. The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell people of every calling what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others. It will have to take the field against the vices of hubris, power-worship, envy, and humbug, as the roots of all evil. It must not underestimate the importance of human example (which has its origin in the humanity of Jesus); it is not abstract argument, but example, that gives the word emphasis and power.

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Macmillan Publishing, p. 381.

In this relative lull before the second Trump Presidency begins, an important movie, Bonhoeffer, has just been released. It is the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leading Lutheran minister in Germany in the 30’s and 40’s who was killed by the Nazis two weeks before the war’s end. He was part of an underground resistance movement from 1935 on, including unsuccessful organized efforts to assassinate Hitler, which is why he was eventually arrested in 1943.

This is a movie that should be seen by as many US Americans as possible. Those who have done so since it was released five days ago have liked it, garnering a 4.5 out of 5 rating by those who saw it according to a Google survey. That is good news.

I’ve known about Bonhoeffer for a long time. When I was in prison for 11 months during the Vietnam War for my draft resistance activism, the most important book which I had inside was his Letters and Papers from Prison. His life example helped a great deal in making my prison time, as difficult as it was on a daily basis, into something of real value, an important learning and deepening experience.

The movie is very sobering. As it portrayed the steadily mounting, brutal realities of Naziism in Germany in the 30’s and 40’s I increasingly found myself thinking that it is hard to see how anything close to what happened there could happen here, now, in the USA. I thought of how, prior to the Nazis winning power electorally in 1933, the political Left in Germany was seriously divided, with the Communists attacking the Socialists, portraying them as more of an enemy than the Nazis, so that when the Nazis won it was much easier for them to proceed with their anti-Semitic, anti-communist and regressive, violent program. There was no unified Left opposition; just the opposite.

That is not our situation right now in the USA. The overall progressive movement was overwhelmingly on board with the organized efforts to defeat Trump and MAGA. We understood that the only way that could happen as far as the Presidency was through the Democrat, Kamala Harris, getting more electoral votes than Trump. In many different ways, primarily on a grassroots level via door knocking and phone calling and postcard sending, we played an important role. That work was unquestionably a major reason why both the Senate and House are closely divided, which will make it hard, even under Republican control, for Trump/MAGA to do all the damage that they would be doing otherwise.

The Green Party and Cornell West, on the other hand, two Presidential candidates who campaigned knowing that their efforts could help to get Trump elected, together received no more than about 0.6% of the Presidential vote.

But as I’ve continued to think about the movie, I’ve come to realize that there is a key lesson that we need to learn from what happened in Germany in the 1930’s. That lesson is the absolute importance of the progressive movement as a whole prioritizing, when Trump takes office, more than any other issue, resistance to mass deportation of overwhelmingly people of color immigrants.

The Bonhoeffer movie shows how the first, major, mass repressive campaign by the Nazis was against Jewish people. One scene portrays Bonhoeffer watching as people wearing “Jewish badges,” the star of David, were forcibly put into trucks going, we now know, to the concentration camps which later became genocidal, murderous death camps for millions of Jews, as well for socialists, trade unionists, gay men, disabled people, Blacks, Poles and others.

What was the biggest issue of the Trump campaign? Immigration. Repeatedly he spoke in racist and violent ways about immigrants, using words like “vermin” and “criminals” to describe these struggling human beings trying to find a better life for themselves and their families. Much of the immigrant surge in recent years is because of the more frequent and destructive droughts, storms and floods happening because of the disruption of the world’s climate due to the continued burning of coal, oil and gas. Emigration is also happening because of the reality of repressive governments south of the border supported by successive US governments for decades on behalf of corporate interests.

If the MAGA’s are able to carry out their outrageous plans at the scale they are clearly hoping to, who will be next? Will the concentration camps set up for immigrants then become filled with others of us who refuse to kiss Trump’s ring?

Are there reasons to think we can mount a successful resistance to this planned mass deportation assault? Yes, there are. The Congressional reality is one of them. The continuing unified strength of the progressive movement is another huge one. The courts are still a place where some victories can be won. One helpful analysis articulating more specifics can be found in this article recently published by long-time revolutionary Carl Davidson.

As Bonhoeffer wrote, “we must not underestimate the importance of human example; it is not abstract argument, but example, that gives the word emphasis and power.” Like Bonhoeffer and so many others down through history, we must continue and step up our game to meet the new reality.

The post The Bonhoeffer Movie and Immigrant Rights first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

A Bizarre Kind of Executive Action: The Suppression of Epochal Documentaries

Edward Curtin — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 15:15:19 +0000

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est /Pro patria mori
(It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country”)

– Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est“

Yes, it seems fitting that I am writing these words on November 11, Veterans Day in the U.S. and Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries, a day that began as Armistice Day to celebrate the ending of World War I, the “war to end all wars.”

That phrase has become a sardonic joke in the century that has followed as wars have piled up upon wars to create a permanent condition, and the censorship and propaganda that became acute with WW I have been exacerbated a hundredfold today. The number of dead soldiers and civilians in the century since numbs a mind intent on counting numbers, as courage, love, and innocence wails from skeletons sleeping deep in dirt everywhere. The minds of the living are ravished at the thought of so much death.

Almost a year ago I reviewed a film – Four Died Trying – about four American men who were assassinated by the U.S. government because they opposed the wars upon which their country had come to rely: President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. I wrote of this documentary film, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, that it was powerful, riveting, and masterful, the opening 58 minute prologue to a film series meant to be released at intervals over a few years. This prologue was released at the end of 2023 to great applause.
I wrote of it:

Today we are living the consequences of the CIA/national security state’s 1960s takeover of the country. Their message then and now: We, the national security state, rule, we have the guns, the media, and the power to dominate you. We control the stories you are meant to hear. If you get uppity, well-known, and dare challenge us, we will buy you off, denigrate you, or, if neither works, we will kill you. You are helpless, they reiterate endlessly. Bang. Bang. Bang.

But they lie, and this series of films, beginning with its first installment, will tell you why. It will show why understanding the past is essential for transforming the present. It will profoundly inspire you to see and hear these four bold and courageous men refuse to back down to the evil forces that shot them down. It will open your eyes to the parallel spiritual paths they walked and the similarity of the messages they talked about – peace, justice, racism, colonialism, human rights, and the need for economic equality – not just in the U.S.A. but across the world, for the fate of all people was then, and is now, linked to the need to transform the U.S. warfare state into a country of peace and human reconciliation, just as these four men radically underwent deep transformations in the last year of their brief lives.

This 58 minute prologue touches on many of themes that will follow in the months ahead. Season One will be divided into chapters that cover the four assassinations together with background material covering “the world as it was” in the 1950s with its Cold War propaganda, McCarthyism, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, and the ever present fear of nuclear war. Season Two will be devoted to the government and media coverups, citizen investigations, and the intelligence agencies’ and their media mouthpieces’ mind control operations aimed at the American people that continue today.

Then in March of this year I wrote about the second film in the series, The World As It Was, that explores the very disturbing history of the 1950s in the U.S.A., a decade that lay the foundation of fear upon which the horrors of the 1960s were built, and from which we now are reaping the flowers of evil that have sprung up everywhere we look because the evils of those decades have never been adequately addressed.

But I was hopeful that if enough people got see to see these illuminating and brilliantly done films, built on more than one hundred and twenty interviews over six years with key historical figures, including many family members of the four men, change was possible because more people would demand accountability. That the movies were also entertaining, despite their profoundly serious content, boded well for their reaching a wide audience.

Just recently, I was again asked by the filmmakers, as were others, to preview the third film, Jack Joins the Revolution, about John F. Kennedy, from his youth to the hope he inspired when he entered politics in 1947 until his death on November 22, 1963 and the shock and despair that overtook the nation and the world. This third film matched the brilliance of the first two, but I did wonder why there had been a lapse of more than six months between this one and the previous.

It seemed to me that this was the perfect time for these films to be released in quick succession to have a profound effect.

But having watched this third film, I discovered to my great surprise that it has not been released, nor, even more shockingly, has the second one that I previewed eight months ago. Why? I do not know, but it is very odd, to put it mildly. I do know that by not releasing them now a significant opportunity is being lost. These films would be of great help to the country, because they depict what a truly populist presidency looks like and the malign forces that oppose him. But alas, for reasons that are hard to fathom, the films are being suppressed by someone. We can only hope that the filmmakers will be successful in their efforts to free the films in time for them to be of value at this crucial moment in our history.

It is well known that JFK was a naval war hero in WW II, but less well known that his war experience turned him fiercely against war, that to end all wars was a fundamental theme of his for the rest of his life.

Jack Joins the Revolution explores this and reminds the viewer that Kennedy was well acquainted with death, having almost died eight times before he was assassinated, something he knew was coming. He was courageous in the extreme. Thus my earlier reference to Veterans Day, for JFK was a veteran of exceptional courage who not only saved his comrades when their PT boat was sunk by the Japanese in the south Pacific, but tried to the end to save his country and the world from the madness of the endless wars that have followed his death at the hands of the CIA and the U.S. warfare state.

This film clearly shows why he became such an obstacle to the imperial war machine and the CIA that to this very day have a huge stake in suppressing the truth about the man. If the film (and the others) is not released, these forces will have been successful. It will be another posthumous assassination.

For what is most striking about this episode is the light it sheds on John Kennedy’s forceful, long-standing anti-colonial and anti-imperial convictions for which he was attacked by politicians of both parties. It is suggested, and I think rightly, that this grew out of his Irish roots, for Ireland’s long fight for independence from British colonial occupation was dear to his heart and also a fundamental inspiration in the following decades for anti-colonial freedom fighters everywhere. It still is.

To listen to the film’s clips of his speeches on these topics is a revelation for those unfamiliar, not only with his radical views for a politician, but to his passionate eloquence that is sorely missing today. Attacking the policies of support for dictators and the coups against foreign leaders under the Eisenhower administration and the CIA led by Allen Dulles, JFK called for freedom and independence for people’s everywhere and the end of colonialism supported by the U.S. and other nations. Algeria, Iran, Cuba, Latin America, Africa – it’s a long list.

Even before he became president, in 1957, then Senator Kennedy gave a speech in the U.S. Senate that sent shock waves throughout Washington, D.C. and around the world. He came out in support of Algerian independence from France and African liberation generally, and against colonial imperialism.

As chair of the Senate’s African Subcommittee in 1959, he urged sympathy for African and Asian independence movements as part of American foreign policy. He believed that continued support of colonial policies would only end in more bloodshed because the voices of independence would not be denied, nor should they be.

That speech caused an international uproar, and in the U.S.A. Kennedy was harshly criticized by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even members of the Democratic party, such as Adlai Stevenson and Dean Acheson. But it was applauded in Africa and the Third World.

Yet JFK continued throughout his 1960 presidential campaign to raise his voice against colonialism throughout the world and for free and independent African nations. Such views were anathema to the foreign policy establishment, including the CIA and the burgeoning military industrial complex that President Eisenhower belatedly warned against in his Farewell Address, delivered nine months after approving the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in March 1960; this juxtaposition revealed the hold the Pentagon and CIA had and has on sitting presidents, as the pressure for war became structurally systematized and Kennedy was removed through a public execution for al the world to see.

Many voices speak to this and other issues in the film: Oliver Stone, James W. Douglass, RFK, Jr., Robert Dallek, Monica Wiesak, his niece Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Peter Dale Scott, James Galbraith, his nephew Stephen Smith, David Talbot, Peter Janney, and others.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaks about the 1953 U.S. coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossaddegh of Iran and of the approximately 72 CIA-led known coups the United States engineered between 1947 and 1989; author Stephen Schlesinger of the Dulles brothers’ work for the United Fruit Company and their subsequent involvement in the 1954 coup d’état against the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz who was instituting land reform that threatened United Fruit’s hold on so much of the country. In both cases, and many others, the U.S. supported vicious dictators and decades of terrible bloodshed and civil wars. We see a clip of JFK himself condemn the U.S. support of the Cuban dictator Batista, who was finally overthrow by Fidel Castro and his rebel compatriots, the Cuban Revolution that Kennedy understood and sympathized with.

All this just leading up to Kennedy’s presidency, which will be covered in the next film.

Watching this riveting documentary, one cannot but be deeply impressed with a side of John Kennedy few know – his hatred of oppression, colonialism, imperialism, war, and his love of freedom for all people. One comes away from the film knowing full well why the CIA had branded him an arch-enemy even before he took office, and then when in office he rattled their cage so much more in the cause of peace.

And one is left asking: why then has this film (and its predecessor about the right-wing witch hunt and crackdown on dissent in the 1950s) not been released to the public at a time when nothing could be more timely?

It is a very strange kind of executive action, considering the brilliance and importance of these films for today – this very moment in history.

The post A Bizarre Kind of Executive Action: The Suppression of Epochal Documentaries first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

Becoming the Backdrop: Hollywood and the Perils of Colonial Attention

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 22:46:21 +0000

Killers of the Flower Moon film poster

Killers of the Flower Moon is a recent epic movie set in the 1920s examining a series of murders of members of the Osage Nation who became wealthy when oil was found on their tribal land. The film is set in Oklahoma (Choctaw language phrase: okla, ‘people’, and humma, ‘red’) and depicts the story of a local political boss who was contriving to steal the Osage wealth. The film is long with a running time of 206 minutes and shows an ensemble cast of well-known actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, and Brendan Fraser.

It did well, grossing $157 million worldwide as well as receiving “critical acclaim, with praise for Scorsese’s direction, the screenplay, production values, editing, cinematography, musical score, and cast performances, especially DiCaprio, Gladstone, and De Niro […] It was also nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, seven Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, and with Gladstone winning Best Actress, nine British Academy Film Awards, and three SAG Awards, with Gladstone winning Best Actress.”

The story revolves around Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) who comes to live with his brother and uncle William King Hale on Hale’s reservation ranch after World War I. Hale is a reserve deputy sheriff and cattle rancher who poses as a friend of the Osage while at the same time secretly organising the killing of the Osage through multiple different means such as shooting, poisoning, and even blowing up a house. Ernest Burkhart marries Mollie Kyle, an Osage whose family owns oil headrights.

Lily Gladstone’s portrayal of Mollie Burkhart garnered critical acclaim, earning her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress

Mollie decides to go to Washington and asks President Calvin Coolidge for help in solving the murders. Bureau of Investigation (the eventual FBI) Agent Thomas Bruce White Sr. and his assistants are sent to Oklahoma to find out who is behind the murders. White finds out the truth and persuades Ernest to confess his involvement and testify against his uncle Hale.

Hale and Ernest were sentenced to life imprisonment but “both were paroled after years of incarceration, despite Osage protests to the parole board.”

Killers of the Flower Moon has themes which differ from traditional Westerns in that the ‘cowboys’ are focused on oil production and resent the community that owns the rights to oilfields. It is also different in that law and order is controlled not by the local sheriff [who is corrupt in this case] but by the federal state who sends in its Agents to find out what is going on. This twentieth century concept of the developing power of the state taking over from the nineteenth century local power of the sheriff is only the start. The newly developed FBI launches into containing local criminality with all the power and forces of the federal state.

The FBI went on to be involved “in the capture and deaths of numerous infamous mobsters of the day, including John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Machine Gun Kelly.”

The Osage case is also depicted in the 1959 American crime drama film, The FBI Story, showing how the FBI developed from a detective agency to an enforcement agency with the statutory authority to carry guns and make arrests:

The FBI was compelled to investigate after one of the [Osage] murders was committed on federal government land. The FBI forensics laboratory ties the doctored wills and life insurance policies of the murder victims to a local banker, Dwight McCutcheon, with the typewriter that he used.

In Killers of the Flower Moon Martin Scorsese had originally intended that Leonardo DiCaprio would play the FBI agent who solves the crimes.

However, screenwriter Eric Roth “began to fear the story underplayed the experience of the Osage people and repeated tired tropes. “We didn’t want to go much further with this great white hope saving Native Americans,” says Roth.

This fear of stereotyping led to Scorsese meeting with members of the Osage community in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, including Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, the principal chief of the Osage Nation.

Hollywood has had a long history of depicting Native Americans in cinema. The Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond covers a century of the portrayal of North American Natives in his documentary Reel Injun:

Reel Injun explores the various stereotypes about Natives in film, from the noble savage to the drunken Indian. It profiles such figures as Iron Eyes Cody, an Italian American who reinvented himself as a Native American on screen. The film also explores Hollywood’s practice of using Italian Americans and American Jews to portray Indians in the movies and reveals how some Native American actors made jokes in their native tongue on screen when the director thought they were simply speaking gibberish.

Reel Injun film poster

Scorsese was obviously aware that to be taken seriously today he would have to involve the Osage Nation in the making of this film. This story involved an extraordinary situation for Native Americans anywhere in North America as the Osage directly benefited from the natural resources of their territory.

“I was anxious,” Scorsese says. “I knew that if I could not gain their trust, then there’s no sense in making the film. As a European American, a Sicilian American, I may have natural limitations, and I hoped that they would forgive that. But they had to know it was coming from the right place and not a surface revisionism, which is simplistic. I wanted something really, really complex that deals with humanity.” […] “One of the people in the room said, ‘You have to be very careful. You’re putting words in the mouths of people that … These are real people to us. They’re part of our families.’ ”

The depiction of the Native Americans from the early cinematic beginnings emphasised violence, vacillating from violence to be admired to violence to be feared, depending on the ideological needs of each decade in the twentieth century. When America was under internal or external threat then the violence of the ‘Injun’ was to be feared. When America needed a strong identity, a powerful role model of the fearless warrior, then the Native American was to be admired.

In either case the violence provides catharsis for the colonising power. Even though it is the Native Americans that are being depicted, their needs are secondary.

Many white actors played Native American roles and had no concern for Native American opinions about their roles. “White people playing native roles? I love it, cos it’s funny!” says Cheyenne/Arapaho filmmaker, Chris Eyre, in Reel Injun. Native Americans were played by Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds, Elvis Presley, Boris Karloff, Anthony Quinn, Chuck Connors, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sylvester Stallone, Pierce Brosnan, Johnny Depp etc.

In Smoke Signals, a 1998 coming-of-age comedy-drama film directed by Chris Eyre, there is an awareness of the Romanticist portrayal of the Native American as a hero for white audiences. Similarly, white heroes were seen as belonging to the colonial cultural mindset. In Smoke Signals, Thomas Builds-the-Fire argues: “Nobody can help us. No Superman. No Batman. No Wonder Woman. Not even Charles Bronson, man.” (Reel Injun)

Smoke Signals film poster

Killers of the Flower Moon tells a Native American story and is even populated with Osage actors yet it is still a white man’s story, paid for and dominated by, white actors.

While it is difficult for any group to tell their story, especially in an expensive medium like cinema, it is even more difficult to imagine the dominant group/oppressor telling your story. Can we expect the British to make radical films about Irish uprisings against British rule? Can we expect the Israelis to make films about the Palestinian struggle against settler land grabs?

As Jesse Wente, an Ojibway film critic, remarks about Dances with Wolves (1990), one of the most successful films about the American West:

The natives were fleshed out as characters, allowed to be seen as more complete people. They weren’t just warriors; they weren’t just peaceful. There was a very sensitive and sympathetic approach. It doesn’t erase the fact that at it’s core the film is not a native movie. It is still a movie made from the outside of us and it’s about us and is meant to be sympathetic towards us. But, it isn’t us. It’s a story about a white guy. And, Indians are the T and A, but it gets promoted as being about native people or Indians, but it’s not, really. We’re just backdrop.” (Reel Injun)

Even though in the Native American, Irish, and Palestinian stories, failures were more common than successes, the depiction of struggle is always profound no matter what era the story is set in. The difficulties, the hardships, the bravery, the resistance is always inspiring.

The post Becoming the Backdrop: Hollywood and the Perils of Colonial Attention first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

Citibank from Apartheid South Africa to Apartheid Israel

Visualizing Palestine — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 15:00:54 +0000

The post Citibank from Apartheid South Africa to Apartheid Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Visualizing Palestine.

A montage of West Papuan everyday life from hip-hop to protest songs

Pacific Media Watch — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:32:34 +0000

I came to this evening of short films not sure what to expect.

I have a history with West Papua (here referring to the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea, which comprises five provinces, one named “West Papua”) from my days fronting the legendary West Papuan band Black Brothers in the early 1990s.

During that time, I was exposed to stories of struggle and pride in the identity of the people of West Papua. From their declaration of self-determination and self-government and the raising of the Morning Star flag on 1 December 1961, to the so-called “Act of Free Choice” referendum in 1969 which saw the fledgling Melanesian state become part of the larger Indonesian state, to the next 40 years of struggle.

However, apart from the occasional ABC or SBS news story and the 1963 ethnographic film Dead Birds, I hadn’t seen much footage on West Papua until now.

The West Papua Mini Film Festival is a touring festival of short films organised by the West Papuan community and their allies and supporters in Australia to raise awareness of the situation in West Papua.

The four films I saw, at the first screening in Sydney, were:

My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee)
Pepera 1969, A Democratic Integration?
Papuan Hip-Hop: When the Microphone Talks
Black Pearl and General of the Field

The first two films were quite harrowing portrayals of internal displacement and coercion in West Papua. My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee) follows the lives and families of two children, both named “refugee”, born and currently being raised in parts of West Papua distant from their families’ places of origin.

Their displacement is clearly correlated with the increased presence of extractive corporate interests backed in and supported by a military presence.

In both children’s cases this has been enabled by the gradual breaking up of the region of West Papua into first two, and now five, separate provinces.

A scene from My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee)

My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee). Video trailer: Jubi TV

The second film, Pepera 1969, A Democratic Integration, deals with the history of oppression and coercion under Indonesian rule and the absurdity of the rubber-stamping process undertaken by Indonesia (the Act of Free Choice, the Indonesian acronym for which is Pepera) which enabled it to annex West Papua under the impotent gaze of the United Nations and the complicit support of countries including the US and Australia.

The film documents the process leading into decolonisation and West Papua’s short-lived period of self-rule.

The second two films were insightful celebrations of Papuan identity in the arts, through hip-hop artists like Ukam Maran and the earlier musical group Mambesak, and in sport, with the incredible story of the Persipura football club of Jayapura.

The latter’s achievements as a football team and subsequent discrimination and suppression in the racially charged Indonesian football league provide an allegory of West Papuan identity.

In both cases, the strength and resilience of West Papuan identity, and West Papuans’ pride in their ancient ties to land and culture, are palpable.

A scene from Papua Hip-Hop: When the microphone talks.

What I liked about the four films was that they presented a montage of West Papua from rural to urban, from the everyday life of internally displaced people to the exciting work of hip-hop artists with their songs of protest; from the big picture and history of West Papua to the smaller microcosm of the Persipura football team and supporters.

All in all, I was surprised how much I came out of the festival better informed about a place, its history and current developments. And this despite having the privilege of knowing more about West Papua than many Australians.

For those who don’t know much about West Papua and would like to know more, attending the West Papua Mini Film Festival is a must. It is on at various locations around Australia until 21 April 2024, with details here.

And to end on a happy note, my evening of film appreciation included meeting one of the festival’s organisers, Victor Mambor. Victor is the nephew of the late Steve Mambor, drummer for the Black Brothers!

West Papua Mini Film Festival 2024, 9-21 April 2024, Wollongong, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, Lismore, Hobart, Melbourne, and Darwin.
The films are also available to view with English and Indonesian subtitles on the Jubi TV Youtube channel.

‘Alopi Latukefu is the director of the Edmund Rice Centre. He previously worked for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This review was first published on ANU Development Policy Centre’s DevPolicyBlog and is republished here under Creative Commons.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Paradise: A Dystopian Anti-Capitalist Gem

Carlos L. Garrido — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 20:02:25 +0000

The 2023 German film Paradise went virtually unnoticed by commentators on the socialist left. Yet, it is amongst the best dystopian anti-capitalist films produced in the decade.

The film follows the life of Max, an employee of Aeon, a company that buys life years from the poor to give them to the rich. Yes, you read that correctly, the life of the working poor (especially the large migrant populations – a phenomenon, as Immanuel Ness shows, integral to modern imperialism) is literally sold to the rich. Max is one of these salesmen. He is exceptional at his job, which is introduced to us as he tries to convince an 18-year-old migrant kid that he should sell him 15 years of his life for 700 thousand bucks. His family has been living in dire poverty since they arrived in the country, so this loss of life is presented as a gain. Now, Max tells them they will have enough money to live better in the years to come. Following this scene, Max is awarded employee of the month (Aeonian of the Year), showing us how capable he is at sucking the life of the poor to keep the rich alive. This award celebrates the 276 years he was able to collect.[1]

Aeon (the company’s name) comes from the Greek ὁ αἰών, which originally meant a lifespan of 100 years. With time, it came to be understood also as vital force (a sort of Élan vital a la Bergson), life, or being. This is, after all, what the company is taking from the working poor to give to the elite. As Max’s working class father-in-law notes, the rich are living longer as the poor (who are unable to pay for the service even with a lifetime of saving) die younger. Because of the enormity of the company, they have their own private militia (which they will use towards the end of the film) and a tremendous power over the state’s judicature. Everything they are doing is perfectly legal, as the father-in-law tells Max. (Interestingly, socialist China is the leading international force behind the attempt to ban these life-year transfers.)

The company pitches the selling of life as an opportunity, as a ‘winning of the lottery’. Their advertisement is filled with phrases like ‘choose your dreams,’ ‘when you give time, life recompenses you,’ ‘your time, your opportunity, your choice.’ The company’s president, Sophie, tells us of how great it would have been if some of the great poets, composers, scientists, etc. could have lived decades longer. Now with Aeon’s services they can!

How can we not think here of Stephan Jay Gould’s famous quote: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” In the Paradise universe, how many geniuses are never able to actualize their potential because of the material conditions of their existence? How many of these, perhaps wealthier in their potential to serve humanity than the wealthy scientists and artists, are forced to give their life years to the rich to get by?

This dystopic society terrifies us because we know that if our society ever achieved such technological development, it would be used and legitimized in exactly the same ways. It doesn’t take much imagination for us to see the homologies already present, even though we lack the technology the movie is centered around.

It is already scientifically established that the wealthier live longer than the poor. Studies which have followed the lives of twins have shown how the richer sibling consistently lives significantly longer. The rich have the capacity to access healthier foods, better medical services, and to free themselves from the life-sucking stresses and traumas of not knowing how one will pay the bills at the end of the month (for the latter point, see the work of Gabriel and Daniel Mate in The Myth of Normal). An MIT study showed that “in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.” These statistics are only intensified when we take into account the inequalities of life expectancies between the rich of imperialist countries and the poor of imperialized countries.

The wealth that the capitalist vampires suck from the working poor is life itself. “Capital is dead labour,” as Marx tells us, “that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks… The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.” Capitalist exploitation is already, like life-year selling in Aeon, the sucking of the Aeon (vital force) of the working class to accumulate capital for the elite. The inequality of life expectancy is merely a reflection of the relations of production and the exploitation at the root of capital accumulation. Each pole is dialectically interconnected; the rich get richer and live longer because the poor are poor and live less, destroying their bodies to accumulate capital for the wealthy.

Research has shown that we have developed the productive forces to the point of only needing to work around 3 hours a day (15 hours a week). The 3-hour workday prediction of John Meynard Keynes, only an aspirational ideal decades earlier for Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, has today become materially possible. The impediment to its realization is rooted in social, not material incapacity. It is the capitalist mode of social life, with profit as its sole goal and purpose, which prevents this freeing up of humanity’s time and potential. Its relations of production are a fetter on human life and culture, not just on the forces of production. Under a different mode of life, with a modus operandi for society other than capital accumulation, we could radically reduce the socially necessary labor time and increase what Martin Hägglund has called socially available free time. As I’ve argued before, the absence of its actualization is “not rooted in the machines and technologies themselves, but in the historically constituted social relations which mediate our relationship with these developments.” But until then (that is, until socialism can freely develop without pressures from the global imperialist system), we will continue to slavishly give more than a decade worth of work hours (90000 on average) working in alienating jobs that make our bosses richer while we stay poor and triply exploited. Is this not, like in Paradise, the giving up of decades of our life to making the rich not only richer, but capable of living significantly longer than us?

The way Aeon defends its practices are also reminiscent of apologists for wage slavery. It is, after all, presented as a ‘choice,’ something we ‘consent’ to. But as with wage slavery, what is the alternative? Can I expect anything other than death if, born into a working family, I decide not to commit my life to being exploited through wage slavery? How would I obtain the necessaries of life if I object to spending labor power in enriching someone else? Under capitalism this is impossible. The choice is between a slavish life of being exploited and death. As socialist thinkers (utopian and Marxists) have criticized from the start, this is really no choice at all. Perhaps there is a slight bit of choice in deciding who exploits us (for instance, Walmart or Amazon), but what does this amount to other than the capacity to pick our slave masters? Is this really what we want to herald as pillars of ‘choice’ and ‘consent’? Likewise, for those who sell their life-years to Aeon, the ‘choice’ is one between unlivable poverty and a fractioned lifespan with a better living standard. This is hardly a ‘choice’ at all.

Aeon also describes selling your life-years as akin to winning the lottery. Is this not, like we see today, a linguistic whitewashing which puts a pretty terminological veil upon a horrific practice? For instance, how we call civilian deaths ‘collateral damage,’ or US state department propped up terrorists ‘moderate rebels’. In relation to work, a similar romanticizing language is operative. Today the growing precarity of a gigifying workforce is pitched as ‘flexibility’. As I have argued before:

The last four decades of neoliberal capitalism has been a continuous disempowerment of workers through the cutting of benefits, stagnating of wages, and repression of unionization efforts. The gig economy takes this even further, through an employer’s complete removal of responsibility for workers. By categorizing workers as ‘independent contractors’, the ‘flexibility’ they continuously speak of is one that is only for them. Flexibility for the capitalist entails the removal of responsibilities for his workers, and subsequently, increasing profits for him. But for the worker – regardless of how much the capitalist’s propaganda says they are now ‘flexible’ and ‘free’ – flexibility means insecurity, less pay, and less benefits. Like in sex, flexibility for the worker here only means he can get screwed more efficiently.

Aeon’s immense resources also allow it to advance its practices, regardless of how unethical they might be, into the sphere of legality. Everything it is doing is perfectly legal. It is accepted under bourgeois ‘justice’, where justice is indistinguishable from the interests of the economically dominant class. Today readily available cancer drugs like Imbruvica are priced at 16 thousand dollars a month, something only the ultra-rich can afford. In the US, 45,000 people die a year because they do not have insurance. Any sane society (as opposed to a deeply irrational one centered on upholding the interests of capital accumulation) would consider the activities of the medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex criminal. However, because the American state is the state of their class (i.e., the big monopoly capitalists), their profit-rooted class interests are consistently upheld to the detriment of the majority of Americans.

Aeon’s capture over their society’s judicature is simply a particular form of how the state and its institutions have always functioned. The state in general doesn’t exist. What exists is particular types of states, corresponding to various modes of life holding one or another class in an economically dominant position – a dominance the state is tasked with reproducing. “The modern state,” as Marx and Engels write in 1848, “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” When profitable technology like Aeon’s develops, the state’s judicature adapts it to the existing framework of bourgeois legality. As Marx and Engels write in 1846,

Whenever, through the development of industry and commerce, new forms of intercourse have been evolved (e.g. assurance companies, etc.), the law has always been compelled to admit them among the modes of acquiring property.

Paradise, all in all, puts a mirror up to our capitalist societies. It shows us, through the medium of a new technological development, the barbarity of the logic operative in our mode of life. A barbarity, of course, which is historical, not eternal. It is something we can overcome when the class struggles for the conquest of political power by working people succeed.

First published in the Midwestern Marx Institute.

Note

[1] This review will focus on the more general social critiques operative in the movie. There are no ‘spoilers’ here, so feel free to read even if you intend to watch the movie afterwards.

The post Paradise: A Dystopian Anti-Capitalist Gem first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlos L. Garrido.

Fame vs Celebrity

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 16:11:31 +0000

Orientation

Questions about fame and celebrity

What does it mean to be famous? Does being famous go all the way back to hunter-gatherers or does it have an origin later in history? What does it mean to be a celebrity? Is it common in all societies or do celebrities emerge at a certain point in history? What is the relationship between being famous and being a celebrity? Are these terms interchangeable or are they distinct phenomenon? What fame and celebrity have in common is that they involve relations that are not:

Everyday
Kin-based
Occupy local places

According to Leo Braudy in his great book The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History there are four parts to being famous: a) a person; b) an accomplishment; c) there is immediate publicity; and d) how posterity has held them ever since. I shall define celebrity later.

My claim in this article is that fame and celebrity, while having the common characteristics above, are fundamentally different and emerge at different points in history.

My sources

In order to make these comparisons I have relied on three books. For the history of fame, Leo Braudy’s great book, The Frenzy of Renown is about the best book I know. While there are many books on celebrity, Chris Rojek’s book Celebrity has the advantage of comparing six other theories of celebrity besides his own. Most theories of celebrity focus in on the fields of entertainment. The first focus is on movies, then secondarily on sports and music. But like it or not, politicians have become celebrities and politics is not supposed to be about entertainment. How do we understand the relationship between fame and celebrity when it’s in politics? A book that does a great job on this question does not set out to contrast fame to celebrity. Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s book Eloquence in the Electronic Age simply compares politics in 19th century Yankeedom before the rise of radio and television to politics in the 20th century. As it turns out, this historical contrast in politics corresponds to the evolution from fame to celebrity. Fame is linked with 19th century politicians while celebrity corresponds with 20th century electronic age politicians. The image that this article leads with is a sculpture of fame in mythology.

My direction in this article

In the first part of this article, I compare fame to celebrity in terms of when each starts historically; how each evaluates authority; how its status was acquired; who is the targeted audience and what media are used to bridge the relationship between these notorious individuals and their public and mass audiences. I also ask questions about what the power bases involved are; how long fame or celebrity lasts and I also ask what the notorious person gives and receives from his audience. As it turns out, unlike fame, the celebrity-mass audience relationship produces psychological pathologies on both sides. In first half of the article, I only talk about celebrity as resulting from entertainment.

In the second half of the article, I contrast the difference between fame and celebrity only in relationship to politics. We will find that famous politicians have a great deal in common with famous military men or artists. However, we discover that political celebrities are very different from celebrities in the fields of entertainment such as movies, sports and music.

What is “Primary Fame” Prior to the 18th Century?

Fame in social evolution

To be famous is to be regarded with special attention by people with whom the average person has no contact – that is, strangers. There was no fame in either hunter-gatherers or simple horticulture societies because everyone knows everyone else by direct or extended kin groups. I suspect the first forms of fame came in complex horticulture societies, in chiefdoms. It is not the chief within one’s own society people consider famous, but a chief from another society with whom a commoner has no personal relationship but the chief has a reputation of being a great fighter, arbitrator or healer. The first time an individual could be famous within a society is in an agricultural civilization with tens of thousands of people and most having no kinship relations with others. The famous person may be of high standing as a religious authority, a divine king or a military hero. In the Italian Renaissance artists and musicians were famous.

Fame is rare, connected to deeds done that are notorious

How easy is it to be famous? Being famous for most of human history was rare. There wasn’t an infinite opportunity for people to be famous. This isn’t because there was some kind of quotient. It’s just because in the caste societies of agricultural states most people lived and died in their social caste and had no ambition to be famous. As you can probably imagine, being famous has little to do with being virtuous or not. It is more a case of people taking notice. You do have to do something to be famous. That is, having achieved status is more than you can inherit by being famous such as being the son of a great military hero. For the most part, being famous is connected to notorious deeds that have been performed. These deeds can be witnessed by the same generation or they can be remembered as having a reputation and then saved for posterity.

Means of cultural transmission

How do people find out about famous people in agricultural civilizations? Because there was no printing press, people found out through theatre, mystery plays and storytelling. The population also found out through mimes and minstrels. In the case of famous people who died their fame was carried on through folk tales. After the invention of the printing press stories of famous people reached middle class readers. The scope of fame reached to the end of empires but was limited mostly to the upper classes. Merchants in agricultural civilizations were unique in learning about famous people since they regularly traded with other societies.

Power bases

The leading power base for fame is competency. Competency means a famous person can get people to follow them because of demonstrated skill. Famous people can also move people because they occupy a social office that people respect, but this legitimacy by itself cannot generate fame. The same is true for charisma and sex appeal. By themselves, neither of these can make people famous, but they help.

How long does fame last?

The answer to this depends on the methods of transmission. The reputation of a famous chiefly warrior will only last as long as the storytellers who transmit the story. In the case of agricultural states famous people’s memory can be preserved through pictures or painting, writing and monuments. Here fame can last over generations.

What do famous people and their publics give to each other?

There is great social distance between famous people and their populations. There are few personal facts about them and their private lives are sequestered from the general population. What do famous people give to their population? Usually, they will bestow political or spiritual blessings. They might claim to heal their populations but they are too distant to give people any psychological satisfaction. There is no reciprocity in their relationship with the public. For famous people, members of the population are interchangeable. They do not depend on the audience for anything. With rare exceptions prior to the 20th century, most famous people were men. Before the 20th century capitalism had not reached its consumer stage, and for this reason famous people could not be commodified and sold to the public as we shall see is true about celebrities.

What is Celebrity?

Celebrity as a form of notoriety did not occur until the end of the 19th century with the rise of mass communication. This included the first newspapers in the seventeenth century, then photography in the 19th century and finally cinema, radio and television in the 20th century. By the end of the 19th century, religious and political authorities were in decline. Military generals alone maintained their fame throughout the two world wars. New heroes and heroines came from three domains – movies, music and sports. While prior to the 20th century ascribed fame was a rarity, no celebrity inherited their status. They were discovered and gained their reputation through the work they did to achieve what they had. It was very difficult to be a celebrity, but the chances were better than it was with primary fame. This is because class mobility made it possible for middle-class and even working-class people to become a celebrity.

Theories of Celebrities

In his book Celebrity, Chris Rojek identifies seven theories of celebrity. The first is the subjectivistic theory of Max Weber. Weber claims that the basis of celebrity is that the person has charisma. Charisma is an inspiring way a person has about them, that sweeps people away and makes the audience want to be like them. Politically this would go with the “Great Men” of history theory. The second theory is that of Orrin Klapp. In his book Heroes, Villains and Fools: The Changing American Character, he argues that all social groups develop character types that function as role models for leadership. Such roles include good Joe, a villain, tough guy, snob, prude and love queen. Celebrities are personifications of these types.

The rest of the celebrity theories are all social and/or historical. In his book The Stars and The Cinema, Edgar Morin argues for the opposite of Weber’s charisma. He says that celebrity is not due primarily to the subjective power of the celebrity but is a projection of the pent-up needs of the audience. Celebrities are transformers, accumulating and enlarging the dehumanized desires of the audience. Likewise, Richard Dyer also focuses on audiences. His post-structural theories, in his books Stars and Heavenly Bodies, he claims the key to understanding celebrities is how audiences construct and consume a particular star’s persona. Discourse theory emphasizes the mass media as productive agents in governing the population and specific audiences. This functions as a kind of crowd control. The books that make this argument include Celebrities and Power and Claims to Fame written by D Marshall and J Gamson. The most one-sided sociological theory is the Frankfurt School. Like discourse theory, they argue that all organized entertainment is in the service of crowd control. Involvement of the masses with their celebrities has no redeeming value. They are all forms of false consciousness. This is argued for in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Aesthetic Dimension. Lastly, there is the work of Chris Rojek who emphasizes how much the point of history matters as to when celebrities emerge. He articulates this in his book Leisure and Culture.

Celebrities have fans

Movies, radio and TV carried with them a host of mediators between celebrities and those who followed them. These mediators – the press, press agents, fan clubs – barge their way into the lives of celebrities so that those who were interested – fans – could find out all about them. Through movies, radio interviews and television appearances the notoriety of celebrities reached more social classes than primary fame. Through fads and fashions, it spread across nations and even became international. The power bases of celebrities were more narrow than primary fame. While many celebrities certainly got into the movies by skill, much of celebrity life was due to charisma and sex appeal. Economic propaganda was at work when film companies promoted their actors and actresses. At its worst, celebrities were more appearance and less skill.

Rapid rise and fall

While famous people built their reputation slowly and their fade-out might take generations, with celebrities it was the opposite. They could rise up instantaneously and fade just as quickly. A good musical example of this is doo-wop groups of the 50s. Many of these groups had one hit and then disappeared from the radio stations forever.

Fans and their celebrities

People who had fame prior to the 20th century had no fans. Fandom was the result of the work of cultural mediators who get the lowdown on celebrities. Because musicians, sports figures and especially actors and actresses partly made their living from box office turnout, they could not ignore their fans. For those fans these “intimate strangers” become increasingly important. It is not only movie magazines where celebrities “tell all”. They appear on television interviews on late night shows or, if they are on the way out, they appear on television game shows.

Celebrity fans expect much more than the crowds that followed primary famous people prior to the 20th century. Fans are psychologically involved with actors and actresses and receive the vicarious satisfaction of living through stars. They are titillated and awe-struck. Fan clubs are set up and fans expect responses to their letters, becoming upset and even violent when a star fails to respond. This can lead to the stalking of celebrities or even fans killing themselves when celebrities die. Fans collect relics and autographs and their homes become shrines to celebrities. At the same time, fans are fickle and change loyalties quite easily.

There is minor reciprocity through fan attendance at concerts, films and sporting events. Fans cheer and boo depending on how a star responds. A good example of this is when a musician plays at a concert. The fans call out for the old songs, a trip down memory lane, while the artist wants to play new work. A most extreme case is Van Morrison and his fans. Watch the first thirty seconds of this video.

This impact of the demands of fans has a great psychological impact on celebrities as they are driven from normal public life and in many cases leads to psychological disorders. Some of these disorders include paranoia and mania narcissism and what Reisman used to call “other directedness” . Celebrities become commodities, bought and sold just like other commodities. This leads to what is called achievement fatigue and achievement mirage. Rojek identifies “achievement fatigue” as when celebrities view their status as a burden and a sequence of diminishing returns. Achievement mirage is the recognition that their status is shallow and false.

Secondary Fame

It is too simplistic to polarize fame and celebrity. While it is safe to say there was once fame without celebrity, it would be naïve to argue that celebrity is the absence of fame. For example, just because the emphasis of fame is on actions and skill that doesn’t mean that celebrities whose identity is largely based on appearance, charisma and sex appeal are not also skilled. We can easily agree that Robert Duvall, Prince, and Aaron Judge all have skill. Secondly, fame is simply a mixture of fame and celebrity. Celebrities’ fame is all mixed up with their fan base, their psychological needs in a way that primary fame is not.

Table 1 is a summary of the differences between fame and celebrity.

Fame vs Celebrity

Fame	Category of Comparison	Celebrity
5,000 years ago Agricultural civilizations to the end of the 19th century	Time period	End of 19th century to present
High Religious (Catholics, Protestants) and political authority (Kings) Military heroes, artists	Evaluation of authority	Low Decline of religious and political authorities Heroes and heroines in movies, music and sports
Ascribed or achieved Achieved – Renaissance artists in open competition	How their status was achieved	Achieved (being discovered)
Rare	How easy to accomplish?	Very difficult but more frequent (class mobility opens up some possibilities)
Public strangers (crowds)	Targeted audience	Mass strangers (fans)
Literature, theatre Monuments Oral – storytelling, mimes, minstrels. Folk tales, mystery plays	Mediums of transmission	Mass communication Newspapers, photography, cinema, radio, television
Beyond locales, to regions spread to empires through reputation	Scope – how far it expands	Beyond locales to regions nations and in some cases international
Legitimacy, charisma, competency	Power bases	Charisma, Sexual power Competency
Survives over generations	How long does it last?	Ephemeral Instant recognition
Reputation, skills Actions (military, artists) Inheritance (kings, aristocrats)	What are its characteristics?	How a person appears physically, skills and actions in some cases
Most distant	Degree of exposure	Less distance because of fan magazines, television appearances
Blessings, healings Awe	What the audience receives	Vicarious satisfaction of living life through stars Titillation, awe
No reciprocity (does not need audience)	Nature of person of Notoriety and audience	Minor reciprocitythrough fan attendance at concerts, films, sporting events—cheering, booing (needs audience)
Little impact Character	Star pathologies	Significant impact – lack of privacy, psychological disorders Narcissism mania, schizophrenia, paranoia
None Not attached	Audience pathologies	Fan pathologies: Stalking Killing themselves when celebrities die
Larger than life Not commodities	How are notorious people held?	Larger than life Celebrities become commodities
		Relics of the dead – Signed autographs Homes are shrines
Long term loyalty	Loyalty	Fickle – rarely exclusive or lifelong Fads, fashions Simmel—fashion makes people radioactive
Men – with rare exceptions	Gender representation	Men and women (technological amplification makes it easier for women)

Fame vs Celebrity in the History of Politics

The impact of the electronic age on politics

Up until now we have limited our discussion of celebrity to movies, and to a lesser extent music and sports. What about politics? In her wonderful book Eloquence in an Electric Age: The Politics of Political Speechmaking, Kathleen Hall Jamieson contrasts politicians and the public before the end of the 19th century to politics in the 20th century. For us, contrasting politics before and during the electronic age overlaps exactly with the time period we are contrasting fame and celebrity. In other words, we can use her work to understand the evolution of fame to celebrity to politics. As we shall see, politicians before the electronic age were famous, whereas after the electronic age they were celebrities.

Means of communication, accessibility private life and the length of speeches

The setting for political fame was communicating directly in public or through newspapers. At the end of the 19th century, first indirectly through the movies and then later through radio first and then television, politicians more and more became celebrities. Before the end of the 19th century the private life of politicians was protected. However, especially after television, the private life of politicians became public. A political public speaker (like Webster, Sumner or Clay) was an orator who could go on speaking for hours to audiences who were interested in politics and came from miles around and stood in agricultural fields. The contents of what the speaker had to say was usually fiery, full of imagery of swords and conquest. But especially after World War II, when politicians now had to compete with movie stars, sports figures and musicians, audiences with shorter attention spans expected politicians to speak briefly, be more entertaining and willing to take the needs of the audience into account.

Politicians as preachers of news vs politicians as reactors to news

Before the electronic age, famous politicians expected people to remember their words. But by the mid-20th century, what mattered more was not only how the politician came across on TV, but what was presented on TV in news (the Vietnam war). Whereas famous politicians were ahead of their audiences because they could simply report on what was going on politically while their audience had no way of knowing about that. But once television began reporting the political news, there was a period where the celebrity politicians had to answer questions about the news that the audience had already seen on television. This contributed to the growing skepticism and disrespect for celebrity politicians.

On the hot seat: celebrity presidents and instantaneous communication

Famous politicians used to only have to deal with a local audience. If a famous politician made a mistake at a local stump stop only the locals would have noticed it. It might be written up in the newspaper but the visual impact on the audience is blunted. Celebrity politicians are dealing with thousands of people all over the country whom the politicians cannot see. But for a celebrity president to make a mistake is a huge deal and thousands of people watching have all seen the same thing at the same time in their own private living rooms.

From rhetoric and newspapers to broadcast media

Famous politicians had to deal with critics who would challenge their oratory style. Their speeches were printed in newspapers. Celebrity politicians were not expected to be skilled in rhetoric because their speaking time was much shorter, at most it was 30 minutes. Newspapers no longer printed the speeches of politicians because people either listened on the radio, saw the speech on television or didn’t bother to watch or listen at all. Because the pace of life had quickened audiences had neither the time nor the interest to read these speeches. Furthermore, advertisers who controlled newspapers would never tolerate that much space taken up with a political speech. Broadcast media of radio and television displaced newspapers.

From argumentation with many sides to playing tag with two sides

Orators of the 19th century spent a fair amount of time defining their terms to the public and then laying out all the alternative prospects just as a lawyer or a rhetorician lays out their case. They presented all the available evidence. In addition, fame politicians used words to create imagines in their audiences. Celebrity presidents didn’t bother with definitions as audiences were not expected to hold definitions in their heads. Perhaps for fear of losing people, celebrity politicians flattened out the alternatives of the debate to two sides. Furthermore, celebrity presidents act like they are playing tag. They hit and they run. Those with the fastest quip win. Whereas public speaking requires a certain degree of an ability to think on the spot and field spontaneous questions from a relatively informed audience, celebrity “town hall” meetings are choreographed with the questions from the audience preselected as are the audiences themselves. Celebrity politicians don’t use words to help the audience create images. They use images from television to begin with and their words followed the images (captions).

From speechwriting to teleprompters

Famous politicians in the 19th century wrote their own speeches. This means they had to distinguish the logos of a speech from the ethos and the pathos and they had to be sensitive to timing – kairos. Celebrity politicians do not have to know anything about rhetoric as they don’t write their own speeches. The speeches are given to them. Because their speeches are televised they don’t have to be ready for audiences’ immediate reactions whether they are verbal or non-verbal. For celebrity politicians, they simply speak their lines. No thinking by them has gone into crafting their speech. In some cases their responses are guided through a teleprompter.

From respect to disrespect of the past

Famous politicians of the 19th century were expected to remember not only their previous arguments, but the political literature of the past. Also quoting poetry demonstrated that a politician was well-rounded. While their public audiences might not be able to quote literature from the past themselves, they respected politicians who could. By the mid 20th century, the audience respect for the past dwindled and they are more likely to be bored by a politician referring to their past arguments or political literature of the past. They might easily say “who cares”?

From hellraiser to moderate

Famous politicians of the 19th century were expected to be powerful, but predictable. There was nothing wrong with riling their audiences up. Famous politicians emphasized the points of disagreement with other politicians and they ignored the points of agreement. Famous politicians expect people to think and vote accordingly.

In reaction to the terror of instantaneous communication and in order to compensate for possible mistakes, celebrity politicians attempt to make up for losing points by seeming to be a “regular guy”. By mid-20th century, psychology has had an impact on the public and politicians begin to use personal examples to become “intimate strangers” to their audiences. Celebrity politicians are expected to be more folksy and inflaming the audience might seem demagoguery at best, or pathological at worst. Please remember that celebrity politicians in the 50s were anti-communists and they were expected to be moderates, not extremists like the communists or the fascists. Celebrity politicians want to appear not too extreme. They want to emphasize the unity of the nation so that the audience will identify with them. Celebrities want to cross a line to gain emotional rapport. They are not far from a hope for mass collective therapy. Engagements were choreographed to resemble conversations more than speeches.

How the electronic age helped women politicians

Public speaking without loudspeakers, let alone radio and television mediations, was a man’s game, because men’s voices usually carried further than women’s. Even if a woman was a good speaker her power would be muffled if not everyone could hear her or her voice was straining. Radio and television definitely assisted female politicians in being taken more seriously. Furthermore, 19th century politicians in Yankeedom was a men’s club. Their wives and children were nowhere to be found. But for celebrity politicians their wives and children were never far out of view. In the 19th century it was possible for single male politicians to be elected. By the middle of the 20th century it became next to impossible to run if you were not married. This is as true for men as it was for women.

From party to personality

What is the relationship between the political candidate and his party? In the 19th century, the party had predictable stances that didn’t change much over decades. The personality of the candidate running was not essential to his winning or losing. However, beginning with the introduction of television, this began to change (certainly in the case of J.F. Kennedy). By the middle of the 1980s political candidates were treated as commodities and party politics began to lose its identity. All you have to do is trace the trajectory of the Democratic Party from the time of JFK to today to understand how the party of FDR has morphed into a neoliberal right-wing party. The personalities of the politician mattered far more than their parties. This can be seen in Part IV of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of the Self.

Two Forms of Notoriety in Politics: Fame vs Celebrity

19th Century	Category of Comparison	20th Century
Public communication	Setting	Mass communication Movies, radio, Television Private living rooms
Private lives protected	Politicians Private/ public lives	Private lives known
Public interested Would walk for miles to spend two hours standing in a field listening to a speech about national affairs	How involved is the audience?	Audiences restless Short attention span
Orator	Type of engagement	Speaker
Fire and sword Conquest	Type of speech	Intimate discloser based on conciliation
Lincoln Webster, Sumner, Clay	Examples of politicians	John F Kennedy, Nixon, Clinton
90 minutes to two hours	Length of speech	Shorter, less than 30 minutes
Newspapers reprinted text	How do newspapers treat speeches?	Advertising takes over newspapers – can’t waste advertising space on politics
	Steps in Argumentation
Spent time defining their terms	Defining terms	Don’t bother – Don’t have time
Explored the range of available evidence Routinely laid out the range of policy alternative for examination – like rhetoricians or lawyers building a case	How expansive is the argument?	No scrutinization of alternatives in depth Argue by hitting and running
Four or five sides	How many sides of an argument?	Flattened to two sides
Study of rhetoric and poetry	Study of rhetoric and poetry	Study of rhetoric In decline Interest in mass persuasion
Tested the ability to recall previous arguments and the literature of the past	Importance of Memory	Americans can’t refer to previous literature Little in contemporary education cultivates memory
Newspapers Marconi – wireless telegraph	Mass media	Broadcast media of radio and tv increased information – displacing the newspaper
Yes – speaking and thinking go together	Does the speaker write the speech?	No – speechwriters Speaking and thinking separated
Heard only by those in the local field Newspapers printed the speech for people in far regions to hear Delayed	Scope of speech	Instantaneous Heard in 90% of homes in US and in 27 other countries all at the same time.
Preacher of news	Do politicians control the news?	Reactor to news
Words	What moves audiences	Images on television are much more powerful than words
Politics No place for personal	Impersonal, personal	Personalized self-disclosure and autobiographical
Powerful, but not predictable—fear and potential destruction	Use of pathos	To inflame the audience was a sign of demagoguery
Areas of disagreement stressed Agreement ignored	Passion or moderation	Emphasize reconciliation Burke – identification
Painted pictures with images and words	Relation between words and images	Images presented first Words worked as caption pictures
Lack of voice projection limited women’s political speaking	Gender dynamics	Technology of radio and TV amplification opens speech up to women
Lone speaker Family absent	Is the family included	Wives, children, pets are close by
Stable party platform comes 1st Personality secondary	Party vs personality	Unstable party platform Personality as a commodity is primary

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Fame vs Celebrity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Fame vs Celebrity

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 16:11:31 +0000

Orientation

Questions about fame and celebrity

Everyday
Kin-based
Occupy local places

My claim in this article is that fame and celebrity, while having the common characteristics above, are fundamentally different and emerge at different points in history.

My sources

My direction in this article

What is “Primary Fame” Prior to the 18th Century?

Fame in social evolution

Fame is rare, connected to deeds done that are notorious

Means of cultural transmission

Power bases

How long does fame last?

What do famous people and their publics give to each other?

What is Celebrity?

Theories of Celebrities

Celebrities have fans

Rapid rise and fall

Fans and their celebrities

Secondary Fame

Table 1 is a summary of the differences between fame and celebrity.

Fame vs Celebrity

Fame	Category of Comparison	Celebrity
5,000 years ago Agricultural civilizations to the end of the 19th century	Time period	End of 19th century to present
High Religious (Catholics, Protestants) and political authority (Kings) Military heroes, artists	Evaluation of authority	Low Decline of religious and political authorities Heroes and heroines in movies, music and sports
Ascribed or achieved Achieved – Renaissance artists in open competition	How their status was achieved	Achieved (being discovered)
Rare	How easy to accomplish?	Very difficult but more frequent (class mobility opens up some possibilities)
Public strangers (crowds)	Targeted audience	Mass strangers (fans)
Literature, theatre Monuments Oral – storytelling, mimes, minstrels. Folk tales, mystery plays	Mediums of transmission	Mass communication Newspapers, photography, cinema, radio, television
Beyond locales, to regions spread to empires through reputation	Scope – how far it expands	Beyond locales to regions nations and in some cases international
Legitimacy, charisma, competency	Power bases	Charisma, Sexual power Competency
Survives over generations	How long does it last?	Ephemeral Instant recognition
Reputation, skills Actions (military, artists) Inheritance (kings, aristocrats)	What are its characteristics?	How a person appears physically, skills and actions in some cases
Most distant	Degree of exposure	Less distance because of fan magazines, television appearances
Blessings, healings Awe	What the audience receives	Vicarious satisfaction of living life through stars Titillation, awe
No reciprocity (does not need audience)	Nature of person of Notoriety and audience	Minor reciprocitythrough fan attendance at concerts, films, sporting events—cheering, booing (needs audience)
Little impact Character	Star pathologies	Significant impact – lack of privacy, psychological disorders Narcissism mania, schizophrenia, paranoia
None Not attached	Audience pathologies	Fan pathologies: Stalking Killing themselves when celebrities die
Larger than life Not commodities	How are notorious people held?	Larger than life Celebrities become commodities
		Relics of the dead – Signed autographs Homes are shrines
Long term loyalty	Loyalty	Fickle – rarely exclusive or lifelong Fads, fashions Simmel—fashion makes people radioactive
Men – with rare exceptions	Gender representation	Men and women (technological amplification makes it easier for women)

Fame vs Celebrity in the History of Politics

The impact of the electronic age on politics

Means of communication, accessibility private life and the length of speeches

Politicians as preachers of news vs politicians as reactors to news

On the hot seat: celebrity presidents and instantaneous communication

From rhetoric and newspapers to broadcast media

From argumentation with many sides to playing tag with two sides

From speechwriting to teleprompters

From respect to disrespect of the past

From hellraiser to moderate

How the electronic age helped women politicians

From party to personality

Two Forms of Notoriety in Politics: Fame vs Celebrity

19th Century	Category of Comparison	20th Century
Public communication	Setting	Mass communication Movies, radio, Television Private living rooms
Private lives protected	Politicians Private/ public lives	Private lives known
Public interested Would walk for miles to spend two hours standing in a field listening to a speech about national affairs	How involved is the audience?	Audiences restless Short attention span
Orator	Type of engagement	Speaker
Fire and sword Conquest	Type of speech	Intimate discloser based on conciliation
Lincoln Webster, Sumner, Clay	Examples of politicians	John F Kennedy, Nixon, Clinton
90 minutes to two hours	Length of speech	Shorter, less than 30 minutes
Newspapers reprinted text	How do newspapers treat speeches?	Advertising takes over newspapers – can’t waste advertising space on politics
	Steps in Argumentation
Spent time defining their terms	Defining terms	Don’t bother – Don’t have time
Explored the range of available evidence Routinely laid out the range of policy alternative for examination – like rhetoricians or lawyers building a case	How expansive is the argument?	No scrutinization of alternatives in depth Argue by hitting and running
Four or five sides	How many sides of an argument?	Flattened to two sides
Study of rhetoric and poetry	Study of rhetoric and poetry	Study of rhetoric In decline Interest in mass persuasion
Tested the ability to recall previous arguments and the literature of the past	Importance of Memory	Americans can’t refer to previous literature Little in contemporary education cultivates memory
Newspapers Marconi – wireless telegraph	Mass media	Broadcast media of radio and tv increased information – displacing the newspaper
Yes – speaking and thinking go together	Does the speaker write the speech?	No – speechwriters Speaking and thinking separated
Heard only by those in the local field Newspapers printed the speech for people in far regions to hear Delayed	Scope of speech	Instantaneous Heard in 90% of homes in US and in 27 other countries all at the same time.
Preacher of news	Do politicians control the news?	Reactor to news
Words	What moves audiences	Images on television are much more powerful than words
Politics No place for personal	Impersonal, personal	Personalized self-disclosure and autobiographical
Powerful, but not predictable—fear and potential destruction	Use of pathos	To inflame the audience was a sign of demagoguery
Areas of disagreement stressed Agreement ignored	Passion or moderation	Emphasize reconciliation Burke – identification
Painted pictures with images and words	Relation between words and images	Images presented first Words worked as caption pictures
Lack of voice projection limited women’s political speaking	Gender dynamics	Technology of radio and TV amplification opens speech up to women
Lone speaker Family absent	Is the family included	Wives, children, pets are close by
Stable party platform comes 1st Personality secondary	Party vs personality	Unstable party platform Personality as a commodity is primary

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Fame vs Celebrity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

A Cinematic Portrait of Graeme MacQueen, A Warrior for Peace

Edward Curtin — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 16:47:23 +0000

It is one thing to read a review of this important and compelling film – a tour de force – and another to watch it. The former fades into insignificance when one takes an hour-and-a-half to immerse oneself in its tragic yet revelatory story. For in it we see and hear a dying man speak eloquently of how he accepted the role that life brought him – a 9/11 truthteller and peace apostle – and now, as he departs the stage, hopes this last effort will ease his exit and help fulfill his mission as a man of peace.

Because Graeme MacQueen was my close friend for the last ten years of his life, I found it very hard to watch this film since his death on April 25^th is still raw and painful. For more than three years he suffered greatly and yet found the strength to cooperate with his colleague Ted Walter in the making of this important film. Walter’s direction admirably portrays MacQueen’s nobility by having Graeme narrate his life’s work interspersed with documentary footage that illuminates the truth about many issues, most notably the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks. The result is a very powerful and important lesson in personal courage and historical truth.

From the opening scenes we see Graeme tell it bluntly and hopefully: that the official story of 9/11 is a fraud, and that because his life’s work has been to oppose war, he hopes he has fulfilled his “mission.” Humble as he was, it is inspiring to hear him speak of his mission, which is another word for vocation or calling, a mystery beyond analysis.

A long-time professor of religious studies at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada where he was the Founding Director of the Center for Peace Studies and a Buddhist scholar, he was also a peace activist, who traveled to El Salvador and worked with peace groups to learn for himself the truth about other conflicts and help resolve them. His writing and research were meticulously logical and evidence based to a fault, and it would be impossible to accuse him of ever reaching rash conclusions based on speculation.

While there are powerful documentaries that focus exclusively on facts and are narrated by omniscient and objective narrators, Peace, War, and 9/11, while also based on proven facts, is doubly powerful because it is told by a man whose personal story is a moving example of one who, from a young age, was inspired by a reverence for life and the embrace of non-violence, and whose vocation long preceded his scholarly and anti-war pursuits.

The documentary footage begins with a clip from President John Kennedy’s indispensable American University speech of June 10, 1963 where he appeals for an end to the Cold War, the abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end of a Pax Americana, and the establishment of a genuine peace: “. . . the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living – the kind that enables men and women to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.” This clip sets the stage for all that follows, for it is implied that this speech, among his other anti-war actions, led to JFK’s assassination by the CIA. The film makes similar points about the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. The point is clear: Peacemaking is a dangerous activity, but it is necessary if we are to reverence life and live by conscience.

To listen to MacQueen give his analysis of war as a system, at times cold and others hot, not one event but a series of events – a tumor on human society as he describes it (echoing the tumors that are killing him) – is to receive a concise lesson on war and peace. The film illustrates his words with powerful footage from Vietnam, the Tonkin Gulf, Pearl Harbor, the words of the warmaking class, etc. all leading to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

He explains how his suspicions about those events gradually grew until in 2005 he read an article by David Ray Griffin that startled him. It was about the testimony of New York City firefighters who heard explosions in the Twin Towers. This prompted him to pursue what his scholarship had prepared him for: the careful pursuit of textual analysis in pursuit of evidence, and so he read the 12,000 pages of the World Trade Center task force report only to discover that 118 NY firefighters talked about explosions throughout the towers and 10 did not. The more he studied, the more he found additional eyewitness, such as police officers, to bring the number to 156. Such eye witness testimony, reinforced by the first reports from television announcers kept adding up, as thermite was found in the dust of the towers. The evidence for controlled demolition of the buildings kept increasing; he concludes that “the evidence is overwhelming.” His words are supported by confirmatory video from many of the people he mentions. This video testimony makes this film so powerful.

From there he dissects the same day emergence of the official narrative which blamed Osama bin Laden for 9/11 without any evidence to support it. It became the propaganda narrative of good versus evil. Evidence for the alleged 19 hijackers was not produced, then or ever. War was simply declared against the bad guys, who were declared guilty by fiat.

Finally, Graeme analyzes the anthrax letters that were sent in the weeks following September 11. Only five people died but the effects were profound. He leads the viewer through his important research as presented in The 2001 Anthrax Deception. His book shows conclusively that the anthrax attacks were an inside job coming from a U.S. government lab, not an Al-Qaeda operation. Nevertheless, this led to the Patriot Act, the invasion of Afghanistan, and in 2003 the invasion of Iraq, although all were based on lies. And significantly, if the anthrax attacks were an inside job which he conclusively proves, so too were those of September 11^th, as some of the alleged hijackers, particularly the leader Mohamed Atta, were involved in the anthrax deceptions.

He concludes by saying many people don’t get the deep state because they can’t imagine treachery of this kind and scope. He accuses many traditional leftists of falling down on the job of showing how 9/11 was a propaganda coup based on “mendacity and deception.” Many such leftists who have often been critics of U.S. domestic and foreign policy – and we are shown pictures of Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Amy Goodman, Glen Greenwald, et al. – have also refused to even discuss the matter. This Graeme says “is probably from fears of looking ridiculous and admitting you were wrong for years and years on a really important topic.” Here I must disagree with my dear friend, for this seems to me false, for these same people could have examined the evidence as Graeme did when he jumped into his research starting in 2005. They adamantly refused then and now and so have given cover for the justification of the endless U.S. wars on terror that are ongoing. I do not believe this was because of “looking ridiculous.” It is more insidious than that.

We see an interview with General Wesley Clarke who says he was shown a paper in the Pentagon in late September 2001 where he was informed that the U.S. was not going to just invade Afghanistan but Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally Iran. Graeme makes clear that any country that dares to resist the U.S. “and our Israeli companions” will be attacked and destroyed. This is the war system at work. It is, as he says, all about collective punishment; the warfare states will attack you and kill you in large numbers even if you individually have had nothing to do with any of this. Systemic killing is at the heart of this state terrorism, as the Israeli massacres of Palestinians has long shown, even as I write.

To cap off his analysis, we are shown video of the collapse of Building 7 at the World Trade Center. It was not hit by a plane and came down in free-fall speed at 5:20 P.M. It was clearly taken down by controlled demolition and its fall was predicted by 60 firefighters in advance. It was the final crime committed that day, one that it has taken many people years to discover, if they have.

“We haven’t tried very hard to abolish war,” Graeme says at the end. It is “this mutually reinforcing tumor on societies” that many don’t understand because of its systemic nature and because they don’t take the time to read and study closely all the official narratives that explain it as unavoidable. These are lies. Yet just as 19^th century crusaders for justice finally abolished slavery and started a gradual process to try to stop wars – to no avail – the fight goes on. As JFK said at American University, “We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

This deeply moving film will elucidate and edify those who care for the world’s children. While one man’s story, it is universal. Graeme MacQueen has departed this earth, but he has fulfilled his mission as a man of peace. “You do your best,” he tells us. What more can we ask of him, and ourselves as well.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

Peace, War, and 9/11 can be viewed here and here.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

The Movie and the Moment

Marcy Winograd — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 14:00:06 +0000

The ground-breaking movie Oppenheimer, despite its unsympathetic protagonist, packs a powerful anti-nuclear punch that makes it hard, if not impossible, to sleep after watching the film.

For this reason alone, the movie should be shown on the floor of Congress and in the White House as required viewing by all in DC bent on spending $1.7 trillion over the next decades to build new nuclear weapons to kill us all.

Only those with a global death wish or on the payroll of Northrop Grumman, the military contractor with the nuclear “modernization” contract, could watch this film and still root for US nuclear rearmament, a horror show now underway with the blessings of DC politicians. Unless people rise up in fury, unless this Hollywood movie sparks a second nuclear-freeze movement, a repeat on steroids of the 80’s nuclear weapons freeze, Congress and the White House will raid the treasury to expand our nuclear arsenal.

On the agenda is a new sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, a gravity bomb with two-stage radiation implosion, a long range strike bomber and the replacement of 400 underground nuclear missiles in the midwest with 600 new Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. These new ICBMS–The Sentinel–could each carry up to three warheads 20 times more powerful than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to incinerate 200,000 people in a span of three days.

Irish actor Cillian Murphy plays the role of J. Robert Oppeneheimer, a hand-wringing scientist, a lackluster womanizer, a man with few convictions but lots of demons, who traverses an emotional landscape of ambition, doubt, remorse and surrender.

Oppenheimer oversees the Manhattan Project, the team of scientists hunkering down in the beautiful desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to build the hideous atomic bomb before the Germans or Russians crack the code.

In a scene reminiscent of the absurd 1950s, when pig-tailed school children scrambled under desks in mock nuclear drills, scientists don sunscreen and goggles to protect themselves during the blinding Trinity Test. This was the first atomic test conducted with no warning to the downwinders–the nearby Indigenous people of the Southwest who developed cancer as a result of radioactive fall out. This was the test before President Truman ordered a 9,000 pound uranium bomb named Little Boy loaded onto a B-29 bomber. This was the trial performance before the same President, depicted in the movie as unctuous and arrogant, orders Fat Boy, a second plutonium bomb– prototype for today’s nuclear weapon–dropped on Nagasaki.

Though the movie can be slow, a three hour endurance test, its historical insights and gut-churning imagery compensate for its lack of likable characters, save for Lt. General Leslie Groves, played by a fun-to-watch Matt Damon as Oppenheimer’s Pentagon handler.

One of the most haunting moments juxtaposes in living color celebrations of the bombings, applause and accolades for Oppenheimer standing at the podium with the guilt-consumed scientist’s black and white visions of irradiated souls, skeletal remains, flesh turned to ash–all amid a cacophony of explosions and pounding feet, the death march.

Even more disturbing are the questions that tug at the moviegoer, who wonders, “Where are the Japanese victims in this film? Why are they missing from this picture? Why are they never shown writhing in pain, their lives and cities destroyed?” Instead, the human targets are seen only through the lens of Oppenheimer who imagines faceless x-rayed ghosts torn asunder in the burning wreckage, their skin, their flesh falling off their bones, their bodies disappearing into nothingness. The omission of the real victims in the interest of maintaining a consistent point of view may make sense from a filmmaker’s perspective, but not from the standpoint of historians and truth tellers. Writer-director Christopher Nolan could have shown us photos, authentic aerial footage of the Japanese, blinded and burned, before the final credits roll to remind us the horror is real, not just a Hollywood movie bound for several Oscar nominations.

In the name of truth the movie does, however, smash the persistent myth that the US had no other choice but to drop the atomic bombs to end WWII. Through dialogue, we learn Japan was about to surrender, the Emperor simply needed to save face; the point of irradiating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, targeting civilians in far off cities, was not to save the world but to show the Soviets the US possessed the technology to destroy the world, so better not cross the aspiring empire.

In closed door sessions, all filmed in black and white, we watch as crusading anti-communist politicians–determined to stop Oppenheimer from advocating for arms control talks with the Soviets–crucify their atomic hero for his association with members of the Communist Party, leftist trade unions and a long ago anti-capitalist lover who threw his bourgeois flowers in the trash.

When the McCarthyites strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance, it’s a big “who cares” shrug for a movie audience weary of Oppenheimer’s internal conflicts over whether science can be divorced from politics, from the consequences of a scientist’s research. How can anyone with a heart want to continue this line of work? To hell with the security clearance.

The movie Oppenheimer is compelling and powerful in its timeliness, though one can’t help but think it would have been exponentially more powerful had it been told from a different point of view, from the point of view of a scientist who opposed the death-march mission.

We see glimpses of a pond-staring fate-warning Albert Einstein, who in real life lobbied to fund the atomic bomb research only to later oppose the project. It could have been his story–or the story of one of the 70 scientists who signed a “Truman, don’t drop the bomb” petition that Oppenheimer squelched, persuading Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb” not to present Truman with the petition drafted by Leo Szilard, the chief physicist at the Manhattan Project’s Chicago laboratory. The movie’s reference to the petition was so fast, so quiet, so mumbled, the audience could have missed it.

If we are not careful, more mindful, more awake, we might miss our moment, our moment to avert another nuclear holocaust, this one a far worse nightmare in which five billion of the Earth’s 8 billion people perish, either immediately from radiation burns and fire or in the months that follow during a famine in which soot blocks the sun.

The White House and a majority of Congress want to rush us, a sleepwalking populace into WWIII with Russia, a nation of 143 million people, 195 different ethnicities and 6,000 nuclear weapons. For those, like the shameful editors of the Washington Post, who insist we continue to forever fund the proxy war, for those in high places who refuse calls for a ceasefire, this movie reminds us of the existential danger we confront in a sea of denial, complicity and exceptionalism.

Despite campaigning on a platform of no first use of nuclear weapons, President Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review echoes his predecessor Trump’s approval of first use should our allies’ interests be threatened.

CODEPINK activists are distributing flyers outside showings of Oppenheimer to invite stunned movie goers leaving the theater in a daze to take action, to join our organization and amplify our peace-building campaigns, to ground the nuclear-capable F-35, to declare China is Not our Enemy and to partner with the Peace in Ukraine Coalition.

This is the movie, this is the moment, this is the time to challenge the euphemistic nuclear modernization program, to expose the madness of militarism that abandons urgent needs at home to line the pockets of military contractors gorging at the Pentagon trough.This is the time to demand a ceasefire and peace talks to end the war in Ukraine, to stop preparations for war with China, to finally pass legislation to ban first use, to take our ICBM’s off hair trigger alert, to abide by our disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to campaign for the US to become signatories to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Opposed by NATO–a huckster for nuclear proliferation–the TPNW has been signed by 95 state parties wishing to outlaw the development, deployment and use of nuclear weapons.

Unlike Oppenheimer, we can make the right choice; the choice that saves the human race from immediate extinction.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Marcy Winograd.

EO: Three Hooves up in High Heaven

Binoy Kampmark — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 00:41:35 +0000

Films featuring animals as screen filled protagonists, often in an imperfect, callous human world, have been made before. There was Robert Bresson’s 1966 Au Hasard Balthazar, which introduced audiences to a saintly donkey subject to the terrible things human beings are so often prone to inflict.

In recent times, the documentary black-and-white film Gunda, directed by Viktor Kossakovsky (executive producer Joaquin Phoenix), stripped of human dialogue, featured the farm life of an impressively large sow and her piglets. To their lives were added cows and a chicken with one leg. In such a film, livestock are seen as breathing, living creatures; they are not mere units of stock, destined for the packet and table. It is a film stunningly free of didactic hectoring or moral scolding.

EO, a film by Jerzy Skolimowski, that seasoned though less known member of the Polish New Wave, which included such busting, big hitters as Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski, pays tribute to Bresson’s work. At the very least, the same animal of biblical lore features. It certainly has gone down well with some of the critics, winning a nomination for Best International Feature Film and netting the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022.

Interestingly enough, this particular animal is very much in cinematic vogue: Jenny, the miniature donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin, has made something of a splash. Jenny was even featured alongside the Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel at this year’s events. “Not only is she an actor,” the humourless Kimmel strained, “she’s a certified emotional support donkey – or at least that’s what we told the airline to get her on the plane from Ireland.”

Skolimowski’s inspiration for selecting the donkey arose from an encounter in Sicily, where he and his wife and collaborator Ewa Piaskowska, spend their winters. At a village Nativity, he noted “an incredible cacophony – chickens, geese, pigs, goats … In the very far corner, I saw those famous ears”.

The donkey, despite moving its startlingly parallel ears, remained silent. It was, according to the director, “like a witness on the side. I came very close and I looked at his eyes – next time you see a donkey, please notice the enormous eyes. They had this very specific melancholic look – not being involved, but looking with a distance and maybe some philosophical reflection.”

In The Economist, Skolimowski is reported regarding donkeys as “extremely intelligent animals and very sensitive”. He condemns industrial farming as “torture”, rightly deserving a ban. Perhaps inevitably, vegetarianism gains appeal through EO, capturing hearts and moving conscience. Half of the crew involved in the filming swore off meat by its end. Both Skolimowski and Piaskowska reduced their own meat consumption.

Where Bresson’s ass is village-bound and passed around its various residents, Skolimowski’s donkey is involuntarily restless, beginning his adventures from a doomed circus in Poland which must let its animals go for reasons of legislation and protest. There, he is much loved by Magda (Sandra Drzymalska), who performs under the circus name Kasandra, his shield against savagery.

EO becomes a witness, something like a fauna-directed camera, finding himself in the company of animals awaiting industrial slaughter, but also journeying through forests and environs populated by free creatures. There are even Jewish graves in a reminder of the Holocaust, that most conspicuous example of centralised and orchestrated killing.

The film is stark, pared back, though enriched by splashes of colour sequences that suggest imminent danger. The mesmerising, head throbbing soundtrack enhances the sense that harm lurks. EO, like Bresson’s Balthazar, finds himself in manifold situations of neglect, betrayal and brutality. He is beaten up by football hooligans who believe their team lost a match because of his braying. A black-market flesh trader attempts to sell him for salami. A dissolute aristocrat prone to gambling befriends him while speaking of his love of meat, including that of donkey.

While eschewing sentimentality, Skolimowski does not shy away from moments of tenderness. After leaving the circus, EO finds himself in an animal sanctuary, where he delights children. At one point, at a mayoral opening, he is garlanded with carrots.

At the hands of humans, animals suffer cruelty; but EO also shows us that humans, in tried-and-true sadistic fashion, are masters of inflicting harm upon themselves. The flesh-trader offers food to a migrant refugee in clumsy fashion, only to have his life savagely concluded. All the time this sequence unfolds, the protagonist waits with his equine companions fated for the knackery.

Skolimowski leaves us tantalised about the perspective of EO. This brings to mind the dilemma put forth by the philosopher, Thomas Nagel, who wondered, famously, what it was like to be a bat. The film, at points, suggests that EO is not immune to reminiscing, notably about the touch of Magda who loved him so, her voice echoing as emotive balm, encouragement and assurance. But we are not necessarily any the wiser for it. One thing we do know: the director misses him.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022): A Parable of Irrationalism

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 15:04:47 +0000

There will be spoilers..

Pádraic Súilleabháin and Colm Doherty (the fiddle player) are old friends whose meetings are as regular as a clock – literally. They meet at 2 pm in the local pub for drinks every day as the bell tolls twice.

However, Colm is getting fed up and feels time is passing. He believes that he needs to start composing to leave something to posterity and decides to end his relationship with Pádraic. Being nice and good friends will all soon be completely forgotten about. He desires to get down to composing with his newly freed-up time instead of listening to Pádraic’s ‘dull’ conversation every day.

Pádraic does not take the news well and is bewildered. Even Pádraic’s sister Siobhán Súilleabháin is astonished. She confronts Colm who states baldly, ‘He’s dull, Siobhán’, who replies,’but he’s always been dull’.

Colm’s decision triggers an alarming set of events that lead to Colm self-mutilating and a series of tit-for-tat actions between himself and Pádraic.

These odd events appear to fit in with the general oddness that abounds on the island as everyone they come into contact with seems to have their own anger issues.

However, the strange thing is that Colm and Pádraic are actually the only two people on the island who are behaving calmly and rationally. They are always civil to each other (except once when Pádraic was drunk). There is no fisticuffs or use of weapons. In general they are the calmest two people on the island. They have polite discussions about their views of each other until the very end of the film. You could even say that everyone else around them is going mad while they are swimming in a sea of tranquility in the centre of the narrative.

Maybe that’s the whole idea. To take two people who are descending into madness and depict this decline from their point of view. How do all the people around Colm and Pádraic appear to them as their madness reaches new depths? While Colm and Pádraic see themselves as wanting what the other cannot give, and negotiating and discussing their problems in a calm way, the island inhabitants show more and more surreal forms of behaviour. It’s the island that’s going crazy, not them. We see the island folk the way Colm and Pádraic see them. Colm and Pádraic are the only sane people as everyone else becomes stranger and stranger.

Check out the actions of the dramatis personae:

Garda Peadar Kearney ‘never says hello’ or is extremely violent and punches Pádraic in the face. He looks forward to going to the Civil War executions with glee (for ‘6 bob and a free lunch’) but can’t figure out if ‘Free Staters are shooting the IRA or the other way around’. He laughs when he hears Pádraic’s donkey has died.

Jonjo (the barman) and Gerry (a customer) form a comedy double act repeating each other’s sentences (not surprising considering they used to be a very popular comedy duo in real life called the D’Unbelievables) and never seem to be disturbed by the horrific goings-on.

The shopkeeper Mrs. O’Riordan is absolutely obsessed with gossip and reading people’s letters while listing off all the people who had no news. Garda Peadar Kearney arrives in with horror stories of murders and Mrs. O’Riordan says to Pádraic ‘That’s a lot of news. This man has no news. Don’t you not, No-Newsy?’.

During confession with Colm the priest orders him out of the confessional screaming, ‘you will be pure fucked’ repeating Colm’s words back to him.

Dominic, the guard’s son, is obsessed with the much older women around him, and Colm’s fiddle students in the bar only seem slightly worried at Colm’s horrific bloody stumps despite the illogic of a man with no fingers on one hand teaching them the fiddle.

In fact, only Siobhán, Pádraic’s sister, and the old woman Mrs. McCormick seem to be aware of what is really going on.

When Siobhán confronts Pádraic about talking to Colm she warns him to leave Colm alone:

Pádraic: Do you think?

Siobhán: Do I think?! Yes, I do think! He’s cut his fecking finger off and thrown it at ya!

Pádraic: Come on, it wasn’t at me.

Siobhan escapes the madness and leaves the island before things get worse. She later invites Pádraic to the mainland but he has no interest and now has his cow and donkey living in the house with him.

Mrs. McCormick is an almost ghostly presence on the island and forecasts that two people will die on Inisherin ‘afore the month is out’. She is soon proved partly right when Dominic is found drowned.

Meanwhile Colm finishes composing his piece of music and tells Pádraic he is thinking of calling it The Banshees of Inisherin. He believes that there may be banshees but states: ‘I just don’t think they scream to portend death anymore, I think they just sit back amused and observe.’

Pádraic’s donkey chokes to death on one of Colm’s fingers and as revenge he tells Colm the day and the time he is going to burn down his house. Again Colm reacts calmly and the guard is not called.

The next day Pádraic burns down Colm’s house and meets him on the beach in front of the burnt-out remains. The old woman, Mrs. McCormick, arrives at the house and sits in a chair outside watching Colm and Pádraic talk, from a distance. Colm’s calm response is that he was thankful that the dog had been saved (by Pádraic), and that he thought it was fair revenge for the death of the donkey.

Even their last conversation is cordial, almost matter-of-fact, as Colm thanks Pádraic for minding his dog and Pádraic replies ‘anytime’ from a distance.

The film ends with Colm staring out to sea, lilting, while Mrs. McCormick watches on from the house.

Martin McDonagh’s rhetorical device of getting into the minds of two people who are going mad but are not aware of it is fascinating in that we see the other islanders also from Colm and Pádraic’s perspective. The islanders’ crazy behaviour serves to divert our attention away from the horrors committed by Colm and Pádraic who always appear calm and rational no matter how gruesome things get, thus making Colm and Pádraic appear to be normal. It is a valuable lesson.

In real life, we are often presented with irrational proposals or events that are presented in a rational, calm, logical way by rational, calm protagonists; and where objectors are presented in caricatured ways as hippies, do-gooders, conspiracy theorists, liberals, commies etc., and we are persuaded that all is fine. Then, and it is often years later, after cover-ups have been exposed, documents brought in the public domain, or unwilling participants reveal the awkward truth, that we finally understand who were the rational actors and who was actually crazy. This game plan is played over and over again until we cannot distinguish between the rational and the irrational, which of course, is the most subtle part of the whole operation.

The post The Banshees of Inisherin (2022): A Parable of Irrationalism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

Living and Learning Against the Odds

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 16:06:48 +0000

Samira is a young Zanzibari woman who had a big dream. To leave home, have a family and study for a career. In many countries this is done as a matter of course. However, in some places there are many struggles and difficulties, both social and financial, that must be faced.

In Samira’s Dream, we follow Samira over a period of seven years as she grows and develops without losing sight of her objectives. The length of time taken to make this documentary reminded me of the fictional film Boyhood which is made and takes place over a period of 12 years, an accomplishment whereby “we watch the actors getting older for real, which gives their characters a sense of authenticity.”

The same can be said for Samira’s Dream as we see the difficulties and real problems she faces over the years, where even being filmed exerted so much pressure at one point that she asks for it to be stopped. She was never sure that she could overcome all the problems she encountered along the way, and the sometimes tense atmosphere during the filming added to the authenticity. As the film’s director Nino Tropiano noted: “Werner Herzog said that filmmaking is not about aesthetics, it is about athletics. In other words, you have to work hard.”

Samira’s Dream (Ndoto Ya Samira) (2022) – Trailer

This is easy to forget in an age where everyone seems to be constantly taking selfies and filming themselves doing the most insignificant things. Having a documentary made about you would be many teenagers’ greatest fantasy and desire. Yet, in societies where liberal freedoms cannot be taken for granted, and your dreams are not easily accomplished (especially for women), there is no sure ending.

Samira gets knocked down, and she gets up again, and again. She works hard, gets help wherever she can, and has the support of a husband who (although anxious about the effect her high level of education might have on their marriage) still gives her wishes his blessing.

For Tropiano this long project was not like Michelangelo’s sculpture where a start had already been made on the block of marble he fashioned into David. The film took shape very gradually, as Tropiano explains:

Here I am thinking where will I start? I called a friend of mine who had spent a few months in Zanzibar. Where is that!? A traditional Muslim society. That’s intriguing. One of her photos in particular, struck me. A group of young female students walking out of a madrassa in a very orderly manner. It was then I knew the subject matter for my film – female education. So, I needed to write down a synopsis of some sort. I imagined a young woman coming from a remote village, who dreams of moving to town to get a college education. By following her life, I would have a film.

Even when Tropiano arrived there, he still did not have a subject for his documentary. A chance meeting with a friendly group of schoolgirls led to some general interviews and his choice of Samira for “her natural charisma, open-minded attitude, and cheerful approach”. Diplomacy then ensued as he had to gain the trust of the local people, the Shia Leader of the community, and the teachers in town. Over the next 7 years, a friendship built up which allowed for a constant revisiting and filming that made for a much deeper story than a single visit would have told. By keeping a low-key profile he was able to fly below state officialdom and keep costs down. Over the years Tropiano was able to gain the confidence of the people, demonstrated by the relaxed humour and friendly disposition of the protagonists while, at the same time, capturing the natural beauty of the landscape and the colourful clothes of the people in some beautiful photography.

Nino Tropiano came to Ireland in the mid-90s where he graduated from the National Film School in Dublin with a 50-minute film entitled My Daughter Does Madonna. He went on to direct and produce Mary’s Last Show, Class Reunion and a short film called The Fall. Later his documentary Chippers (2008) was awarded Best Documentary Memorie Migranti at Gualdo Tadino in 2010.

Chippers: The story of the Italian community in Ireland

Even though fish and chips is an English fast food tradition, by a strange quirk of fate it was mainly Italians who set up the fish and chip shops all over Ireland. Tropiano delves into the history of the Italian peasant farmers who sought work abroad and ended up selling English traditional food to the Irish. Irish efforts to mimic the business soon discovered that selling fish and chips was hard work with very long and unsociable hours.

Tropiano’s ability to be a fly-on-the-wall and let ordinary people tell their own story is very evident in Chippers and this style of filmmaking pays off handsomely in Samira’s Dream. With a minimal voiceover, much of the narrative is conveyed in Samira’s own words.

His own struggles to get funding, the difficulties of getting to Zanzibar and the problems of production and editing, could have led him to give up the project altogether. He notes:

Each time I got turned down when I applied for funds, I faced an existential crisis, followed by an upsurge that fed in me the ability to see things in perspective. In hindsight, things went the way they were meant to.

However, Tropiano is also aware of Western tropes, a trap whereby authors/filmmakers/artists make themselves the centre of their own work and lose sight of their original intention: “I faced many obstacles along the way and I suspect that in the hands of other filmmakers, Samira’s story would have come second with the focus shifted towards the struggling life of a filmmaker trying to tell a story in Africa. I resisted the temptation to put myself into the film, to narrate some thrilling backstories in fear they might divert from Samira’s quest into the unedifying and morally bankrupt African tale Western audiences generally look for and festivals tend to love and give awards to.”

This predicament faced by the artist is discussed by the writer James Joyce who discusses creativity (in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) in terms of the developing maturity of the the artist:

The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others. If you bear this in memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others.

Tropiano moves away from making his art about himself, or about his encounters with others. He takes himself out of the equation while guiding his project in such a way that it becomes a story that the real hero, Samira, can take centre place in, all the while providing inspiration for many women who aspire to achieve similar educational goals.

It is so easy in Western society to fulfill the role of the individualist, Romantic hero telling of his adventures far away from home in distant lands. Western cinema is full of heroes and superheroes, but to create something which turns an ordinary local into an extraordinary example and symbol is a real achievement in art.

Back in Zanzibar at a music and film festival, Samira’s Dream (Ndoto Ya Samira in Swahili) was to be screened. After two hours of dancing to live music Tropiano was called to the stage to speak:

I prepared a little speech in Swahili and the crowd jeered at my blunders. Then magic happened. There were about six hundred people, and they sat, remaining glued to the screen till the end. That was my reward: I realised the film deserves to be promoted and be seen as it creates a true sense of awareness in Tanzania.

Samira’s Dream is a story that takes us through the hardships and joys of life, over a timescale that is a rare experience in cinema and which demonstrates dedication to a craft and an idea which takes time to be perfected and achieved so well.

The post Living and Learning Against the Odds first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

EO: Bearing Witness in the Hell of Speciesism

Randy Shields — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 16:20:58 +0000

Once upon a time Dostoevsky wrote a passage in The Idiot (1868) about an abused donkey passed from owner to owner which inspired Robert Bresson’s classic 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar.

Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski, 56 at the time, watched the Bresson film and it became the first, last and only movie that ever made him cry.

Now, at age 84, Skolimowski and his co-writer and wife Ewa Piaskowska give the world EO, a partial homage to Au Hasard Balthazar and the most broad-based attack on speciesism in a feature film. EO is making plenty of audiences cry.

The title character EO is a small gray big-eyed Sardinian donkey (played by six different donkeys) who begins the film in a Polish circus and ends up in Italy. Animal protection legislation puts the circus out of business and splits up EO and his beloved human co-performer Magda which starts a worse series of events as no humans will take responsibility for EO unless they can exploit him/her. (Right with the times we don’t know if EO is a he or a she, although with six donkeys that definitely qualifies as a “they.” I’m going to refer to EO as a female in this article.) This sweet beast of burden is always looking for a friend – a horse, a human, a junkyard dog – and is frequently used to facilitate the enslavement of other animals.

There are echoes of Koyaanisqatsi and White God (a girl and her dog) in EO (a girl and her donkey) and the sensibility is very much like Okja (a girl and her pig) and Gunda. Stylistically, though, EO is the anti-Gunda: Gunda’s black and white minimalistic, music-less, human-less barnyard is replaced by a pulsating soundtrack, a slew of villains seen and unseen, great distances across Europe, tunnels, forests, windmills and mountains. Striking images of EO on a hillside at sunset, lost in a forest at night and standing on a small arched bridge in front of an enormous dam/waterfall and looking into the maelstrom will linger long after viewing.

When showing animal abuse on screen a director’s challenge is to keep people watching without overwhelming them. It’s a truism that many people are “too sensitive” to watch films of animal abuse but not sensitive enough to stop paying for the brutality, terror and injustice that goes into every piece of meat or a fur coat. Skolimowski skillfully navigates this by not showing most of the violence but simply showing the fear of the animals or letting us hear the violence. This will be a small comfort to many but I didn’t see anyone walk out of the movie.

After the circus folds EO is shipped to an equestrian center where a majestic white horse, tethered in an indoor riding ring, runs in circles with less freedom than a hamster on a wheel. EO accidentally knocks over a display case of equestrian trophies and is then shipped to a petting zoo where she’s ridden by special needs children. EO is visited one night by Magda who brings her a carrot muffin for her birthday. As Magda dances in the moonlight, thinking about the old days of the circus, we’re sure of EO’s love for her but Magda seems lacking as she obeys the commands of her jealous (of EO) boyfriend to leave and never sees EO again. The patriarchy is always seamlessly woven into speciesism. (See Green Paradise Lost by Elizabeth Dodson Gray or The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol Adams.)

Seeking Magda and escaping the petting zoo, EO walks through a Jewish cemetery, reminding us that there are all kinds of holocausts although only someone like Isaac Bashevis Singer can get away with comparing them: “In their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might makes right.” (Enemies, a Love Story.) And: “For animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.” (The Letter Writer.) For different but similar slaveries, see Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison.

EO then enters a forest at night but she’s out of place. Beautiful immersive cinematography by Michal Dymek follows fast and furious: a close up of a web-spinning spider, a swimming frog, an owl treating EO as an intruder. There are foxes and, hair-raisingly, howling wolves. Will the wolves attack EO? No, actually, because Satan’s minions are here too: green lasers from rifles start flashing throughout the forest like a rave and hunters begin blowing away the wolves.

EO then comes upon a soccer match and is made an unwilling mascot by the winning team and later beaten with 2 by 4’s by the losing team. In a broken bloody heap EO seems to be dreaming of a robot dog moving through the grass, techno progress contrasted with a deficit of ethical progress. The human gods will try their damndest to recreate something that moves and performs like a real animal (almost exclusively to repress other humans) but they won’t treat real animals with even rudimentary respect.

(The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is currently torturing monkeys in his neuralink experiments. Fuck anyone who would attempt to “help” by torturing. George Bernard Shaw summed up Elon Musk a long time ago: “Any race of people who would use something as barbarous as animal experiments to ‘save’ themselves would be a race of people not worth saving.” EO stumbles into just about every setting of animal abuse except a vivisection lab.)

EO’s next stop is pulling a cart on a fox fur farm while a worker throws dead foxes into it. Skolimowsky doesn’t show the anal electrocution of the foxes but he does show their terror as each of them watch others being killed. The worker commands an unwilling EO to move and bends over behind her and gets kicked in the throat, definitely knocking him out and possibly killing him. The instant karma delivered to this speciesist brute is one of the rare feel good moments in the movie. Fuck the working class torturers too.

After an incredibly sure-footed and gripping 75 minutes or so the film loses its intensity with the introduction of many more humans, much more human dialogue, much less EO, a scene of random human violence at a truck stop and a countess (Isabelle Huppert) getting frisky with her priest stepson which seems like another movie altogether. Maybe with another viewing I’ll understand these puzzles. The strength of most of the film is that any dummy can get it.

I was expecting the film to do justice to EO’s character and struggles by building to a monumental emotional intimate denouement focused on EO’s last moments but, unlike Au Hasard Balthazar or Gunda, the movie pulls back emotionally, visually, artistically, politically.

A blurb after the film ends says no animals were harmed in the making of it. I’m against using animals in films but if directors are going to take advantage of its “legality” – and deliver pro-animal messages – they are able to simulate violence, suffering and death a la Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Amores perros.

(Some viewers will dispute that the film pulls back but your reviewer believes in seeing the captive bolt pistol, the futile attempts to escape the kill box, the expression in the eyes as the light and life goes out, the throat-slitting, the dismemberment and turning of innocent beings into blasphemous nothingness – and spiritual terms are correct because EO and Balthazar and all the other non-humans are being crucified every day. “Completely humble, completely holy,” said the great Bresson about his donkey Balthazar. That’s how a film would do justice to the life and character of EO – after all, the audience has come all this way, let them walk now — or explode their prejudices and reveal their complicity as they’re mortified in their seats. They should be bawling their eyes out. It’s a war – act like it.)

EO is the perfect guide through Skolimowski’s inferno but the film is not perfect. It is, however, the most comprehensive non-documentary attack on animal exploitation ever filmed. Despite its flaws, EO should be seen, applauded and promoted.

After a December 4 screening at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles Skolimowski and Piaskowska discussed the film, saying it was “made out of love for animals and nature” and likening it to a “protest song.” The film does seem like the cry of an 84-year-old man sick to death of the cruelty in the world although he isn’t (yet?) vegan, or even a vegetarian, saying, “We reduced our meat consumption by two thirds and half of my crew stopped eating meat entirely.” And: “Do we really need to have bacon every morning?” No, my man, no more than we need to eat donkey every morning.

Despite my uneducated impertinent quibbles, EO has won many awards: Cannes Jury Prize, Cannes Soundtrack Award, New York Film Critics Circle Awards Best International Film and European Film Awards Best Original Score. Rotten Tomatoes critics rate EO as 96% fresh and the film is Poland’s Best International Feature submission for the 2023 Oscars.

The post EO: Bearing Witness in the Hell of Speciesism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Randy Shields.

Martial law brutality in ‘educational’ musical drama Katips touches raw nerve in NZ

David Robie — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 11:21:02 +0000

REVIEW: By David Robie

Seven weeks ago the Philippines truth-telling martial law film Katips was basking in the limelight in the country’s national FAMAS academy movie awards, winning best picture and a total of six other awards.

Last week it began a four month “world tour” of 10 countries starting in the Middle East followed by Aotearoa New Zealand today – hosted simultaneously at AUT South campus and in Wellington and Christchurch.

The screening of Vincent Tañada’s harrowing – especially the graphic torture scenes – yet also joyful and poignant musical drama touched a raw nerve among many in the audience who shared tears and their experiences of living in fear, or in hiding, during the hate-filled Marcos dictatorship.

READ MORE: Two films duel for last word on brutal Marcos dictatorship in Philippines

The martial law denunciations, arbitrary arrests, desaparecidos (“disappeared”), brutal tortures and murders by state assassins in the 1970s made the McCarthy era red-baiting witchhunts in the US seem like Sunday School picnics.

Amnesty International says more than 3200 people were killed, 35,000 tortured and 70,000 detained during the martial law period.

Tañada has brushed off claims that the film has a political objective in an attempt to sabotage the leadership of the dictator’s son, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr, who won the presidency in a landslide victory in the May elections to return the Marcos family to the Malacañang.

He has insisted in many interviews — and he repeated this in a live exchange with the audiences in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch — that the film is educational and his intention is to counter disinformation and to ensure history is remembered.

Telling youth about atrocities
Tañada, from one of the Philippines’ great political and legal families and grandson of former Senator Lorenzo Tañada, a celebrated human rights lawyer, says he wanted to tell the youth about the atrocities that happened during the imposition of martial law under Marcos.

He wanted to tell history to those who had forgotten and those who aren’t yet aware.

The Katips movie trailer.

“You know, as an artist it is also our objective not just to entertain people but more important than that, we are here to educate,” he says.

“We also want to educate the young people about the atrocities – the reality of martial law.

“History is slowly being forgotten. We have forgotten it during the last elections and I guess we also have the responsibility to educate and let the youth know what happened during those times.”

Katips film director and writer Vince Tañada talking by video to New Zealand audiences in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch today. Image: David Robie/APR

It is rare that such brutal torture scenes are seen on the big screen, and before the main screening at AUT the organisers — Banyuhay Aotearoa, Migrante Aotearoa and Auckland Philippine Solidarity — showed two shorts made by the University of the Philippines and Santo Tomas University of Manila featuring martial law survivors describing their horrifying treatment during the Marcos years to contemporary students.

Some of the students broke down in tears while others, surprisingly, remained impassive, sometimes with an air of disbelief.

The film evolved from the 2016 stage musical Katips: Mga Bagong Katipunero – Katips: The New Freedom Fighters, which won Aliw Awards for best musical performance that year.

Freedom fighter love story
In a nutshell, Katips tells the love story of Greg, a medical student and leader of the National Unions of Students in the Philippines (NUSP), who with other freedom fighting protesters stage a demonstration against martial law on a mountainside called Mendiola.

His professor is abducted by the state Metropol police, murdered and his body dumped in a remote location.

The protesters begin a vigil and the police brutally suppress the protest and arrest and kidnap other freedom fighters. They are subjected to atrocious torture and their bodies dumped.

A safehouse branded “Katips House” takes in Lara, a New York actress and the daughter of the murdered professor who is visiting Manila but doesn’t yet know about the fate of her father. Lara and Greg form an unlikely relationship and their lives are thrown into upheaval when the safehouse “mother” Alet is abducted and tortured to death.

Greg and another protester, Ka Panyong, a writer for the underground newspaper Ang Bayan, are forced to flee into the jungle for the safety and become rebels. Both get shot while on the run, but manage to survive.

When Greg returns to Lara at the “Katips House” during the Edsa Revolution in 1986, he finds he has a son.

The film has a stirring end featuring the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, a memorial wall to the fallen heroes struggling against martial law– a fitting antidote to the Marcoses and their crass attempts to rewrite Philippine history.

Ironically, the same month that Katips was released in public cinemas, another film, the self-serving Maid of Malaçanang, was launched in a bid to perpetuate the Marcos myths.

Katips – The Movie, director Vincent Tañada (2022)

A member of the audience poses a question to Katips film director Vince Tañada on AUT South campus today. Image: David Robie/APR

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by David Robie.

Not so Black and White: Belfast in the 1960s

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 12:34:24 +0000

For those not familiar with the vicissitudes of Northern Ireland, Kenneth Branagh’s 2021 film Belfast may not give one a full idea of the terrible things that happened there over a period of three decades- euphemistically known as ‘the Troubles’. Many died in a war of colonial origins involving Irish nationalists, Protestant loyalists and unionists, and the direct involvement of the British Army and Government.

However, that was then and this is now. A quieter, slowly changing, more peaceful air hangs over Northern Ireland since 2005 when the IRA announced the end of its armed campaign.

Despite some flare-ups, the peace is holding and hopefully creating the conditions for a more tempered mutual understanding of two communities that underwent so much division for so long. Branagh’s film sits neatly into that crevice arguing for a basic human understanding and empathy, to encourage unity and mutual acceptance.

Brannagh’s Oscar-winning screenplay (seven nominations at the 94th Academy Awards, winning for Best Original Screenplay) tells the story of nine-year-old Buddy from a working-class Ulster Protestant family. He lives on a terraced street of mixed Protestant and Catholic families who all know each other well and get on with each other well. A group of Protestant loyalists attack the homes and businesses of the Catholics, as well as putting pressure on Buddy’s father to participate in the violent sectarianism which he refuses to do. Buddy becomes very attracted to a fellow high-achieving Catholic classmate, Catherine, and they become friends. Buddy’s father works in England and comes home as regularly as he can while his wife struggles with their accrued debts.

Brannagh’s story avoids sectarian rhetoric and shows us that the Catholics and Protestants had much in common: their working class struggles with poverty and emigration.

Apart from historical differences of origin, and Unionist politics notwithstanding, the people had much in common culturally to unite them. Throughout Irish history since the 18th century Protestants have been leaders of movements that emphasised British heritage, as well as movements that asserted Irish identity.

These similarities have created confusion even amongst the people themselves as the visual differences between Catholic and Protestant are not obvious in Ireland.

Thus, Buddy tries to figure out the differences, through tutelage, about the sorts of names and spellings Catholics use as distinct from Protestants. One example of naming traditions stands out from recent history – the TV debate between Mr Ken Maginnis (the Ulster Unionist security spokesman) and Mr Martin McGuinness (Sinn Fein’s senior negotiator), as reported in the Irish Times in 1997.

The debate highlighted the similarities as much as the differences between two politicians who used different spelling versions of the same name (Mac Aonghusa). (The name, Aonghus (One Strength), resulted in not one, but two famous drinks, the other being Hennessy’s brandy (the O’hAonghusas). Both Maginnis and McGuinness are formed from the colonial phonetics of a coloniser who could not speak Gaelic, confronted with the colonised who could not read or write. They simply wrote down what they heard, often accurately recording the local accents. Over time the names became shibboleths for different sets of ideas, both names being determined by the coloniser.

Although descendants of colonists who arrived from Britain in the early 17th century, by the 18th century many Protestants had, in the words of Albert Memmi’s famous theory of the ‘coloniser who refuses’, formed the Irish Volunteers (local militias) in Ireland in 1778. The Volunteers were made up of Anglican Protestants, Presbyterians and a limited number of Catholics. Taking advantage of the British preoccupation with the American Revolutionary War, the Volunteers paraded fully armed and demanded an end to the tariffs that Irish goods had been subject to upon entering Britain (unlike British goods which could be imported freely into Ireland). Many of the Volunteers were concerned with “securing Irish free trade and opposing English governmental interference in Ireland. This resulted in them pledging support for resolutions advocating legislative independence for Ireland whilst proclaiming their loyalty to the British Crown.”

Orangemen marching in Bangor on the Twelfth of July 2010

In the pre-partioned Ireland of the 19th century many Protestants were nationalists. For example, Thomas Davis, the Irish nationalist, was well known for a doctrine of nationality that he propagated through the newspaper, The Nation, of which he was one of the founders. He described his tenets as “a nationality that would embrace all creeds, races and classes within the island […] which would establish internal union and external independence”. As a Protestant of mixed English and Anglo-Irish parentage, his nationalist views and writings put him into conflict with the colonial strategies of the empire. By proclaiming the slogan “gan teanga, gan tír” (no language, no nation) he tried to redress some of the worst effects of colonial policies.

Indeed, the six counties of Northern Ireland had communities of Irish speakers. The census figures of 1851 and 1891 demonstrated the presence of Irish-speakers respectively as follows: Antrim 3,033 (1.2%) and 885 (0.4%); Armagh 13,736 (7.0%) and 3,486 (2.4%); Derry 5,406 (2.8%) and 2,723 (1,8%); Down 1,153 (0.4%) and 590 (0.3%); Fermanagh 2,704 (2.3%) and 561 (0.8%) and Tyrone 12,892 (5.0%) 6,687 (3.9%). There were minor Gaeltachtaí (Irish-language communities) in Tyrone, the Sperrins (Derry), the Antrim Glens and Rathlin Island that had all but died out by the 1940s.

In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising many of the revolutionaries were interned in a camp at Frongoch in Merionethshire, Wales. There were some Protestant internees, such as Arthur Shields, Harry Nichols and Ellett Elmes (Dublin); Sam Ruttle (Tralee and Kildare) and Alf Cotton (Tralee and Belfast) whose background in the Volunteers, Citizen Army and Conradh na Gaeilge demonstrated the non-sectarian outlook of the revolutionary movement.

The first president of Ireland, Douglas Hyde (1863-1949), was the son of a Church of Ireland (Anglican) minister and had been influenced by nationalist circles while studying for a Doctorate of Laws in Trinity College. However, it was his speech “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” in 1892 that heralded a qualitative change in the struggle to maintain and develop the popular basis of support for the Irish language. Hyde elaborated on his call for de-Anglicisation, which he emphasised, was not conceived out of Anglophobia:

When we speak of ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising the Irish Nation’ we mean it, not as a protest against imitating what is best in the English people, for that would be absurd, but rather to show the folly of neglecting what is Irish, and hastening to adopt, pell-mell, and indiscriminately, everything that is English, simply because it is English.

Maybe because of his Church of Ireland background, Douglas Hyde stayed away from direct involvement in politics but had he been alive he would have most likely supported the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), signed on 10 April 1998 which established in law basic principles such as:

The British government would uphold the right of the people of Northern Ireland to decide between the Union with Great Britain or a united Ireland. The people of the island of Ireland, North and South, had the exclusive right to solve the issues between North and South by mutual consent. The Irish government would try to address unionist fears of a united Ireland by amending the Irish Constitution according to the principle of consent.

In other words, there would be no change to the status of Northern Ireland without the express consent of the people.

On 28 July 2005, the IRA announced the end of its campaign, and promised complete decommissioning of all its weapons, to be witnessed by clergymen from Catholic and Protestant churches.

A republican mural in Beechfield Street, Short Strand, Belfast, during the mid-1990s, with the Gaelic text Slan Abhaile “safe home” to British troops. Security normalisation was one of the key points of the Good Friday Agreement. (Photo credit: Jimmy Harris, taken 1995, Flickr)

In 2007, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) agreed to share power with republican party Sinn Fein, and Paisley and McGuinness became First Minister and Deputy First Minister. McGuinness said after Paisley’s death:

Our relationship confounded many. Of course, our political differences continued; his allegiance was to Britain and mine to Ireland. But we were able to work effectively together in the interests of all our people.

More recently Linda Ervine (whose brother-in-law is the former UVF commander and politician David Ervine) started the Turas Irish Language Project in east Belfast 10 years ago. She noted that the programme has gone from strength to strength as Protestant, loyalists and unionists in Belfast are learning the Irish language in increasing numbers.

Whatever the decisions the Protestant people make about their future in the UK or a united Ireland the cultural similarities born of sharing the same place will remain of utmost importance. Ervine notes:

I think what was interesting at the time – now this was 11 years ago – the Protestant women were really intrigued, because we’d never had the opportunity, and the Catholic women were much more interested in the royal wedding that was coming up and what Kate’s dress was going to look like.

Branagh’s film Belfast is an important reminder that all our futures are dependent on what unites us rather than what divides us.

The post Not so Black and White: Belfast in the 1960s first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

Dystopian Movies Fit for a Dystopian World

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:21:52 +0000

The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we’re part of the medium. The scary thing is, we’ll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.”
— Director Steven Spielberg, Minority Report

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by such science fiction writers as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move.

Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.”

Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report which was released 20 years ago—we are now trapped into a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

Minority Report is set in the year 2054, but it could just as well have taken place in 2022.

Seemingly taking its cue from science fiction, technology has moved so fast in the short time since Minority Report premiered in 2002 that what once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, Spielberg’s unnerving vision of the future is fast becoming our reality.

Both worlds—our present-day reality and Spielberg’s celluloid vision of the future—are characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America.

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state. Much of the population is either hooked on illegal drugs or ones prescribed by doctors. And bodily privacy and integrity has been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

All of this has come about with little more than a whimper from an oblivious American populace largely comprised of nonreaders and television and internet zombies, but we have been warned about such an ominous future in novels and movies for years.

The following 15 films may be the best representation of what we now face as a society.

Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Adapted from Ray Bradbury’s novel and directed by Francois Truffaut, this film depicts a futuristic society in which books are banned, and firemen ironically are called on to burn contraband books—451 Fahrenheit being the temperature at which books burn. Montag is a fireman who develops a conscience and begins to question his book burning. This film is an adept metaphor for our obsessively politically correct society where virtually everyone now pre-censors speech. Here, a brainwashed people addicted to television and drugs do little to resist governmental oppressors.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
The plot of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, as based on an Arthur C. Clarke short story, revolves around a space voyage to Jupiter. The astronauts soon learn, however, that the fully automated ship is orchestrated by a computer system—known as HAL 9000—which has become an autonomous thinking being that will even murder to retain control. The idea is that at some point in human evolution, technology in the form of artificial intelligence will become autonomous and human beings will become mere appendages of technology. In fact, at present, we are seeing this development with massive databases generated and controlled by the government that are administered by such secretive agencies as the National Security Agency and sweep all websites and other information devices collecting information on average citizens. We are being watched from cradle to grave.

Planet of the Apes (1968). Based on Pierre Boulle’s novel, astronauts crash on a planet where apes are the masters and humans are treated as brutes and slaves. While fleeing from gorillas on horseback, astronaut Taylor is shot in the throat, captured and housed in a cage. From there, Taylor begins a journey wherein the truth revealed is that the planet was once controlled by technologically advanced humans who destroyed civilization. Taylor’s trek to the ominous Forbidden Zone reveals the startling fact that he was on planet earth all along. Descending into a fit of rage at what he sees in the final scene, Taylor screams: “We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you.” The lesson is obvious, but will we listen? The script, although rewritten, was initially drafted by Rod Serling and retains Serling’s Twilight Zone-ish ending.

THX 1138 (1970). George Lucas’ directorial debut, this is a somber view of a dehumanized society totally controlled by a police state. The people are force-fed drugs to keep them passive, and they no longer have names but only letter/number combinations such as THX 1138. Any citizen who steps out of line is quickly brought into compliance by robotic police equipped with “pain prods”—electro-shock batons. Sound like tasers?

A Clockwork Orange (1971). Director Stanley Kubrick presents a future ruled by sadistic punk gangs and a chaotic government that cracks down on its citizens sporadically. Alex is a violent punk who finds himself in the grinding, crushing wheels of injustice. This film may accurately portray the future of western society that grinds to a halt as oil supplies diminish, environmental crises increase, chaos rules, and the only thing left is brute force.

Soylent Green (1973). Set in a futuristic overpopulated New York City, the people depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation. A policeman investigating a murder discovers the grisly truth about what soylent green is really made of. The theme is chaos where the world is ruled by ruthless corporations whose only goal is greed and profit. Sound familiar?

Blade Runner (1982). In a 21st century Los Angeles, a world-weary cop tracks down a handful of renegade “replicants” (synthetically produced human slaves). Life is now dominated by mega-corporations, and people sleepwalk along rain-drenched streets. This is a world where human life is cheap, and where anyone can be exterminated at will by the police (or blade runners). Based upon a Philip K. Dick novel, this exquisite Ridley Scott film questions what it means to be human in an inhuman world.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). The best adaptation of Orwell’s dark tale, this film visualizes the total loss of freedom in a world dominated by technology and its misuse, and the crushing inhumanity of an omniscient state. The government controls the masses by controlling their thoughts, altering history and changing the meaning of words. Winston Smith is a doubter who turns to self-expression through his diary and then begins questioning the ways and methods of Big Brother before being re-educated in a most brutal fashion.

Brazil (1985). Sharing a similar vision of the near future as 1984 and Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, this is arguably director Terry Gilliam’s best work, one replete with a merging of the fantastic and stark reality. Here, a mother-dominated, hapless clerk takes refuge in flights of fantasy to escape the ordinary drabness of life. Caught within the chaotic tentacles of a police state, the longing for more innocent, free times lies behind the vicious surface of this film.

They Live (1988). John Carpenter’s bizarre sci-fi social satire action film assumes the future has already arrived. John Nada is a homeless person who stumbles across a resistance movement and finds a pair of sunglasses that enables him to see the real world around him. What he discovers is a world controlled by ominous beings who bombard the citizens with subliminal messages such as “obey” and “conform.” Carpenter manages to make an effective political point about the underclass—that is, everyone except those in power. The point: we, the prisoners of our devices, are too busy sucking up the entertainment trivia beamed into our brains and attacking each other up to start an effective resistance movement.

The Matrix (1999). The story centers on a computer programmer Thomas A. Anderson, secretly a hacker known by the alias “Neo,” who begins a relentless quest to learn the meaning of “The Matrix”—cryptic references that appear on his computer. Neo’s search leads him to Morpheus who reveals the truth that the present reality is not what it seems and that Anderson is actually living in the future—2199. Humanity is at war against technology which has taken the form of intelligent beings, and Neo is actually living in The Matrix, an illusionary world that appears to be set in the present in order to keep the humans docile and under control. Neo soon joins Morpheus and his cohorts in a rebellion against the machines that use SWAT team tactics to keep things under control.

Minority Report (2002). Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick and directed by Steven Spielberg, the film offers a special effect-laden, techno-vision of a futuristic world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. And if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams will bring you under control. The setting is 2054 where PreCrime, a specialized police unit, apprehends criminals before they can commit the crime. Captain Anderton is the chief of the Washington, DC, PreCrime force which uses future visions generated by “pre-cogs” (mutated humans with precognitive abilities) to stop murders. Soon Anderton becomes the focus of an investigation when the precogs predict he will commit a murder. But the system can be manipulated. This film raises the issue of the danger of technology operating autonomously—which will happen eventually if it has not already occurred. To a hammer, all the world looks like a nail. In the same way, to a police state computer, we all look like suspects. In fact, before long, we all may be mere extensions or appendages of the police state—all suspects in a world commandeered by machines.

V for Vendetta (2006). This film depicts a society ruled by a corrupt and totalitarian government where everything is run by an abusive secret police. A vigilante named V dons a mask and leads a rebellion against the state. The subtext here is that authoritarian regimes through repression create their own enemies—that is, terrorists—forcing government agents and terrorists into a recurring cycle of violence. And who is caught in the middle? The citizens, of course. This film has a cult following among various underground political groups such as Anonymous, whose members wear the same Guy Fawkes mask as that worn by V.

Children of Men (2006). This film portrays a futuristic world without hope since humankind has lost its ability to procreate. Civilization has descended into chaos and is held together by a military state and a government that attempts to keep its totalitarian stronghold on the population. Most governments have collapsed, leaving Great Britain as one of the few remaining intact societies. As a result, millions of refugees seek asylum only to be rounded up and detained by the police. Suicide is a viable option as a suicide kit called Quietus is promoted on billboards and on television and newspapers. But hope for a new day comes when a woman becomes inexplicably pregnant.

Land of the Blind (2006). In this dark political satire, tyrannical rulers are overthrown by new leaders who prove to be just as evil as their predecessors. Maximilian II is a demented fascist ruler of a troubled land named Everycountry who has two main interests: tormenting his underlings and running his country’s movie industry. Citizens who are perceived as questioning the state are sent to “re-education camps” where the state’s concept of reality is drummed into their heads. Joe, a prison guard, is emotionally moved by the prisoner and renowned author Thorne and eventually joins a coup to remove the sadistic Maximilian, replacing him with Thorne. But soon Joe finds himself the target of the new government.

All of these films—and the writers who inspired them—understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan, flag-waving, zombified states, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs.

Eventually, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, even the sleepwalking masses (who remain convinced that all of the bad things happening in the police state—the police shootings, the police beatings, the raids, the roadside strip searches—are happening to other people) will have to wake up.

Sooner or later, the things happening to other people will start happening to us.

When that painful reality sinks in, it will hit with the force of a SWAT team crashing through your door, a taser being aimed at your stomach, and a gun pointed at your head. And there will be no channel to change, no reality to alter, and no manufactured farce to hide behind.

As George Orwell warned, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.”

The post Dystopian Movies Fit for a Dystopian World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Oliver Stone Answers his Critics

Edward Curtin — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 14:19:38 +0000

Two of the greatest speeches ever delivered by an American president bookend this extraordinary documentary film. It opens with President John F. Kennedy giving the commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963 and it closes with his civil rights speech to the American people the following day. It is a deft artistic touch that suggests the brevity of JFK’s heroic efforts for world peace and domestic racial equality and justice before he was assassinated in a public execution in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.

In the former anti-war speech, he called for the end to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the halt to the arms race, and the abolishment of war and its weapons, especially nuclear. He said:

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

In the latter address to the American people, having just sent National Guard troops to the University of Alabama to make sure two black students were admitted despite the racist objections of Governor George Wallace, his words transcended the immediate issue at the university and called for the end to the immoral and illegal discrimination against African Americans in every area of the nation’s life. He said:

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Having framed the documentary thus, Oliver Stone and the screenwriter James DiEugenio do a masterful job of explaining what really happened in the years of Kennedy’s short presidency, why he was such a great threat to the CIA and the military industrial complex, what really happened when they killed him, and how the Warren Commission, the CIA, and the corporate media have worked hand-in-hand to this day to cover up the truth. The current two-hour version of JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass will be followed in a month or so by a more detailed four-hour version.

The importance of this film is twofold: It establishes an updated historical record since the Assassination Records Review Board (AARB) was established as a result of Stone’s 1991 breakthrough film, JFK, which forced the release of previously hidden documents, and, more importantly, it emphatically shows why JFK’s assassination is crucial for understanding the United States today. For without a clear and unambiguous accounting of why he was killed and by whom (I do not mean the actual shooters), and who in the government and media has covered it up, we are doomed to repeat the past as this country has been doing ever since.

Because JFK Revisited assiduously documents the essential claims of Stone’s 1991 film and adds to it with the latest factual material released since the ARRB required the release of the previously secret documents, the film, like the JFK film before it, will be denounced by the same media/intelligence forces that slammed the earlier movie. Back then the bogus critiques claimed Stone’s imagination had gone wild and he distorted history, so now the best way for those critics to rip this evidence-filled documentary is to omit mentioning its contents and to continue calling him a conspiracy obsessed guy still intent on promoting his fantasies.

Once it was his “fictions” that were ridiculous; now it is his facts, despite his research colleague and screen writer James DiEugenio’s exhaustive confirmation of the facts that will be released later this year when the annotated script is published. JFK Revisited proves with facts that Stone was right in 1991. Even then, but little known, is that JFK was also accompanied by a book of the film that included copious research notes. But facts don’t seem to matter to Stone’s critics, then or now. They are too damning.

So let’s examine the documentary.

It opens with Kennedy speaking at American University and quickly switches to a montage of condensed news reports of the shooting in Dallas, Kennedy’s death, people’s reactions, Oswald’s arrest, his claim that he’s a “patsy,” Ruby’s killing of Oswald, JFK’s funeral, reports that Kennedy was shot from the front and the rear, the formation of the Warren Commission and the naming of its members, including most significantly the former Director of the CIA Allen Dulles whom Kennedy had fired, the Commission’s finding that Oswald alone killed the president, that there was no conspiracy, the Zapruder film, and NBC’s Chet Huntley saying that the assassination is thoroughly documented (in the Warren Commission Report) and it’s all there for anyone who would like to pursue it.

Huntley’s ironically false statement is followed by a jump cut to Oliver Stone in Dealey Plaza telling how it wasn’t all there at all, that The Warren Report was a sham, and how in the intervening years plenty of new information and evidence has been revealed by the Church Commission Hearings in 1975 that uncovered the CIA and FBI’s machinations in assassination plots at home and abroad; followed a decade later by the public showing of the Zapruder film and the subsequent House Select Committee on Assassinations’ (HSCA) finding that there was probably a conspiracy in Kennedy’s murder.

Although the Warren Report came under questioning during these years, the HSCA sealed half a million “dangerous records” until 2029. But as a result of Stone’s JFK film in 1991, the government was pressured to pass The John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act with its Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). The ARRB ordered the release of the secret documents within four years. Over two million pages were released and they are housed at the National Archives, although certain documents are still being withheld.

One could argue that the truth about the assassination was obvious from the start and that only elements within the U.S. government could have carried out this crime and covered it up. That only simple logic was needed to solve the crime because from the start the Warren Commission made no sense with its magic bullet explanation, and that only national security operatives could have withdrawn the president’s security protection, etc. That new documents are not needed. That arguing any of this is just a pseudo-debate and a waste of time.

There is cogency to that argument, but Stone prefers to take a different route and use the released records to bolster his argument and establish a cinematic record for future generations. He is making accessible in a two-hour movie a powerful historical lesson that should be seen by everyone; it is one absent from the history books students read in school.

That his enemies will try to dissuade the public from viewing the film is not surprising, for doing so with the supporting testimonies of so many experts and the presentation of the suppressed official documents make these critics look like fools, or simply the tools they are. For while this film relies on many documents forced out of the government’s own vaults and therefore hoists the critics with their own petard, it is also a reminder that the media is deeply infiltrated with CIA plants and assets, as has been shown by the revelations of Operation Mockingbird, a program that surely never ended but has only intensified today’s propaganda.

One glance at the headlines of reviews of this film since its release two months ago reveals the vituperative personal nature of the attacks on Stone, showing that the film’s evidentiary content is of no interest to the reviewers. Ad hominem attacks will suffice. Even the one review I read previous to writing this – sent to me by someone who considered it to be positive – was a sly piece of disinformation disguised as praise. The enemies of truth are not just vulgar morons but very sophisticated tricksters.

Let me break down the evidence presented in the film in order of appearance. First, the so-called three bullets and the magic bullet. Second, the alleged rifle and new evidence confirming that Lee Oswald was not on the 6^th floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Third, the autopsy, its faked photographs, and the pressure placed on the Parkland Hospital doctors to change what they saw with their own eyes. Fourth, Oswald’s history working with the CIA and FBI, his fake defection to the Soviet Union, the coverup of the intelligence agencies’ use of Oswald from start to finish, and the other plots to assassinate Kennedy in Chicago and Tampa that follow the same template as Oswald in Dallas. Fifth, why Kennedy was murdered.

None of these issues are analyzed in some half-assed theoretical way, but are supported by documentary facts – evidence, in other words. As Stone says, “Conspiracy theories are now conspiracy facts.” Nevertheless, those writers whose review headlines I mentioned prefer to call Stone “looney,” a “conspiracy quack,” etc. as they ignore the facts, new and old.

The Magic Bullet

The Warren Report claimed that since three empty shells were found on the floor of the sixth floor of The Texas Book Depository that only three bullets were fired, and from that spot. The FBI claimed that all three bullets hit inside the car, two hitting Kennedy and one Gov. Connolly. But evidence showed that one bullet missed the car, striking an underpass.

This forced the Commission into a dilemma, and so Arlen Specter, the future long-standing senator, conjured up the so-called Magic Bullet Theory, claiming that one bullet hit and passed through Kennedy only to hit Connolly, zigzagging absurdly and causing seven wounds. It was ridiculous but conveniently avoided admitting that there had to be more shots and therefore a conspiracy. The Magic bullet – CE 399 – was said to have been found in pristine condition on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital. This bullet was foundational to the Warren Commission’s case, but Stone shows with released documents that there was no chain of custody for this bullet and that lies were told about it. He further shows how this magically found pristine bullet could not have passed through two men and emerge like new.

The film immediately demolishes the Warren Commission’s basic premise.

The “Rifle” with No Oswald on the Sixth Floor

And then this: the film shows that the rifle Oswald is alleged to have used and ordered through the mail with its paper trail (he could have walked into a store and bought one without leaving evidence) does not look like the famous highly questionable photos of Oswald posing with a rifle in the back yard. But more importantly than various other anomalies concerning the rifle(s-?), such as the absence of Oswald’s hand prints, is the new evidence the film documents about Oswald’s non-presence on the sixth floor.

Researcher Barry Ernest went to the National Archives to find the original testimony of Victoria Adams who worked on the fourth floor and knew Oswald. He discovered that it was missing and that the Warren Commission had destroyed the tapes. So he went and found Adams, and what she told him contradicted the Commission’s findings. It was claimed that after shooting Kennedy, Oswald quickly went down the back stairs to the second floor lunch room. Adams told Ernest that immediately after the assassination she went down the back stairs from the fourth floor and saw no one. Ernest found corroborating evidence from two other women, Sandra Styles who accompanied Vicki Adams down the stairs and Vicki’s supervisor Dorothy Garner who saw them descend, to back Adams’ testimony, about which the Warren Commission lied. Further proof that Oswald could not have shot Kennedy from the sixth floor window since he wasn’t there.

The Head Wound and the Autopsy Coverup

With video testimonies from Doctors Perry, Clark, and Crenshaw from Parkland Hospital, Stone shows how the original testimonies placed the neck and head wounds to Kennedy coming from the front, but that pressure was applied to Perry to recant, which he did, only to later to admit his recantation was a lie and that the wound in Kennedy’s neck was an entrance wound.

Then with the autopsy, we learn how it was controlled not by forensic pathologists experienced in doing autopsies on gunshot victims, but by shadowy military and intelligence figures. We learn of another magic bullet that allegedly was found in Parkland Hospital where it was claimed it fell out of a back wound of the president. But this bullet later turns out to be The Magic Bullet after further legerdemain by Warren Commission member Gerald Ford.

This stuff is highly comical if it weren’t so sinister, and it is surely “unbelievable” as the eminent forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht tells the viewer. That one of the autopsy doctors burned his notes and another had his disappear might not be new knowledge, but to learn that two honest FBI agents who witnessed the autopsy and were not called as witnesses by the Warren Commission – James Sibert and Francis X. O’Neill, Jr. – were shown the autopsy photos in depositions taken by the Assassinations Record Review Board in 1997 and claimed that Kennedy’s head had been doctored to conceal his gaping rear head wound is startlingly new evidence.

As is the important diagram Sibert drew of a large head wound in the back of the head supporting a shot from the front. As is the ARRB’s declassification of forty witnesses’ testimony that they saw a gaping hole in the back of the President’s head consistent with a shot from the front. As is the White House photographer Robert Knudsen’s admission thirty-years later that the photos he took were after the head had been doctored to conceal the wound. As is the evidence that the autopsy photos of JFK’s brain in the National archives are fakes.

Thus, the film emphatically shows that the new forensic evidence proves that there were multiple shooters and that Oswald, who was not on the sixth floor, was not one of them. Oswald, because he was killed by the F.B.I. affiliated Jack Ruby two days later, never had a trial, but if he did, in light of all we know now, he would never be convicted, yet the media, led by The New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, etc., have spent decades covering up the truth and claiming Oswald killed Kennedy, just as they have with their equally bogus claim that Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK. They can not be so ignorant not to know they are spouting absurdities, so one can only conclude they are lying to protect the killers. That they are accomplices after the fact.

Oswald the Patsy and his Connections to the CIA and FBI

This section contains much evidentiary information about Oswald that is in the 1991 film. That he was associated with David Ferrie, Guy Bannister, and Clay Shaw (alias Betrand), all of whom were FBI and CIA affiliated. That he was a provocateur playing multiple roles, one day an anti-Castro protester and the next day a Castro supporter. That he was trained as a Marine at a top secret Military base in Japan that ran U-2 spy flights run by the CIA over the Soviet Union. That his defection to the Soviet Union was likely a part of a CIA defector program. That after marrying a Russian wife, he was welcomed back into the U.S. by the government he “betrayed” and greeted upon his arrival by an intelligence asset who got him to Dallas to hook up with another CIA operative, George de Mohrenschildt.

Everything we learn about Oswald makes it clear he was working for the CIA and FBI while simultaneously being on their watch list for years. The CIA denials that this was true were lies. We learn that the ARRB had a hard time getting the CIA to hand over documents on Oswald, that both the FBI and CIA lifted flashes on Oswald in early October 1963 which allowed him access to the Dallas parade route without attention. We learn that the Secret Service destroyed their threat sheets for 1963, those being reports of JFK’s prior trips and threats associated with them.

Essentially, we learn again with documentation what was in the earlier film, JFK, and more; all of which proves that Oswald was being run by the CIA and that he was used as a patsy after the assassination. We see the similarities to the earlier plots on the President’s life in Chicago (see JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass re the Chicago plot) and Tampa that are eerily alike to that in Dallas. We learn everything essential, and yet this is just the two-hour version of the film.

Why Was Kennedy Killed, Who Benefited, and Who Had the Power to Cover it Up?

In the conclusion of the film, we are told all the things that Kennedy did that made him an arch-enemy of the CIA and the military. Kennedy, who was hated by the CIA even before the Bay of Pigs disaster, afterwards fired the CIA Director Allen Dulles and his subordinates and promised to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds after he realized that they tricked him with the Bay of Pigs.

In 1961, they also killed those Kennedy greatly admired and was working with on issues of decolonialization: Patrice Lumumba of the Congo and the Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld. Less than eleven months into office, JFK was faced with a savage enemy from within that he didn’t control. He told the French ambassador that he was in no way involved in the CIA’s attempts to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle, his ally, and that he had no control over the CIA.

After JFK’s assassination, Allen Dulles told journalist Willie Morris that Kennedy “thought he was a god.” This from the man who had his henchmen kill with impunity and loved the Nazis with whom he worked and brought into the U.S. government (see David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard). In a document uncovered by the ARRB called the Northwoods Document, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended to Kennedy that he approve a false flag operation to start a war with Cuba by blowing up an empty plane over Cuba and blaming it on Castro and setting off bombs in American cities killing Americans for the same purpose. Of course, Kennedy refused, only intensifying their hatred of him. Then when he wouldn’t bomb Cuba during the missile crisis in October 1962, gave his American University speech the following June, sought reconciliation with the Soviet Union, and decided to withdraw from Vietnam, the die was cast: He had to die.

Who has benefited from his death?

The war manufacturers first and foremost, for they have been reaping their bloody profits ever since. The war against Vietnam was just the start, for the wars and alarms of war have never stopped.

And the CIA, working as the leading edge for the military around the world, continuing the Pax Americana for Wall St. and the power hungry millionaires and billionaires who hate democracy.

And of course, the media companies that are stenographers for the CIA, the politicians who pimp for them, and the vast interconnected power elites who cash in while playing innocent.

Finally, without having to explicitly say it, JFK Revisited makes it emphatically clear by presenting evidence that the criminals who committed this terrible crime, together with their media accomplices, were the only ones able to cover it up.

Of course, there is more to this powerful and important film than I have mentioned here, all carefully laid out and documented. Those who criticized Stone’s earlier movie and continue to hurl insults at him rather than consider the evidence he and DiEugenio present are the worst kind of anti-intellectual sycophants. If they were forced to dispute the content of this film step-by-step, that would simply expose their agendas, something they must keep hidden to safeguard their establishment credentials.

JFK Revisited ends with an important reminder from David Talbot that the truth of this film about an event that took place long ago is so essential to understand because of its contemporary relevance. It is not dead history. The “horror show” we are now experiencing has its roots in JFK’s public execution on the streets of Dallas, when the killers sent the most obvious message:

Obey or you will suffer the same fate.

The United States is still controlled by the forces that killed President Kennedy – the CIA and those who comprise the national security state that wage war at home and abroad in contradistinction to everything JFK was trying to accomplish. Their cowardly allies in the media are everywhere.

There is a reason why, as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tells the viewer near the film’s end, that all across the world there are streets named and statues erected to honor President Kennedy: for people know that he was a brave man of peace and human reconciliation and that he died at the hands of scoundrels intent on stopping his work.

With JFK Revisited, Oliver Stone has truly honored this fallen hero. Like Jim Garrison in JFK, he offers this film as his closing statement to the jury, which is all of us. Here is the evidence. Consider it closely. Render your verdict.

By doing so, we may yet take back the country from the forces of evil.

Bravo to Stone and DiEugenio! They have created a tour de force.

The post Oliver Stone Answers his Critics first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

The Battle at Lake Changjin: China’s Anti-war Film

Kim Petersen — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 18:48:13 +0000

For decades, Hollywood has produced a plethora of films extolling American military prowess in warfare. Aside from Oliver Stone films and a few others, e.g., Casualties of War, usually these Hollywood films depict the United States as a force for good defeating fascists and other evildoers. Never-ending US militarism has provided a cornucopia of potential war scripts for Hollywood. Currently designated bête noires have already featured in Hollywood war films. In 1984, Hollywood made Red Dawn about an invasion of the US by the Soviet Union. In 2012, Red Dawn was updated to the other source of US demonization, China. However, capitalism and the lust for profits caused a switcheroo. The Chinese market is very lucrative for Hollywood. Consequently, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) bogeyman was substituted in as invading the American homeland.

The Soviet Union and Russia have produced a number of war films, albeit to little fanfare in the West. In the western world, Hollywood has been ruling the movie roost. Recently, however, Chinese film production has grown by major leaps and bounds, and blockbusters have been among the film fare. China is now the world’s largest cinema market, and it is expected to continue to grow.

The major Chinese film of 2021 was a war epic, The Battle at Lake Changjin. It was produced at a cost of $200 million and grossed $905 million worldwide. It was commissioned by the Communist Party of China for its 100th anniversary in 2021.

The year previously, 2020, China honored the 70th anniversary of its People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) that made the sacrifice to fight the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. This war is encapsulated in The Battle at Lake Changjin.

A basic outline of what preceded China’s entry into the war on the Korean peninsula is that the DPRK and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south were engaged in a civil war, a war precipitated by the US splitting the country in two. The DPRK had advanced throughout the ROK except for a small southern pocket when the US decided to interpose itself into the war on the side of the ROK. The US would also manage to bring the United Nations on board, bringing other countries to its side. This massively tipped the scales, and the war pushed north over the 38th parallel. China had warned the US on numerous occasions to stay away from the Yalu River that delineates the Korean border with China. (For detailed and footnoted substantiation read A.B. Abrams’ Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power. Review.)

Near the beginning of the movie, viewers see US planes strafing the environs of the Yalu River. China was very reluctant to enter the war, having not so long ago emerged from its own civil war. At the time China was a poor country looking to get back on its feet. But as pointed out in the film, that generation had to fight to spare a future generation from having to fight the war.

Thus, the 9th Army of the PVA is sent across the Yalu River during the frigid winter of 1950. The PVA was ill equipped, and they were going up against the best equipped and most formidable army of that epoch. At Changjin Lake temperatures plunged to -30°C. The film depicts ferocious fighting, numerous casualties, gore, and deaths on both sides. The remnants of the fleeing UN army made it to the port in Hungnam and escaped on vessels. The UN-US military would retreat back over the 38th parallel.

China had won that battle, but jingoism is muted.

Despite warnings from the Chinese side, the US breached the Yalu River, and China responded. Nowadays, a scenario plays out in Europe where Russia has warned the US against further eastward expansion.

The US ought to have drawn some lessons from the debacle of losing to “Mao Zedong’s peasant army.” But history reveals the US was forced to withdraw from Afghanistan by peasants with AK-47s; to flee from peasant fighters in Viet Nam; told to leave from war-ravaged Iraq; and it is still mired in the abject embarrassment it helped cause in Syria, reduced to being a thief of oil and wheat.

The Battle at Lake Changjin also commits Hollywood-style theatrical excesses. However, there is no glorification of warring in the film. The sensitive viewer can only conclude that war as a means to settle differences or to impose oneself on another is barbaric and immoral. But when one side resorts to violence, the other is forced to fight back or to submit. As Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata put it: a choice of dying on one’s feet or living on one’s knees.

The film’s obvious message is that violence must be rejected by the peoples of all countries. But not only that: violence in all its forms must be rejected by humanity. The violence of oppression, brutality, inequality, poverty, racism, intolerance, etc all carry the seeds of greater violence that leads to all-out war.

The post The Battle at Lake Changjin: China’s Anti-war Film first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

The Green Knight: A Captivating Allegory on Human Adventure

Christos Kefalis — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 15:57:37 +0000

The Green Knight, written and directed by David Lowery, is undoubtedly one of the most original and interesting films of the previous year. The film, adapted from the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, tells the story of Gawain, a medieval Knight in Camelot, the castle of legendary King Arthur, who sets out on a journey to test his courage and face the Green Knight.¹ Yet, as we shall see, although a metaphysical medieval fantasy film, The Green Knight has a profoundly worldly approach and some timely implications.

After an introduction with Gawain (Dev Patel) and his mistress Essel (Alicia Vikander), a prostitute, action begins in the palace of King Arthur (Sean Harris), whose nephew is Gawain. At Christmas, Arthur invites Gawain to sit at his side. At the same time, Gawain’s mother (Sarita Choudhury), a witch who intends to make him king, invites through magic the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) to the castle. The latter promises that any knight who confronts him will win his green ax, but will have to visit him after a year at the Green Chapel, where he will receive the same blow in return. Gawain responds and beheads the knight, who walks away with his head at hand, laughing and reminding him of his oath.

After a year of debauchery, Gawain departs for the Green Chapel, taking with him the green ax and a green girdle from his mother, which will protect him from all evil. On his way he encounters various adventures: a group of robbers steal his horse, ax and girdle; a beheaded woman villager in a hut asks him to put her head at its place; he meets a fox with a human voice as well as a race of women giants and is hosted in a castle by its lord (Joel Edgerton), whose wife, a double of Essel (also played by Alicia Vikander), seduces him. While being there, a mysterious woman wrapped in bandages, who is actually his mother, gives him back the green girdle.

Eventually, Gawain arrives at the Green Chapel, where the sleeping Knight awakes on Christmas morning and prepares to behead him. Gawain reacts, saying he is not ready, and in a vision he fantasizes he escapes and returns to Camelot. He becomes a knight and king after Arthur’s death. Essel gives him a son, but he abandons her and marries a noblewoman. His son is killed in battle, his castle is besieged, his family flees away and he, removing the green girdle, eventually falls decapitated to the ground.

Seeing what the future has in store for him, Gawain removes the girdle, turns to the Green Knight and tells him that he is now ready to accept his fate. The latter raises the ax with the words, “Now, off with your head”, and at this point the film ends.

The Green Knight, as has already been mentioned, is a highly allegorical film, a metaphor for the human quest (this being also partly true of the medieval poem on which it is based). This makes it susceptible to a variety of interpretations. However, a central nucleus can be discerned in it. It becomes clearer when one takes account of the changes Lowery has introduced to the original story, creating thereby the specific atmosphere that gives the movie its identity.

Contrary to the medieval myth, which highlights chivalrous ideals, Lowery’s hero has hardly anything chivalrous about him. He is rather an anti-knight, an uncertain young man still at his formative age. He has good, positive elements and moods in him, he seeks greatness, but without possessing a positive goal of his own. His existence is carried away and dominated by external forces that he does not control and to which he adapts passively or reacts spasmodically. His relationship with a prostitute, Essel, also points away from chivalry in any sense.

These original, decisive traits of the hero have been keenly noted by critics. In a detailed analysis, Alissa Wilkinson points to their centrality in Lowery’s version: “In the [medieval] poem, Gawain is already a beloved and respected member of the Round Table, noted for his chivalry. In Lowery’s film, Gawain is young, impetuous, prone to carousing, and ashamed of how little of his life has been spent on bold and brave exploits. He’s new to manhood. In other words, he’s also “green,” and that’s an important part of the story… In the film, unlike the poem, Gawain has a love interest named Essel, a young woman… who is a sex worker, and dreams of spending her life with him.”² And Alison Willmore adds that the film “is about someone who keeps waiting for external forces to turn him into the gallant, heroic figure he believes he should be… at the film’s heart is a lesson that’s as timeless as any legend – travel as far as you like, but you’ll never be able to leave yourself behind.”³

Indeed, it is the innovations noted by Wilkinson that modernize the story and at the same time, in a sense, make it timeless.⁴ Clearly, while a medieval king would look quite different from a modern royal remnant like queen Elizabeth II or from Alexander the Great, there is a much closer affinity between youths of every epoch. Yet, while these unformed traits could be partly shared by youths at all times, Lowery makes us feel that they are still distinctive of the hero: in the year that follows after his first encounter with the Green Knight we do not see him change or mature in any way.

The external, foreign forces that dominate Gawain are embodied by his mother and the world of magic she sets in motion. That already points to a close, necessary connection: they are not something accidental, which he could bypass, but lie at the core of his destiny, which is not determined by him, but is rather predetermined by what he should become, in accordance to social roles and conventions.

The Green Knight, on the other hand, personifies the experience of life, wisdom and self-knowledge that each person gains in his journey. Far from being a frightful, horrific force, in the end he addresses Gawain with understanding and humanity. In a sense, it could be said, he elevates him to a conscience of his human duty, however cruel and fearful this may be.

The robbers on their part may be compared to the hardships on the road, the fox with the animal instinct of self-preservation – she warns Gawain not to continue on his way to the chapel, as this will be his doom – the beheaded woman to human aspirations that remain unfulfilled, the giant women with the ideal of a bright, humane future and the lord and lady with the ideal of happiness that Gawain would desire for himself and Essel.

Lowery’s depiction of the Middle Ages is basically realistic in its spirit. True, he does not focus on the oppressive aspects of social relations, crystallized in secular and religious powers, as Verhoeven’s movie we discussed recently does,⁵ but to their viable aspects. There is nothing problematic in this; every society has its viable aspects, otherwise it could not endure for long, and the Middle Ages were no exception to this. The decisive question, however, is whether these aspects allow for a valid, genuine realization of human aspirations, and this turns out not to be the case with Gawain.

Another aspect in which the film remains realistic and worldly is the insignificant role played by religious and magical forces in developments. Religion with its miracles is in fact absent from the story, while magic simply serves as a tool to confound reality with imagination and help the allegory unfold. However, having been set as a frame, the world of magic does not determine the hero’s decisions or interfere with their realization. This accords with another contrast with the medieval poem: in the later much emphasis is laid on Gawain’s temptations, while Lowery focuses on the hero’s adventures, with his actions being responses to real challenges.⁶

In one connection, the Green Knight can also be seen as personifying the world of nature, as opposed to the sterile and static Christianized world of Camelot.⁷ However, it is precisely here that the backward, barbarous features of medieval society come to the fore and are revealed, in the final scenes of the movie, as necessary aspects of all discriminating societies. Gawain’s quest for happiness and goodness proves unfeasible, because the conditions for its fulfillment are missing: wicked social norms will not allow a king to marry a prostitute. Realizing what he would become if he lived –a king whose apparent greatness would be based on a lie– he tells the knight to take his life. The crucial final scene sums up the meaning of the film: the recognition that death and non-existence are better than a fake, meaningless, even if flamboyant life.

Georg Lukacs, the famous Hungarian Marxist, had argued in his time with some justification that allegory, being closely linked, like parables, etc, with religious moods, lends itself to mystifications and distortions of reality in the spirit of religion and mysticism. Yet all things are two sided. Lowery’s film bears witness that, provided one holds a “this-sided” worldview, allegory can be quite helpful in artistic generalization, in raising the particular to the general.

The Green Knight deservedly received almost universal praise in sites like “Rotten Tomatoes” and “Metacritic”. Yet even some partly negative criticisms seem to justify this appraisal. Thus, Keith Watson argues that being “A self-consciously revisionist take on Camelot lore… [the film] smooths out the enduring mysteries, opaque psychology, and narrative idiosyncrasies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, resulting in a work that’s only superficially more daring and enigmatic than its source material.”⁸ We think, however, that it is precisely this smoothing of mystery in favor of real human motives, values and aspirations that makes the film truly remarkable.

Lowery himself stressed the importance of the final scene in the plot: “[The beheading of the hero is] a positive thing… He faces his fate bravely, and there’s honor and integrity in that. But that doesn’t mean that he’s dead, he’s killed. He received the blow that he was dealt, and all is set right within the universe of the film.”⁸

One should only add that to the same extent the film succeeds in strongly conveying the feeling that not everything is right within the kind of society that causes the hero’s tragedy and demise. This, together with its inspired, captivating and artistically gifted exploration of human adventure, is what makes The Green Knight a valuable achievement.

There exist in fact two earlier movies based on the same poem, Gawain and the Green Knight (1973), Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1984), both directed by Stephen Weeks. Yet they are generally considered as failed.
A. Wilkinson, “The Green Knight is glorious and a little baffling. Let’s untangle it.”
A. Willmore, “The Green Knight Is a Ravishing, Unsettling Fantasy.”
I.e., in the sense of not being above time, but of expressing what is common to all times.
See Chr. Kefalis, “Benedetta: A ‘Provocative’ Film that Demythologizes Religion.”
A. Wilkinson again aptly notes this difference of emphasis in her article: “In the poem, the journey is described as arduous, but Gawain’s adventures are only hinted at. In the film, two main adventures are shown.”
See also here Wilkinson’s remarks: “one way to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is to view the Green Knight as representative of the natural world –the wildness of creation and even a more pagan spirituality, full of witchcraft and unseen creatures– impeding on the deeply Christianized and slowly modernizing world of Camelot.
See “The Green Knight.”

The post The Green Knight: A Captivating Allegory on Human Adventure first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Christos Kefalis.

Benedetta: A “Provocative” Film that Demythologizes Religion

Christos Kefalis — Fri, 24 Dec 2021 02:57:11 +0000

Relatively recently we criticized Man of God as a film that obscures reality and, by deifying religious feeling, could lead those who adopt its standpoint only to wrong, deceptive paths.¹ Benedetta, Paul Verhoeven’s latest film, can in many ways be considered its opposite. It is a film that demythologizes, deconstructs and keenly dissects religion with all its various counterparts, the Church, mysticism, etc. Yet, it does this on a high artistic level, with unshakable realism and persuasiveness, clarifying thus all those things Man of God tried to hide and embellish.

Admittedly, Verhoeven is a somewhat uneven director. Some of his films, such as RoboCop and Total Recall, are commercial, Hollywood type productions, a fact partly damaging the issues they raise. But he is also a director with a keen sense and ability to expose the corruption of the bourgeois world, especially the star system, of which he is a part. Another classical film of his, Showgirls, was one of the sharpest anatomies of the showbiz ever, receiving at its time many unjustified negative reviews. Benedetta does the same thing with regard to the Church and monasticism, not with the aim of countering religion scientifically but of demonstrating its role in real life.

A true story

The story takes place in the early 17th century, a time of papal omnipotence in Italy, when medieval prejudices and institutions were still dominant. It is based on the life of the mystic abbess Benedetta Carlini, who had a lesbian relationship with one of her nuns, Bartolomea. Verhoeven loosely follows Carlini’s biography,² giving his own version, which becomes a social critique of the time and of our time as well. And while the critique focuses, as we have said, on medieval papacy, it acquires broader, contemporary dimensions.

Benedetta (played by Virginie Efira), a young woman with a religious upbringing, is dedicated by her father, a wealthy Tuscan lord, to a monastery in Pescia. There she begins to have visions, and when during such an experience the signs of crucifixion appear on her body, she is proclaimed abbess by the local bishop, setting aside her aged predecessor (Charlotte Rampling). Meanwhile, Benedetta begins an affair with Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), a young woman who is raped by her father and brothers and takes refuge in the monastery just to escape her martyrdoms. When Christina, the daughter of the old abbess, who had accused Benedetta of causing herself the signs by self-injury, is sentenced to self-whipping and commits suicide, the abbess secretly watches the girls’ erotic meetings and makes sure they come to the knowledge of the Florentine Nuncio (Lambert Wilson). The latter comes to Pescia and imposes the removal of Benedetta, who, as soon as Bartolomea confesses about their relationship after being tortured, is condemned to be burned on the stake.

Meanwhile, plague has spread in Florence and the Nuncio and the old abbess get infected. In the end, when Benedetta is tied to the stake, the people of the city revolt and kill the Nuncio and his entourage, while the dying abbess, a victim of the circumstances, helps Benedetta. The latter and Bartolomea escape from Pescia, but next day Benedetta announces that she must return, even if this means to be burnt on the stake, because the monastery is her home and there is no life elsewhere for her. In the epilogue we learn that Pescia was not touched by the plague and Benedetta lived until her death in confinement in the monastery.

The main thing is not whether the movie remains true to the original story – which it does to some extent – but the specific point of view with which Verhoeven approaches it and the atmosphere he creates. At every step, religion, the Church and monasticism are revealed as a lie, a fig leaf for the very earthly, selfish pursuits of their servants who have nothing to do with their religious wrappings.

The old abbess proves to be a merchant of faith, who takes care to extract from the rich parents of the girls the maximum possible price for their acceptance in the monastery. When Benedetta’s wealthy father, who is supposed to have dedicated her piously to God, brings her there, we see him haggling hard with the abbess about the owed sum. The local bishop, learning about the marks on Benedetta’s body, decides to support her becoming the abbess, not because he believes in the “miracle,” but because the news will draw attention to his bishopric and help him rise in the hierarchy. The Nuncio, on his part, will react and try to exterminate the heroine for the exactly opposite reason, as he views these developments as a threat to his own power. Even Bartolomea’s brutal father and rapist, joyfully allows her to leave when his pay rises from ten to twenty dinars. In short, money and power are the common goal of all, for the achievement of which religious “faith” serves as a vehicle to some, as theft, cruelty and prostitution serve to others.

In this deceptively pious world, Benedetta is comparatively the more honest person, as she truly experiences her visions and ecstasies, which include a direct communion with Christ and various demons. But even in her case, there is no doubt that the “miracles” are fabricated and she causes her wounds herself. When the marks of Jesus appear on her body, she forgets to make them on her forehead, in correspondence with Christ’s crown of thorns, and Christina, the abbess’s daughter, sees her inflicting them later. Even in the end, when Benedetta shows the crowd the new wounds that have appeared in her hands, supposedly by divine providence, to incite them against the Nuncio, Bartolomea finds the nearby fragment of a vase, which to all appearances has been suitably used for the purpose.

A plausible question is whether the absence of some genuinely faithful priests in the film, such as the protagonist and the nuns in Man of God, violates the realistic representation. After all, in all ages a portion of the clergy cherished a sincere conviction that they represented the law of God, and their deeds and words, even if they diverged, were not in complete disharmony with it, as is the case in Benedetta.

We think not, for a number of reasons.

To begin with, the movie refers to a time when the corruption and fanaticism of the papal church had reached its peak. Throughout the 16th century Rome was steeped in prostitution and the popes lived in luxury, often having mistresses, indulging in intrigue and murder and collecting revenue from the infamous pardons. Pope Leo the 10th had famously said: “Since God has given us the Papacy, let us enjoy it.”³ The next phase, during which the story of Benedetta Carlini takes place, was marked by the Counter-Reformation, the Holy Inquisition (Giordano Bruno was burned on the stake in 1600) and the persecution of witches. All this did not mean a real change of morals, but a reaction to the Lutheran Reformation, through the most obscurantist oppression. Verhoeven justifiably omits the exceptions in order to portray the true spirit of the age.

Secondly, the film does present some pious types, but it turns out they are hopeless in this situation. The abbess’s daughter, Christina (Louise Chevillotte), is one such case, who puts truth above everything else. Christina decides to denounce Benedetta’s fraud not because she does not believe in miracles, but because she requires a true miracle to believe, and she knows that in this case it is a lie. However, she is condemned by her own mother, who has warned her not to reveal the truth and when she does, she denies her, as she believes that acting at that moment will not help getting rid of Benedetta and will harm her and the monastery.
Christina, like the pastor who hears the confessions of the nuns, is a layman figure, and their religious faith, after removing its metaphysical cloak, is nothing more than a naive and immediately unfeasible requirement for purity and authenticity. Christina, however, lacks the hard experience of life, which the resourceful and strong Bartolomea has, with the consequence that her love of truth remains idealistic.

Another question that could be asked is whether Verhoeven is over-modernizing the past, shifting to it problems and experiences of our time. The pace of developments in the movie, e.g., is a bit too fast, in a way more suited to the present than to the Middle Ages. This of course can be explained by the need to include all the necessary episodes and it is true that he tries to highlight the conditions of the time, as in the scene when Bartolomea sits for the first time in her life on a crapper. A more intricate director like Coppola would probably convey more accurately the spirit of the age, and this is also true of recent productions such as The Green Knight that make contemporary allusions in a subtler way. The crucial question, however, as Lukacs used to remark, is whether the creator succeeds in extending those tendencies of the past that lead to the present, or simply artificially loads the past with alien to it tendencies and behaviors of the present. Verhoeven’s more direct approach does not lose the right path, preserves naturalness and has its own merits.

The aesthetic result is greatly helped by the excellent match and natural playing of the actors. In addition, Verhoeven adorns the film with humorous episodes, such as the dialogue between the dying Nuncio and Benedetta,⁴ as well as some bold love scenes, culminating in Bartolomea transforming a small statue of the Virgin into an erotic aid.

The latter finding may seem blasphemous to some, and it would indeed be if it was inserted arbitrarily, for no real reason. But it allows Verhoeven to intensify the confrontation between the Nuncio and the heroine. In an important dialogue, the Nuncio, after finding the statue, accuses Benedetta of perversion and that her love for Bartolomea violates Christian faith, just to receive by her the answer that in Bartolomea she loves all other people. The discovery of the statue during the interrogations in a “crypt” Bartolomea has opened in the voluminous accounting book of the monastery, makes a strong hint to the lust for pleasure hidden behind all power relations.

Reactions and reviews

With its sharp challenge to prevailing prejudices and conformism, Benedetta was certain to provoke reactions and criticism, but they generally failed to reach its core and confront the issues it raises.

Benedetta has been widely described as a “provocative” film, and it really is. However, its “provocations,” far from reflecting Verhoeven’s personal whim and craving to shock people, bring us face to face with the inhumanity of a historical era, differing only externally and formally from ours.

Although the attitude of the Catholic Church so far has been to keep silent – wisely so because an open condemnation would only add to the strong sense of its hypocrisy that those who see Benedetta will get – fundamentalist Catholic organizations have protested against “insulting Jesus” and the like. Characteristically, during the screening of the film at the New York Film Festival in September, a group of Catholics held placards with slogans such as “We vehemently protest the blasphemous lesbian movie ‘Benedetta,’ that insults the sanctity of Catholic nuns.”⁵ The site of the eloquently titled “The American Society for the Protection of Tradition, Family, and Property,” presents us with thundering articles on “Why the Movie Benedetta Is Blasphemous And Anti-Catholic.”⁶ while Russia banned the film.

On the other hand, the film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, received positive reviews from critics, with an 85% acceptance in Rotten Tomatoes.⁷ Many, however, saw it as a reflection on the relationship between sexual freedom and faith. This dimension does exist, as the weight of erotic scenes suggests. But it is far – even if we accept, which is quite doubtful, that this was Verhoeven’s intention – from being the chief one. This is why criticisms that the film is just trying to scandalize, without having anything to say, are quite erroneous.

This kind of feeling is somehow promoted even by critics in “progressive” sites like Vox. A. Wilkinson, citing a number of recent movies with nuns, finds Benedetta a typical “nunsploitation film” and quite “unsurprising… Nunsploitation movies are salacious, often hypersexualized, and frequently critique the practices, rituals, and authority of the Catholic Church.” Having said that, however, Wilkinson hastens to add there is more in the movie: “Benedetta is not, fundamentally, just a romp about lesbian nuns. It’s about a religious hierarchy filled with people who have very little faith in God but have found in the church some way to access power and standing… Benedetta is also about church politics, fundamentally corrupt and self-serving, more interested in personal gain and decadent living than the slowly encroaching plague and the spiritual well-being of the faithful.”

Why then not focus on what is important in the film and be consumed with dubious comparisons?

In Greece there were quite a number of hostile criticisms and some more objective ones. It is not superfluous to take a look at them.
M. Theodoropoulou makes an extremely disparaging critique:

Benedetta… [tries] to pass as a serious psycho-social critique of blind power instead of a childish troll… Throughout his career, from RoboCop to Basic Instinct and from Showgirls to Elle, Verhoeven has dealt with issues of faith, flesh, power and sex, but here the clumsy attempts at humor, the low budget satire and the superficial clash of the sacred with the insignificant make the film correspond to nothing more than a farce in a schoolyard.

All this could, of course, be true, but it should have been substantiated somehow. Our critic does not bring a single argument, presenting her attacks as self-evident and leaving us in the dark.
A much more serious criticism is made by Chr. Mitsis, yet he stops halfway. Mitsis aptly identifies the element of social criticism that is constantly present in the film, a fact depriving a basis from all kinds of superficial rejection:

If one expects that the film will focus exclusively on the forbidden love affair of the two women and the denunciation of clerical intransigence, he will surely be surprised. Benedetta maintains Verhoeven’s aggressive sarcastic stance on uncontrollable passions and their clash with a strict institutional conformity. Here the latter is represented by all the ‘people of God’, who from the representative of the Pope to the abbess of the monastery bargain economically and politically for each of their spiritual confrontations. In a male-dominated, violent and sick (literally and figuratively) world where everything is sold and bought, Verhoeven does not counterpose two romantic, in love women.⁸

Having made these valid remarks, Mitsis rebukes however Verhoeven’s “cynicism,” which, he deems, “brings to the fore the instinct of survival and mocks bitterly perpetrators and victims, slowly but steadily beginning to be carried away by his frantic mood for ruthless parody.” Because of this, “the characters slip into the grotesque, the plot culminates in an uncontrollable noisy conflict, psychological moods change in a minute and a subversive, dark satire ends in an unequal parody.”⁸

Here the critic, in our opinion, misses the point. The cynicism he detects exists indeed in the film. Only is it not a cynicism Verhoeven implants from outside, but – as Marx used to say in such cases – a cynicism that inhabits within the thing itself. As a result, he fails to appreciate in their authentic meaning important elements of the plot and especially the final scene of the film that have nothing of the parodic mood he attributes them. In any case, he gives us a good reason to complete these points.

Benedetta is, in fact, a harsh film, depicting the barbarity of the Middle Ages, and more broadly of all exploitative societies, in order to inquire whether there is a way out for human realization. It is quite reminiscent of one of Verhoeven’s first films, Flesh and Blood, in which two groups of medieval mercenaries killed each other. But while there the emphasis was on individual adventure, here we find a fairly faithful representation of the social forces acting behind individuals, with individual fates being strongly determined by those forces.

The resulting image of religion basically coincides with young Marx’s assessment of religious sentiment: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”⁹

On the other hand, those critics, such as L. Katsikas,¹⁰ who believe Benedetta represents instinct as opposed to religious fanaticism, are quite wrong. Benedetta‘s persistent appeals to close the city walls when the plague spreads –what is left of her ecstasies if their metaphysical vestments are removed– is the voice of reason, even if it comes about by a combination of calculations (her pursuit not to let the Nuncio enter the city) and instinct (her mystical frenzy and the oppressed hedonistic background that lurks behind it). In an age of primitive barbarism, logic cannot be imposed by persuasion, but only by fear and superstition (the comet interpreted as a divine sign), taking the form of divine commands, the violation of which will evoke punishment. Only in this way can the basic norms of behavior be observed, which make it possible for people to live together and, in the given situation, to be saved from the terrible disease. Benedetta’s decision to return to the monastery is a recognition of the little that religion offers to human fulfillment in the prehistory of humanity, but at the same time a demonstration of its inadequacy. And while Benedetta is defeated and subjected to the Church authority in the end, the Nuncio’s violent death and the salvation of the city seem to imply a fundamental historical openness.

While it would be mistaken to carry directly the film’s problematic to the present day, there exist quite obvious implications. It is enough to replace the plague with the Covid pandemic (although the filming preceded it), religious fanaticism and torture with racism and abuse of women today or the rape of children by Catholic priests, to have the feeling that humanity has not progressed much since then and that the root cause of this will be found in the dominant institutions. At the end of the movie the viewer is confronted with the question: “If Benedetta necessarily chooses the monastery from prostitution, can this dilemma be the choice in our times, when a good life for all is possible?”

The uprising of the masses is present in the scene when the crowds attack the Nuncio and his entourage. Verhoeven, who had made in the past interesting films about the socialist movement, such as Katie Tippel, does not ask questions – his material does not allow it – about whether and how such a movement could develop today and become effective. But he shows us the ineffectiveness of all other attitudes, the noblest epitome of which is exemplified by religion. This makes Benedetta one of the veteran director’s most mature and comprehensive films.

*****

The writer expresses his thanks to Nikos Christopoulos for his remarks in a discussion about the film.

See Chr. Kefalis, “Green Knight or Man of God?”. Man of God, directed by Yelena Popovic, has been extolled by the Greek Orthodox Church as a model of “Christian ideals” in our times.
Verhoeven utilized Judith C. Brown’s 1986 book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. With regard to Carlini’s life, see “Benedetta Carlini.”
Quoted in “Renaissance Papacy.”
The Nuncio asks Benedetta if she saw in her ecstasies whether his soul was in Paradise or in Hell and, when she answers “In Paradise”, he opposes her, “You are lying again.”
See E. Shafer, “Catholic Protesters Congregate Outside ‘Benedetta’s’ New York Film Festival Premiere.”
L.S. Solimeo, “Why the Movie Benedetta Is Blasphemous And Anti-Catholic.” Verhoeven is vilified in the article because he is a member of a society that views Christ not as God but as a rebel – a view indicative of his strengths and limitations. For the ban on the film in Russia, see, e.g. “Benedetta with Virginie Efira banned in Russia.”
See “Benedetta (film).”
Chr. Mitsis, “Benedetta.”
See K. Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction.”
This assessment leads Katsikas to some extreme judgments: “Paul Verhoeven maintains the pretext of a parable about the dangers of religious and all other kinds of fanaticism and the sweeping, almost cosmogenic call of instincts. ‘Benedetta’ is sure to entertain fans of easy challenges and promises to make a lot of tickets in movie halls. In no case, however, should it get confused with good taste, good cinema and good intentions. It is a childish sadomasochistic spectacle that knows no subtlety and which attacks the sensibilities of the public with the rush of a bull in a glass shop” (L. Katsikas, “Cannes 2021: Paul Verhoeven’s infamous ‘Benedetta’ is the ideal scandal film for those who wanted something like this.”)

The post Benedetta: A “Provocative” Film that Demythologizes Religion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Christos Kefalis.

Violence and the State

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 22:54:52 +0000

From Macalla Teoranta website

In mainstream culture, social and political violence by the poor depicted in cinema is generally situated in narratives that try to maintain the legitimacy of the state. Consequently it also tries to delegitimize violence that may threaten the state. For example, the recent Mexican-French film New Order (2020) depicts the street violence and demonstrations of the poor as mindless violence, murder, and robbery, rather than as an inevitable reaction to decades of extreme poverty and oppression.

In these scenarios, the indigent, the poor, the working class, have no rational program, no ideological agenda, and no democratic future where they could be in the driving seat of economic and cultural progress. They are forever condemned to explosive, cathartic and senseless cyclical violence that is then simply stage-managed by the state through its courts, police, army and prisons. It could be argued that the main reason for these depictions of the poor is that mainstream culture is itself one of the tools used in the maintenance of that status quo.

Two recent Irish films, Arracht (‘Monster’) (2019) and Herself (2020), depict violence in very different eras. Arracht is based in Connemara in the middle of the nineteenth century, while Herself is set in a modern urban setting in Dublin. On another level, both films show how violence is allowed to be depicted in mainstream cinema.

Arracht, for example, is a well made film with much work gone into the authenticity of the depiction of the potato blight and the subsequent desperation of the local inhabitants. The narrative centres on Colmán Sharkey who lives on the Atlantic coast with his wife and young son. Colmán has taken on Patsy Kelly as a farmhand and fisherman, a dodgy character who was in the Royal Navy. The landlord has raised the rents and Colmán decides to talk to him personally, bringing Patsy with him. However:

At the landlord’s estate, Colmán unsuccessfully tries to persuade him not to raise rents due to the famine devastating the country. Patsy wanders off where he encounters the two collection agents and the landlord’s daughter. He murders all three before being discovered by Colmán, who is shocked by what he finds and notices a frightened young girl has witnessed the scene. Patsy kills the landlord, leading to a confrontation with the Sharkey brothers in which Sean [Colmán’s brother] is fatally stabbed. Enraged, Colmán brutally beats Patsy and leaves him for dead.

Soon these murders enter local nationalist folk culture in the form of a ballad sung by local fishermen. It is assumed that Colmán killed the landlord and he is seen as an heroic resistance fighter. However, it was shown that Colmán is not a violent person from an earlier scene when Patsy disarms an armed man sent to collect the rents, and Colmán orders Patsy to return the gun.

We know that the violence in the landlord’s house was committed by Patsy and not Colmán. In this case it is the actions of a sociopath (Patsy) which are immortalized in culture despite Colmán’s non-violent approach to resistance. There is a sleight of hand here that shows radical nationalist culture as illegitimate violence carried out by sociopaths and furthermore depicts the singers of the ballad as being ignorant of the facts of the situation, and that they are glorifying deeds that are basically portrayed as terrorism.

Given the severity of colonial oppression in Ireland in the nineteenth century, violence against the landlords or representatives of the state is unsurprising. Resistance by the peasants is delegitimized and limited to the legal and courts system, which is upholding the landlord rent increases and evictions that are exacerbating the conflict in the first place.

A similar cinematic sticking point over legitimate and illegitimate violence occurs in Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins set during the Irish War of Independence. Jordan has the IRA explode a car bomb even though car bombs were not used until much later during the Troubles. Some critics focused in on this event as legitimating the later IRA campaign which they saw simply as modern terrorism unlike the earlier struggle for independence.

In Herself, the contemporary story of a woman (Sandra) fighting back against her violent ex-husband in the courts system, is a more positive narrative in that it shows her struggle against the structural violence of state bureaucracy. Furthermore, her tenacity in also resisting criminal violence by her ex-husband works well on both literal and symbolic levels.

Poster for Herself

While her battle against domestic violence is an uphill struggle against the prejudices of the state court system she eventually wins custody of her children. Her decision to build her own house in the back garden of the wealthy doctor she works for is an interesting twist in that her desire to be free and independent is determined by middle class power and control. However, her determination to create something for herself is significant as the learning processes involved in building a house counters modern consumerist ideology with the practical knowledge of production.

Furthermore, Sandra organizes a team to help her build the house, working for free, which harks back to an old Irish social tradition of a meitheal (where neighbours would come together to assist in the saving of crops or other tasks).

Unfortunately, the finished house is then burned down by her ex-husband in a criminal act of revenge. Yet this does not deter her (or her friends) from starting afresh. Thus the film carries a positive message that one can win out through struggle within the system, but also symbolically without the system, with the collective help of others despite enormous setbacks and challenges.

Despite the fact that the legitimacy of the state is maintained in Herself (winning custody of her children through the courts, her husband being caught and put away for years), the message of struggle, learning, and co-operation towards a common goal is quite subversive. She learns not only how to fight the system but also how to construct a new way of being within the system which has profound possibilities for the future (learning new skills, working collectively, solidarity, etc.).

A similar situation can be seen in The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006), a film by Ken Loach set during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) and the Irish Civil War (1922–1923), wherein the First Dáil sets up a parallel court system to the colonial institutions, which not only became accepted and recognized by the local people (de facto) but were eventually to become de jure with the setting up of the new Irish state.

However, whether the message is conservative (Arracht) or progressive (Herself), it is usually oblique, as overtly radical content rarely gets screened. Cinema is an extremely costly business, and screenplay and finished film decisions are made by wealthy and conservative producers. Yet, every now and then films depicting working class life and struggles are produced which are significant, for example, Salt of the Earth (1954), The Organizer (1963) (Italian), The Battle of Algiers (1966) (Italian-Algerian), Blue Collar (1978) (USA), Norma Rae (1979) (USA), Vera Drake (2004) (UK), I, Daniel Blake (2016) (UK

The post Violence and the State first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

No Time To Think: The Changing Geopolitics of International Blockbusters?

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 21:40:19 +0000

By Official James Bond 007 Website

The latest Bond flick No Time To Die was certainly a rollercoaster ride of exciting action scenes and great special effects, yet contained more than a quantum of longueurs. With a running time of 163 minutes it certainly tries the patience and the bladders of its audiences (who I saw popping out of the cinema throughout the film). Personally, I think 90 minutes is enough for any film, especially since the disappearance of the intermission and ice-cream selling of yore. In this case, the increased length seems to have been to incorporate backstories of some of the individuals involved. The effect of this is to attenuate Bond’s appearances in the film, while adding very little to the story (hence the longueurs).

One effect of this narrative style is to put more emphasis on the story of Bond and less on the usual geopolitics and action we associate with Bond films. Now this is very interesting considering that if one was to ask oneself: which country would be the most likely target and villain of the latest Bond film as a cultural representative of the world’s imperialist and neo-colonial powers? It would have to be: China.

Who’s bad?

Yet there were no Chinese baddies, no stereotyped ‘yellow peril’, no Chinese mad scientists, no Chinese monomaniacal nutter bent on ruling the world. Why would this be? Could it be something to do with new British geopolitical sensitivities and Brexit anxieties over its current position in the world? In the past the Russians were usually targeted, as well as the more abstract multinational SPECTRE baddies. At least during the Cold War (and some time after) there was definitely a cultural reflection of the realities of geopolitics in the James Bond narratives. Are they keeping one eye on the potential economic and military alliances of the future while keeping the other eye on their current alliances?

Instead what we get is yet another Russian mad scientist with a comically exaggerated Russian accent, lots of SPECTRE goings on, and the monomaniacal nutter ‘Lyutsifer Safin’ (with equally crazy spelling). Thus we have a caricature of the early Bond films with some ’emotionally deep’ background filling to make up for its lack of relevance to current geopolitics.

Added to this emasculated plotline is the Bond’s 007 replacement with Nomi, his successor – a female black Bond. Not that there’s anything wrong with a female black Bond, but it does show one of the weaknesses of current identity politics, that her identity as an operative for an imperialist, militarist organisation is more important than her identity as a colonial victim of imperialist, militarist organisations in the past.

The Noname Book Club, for example, tweeted the general point that:

under white domination we consistently celebrate the “first black …” because we’ve been taught that assimilation into white society means safety, upward mobility, liberation. beyond how this can lead to black children idolizing the first black billionaire or war criminal, […] it also individualizes / romanticizes black success. it reduces our desire for collective liberation and makes us hyper focus on white approval.

There is also a slight ramping up of what I call the ‘theatre of cruelty’ factor – that is the pushing beyond the normal standards of ‘common decency’ that underlies cinema narratives in the public sphere. In general the depiction of violence and cruelty has been increasing steadily since the 1950s and 1960s, progressively desensitising audiences to basic human norms (another role of action movies like the Bond films). In this case, a child (Mathilde) is used in the narrative as a human shield but in the end the film does not go so far as to actually hurt her – there are still some limits to what is acceptable in the public’s eyes.

One Empire

Militarism

However, there seems to be very few limits to the extent to which the British government is creating new and targeted strategies to promote support for the military, for example:”Armed Forces Day, Uniform to Work Day, Camo Day, National Heroes Day – in the streets, on television, on the web, at sports events, in schools, advertising and fashion – the military presence in civilian life is on the march. The public and ever younger children are being groomed to collude in the increasing militarisation of UK society.”The role of these forms of militarism has been to encourage people “to see the military, and spying, in positive terms; to think of violent, military solutions as the best way to solve international disagreements; and to ignore peaceful alternatives.”Children have long been drawn in through comics such as The Boy’s Own Paper, published from 1879 to 1967, and aimed at young and teenage boys. For example the first volume’s serials included “From Powder Monkey to Admiral, or The Stirring Days of the British Navy” and promoted the British Empire as the peak of civilization.

Later comics about World War 2 were founded in the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as War Picture Library (1958), The Victor (1961) and Commando (1961) (which is still in print today) were popular for decades after the war. According to Rod Driver, these comics

had a strong focus on patriotism and heroism. They stereotyped people from enemy countries as cruel or cowardly, and used derogatory terms such as jerries, huns or krauts for German people, eyeties for Italian people, or nips for Japanese people. A generation of children grew up with a very distorted view of the war and people in other countries.

As for the adults, stereotypes and cruelty are still the stock in trade of culture producers and the James Bond films rejoice in them.

The Victor cover

Recruitment campaigns

The significance of Nomi as a black 007 can be seen in new recruitment advertisements which feature a black female soldier. Women represent less than 10% of the British Army, so they launched a new female-led recruitment campaign. According to Imogen Watson, the ‘This is Belonging’ campaign:”follows the army’s most successful recruitment to date. Four days after the launch, the record was broken for the highest number of applications received in a single day. After a month, 141% of the army’s application target was reached. By March, it had surpassed 100% of its annual recruiting target for soldiers, for the first time in eight years.”

International institutions

In one sense James Bond films depict a reality that despite the many International institutions dedicated to promoting world peace, military build-ups continue apace. In an article entitled ‘The False Promise of International Institutions’, John J. Mearsheimer writes “that institutions have minimal influence on state behavior, and thus hold little promise for promoting stability in the post-Cold War world.” [p. 7]

He discusses the differences between the ideas of Realists and Critical Theorists. The Realists believe that there is an objective and knowable world while the Critical Theorists see “the possibility of endless interpretations of the world before them”, and therefore there is no reason “why a communitarian discourse of peace and harmony cannot supplant the realist discourse of security competition and war”.

However, there is a contradiction in that, for example, Americans who think seriously about foreign policy dislike realism as it clashes with their basic values and how they prefer to think about themselves in the wider world. Mearsheimer outlines the negative aspects of realism that depict a world of stark and harsh competition, where there is no escape from the evil of power and which treats war as inevitable. Realism goes against deep-seated beliefs that progress is desirable and “and with time and effort reasonable individuals can solve important social problems.” One major problem is that while the international system strongly shapes the behavior of states, “states still have considerable freedom of action”. He gives the example of the failure of the League of Nations to address German and Japanese aggression in the 1930s. Thus, the role of international institutions may actually be to stave off war until countries feel ready to attack or defend themselves.

What he does not discuss, however, are the situations where ordinary people rose up to extricate their nations from imperialist wars, such as Ireland in 1916 (“We serve neither King nor Kaiser), and the Peace! Land! Bread! campaign of the Bolsheviks in 1917. These campaigns show that while ordinary people are generally considered cannon fodder in times of war, it is possible for future mass movements to transcend the narrow triumphalism and national chauvinism encouraged by recruitment campaigns and blockbuster films.

The post No Time To Think: The Changing Geopolitics of International Blockbusters? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

The Great Fear: The Accelerating Apocalypse

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 19:27:09 +0000

Theatrical release poster

For apocalyptic disaster films, they don’t get much more up close and personal (and apocalyptic) than the film Greenland (2020). Set in contemporary times, the story revolves around the news that an interstellar comet named Clarke is heading for Earth, and that it was made up of fragments of rock and ice big enough to wipe out modern civilization.

John Garrity, a structural engineer, receives a message from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notifying him that he and his family have been selected to go to emergency bunkers. While he is at home a massive fragment lands on Tampa, Florida and wipes it out live on TV. Garrity receives another message with instructions to head to Robins Air Force Base for an evacuation flight. They are to be taken to large bunkers in Thule, Greenland, as the largest fragment is expected to cause an extinction level event.

However, as panic sets in among his neighbours there is mutual shock as they realise that they have not been selected, and Garrity is unsure why he was. Gradually he realises that his skills as a structural engineer would be required in the rebuilding of the post-apocalyptic world, hence the reason for his inclusion.

As others realise the value of the wristbands the family have been given for the flight to Thule, Garrity and his family become targets for different kinds of attacks and schemes to wrest the wristbands from them throughout the narrative of the film.

Overall, Greenland is a well crafted film and focuses on the family’s desperate attempts to make it to Thule before the main fragment of Clarke strikes Europe (!) and destroys civilization.

The most interesting aspect of the film is the drama around the conflicts between the ‘chosen few’ and the rest of the population. While Garrity may be an all-American citizen, he does not reject the elitism of his new status but embraces it wholeheartedly. He may be a member of a democracy, and hold democratic values but when push comes to shove, all that is very quickly forgotten about in the panic. It’s every man for himself and he accepts the changes in state ideology from citizen to elect in a heartbeat.

The ‘chosen few’

The idea of the ‘chosen few’ is not new. According to the bible, Jesus initiated a New Covenant on the night before his death during the last supper. Those who had heavenly hope would be selected by God to rule with Christ as kings with him for 1,000 years. The Bible also gives the number of those anointed:

Revelation 14:3–4, ‘And they are singing what seems to be a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and the elders, and no one was able to master that song except the 144,000, who have been bought from the earth.’

The Ladder of Divine Ascent is an important icon kept and exhibited at Saint Catherine’s Monastery, located at the base of Mount Sinai in Egypt. The gold background is typical of icons such as this, which was manufactured in the 12th century after a manuscript written by the 6th century monk John Climacus who based it on the biblical description of Jacob’s ladder. It depicts the ascent to Heaven by monks, some of whom fall and are dragged away by black demons. (The recent scenes of chaos at Kabul airport with people crowding up stairs to passenger jets and falling off military jets are unfortunately brought to mind)

Elites have always tried to keep a section of their loyal, unwavering followers on board with their ideology by doling out good jobs, high status symbolism (e.g. knighthoods), or good pay (for mercenaries). While they espouse democratic ideologies which imply that everyone is important, they are also very aware that their actions lead to mass resentment (e.g. massive national debts, unemployment, inflation, declining national health systems, etc.), and the potential for mass uprising. For this reason, for example, middle-class political police can be more important to the state than working-class national armies.

The mass media play an important role in reducing resentment by playing up the activities of politicians, ideologically controlling the news and history, and popularising the use of specific language.

Every time an idea critical of the ruling ideology becomes popular it is relabeled or branded with terms such as:’political correctness’ (covering up or trivialising legitimate concerns about “language or behavior that can be seen as excluding, marginalizing, or insulting to groups of people disadvantaged or discriminated against”); ‘cultural Marxism’ (covering up or trivialising legitimate concerns of, for example, feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights, etc); ‘conspiracy theory’ (covering up or trivialising legitimate concerns regarding anomalies in high profile events); ‘The Good Guys’/’The Bad Guys’ (covering up or trivialising legitimate concerns regarding who the state defines as progressive or reactionary); ‘wokism’ (covering up or trivialising legitimate concerns regarding racial prejudice, discrimination and social inequality, etc.); thereby sterilising the ideas and fitting them into ‘acceptable’, non-threatening language.

Every new deviation from the capitalist norm is diverted and instantly bubble-wrapped so that it does not impinge on the growing mass consciousness/suspicion that something is wrong. Whistleblowers are hounded (Assange, Snowden) and workers are kept quiet or ignored (Boeing).

Originally printed in New York World, October 30, 1884. Reprinted: Belshazzar Blaine and the Money Kings. HarpWeek. HarpWeek, LLC. A political cartoon parodying James G. Blaine. Wealthy and influential figures dine on dishes labeled “Lobby pudding”, “Monopoly soup”, “Navy contract”, etc. while a poor family begs.

Furthermore, Monolithism denies radical difference in ethnic groups (the most reactionary become the spokespersons of the group), while on a philosophical level Modernism, Postmodernism and Metamodernism deny reason and radical opposition. All with the promise that if you are good, if you behave yourself, you will be put on Santa’s nice list and become one of the chosen few when the financial/political/social catastrophe or cataclysm begins.

During the crisis, the rhetoric of universal protection collapses (neighbours shocked and disappointed), leading to struggle for survival in elite terms (bunkers, planes, boltholes).

The struggle for survival

It is then that the masses realise that they have been duped, misled, or even deluded. Because Greenland could be said to represent the ideology of the elites, then one sees the choices offered by the elites are: to be chosen or damnation, and no other possibilities. Similarly, when the elites represent the masses they are in negative terms of fear, for example, the symbolism of the masses of zombies in the film World War Z (2013). (See also my article on World War Z

Historically, mass uprisings result in a fundamental change in society, not a temporary blip in the ruling ideology, therefore elites have a good reason to be afraid. For example, the Great Fear in France in 1789 ultimately resulted in the end of its feudal system:

The members of the feudal aristocracy were forced to leave or fled on their own initiative; some aristocrats were captured and among them, there were reports of mistreatment such as beatings and humiliation, but there are only three confirmed cases of a landlord actually having been killed during the uprising. Although the Great Fear is usually associated with the peasantry, all the uprisings tended to involve all sectors of the local community, including some elite participants, such as artisans or well-to-do farmers. Often the bourgeoisie had as much to gain from the destruction of the feudal regime as did the poorer peasantry. Although the main phase of the Great Fear died out by August, peasant uprisings continued well into 1790, leaving few areas of France (primarily Alsace, Lorraine and Brittany) untouched. As a result of the “Great Fear”, the National Assembly, in an effort to appease the peasants and forestall further rural disorders, on 4 August 1789, formally abolished the “feudal regime”, including seigneurial rights.

“You should hope that this game will be over soon.”
Caricature of the Third Estate carrying the First Estate (clergy) and the Second Estate (nobility) on its back.

Current elite ideology of the future tends towards ideas of bringing about global governance, or post-apocalyptic colonies on earth, the Moon or Mars. Like lemmings going over a cliff (or the aristocracy of the eighteenth century), they can only imagine a future with themselves in total control, or total destruction.

Thule in Greenland, where there is an American military base, is symbolically appropriate as “in classical and medieval literature, ultima Thule (Latin ‘farthermost Thule’) acquired a metaphorical meaning of any distant place located beyond the “borders of the known world”.”

Unlike the destruction wrought by comet Clarke in Greenland, we are not doomed to be destroyed or hiding in bunkers because of an errant comet, but only condemned to have our future dictated to us forever – unless we take our destiny into our own hands.

The post The Great Fear: The Accelerating Apocalypse first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

The REAL First Rule of Fight Club

Mickey Z. — Sat, 24 Jul 2021 07:04:57 +0000

(Credit unknown)

Life in the United States of Algorithms has me thinking about Fight Club again — reading snippets, posting quotes, and watching YouTube clips until I finally gave it a re-watch. Such is the power of Fight Club. I saw it in the theater when it came out in 1999. It was love at first sight. Like the well-programmed white male “radical” I was, I swooned at the anarchy [sic] and anti-corporate virtue signaling and dutifully memorized Tyler Durden’s pithy one-liners. Over the ensuing years, I read the book a few times and re-watched the film version more than a few times.

Eventually, as I became “woke” to the once-invisible-to-me influences of patriarchy, I saw Fight Club quite differently. It suddenly appeared as a horrifying homage to male pattern violence, misogyny, and white supremacy. Middle-class white males were the “real” victims and the path to redemption was, of course, soaked in blood. I donated my copy of the book to the local library and stopped quoting Tyler Durden (at least, in public) lest I be accused of not being the “right” kind of feminist ally. The long relationship (I thought) was over and I was at a loss (I thought) — embarrassingly unsure what I ever saw in him in the first place.

More recently — identifying now as something along the lines of “ex-everything” — I re-visited my old crush. What I saw with my latest set of new eyes was astonishing. Fight Club is now a cautionary tale. Please allow me to introduce my final [sic] take on a piece of pop culture more than two decades old.

Robots in Uniforms

The Narrator (a.k.a. Edward Norton-Tyler) is an unhappy, unfulfilled, order-following corporate drone who seeks emotional emancipation by waging war against his cubicle and tie. In the process, he transforms into an unhappy, unfulfilled, order-following anti-corporate drone who misses the entire point of liberation. He’s a robot who switches uniforms without addressing his robot-ness.

Some of Brad Pitt-Tyler’s quotations are revolutionary and inspiring. Others are just as mundane, predictable, and banal as the corporate-speak Narrator-Tyler encounters while going through the motions of his job. The book’s author and film’s director weren’t (I hope) attempting to position the two versions of Tyler Durden as opposites. We aren’t being asked to choose sides in some kind of epic showdown. Instead, we are being implored to recognize and subsequently abandon groupthink.

The road to self-realization and deeper connections with others does not include trading one soul-crushing hive mind for another. It doesn’t mean we merely aim our strident arrogance in a new direction and label it evolution or revolution. And it probably doesn’t require us to punch anyone into submission as a recreational way to reconnect with our inner child and/or display our psychological independence.

Fight Club is a parable. It warns us about the seductiveness of conformity, the urge to surrender and delegate the hard work of emotional labor. Sure, the 9-to-5 grind is utterly inhuman. It requires us to compromise on far too many levels and it must be avoided at all costs. But the same can and must be said about all “activist” echo chambers — from MAGA to BLM and beyond.

Tyler DGAF

Despite all this, there is still value in modern men tuning into our own inner Durden. Brad Pitt-Tyler can teach us to clearly define what’s important to us, fashion a mission to guide our actions, have some laughs along the way, and not give too many fucks about contorting oneself into any societal box (especially if that box reads: IKEA). Call it, “the ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”

Edward Norton-Tyler tries to reign in the ugly and unnecessary aggression, delusion, and arrogance. To do so, he goes as far as shooting himself in the face just to stop Brad Pitt-Tyler’s misguided machinations. Edward Norton-Tyler teaches us that we can be truly decent people — even as we strive to vigorously reject the mainstream formula and embrace the subversive pleasure of critical thought. In the end, it’s Edward Norton-Tyler who reaches for Marla’s hand and offers an apology (of sorts) as the violent virtue-signaling plays out all around them.

We all have multiple personalities, contradictory ideals, and competing desires within us. They do not have to be labeled good or bad. What matters is how we manage such juxtapositions as they translate into daily behavior. In other words, the first rule of Fight Club is… balance.

The post The REAL First Rule of Fight Club first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

Going to Hell and Back: Fighting Our Worst Nightmare

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Sat, 24 Jul 2021 00:53:56 +0000

Theatrical poster

Interrogate the devil; he will tell you that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws and a tail.
Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary

Bullets of Justice is a gritty 2019 film made by Valeri Milev and Timur Turisbekov, which takes place in the United States during the Third World War. The story centres around Rob Justice, an ex-bounty hunter who is fighting a mixture of half humans and half pigs (human bodies and pig heads). They were bred under an American government secret project to create super soldiers called Muzzles. The project goes awry and years later the Muzzles are at the top of the food chain and are farming the remnants of the human race. Rob Justice is trying to find their source to eliminate the Muzzles once and for all. The film is shot with bleak scenes in very bleak colours and has quite explicit sexual and violent scenes. However, it also has a very dry sense of humour and can be very funny without intentionally playing for laughs.

Screenshot from Bullets of Justice (2019)

The whole premise of the film is based on the symbolic reversal of our treatment of animals as food products, and shown in all its horror. Muzzles fatten up humans in cages, kill them upside down in factories and throw corpses on to conveyor belts. Their meat is even tinned and sold (“Human Meat, Always Fresh, Steak from a well fed male”). The idea that humans are somehow ‘special’ and superior to animals is ‘debunked’. In an early scene the Grave-digger unearths a human skull and says to his kids: “See, they don’t go nowhere. They just turn into dirty old bones. God is a human mistake. We die ‘cos of some shit and we die full of shit.”

Screenshot from Bullets of Justice (2019)

There is an apocalyptic feeling to the film as humans are dying out and some strange human oddities form a resistance to the Muzzles (a woman with a prominent moustache, a fighter who can stop bullets with his chest, and a female leader who talks as if using a home-made speech synthesizer). However, we get the feeling that their resistance is pointless and the Muzzles are the strongest of the two opposing sets of monstrosities.

Screenshot from Bullets of Justice (2019)

The portrayal of human monsters is not new in culture as the depictions of the Golem, Frankenstein’s monster and Zombies makes apparent: representations of humans that cannot really live or reproduce, the symbols of anti-nature. Our anxieties about our position in the natural order of things and our treatment of animals have always been reflected in our beliefs and depictions of ourselves as a higher order and created by an omnipotent being.

However, our relations with animals has always been fraught, as Yuval Noah Harari writes:

About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story. The tragedy opens with a scene showing a rich and varied population of large animals, without any trace of Homo sapiens. In scene two, humans appear, evidenced by a fossilised bone, a spear point, or perhaps a campfire. Scene three quickly follows, in which men and women occupy centre-stage and most large animals, along with many smaller ones, have gone. Altogether, sapiens drove to extinction about 50% of all the large terrestrial mammals of the planet before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

The Golden Age

These realities contrast wildly with our mythical story-telling of a Golden Age when humans lived in “primordial peace, harmony, stability, and prosperity. During this age, peace and harmony prevailed in that people did not have to work to feed themselves, for the earth provided food in abundance.” And as Richard Heinberg has stated: Dicaearchus of the late fourth century BCE noted “of these primeval men […] that they took the life of no animal”.¹

Roman Orpheus mosaic, a very common subject. He wears a Phrygian cap and is surrounded by the animals charmed by his lyre-playing.

However, as the Golden Age declined through the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age, to the Iron Age, the dire warnings got direr. As men moved from the wondrous cornucopia of nature to the wars of extractivism, they paid a heavy price for their bloodlust. Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BC) wrote: “As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” Much later, Ovid (43 BC – 17/18 AD) follows up with similar sentiments:

Not so th’ Golden Age, who fed on fruit,
Nor durst with bloody meals their mouths pollute.
Then birds in airy space might safely move,
And tim’rous hares on heaths securely rove:
Nor needed fish the guileful hooks to fear,
For all was peaceful; and that peace sincere.
Whoever was the wretch, (and curs’d be he
That envy’d first our food’s simplicity!)
Th’ essay of bloody feasts on brutes began,
And after forg’d the sword to murder man.
— Ovid (43 BC – 17/18 AD) Metamorphoses Book 14

As Christianity took hold and changed the reverence for nature to the reverence for a monotheistic god, nature itself became demonised as the heavenly was substituted for the earthly. It is interesting to note the similarities between the Devil (“a pair of horns, four claws and a tail”) and the animal-like god of nature, Pan, “the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, and connected to fertility and the season of spring. Pan’s goatish image recalls conventional faun-like depictions of Satan.”

Hell

In medieval depictions of Hell, the Devil and his helpers torture humans. Hell, as Sartre has said “is other people” and, like packed trains and buses, always seems to have an awful lot of people crammed into very small places. Moreover, the animal-like Devil and his helpers seem to be like animals getting their revenge on humans by killing them and cooking them in the same way that humans kill and eat animals, by hanging them upside down (blood draining?), roasting over a fire on a spit, boiling in large vats, or baking in a fiery oven.

The Torments of Hell, French book illumination, 15th century. Illustration for Augustinius’, De civitate Dei, Bibliotheque de Ste. Genevieve Ms. 246, vol. 389.

It seems that deep in our psychology, the more we brutalise animals the more we fear that one day the animals will rise up and brutalise us. However, in some sense it is already happening. As Mike Anderson writes, they do get their revenge but in a slower, but just as deadly, way:

As far as eating is concerned, humans are the most stupid animals on the planet. We kill billions of wild animals to protect the animals that we eat. We are destroying our environment to feed to the animals we eat. We spend more time, money and resources fattening up the animals that we eat, than we do feeding humans who are dying of hunger. The greatest irony is that after all the expenses of raising these animals, we eat them; and they kill us slowly. And rather than recognise this madness, we torture and murder millions of other animals trying to find cures to diseases caused by eating animals in the first place.

In his article ‘Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history’, Yuval Noah Harari wrote:

The fate of industrially farmed animals is one of the most pressing ethical questions of our time. Tens of billions of sentient beings, each with complex sensations and emotions, live and die on a production line. Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. The march of human progress is strewn with dead animals.

At least in recent years, in tandem with the ever increasing herds and flocks of domesticated animals for human consumption, there has been the development of movements against the slaughter in animal rights activism. Peter Singer wrote about it in the 1970s in his book Animal Liberation and, inter alia, in the 2000s Joaquin Phoenix told us about this slaughter in two truly difficult-to-watch documentaries: Earthlings (2005) and Dominion (2018).

Colonialism and Genocide

Our attitude towards animals, our bloodthirstiness, has unfortunately carried over into our historical and current treatment of our fellow human beings in the form of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Joseph Conrad expressed it succinctly in his novel Heart of Darkness (1899) where Mr Kurtz (making a report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs) reveals his true colonial mentality when he writes ‘Exterminate all the brutes’. The colonial mindset that sees ethnic groups as not much better than animals (brutes) is predicated on the idea that the coloniser is somehow ‘superior’ and ‘civilised’ despite the fact that nowadays and ecology-wise, it is realised that these ‘primitive’ groups generally live in tune with nature rather than destroying it, as the ‘civilised’ West does. Sven Oskar Lindqvist (1932 – 2019) a Swedish author of mostly non-fiction, took Mr Kurtz’s exclamation as the title of his book on the history of colonialism and genocide, Exterminate All the Brutes (1992). The title was subsequently used again for a harrowing four part documentary series (2021) directed and narrated by Raoul Peck who worked with Lindqvist.

Punch (1881)

Furthermore, even in our more ‘enlightened’ era, our attitude towards animals as our fellow ‘earthlings’ has run into other, more serious problems, as Michael Cronin writes:

In more recent times, it is fears around what is seen as the neo-Malthusian pathology of deep ecology that prompts a reticence around stressing the animal nature of humans. In this reading of ecology, treating humans as one species among others leads inevitably to the conclusion that the only way to deal with human overpopulation is through the mass elimination of humans. As they would not enjoy higher ontological status than other species, such genocidal practices could be justified by the overall flourishing of species on the planet.²

Once again, our fears of our brutal selves lead us to try and characterise ourselves as more important than ‘mere’ animals in a self-defeating vicious cycle. Which brings us back to the point that Pythagoras made (‘as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other’). In other words, as long as we treat animals like ‘animals’ (brutes) we will treat each other like ‘animals’ too.

Richard Heinberg, (1989) Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age, Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, p. 48.
Michael Cronin, (2016) Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies), London: Routledge, p. 74.

The post Going to Hell and Back: Fighting Our Worst Nightmare first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

A Successful Combination of Inspiration and Perspiration

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Fri, 07 May 2021 04:07:04 +0000

Poster promoting the theatrical premiere of the 1954 American film Salt of the Earth at a (now demolished) theater on 86th Street in Manhattan. Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, who played the leading role, is shown.

Born in controversy but then ignored in its youth, the film Salt of the Earth has matured beautifully into a classic film in the neorealist style. Set in Zinc Town, New Mexico, a mining community with a majority of Mexican-Americans, strike for working conditions equal to those of the white, or “Anglo” miners. The town and the mine is run by Delaware Zinc Inc. who refuse to negotiate with the workers and the strike goes on for months. The story focuses on Ramon Quintero (Juan Chacón) and his wife Esperanza Quintero (Rosaura Revueltas) who is pregnant with their third child. Ramon is arrested by police and beaten in prison at the same time his wife gives birth to their new baby.When Ramon is released he counters resistance to his activities by Esperanza and he points out their struggle is for their children’s futures too. The company then uses the Taft-Hartley Act injunction on the union forbidding picketing. However, the wives realise there was nothing to stop them from taking the men’s places on the picket line. A lot of the men are quite traditional and are not happy seeing their wives on what can be a dangerous and violent place on picket lines. Ramon forbids Esperanza to go but eventually relents. However, as the full film is freely available online for you to watch on the Salt of the Earth wikipedia.org page, I will not go into full details here.

The involvement of the women is one of the most interesting aspects of the film as they rather timidly, at first, assert that their issues regarding hygiene (sanitation and ‘decent plumbing’) are as important as the safety of the men, and Esperanza is annoyed that ‘what the wives want always comes later’. Over time the women gain more experience dealing with the police and scabs, and consequently gain more confidence in their demands too. As the mine had already been unionised the film’s real narrative dwells more on showing the men how the union is strengthened by the involvement of the whole community.

Union Meeting

The production of Salt of the Earth faced many difficulties from locations, cameramen to actors. A small plane buzzed overhead and anti-communists fired at the sets. They eventually found a documentary cameraman who was willing to take the risks involved with working on the project. Later, Rosaura Revueltas (Esperanza Quintero) the lead actor, was deported to Mexico and the editors had to cut in previously filmed footage to finish the narrative.The origin of the film’s woes stretched back some years when the director Herbert Biberman refused to answer the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 on questions of affiliation to the Communist Party USA, and he became known as one of the Hollywood Ten who were cited and convicted for contempt of Congress and jailed. This meant that Biberman (as well as actors, screenwriters, directors, and musicians) were denied employment in the entertainment industry for years after. During the making of Salt of the Earth Biberman was hounded by Roy Brewer. Roy Martin Brewer (1909–2006) was an American trade union leader who was prominently involved in anti-communist activities in the 1940s and 1950s. He accompanied Ronald Reagan on his first visit to the White House.

Brewer tried many times to stop the production of Salt of the Earth. He believed that “officers of the Writers’ Guild were under the domination of the Communist Party until the hearings of 1947. During that time they began to change the mind, the creative minds, of the people who made these pictures and they didn’t do it by selling them communism. They got them to accept the idea that it was the obligation of a writer to put a message in the film.”

Paul Jarrico (1915–1997) the blacklisted American screenwriter and film producer of Salt of the Earth commented on Brewer’s statements:

The studio reluctance to make message movies started long before the blacklist and Brewer’s attribute to our cleverness in manipulating the culture of America is undeserved. We were unable to get anything more than the most moderate kind of reform messages into our films and if we thought we got some women treated as human beings rather than as sex objects we thought it was a big victory and in fact one of the reasons we made Salt of the Earth after we were blacklisted was to commit a crime worthy of the punishment having already been punished for subverting American films, it was all ridiculous.

Members of the Hollywood Ten and their families in 1950, protesting the impending incarceration of the ten

To make matters worse, Salt of the Earth had been sponsored by a Union (the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers) and many blacklisted Hollywood professionals helped produce it. After editing in secret, the release of the film was met with an American Legion call for a nationwide boycott and the majority of theaters refused to show it. For ten years the film was ignored in the USA while finding an audience and accolades in Eastern and Western Europe. In the 1960s the film was seen by larger audiences in union halls, women’s associations, and film schools.The narrative of the film was based on an actual strike which had occurred only a couple of years before the production of Salt of the Earth:

The film recreates the 1951-2 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in New Mexico where a court injunction barred workers of the Local 890 chapter of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Works from the picket line. As the strike continued, the community’s women assumed increasingly active leadership roles in the protests, defiantly picketing Empire Zinc themselves. The 15-month strike ultimately led to considerable gains for the workers and their families.

The film not only laudably covered labour rights and women’s rights but also minority rights. As Mercedes Mack writes:

On October 17, 1950, in Hanover, New Mexico, workers at the Empire Zinc mine finished their shifts, formed a picket line, and began a fifteen-month strike after attempts at union negotiation with the company reached an impasse. Miner demands included: equal pay to their White counterparts, paid holidays and equal housing. As a larger objective, the Local 890 Chapter of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers was to end the racial discrimination they suffered as a product of the institutions created by the Empire Zinc company in their town. For example, Mexican-American workers were subject to separate pay lines, unequal access to sanitation, electricity and paved streets as a result of discrimination by company sponsored housing, segregated movie theaters, etc. […] While women continued the strike, men assumed household duties and were not the center of the movement anymore. In January 1952, the strikers returned to work with a new contract improving wages and benefits. Several weeks later, Empire Zinc also installed hot water plumbing in Mexican American workers’ houses–a major issue pushed by the women of these households.

The producers and director used actual miners and their families as actors in the film in neorealist style. Christopher Capozzola describes how:

Paul and Sylvia Jarrico heard of the strike and went to Grant County to walk the picket line; within a year, Michael Wilson was in town. Although Wilson started the script, the men and women of Local 890 finished it, insisting in the era of Ricky Ricardo that Latino/a characters would be favorably presented in the mass media. Biberman cast only five professional actors, among them a young Will Geer (better known to television viewers as the folksy Grandpa Walton) and the leftist Mexican actress Rosaria Revueltas, who called Salt of the Earth “the film I wanted to do my whole life.” Strike participants filled the ranks, most memorably Juan Chacón, who played the leading role of Ramón Quintero. His emotional richness and sly humor make him far and away the film’s best performer.

Juan Chacón as Ramón Quintero in Salt of the Earth

In 1982, a documentary about the making of Salt of the Earth was released, titled A Crime to Fit the Punishment and was directed by Barbara Moss and Stephen Mack. The full documentary can be seen online here.The making of Salt of the Earth was also the subject of a Spanish-British bio-picture in 2000. The film, titled One of the Hollywood Ten, was written and directed by Karl Francis and stars Jeff Goldblum and Greta Scacchi.

Theatrical release poster of One of the Hollywood Ten with Jeff Goldblum as Herbert Biberman

Salt of the Earth still stands up there as one of the great union films along with Blue Collar (1978) and Norma Rae (1979). However, its authenticity and sincerity arising from working directly with workers, and its successful production despite so many obstacles put in its way, will make it one of the most inspiring union films ever produced.

The post A Successful Combination of Inspiration and Perspiration first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

A successful combination of inspiration and perspiration

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Fri, 07 May 2021 04:07:04 +0000

Union Meeting

Paul Jarrico (1915–1997) the blacklisted American screenwriter and film producer of Salt of the Earth commented on Brewer’s statements:

The studio reluctance to make message movies started long before the blacklist and Brewer’s attribute to our cleverness in manipulating the culture of America is undeserved. We were unable to get anything more than the most moderate kind of reform messages into our films and if we thought we got some women treated as human beings rather than as sex objects we thought it was a big victory and in fact one of the reasons we made Salt of the Earth after we were blacklisted was to commit a crime worthy of the punishment having already been punished for subverting American films, it was all ridiculous.

Members of the Hollywood Ten and their families in 1950, protesting the impending incarceration of the ten

The film recreates the 1951-2 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in New Mexico where a court injunction barred workers of the Local 890 chapter of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Works from the picket line. As the strike continued, the community’s women assumed increasingly active leadership roles in the protests, defiantly picketing Empire Zinc themselves. The 15-month strike ultimately led to considerable gains for the workers and their families.

The film not only laudably covered labour rights and women’s rights but also minority rights. As Mercedes Mack writes:

On October 17, 1950, in Hanover, New Mexico, workers at the Empire Zinc mine finished their shifts, formed a picket line, and began a fifteen-month strike after attempts at union negotiation with the company reached an impasse. Miner demands included: equal pay to their White counterparts, paid holidays and equal housing. As a larger objective, the Local 890 Chapter of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers was to end the racial discrimination they suffered as a product of the institutions created by the Empire Zinc company in their town. For example, Mexican-American workers were subject to separate pay lines, unequal access to sanitation, electricity and paved streets as a result of discrimination by company sponsored housing, segregated movie theaters, etc. […] While women continued the strike, men assumed household duties and were not the center of the movement anymore. In January 1952, the strikers returned to work with a new contract improving wages and benefits. Several weeks later, Empire Zinc also installed hot water plumbing in Mexican American workers’ houses–a major issue pushed by the women of these households.

The producers and director used actual miners and their families as actors in the film in neorealist style. Christopher Capozzola describes how:

Paul and Sylvia Jarrico heard of the strike and went to Grant County to walk the picket line; within a year, Michael Wilson was in town. Although Wilson started the script, the men and women of Local 890 finished it, insisting in the era of Ricky Ricardo that Latino/a characters would be favorably presented in the mass media. Biberman cast only five professional actors, among them a young Will Geer (better known to television viewers as the folksy Grandpa Walton) and the leftist Mexican actress Rosaria Revueltas, who called Salt of the Earth “the film I wanted to do my whole life.” Strike participants filled the ranks, most memorably Juan Chacón, who played the leading role of Ramón Quintero. His emotional richness and sly humor make him far and away the film’s best performer.

Juan Chacón as Ramón Quintero in Salt of the Earth

Theatrical release poster of One of the Hollywood Ten with Jeff Goldblum as Herbert Biberman

Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at http://gaelart.blogspot.ie/. Read other articles by Caoimhghin.

This article was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2021 at 9:07pm and is filed under Film Review.

Gunda:My Porcinus Teacher

Randy Shields — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 08:14:42 +0000

Over the years as an animal activist I’ve shown many films of graphic animal cruelty, both in class rooms and out in the streets. Except for the granddaddy of them all, 1981’s The Animals Film, there is very little art about them. Mostly, they’re just blood and guts.

And I’m a big believer in showing blood and guts because if they are left out completely — as in The End of Meat (2017) or Eating Animals (2018) — the films don’t engage the emotions and are forgotten about the next day. Without the suffering and killing there’s no sense of urgency and we are left wondering exactly what the stakes/steaks are. Absent this truth, these films feel hollow no matter how well-intentioned and researched.

Finding a balance between keeping people watching, showing the cruelty, making a lasting impression and inspiring change has always been difficult.

In contrast to the wildly colorful, fast-moving sea creatures and unpredictable underworld of My Octopus Teacher, Viktor Kossakovsky’s black and white, narrator-less, music-less slow-moving Gunda charts a completely different course.

Gunda (German for “female warrior”) is a mother pig raising a dozen piglets on a good-as-it-gets “traditional” farm in Norway which bears no resemblance to how 99% of pigs are raised in industrialized countries. This makes the emotional wallop of the film’s ending all the more impactful.

Gunda and her babies are followed from birth to four months old. To facilitate camera work, the film crew built Gunda an ingenious small barn with a very key small squarish opening where much of the film’s “action” takes place. The pigs can go in and out when they want, roam a field, root in the dirt and take mud baths. There’s no scenes of killing or graphic cruelty. No humans are ever pictured. The film goes at the pace that the animals live their lives with only the ambient noise of the farm: grunts, squeals, snorts, oinks, clucks, buzzing flies, chirping birds, wind rustling over grass, an airplane, a muffled hammer pounding in the distance.

Gunda is generally a very exhausted mother. She nurses, corrects, cleans, corrals, leads, herds with her snout and occasionally tries to make some alone time. Usually, though, she’s rolling her enormous self over so the piglets can feed again. The curious piglets play, fight, bite, feint, tumble, run, chase and climb Gunda like the mountain she is. One of the most memorable scenes is when a downpour begins and several of her offspring take turns coming out of the barn, raise their heads to the sky and drink in the rain drops. Another striking image is Gunda filmed through the small barn door, her face, ears and hair outlined in a white almost neon-like light.

Even more so than the cat’s-eye view of Istanbul in 2016’s Kedi, the pig’s-eye view of Gunda’s world is stunningly intimate and makes us completely forget that there are filmmakers anywhere around capturing the minute sounds, close ups and scenes of piglets on the run. (Kossakovsky, who directed the highly-acclaimed Aquarela, says that most of the time on the farm wasn’t spent filming — only six hours of footage was shot — but hanging out and gaining the trust of the animals.) Not distracted by color, we pay much more attention to the expressions on the animals’ faces. We see them as they are: friendly playful beings more intelligent than dogs.

Also in the film are scenes from a couple animal sanctuaries where raggedy battery-caged hens are released into a field, taking their first-ever tentative steps in a strange new world of grass and soil — the real world that humans have deprived them of their entire lives. A one-legged chicken pecks and hops up on a log, seemingly showing the instant acceptance of life as it is and the desire to live at all costs.

On another farm a large and quasi-liberated herd of cows bounds out of a barn into a field in a slow motion dream-like sequence. Once they stop several of them stand parallel to each other, heads to butts, and switch their tails to keep flies off the faces of their friends. Kossakovsky isn’t condemning the human animals watching Gunda but — with their tagged ears and accusatory looks — the eyes of the cows are.

I’m going to reveal the ending of Gunda because I don’t think it takes away anything from the experience of watching it.

After about 75 minutes of the sights and sounds of this mostly peaceable kingdom there is a shocking jolt when a deafening tractor appears near Gunda’s barn. Initially we assume this tractor is there to plow a field but, no, this tractor — sounding like a helicopter, sounding like war — is hauling a rectangular container that is backed up to the barn door and — unseen to viewers — an unseen human animal is loading up all of Gunda’s screaming offspring to go to the slaughterhouse. In a wild intuitive foreshadowing, just before the tractor appears, Gunda lies in the small doorway where her family has spent most of their lives and looks nothing like she has for the entire film — she looks incredibly sad, like she’s crying. She looks like she knows. Did she hear the familiar horrible sound of the tractor before we did? Who made this movie? Was it someone named Viktor Kossakovsky or a gigantic sow named Gunda and her family? I think they all did.

(Now you see them, now you don’t. You get to know them, you marvel at them, you root for them, then you kill them. And you pretend that you aren’t a monster and that you — for some strange reason — deserve mercy and justice and consideration when you won’t show them any. And the next time you see them they won’t look anything like they do in this film — they’ll be sliced and diced and wrapped in plastic, their gray/green color temporarily covered up by nitrates and nitrites to make them look pink, reddish and “fresh,” heavily salted and perhaps seasoned with growth hormones and antibiotics so you can imagine that you’re eating anything other than a rapidly decaying corpse. Because it’s “natural.”)

The container is raised up and the tractor drives away. The initial zeroing in of the camera on the gigantic tractor wheel makes the connection to the creation of the wheel thousands of years ago and our destructive reign on this planet. (What’s been more destructive to the earth and non-humans than the wheel and its roads?)

Now, for the first time in the movie, Gunda is animated and alarmed, not the lumbering hulk we’ve seen so far, and she runs after the tractor and her screaming, squealing family. The tractor disappears and several times she comes to the barn door and then turns around, as if going back inside would be giving up on finding them so she runs around and continues to look.

Gunda has as much anguish in her eyes as any human ever had. The last time we see her she’s looking for help — from any of us, from all of us. Defeated by the human monster (I repeat myself), she disappears into the darkness of the barn, Kossakovsky lingering on that small squarish doorway, a black hole… of what? Greed? Indifference? Empathy-less humans? Our conditioned ethical blindness? The narrow dark selfish merciless completely unnecessary mind-tunnel that we choose to live in?

We wonder how many times throughout Gunda’s life this has happened. The lives are stolen, the family bonds are broken, her labor is stolen, just as working class labor is stolen — but every human worker has that capability to victimize some weaker species and be their own little capitalist scumbag and tell themselves that oppression and being a slavemaster are “normal” and “right.” (According to Kossakovsky, Gunda’s owner says she won’t be bred again and will live out the rest of her life on the farm.)

My Octopus Teacher shows that fascinating interspecies bonds can be formed with seemingly the strangest creatures if humans have patience and dispense with fear, hate and aggression — if our role models were capybaras that’s all we’d have to do. The artistry of Gunda shows that there are other ways to reach the meat eating masses that don’t involve showing killing, blood or brutality and yet still pack an emotional and memorable punch.

No one can accuse Gunda of anthropomorphizing. If you as a viewer think there is any anthropomorphizing in Gunda you should have the honesty to admit that — for all intents and porpoises (and octopuses and porcines) — these are people, as are all the rest of the furred, finned and feathered — and then figure out a just, humane and miraculous way to go forward in the world.

This article was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2021 at 1:14am and is filed under Film Review.

Kalashnikov: the amateur inventor who shot to global fame

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 07:44:24 +0000

AK-47: Kalashnikov (2020) is a biographical film about Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919–2013), the inventor and designer of the AK-47 automatic rifle. This Russian film, released in February of last year, follows the young Kalashnikov as he is bombarded by Germans during WWII and is interspersed with flashbacks of his childhood. Disturbed by the failure of a newly designed gun that nearly gets a comrade killed when it jams, he examines the parts and lists out various problems with the new design. An amateur inventor who had been playing around with various types of primitive gun designs since he was child, Kalashnikov goes back to work in a steam engine workshop after being injured in battle. There he is assigned a desk and tools, and struggles to assemble a new gun design he had been drawing up. Help is at hand when the other workers in the workshop offer their after-hours services to help him tool the parts necessary for his new design. After this, his life takes many twists and turns as he struggles to perfect his design and gain acceptance through inventor competitions, testing ranges and the military hierarchy.

The story focuses on his drive and sincerity in producing a safer gun that would help the Soviets win the war. Although the gun he is famous for was not produced until 1947 (“Avtomát Kaláshnikova” (Russian: Автома́т Кала́шникова, lit. ‘Kalashnikov’s Automatic Gun’), its reliability and design ensured its wide use in many armies around the world in subsequent decades. The film also strives to show Kalashnikov as a role model for how someone with a basic education (Kalashnikov left school after seventh grade) can achieve so much in the way of plaudits and global fame.

In AK-47: Kalashnikov, the testing processes of the gun were not complete successes but Kalashnikov is given more promotions and more help in developing his ideas. With the development of new technologies, a simplified, lighter version of the automatic rifle was developed which soon became the most ubiquitous variant of the AK-47. In the real world, the popularity of the design meant that “approximately 100 million AK-47 assault rifles had been produced by 2009, and about half of them are counterfeit, manufactured at a rate of about a million per year. Izhmash, the official manufacturer of AK-47 in Russia, did not patent the weapon until 1997, and in 2006 accounted for only 10% of the world’s production.”

Kalashnikov’s first submachine gun

The film is beautifully shot with realistic battle scenes and panoramic landscape settings. The relations between the soldiers, and between the soldiers and their superiors are developed without the stereotyped or charicatured portrayals seen in films like Enemy at the Gates (2001), as Kalashnikov gets help and encouragement all around him, even at his lowest points when he feels like giving up. Moreover, in these days of instant-everything and easy consumption access to any product, it is refreshing to see male and female workers with so many skills (including his drafting technician who becomes his wife) bringing an idea from drawings through precision tooling to the finished gleaming weapon.

Kalashnikov himself did suffer “spiritual pain” about whether he was responsible for the deaths caused by his weapons, but also believed that their use was defensive rather than offensive. The AK-47 has been used in many anti-colonial wars and received the ultimate praise when appearing on some national flags and coats of arms. Of course, like any weapon his guns have been used in terrorist organisations but one could argue that overall its reliability and simplicity evened up the stakes in many an asymmetrical war.

Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919–2013)
Kalashnikov at the Kremlin, December 2009

Kalashnikov was hospitalized on 17 November 2013, in Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurtia and where he lived and died on 23 December 2013, at age 94 from gastric hemorrhage. A statue dedicated to Kalashnikov was commissioned by the Russian Military Historical Society and unveiled in Moscow in 2017. It is a 7.5m (25ft) monument, which shows Kalashnikov holding an AK-47 in his arms. However, it was soon spotted that the technical drawing of the gun etched onto a metallic plate at the base of the monument was actually of an StG 44 rifle used by the Nazis during WWII.

The symbolism of this mistake was not lost on the public, a country that lost millions of its people at the hands of the Nazi invasion which started on Sunday, 22 June 1941. The section of the metallic plate with the gun design was soon removed with an angle grinder.

This article was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2021 at 12:44am and is filed under Film Review.

A History of Warring on the Homefront

Mickey Huff — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 16:49:12 +0000

Scott Noble’s latest documentary series, The War at Home, takes a deep dive into the history of labor movements and state repression in the United States. Soon to be a multi-part series, the first entry is titled “Rebellion” and can be viewed online for free [and below]. As with all of Noble’s films, The War at Home is meticulously researched and weaves a rich tapestry of primary and secondary sources and documents, including amazing period footage of momentous yet often little-remembered (or effectively censored) events. Punctuated by classic American folk and blues music, it is as much a celebration of America’s rebels as a condemnation of its injustices.

[embedded content]

The film looks at history through the lens of the working class, beginning with the Haymarket Massacre of 1886 in Chicago, continuing through the spread of Jim Crow in Louisiana, to the Triangle Shirtwaist tragedy of 1911, and on to the violent strikes and police crackdowns of the Great Depression. In the first few minutes alone, the film tackles the concept of “wage-slavery,” noting that the great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially rejected the term, yet later conceded, “there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery.” Conservatives who have re-branded themselves “classical liberals” may be surprised to learn that 19th century English philosopher John Stuart Mill believed that wage-labor would soon be replaced by something more amendable to the majority, as it was not a “satisfactory state to human beings.”

The period of industrialization following the Civil War had a brutalizing effect on most Americans, creating horrendous working conditions and giving rise to the first labor unions, as well as more radical movements devoted to various forms of socialism. Noble connects the dots between the rise of industrial capitalism, mass corporate profits, and the suppression/exploitation of labor along with affiliated radical political adherents, eventually leading to international conflicts and destruction on a scale the world had never before seen.

Particular attention is paid to the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (aka “the Wobblies”), who as the film notes were the first American union “to reject all divisions among workers, even that of nationality.” At a time when racial issues are occupying much of our public discourse, the film reminds us that racial conflict and white supremacy have always been intentionally fostered by America’s ruling class, pitting workers against one another to prevent class solidarity. Though the Wobblies were non-violent, they embraced an overtly anti-capitalist and revolutionary doctrine (the Wobblies have undergone a resurgence in recent years, though have yet to approach their former heights).

Noble highlights how these struggles put common people in the crosshairs of their own civil institutions. Time after time, authorities responded to union organizing with extreme violence, often via the National Guard. When combined with the equally violent counter-insurgency methods of private armies like the Pinkertons, it was perhaps inevitable that some workers responded with violence of their own. The “propaganda of the deed” campaign, which originated in Europe, saw anarchists engage in assassinations and bombings of ruling class figures, undertaken with the hope of spurring on the masses to revolution. Instead, the campaign mostly had the effect of increasing state repression. In the United States, the most deadly and dramatic of these incidents was the bombing of Wall Street in 1920 (the film adds a grimly ironic historical footnote, namely that Wall Street was originally founded as a slave market).

The Industrial Workers of the World (and socialists of all stripes) were viciously repressed during WWI, often under the pretense that they were saboteurs working for Imperial Germany. New legislation such as the Espionage Act and later the Sedition Act provided broad authority to the Bureau (later Federal Bureau) of Investigation, resulting in the Palmer Raids and the deportation of hundreds of people, mostly poor immigrants. Leading the assault was a young J. Edgar Hoover, initially the head of the “radical division” or G.I.D. According to a later report, constitutional violations became a matter of routine. Mass surveillance was implemented against dissidents, ranging from the NAACP to Hellen Keller, a socialist and the first deaf and blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. People were beaten and sent to jail without trial or warrant. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs was imprisoned after delivering an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio (stating that he would not “go to war for Wall Street”). Equally damaging to radical union organizers were the introduction of “criminal syndicalism” laws passed at the state level. The laws were so broad in their wording that “loitering on the job” could be classified as “sabotage.”

Discussion in The War at Home of repression during WWI and the Red Scare includes an analysis of propaganda and information control (looking at the influences of Walter Lippmann, George Creel, and Edward Bernays among others), and how such campaigns paved the way for social/political acceptance of such repression. Conscription is also highlighted as a serious injustice (most American men who fought and died in WWI did not do so voluntarily). The anarchist Emma Goldman spearheaded a legal challenge to outlaw the practice, arguing that it violated the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against involuntarily servitude. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the petition.

The film draws a link between the purging of radicals from labor unions and the decline of union power during the 1920s. Following the Bolshevik revolution, mainstream unions such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) ejected communist members, while business organizations simultaneously portrayed unions as a communist plot. The Socialist Party fractured after a majority of their members voted to support the Comintern in Russia. Minimum wage laws were struck down. The drunken exuberance of the wealthy during the “roaring twenties” is contrasted with the poverty of the majority (as well their hellish workplaces, epitomized by soul-destroying assembly lines under the corporate metric tyranny of Taylorism).

The final section of the film deals with events during the Great Depression, emphasizing the great labor strikes of 1934. Many of these strikes, including those in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis, were led by communists. In Minneapolis, militant Trotskyists created alliances with farmers and encouraged everyone connected to the delivery process to join in the strike – not just truckers. The events of 1934 were instrumental both to the creation of Congress of Industrial Organizations (CEO), which sought to organize unskilled workers, and various New Deal measures adopted by president Franklin. D. Roosevelt (FDR). Increasingly frightened of rebellion from below, certain segments of the ruling class actually supported FDR’s reforms.

Based on research from historians like Howard Zinn, Sharon Smith, Peter Kuznick, Peter Rachleff, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, The War at Home – Rebellion exposes the roots of America’s class war on its own people. If this montage paints what seems a grim portrait of US history, it is because most students are rarely presented with the Untold History that Noble explores. But the story he tells is not a bleak one, rather, it is ultimately a history of hope and struggle, of progress and perseverance. It shows just how powerful we the people can be when we work together against the odds, against our myriad oppressors.

Glimpses of genuine worker solidarity and triumph appear at various stages of the film: the Wobblies overcoming free speech prohibitions in the early 20th century; the Lawrence Textile strike, which involved immigrant workers (mostly women) from dozens of different nationalities; the Seattle General strike of 1919, which saw workers taking over the entire city for a brief time period; the great sit-down strikes of 1936-37, by which workers successfully challenged some of the largest corporations in the country and indeed the world.

In a time when many are questioning institutional integrity across society, seeking accurate and relevant information to help make sense of our supposedly post-truth era, Noble shines a spotlight into our dark past while providing a crucial class context often missing or obscured in mainstreamed accounts. It is precisely this sort of work that can provide a foundation for mapping a better, brighter, and more just future for all.

As I write this, Noble promises to upload part II of The War at Home, titled “Blacklist.” It explores the years 1936 to 1956, and ends with the word “COINTELPRO.” All of Noble’s films can be viewed at his website. He is currently seeking support for Part III, which will cover the 1960s.

Having seen all of Noble’s previous films, it is safe to say that once completing the series, he will have provided yet another stellar resource for educators and others who seek a deeper understanding of the world’s most powerful hegemon, and of its many oppressed inhabitants fighting for liberty and democracy in the United States of America.

First published at Project Censored.

Mickey Huff is director of Project Censored and president of its parent nonprofit the Media Freedom Foundation. He is also Professor of Social Science/History, and Journalism; Chair of Journalism, and Co-chair of History, at Diablo Valley College in Northern California. Recently, he was co-author with Nolan Higdon of United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (and what we can do about it); and co-editor with Andy Lee Roth of Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2021. Huff is the executive producer and co-founding host, along with Peter Phillips, of The Project Censored Show, a syndicated weekly public affairs program on Pacifica Radio that’s been on the air since 2010. Contact: Mickey@projectcensored.org. Read other articles by Mickey.

This article was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2021 at 9:49am and is filed under Anarchism, Film Review, History, Labor, Unions.

USSR to Russia

William Manson — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 04:09:29 +0000

In the early 1960s, the intensifying Cold War confrontation between the U.S. and the USSR was not only a terrifying nuclear-arms race, but also a struggle for prestige and influence vis-a-vis non-aligned Third World nations. The “Soviet” Union — founded on the promise of a dictatorship of proletarian councils — had long since become a highly centralized and corrupt, Party-run system, in which massive worker uprisings could only prove embarrassing in the “court of world opinion” (and dangerously disillusioning to the well-indoctrinated populace). Thus, the efficient cover-up of this 1962 massacre of striking workers at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant — which is realistically depicted, with some fictional elements, by director Konchalovsky (Siberiade, Runaway Train).

Lest American viewers come away feeling overly complacent about their “democracy,” the rarely acknowledged 1894 massacre of Pullman strikers by 12,000 U.S. Army troops bears some startling resemblance to the events depicted. Even so, in more recent decades, U.S. administrations have preferred to “export” their initiated and/or heavily backed massacres (Indonesia, East Timor, e.g.; cf. also documentaries The Panama Deception and RAI’s Fallujah, the Hidden Massacre).

The fact that the making of this film was heavily funded by Russia’s Ministry of Culture should also alert us to its possible use as favorable propaganda for President Putin. Young Russians, many of whom remember little about the Soviet Union, may come away with the impression that living under Putin’s government must be “much better” than under Krushchev’s Communist regime. (Under Putin, brutal suppression of rebellion has been more likely to occur, from time to time, in remote regions like Chechnya.) I particularly found the movie’s ending suspect: in the aftermath of the killings, having feared that her daughter was among the dead, stalwart Communist official Lyudmila expresses nostalgia for the days of Stalin (who “reduced food prices”) — and also comes to appreciate her KGB acquaintance as basically a helpful, nice guy. Former KGB operative Putin, who reportedly plans to oversee Russia for a longer period than Stalin’s reign, would most likely appreciate the character Lyudmila’s outlook.

The script could also have provided more explanation for the causes of the events depicted. Why the increase in food prices in the first place — which first ignited the workers’ rage? Bad harvest, hoarding (price-fixing), and/or diversion of budget into “defense”? Why did plant managers cut wages precisely at this time (talk about bad timing)? And why didn’t the higher-ups immediately reverse this terribly ill-timed measure — thereby quelling the massive spread of the labor protests? The film does seem to depict realistically an incompetent, decision-evading process, whereby officials preferred a brutal “quick fix” to patiently resolving the crisis (and possibly being blamed for ineffectiveness). In sum, this viewer is left with many unanswered questions. Of course, the ultimate irony, historically, is that Poland’s Solidarity labor movement, begun in 1980 among Gdansk dockworkers, was the beginning of the end for the bureaucratic Communist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe.

This article was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2021 at 9:09pm and is filed under Cold War, Film Review, Russia, The Soviet Union.

Same Procedure as Every Year: The Story of Dinner for One

Binoy Kampmark — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 07:44:18 +0000

Memories are thick of this: the respectful, even reverential German introduction of a comedy sketch; the scratchy string orchestral music that adds a layering of anticipation. Black-and-white film. Dining room, white tablecloth, silver chandeliers. The names Freddy Frinton and May Warden. An English show broadcast on German public TV networks without subtitles. Family members, perched, sprawled, slumped, comfortable, lightly sozzled, eyes glued to an 18-minute sketch with only two actors: the attentive butler by the name of James, played by the roguish Frinton; the spinster lady of the birthday moment, Miss Sophie, played by Warden.

This 90th birthday is characterised by notable absences. After nine decades, mortality has done its bit of gathering. The venerable lady has been left the sole survivor of a circle of beloved friends. The bawdy subtext here is that they are all males and must have been a rather naughty crew at that. She misses them, and longs for their company.

The task for James seems, at least initially, innocuous. The table, with Miss Sophie at the head, is set for the spectral guests: Admiral von Schneider, Mr Pomeroy, Sir Toby and Mr Winterbottom. James assumes the role of each of the departed, standing before each empty seat for each course that will be served. “They are all here, Miss Sophie,” begins James. But his task is not merely to mimic them and assume their persona with conviction; he is also required to drink their share. The task is formidable, challenging both sobriety and liver. A different set of drinks must accompany the servings for the phantom guests: sherry with the mulligatawny soup; white wine with the fish; champagne with the bird; port with the fruit.

Through the course of the sketch, there are the tireless favourites for the audience. James trips over the head of a tiger skin rug with stubborn, unfailing regularity. Drinks are poured and drunk with gusto. Drinks are spilled. There is slurring. Before each course, the butler always inquires with increasing desperation: “The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?” The insistent reply follows: “The same procedure as every year, James.”

Dinner for One, or the 90th Birthday, was recorded in 1963 and found a ceremonial home across Germany’s regional public TV channels. Scribbled by Lauri Wylie in the 1920s, it had its London premier in 1948, making its way to Broadway in 1953. Frinton secured the rights in the 1950s. Both he and May had been performing it as a routine seaside resort gig, very much a music hall staple destined for modest obscurity. In 1963, German TV presenter Peter Frankenfeld, on a mission of cultural reconnaissance, was in one of those audiences in Blackpool. He fell in love. Frinton and May were invited to perform on his program Guten Abend before a live Hamburg audience at the Theater am Besenbinderhof, where it was recorded by NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk). In 1972, the ritual of showing the program as a New Year’s Eve special was established.

The date, Dinner for One retains the Guinness World Record for the most repeated program in history. It has created a commemorative industry in Germany. It spurs drinking competitions and inspires cookery. It has even inspired productions in various dialects: Hessian and Kölsch.

In 2017, more than 12 million Germans saw the show. But it remains unknown, for the most part, to audiences in the US and UK. Of the Anglophone states, Australia has had a decent, smattering acquaintance. Northern European states in Scandinavia and the Baltic are also familiar. It took till December 31, 2018 for the production to be shown in Britain.

Dinner for One has managed to emerge from its subcultural cocoon in music hall entertainment and heavy German consumption. Netflix took interest in it in 2016, if only to promote its own programs with a parody. The imaginary guests, on that occasion, were Saul Goodman (Michael Pan in Better Call Saul); Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey in House of Cards), Pablo Escobar (Wagner Moura in Nacros) and Crazy Eyes (Uzo Aduba in Orange in the New Black).

As with all rituals, viewing Dinner for One comes with its presumptive historical and cultural baggage. For German audiences, this is a British museum piece with perennial relevance. There is more than a tang of hierarchy to it. Frinton and May converse in a setting of nostalgia and the whiff of a departed empire. Stefanie Bolzen, the UK and Ireland correspondent for Die Welt, was not wrong to wonder if the sketch had re-enforced such assumptions celebrated by the staunchest Brexiteers. The UK is leaving the European Union, but this little jewel of British slapstick remains the emotional preserve of German audiences, so much so it has become indigenous.

This article was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2020 at 11:44pm and is filed under Film Review, Germany, United Kingdom.

Moore’s Law of Entropy

John Hawkins — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 16:16:40 +0000

There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that, everything is possible.

— Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942-51

For those of us who grew up watching Charlton Heston films, we can recall enactments of heroic courage, both in the early development and later downward decline of human civilization. Heston gave us a magnificent Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), returning all scraggly from the wilderness, like some people I knew in the Sixties returning from poetry communes, holding up that Decalogue in revolutionary resistance to the gold lust of Baal. He refused to be a slave in Ben Hur (1959). He gave us a Live Free or Die kind of ethos. No debt slavery, no bondage of any kind.

Toward the end of his career, Heston got dyspeptic over gun control and dystopic in his roles, teaming up with Edward G. Robinson (his last film role) in Soylent Green (1973) as Detective Thorn, a contraband-sniffing cop for the State in a world catastrophically fucked up by climate change and overpopulation and resorting to cannibalism (recycled humans, get it?) that he has a late epiphany as he watches his good friend, Sol, old enough to remember beauty, die by euthanasia, fading to a surround screen explosion of splendor and Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony. He’s been told stories by Sol, but Thorn has never seen this before and he weeps, as if to say: My god, that’s the way it used to be?

But arguably his most important role came a few years earlier in Planet of the Apes, where he plays astronaut George Taylor, who, inadvertently time travels, and comes to realize that he’s landed on the future Earth controlled by fascist orangutans. Who can forget the final beach scene, Lady Liberty buried in sand, while an epiphanal Taylor exclaims, “Goddamn you all to hell!” When I remember his roles as a revolutionary, and an orbiter, I’m almost willing to cut him some slack for his last role, before dying, as president of the National Rifle Association, where he promised you’d have to pry his gun from his “cold, dead hands.” (Damn, the way things are going, we may need those 400 million guns after all.)

Apparently, the Taylor role is the one Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs chose to remember for Planet of the Humans, a recently released film on the politics of things Green and the looming environmental catastrophe ahead, once we knock back Covid-19 with some more Happy Zoom and recreational therapy Corona mask decorations. The film is written and directed by Gibbs; Moore was executive producer. The film was released on YouTube, in time for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day (remember Earth?), and was available for viewing for free, until “controversy” over 4 seconds of Fair Use footage caused the film to be pulled by Google. It has since been put up, in its entirety, on Vimeo, without incident thus far.

As we recall, the last time Moore and Heston came head-to-head was in Bowling for Columbine (2002), and things got ugly during the interview, with Moore shooting his mouth off about Heston’s gun rhetoric, but not so much guns themselves (Moore is a member of the NRA). The question is: Why did Moore and Gibbs bring back Heston from the dead to ‘headline’ their environmental film? The answer is simple: Astronaut Taylor realized that They went ahead and did it: They blew up the planet despite years of warnings of impending catastrophe. And Moore and Gibbs are promoting the notion in their new film that we’re an environmental flashpoint away from a planet ruled by fascist orangutans. (Trump as omen.)

As you could almost guess from the title, the film wants to show and explain to us what happens when one species — guess which one — takes over the planet and shits repeatedly in its own well-feathered bed. Well, it’s a Michael Moore film (executive producer), so you can probably see where the film goes, after an opening sequence where passersby are asked the loaded gun of a question: How much longer do you think the human race has? Typically, no one has a clue. Then the soundtrack vibes somber synthetic, Gibbs’ voice-over all disillusioned monotone. Recalls Fahrenheit 9/11. Another bummer rant from Moore ahead.

According to Rolling Stone, “Moore and Gibbs said they decided to release it now, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the hopes of getting people to reflect on ‘the role humans and their behavior have played in our fragile ecosystem.’” This hope seems promising, on the surface, where most of us interface and internet, and so many people have already expressed wonderment at how much the world will have changed while we’ve been in ‘lockdown’. Prisoners opine that way: I wonder how the world will be, without me, in 5 to10.

But, we have people expressing the sentiment after just two months of half-assed ‘self-isolation’ (though increased internet activity). The New Yorker has weighed in for the comfy middle class. Psychology Today speaks for the masses. Yesterday, I watched masked baseballers play in an empty stadium (big screens inexplicably lit up) and thought I was hallucinating: How come this vision (of the future) doesn’t scare the shit out of us? (Plus, these guys like to spit: Yuck, when they remove their masks!)

Planet of the Humans is a tone poem more than a documentary. The vision is in the title. It suggests not so much defeatism as disturbing resignation in the face of Climate Change. Moore and Gibbs argue that We Just Don’t Get It: The much ballyhooed “transition” from an age of fossil fuel dependency to renewable energy is illusory, ineffectual, and too late. The “intermittent” technologies – Solar and Wind – as well as, biomass burning, will never be fully removed from fossil fuel dependency and/or usage. Even if these technologies have improved exponentially in the last decade (when the film was being produced), we humans should be spending our time preparing for the now-unavoidable climate apocalypse ahead. As far as Gibbs and Moore are concerned, pushing renewables at this stage is little more than stylin’ out Covid face masks.

And, yes, recognized leaders of the environmental movement – Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Sierra Club – even if not personally cashing in, have, by partnering with venture capitalists (like Goldman Sachs), corporates and other oil-associated companies, put the “problem” into the hands of private interests and reduced the role of public policymaking. As far as the filmmaking pair are concerned, putting the problem into the controlling hands of capitalists is exactly the wrong thing to do because their interest is growth and profit, not public interest, or, it seems, the fate of the human race. With the global population expanding, almost out of control, with a projected 11.7 billion people by 2100. Prodded by Gibbs, Penn State, anthropologist, Nina Jablonsky, tells us that population growth “continues to be not the elephant, but the herd of elephants in the room.”

Planet begins by reminding the viewer that we’ve had plenty of warning about disastrous climate upheaval. Gibbs inserts a clip from the 1958 Frank Capra movie, The Unchained Goddess, which graphically warns Americans of flooding that will greatly reduce the land mass. It’s not so wonderful a life anymore. Mother Nature standing behind us on a wintry snow-driven bridge telling us to Jump, after giving us a vision of how much Earth would have been better off if we’d never existed.

It’s clear that Planet is a deeply personal film, and Gibbs begins by laying down some street cred. Observing, as a child, some bulldozers taking down woods near his home, Gibbs lets us know he put sand in one of their gas tanks. More contrite, perhaps, he wonders, “Why are we still addicted to fossil fuels?” And he follows the Green movement to understand and to participate in the Pushback. There’s movement forward. 2008 Obama. A stimulus bill with billions for renewable energy development. (Hope, Change). Al Gore’s brought in for some inconvenient rah-rah. End Coal rah-rah. The New Green Economy rah-rah. Bill McKibben. 350.org. Sierra. The Chevy Volt. Rah-rah-rah. Give me a G. Give me an R. Give me an E. Give me an E. Give me an N. GREEN!

But then Gibbs’s anxiety creeps in (the Moore Uncanny with music) and suddenly he’s interviewing well-meaning ‘folk’ giving us the ta-dah! on the Chevy Volt, an electric car that will lead us into the future, no more mean Mr. Carbon. But how are they recharged? They’re plugged into the coal-powered grid, just like your toaster. And you can almost hear the bagpipe crumple into a bummed out wheeze. On to solar arrays. More despondent bagpipes. A ‘folk’ person tells us the football field sized array before us generates enough electricity to power an underwhelming “10 homes” per annum. Getting worked up, Gibbs reminds us that renewables are intermittent and that we can’t count on sun and wind in most places, and we need to have storage, and storage means dependency. In short, there are “profound limitations of solar and wind, rarely discussed in the media.”

Suddenly, we’re being sold a bill of goods by the snakes of Oil and mining; we’re Koch suckers, who believe we can frack (XL) and mine our way to private Paradise. The manufacture of solar panels and other materials that are not renewable replacements. Gibbs gives us a list of the elements unearthed in name of sustainability and renewableness. We are daunted: silicon, graphite, rare earths, coal, steel, nickel. sulphur hexaflouride, tin, gallium, cadmium, lead, ethylene vinyl acetate, neodymium, dyprosium, indium, ammonium fluoride, molybdenum, sodium hydroxide, petroleum. Sweet Jesus!

“It was becoming clear,” he tells us, “that what we are calling green renewable energy and industrial civilization are one and the same. Desperate measures not to save the planet, but to save our way of life. Desperate measures, rather than face the reality that humans are experiencing the planet’s limits all at once.” And he blames the direction that Greenies are now heading in on sell-outs in the ranks and co-optations by the Cappies. Bill McKibben gets enveloped in extra insinuating mood music because he once championed biomass energy and is caught on camera saying, “Woodchips is the future of energy…It must happen everywhere!” Though McKibben has since recanted, Gibbs is all bongos because McKibben’s enthusiasm got the Koch brothers involved. They own Georgia-Pacific, and “are now the largest recipient of green energy biomass subsidies in the United States.” Lawd, almighty!

Gibbs saves some of his best speed bag work for the face of self-appointed Environmental Savior, Al Gore. The Could-Have-Been-President-Had-He-Fought-A-Little-Harder is taken to task for selling his Current TV news company to Al Jazeera, for “that government is nothing but an oil producer,” and Gore picked up the tidy sum of $100m (pre-tax), and he has crowed about how “proud of the transaction” he was. Later Night show hosts lay into his hypocrisy. He doesn’t care.

Gore once claimed to have “created” the Internet because he was part of the Congressional committee that extended funding for ARPANET (the internet’s precursor), which is like tossing some coins into busker Tracey Chapman’s hat and taking credit for her later success. Later, two internet pioneers, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, trying to smooth things over said, Gore “helped create the climate,” which is when Gore got cluey and created the Environmental Movement, in his own mind. Look at the obese beaver get called out by Richard Branson.

Again, Planet of the Humans is a tone poem that begins where astronaut Taylor’s lamentations leave off. Gibbs consults anthropologists and psychologists to explain the mental limitations preventing us from getting it. “What differentiates people from all other forms of life is that we’re not only here, but we know that we’re here. If you know that you’re here, then you recognize, even dimly that you’ll not be here some day,” Sheldon Solomon, social psychologist at Skidmore College tells us. “And on top of that, we don’t like that we’re animals. So we don’t like that we’re going to die someday. We don’t like that you can walk outside and get hit by a fucking meteor.” Like the fuel-producing dinosaurs did. Or Climate Change for us. What a fucking feedback loop.

Gibbs closes the film with an appeal, or closing argument, of sorts to viewers, and it’s probably best to let it speak for itself:

There is a way out of this. We humans must accept that infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide. We must accept that human presence is already far beyond sustainability. And all that that implies. We must take control of our environmental movement and our future from billionaires and their permanent war on Planet Earth. They are not our friends. Less must be the new more. And instead of climate change we must at long last accept that it is not the carbon dioxide molecule that’s destroying the planet — it’s us….

This is the nub: We are looking for scapegoats instead of acting radically to save ourselves from extinction. Far from being outliers with their view, the New Yorker’s Jonathan Franzen asks the very same questions the film queries and responds: “What If We Stopped Pretending?”

Apparently as anticipated, criticism from fellow Greenies came fast and furious. Though, if you were inclined, you could have pointed out that Moore/Gibbs films have been for years more psychodrama in their approach than documentarian in, say, the mode of Ken Burns; suddenly, fellow environmentalists were complaining vociferously about the accuracy of Moore’s films. Nobody has been more reactive, so far, than Bill McKibben. It’s clear he feels personally bushwhacked. In a Rolling Stone piece, “‘A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement’: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal,” he bitterly denounces the film’s ethos and damage it is said to have done to the Movement, and avers that it was not only made “in bad faith,” but “dishonorably.” Ouch.

“Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy,” says McKibben, and continues, “The film’s attacks on renewable energy are antique, dating from a decade ago, when a solar panel cost 10 times what it does today; engineers have since done their job, making renewable energy the cheapest way to generate power on our planet.” It short, the science cited in the film is bad, he says. Gibbs wants to raise consciousness, says McKibben, “But that’s precisely what’s undercut when people operate as Moore has with his film. The entirely predictable effect is to build cynicism, indeed a kind of nihilism. It’s to drive down turnout — not just in elections, but in citizenship generally.”

McKibben also defends his previous championing of biomass energy, saying, “I thought it was a good idea [at the time],” but, he goes on, “And as that science emerged, I changed my mind, becoming an outspoken opponent of biomass. (Something else happened too: the efficiency of solar and wind power soared, meaning there was ever less need to burn anything.)” So, McKibben may justifiably feel as if he’s been called to task for a view he no longer holds. But he’s most irate about the insinuation that he’s a “sell out.” McKibben feels the need to spend much space in the Rolling Stone piece defending his record of achievement over the years. And this may be entirely unfair to his activism.

However, McKibben may be off when he says little science is at play in Planet of the Humans. While it’s true that it relies heavily on anthropological and psychological considerations (because that’s really the concern of the film), Moore and Gibbs do cite a relevant study by Richard York, a much-lauded professor of environmental studies at Oregon State University, who published a peer-reviewed article in Nature magazine, “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” His answer is No, not really. Other pieces there suggest similar findings, such as York’s more recent article, co-written with Shannon Elizabeth Bell, “Energy transitions or additions?: Why a transition from fossil fuels requires more than the growth of renewable energy” and the Patrick Trent Greiner (et alia) piece, “Snakes in The Greenhouse: Does increased natural gas use reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal consumption?” They say, No, not really.

In a private communique to me, York clarifies how his work was used in the film, “My research that Gibbs draws on found that in recent decades, nations that have added more non-fossil energy sources don’t typically reduce their fossil fuel use substantially (controlling for economic growth etc.) relative to nations that don’t add a lot of non-fossil energy. Thus, it’s not a simple case where there is a fixed energy demand so that adding renewables necessarily pushes out fossil energy, but rather adding energy sources is typically associated with rising energy consumption.” So, again Gibbs and Moore, if somewhat inarticulately, are drawing attention to renewables a s an expansion of energy options without a significant drop in the use of fossil fuels. “I find the movie frustrating,” writes York, “because I don’t think they do a good job of articulating a vision for action.”

Even a recent Guardian article meant to defend McKibben and the environmental movement against the slights of Planet accidently, it seems, underlined Gibbs’s point. Oliver Milman links to a study touting the extraordinary increase of efficiency in renewable technology designs – a study that brags, “Decarbonization of electric grids around the world by an average of about 30% will result in approximately 17% lower battery manufacturing emissions by 2030.” This, to Gibbs and Moore, is merely improvement (and only a best guesstimate at that) and insufficient for the long haul. Milman writes, “Scientists say the world must reach net zero emissions by 2050 to head off disastrous global heating, which would likely spur worsening storms, heatwaves, sea level rise and societal unrest.” By 2050. That’s exactly why Moore and Gibbs seem to be throwing in the towel. That’s not going to happen.

Moore and Gibbs have put together a sober and quiet response to the reactions of fellow environmentalist against Planet of the Humans. (You could argue that the 17 minute discussion is better than their film.) Once done with watching Planet and listening to rebuttals and getting dismayed, you may want to pull an Edward G. and have a lounge-down with a bev or bone and remember how much you love Being and Nature by watching the Qatsi Trilogy at Documentary Heaven. You could start with Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance. A Palate cleansing after a hard-to-swallow reality check.

Or you could go the whole Earth Abides route, and prefer to see it the late George Carlin’s way. Cynical, but realistic, for a species that just doesn’t seem to give a shit about most things for very long. Distracted from distraction by distraction, as T.S. Eliot puts it. Of course, Carlin’s Way is unavailable to anyone with a family.

John Hawkins is an American freelance journalist currently residing in Australia. His poetry, commentary, and reviews have appeared in publications here, in Europe, and in the USA. He is a regular contributor to Counterpunch magazine. Read other articles by John.

This article was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2020 at 9:16am and is filed under Environment, Film Review, Global Warming, Renewables.

Still Fighting “Whatever” in Afghanistan

Todd Smith — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 21:02:05 +0000

This just in: Cable news presenter-hero Jake Tapper finds new spotlight at the Movies with the Millennium Media studio release of The Outpost, based on Tapper’s 2012 book The Outpost: an Untold Story of American Valor. Tapper’s tale tells the story of a locally massive attack by Taliban-types on a remote American forward operating base, Combat Outpost Keating, in the precipitously rugged Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Nuristan, which borders Pakistan. This violent incident occurred on October 3, 2009, and is known as the Battle of Kamdesh, named for a village near the base.

At first glance, Mr Tapper’s literary foray into the American-Afghan war appears rather off-topic for a cable news teleprompter-reader, especially when Tapper was never “embedded” with the Troops “over there.” So: what “American valor” is the Dartmouth-educated Tapper talking about? What drove the perpetually peevish-looking Tapper to write upon a current conflict he never personally reported on happening in a galaxy far, far away? Cable news anchor guilt? A mid-career crisis, because our fearless Tapper has suddenly almost realized–even though he can’t quite form the words–that he’s just another paid tool echoing corporate War Machine talking points? Recently, Tapper was interviewed by Yahoo Movies person Ethan Alter (July 2) in coordination with the roll-out of the film, and some of his answers are revealing…

But first, a note about our man Tapper’s current employer (since 2013), CNN. CNN hit the jackpot in 1991 with its breathlessly promotional coverage of Iraq-Attack-One. Tapper’s elder-in-chief @ CNN, Wolf Bullshitzer, also cashed in on CNN’s “Desert Storm” news coup. Blitzer’s career as a hawking-head had suffered the great good fortune of joining America’s first 24-hour TV news network in May of 1990, as CNN’s Pentagon spokesperson, and he has been cheering on America’s “Whatever” wars from that desk ever since. Whatever Ted Turner’s original vision was for a round-the-clock TV news service (1980), by now it is quite clear that CNN was tailor-made for the War Department of the United States of America: “Only carefully scripted awkward questions, please!”

Now: back to that Tapper interview…

Our news hero Tapper’s spectrum of non-committance-to-cognitive-dissonance is more than manifest in his reply to a relevant question concerning the U.S. finally leaving Afghanistan altogether, as cartoon President Donald Trump has frequently falsely promised. Indifferently chomping at the bit, Tapper blithely states that the “Taliban is the enemy,” but goes on to say that America should still maintain “…some sort of counter-terrorism presence, just in case ISIS, or Al-Quaeda, or whatever, rises up again.” This “or whatever” really captures Tapper’s otherwise elusive conceptualization of the conflict. Unfortunately, the interviewer–Ethan Alter–fails the Consumer-reader by not following-up with an uber-relevant question such as: “Gee, Jake, but what would ‘whatever’ look like in Afghanistan today? Are you so certain that We are not the Enemy over there?” At this imaginary point in the “presser,” our successful info-tainment personality looks more peeved than usual: Could we be the Enemy? ricochets around the echo chamber of his cable news brain…

Jake Tapper did eventually visit Afghanistan, that “galaxy far, far away,” and was oratorically able to unleash this nugget from his “on-the-ground” experience there:

When we got to FOB Bostick, the mission was providing security for building a road so that there could be commerce, and improve the way of life for Afghans in that province. It’s just otherworldly, because you’d think building a road would be a basic project, and U.S. troops were killed for just being there.

This is a truly striking statement. Has our befuddled–or possibly even lobotomized–anchor-protagonist never heard of the “White Man’s Burden,” the sentiment of which he perfectly recapitulates in this quotation of his very own words? Again, one hears whizzes, zips and tiny bangs! whipping across Tapper’s unconsciously Kiplingesque mind as an Idea–behold, almost!–nearly forms there: Maybe the “Afghans” see the Americans as Stormtroopers like in a Star Wars movie– or whatever–as the Enemy, as opposed to how we prefer to Luke Skywalker ourselves...

Yet questioning nearly 2 decades of violent partial occupation of Afghanistan is not Tapper’s true mission; he’s “not a policymaker,” after all. Instead, our Yellow Press agent concludes that “…we wanted to have respect and reverence for the fact that this story is about real people who died there.” By “real people,” of course, Tapper means Americans, not Afghans, whom he barely mentions in the interview.

Despite Mr Tapper’s critical cluelessness concerning his subject of note, the fact that his book is now a movie reveals a curious collusion of interest between a Major Media News outlet and Hollywood. Presumably, Tapper could have shopped his “story” to a documentary filmmaker, but instead chose the Hollywood outfit Millennium Media, which deals primarily in gung-ho testosterone fests. A quick look at the trailer shows that The Outpost will indeed be an action-packed testosterone fest. The tone of the film is most likely set in the last spoken line of the trailer: “We’re taking this bitch back!” (Evidently, this movie is not being marketed to feminists…). By this mini-climax in the action of the film (which I will not be watching, as I have probably seen more than one-too-many jacked-up war movies in my time), Holy Camp Keating has been largely overrun by the Infidels, who were most likely not even Taliban, but fighters employed by the notorious Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who, ironically enough, is said to have received the most CIA funding of any Mujahideen leader fighting the Soviet Russians in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Perhaps a figure like Hekmatyar fits the description of “or whatever” in Jake Tapper’s this-worldly, reality-challenged brain? The Outpost, the movie, probably does not answer this question either, as one of the leading characters in the trailer informs his “men” that their mission is to “separate the Taliban from the ordinary people.”

How Many Green Berets Can be Physically Fit into a Hurt Locker?

The Outpost will most likely not be separating any Oscars from the mitts or myths of the Motion Picture Academy any time soon. However, a war film of the “War on Terror” era that did delight the hawkish Hollywood elites was the 2009 release The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, which gobbled up 6 Oscar trophies, including “Best Picture.” Needless to say, Major Mainstream Media critics universally praised the movie as well, which is quite telling, since the Hurt Locker totally whitewashes the criminal invasion of Iraq (a country run by a well-known criminal, by the way), as well as any lingering “liberal” institutional guilt over that crime.

At its soulless core, this movie focuses on the personal trauma of the American soldier–this mercenary–while ignoring the civilizational catastrophe that Iraq-Attack-Two was, and still remains. Really, it’s kind of clever how this much-lauded propaganda piece accomplishes its aim, by substituting the “IED” for the “WMD” story that was used to sell–or “justify”–the invasion. This is the same move that CNN-guy Tapper makes with his Afghan battle book: Fucking focus on the “heroic” American soldier!, while the larger–and illegal–context of the “war” blurs into a contour-less, unaccountable background; after all, you can’t charge a shape that you can’t identify with a crime–and Afghanistan is one of the most shapeless places there is from an American point-of-view.

The Hurt Locker also serves up steaming piles of “White Man’s Burden.” The Iraqis depicted in the film are, stereotypically enough, either victims or villains, with nothing but a killing ground in between; they are never granted, as real world actors, an ounce of so-called agency–unless it’s absolutely malevolent, of course. The one Iraqi that the American Bomb Disposal Unit befriends, a teen-age boy, naturally, gets callously sacrificed to show both the Americans’ good intentions, while also proving the absolute viciousness of the Iraqi “Improvised Explosive Device” makers–as if the United States had nobly invaded Iraq in order to rid the former British Mandate of it of its “IED” problem (“Never mind the WMD, folks: They never existed in the first place!”). Incidentally, an Improvised Explosive Device pre-existing condition was not a pre-existing condition in Iraq until the United States arrived “in-Country”, in 2003. In any case, the one Iraqi who is granted any kind of “identity” is quickly reduced to a symbol, or plot device. Deus ex machina: Hello!

On top–or over-the-top–of everything else that is wrong with this movie, the Oscar Award winning Hurt Locker, there is the fundamental visual issue that the camera work is shoddy-to-terrible. The basic camera work is “shakey,” as if the cameraperson needs a drink, because they are “shaking” because of their alcoholic condition. Or the camera zooms in too fast, which indicates that the cameraperson’s medication was inappropriately taken, and contra-indicatory effects are formalizing, so the scene looks weird, even though it is, which is nothing unusual, even though it is.

In other words, strictly speaking, The Hurt Locker is not a very good movie–never mind the “Best Picture”; or, it’s a very gratuitous play on what Iraq-Attack-Two really was. Nevertheless, Hollywood really loved it just as much as the Mainstream Media embraced it–all of which indicates the wildly pro-War bias of both institutions: Hollywood and the Mass Media. Who knew that both were playing the same Pentagonal tune?

Nevertheless, in the storied annals of pro-War pornography, not all War movies are loved the same. Although paternity is still difficult to determine with absolute certainty, even in this advanced age of DNA testing, it is highly probable that the “War on Terror” baby’s-Daddy was the undeclared war on Vietnam. With this hypothesis in mind, one war movie the Major Media establishment lovingly loathed was John Wayne’s explicitly pro-War film The Green Berets, which was released in the summer of 1968 while the American war on Vietnam was in full-tilt boogie mode. Although a cliche-ridden testosterone fest in its own self-righteous right, The Green Berets is light years more honest than its bastard offspring The Hurt Locker, as the propaganda agenda of Wayne’s film is flaunted, not hidden. Still, there is a basic deception woven into the “Duke’s” attempt to re-enlist the movie-going Public’s support for an undeclared war that was fast becoming demonstrably unpopular.

The real Green Berets are an elite U.S. Army unit, whereas the vast majority of the half million Americans fighting in Vietnam were mandatory draftees who did not have a choice to opt out, unlike famous non-combatants like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Dick Cheney, etc. By dwelling on an elite fighting unit, Wayne’s instrument for winning back “Hearts and Minds” on the Homefront would appear to have been out of tune. Nevertheless, in retrospect, it makes perfect sense because the American war against Vietnam was launched by elites–just as all subsequent American “undeclared” wars have been ever since. The average American citizen has zero stake in any of these foreign wars. I can hear Jake Tapper’s brain rattling: If we de-fund the Pentagon I’ll be out of a job, so…

Of course, John Wayne’s jingo Vietnam movie did not make too much of a splash–although the “Duke” did brag about the box office cash at the time. Live television coverage probably had as much as anything else to do with turning the American Public against the war, and so the plug was finally pulled on that atrocity. In the meantime, the Pentagon’s fixed that Media image problem; our current series of wars are “special access” only. We’re occasionally allowed the “Live Look-in,” but only with carefully curated framing. CNN’s Jake Tapper is just such a curator. If one were to say to Jake: “This Afghan War’s vainglorious genocidal bullshit!” the Tapper would shift or swivel uncomfortably, look extra peevish, and tell the too far left-or-right critic that it’s all about “valor,” which is exactly what he’s paid to do.

Just to wrap up: even though I gave CNN’s Jake Tapper the “lead,” so to speak, in this article, I would like to give a real journalist the final words on the subject. Concerning the multiple Academy Award winning movie The Hurt Locker, the venerable John Pilger had this to say: “It offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in someone else’s country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion.”

This article was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2020 at 2:02pm and is filed under Afghanistan, Film Review, Media, Militarism, Opinion.

Moore’s Planet of the Humans: More Misanthropic than Malthus

Roger D. Harris — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 04:47:45 +0000

by Roger D. Harris / July 4th, 2020

In reverential tones with ominous background music, director of Planet of the Humans Jeff Gibbs intones about “the most terrifying realization I ever had.” Gibbs instructs us, “Every expert I talked to wanted to bring my attention to the same underlying problem.” It is “not the elephant but the herd of elephants in the room,” Prof. Nina Jablonski warns. “The underlying problem,” the movie earnestly preaches is that “there are too many human beings.”

Planet of the Humans is produced and promoted by Michael Moore and is free online. The underlying message of the movie, critiquing the green energy movement, is about the existential threat of human overpopulation. “Without seeing a major die-off in population, there is no turning back,” is anthropologist Steven Churchill’s gloomy prognostication.

This truly draconian deduction makes the “zero population growth” (ZPG) folks look like baby boom boosters. Seminal overpopulation theorist Thomas Malthus, who opposed the English Poor Laws because they relieved human suffering, would be by comparison a humanitarian. (Spoiler alert: the movie does not prescribe any particular means of achieving the die-off.)

Prof. Churchill presents a cautionary tale in the movie: “Species hit the population wall and then they crash. It is a common story in biology. If it happens to us, it is the natural order of things.” As a professional conservation biologist, I can attest that not a single one of the 1,540 species on the US Endangered Species list got there because their populations indiscreetly boomed and then crashed. The cautionary tale is really a fictional tale, not a common story and not the natural order of things.

Paradox of Our Times

An uncritically favorable review of the movie by a self-described “pal” of the director comments, “The bottom line is that there are too many Clever Apes, consuming too much; too rapidly. And ALL efforts on addressing the climate costs are reduced to illusions/delusions designed to keep our over-sized human footprint.”

So, are we humans using too much, too fast as the movie warns? The answer is apparently not everybody. Some 24,600 of us die every day from starvation in a world where there are food surpluses and more than enough food to feed everyone. Likewise, 3,000 children die every day from preventable malaria. And 10,000 fellow human beings die every day because they are denied publicly funded healthcare.

To put these numbers into context, the peak world daily death toll for the coronavirus pandemic was 10,520 on April 26. The current world daily death toll, as of this writing, is 5,728. That is, the magnitude of preventable starvation is over four times the current death rate for COVID-19.

An anti-viral vaccine is not yet available to protect from COVID-19, but a square meal is all that is needed to cure the malady of starvation. And there is no impediment from international property rights in sharing bread.

These dreadful statistics on existing world hunger are, in relative terms, the good news. The UN World Food Program most recently reports that the coronavirus crisis could double the number of people suffering acute hunger. “COVID-19 is potentially catastrophic for millions who are already hanging by a thread,” said Dr. Arif Husain, chief economist at the World Food Program. “It is a hammer blow for millions more who can only eat if they earn a wage. Lockdowns and global economic recession have already decimated their nest eggs. It only takes one more shock – like COVID-19 – to push them over the edge.”

Especially hard hit are the countries in the crosshairs of US imperialism, including a third of humanity subject to unilateral coercive measures by the US – so called, sanctions. For example, the UN World Food Program reports, “the needs in Syria have never been greater”; likewise for Yemen. These people are suffering from imperialism not, as the movie contends, from overpopulation.

Obscured by overpopulation ideology, which monomaniacally focuses on over-consumption, the movie fails to recognize the existence of monumental under-consumption for the majority of the world’s population. The paradox of our times is that we live in an era, for the first time in human history, when the technical means to end poverty are in place. The means of production have advanced so that human needs can be met. At the same time, the relations of production are such that these needs are not met. Gross over-consumption and acute under-consumption are two sides of the same coin.

Left out of the “every expert” interviewed in Planet of the Humans are authorities such as Eric Holt-Gimenez, former director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy. His research indicates, “We already grow enough food for 10 billion people – and still can’t end hunger. Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity.” The world’s population is currently 7.8 billion. The 10 billion people that Holt-Gimenez refers to is what the UN Population Division projects as the leveling out number, which is projected to occur by the end of this century.

Clearly more than simple human demographics are at play with the paradox of starvation amidst plenty, especially considering Holt-Gimenez’s finding: “For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth.” That story is omitted by the misanthropic Planet of the Humans.

Too Many People?

When in the movie Richard Heinberg, author of The End of Growth, says “There are too many human beings, using too much, too fast,” he is right about some people. We have too many super-rich, though you wouldn’t know that from watching the movie.

The wealthiest 1% of the population own over half of all household wealth in the world. From a global warming point of view, the richest 10% are responsible for almost half of total lifestyle consumption emissions. Meanwhile, the poorest 50% are responsible for only about 10% of the total lifestyle consumption emissions.

A similarly inequitable pattern, ignored by the movie, is evident when comparing the wealthy developed countries to the rest of the world. Per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the more developed countries are around three times higher than the world average. The developed countries are the ones most responsible and least at risk from global warming. The poorest nations contribute less than 1% of total world greenhouse gas emissions.

While the US unjustly calls upon the poor nations of the world to assume a level of responsibility for combatting global warming, which would impede their development, the rich nations of the world have been both the beneficiaries and the cause of today’s excessive greenhouse gas production.

The United States stands out in terms of global warming in three respects: greatest historical contributor of greenhouse gasses, among the highest per capita greenhouse gas producers of the more populous countries, and the highest oil producer.

The rich nations, with the US as most prominent, have a “climate debt” to pay off, because it is their military and their industry which has disproportionately caused global warming. For all the angst and indignation expressed in Planet of the Humans about the environment, not a murmur is heard about climate justice.

Climate Science and Overpopulation Ideology

The climate movement, so roundly criticized in the movie, is based on science, while the overpopulation ideology espoused in the movie is not. The climate movement can scientifically demonstrate, when human-caused global warming began. But the overpopulation ideologues cannot say what date overpopulation began. As Karl Marx demonstrated in his critique of Thomas Malthus 200 years ago, the overpopulation ideologues theorize the planet was always overpopulated.

The climate scientists can demonstrate a relationship between concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and global warming. The overpopulation ideologues cannot demonstrate a scientific relationship between population and resource consumption because they ignore the issues of concentration of wealth and unequal distribution.

The climate scientists can quantify a level of greenhouse gasses which is desirable to prevent catastrophic global warming. In fact, the leading US climate movement group, 350.org, takes its name from that scientific finding. In contrast, the overpopulation ideologues can give no optimal number of humans other than the prejudicial declaration “there’s too many of them.” And by “them,” they implicitly mean people that are not like them and their friends.

Time to Fix the Population Fixation

Planet of the Humans savages the green energy movement for its collusion with capitalists, yet the movie fails to make the next logical step of indicting the capitalist system’s inherent imperative for endless growth while generating inequalities. Instead, movie director Jeff Gibbs blames overpopulation, concluding: “We must accept that our human presence is already far beyond sustainability.”

Fortunately, there is a growing understanding that his is not the right “fix.” According to a commendable recent issue of the Sierra Club magazine, it is “time to fix the population fixation.”

The problem is not the fertility of women but over-consumption and the outsized contribution of the wealthiest few, found in the wealthiest nations, to the climate catastrophe. Birth rates go down when human needs are met and women are afforded reproductive freedom. Planet of the Humans director Gibbs is right that there are some things truly “terrifying” going on (e.g., nuclear annihilation), but it is not due to that most human act of procreation.

This article was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2020 at 9:47pm and is filed under Climate Change, Climate Science, Environment, Film Review, Fossil Fuel Emissions, Global Warming, Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG), Hunger, Hypocrisy, Overpopulation Ideology.

The Fate of Capitalism as a Globalist Runaway Train

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 17:06:55 +0000

Western countries see the rest of the world as their playing field fit only for exploitation.
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer in conversation with Andre Vltchek, in Jakarta, 2004

The “global playing field” is “level” only from the perspective of the west.
— Robert H Wade

Spoiler alert

Introduction

The success of Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite (2019) has drawn attention to his back catalogue, in particular his first mainly English-language film, Snowpiercer (2013).

Snowpiercer is a fast-paced movie about a train on a global circular train track, set in the future after a climate change engineering experiment goes wrong. Ice cold temperatures freeze the world into a new ice age. The train is designed and run by the magnate Wilford to circumnavigate the planet perpetually. The passengers, the earth’s only survivors, are segregated: the elites in the luxurious forward cars and the poorest in the grimy tail compartments. The tail-enders, led by Curtis, decide to revolt and make a plan to get through the fortified doors of each carriage to take over and control the train. However, after battles with the train guards take a heavy toll on the insurgents, a select few are brought to the front of the train to meet Wilford.

The film encapsulates the class system very cleverly with different classes enjoying very different levels of comfort on the train. The tail-enders revolt was only the latest in a series of failed revolutions on the train. This latest revolutionary failure under Curtis’ leadership heralds a change in the tone of the film from violent battle scenes to increasingly decadent and bizarre scenes as he moves through the elite carriages. The disappointing failure of the insurrection seems to have led some film critics to see the film as a depressing metaphor for class struggle. The journey of the survivors through the train to the cockpit seems surreal and pointless after the initial exciting revolutionary exuberance.

Snowpiercer (2013), Director: Bong Joon-ho

Metaphorically speaking

However, a different way of looking at the film might throw some light on the dramatic changes that take place throughout the narrative of the film. And that would be to look at the film, not as a metaphor of class, but as a metaphor of time.

There are many key symbols throughout the film that suggest the train and its carriages are a metaphor for the passage of time, not least that the train itself represents the arrow of time, but also the progress of capitalism through the twentieth century.

That is, a metaphor for the progress and profound changes of the twentieth century that led to climate change, and the attempts to rectify it in the twenty-first century experimental disaster that followed.

Seeing the train as a metaphor of time also clarifies why the narrative changes from a people’s uprising to elite decadence. It is a view of the twentieth century which looks at class but does not have a class analysis. What it has instead is a nihilistic ecological analysis which prefers to see the destruction of society itself (and all those who both benefit from it and all those who are exploited by it) rather than face up to global issues of exploitation and injustice. If there is any hope it is rather vaguely put into a reverse biblical Adam and Eve symbolism whereby the survivors return to the earthly Garden of Paradise much chastened by their catastrophic expulsion.

Carriages and Time: Depicting the Twentieth Century

1910s and 1920s: Slum

The film starts with the failed climate engineering ‘chemtrails’ and moves swiftly to the carriage where the tail-enders, led by Curtis and his second-in-command Edgar, are being overseen by armed militia. The atmosphere is Dickensian as the living quarters resemble slums from the Industrial Revolution. The dirty grey clothes, drawn faces and squalor are straight out of the documentary photography of the early twentieth century and resemble descriptions from Upton Sinclair’s extraordinary novel The Jungle (1906) of the meat-packing industry in Chicago. The first three train cars we see depict a ghetto slum, a prison and mortuary, and a factory respectively. In the prison car they release Namgoong, a captive security specialist, and his clairvoyant daughter Yona to open the doors. They enter the factory car that makes their black protein bars (‘nutrient gel’) and discover the large hoppers are full of cockroaches. This scene could be straight out of The Jungle as Sinclair describes the sausage-making process:

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white – it would be doused with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then the rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.

1930s and 1940s: Fascism

After the shock of seeing the contents of their diet the insurgents move on to the next carriage door. As the doors open they face a large group of burly masked men dressed in black and carrying hatchets. They launch into a bloody battle. This scene is reminiscent of the street battles between workers and fascists in England, Germany and Spain in the 1930s. As if to make the point clearer the hatchets resemble the axe of the fasces, a bound bundle of wooden rods, including an axe with its blade emerging carried by the Roman lictors. (The lictor‘s main task was to attend as bodyguards to magistrates who held imperium. The axes symbolized the power to carry out capital punishment and became a symbol of the Italian fascists). And the group’s leader is called Franco the Elder.

Things get worse as the train goes into a long tunnel while the ‘lictors’ put on night vision goggles. The complete overpowering of the tail-enders in the dark reminds one of the total war of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Eventually, lit torches are brought up from the back of the train and the rebels overcome the men in black. Despite this victory, the group of insurgents is much weakened and at this point it is decided that Curtis, Namgoong, Yona, skilled fighter Grey, and Tanya and Andrew will go it alone to the top of the train. The revolution is effectively over and a select few are brought forward to meet the elite.

1950s: Self-Sufficiency

The small group are now brought through the fifth car showing a woman knitting in a conservatory listening to classical music. All is quiet as peaceful workers tend to the vegetable plants. The sixth car is an aquarium with a sushi bar. They sit down and have real food for the first time since they got on the train.

The symbolism of Japan at this point in the chronology is interesting as:

Post-World War II Japan of the 1950s and ’60s saw many changes. It experienced record economic growth and advances in manufacturing and design that resulted in a wealth of goods that fascinated people across the world.

Japan also has significance as an Asian country with a development curve similar to the West. The seventh car is depicted as a fully stocked refrigerated meat section. These cars of fruit, vegetables, and meat could easily represent the post world war nationalist ideology of self-sufficiency, that partly arose out of the war economy, but was soon affected by supranational free trade areas and international free trade agreements. For example:

In the 19th century, Britain did completely embrace free trade. It was enormously to our advantage to do so, as the workshop of the world, and we imported most of our food by the end of the 19th century. The result was that we nearly starved in two world wars. After the Second World War, we did not make the same mistake; even with the enormous change in tastes and increase in food imports in recent decades, we still produce more than half of what we eat.

The eight car is a classroom where the teacher, a middle class lady dressed in 1950s style clothing, tells the children about the greatness of Wilford and the “sacred engine”. The children are taught negative views of the ‘Old Worlders’ and the ‘Tail Sectioners’, for example:

YLFA (8) a sweet little girl with blond pigtails waves her hand at Teacher. She jumps up without being acknowledged…
YLFA: I heard all Tail Sectioners were lazy dogs who slept all day in their own shit. […]
YLFA: Old World people were frigging morons who got turned into popsicles!

Boiled eggs are handed out to the children and the workers. However, guns are concealed underneath and the teacher pulls out a machine gun and starts firing at the rebels and is killed. This is a shocking moment revealing the fanaticism and violence of Wilford’s supporters.

Curtis’ declining group continues through the ninth and tenth car which resemble luxury carriages from the Orient Express. In car 10 they pass by an academic, a dentist and a tailor all busy at work in their compartments.

1960s: Equilibrium

In the eleventh car there is a very plush bar where the elites inhabit their own world in their own older fashion sense. A staircase leads up to a row of women sitting under typical 1960s hair salon hair-drying chairs. The next car has swimming pools straight out of a 1960s James Bond movie where another gun battle takes place. The 13th car has two rows of individual sauna cubicles. These carriages (from the 5th to the 13th) have a mood of equilibrium and peace where the elites can live undisturbed and the middle classes can enjoy the good life.

1970s and 1980s: Decadence

However, now the rebel group (Curtis, Namgoong, and Yona) enter a disco in the 14th car where we see the middle class youth for the first time dancing and taking drugs. They are kept constantly high and drunk. After the disco they pass through a nightclub VIP room where the drugged out ‘zombies’ loll about in animal skins oblivious to the drama taking over the train.

1990s and 2000s: Computer Age

This leads them into a carriage lined with banks of computers and large engine cogs turning the wheels of the train. The last carriage for Curtis is the section where Wilford himself resides behind massive metal doors. Here the system is digitised and runs on a perpetual power source. Despite its technological sophistication it still needs children (Tim) from the tail-end of the train to sit in the works as living components of its power generation. The ‘perpetual’ or ‘sacred’ engine feeds off the poorest and youngest to keep going indefinitely, symbolising capitalist dependence on children in the factories and mines of the nineteenth century, and the child labour scandals in the modern factories of today.

Thus the whole train seems to move through time as well as space. From slums to fascism, expansionism to decadence and finally technology and the 1%, the elites on the train promote a hierarchical system and ideology which they believe is ‘correct’ and ‘natural’. As Wilford says to Curtis:

Wilford: Curtis, everyone has their own pre-ordained position. This way and that…and everyone is in it. Except you.
Curtis: That’s what people in the best place say to the people in the worst place. There’s not a soul on this train who wouldn’t trade places with you.

This ‘correct’ attitude can still be seen among the aristocracy today, as Chris Bryant writes:

Historically, the British aristocracy’s defining feature was not a noble aspiration to serve the common weal but a desperate desire for self-advancement. They stole land under the pretence of piety in the early middle ages, they seized it by conquest, they expropriated it from the monasteries and they enclosed it for their private use under the pretence of efficiency. They grasped wealth, corruptly carved out their niche at the pinnacle of society and held on to it with a vice-like grip. They endlessly reinforced their own status and enforced deference on others through ostentatiously exorbitant expenditure on palaces, clothing and jewellery. They laid down a strict set of rules for the rest of society, but lived by a different standard. Such was their sense of entitlement that they believed – and persuaded others to believe – that a hierarchical society with them placed firmly and unassailably at the top was the natural order of things. Even to suggest otherwise, they implied, was to shake the foundations of morality.

In Snowpiercer, the train hierarchy is a patriarchal system of which Wilford is the highest priest of the ‘sacred’ engine and father of all. The whole system is self-reproducing as the children of the middle class and elites are indoctrinated into it from an early age.

Throughout his journey through the cars Namgoong has been collecting the drug Kronole made from hallucinogenic industrial waste which is also highly flammable. He pushes the small blocks together to make a plastic explosive bomb which he uses to blow open a train door. However, the explosive shock waves cause the train to be hit by successively stronger avalanches and is eventually derailed and crashes. Everybody is killed except for Yona and Tim (as far as we know).

This metaphor for the complete collapse of the whole system (and a catastrophe triggered by an unforeseen event) is typical of modern ecological ideologies that blame the ‘greed’ of the human race for climate chaos, and not the global class system which exploits natural resources relentlessly, and under which the vast majority of people have to struggle to survive. Thus, ideologically, the working class not only fails to take control of the train (and thereby the system) but is itself destroyed in the train crash.

Conclusion

On a broader level the survival of Yona and Tim has some interesting parallels with Mao’s Three Worlds Theory. In the Snowpiercer narrative, the First World [e.g.the US] and Second World [e.g. Europe and Japan] are destroyed while the Third World [e.g. Asia (Yona) and Africa (Tim)] survives to repopulate the world presumably with a more nature-friendly ideology. Thus the survivors become a metaphor for the supra-national entities of Asia and Africa, who, after centuries of colonialism and imperialism (by the First and Second Worlds) cannot be blamed for not investigating the destruction behind them as they walk away.

Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at https://gaelart.blogspot.ie/. Read other articles by Caoimhghin.

This article was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2020 at 10:06am and is filed under Film Review.

Changing Depictions of America in Cinema: Signs of ‘Self-Awareness’, ‘Resistance’ or a ‘Multipolar World’?

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 18:37:25 +0000

• Author’s Note: Contains spoilers for Knives Out (2019), Bacurau (2019), and The Wandering Earth (2019)

How can I confound myself with those who today already find a hearing? — Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1895

Introduction

2019 was a very interesting year in cinema, in particular for the South Korean film Parasite which became the first film in a language other than English to win Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards. The success of Parasite shows the changing attitude of Americans towards foreign cinema. 2019 also showed three major new films (national and international) with varying depictions of America’s relations with the rest of the world: Knives Out (2019), Bacurau (2019) and The Wandering Earth (2019). All three films present a hardening attitude towards taken-for-granted positive roles and image of the United States. This is unusual for mainstream cinema. In Knives out, an American film, a wealthy American family is depicted as a greedy, grasping lot in contrast to the South American caregiver of their father. Like Parasite, we see class and inequality playing itself out horrendously for the wealthy family as the tables turn against them in this modern whodunit.

In the Brazilian film Bacurau, a group of American adventurists bent on hunting human prey, also end up badly as the village unites and fights back. In the Chinese science fiction film, The Wandering Earth, America is more conspicuous by its absence in a story of a world government saving the planet by shifting it off to revolve around another star. It is a film that doesn’t exclude the United States completely, but like its country’s diplomatic attitude of trying not to provoke a head-on confrontation with America, The Wandering Earth shows the Chinese getting on with things on their own initiative.

In all three films there is no negotiation, no crossover, no resolution, no happy ending whereby typically the United States resolves problems resulting in a negotiated, face-saving outcome that makes everyone happy. This is all a far cry from the outcome of an older film, The Day After Tomorrow from 2004, that also depicts the United States’ relationship with a Latin American country, Mexico. The Northern Hemisphere is freezing over and the immigration situation is reversed as thousands of Americans flood across the border into Mexico. While the Mexicans are not particularly happy about this (considering the American attitude to Mexican immigrants and the US border fences) they turn the situation to their advantage and negotiate a debt forgiveness deal. Which begs the question: what would the Mexicans have done if they had not owed the United States a lot of money? Would the Mexicans have kept them out? or would they generously have helped them anyway despite the way they were treated historically? All this shows why it is important to stay on good terms with one’s neighbours. But that was 2004.

In 2019 we see changing attitudes. In Knives Out, Bacurau, and The Wandering Earth we are shown something symbolically different by three different directors: how America sees itself, how Brazil sees the United States and how China perceives America. I will look at each of these three films in turn briefly to examine this changing attitude.

Theatrical poster

Knives Out

In Knives Out, wealthy crime novelist Harlan Thrombey is a self-made whose novels have made him rich. His family all depend on, feed off, or siphon off funds from him. However, Harlan has decided he has had enough of keeping his extended family financially afloat. Marta is his low paid caregiver who treats all the family with great respect. She is a south/central American but nobody really knows or cares:

“Ransom to Harlan: To your Brazilian nurse? Are you goddamn insane?”
“Richard: No, Marta your family came from Uruguay but you did it right, she did it legally, I’m saying.”
“Linda: Uh. There was Fran, the housekeeper. Marta, Harlan’s caregiver, good girl, hard worker. Family’s from Ecuador.”
“Richard: Good kid, been a good friend to Harlan. Her family’s from Paraguay. Linda really likes her work ethic.”

After Harlan’s death, Marta inherits all his property and money. The family use coercion, persuasion, threats and blackmail to try and get the property back. Harlan’s grandson Ransom coerces Marta into confessing to him and offers to help her in exchange for a share of the inheritance. The other Thrombeys try to persuade Marta to renounce the inheritance; Walt threatens to expose her mother as an undocumented immigrant:

“Walt: Marta if your mom came here illegally, criminally, if you come into this inheritance with the scrutiny that entails I’d be afraid that could come to light. That’s what we’re all trying to avoid here. We can protect you from that happening, or if it happens.
Marta: You’re saying even if it came to light, with the family’s resources you could help me fix it.
Walt: Yes. The right lawyers, none of those local guys but New York lawyers, DC lawyers, enough resources put towards it, yes. But there’s no need it should ever even come up. But yes.
Marta: Ok. Good.
Walt: Ok?
Marta: Cause Harlan gave me all your resources. So that means with my resources I’ll be able to fix it. So I guess I’m going to go find the right lawyers.”

Already Marta sees the advantages of having lots of money in a materialistic world. The family hope to have Marta convicted of Harlan’s death so that slayer law will invalidate the will. However, this does not happen as the whodunit story structure plays itself out. In the last scene the family are all looking up at Marta on the balcony holding a mug bearing the legend: “My house, my rules”. This time there will be no negotiation.

The family have no one to blame but themselves as all their aggressive tactics fail one by one. They lose everything in the process but most of all they lose respect and sympathy. Marta is an immigrant, a symbolic representative of Latin America, of the Third World. The First World is in a serious economic crisis with mounting debts. Is Knives Out a morality tale about the First World and the wider world? After decades of geopolitical manipulation and military action around the world combined with massive national debts, how would the First World be perceived if it all suddenly fell apart? So much of our economy is based on cheap production in Third World countries. If real wealth is rooted in production (and not digitally created fiat currencies) then could we also see a wealth switch some day?

Theatrical poster

Bacurau

Bacurau is a fictional Brazilian town that becomes the focus for a group of American gamers who want to use real people in a trophy hunting game. The town is cut off, first it disappears from maps and then their WiFi signal disappears. The group uses a drone to spy on the village. Michael, their leader is older and of German origin. When two Brazilian helpers of the gamer group kill locals they are shot for interfering in the ‘white people’s’ game. Their identity cards show that they work for the Brazil state. At first the towns people are confused about the random shootings of their neighbours. However, as they learn what is going on the villagers fall back on their own natural (and historical) survival skills as they remove their old guns from their village museum.

The gamers head to the village but are then abandoned by the leader, Michael (an ageing German played by Udo Kier), who goes to high ground to a sniper position. Without leadership, the first two gamers are outsmarted and killed by a Brazilian old couple who have guns. Michael shoots everything that moves in the village including the gamers (like the Nazi Amon Göth shooting random Jews from his balcony overlooking a concentration camp).

The rest of the gamers are killed by the hiding villagers. All are beheaded and their heads are displayed in front of church, but with no triumphalism. This act reflects the Brazilian folk hero Lampião and his cangaceiros (Cangaço – “social banditry” against the government) who had their heads publicly exhibited in a square.

Michael is captured and buried alive in the street cellar. The gamers have the latest weaponry but are killed by villagers using guerilla tactics and their ancient guns. They operate in self defense and their violence is not glorified. No mercy is shown to their mayor who collaborated with the Americans and he is tied naked to a donkey and sent off to die in the desert.

The clashing contrasts of high tech urbanism and Brazilian semi-desert give the feel of a 1960s science fiction film yet there is always a down-to-earth reason. The flying saucer turns out to be a drone and the two strangely dressed murderous motor bikers turn out to be Brazilians and not so alien after all.

As a metaphor for external influence in Brazil the film shows the resilience of the local people against attack from outside forces, and their merciless revenge on the Brazilians who sold them out for their own profit. Is Michael a metaphor for the Nazis who were sheltered in South America after the Second World War? If so, his permanent incarceration in the street cellar has the look of an evil influence being sent down to Hell and covered over to prevent its escape back into society ever again.

Theatrical poster

The Wandering Earth

In The Wandering Earth the sun is dying and people all around the world build giant planet thrusters to move Earth out of its orbit and bring Earth to revolve around the star Alpha Centauri. However, as they pass Jupiter, Earth has a tremor and many of the earth engines stop working. The Earth is pulled in by Jupiter’s gravity and looks to be doomed to fail. However, “a contingency plan exists called Project Helios that involves preserving the crew of the Space Station, 300,000 frozen embryos, 100,000 seeds of basic crops, and digital libraries of all civilizations, should a disaster befall the Wandering Earth.”

The Chinese protagonists then devise a plan to prevent the planetary collision but this means sacrificing the Helios project. The plan works and the Earth continues on its long journey to Alpha Centauri.

On a computer monitor we see that the plans were designed by the ‘United Earth Government’ where underneath we see a vertical row of flags with the United States flag on top, then Russia, China, United Kingdom and France. However, the first time the flags are shown on a monitor the flags are horizontal and in the same order but the Chinese flag is now in the centre but on the same level as the other countries’ flags. Also, an actual American flag is shown in the large cockpit of a transport truck just as the failure of the Wandering Planet project is announced. At first it looks like the flag is draped over a coffin but as the camera pulls back we see the flag is actually just sitting on top of a couple of computer monitors.

The names of the two projects here are also interesting. The Wandering Earth reflects the medieval geocentric view of the earth at the centre of the universe with the sun and the other planets going around the earth. The paths of the planets seemed to make no sense so they were called in ancient Greek ἀστήρ πλανήτης (astēr planētēs), meaning ‘wandering star’.

The heliocentric view cleared up that problem. When it was realised that the planets all revolved around the sun everything fell into place. In the film the Earth has broken out of the gravitational pull of the sun and has become a wanderer again in its long slow journey to another star. Does Project Helios represent the importance of science (frozen embryos, seeds of basic crops, and digital libraries) in the same way that heliocentricism does? Does that mean that science itself is represented as an elitist project which can be sacrificed? It is very common in the Romanticist tradition to denigrate science while at the same time taking advantage of the benefits of science; e.g., the Romantics of the 19th century loved the raw wild nature of the Alps which they traveled to see by the new train systems. It is also contradictory in a genre called ‘science fiction’.

The Wandering Earth is a Chinese film but emphasizes internationalism and does this without nationalism or jingoism. It is a low-key subtle approach to international relations giving everyone their due. As the science fiction writer Roberto Quaglia states:

The Chinese are now also interested in non-English mother-tongue authors. Which means: They want a wide range of views. And above all they cultivate their new generations of Chinese science fiction authors and work to make them known around the world. In other words, the Chinese are introducing a marked multipolar orientation to a cultural sphere with a strong impact on reality, an area that until recently had always been a hostage to a unipolar status quo.

The vertical orientation of the flags on the monitor is an interesting metaphor for a hierarchical and hegemonic Hollywood cinema industry which is in contrast with the other horizontal, ‘multipolar’ array, with China in a prominent but not dominating position.

Conclusion

As we move firmly into the 21st century with all its geopolitical changes and challenges, we can see some of this reflected in the arts. Whether ideas in cinema symbolise projected possible futures or are reflective of changing current realities, our attention is drawn to them and shaped by their bold visualisations. Whatever their meanings, these are three very confident movies: Knives Out for slick storytelling, Bacurau for cinematic intelligence and The Wandering Earth for extraordinary design and craft.

Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at https://gaelart.blogspot.ie/. Read other articles by Caoimhghin.

This article was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2020 at 11:37am and is filed under Film Review.

Inflammatory ‘The Hunt’ Delivers Mere Sparks

Jordan Riefe — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 00:54:42 +0000

Horror movie specialist Blumhouse Productions has carved its niche weaving cogent themes of socio-political insight through popcorn movies. It has enjoyed a number of blockbuster successes including Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning “Get Out,” which explores racial tensions and traumas; and more recently Leigh Whannell’s “The Invisible Man,” in which a woman grapples with gaslighting and domestic abuse by an invisible ex, highlighting MeToo-era realities.

But did company head Jason Blum go too far when he greenlit the company’s latest release, “The Hunt”? Formerly titled “Red State vs. Blue State,” the film follows a number of blue-collar conservatives who awaken in an empty field to findthey’ve been captured and delivered as live game for a cadre of liberal elites to hunt and kill. The concept is not a new one to fans of the 1965 thriller “The Naked Prey,” or the 1932 action feature “The Most Dangerous Game,” before it (based on the classic 1924 short story of the same name). It’s a bit hoary as plots go, but the difference is in the telling.

Writer-producers Damon Lindelhof and Nick Cuse, both veterans of the apocalyptic TV Series “The Leftovers,” reportedly came to “The Hunt” after they challenged themselves to come up with the craziest idea conservatives might believe about liberals. Inspired by the debunked far-right conspiracy theory Pizzagate, they arrived at the invention of“Manorgate,” a conspiracy theory about hunting humans that runs through the plot of “The Hunt.”

“The Hunt” was initially set for release on Sept. 27, 2019. While there were mixed audience reviews following several initial test screenings around the Los Angeles area, Universal claimed the film had enjoyed some of the highest test scores ever for an original Blumhouse film. But trailers for the film triggered a right-wing backlash from people who had not yet seen the movie, complete with death threats.

The release date held until the mass shooting on August 3, 2019, when a gunman killed 22 and injured 24 people in El Paso, Texas. Then, less than 24 hours later, another shooter in Dayton, Ohio killed nine people and injured 27. A week later, Trump attempted to connect “The Hunt” to the shootings when he tweeted on August 9:

“Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate! … The movie coming out is made in order….to inflame and cause chaos.”

The next day, Universal removed the film from its release calendar.

And now the film has reemerged, released this Friday, March 13 at a time when vitriol between political parties is as rancorous as ever.

In the film, a young woman (Emma Roberts) wakes up in the wilderness and joins with several others, all emerging from the brush somewhere remote. Soon, they are on the run through a forest, with bullets and arrows whizzing past them. Protagonists come and go for the first 30 minutes as each is dispatched in some grizzly manner, leaving the audience disoriented until it lands with the decidedly non-dispatchable Crystal, played with stoic righteousness by Betty Gilpin(“Nurse Jackie,” “GLOW”).

She partners with conspiracy theorist, Gary (Ethan Suplee), affording him the benefit of her survival tactics and combat expertise, honed while serving in Afghanistan. They meet at what appears to be a roadside convenience store run by Ma and Pop, (Amy Madigan and Reed Birney), who turn out to be in on the game.

“He’s a monster!” Pop says of one of their victims. “He probably uses the N-word!” Ma bristles when Pop says “black” instead of “African-American.” But he assures her it’s okay. “According to who?” she asks. “NPR,” he answers, which she points out is staffed by mostly white people. This is about the most clever stab at liberals the movie takes.

The satirical dialogue throughout the movie is tonally-off and clashes with, rather than relieves, the film’s tensions. And while “The Hunt” is occasionally smart, it’s not smart enough. It employs lazy cliché in lieu of savvy observation, which only reinforces what each side of the political divide already thinks of the other.

The idea that progressives (some of whom could not be there for the hunt because they are battling AIDS in Haiti, as the plot goes), would be interested in shooting people, or even firing guns, is fairly tone deaf given that they are the ones who tend to call for stricter gun control laws. But then again, absurdity was the point when Lindelhof and Cuse dreamed Manorgate up.

Almost anyone can die in this screwball, blood-soaked thriller (which they do in a variety of over-the-top ways) with the exception of Gilpin. She moves through her scenes the way Eastwood’s Man With No Name stalks Sergio Leone’s outlaws in “A Fistful of Dollars.” She’s smart, capable, a woman of few words, fast to action when needed and the sanest character in the cast.

In the last act, Gilpin meets her match in Athena (Hilary Swank), the liberal mastermind behind Manorgate, who draws Crystal into her country kitchen for a fatal duel involving a Cuisinart blade. The scene is long and drawn out, and Tarantino did it better in “Kill Bill, Vol. 1,” but it resolves the movie in a satisfactory, if unoriginal, way. The ending only underscores the film’s overall deficiency: a lack of imagination.

Even so, bravo to the new movie for treading a territory average thriller flicks dare not. While brushing up against an issue is not the same as exploring it, “The Hunt” may be as close as Hollywood comes to saying something about the nation’s tense and divisive political atmosphere.

Painting A True Christ

Edward Curtin — Sat, 15 Feb 2020 02:12:52 +0000

There’s an early scene in Terrence Malik’s masterful new film – what I would call a moving painting – where the central character Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian peasant farmer from an isolated small mountainous village who refuses to take an oath to Hitler and fight in the German army, is talking to an older man who is restoring paintings in the local Catholic church. Franz, a devout Roman Catholic, is deeply disturbed by the rise of Hitler and the thought of participating in his immoral killing machine. The older man tells Franz – who has already been admonished that he has a duty to defend the fatherland (homeland) – that he makes his living painting pretty holy pictures for the culturally conditioned parishioners for whom God and country are synonymous. He says.

I paint their comfortable Christ with a halo over his head. We love him, that’s enough. Someday I’ll paint a true Christ.

Malik’s “someday” has arrived with A Hidden Life, where the older Malik shows the younger Malik – and us – a moving picture of what experience has taught him is the complex essence of a true and simple Christ: out of love of God and all human beings to refuse to kill.

To watch this film is to undergo a profound experience, an experiment with truth and non-violence, a three-hour trial (Latin: experimentum – trial). While Franz is eventually put on trial by the German government, it is we as viewers who must judge ourselves and ask how guilty or innocent are we for supporting or resisting the immoral killing machine of our own country now. Hitler and his Nazis were then, but we are faced with what Martin Luther King called “the fierce urgency of now.” Many Americans surely ask with Franz, “What has happened to the country that we love?” But how many look in the mirror and ask, “Am I a guilty bystander or an active supporter of the United States’ immoral and illegal wars all around the world that have been going on for so many years under presidents of both parties and have no end? Do I support the new cold war with its push for nuclear war with its first strike policy? Do I support, by my silence, a nuclear holocaust?”

I say that A Hidden Life is a moving painting because its form and content cannot be separated. A true artist, Malik realizes that what non-artists call form or style is the content; they are one. The essence of the story is in the telling; in a film in the showing. The cinematography by Jörge Widmer, a longtime Malick collaborator, is therefore key. It is exquisitely beautiful as he paints with swiftly moving light the mountains and streams of the Austrian countryside, even as the storm clouds with their thunder and lightning roll in across the mountains. The ever-recurring dramatic scenes of numinous nature and the focus on the sustaining earth from which our food comes and to which we all return and in which Franz, his wife Fani, and their young daughters romp and roll and plant and harvest and dirty their hands is the ground beneath our feet, and when we look, we see its marriage to the sky, the clouds, the light, the shadows, which in their iridescent interplay of light and darkness beseech us to interrogate our existence and ask with Franz what is right and what is wrong and what is our purpose on this beautiful earth.

That question is especially focused when between the beauty comes the terror in the form of interspersed documentary footage of Hitler, his fanatical followers, and horrifying scenes of war and violence.

Like the movie, I think you would agree that we are always moving, asking, wondering, if we are not the living dead. All is now, and now is nevermore, as it disappears into the darkness behind us. The light is always pointing into the future, so we can see where we are going. We don’t look at the light but by the light, as the great South African preacher, Alan Storey, puts it. But what is our light?

Where, asked Nietzsche, was the lightning before it flashed? To which the answer comes: it wasn’t. It is its flashing. Only a doing, an act, just like love, not a thing but action. Just like the word God, theόs in Greek, which has no vocative sense, as Roberto Calasso has pointed out in Literature and the Gods. “Theόs has a predictive function: it describes something that happens.” God is a verb; God is happening. God is happening when humans are happening, acting. Only then. “What you do (or don’t) speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say,” was the way Emerson phrased it.

The filmic interplay between Franz’s agonized moral dilemma, his action, and the embodiment of Christ in the natural world, the body of Christ (Corpus Christi, not the erstwhile American nuclear submarine by that name), is its genius, one that might be lost on one impatient for action and garrulous dialogue. A Hidden Life is far from Hollywood. Silence and natural beauty permeate it, as if to say the only way to grasp the mechanized and conscienceless brutality of Hitler or today’s killers and grasp why some resist it, is to enter a contemplative space where the love of the incarnated world awakens our consciences to our responsibility to our sisters and brothers everywhere. For in the silences one can also hear the screams of the millions of innocent victims beseeching us to heed their cries and intercede.

Malik shows us that the “true Christ” must be experienced as all of creation. No divisions. We must feel this in our flesh and blood, as does the rather inarticulate Franz, who speaks very little. His silence, however, and the marvelous acting of August Diehl, speak volumes. Valerie Pachner, as his supportive wife Fani, is gripping in every sense of the word, as Franz and Fani grip and grasp and hold each other in a fierce struggle to stay united in the face of the evil forces that threaten to separate them. It tore me apart to watch their struggle, and I left the theater shaking.

In one of his marvelous essays, “A Kind of Sharing,” John Berger, writing about painting, said:

The act of faith consisted of believing that the visible contained hidden secrets, that to study the visible was to learn something more than could be seen in a glance. Thus paintings were there to reveal a presence behind an appearance.

This could be Malik’s motto, his faith. Or perhaps “to reveal a presence that is the appearance.” The body is the soul. We are the world.

When I was young and in the U.S. Marines, seeking release as a conscientious objector, I read a book by Gordon Zahn, a sociologist and Catholic peace activist, called In Solitary Witness. It was the book that first brought Franz Jägerstätter to the world’s attention. I found it deeply inspiring to learn about someone else who felt alone in his spiritual decision to refuse to fight in war. Unlike Franz, who had been a wild motorcycle-riding young man prone to fighting, I had tried to be an upstanding, Jesuit-educated, patriotic, Irish-Catholic boy. Tried but didn’t completely succeed. I prided myself on my toughness and sensitivity. Don’t laugh. It’s not that uncommon. We are often strangers to ourselves, complicated creatures, even the worst among us open to redemptive change. But as I said then and say now, war is another matter. I felt it in my soul, as Franz clearly did, even if all he could say was, “I have this feeling inside me that I can’t do what I believe is wrong.”

War is a racket, as Marine Major General Smedley Butler put it. It is waged for the tyrannical oligarchs and always kills mostly civilians. Over ninety percent now, probably more. Innocent people. War is immoral. It is not complex. It is simple. Like the gospel message. Jägerstätter grasped that long ago and paid the price. I paid no price since I was released from the Marines to “take final vows in a religious order,” which was a complete lie, something I had never mentioned or considered but which allowed them to get rid of me. But I vividly remember the spiritual sustenance I got from Franz’s witness as I awaited the ruling, for I was unequivocally determined to go to prison before ever donning the uniform again. I got off easy and still feel guilty that I pocketed their lie and went my merry way. Watching A Hidden Life reminded me of my cowardice.Despite feeling “he had no one to turn to,” despite being urged “to say the oath and think what you want,” despite the advice of family and Bishop to compromise, despite the animosity of the villagers toward him and his family, despite being alone with his conscience, Franz remained faithful to his soul’s promptings. He lived forward by the light.

Malik shows us the anguish that was involved in his decision, the agony for him and his wife, who, ironically, seems to have been instrumental when they married in his spiritual awakening and whose suffering is palpable as she supports his decision to the end. It is not easy to watch. Aside from Franz, who remains steadfast throughout all the abuse and suffering that he undergoes when jailed by the Nazis, the viewer is not fed a simple story of good against evil but instead is invited to examine one’s own life, to ask what would one have done, to wonder whether Franz was right or wrong to subject his family to such suffering. Even the humanity of the Nazi judge is shown when he privately tries to dissuade Franz from not signing the oath, telling him that no one will ever know of his sacrifice, that “the world will go on as before” and “someone else will take your place.” We see the torment on this man’s face and in his harrowed hands when he is left alone after Franz tells him simply that “I don’t know everything” but “I can’t do what I believe is wrong,” despite knowing the consequences, and Franz is taken off to his solitary witness and his death.

The viewer is left to interpret the meaning of it all. Afterwards, we hear Fani says that “the time will come when we’ll know what all this means.”

Has that time come?

In 2007 the Catholic Church declared Jägerstätter a martyr and beatified him. The irony of making a saint out of a man whose spiritual witness was opposed by the institutional church authorities cannot be lost on a thinking person. Long dead, safely in his grave, a monument can be erected to his memory. Or is it a monument erected to the church itself, the church whose silence was in those days deafening?

When I was leaving the theater with the seven other attendees, a man engaged me in conversation. I asked him what he thought of the movie. He said only that “it was beautiful.” I was startled and had no response, but I thought of Rilke’s words about beauty from the Duino Elegies:

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

A Hidden Life is like that.

Near the end we see Franz and a group of prisoners sitting on a bench awaiting their turns to be beheaded by the executioner in a black coat and bowler hat. A man just doing his job, a bored look on his face, loping off heads one by one, anxious to get the mornings work done and get to lunch. The terror on the victims’ faces is palpable. I felt sick. While some prisoners struggled as they were led into the shed that housed the guillotine, Franz walked calmly in. Malik spares the viewer the details. All we are shown is the aftermath – a floor awash in blood. And as I recall, the light streaming in a high-up window.

Always the light to show us the way.

Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.


        <p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Friday, February 14th, 2020 at 6:12pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/movie-reviews/" rel="category tag">Film Review</a>.

Routine Myth Maintenance: Tarantino and American Exceptionalism

Caoimhghin O Croidheain — Mon, 20 Jan 2020 13:02:26 +0000

Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is a 2019 comedy-drama set in 1969 Los Angeles and features a large ensemble cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. The story centres around veteran actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), star of the 1950s Western television series Bounty Law, and and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Dalton is worried that his career is in decline and is reticent to take advice to travel to Italy to make Spaghetti Westerns. Cliff Booth also struggles to get work in Hollywood due to rumors that he murdered his wife on a boating trip.

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino re-emphasizes many of the bugbears, cliches and and myths of US elites with his checklist portrayal of misogynist violence against women, negative depictions of Chinese, Mexicans and Europeans, and the negative association of cult-following hippies with youth opposition to the Vietnam war. And all this happens during a period of much political activity and public demonstrations against the Vietnam war which is barely noticeable during the length of this film.

1937 Louisville, Kentucky. Margaret Bourke-White. There’s no way like the American Way

Doppelganger

Dalton gets a big opportunity when he is cast to play the villain in the pilot of Lancer, a new American Western series broadcast from 1968 to 1970. He tries hard to toughen up for his new cowboy role yet fluffs his lines and has a minor breakdown in his trailer. The softer side of Dalton is also still visible when he shows concern for a child actress he has thrown on the floor in a ‘tough’ acting scene. Following in an old cinematic tradition Cliff appears to be Dalton’s doppelganger or alter ego as he represents the tough side of Dalton off screen. Within the film they merge on screen as they play one character when Cliff plays Dalton’s body double. The reality of Dalton is that off screen he is shown to be a sensitive and anxious person, particularly about his declining fame.

Dalton’s new role also shows that the cowboy as a symbol of the tough American individualist undergoes changes from old style hero to gritty realism, while also being caricatured in Spaghetti Westerns.

The fact that Dalton plays a famous hero cowboy role during the 1950s but becomes a tougher character in Lancer in the 1960s mirrors the changing perception and role of the USA, which changes from a simple positive force post WW2, to a more complex position during and after the Vietnam war.

Because many of the veterans and demonstrators against the Vietnam war became hippies and were fundamentally opposed to state warmongering, Cliff dislikes all hippies. Tarantino then portrays the hippies in the film as cultists who blindly follow their violent leaders.

Cliff discovers that hippies have taken over the farm where earlier cowboy movies where filmed during Dalton’s heyday, and they seem to do nothing but laze around all day watching TV. This ruination of such an important site of American cowboy symbolism only confirms Cliff’s negative attitude towards them.

Bruce Lee, portrayed in the film by Mike Moh

Mexicans and Chinese

The negative portrayal of Mexicans and Chinese as somehow ‘lesser’ beings is stoked up in two other scenes from the film. In Hollywood, Cliff gets thrown off a set after a scene when he provokes Bruce Lee into a fight. Lee is depicted making ridiculous cat wailing noises as he enters into a fight with Cliff, reminiscent of the worst Kung Fu movie cliches and turns the scene into a comedic parody of Bruce Lee’s own films. Cliff smashes Lee into the side of a car leaving a huge dent as if it was a superhero movie without superheros, symbolically demonstrating the ‘natural’ strength and power of the Westerner without the tutoring of Eastern martial arts. The unspoken supremacy of the white male is also depicted as Cliff shields Dalton from Mexican workers who might see him crying. The tough male hero cannot be seen to be upset before lesser mortals.

Women and Europeans

The final scenes of absolute brutality and misogyny depict Cliff slamming a can of dog meat into a female hippie’s face, then slams her face into the mantelpiece and then onto the marble floor are only equaled by the scene of Dalton roasting her alive in the swimming pool with a flame thrower from an earlier film set. Clearly Dalton has got his ‘toughness’ back after being ‘impoverished’ by his European wife and sacking his alter ego Cliff.

The effete men of Europe are represented in his depiction of Roman Polanski and the European distortions of the cowboy genre which Dalton eventually agrees to act in. Following the Italian director Sergio Leone’s success, many Spaghetti Westerns were filmed at Cinecittà studios and various locations around southern Italy and Spain between 1964 and 1978.

Like in Inglourious Basterds (where Tarantino has Americans assassinate Nazi Germany’s leadership), Tarantino gives an alternate history of the Manson Family murders when the members decide to instead kill Dalton as a representative of Hollywood which had ‘taught them to murder’ according to the ‘hippie’ logic of one of the Family members, Sadie. This symbolically turns the anti-Vietnam peace-loving hippies into the perpetrators of violence, creating more right-wing prejudice against them.

Classical Hollywood

The greatest irony of Tarantino’s nostalgic view of Classical Hollywood is that Hollywood of the time followed a code of ethics agreed by the filmmakers themselves (which would have rejected Tarantino’s movies outright). During the Classical Hollywood period American toughness was tempered with respect for women, the body, foreign nationals and countries. This code of ethics, called the Motion Picture Production Code, was applied to most United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1934 to 1968. It had a quite comprehensive set of guidelines, a selected few of which are described here:

Resolved, That those things which are included in the following list shall not appear in pictures produced by the members of this Association, irrespective of the manner in which they are treated:

– The illegal traffic in drugs;
– Willful offense to any nation, race or creed;[…]

That special care be exercised in the manner in which the following subjects are treated, to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good taste may be emphasized:

– International relations (avoiding picturizing in an unfavorable light another country’s religion, history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry);
– Brutality and possible gruesomeness;
– Technique of committing murder by whatever method;
– Third-degree [torture] methods; […].

Thus we can see that one of the reasons why the Classical period was so successful is because of its upstanding and humanistic approach to the narratives of the time. People (and their political, cultural and ethnic backgrounds) were treated more respectfully within the films and the audiences were spared the gross bone-breaking, blood spurting violence of many films made since the relaxation of the code. Directors like Tarantino have turned cinema into a modern gladiators’ ring where the audience catharsis of thumbs up or thumbs down prevails.

Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name in a publicity image of A Fistful of Dollars, a film by Sergio Leone.

Tartantino’s modus operandi is to play up successful features of American culture while at the same time re-writing aspects of American history that ’embarrasses’ the political right or doesn’t fit into its over-embellished image of itself. Also in its negative depictions of other nations, women and ethnic groups (the negative portrayal of Native Americans is implicit in the cowboy genre), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood props up the ideology of American exceptionalism.

Tarantino has produced and directed a classic of Trumpean cinema in that it reasserts the primacy of the American way of life married to conservative Republican values.

Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at https://gaelart.blogspot.ie/. Read other articles by Caoimhghin.

This article was posted on Monday, January 20th, 2020 at 5:02am and is filed under Film Review, Hollywood.

‘1917’: A Cinematic Trip Through Hell

Jordan Riefe — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 23:58:38 +0000

In the spring of 1917, in the days following Operation Alberich, a strategic withdrawal by the German army to the heavily fortified Hindenburg Line dividing the French countryside, two soldiers are dispatched with a warning. They have only 24 hours to deliver orders to the Second Battalion, 1,600 strong, to cancel attack plans that unwittingly play into a German plot. This tale, reportedly told to filmmaker Sam Mendes by his paternal grandfather who fought in World War I, is the basis for his captivating cinematic reimagining, “1917.”

Wilderness shots bookend this arresting study in mise-en-scene. A bucolic field is bordered by forest, copses and meadows in between as the camera pulls back to reveal a soldier sitting foreground, Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay). As the camera pulls further back, we find Schofield is with his comrade, Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman). When they are summoned by their superiors, the camera recedes even further to reveal that they are not alone. Instead, they are sitting on the perimeter of a sprawling British army unit dug into the landscape in a maze of battle-worn trenches.

With the camera leading and trailing and looping around them, Mendes and his army of artists and actors populate the trenches with soldiers doing everything from sleeping to sharing a cigarette, singing, cooking, fighting, yelling and eating. The two lads enter a bunker and are given orders by General Erinmore (Colin Firth), who adds that Blake’s brother is among the soldiers at risk of falling into the German trap.

Periodically pursued through the decades, the one-take movie is a filmmaker’s coveted conundrum. Its first notable appearance is the 1948 Hitchcock classic, “Rope,” in which James Stewart solves a murder based on the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s. The effect of a single take employs edits hidden in moments where the screen is blackened or otherwise obscured. When digital photography entered the lexicon, it accommodated longer takes than the 11-minute running time of a 1,000 foot film load. The first feature-length film done in a single take without hidden edits is 2002’s “Russian Ark,” shot on location in the Hermitage Museum, the former Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Editing is the filmmaker’s principal tool to govern pacing. In “1917,” to compensate for its lack, Mendes cleverly directs his actors to increase the speed of their gait, which translates into greater urgency, augmented by the two figures’ frequent change of position in relation to the camera. Dialog comes faster, off-camera space is employed to suggest mortal danger, and yes, despite the fact that we are over 10 minutes into the movie without a single edit, the intensity escalates.

Mendes made his name as a stage director, winning back-to-back Olivier Awards in 1995-56 for his West End revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” and “Company.” A Tony nomination for “Cabaret” came the following year, leading to his film debut, “American Beauty,” which won him an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award. In it, he demonstrated a dramaturg’s ease with his outstanding cast, including Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey, who won an Oscar for his work.

While there was little doubt he could work with actors, it wasn’t until he directed the James Bond classic “Skyfall” in 2012 that Mendes proved beyond doubt he had mastered the visual component of filmmaking. Here, he reteams with that film’s creatives, Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins and production designer Dennis Gassner, whose muddy craters with soldiers’ remains worn into the walls are as eerie as his graveyard of cannons self-sabotaged by Germans in their retreat. A denuded cherry orchard in blossom and the ghostly ruins of a bombarded village are just some of the breathtaking warscapes traversed by Blake and Schofield on their way to deliver their message.

In what is essentially a two-hander, Chapman and MacKay acquit themselves well with a screenplay that hamstrings their performances and likewise the entire, glorious endeavor. Written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, best known for T.V.’s “Penny Dreadful,” “1917” doesn’t go anywhere. Naturalistic dialogue is mostly about nothing extraordinary—an argument over whether they should rest or continue, or reminiscences of home. Both actors are given ample opportunity to display their craft during one particular mortal moment which, with a lesser cast and director, might have been rendered hopelessly maudlin.

In the end, having fulfilled his mission, Schofield sits by a tree, as he did at the film’s beginning, and gazes out on the countryside. Yes, he has grown through the process, but if there is a point to “1917,” it’s difficult to discern, which doesn’t make it a bad or unenjoyable movie. It is an unusual epic told in a unique way that manages to engage even as it struggles to become more than just a cinematic exercise.

Jordan Riefe

Contributor

After studying Mandarin in post-Mao China, Jordan got into the film business as a camera assistant working with directors like…

‘Little Women’ for Millennials

Carrie Rickey — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 03:39:57 +0000

Whether literary adaptation or historical drama, a period film reveals as much about the era in which it is made as it does the era in which it is set. Case in point: Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women,” the fourth screen version made since 1933 of the Louisa May Alcott novel about the four March sisters. One reason it is remade so often is that, more than a century before Alison Bechdel proposed her “Bechdel test” to confront gender inequity in entertainment, “Little Women” had already gotten it right. It’s fun to see how those who adapt Alcott inevitably project their zeitgeist onto hers.

Few narratives honor the very different choices very different women make with their lives. That, I think, is one reason Alcott’s story is ageless. There’s an additional bonus: Watch the iterations of “Little Women” chronologically and you see radically different interpretations. The earlier versions are about America at war and at peace. The later ones are tuned into how women negotiate a world tilted against them.

Seen from a present-day perspective, the 1933 version of “Little Women,” starring Katharine Hepburn as aspiring writer Jo, reflects both the Depression era in which it was made and the Civil War era in which it is set. Director George Cukor frames the story as one in which the March family falls from prosperity to the striving end of the working class. Brought together by hard times, they embody New Deal ideas of sacrifice and sharing the wealth. The March family helps their immigrant neighbors, the Hummels; the wealthy Laurences help out the less fortunate Marches.

Released in 1949 and starring June Allyson as Jo, Mervyn Le Roy’s “Little Women” underlines the similarities between the periods following the Civil War and World War II, when women are eased out of the workplace and back into the domestic sphere. It seems less 1865 than 1945 when Laurie Laurence (Peter Lawford) patronizingly proposes to Jo, noting that if she accepts him she won’t have to write anymore. He has failed to notice that Jo’s identity is as a writer.

Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 film may be the canonical big-screen version of “Little Women.” Released shortly after the 1980s-‘90s years that feminist critiques dubbed “post-feminist,” it revels in a multitude of feminisms. Every scene is alive with active women involved both in their duties as breadwinners and their avocations as artists. They are caregivers, rolling bandages at hospitals and rolling out dough in the kitchen. And they are sustained by creative work, whether it’s Jo (Winona Ryder) at her desk writing, Amy (Kirsten Dunst) at her sketchbook drawing, or Beth (Claire Danes) at the piano.

Where their filmmaking predecessors tend to frame Jo as unconventional and her sisters traditional, Armstrong and screenwriter Robin Swicord, along with the titular little women and their mother, Marmee, see a spectrum of women who make individual choices and support each other in them.

Gerwig’s adaptation — she both wrote the screenplay and directed — is more pragmatic, dramatizing many of the same vignettes but framing the story differently. For the writer/director, it’s about how the daughters of an improvident father (played by Bob Odenkirk) and a resourceful mother (a splendid Laura Dern) make decisions about marriage and about art. Do they do it for love or for money? One of the sisters, Meg (Emma Watson) chooses love; two others, Jo (Saiorse Ronan) and Amy (Florence Pugh, also splendid), find ways to balance both. In order to find that equilibrium, Jo must make compromises to her art, while Amy consider compromises to her heart.

The film opens in the middle of Alcott’s story, with the adult Jo bracing herself to walk into the office of “The Weekly Volcano,” the journal to which she wants to submit her fiction. Mr. Dashwood, its proprietor (Tracy Letts), gives her a ironclad rule: By story’s end, the heroine must be “married or dead.” While Alcott herself never wed (she wasn’t so inclined, and anyway, she was too busy supporting her sisters and their kin), her alter ego, Jo, will make sure that each March sister ends as Mr. Dashwood demands. (Those who know how movie studios run today can also imagine Mr. Dashwood’s counterpart saying something like this to Gerwig.)

Gerwig proceeds from the establishing scene to ping-ponging flashbacks and flash-forwards. This has the advantage of accelerating the pace of an episodic narrative but the disadvantage of causing character development interruptus. The pleasure of coming-of age stories is in watching characters evolve. By scrambling the chronology, Gerwig discloses effects before showing their causes. (Many in the audience I saw it with kept asking out loud, “Have we gone ahead or back in time?”)

Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously observed that a movie needs a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. In this case, discontinuous storytelling is to the detriment of the performers — particularly to Watson, whose Meg is superfluous in this telling, and to Ronan, an actress of unshakable confidence, whose rhythms are shaky here. As Laurie, Timothee Chalamet, who plays Laurie, seems downright anachronistic. He’s petulant when he should be ardent and giggly when he should be buoyant.

Happily, Laura Dern as Marmee and Florence Pugh as Amy enlarge every scene they are in and emerge as the critical characters. Amy, the vain, calculating and materialistic youngest, is the least likeable in the novel and in most of the movies (Elizabeth Taylor played her in the 1949 version). Gerwig and Pugh interpret Amy as one who belatedly emerges from Jo’s long shadow.

Amy’s the one her father’s rich aunt dotes on, the one Aunt March (Meryl Streep) instructs to marry well so she can support her family. Much to Amy’s own surprise, she’s not a gold-digger, She doesn’t marry the man her aunt chooses; she chooses the one she loves. In loving, she grows a conscience, heart and generosity so conspicuously absent in her youth.

The parts of Gerwig’s film I appreciated most were those of its candidness about the economic choices a woman makes. Some of them are in Alcott’s novel — as they are in the novels of Jane Austen and Willa Cather. Others — like a very droll exchange between Dashwood and Jo about her percentage of book profits, are Gerwig’s projections of our zeitgeist onto Alcott’s.

“Little Women” may have been written more than 150 years ago, yet it is still so pertinent today that every movie version has things to teach new generations of fans. Of how many other novels, or movies, can we say the same?

Carrie Rickey

Contributor

In addition to writing film reviews and essays for Truthdig, Carrie Rickey has been a film critic at The Philadelphia Inquirer and Village Voice and an art critic at Artforum and Art in America. Rickey has…