Gilad was recently here for the JZ Festival in Shanghai’s Pudong district and he also taught; I’m assuming, at the JZ school. I can imagine the experience. The JZ Festival went off without a hitch in a beautiful park in the Pudong New Zone. The JZ school is situated in the former French concession among old houses and tree lined lanes. Between the lanes, the Jazz and the skyscrapers of Pudong, it must have been an intoxicating week. But we are supposed to be dissidents and radicals and some parts of Gilad’s article are lazy and dangerous. We need perspective.

Gilad writes, “China is a financial miracle.”

I have lived in Shanghai for eight years and a large part of my life is given to the underground music scene. But before we get to the reality of that we have to address the big problem. The myth of the “economic miracle”. This is not specific to China. This is a global myth. Let us start with a reminder of the state of the global system. According to the World Bank development indicators for 2008, 80% of the world, or 5.15 billion people, live on less than ten dollars a day with 3.14 billion of those, or half the world’s population, living on less than two dollars fifty.² The top 20%, as we are all aware, is divided into the so called middle classes and the super rich.

China is a fair reflection of this global trend. The most recently touted indicator has been the internet usage stats.³ China recently approached the 300 million mark for internet users. Economic commentators foamed at the mouth and noted that was equal to the entire population of the USA. Of course, what it actually represents is the creation of a 20% middle class to go with it’s remaining billion people who are on or below the subsistence mark. Gilad also states, “It is a miracle because it somehow manages to restrain hard capitalism with a unique socially orientated system.” That is simply not true. It is purely hard capitalism. Period. There is no restraint, there is a free for all that is destroying the countryside and resulting in monthly riots across the land.⁴

In any region of the world, a system which enriches a minority of the people while plunging the rest downwards — while destroying their land rights and environment — should never be called a miracle. It should be called a disaster.

It is also dangerous to freely mix ideas of state or government with people or culture. I love to live here and my experiences on the underground rock scene and with local artists have been amazing. However, a little reading or asking around the subject will reveal that writing, music and art has a glass ceiling that is directly imposed by state censorship. For every Jazz Festival that goes on there are a slew of cancelled events.⁵ During the Olympics, the entire music scene was forcibly shut down for a month by the police.⁶ The underground is allowed to exist, as long as it doesn’t try to go public. I might also mention that no word gets published in print media without being first read by the Xinhua Agency.

I love living in China and Shanghai. The people are great and the issues I bring up are not only relevant to China. I myself don’t like ‘China Bashing’ and the countless lazy stereotypes that appear in journalism about this complex country. However, Shanghai is the glossy facade for the rest of the country and it’s our job as radicals to always keep our perspective.

1. ”Autumn in Shanghai” by Gilad Atzmon
2. ”Global Issues Poverty Facts.”
3. ”China has close to 300 million internet users AFP.”
4. ”58,000 mass incidents in China in first quarter as unrest grows to largest ever recorded.”
5. ”Modern Sky Festival 2009” from China Music Radar.
6. ”The Clampdown” from China Music Radar.

You don’t need to have written a thesis on Black Athena or Greek Democracy to get why 300 should be unacceptable by current standards of awareness. The Spartans were a brutal military dictatorship that used slaves for labor. They eventually toppled the fledgling Athenian democracy during business as usual — fighting other Hellenic states. That ancient Greeks were a bunch of enlightened freedom loving whites holding out for democracy in a cruel world is a classic myth cultivated to boost racist empires in the time of colonization. In the movie 300, Zack Snyder exaggerates the myth to outrageous proportions. The Spartans become heroic supermen that would bring a tear to the eye of yesterday’s supremacist and the Persians get literally demonized — turned into demons and monsters. The whole affair is then fetish-ized to the nines without a shred of irony or comment.

The Dark Knight asks us what can be done when people with morals and decency face up to an enemy with none. It explores the avenues from three perspectives: Gordon the police officer, Batman the vigilante, and Harvey Dent/Rachel Dawes as the letter of the book method. The Joker plays out the terror scenarios on the city and presents us with an evil force that can’t be understood or reasoned with. For anyone who doesn’t live in a cave, this movie is a heavy-handed exploration of the War on Terror and terrorism itself. It happily follows far-right propaganda on the matter without batting an eyelid. It starts right at the beginning with the false premise that underlies all ‘war on terror’ propaganda — that terrorists, people we label as such, are crazed evildoers with no values or agenda and they simply have to be stopped or they will go on horrific rampages for no reason.

I’m sorry Christopher Nolan and all the talented people that worked on this movie but: terrorists do have grievances and view themselves as part of a conflict. These conflicts have histories. Intelligent people should seek to resolve these conflicts peacefully and not get behind mythmaking designed to continue the dehumanizing spiral of violence on both sides. The term propaganda implies intent to deceive and if that intent was not there at any level then we have to conclude that these values are completely internalized by the film makers.

This brings us to Wanted. This movie is unlike the other two in that it doesn’t make a direct comment on practical events or identified ideologies so to speak. Wanted is assaulting us with a more nihilistic abstract that is far reaching and universal. The premise of the movie is this: you have to kill people to save people. It’s tough but there are skilled people who will do this and to ask why or seek more details will only cause trouble. What’s more, who to kill is revealed by a higher power that you should follow without question. Do I need to explain real-world parallels or explain why this is offensive? The scene where the train falls into the ravine is also perhaps the most nihilistic and amoral vision of collateral damage committed to film.

I’m not a book burner or a banner. Edward Said writes in Orientalism that works written in the colonial ideology should not be dismissed entirely. They are multi-faceted complex texts. They are historical records, they are prejudiced and they are technically brilliant, they are repulsive and at the same time influential within a canon. But to talk about extreme texts such as the three movies I mention and not acknowledge their ideology at all is to accept their ideas as normal or uncontroversial. What does it say about us that a large majority of literate, educated people are literally worshipping these movies without a single passing comment on what I have discussed above?

These are clear examples of the bad outweighing the good. As for me, the battle scenes in Birth Of A Nation don’t offset it’s race hatred. The set pieces in Triumph Of The Will don’t make up for Fascism. Vivien Leigh’s performance in Gone With The Wind doesn’t make up for Slavery. And, I’m not going to excuse rampaging slaughter in Afghanistan and Iraq because the Batbike is like … really cool, man.