As the year winds down and Hollywood gets busy creating Oscar buzz, one unlikely contender is The Hurt Locker, the widely praised Iraq movie that premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and was released in the U.S. in June 2009.

“Just when I thought I’d seen enough of Iraq war movies, along comes (Hurt Locker),” an Access Hollywood film critic told USA Today in September. “If any movie about Iraq is going to break through to the academy, this is it.”

Indeed, the “megabuzz-spawning film” (to quote the Modesto Bee) was nominated for its first official honor last month, by the prestigious (if relatively obscure) New York-based Independent Filmmaker Project, which tapped it for Best Feature. According to the Los Angeles Times, which has started tracking Oscar favorites, The Hurt Locker has been tapped by no fewer than 16 leading film pundits as a serious Academy Award contender.

Even if it skipped your radar, you’ve probably heard some beaming reviews about The Hurt Locker by now.

The almost unanimous acclaim it attracted from mainstream reviewers focused mainly on director Kathryn Bigelow’s suspenseful action scenes, which make up the majority of the film’s run time, and prominent reviewers agree that it’s a masterfully crafted American combat epic about three deceptively simple-looking and courageous American men making sacrifices for their country while in unfamiliar, hostile territory.

At least partially thanks to clever marketing, the film produced over $12 million in box office revenue, making it the most successful movie made about the U.S. war on Iraq and its so-called war on terror to date. (Compare to films like Redacted, which earned $25,628, or Rendition’s $9.6 million.)

But there are some curious contradictions in the praise Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have received for their work.

Reviewers cite Boal’s brief stint as an embedded journalist following a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq as supporting evidence for the film’s alleged accuracy. But they fail to consider the inevitable bias of such a narrow perspective.

Would reviewers have lauded the accuracy of a story based on the experiences of a journalist who had been embedded with the “other” side — particularly if the portrayal of American soldiers had not been positive?

Some reviewers have praised Bigelow for allegedly not incorporating a political stance into the film. This is simply ridiculous: It’s being endorsed by military-recruitment sites as we speak. A link to military.com, the largest military organization in the United States, appears on the front page of the film’s official Web site.

A Realistic Portrayal of Iraq?

Filmed in Jordan, The Hurt Locker is supposed to have taken place in Iraq in 2004, where an American bomb-dismantling team visits various danger spots in unfriendly neighborhoods.

The first scene, ironically, opens with a quote from award-winning anti-war journalist and author, Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction for war is a drug.” Cue screen fade.

The display re-emerges from within the lens of a remote-controlled robot making its way across a rocky road toward a suspicious-looking pile of sacks laid out on the ground near an old railway track. The audience catches brief glimpses of destruction from this unsteady viewpoint, as well as a shaky camera (through which most of the film is viewed) that narrows in and out on people and objects, as though they are all targets.

From these two perspectives, we see old blown-up cars and destroyed buildings juxtaposed beside the U.S. presence, shown here through the existence of a crushed Pepsi can and U.S. military men. A man’s voice sounds in the background while Iraqi civilians are told to evacuate. Cars continue to drive down a road very nearby. The civilians are either frantic or annoyed that they are being asked to exit the area.

Other Iraqis are also portrayed as disaffected, their blank, suspicious faces watching from balconies, windows, stores. Shots of expressionless or menacing Iraqis staring at American soldiers appear throughout, especially during action scenes that make up the majority of this film.

The Hurt Locker may be winning critical acclaim for its cinematic artistry, but it’s Web site suggests a different target audience. The site bares striking similarity to shoot ‘em-up video game Web sites like Call of Duty and Halo.

Complete with eerie, adrenaline-inspiring sound effects, flash clips and graphics taken from the film, the Web site caters to thrill-seeking, pro-military, weapons enthusiasts who want to see destruction and the technology and methods that breed it.

Boal, whose work on In the Valley of Elah was superior in its depth and complexity, apparently spent two weeks embedded with an explosives-ordnance-disposal team (EOD) team in Iraq. (Thus the repeated claims that the film is a fair and realistic portrayal of the situation in Iraq.)

But Guy Marot, a former bomb-disposal officer who also served in southern Iraq, points out in the Guardian, the film is full of “numerous glaring inaccuracies,” not the least of which is Jeremy Renner’s character, an impulsive, thrill-seeking team leader who endangers himself and everyone else on his team several times throughout the story:

Staff Sgt. William James … is basically insane. He’s supposed to have dealt with some 870 devices, which is completely unbelievable — it would mean dealing with three improvised explosive devices a day — and he just rocks up near a device and puts on a bomb suit.

If a bomb-disposal officer started behaving like this, he or she would be shipped home in minutes. James makes us look like hot-headed, irrational adrenaline junkies with no self-discipline. It’s immensely disrespectful to the many officers who have lost their lives.

When asked indirectly whether he thought his screenplay was narrow in perspective, during an interview in Vanity Fair, Boal was somewhat defensive:

I take a tiny issue with the premise of your question. I think the film investigates an awful lot. The IEDs [improvised explosive devices] are the central feature of the war. It’s a war of bombs. They are the key tactic of the insurgency; the success or failure of entire Iraq war depends on the ability to deal with IEDs. The movie is about the guys that deal with IEDs. So to me there couldn’t be a more topical, down-the-middle-of-the-plate look at the war.

While Boal is correct that IEDs are the cause of more than half of U.S. casualties in Iraq, his claim that “the success or failure of the entire Iraq war depends on the ability to deal with IEDs” is simplistic and confused (not unlike like some of the justifications given to launch the war in the first place).

In fact, Bigelow and Boal, like the characters in the film, never factor into the movie the question of why Iraq was invaded and occupied by the U.S. More importantly, they also never define what success or winning involves. This lack of context explains why the few non-action scenes in the movie seem misplaced or forced, like they were sloppily incorporated just for the sake of it.

Time reviewer Richard Corlisse concurs:

Except for a few digressive scenes — a solo sortie of personal vengeance, a conversation about what it all means — that could easily be cut from the 2-hour, 11-minute running time, The Hurt Locker is a near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work.

Indeed, the film only provides the perspectives of three American men working in a very dangerous military unit, with the lead character being the most unrealistic character of them all — an assessment even lead actor Renner agrees with:

“I got to spend a lot of time with the guys at Fort Irwin, and off base as well — to get in their heads a little bit, get to know them personally, which was even more important. I had to learn all the rules so I’d know how to break them. That was one of the toughest things when I was hanging out with these guys. There’s no one really like the character of James.”

But if the lead character is unrealistic, then what was realistic about the film? Certainly the anxiety portrayed by supporting actor Brian Geraghty, playing the young and inexperienced Spc. Owen Eldrige, is closer to real solders’ testimonies. The trauma Eldrige suffers after losing his first team leader enhances the fear he experiences every day of losing his own life.

Less realistic perhaps, in contrast to the “insane” but nevertheless endearing, altruistic and deeply caring James who is Caucasian, is that the most racist character in the film is the African American Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who refers to James as a “redneck piece of trailer trash.”

Unlike Sanborn, James actually cares about the Iraqis and risks his own life many times to save theirs. He even goes on a rampage after he mistakenly thinks that an Iraqi boy who he had gone out of his way to befriend was savagely murdered by insurgents and made into a human bomb. His quest to find answers takes him into an Iraqi professor’s home where he is greeted with joy: “I am very pleased to see CIA in my home,” after his unexpected presence is discovered in the house.

Is this supposed to be another realistic portrayal of the situation in Iraq? Are we to believe that Iraqis welcome the presence of the CIA in their country?

In another scene, which was the most implausible event in the entire film, James risks his life until the very last minute trying to help an Iraqi man who somehow made it through U.S. security checkpoints alive while frantically yelling that he had multiple bombs attached to his body. (This is in direct contrast to Sanborn, who always only does the minimum and even hints that he would be willing to kill the unpredictable James and make it look an accident, since all he wants to do is finish his tour and go home alive.)

Racial misrepresentations are however most easily observed in the film’s portrayals of Iraqis. Aside from the Iraqi boy James becomes smitten with (even he is Westernized to the extent that he sells American DVDs and introduces himself as “Beckham,” after the British soccer player), there is no Iraqi that is given any meaningful character development in the film. They are either the anonymous, sneering or menacing Arabs who watch the American soldiers while they are in high-stress situations, the victims of other evil Iraqis who murder young boys to put bombs inside their bodies, or the voiceless snipers and aiders of those determined to harm Americans and other Iraqis.

That a film that does not include a single Iraqi perspective is being hailed as an accurate portrayal of the situation in Iraq is either indicative of the blatant bias and possibly hidden intentions of the film’s creators and reviewers, or representative of the flawed view that continues to resonate within people’s minds about the war in Iraq.

These views, are, in case they need repeating: that this war was waged with good intentions, that the continued U.S. presence is actually beneficial to the Iraqis, that Iraqis are either idiots or savages, and that the American presence there is composed of lost or lonely soldiers who are just trying to live another day.

This after a reported 1 million Iraqis are now dead, and after we have seen such atrocities committed by U.S. troops as the torture at Abu Gharib, the Al-Mahmudiyah killings and the Haditha slayings.

On The Hurt Locker Web site’s “Acclaim” section, the following quote is attributed to The New Yorker: “Quite a feat. A classic of tension, fear and bravery that will be studied 20 years from now.”

If this proves to be true, what a sad prediction it would make. Ironically, a different quote, taken from a review of the film on military.com, is actually far more honest:

“The Hurt Locker is both a gripping portrayal of real-life sacrifice and heroism, and a layered, probing study of the soul-numbing rigors and potent allure of the modern battlefield.”

Pay attention to the last part of that statement. Listening to the young men in front of me discuss it after watching the film for the third time in the theater, I’m also confident that many like them left with the impression that while war may not be pretty, it sure can be fun.

When the film ends with James marching defiantly toward yet another bomb in slow motion, one can practically hear the parody song, “America, Fuck Yeah!” playing in the background.

One of the important offerings in Money Driven Medicine is a clear timeline of the development of the private health care system in the United States (US). The first key moment comes after World War II as many other nations shift to public insurance and publicly controlled delivery of care. In the US, doctors played a key role in preventing the creation of such a public system by asserting their right to determine care. But this physician-centered care was displaced in the 1970s with the rise of Health Management Organizations. “M.D.’s,” Mahar states, “were traded in for MBA’s.” As this business-centered system failed in the 1990’s, private insurers tried to reign in costs by denying costly, but often medically necessary, medical procedures. Backlash ensued and since the late 90s, insurers have liberally approved procedures while jacking up premiums to defend their profit margins. Costs have skyrocketed.

The result is a bloated health care system which rewards specialists who perform multiple procedures instead those who provide good preventive care. A critical assessment is, therefore, offered about the myth that America has the best health care in the world. When it comes to what Donald Berwick of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, calls “rescue-care” the system performs quite well, but what most people need is open access to simple preventative care. Here Berwick argues, “We are nowhere near the best and it is reflected in outcomes.” The health care system in US pays for doing things not healing patients.

In fact, as studies conducted by the Dartmouth Institute prove, doing more has little impact on positive outcomes. High-treatment states such as New Jersey, which spends 20% more than the average for Medicaid, have equal or worse outcomes than low-treatment states such as Iowa. Physician interviewees in the movie spoke openly about a health system that has been commodified, industrially produced and, finally, is not designed to improve people’s health.

This leads to the second key argument in Money Driven Medicine. The problem with health care is not just lack of insurance; it is an overall lack of access to the kind of care people need. The fee-structure described above has consequences that have filtered down to the training of doctors resulting in a scarcity of primary care physicians. Medical student Krystal Irizarry called primary care, “A burden compensation wise.” Consequently, the film presents multiple patients who have no “medical-home” – no single primary care physician – and are reduced to emergency room visits when minor conditions turn into chronic illnesses.

It is no wonder then, that Mahar found plenty of willing subjects for her study. Five out of six doctors she solicited responded. Most described a health care system slipping out of their control. This idea is brought home powerfully when Dr. James Weinstein describes the story of his daughter Brianna who was afflicted with childhood leukemia. After multiple protocols of chemotherapy, Weinstein objected to continued treatment – viewing the proposed cure as more damaging than the disease. Brianna’s doctors insisted on continuing treatment and threatened Weinstein with a lawsuit if he resisted. The doctors in this case feared a costly lawsuit. The result? Multiple, and ultimately futile, treatments which had no medical justification other than avoiding litigation.

The experience allowed Weinstein to realize that most doctors are not really trained to provide useful information to their patients. What’s needed, the film then argues, is a shift to a more unmediated relationship between doctors and patients. As Weinstein and Berwick and others emphasize, such a relationship need not be unbalanced – with physicians lording over patients. Berwick points to studies which indicate that when provided with the proper medical information, patients tend to make more efficient and frugal choices about their health care. Removing profit-motive from medicine will allow doctors to act like doctors – to place their ethical commitment to patients ahead of bottom-line calculations – and patients to make informed decisions.

Some reservations can be noted about the film. Mahar is an investigative journalist who relied primarily on interviews with medical practitioners to piece together her narrative. Some of the history presented in the film could use a broader contextualization. For instance, the post World War II turn away from a public system occurred, not coincidentally, with an intense witch-hunting of socialists and communists. Aspiring politicians such as Ronald Reagan made great currency as both anti-communist hunters and as spokesmen against socialized medicine. Similarly the 1970’s pivot toward HMOs occurred in a moment of transition for Corporate America away from the post-war production model and toward a neo-liberal strategy of lean wages and slim benefits. These broader developments informed changes in the health care industry.

Ultimately, Money Driven Medicine offers perspectives essential for Americans evaluating proposals for health care reform. As stated in the film, the goal is not to tinker with this or that part of the market system, but to totally re-think the relationship between doctor and patient that has developed under a privately owned system. Undoubtedly, although the film does not state this explicitly, a single-payer national healthcare system offers to best hope for reclaiming the doctor-patient relationship. Unfortunately, the trajectory of the health care debate in Washington seems to be bending more toward the tinkering side. Money-driven medicine in America may be able to survive another attempt at reform.

So begins the deeply moving documentary Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, Abe Osheroff’s story of breathtaking courage and commitment. With Osheroff’s opening monologue, director Nadeem Uddin brilliantly establishes the dominant theme of this work: How does an individual live righteously in an unrighteous world?

Osheroff spent his entire life answering that question — not with erudite philosophical treatises — although as he demonstrated many times, he was more than capable of doing so — but with a simple unfailing passion to better humankind. To become a citizen of the world in the truest, fullest sense of the word. Wavering, quitting, or succumbing to the fear often stalking him were never options. He needed, as he said, to like the face he saw in the mirror each morning.

His was an inner determination sculptured by the inescapable inequities of his youth in a Brooklyn ghetto. The grinding desperation of the factory workers, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the shameless evictions of impoverished tenants, these whittled away all traces of passivity and self-preservation to leave a fierce uncompromising will. From his earliest days he became determined to fight what those on the left call “the good fight.” And he did so wherever it took him.

First to Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in its stand against fascism. This decision, daring in itself, became fraught with even more danger when his ship was torpedoed, requiring Abe to swim two miles to shore. He fought in several battles before a bullet destroyed one of his knees.

Abe came back to the states and immersed himself in the labor protests of the late 1930s. With his early call for workers’ compensation, even some of this friends thought he was “nuts.” But Abe never backed down from demanding rights for the downtrodden and disenfranchised.

Using his skills as a carpenter, he traveled to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer in 1964 to construct a community center. Danger dogged him at every turn; his car was blown up the night he arrived, the house he was staying in was riddled with a thousand bullets, but he stayed with his work.

And he built homes, again, in Nicaragua, in the poor rural communities — 30 houses altogether, including the roads and bridges to reach them. Osheroff was a vocal opponent of the war in Vietnam, and continued his activism up until the end of his life at the age of 92, speaking out against the Iraq War.

More than seven decades of Osheroff’s political organizing are brought to life by this captivating documentary. Haunting music by David Brunn, and skillful use of news footage, some culled from Abe’s own earlier award-winning film Dreams and Nightmares, bring a dramatic focus to the narrative. We listen to Osheroff in conversation with the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and listen to poet Martin Espada read his tribute to Osheroff. But mostly what we hear is Abe — authentic, irreverent and always challenging complicity in the face of injustice and inequality.

Much as One Foot in the Grave is the story of Osheroff’s life, it’s also a probing and unflinching look at the philosophy behind that life — a philosophy that demands peace instead of war, human cooperation instead of exploitation. Old though he was, Osheroff refused to live in the past. Year after year, he spoke at college campuses and high schools, as he worried with and for his young audiences about our nation’s misdirections. He told students that history is made through organized anger, that dissent brings growth, and, my favorite, that solidarity is love in action.

Abe Osheroff died in April 2008. But because of the dancing beat of his courage and refusal to compromise with injustice, through this poignant documentary he will be heard by new generations. As Osheroff hoped, all that mattered to him will remain fully alive.

Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing is distributed by the Media Education Foundation.

For more information on Osheroff and the film, contact producer Robert Jensen.

The transcript of an extended interview Jensen conducted with Osheroff and a print version of that interview in pamphlet form also is available.

A new documentary by filmmaker Damien Gillis shows how current practices used by Norwegian-owned companies operating in Canadian waters continue to threaten wild salmon and the iconic species that feed on them, including grizzly bears, bald eagles and killer whales. The film, Dear Norway: Help Save Canada’s Wild Salmon, also features testimonies from local scientists, fishermen and First Nations chiefs detailing the dangers posed by open-net fish farms to British Columbia’s biologically diverse ecosystems.

More than 50 Pure Salmon Campaign partners and global allies sent a letter to King Harald of Norway asking him to help protect wild fish populations from Norwegian-owned salmon farms. The campaign also invited King Harald to a screening of Dear Norway at Aqua Nor. Norway’s king officially opens this year’s trade show and will be joined by Norway’s fisheries minister, Helga Pedersen as well as the Canadian fisheries minister, Gail Shea. Aqua Nor runs from August 18-21 (The Pure Salmon Campaign’s booth is # B-111C).

“The weight of scientific evidence my colleagues and I have published in peer-reviewed journals shows that sea lice from Norwegian-owned salmon farms are pushing wild pink salmon toward extinction,” said Alexandra Morton, director of the Salmon Coast Field Station. “I personally invite the King of Norway, together with fellow passionate angler John Fredriksen, to come out to the Broughton Archipelago to bear witness themselves to the poor practices of Marine Harvest, Cermaq and Grieg.”

Despite repeated calls for reform, the Norwegian government – a major shareholder in the aquaculture industry – has yet to take responsibility for its management practices in Canada.

“Norwegian salmon farming companies continue to disregard our peoples’ directives to alter their business practice, to respect our territories and natural resources,” said Chief Bob Chamberlin of the Musgamagw Tsawataineuk Tribal Council. “This is in direct conflict with the Norwegian Government’s support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is a real shame that such behaviour from Norwegian companies is acceptable and in conflict with international positions made on behalf of all Norwegian Citizens”

Norwegian-owned companies control more than 90% of British Columbia’s salmon farming production.

“It is ironic that the King of Norway is opening the world’s largest farmed salmon trade show in one of only two fjords where wild salmon are fully protected from salmon farms,” said Geir Kjensmo, chairman of the Norwegian Salmon Association. “In view of the declines in wild salmon and sea trout stocks and rise in sea lice infestation here in Norway, the Laksfjord protection in the Trondheimsfjord and the Tanafjord must be extended to completely cover other fjords. And the message coming loud and clear from Canada is that wild Pacific salmon must be afforded protection from Norwegian-owned open net cages misplaced on migration corridors.”

“Norwegian authorities must look to British Columbia and learn from the severe, documented effects that sea lice from the fish farms are having on the migrating wild smolts,” said Vegard Heggem, a river owner on the River Orkla near Trondheim. “Norway should take a leading role to quickly develop and implement the use of closed containment systems like Preline. This looks like a potential way that salmon can be farmed without destroying the stocks of wild, migrating fish both in BC, Norway and other areas where salmon is farmed”.

Other countries also feel the effects of open-net salmon farms.

“In Scotland and Ireland, many of our most iconic stocks of wild sea trout and salmon have been very hard-hit within those areas where Norwegian companies own the majority of the salmon farms,” said Fiona Cameron of the Sea Trout Group in Scotland. “All of the organizations that have an interest in wild salmonids agree that something must be done urgently to reduce the impact of commercial salmon farming.”

To watch Dear Norway: Help Save Canada’s Wild Salmon. To read the letter sent to King Harald. To read more about Aqua Nor.

Near the beginning of the film, we meet Angel Dillard, a statuesque wife, mother, songwriter, singer, farmer, and pro-life advocate. Dillard is a Christian woman raised to be a critical thinker, which led her to the Republican Party.

Dillard and her family attend the Baptist church services of senior pastor Terry Fox — an avowedly anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-ACLU, and anti-Islam minister. It would be contradictory to describe this individual as pro-life given that he applauds the pro-death penalty. Fox’s strident pulpit causes a split in the church, and Fox finds himself a new parish in a fledgling amusement park.

A contrasting character is the 73-year-old crusty, straight-talking, liberal and artist provocateur M.T. Liggett. Said Liggett, “Gay marriage!? Who gives a shit? It’s none of my business. Abortion; it’s the same thing …”

Two camps are clearly delineated. Liggett respects individual autonomy — that no group has the right to impose its standards of behavior on another group. On the other hand is the view expressed by Brittany Barden, a volunteer campaigner with the Republic Party, that the United States is “meant to be a Christian nation; that is what the founding fathers intended.”

Bob Lippoldt, a substitute teacher and pro-life advocate, frames the liberals as “anti-Christian.”

Yet, Julie Burkhart, a pro-choice advocate, said, “I believe in what Jesus had to say … but I’m not a Christian.”

The pro-life versus pro-choice battleground occupies a chunk of the film, including the six-week so-called Summer of Mercy when pro-choice advocates targeted abortion clinics. This morphed into a well-organized and successful political movement. The long-time Kansan Democratic representative (1977-1994) Dan Glickman was the electoral target of the pro-lifers, and he was defeated.

When Glickman voted for NAFTA, he alienated many workers. Glickman noted that he had fared worst in blue-collar Democratic districts.

Bespectacled Dale Swenson, a former Boeing worker described a schism in the Democratic Party between “working class Democrats” and “Democrats of the leisure class.”

Swenson reasoned, “There’s nothing left within the Democratic Party for me to vote for if they are going to keep targeting the working class. If I’m in the crosshairs of the Democratic Party, then I’m not any worse off in the Republican Party.”

Donn Teske is a cigar-chomping, struggling farmer, farmer union president, and father. He detests the Bush administration but distances himself from the Democratic Party. He calls himself a Populist without a party.

Teske laments the current dog-eat-dog competition among farmers: “I’ve had friends who said, ‘I can’t wait until he goes broke so I can get my hands on it [the farm].’”

The separation between the two camps is wide. Dawn Barden, Brittany’s mother, deplores secular universities for having an alleged prejudice against Christian students. Dawn Barden claims that 80 percent of Christians leave the faith after studying at a secular college. Unexplored is why. Is not the testing of faith and its affirmation part of being a Christian? Was not Abraham tested? Was not Job tested? Is steadfastness to the faith not at the root of being a Christian?

Frank Thomas explores the radical Kansan political roots. The now defunct Populist Party had its origin in Kansas. Thomas refers to the socialist colonies of the nineteenth century as “My Kansas.” He calls for Liberalism to return to its roots. The question unanswered is: who will represent these roots?

Who are the liberals today? Thomas did not call for the development or strengthening of a “third party” movement. Instead of a future vision of progressivism, the film eulogizes the passage of worker parties in Kansas.

Frank wrote in his book, “For us it is the Democrats that are the party of the workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood.”¹ Implied was that by voting for Democrats the economic interests of regular Kansans would be served. Confining our analysis to recent decades, however, shows that the Clinton presidency and the Obama presidency have not protected the average Americans’s economic interests.

I wondered how Frank could get it so wrong — especially after how he recognized and depicted the economically self-defeating habit of middle America to vote for Republicans? Frank knows that the Democrats abandoned much of their base.

The film depicts the Democrats as a house divided. Fox’s church was a house divided. Jesus’s – and subsequently Lincoln’s – admonition about division is undiscussed, but it hangs heavy in the film.

Thomas points out that many in the working class voted for Bush in 2004 and at the top of their agenda were moral issues – but Bush’s agenda was economic, as in tax reform (to benefit the wealthy).

The film ends with the electoral defeat of the Republicans in 2008. God had not blessed the Republicans and neither did God bless the theme park venture nor the investments of Fox and many parishioners.

The Democrats are, for the time being, resurgent. Recently, however, Obama and the Democrats compromised on their committment to workers on the Employee Free Choice Act.

For this writer, the Democrats are a part of the corporate political duopoly that serves capitalist interests that exploits the workers, the poor, the weak, and the victimized. Understanding this, I submit, is basic.

The film explored the Kansan historical flirtations with populism and socialism. It did not delve deeply into Democratic politics like the book. What’s the Matter with Kansas? explores what drives middle-class Kansans and why they vote as they do. It is an illuminating film insofar as the political duopoly goes. Notably absent from the film was discussion of prospects for a credible “third” party movement on the political scene.

What’s the Matter with Kansas? will have its world premiere at Film Society of Lincoln Center on 6 August, at which point the DVD will also be released.

1. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan Books, 2004):1.

In the 1960s, the TV series Star Trek presented viewers a progressivist future wherein humans had overcome poverty, racism, and war. Some progressives even considered Star Trek to be a pareconist future.¹ This is, however, decidedly not the case as a starship is a hierarchical and not an egalitarian workplace.

Many of the episodes focused around ethical challenges that confronted space explorers of the twenty-third century. Viewers saw captain James Kirk and Mr. Spock grappling over whether to arm one side in a conflict against another side that were being armed by an enemy race (“A Private Little War”). In “A Taste of Armageddon,” Kirk advocated non-violence:

We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers; but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes: knowledge that we’re not going to kill […] today…

Episodes dealing with moral dilemmas continued into the twenty-fourth century. In Star Trek: Voyager’s “Death Wish,” captain Katherine Janeway is asked to consider an individual’s request for asylum so he may commit suicide. In “Scorpion,” weapons of mass destruction are abhorred.

Star Trek: Voyager’s “The 37s” explored solidarity. The crew of Voyager was given the choice of staying on a habitable planet, which appeared much like earth and had, in fact, been “seeded” with humans from Earth. The choice was an important one because if too many crew members elected to stay on the planet and start a new life, then the remaining crew that wished to return home might be insufficient in number to fly Voyager.

During the early voyages of the starship Enterprise, the episode “Bound” explored the issue of obedience on the most recent of the Star Trek TV runs: Star Trek: Enterprise.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s “The Way of the Warrior I” is an antiwar episode. The Klingon warrior Lt. Commander Worf stands by the principle: “Starfleet will not participate in an unprovoked invasion.”

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Drumhead,” a struggle takes place over protecting human rights in the face of fear.

There is little difference in the substance of the current film Star Trek and the previous film Nemesis. The disappointing Nemesis was directed by Stuart Baird who, like Abrams, was unfamiliar with the Star Trek universe. Nemesis was an action-adventure good guys-bad guys flic with a villain from the Romulan Empire, but it did raise the specter of cloning technology gone awry.

The latest Star Trek is a story of vengeance, of mass murder by the Romulan Nero who searches the stars for Mr. Spock in a spaceship that looks like an agglomeration of bull kelp. The film was replete with typical musical flourishes designed to add oomph, but these were so overbearing that this viewer was irritated and distracted from the on-screen action. The storyline even warped to the extent that Vulcan children revealed racism toward the mixed-blooded Spock — a highly illogical behavior.

So why the absence of a progressivist theme in Star Trek?

Is it just applying a successful money-making formula to draw in fans? Probably.

Has Star Trek departed from its early progressivist visions? With sufficient hype — and, after years of dormancy, Star Trek was ripe for hyping — the storyline of phasers firing, photon torpedoes launching, weapons-of-mass-destruction destroying, and planets exploding is a formulaic box-office draw. Nonetheless, one movie review lamented the “mere 3 explosions, [as] an unconscionably low amount for such a big movie.”²

Writing and producing a script that appeals to the moviegoer’s intelligence is much more challenging but maybe less lucrative, and it is profit that keeps Hollywood movies being made — not critical accolades.

As a movie franchise, it appears that Star Trek has gone fully for fast-paced thrills to please moviegoers. The numbers indicate the film is a box-office success and has guaranteed a second movie with the same crew.

There is talk also of a Star Trek TV series being revived as well.

Action films that keep the viewer in perpetual suspense are highly entertaining, but some viewers yearn for more. This writer hopes that any future TV series will preserve the dynamism but also engage its audience with episodes exploring, for example, the depths of humanity, moral dilemmas surrounding the Prime Directive and cherished principles of the Federation, and progress toward egalitarianism in the future. In this way, Star Trek might recapture the progressivist attraction of the earlier series and appeal to the sanguinity of many viewers.

1. Matt Grinder, “Unofficial Economics of Star Trek.”
2. Kyle Buchanan, “Summer Movie Explosion Preview Spectacular!” Movie Line, 13 April 2009.

The movie receiving these fawning reviews is Sin Nombre (Without a Name), directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. His first feature-length film — “[o]ne of the most memorable directorial debuts in recent memory” according to the Post — it won the California-born and –raised Fukunaga the directing and cinematography award in the dramatic competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

There is certainly much to recommend the film. It tells a visually compelling tale that takes the viewer on a gripping journey from the streets of Tapachula, Chiapas — a mid-size Mexican city on the border with Guatemala — to Mexico’s boundary with Texas. In doing so, Sin Nombre brings the audience into the underworld of Mexican youth gangs, one depicted as often horrifically violent, while providing a window into the grueling trip from southern Mexico taken by many Central American migrants to reach the United States.

The movie revolves around a young member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, Willy, and a young Honduran woman, Sayra, who is trying to reach the United States with her uncle and her father, recently deported from New Jersey, and who she hasn’t seen since she was a child. The two teenagers’ paths cross on the top of a freight train, an efficient but highly dangerous form of transportation for migrants traveling to “el Norte.” On the trip, Sayra develops — rather far-fetchedly — a deep attachment to Willy as he tries to outrun his former gang brothers intent on hunting him down.

While the story in and of itself is quite engrossing, it presents a largely one-dimensional view of Mexico as a land of violence with few honorable people. At the same time, it presents no context to help the viewer understand who the gang members are, and how and why they — and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) itself — came to be.

Apart from a single reference to the gang’s presence in Los Angeles, there is no mention of the MS-13’s origins in southern California, and the U.S. government’s role in facilitating its emergence and spread. Salvadoran migrants, whose very residence there was owed to U.S. support for El Salvador’s brutal military-oligarchy alliance, created the gang in the 1980s as a form of self-protection. U.S. deportations of members helped to internationalize the gang, which now has a strong presence in many Central American countries, and in southern Mexico.¹

Given the focus of the film, it is perhaps far too much to expect Sin Nombre to address such matters. But is begs the question of what the movie — or, more precisely, the filmmaker — is trying to accomplish by focusing on gang violence and its intersection with the Central American migrant passage through Mexico. It is in this area where Sin Nombre proves to be quite problematic and confusing.

A question-and-answer session with Fukunaga and Focus Features CEO, James Shamus, following a recent showing of the film at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, helped to shed some light onto the production- and marketing-related thinking surrounding the film.

Shamus somewhat cryptically called the film “radically political” (suggesting that it was so in a progressive sense), and praised the fact that it gives voice to people rarely heard in feature films — Latinos (which is like lauding a film on the Bloods and the Crips for giving voice to African Africans). He also gushed about how the film is bringing large numbers of Latinos into art-house theaters, evidence of its cross-over appeal.

Fukunaga indirectly took issue with Shamus’s suggestion that Sin Nombre was political. “I didn’t write it as a political film,” the filmmaker asserted. “I wasn’t trying to change anyone’s mind.” Instead, he stated that he wanted viewers to have an “experience” and to “make up their own minds.” The question is, what is it that he wants people to make up their own minds about?

In published interviews, Fukunaga makes clear that the migrant journey — specifically the dangerous odyssey by train from the Mexico-Guatemala border to the U.S.-Mexico divide — and the violence and suffering that surround it is his intended focus.² Yet, this is at best a secondary aspect of the film, as Sin Nombre privileges the gang-related drama to a great extent. And in doing so in the way that it does, the film paints a picture of Mexico — and, by extension, its people — that is anything but flattering. Indeed, it is difficult to come away from the film not feeling a sense of revulsion toward and fear of many things Mexican, in particular the country’s men. In this regard, the film plays into some of the worst stereotypes that fuel anti-migrant sentiment — especially as it relates to Mexico.

Undoubtedly there is a lot of brutal violence — perpetrated by Mexican authorities, gang members, and bandits — associated with the migrant passage from southern Mexico to the United States.³ And, in addition to the deaths and injuries brought about by such brutality, innumerable migrants lose their lives or limbs each year by falling off and underneath what many call the “train of death” or “the beast.”⁴ Sin Nombre provides a valuable glimpse into these varied forms of violence, but the film doesn’t give the viewer a sense of the frequent nature of the fatalities and injuries associated with the train itself.

At the same time, Sin Nombre makes invisible the U.S. enforcement apparatus. In terms of the actual movement across the U.S.-Mexico boundary, it only shows a single unauthorized crossing, one that is successful and seemingly challenge-free. The films does this despite the fact that the size of the boundary and immigration apparatus has exploded in the last 15 years — the U.S. Border Patrol, for instance, has more than quadrupled in size (there are today 18,000+ agents) during this period. Meanwhile, more than 5,000 migrant bodies have been recovered in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands since 1995, a tragic manifestation of the boundary’s “hardening.”

In addition to such misrepresentation, the movie effectively exculpates the United States for its role in helping to make Mexico a grueling zone of passage for migrants from Central America and beyond.

In the 1980s, during a northward exodus of Central American refugees, Washington put considerable pressure on Mexico, and assisted Mexican government efforts, to crackdown on third-country nationals migrating without authorization through Mexico to get to the United States.⁵ Since the 1990s, U.S. authorities have intensified such pressures and efforts,⁶ while extending them geographically so that the U.S. boundary and immigration enforcement apparatus is today effectively present in Mexico and in countries well beyond.⁷ In other words, the arduous and dangerous journey across Mexico that the film helps bring to light has been made in no small part in Washington, D.C.

Given this reality — and the almost omnipresent and highly charged nature of present-day debates surrounding immigration and boundary enforcement — it is, at best, pure fantasy to think that one can avoid politics in making a film that is to a significant degree about migration from Mexico and Central America. The title of one of Howard Zinn’s book says it best: You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train.

To pretend that you can be otherwise facilitates the myopic thinking that led Fukunaga to make a film that purports to be a sympathetic portrayal of the migrant passage, but that ends up obscuring much and inadvertently fueling some of the flames which underlie the very making of the journey’s fatal obstacles that seem to concern him.

It is easy to decry migrant deaths and the many forms of suffering endured by unauthorized migrants as they make the dangerous trek to the United States. Everyone from the Minutemen to the most ardent congressional advocates of increased enforcement does so. It is much more difficult — and important — to analyze and challenge the factors and agents that compel migrants to leave their homes and that deny them passage and entry to the relatively safety and security of places like the United States. Because it does the former without doing the latter, while reinforcing ugly images of Mexico that inform anti-immigrant sentiment, Sin Nombre is hardly progressive or radical, and is regrettably part tragedy in more ways than one.

1. Alfonso Gonzales, Rethinking U.S. Involvement in Central America’s War on Gangs, Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 2006.
2. See, for example, indieWire, “Cary Joji Fukunaga on ‘Sin Nombre’: Border Crossings, Authenticity, and Authorship,” indieWire, March 17, 2009.
3. See N.C. Aizenman, “Meeting Danger Well South of the Border,” Washington Post, July 8, 2006: A1+; Velia Jaramillo, “Hipocresía migratoria,” Processo.com.mx, August 14, 2006 and Jeremy Schwartz, “Mexico’s Southern Border Snares Central American Migrants,” The News & Observer (North Carolina), March 10, 2007.
4. Christine Evans, “Train Jumping: A Desperate Journey,” Palm Beach Post, November 11, 2006; a compelling photo essay — with audio — accompanies the article. See also Mariana Van Zeller, “Death Train,” Current TV, Nov. 25, 2005; and “Amputee Shelter,” Current TV, Jan. 4, 2006.
5. See Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home, Austin: The Center for Mexican American Studies, the University of Texas at Austin, 1996.
6. Ginger Thompson, “Mexico Worries About Its Own Southern Border,” New York Times, June 18, 2006.
7. See Michael Flynn, “Dondé está la frontera?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 58, No. 4, July/August 2002: 24-35.

Tourists drive by and people with cameras gawk. Richard looks directly at the camera and says, “It looks like there’s more money to be paid in devastation than regeneration. If y’all keep paying your money to see it, should we rebuild it?”

The short film New Orleans For Sale, which has garnered several awards, was made by 2-Cent Entertainment, a group of young Black media makers in New Orleans. The group, which currently has 10 members , made New Orleans for Sale to convey the frustration felt by many New Orleanians as the city has become a national spectacle and a backdrop for countless national politicians, while the aid the city needs to rebuild still hasn’t arrived. In 2008, the film won several awards including an NAACP image award in a competition, called Film Your Issue, which featured a high-powered jury with the likes of news anchor Tom Brokaw and media executives from MTV Networks, Lionsgate Entertainment and USA Today.

Working at the intersection of art and justice, as well as entertainment and enlightenment, 2-Cent has attracted a wide and growing audience. In New Orleans, they’ve also collaborated with the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, produced shows on local television and radio stations, and created mix CDs and scores of short videos. Beyond creating inspiring programming, 2-Cent members also seek to pass their skills onto the next generation, and have taught and presented their work and in New Orleans high schools and colleges.

“Huey Newton said the young people always inherit the revolution,” says Brandan “B-Mike” Odums, 2-Cent’s founder. “And that’s what 2-Cent is, it’s how our generation responded to that call.”

Positive Images

The collective formed in 2004, when Odums gathered a group of friends (most of them fellow students at the University of New Orleans) to produce a TV show with a message.

“A lot of TV promotes a monolithic way of thinking, saying there’s only one way to be, or promoting ignorance as cool,” says Odums. “We say it’s hot to stand up for yourself and speak for yourself.”

The group was still newly formed when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and in the aftermath of the storm, with 2-Cent members spread across the United States, they nearly disbanded. “Katrina made us realize that this is what we want to do,” says Odums. “We’d done two episodes before the storm. Everybody was scattered. We had to decide if this is something we really want to do. Katrina forced us to make the decision.”

The collective briefly relocated together to Atlanta, then made the decision together to return to New Orleans.

Kevin Griffin, another of the founding members of 2-Cent, joined because he shares Odum’s desire to change the images and messages delivered to today’s youth. “We were seeing the images that BET and others were putting out,” Griffin says. “And we wanted to do something different, more positive.”

Griffin is not just a media activist; he is also one of the leaders of a citywide movement spearheaded by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, an organization whose mission is to close the Youth Studies Center, the city’s youth prison. The group has led campaigns to shut down other youth prisons around the state including the notorious youth prison in Tallulah, Louisiana, and they are also working to create more options for young people beyond jail.

For Griffin, these struggles have personal meaning. “At the age of 10, I was sent to the Youth Studies Center,” Griffin explains. “A year later I was moved to Tallulah, which was known as the worst youth prison in the country. I was 11. The next youngest person was 17, so I was a child among adults. And I was there for five years.”

When he was released, Griffin was determined to turn his experience into something positive. “I could have stayed on that path that was laid out for me,” says Griffin. “But I didn’t want to become that.” He credits his family for helping support him when he got out.

Griffin now works full-time at WBOK, a Black-owned talk radio station (their slogan is “Talk back, talk Black”). Art also runs in his family. His cousin Mannie Fresh, the music impresario of New Orleans’ Cash Money record label, produced much of the music that made New Orleans hip hop famous.

Humor and Style

2-Cent videos are notable for both humor and great production values. “We liked a lot of the messages you would see on Public Access TV,” explains Griffin. “But we wanted to make something with better production.” This combination of form and content, and a mix of serious and comic, defines the 2-Cent style.

“We take education and comedy and we mix it all together,” says collective member Manda B, who writes and acts in many of the group’s videos. “We can trick people into learning. We built it off a foundation of edutainment. Even with our most crazy and bizarre scripts, we have a meaning.”

The group seems to have limitless energy and ideas, and they bring new angles to their subjects, finding humor in unexpected places, and bringing ideas to young people by using that humor. Their piece on Jena, Louisiana, is filmed at the September 20, 2007 protests in Jena, when tens of thousands of young people converged in what was called the birth of the 21st century civil rights movement. But the 2-Cent video intercuts with one of their members—an effortlessly humorous young performer named Stiggidy Steve—wandering confused on Jena Street in New Orleans and wondering where everyone is.

“Older folks may try to put out similar ideas,” says Manda B. “But it’s like they’re preaching. I think we know how to connect with our generation.”

These young media activists praise Gil Scott Heron, who said the revolution will not be televised, but for 2-Cent, media is a tool to be taken and used for the mission of social change.

“Other generations marched, and we march too,” says Odums. “But in this age we have a whole new range of weapons, and we’re trying to use those weapons. I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would want to be on YouTube, to have his speeches distributed that way. Malcolm X would love to make mixtapes, have those out on the streets. The same reasons they boycotted and had protests in that era are our reasons too. We’re coming from that same mindset, but we’re using new tools, trying to get our inheritance.”

After nearly five years together, the group has survived Katrina and all the connected stresses of living in New Orleans during this time, and their bonds become stronger and closer. When asked what aspect of their work they were most proud of, various 2-Cent members expressed the same sentiment as Manda B, who explained, “For me, the best element of all this is that we’re family.”

For a large collective, 2-Cent seems to have no problem working together, creating new content every week, and continually expanding the range of work they do and the audiences they reach. “We’re all together like family,” says Griffin. “And we can’t imagine not staying together.”

The documentary Mine: Story of a Sacred Mountain.

The occasional rustling in the tree above us revealed itself to be a giant squirrel. We’d been climbing for what felt like an eternity but was, in reality, only an hour. The 50lb backpacks stuffed with filming gear weren’t making the hike any easier.

Our journey had already taken us from a village of India’s remote Dongria Kondh tribe, up through gardens of palm trees, jackfruit and millet and into the dense forests above. Now we were nearing the plateau at the top of the mountain. Occasional glimpses through the trees revealed forested ridges rising through the wispy clouds, and stretching down into the plains below.

We were following Lodu Sikaka, a Dongria Kondh tribesman and leader of Lakhpadar, the village we had been staying in the past nights. He led the way through the trees, kicking away the red rocks that lay scattered across the path so we wouldn’t trip.

Despite the beauty of the forests, and the butterflies which now filled the air, it was these rocks we had come to see. Their colour was down to bauxite, the raw material for aluminium. It’s these riches which have attracted Vedanta Resources, a London-based mining company, to the Dongria Kondh’s Niyamgiri hills. They’ve been given the go-ahead to build a vast open-cast mine on the top of Niyamgiri, the mountain the Dongria Kondh people worship as a God. Lodu had plenty to say about that.

We found a spot on the edge of a ridge with extraordinary views over the foothills. The camera was quickly set up, and we started recording.

“They want to take these rocks from the mountain,” he said. “But this is our life. If we lose the mountains, we’ll end up in great trouble. We’ll lose our soul. Niyamgiri is our soul.”

“That is why we are ready to lay down our lives to save Niyamgiri.”

Lodu was reserved, but it’s clear he knew every inch of the mountain he had grown up on. Planning to blast millions of tons of bauxite out of it was bad enough. But Vedanta hasn’t even consulted the Dongria Kondh. At one point it claimed they don’t even live there.

Genuine anger – and fear – bubbles away just underneath the surface. But the Dongria aren’t the kind of people to accept their fate meekly.

“We’ll not allow Vedanta to take away our mountains. We’ll just not allow it,” Lodu said.

Vedanta Resources was dealt a double blow on 30 March as the OECD agreed that all the complaints made by Survival International about the company’s planned bauxite mine in Orissa merit further consideration, and Indian police investigate fraud allegations against the company’s billionaire chairman Anil Agarwal.

The symbolic dimension is indeed central in science fiction. Moreover, its symbolism does not draw from the past, as in the case of myth, but turns to the future, which it attempts to predict and foreshadow. Yet, while in apologetic movies symbolism is realized in an irrational way, covering or distorting social contradictions in order to foist biased and fallacious conclusions on the spectator, in progressive creations it fulfills a realistic function of revealing and emphasizing contradictions, which elevates to a sense of the totality and awakens consciousness.

Following this second road, Carpenter, a talented, independent director who has given us a number of significant films, is able in “They live” to represent in exemplary fashion the process of neo-conservative barbarization in American society as well as the dynamic of its revolutionary overthrow. And while he possesses an element of conscious approach – he himself has compared his strange aliens to republicans – his sharp intuition results in lending the movie a much deeper problematic than his conscious intentions.

Virtual reality

Nada, Carpenter’s hero, is a simple worker, a builder immersed in the American dream. His words in one of the first scenes, “I believe in America and follow the rules. I’m waiting for my chance”, sum up the illusions of the majority of American workers. What he ignores is that the yuppies and “successful” people he encounters in the streets are not what they seem. In fact, they are aliens who have come from a distant world and are plotting to gain control of our planet. The road of success is thus open only to those humans that are recruited by them and consent to become their docile organs.

Nada will become aware of this when he is hired in a construction plant and gets in touch with the rebel forces fighting the aliens. After an attack of the police, he will accidentally discover in a garbage heap the special glasses with the help of which it is only possible to perceive the ugly aliens. These creatures seem completely alike ordinary humans when one looks at them with a bare eye. However, when observed with the glasses, they transform to zombies, with a hideous, black face, just as in fact they inwardly are.

Yet the glasses have another, still more important function. Thanks to them, the multicolored virtual reality around us becomes white-black and the process of subjugation and brain washing, through which the aliens keep humans in ignorance and obedience, is revealed. When the hero puts them on, he is thunderstruck to see “Come to the Caribbean”, with the much promising, seductive top models, turn into a two-colored bill, “Reproduce”. “We are creating a transparent computing environment” becomes “Submit”. He is encircled with commands from all sides: “No independent thought”, “Consume”, “Watch TV”, “Buy”, “Stay asleep”, “Do not question authority”. As for dollar, it is a white paper with a black stamp imprinted on it: “This is your God”.

With this extremely clever trick, Carpenter is able to bring to light the true nature of the ruling elite, which is symbolically presented as a clan of aliens. Besides the rulers and politicians – almost never appearing in the scene, except for a brief but significant snapshot, when the hero sees a politician delivering a TV speech and then, wearing the glasses, the man turns to an alien appearing under the signboard “Obey” – the zombies include businessmen, policemen, bored petty-bourgeois and people of the star system. Even more cleverly, their headquarters is placed at Channel 54 (an allusion perhaps to the infamous Studio 54, the well known Manhattan yuppie disco of the eighties), a typical mass media corporation, through the antenna of which they come to earth and return to their far away planet, a clear hint at the role played by the media in general brain washing.

The role of the media

The channel controls heavily the information allowed to the people. Sporadically, the illegal channel of the rebels appears on the screen, only to be lost in the noise interfered by the aliens. The speaker, an orator with a somewhat fanatic look, zealously castigates the devilish rulers: “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices… They have made us indifferent, to ourselves, to others, we are focused only on our own gain. That is their primary method of survival. Keep us asleep, keep us selfish, keep us sedated… More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery”.

Through a number of such epigrammatic phrases, a bit schematic but illuminating as well, the creator depicts the essence of the social conditions. Yet, apart from its direct message, the movie unfolds in a second, deeper level, developing the dynamics of the struggle between the oppressors and the rebels.

When Nada realizes what is really happening, he decides to take law into his hands. He rushes into a bank and starts shooting the zombies. The aliens locate him soon, but he manages to escape and finds refuge in Holly’s house, who proves to be a highly standing executive of Channel 54. Ignorant of what is really happening, she violently defenestrates him when she finds a chance, and Nada returns in terrible plight to his workplace. There he meets Frank, his Negro friend, and attempts to enlighten him about the reasons of his strange behavior, which has resulted in him being presented by the media as a criminal and his persecution by the authorities. However, although eager to help him with some hardly saved money, Frank resists and declines his exhortations to wear the glasses. Their conversation is very revealing:

Frank: “I don’t want to see anything. I have a family and children.”

Nada: “I’m trying to save you, you and your family.”

Frank: “You did not save your own…”

Nada: “Put on the glasses. I do not want to fight with you.”

Frank: “I do not want to get in trouble.”

In the overall symbolism of the work, the heroes are not so much acting as individuals, but rather as embodiments of social groups. If Nada represents the conscious vanguard, Frank is the backward, still naive worker, who tries to hold himself aloof, in the hope that he will avoid all problems:

Nada: “You are a worker. Come to see the revolution.”

Frank: “Give it up, friend. This does not concern you or me. I want to keep my job. Do the same.”

Nada: “The white line is in the middle of the road. You are in danger.”

There follows a long scene of tough beating, when Nada reaches the point of almost killing his friend in order to force him wear the glasses. A scene with a deep meaning: the vanguard must show an iron will, in order to make the whole class accept the truth, after a process that will be both difficult and painful. Bleeding heavily, the two friends make up and fraternize again when Frank sees the deeper reality through the glasses. “They came here for profits. Many people sell themselves and get promotions. New houses. Money”, Nada explains.

The ascent of the aliens is ably depicted. In all places, banks, police, mass media, we see normal humans and aliens – honest people and scoundrels – coexisting, without the last being perceived by the first. Yet the aliens are methodically advancing and strengthening their domination and power.

Finally, the two heroes, using a special device of the zombies, will penetrate their headquarters and find themselves in front of a gathering of the newly rich. “In a few years”, the speaker prophesies, “the whole planet will be under our domination. Profits are huge. The capital of all us present here increased last year by 39%. The terrorist network was obliterated” (this last remark refers to the extermination of most rebels after a police attack in their refuge).

When Nada and Frank start shooting the guards in order to get inside the forbidden area of Channel 54, one of the rascals attempts to dissuade them: “Believe me, they know what they are doing. You are making a big mistake. It is only business. There are no countries any more. The planet belongs to them. Is profit bad? They will give us money. We sell ourselves every day. I will go with the winners”. They are ready to shoot him as well, but he manages to escape by using a special watch-like device, permitting the aliens to disappear.

An excellent finish

The last scene sums up the meaning of the movie. The two friends ascend to the sundeck of the building, aiming to destroy the antenna making the aliens appear as ordinary human beings. Holly, who meanwhile has learned the truth about the aliens and met once the hero in the underground movement leads them, yet events prove that, while she is not one of the aliens (when seen with the glasses, she appears human), she in fact belongs psychically to them. She shoots Frank and threatens Nada from behind with her gun, precisely when he is ready to destroy the machine. “Do not do it. You can not win”. Initially he is taken by surprise, but manages to draw a gun from the back of his trousers and shoots her dead. In the end the hero is himself killed by guardsmen in a security helicopter flying over the roof, but only after he succeeds in destroying the antenna. In this way the aliens become uncovered. In the comic epilogue we watch the Oscar winners as zombies now being interviewed without knowing they have been revealed (“all this sex, all this violence” one of them protests hypocritically) and a zombie-yuppie wondering in front of his girlfriend staring at him with disgust: “What is the problem, baby?”

The expressive and attractive Holly is in fact the embodiment of the American dream, of the hero’s illusions that he can satisfy his human needs within the capitalist system. Only after killing her, thus liberating himself form illusion, he will therefore be able to accomplish his mission. And his loss immediately after this displays a tough but authentic realism. The vanguard sacrifices itself, bearing the difficulties of the struggle, but due to its efforts and self-sacrifice it becomes possible to open the eyes of the people.

With this scene “We live” is elevated from the level of an acute polemic to that of a masterpiece. If instead Carpenter had given a different solution – making his heroes triumph in a happy end or even allowing them to be killed by the aliens only and not Holly, the artistic result would be significantly inferior. For Holly does not only personify Nada’s illusions, but also his inward uncertainty. Her phrase, “You cannot win”, sums up the essence of dominant ideology, its ability to create confusion and passivity, by continually corrupting human minds and consciences. Had this moment been ignored, the work would lose in strength and persuasiveness, because the most crucial question would remain unanswered: is the working class able to overcome this pernicious influence?

The truly amazing thing is that while other symbolisms, like the comparison of the aliens with republicans, are made consciously by the creator, the peak of the movie comes intuitively, without a clear comprehension of its meaning. Thus, Carpenter himself in his interviews failed to give the above interpretation, moving in the circle of Christian sacrifice ideas and other metaphysical notions with which he is preoccupied in other movies.

Reactionary and misconceived criticisms

Needless to say, reactionary commentators, sensing the significance of the movie as a devastating critique of their beloved capitalist system, have made every attempt to bury and discredit it. Making it worse, even progressive commentators have sometimes failed to appreciate the meaning of critical scenes and details.

Limiting ourselves to just a few examples, Mike Clark of USA Today is of the opinion “They live dies around the time Carpenter allows 10 minutes of gratuitous Piper-David eye-gouging, an apparent bone to wrestling fans. Forget the amusing premise; a full crate of magic glasses couldn’t make this a bearable movie”. A similar view is echoed by Peter Stack of San Francisco Chronicle: “Typical of some of the absurd moments in this film is a long drawn-out fist fight between the hero and Frank, who almost kill each other because Frank is too proud to try on the magic dark glasses. It is completely stupid.”

Even more hostile is Richard Harrington of the Washington Post: “Even for sci-fi, the creatures-walk-among-us plot of “They Live” is so old it ought to be carbon-dated. Oh, sure, director John Carpenter trots out the heavy artillery of sociological context and political implication, but you don’t have to get deep down to realize he hasn’t a clue what to do with it, or the talent to bring it to life… The plot for They Live is full of black holes, the acting is wretched, the effects are second-rate. In fact, the whole thing is so preposterous it makes “V” look like “Masterpiece Theatre.”

These unjust and scornful remarks are easily understandable. Their motives lie in the reactionary commentators’ sense that they themselves are the zombies so acutely exposed and satirized in the movie. It is this feeling of those who not only do not understand, but do not wish to understand that stirs their indignant contempt and not any concern to show some real shortcomings of the film, which, if existent, are definitely of secondary nature.

Passing to a more objective critic, G. MacReady, praising the critique of capitalism, also considers that from the moment Nada takes law into his hands “Carpenter fails to make much of the movie… Meg Foster’s character is almost totally irrelevant and extraneous. She serves no purpose. The prolonged fight scene between Nada and Frank is supposed to be funny, but simply isn’t. It just feels odd”. Similar complains have been expressed by others, finding Nada’s character too rough and his remarks, like the one in the bank shooting scene – “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass and I’m all out of bubblegum” – excessively crude (in fact Roddy Piper, whom Carpenter appropriately selected for Nada’s role, is a wrestler and no actor at all).

In fact, these are the vital innovations introduced by Carpenter, who based himself on Roy Nelson’s small novel Eight o’ Clock in the Morning. Such innovations, having a deep, if hidden, meaning, are feasible only to a great, inspired creator, and Carpenter depicts the workers in a realistic way, as they truly are in capitalist society, which prevents them from acquiring any kind of subtle taste.

Asked if his approach is somehow related with Marxism, Carpenter answered in the negative. Nevertheless, They Live does not cease to be perhaps the Marxist movie par excellence in the history of the seventh art. Even if it appeared 20 years ago, it does not cease to be topical and will remain so until the social evils it so graphically and skillfully depicts will be removed through social transformation.

Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant, written by Dustin Lance Black, stars Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch and Josh Brolin.

Sean Penn’s portrayal of Milk, the first openly gay elected official in 1977, is a stunningly intense political knockout at the very moment the LGBT struggle could use it most.

For a change, protests, organizing and mass outrage in the face of police brutality and discrimination are not the perfunctory backdrop to a soupy tale of individual excellence. Instead, they lie at the heart of the story of a movement and the man who came to symbolize its dynamism and persistence. If there is a smidge of honesty in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Oscar is Penn’s.

The gay director of Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant, hewed closely to author Randy Shilts’ biography of Milk. Van Sant worked alongside Milk’s activist collaborators, particularly Cleve Jones, in crafting the visual and political accuracy of the time–from San Francisco’s Castro Street where Milk had his camera shop storefront that served as movement/campaign headquarters, to the placards and chants of “Civil rights or civil war, gay rights now!”

Socialist Worker readers will get a kick from glancing shots of the red-and-black-fisted Socialist Worker posters hung in Jones’ apartment, an attempt to evince the zeitgeist of that era–and perhaps a bit of our own.

The film, like Shilts’ The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, shows Milk as a charmingly disarming gay Jewish New York businessman who abandons the closet and Manhattan for the nascent gay hippy bohemia of San Francisco’s Castro Street in the early 1970s.

Today’s audience is shocked from the start of the film into the realization that well into the 1970s, the police, media and politicians legally tormented LGBT people. The 1960s is often perceived as an era of social upheaval and orgiastic revelry. But for LGBT folks in America, the efflorescence of sexual expression did not begin until the waning months of that decade.

The relative freedoms and social acceptance that millions of particularly urban American LGBT people experience today would have seemed as surreal to Milk’s generation as the prospect of an African American president.

After President Dwight Eisenhower signed the 1953 executive order on the heels of the military’s postwar purge of gays, “sexual perversion” was grounds for being fired from government jobs. Since records were shared with private industry, exposure or suspicion of homosexuality could render a person unemployable and destitute.

“Loitering in a public toilet” was an offense that could blacklist a man from work and social networks, as lists of arrestees were often printed in newspapers and other public records.

Most states had laws barring homosexuals from receiving professional licenses, which could also be revoked upon discovery. Sex between consenting adults of the same sex even in a private home could be punishable for up to life in prison, if not confinement in a mental institution, or even castration.

California’s Atascadero State Hospital was compared with a Nazi concentration camp and called a “Dachau for queers” for performing electroshock and other draconian “therapies” on gays and lesbians.

Though many today perceive the social explosion of gay militancy in 1969 at New York’s Stonewall Inn as the event that wiped away official homophobic reaction, the real history is not so swift or tidy. Years of struggle, organizing and occasional setbacks paved the way for Harvey Milk’s–and the gay movement’s–rise in the 1970s.

In 1974, Teamster representative Allan Baird took the unprecedented step of approaching gay activists and Milk, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Castro Street,” to help truckers win a boycott against Coors beer for refusing to sign a union contract. Not only did Milk participate in a movement to win over gay and lesbian bars and clientele to join the boycott, but they also won Teamster jobs for gays in exchange.

Their organizing efforts were so successful that gays and labor militants eventually slashed Coors’ sales in California from 43 percent to 14 percent, spread the boycott to 13 other states, and established links with Latino workers and organizations that endured for future battles.

Using old news footage, Milk effectively portrays the emergence of pop singer and orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant, who threw down the gauntlet launching the anti-gay culture war.

Her Save Our Children campaign in Dade County, Fla.–in response to anti-discrimination legislation–set a combative tone with Bryant’s verbal salvo: “What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life…I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before.”

Save Our Children was not only successful at winning over a majority of voters to repeal the Dade County pro-gay legislation, but went on to wage successful repeal campaigns in St. Paul, Minn., Wichita, Kan., and Eugene, Ore.

The efforts of newly formed LGBT groups organizing alongside labor unions in California, with the creative spokesmanship of Milk, now a newly elected San Francisco Supervisor, stemmed this flurry of setbacks.

In 1978, a conservative Orange County state legislator, John Briggs, placed Proposition 6 on the ballot, calling for the firing of any California teacher caught “advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting” homosexuality. Initially, Briggs’ attempts to stoke bigotry were successful, with more than 60 percent of those polled supporting the measure. However, the earlier Coors boycott had set the stage for organizing against the Briggs Initiative.

The Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL) committee that formed out of the Coors boycott helped coordinate statewide rallies, speak-outs, popular concerts and aggressive campaigning against this anti-union and homophobic legislation. Milk’s relentless campaigning and offensive against backroom politicking helped win over the majority of Californians, who voted down the ballot measure by more than a million votes.

In a scene reminiscent of the recent California initiative battle over Proposition 8 in which gay marriage rights were overturned, the audience is treated to a glimpse of a timely debate. Milk effectively challenges gay magazine magnate David Goodstein who insists on circulating fliers against the Briggs Initiative that never mention the word “gay” or explicitly argue what the battle is really about.

If only an unapologetic and openly gay civil rights movement had been organized this time around, perhaps Prop 8 would have had a similar fate.

In 1978, Milk and thousands of previously inactive and apolitical gays and lesbians, as well as straight unionists, mobilized together in an effort that opened the door to a partnership that introduced some workers to new allies and allowed some LGBT workers to come out at work and begin fighting for civil rights within their unions.

Mass organizing tactics signaled a sharp departure from traditional backroom power brokering. Milk’s urging led the California Teachers Association to mail out 2.3 million “No on 6″ voter cards throughout the state.

Just weeks after the Briggs Initiative went down to defeat, a conservative ex-policeman, former fireman and city official, Dan White, slipped into City Hall and assassinated the liberal mayor George Moscone and newly elected supervisor Milk.

Having anticipated his killing, Milk made a tape that friends played upon hearing the news of his death. In an act of political chutzpah, Milk’s recording declared himself a committed gay movement activist to the end, named and derided moderate political gays who equivocated and quelled struggles rather than lead them, and then named who he believed his successors should and should not be in the event of assassination.

Finally, he repeated a sentiment he had expressed many times on the campaign trail, “Let the bullet that rips my brain open every closet door in America.” Tens of thousands heeded Milk’s call to come out and take action 30 years ago.

Celebrate his legacy today by grabbing a friend and a stack of fliers for the next action to repeal Prop 8 and hit the movie lines for Milk.

Fabled Enemies is written and directed by Jason Bermas, who was a co-producer of the Loose Change series, and produced by Alex Jones. It is a significant improvement over the Loose Change videos, which, although progressing in quality which each new version, focused heavily on questions like whether or not a plane hit the Pentagon, whether Flight 93 crashed in the field in Pennsylvania, and whether the WTC buildings were brought down in controlled demolitions, while failing to sufficiently address the enormous amount of other information demonstrating that the official story is a lie. Fabled Enemies goes a number of steps further than the third and final edition of Loose Change toward bringing a good number of these other matters to the attention of the viewing public.

Bermas begins by suggesting that Osama bin Laden was not responsible for the attacks, such as by pointing out that 9/11 is not listed as being among the crimes for which Osama bin Laden is wanted on his FBI poster, and that the FBI has explained that this is because there is no hard evidence linking him to the attacks. He perhaps does himself a disservice, however, by implying that he isn’t a dangerous terrorist, a conclusion that doesn’t necessarily follow from the premise.

He then addresses the matter of the hijackers’ connections to U.S. intelligence and the military, such as reports that some were trained at U.S. bases.

The video features an interview with Mike Springman, a former consular officer who worked in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. During his service there from 1987 and through the end of the Soviet-Afghan war, he routinely turned down visas for foreigners seeking entry into the U.S. based upon the requirements of the law. But his decisions were sometimes overturned as CIA officers bypassed him or went over his head to get visas for members of the mujahedeen from the war in Afghanistan to travel to the U.S. for recruitment and training and other actions to assist the CIA-backed war effort.

Bermas might have also noted at this point in the video that there are other precedents substantiating Springman’s claims, such as the fact that it was similarly CIA agents that repeatedly granted Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh” accused of masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, entry into the U.S. despite the fact that he had been included on the State Department’s terrorist watchlist.

The interlocking web of events and characters connecting the 1993 bombing with the 2001 attacks is another underreported facet of 9/11.

Before bin Laden’s organization became known as “al Qaeda” or “the Base,” it was known as Makhtab al-Khidamat. Either as an alias or subsidiary branch, it was also known as Al Kifah. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has this to say about it: “Makhtab al-Khidamat/Al Kifah (MK) is considered to be the pre-cursor organization to al Qaeda and the basis for its infrastructure. MK was initially created by Osama bin Laden’s (UBL) mentor Shaykh Abdullah Azzam who was also the spiritual founder of Hamas, as an organization to fund mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan conflict. MK has helped funnel fighters and money to the Afghan resistance in Peshawar, Pakistan, and had established recruitment centers worldwide to fight the Soviets.”

One of those recruitment centers was the Alkifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, New York. One of the mosques from which a certain Omar Abdel Rahman, a.k.a. “the Blind Sheikh,” preached was a few doors down from Alkifah.

The Sheikh was good friends with Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, and had travelled to Peshawar to meet with the CIA’s favored beneficiary.

Despite being on the terrorist watch list, Sheikh Omar was allowed to enter the U.S. In fac, this visa was approved by the CIA. The Sheikh travelled in and out of the country at will, and it was the CIA itself which reviewed and approved his application on at least six separate occasions.

Of course, it is impossible for filmmakers to fit every piece of information into a reasonable time frame that seeks to keep viewers informed while keeping pace enough to not lose out to those with short attention spans. Bermas does an excellent job in his documentary of touching briefly on a huge variety of aspects of 9/11 that are, regrettably, often overlooked and overshadowed by the enormous focus within the 9/11 Truth movement on the building collapses. It is up to proactive viewers to then take that information they are presented and follow through by doing some research of their own.

Moreover, while Bermas has a tendency to sensationalize or overstate the evidence he presents, for the most part the information he covers has been solidly documented and his narrative draws plenty of solid conclusions and asks a lot of the right questions.

One example of information viewers should be skeptical about is the document that is shown stating that Osama bin Laden was a CIA asset known by the alias “Tim Osman”. This document is given even more prominence by its inclusion on the box cover for the DVD. Although widely distributed on the internet (such as at WhatReallyHappened.com, the website of Michael Rivero, who is also interviewed in the video), it is not sourced and is thus of questionable authenticity (Mr. Rivero did not respond to an e-mail request for information on the source of this document). Bermas does a disservice to his viewers by presenting the information this document purports to show as absolute fact while himself also failing to source it.

The courageous former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney makes an appearance in the video. In one section of her interview, she talks about how the U.S. financed the bin Laden family during the Soviet-Afghan war to construct the bases used to train the mujahedeen.

The video touches briefly on Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, noting that they rented an apartment from an FBI informant. It does not mention the arguably much more significant fact that the CIA not only tracked the two hijackers prior to their entry into the U.S., but then allowed them to enter despite having known that they had obtained visas. That bears repeating: The CIA knew two known al-Qaeda operatives under its surveillance intended to travel to the U.S. and allowed them to do so.

John O’Neil, the former deputy director for the FBI, is also mentioned as an example of government complicity in blocking terrorism investigations. O’Neil quit his job out of frustration at his investigations into terrorism being blocked to become head of security for the World Trade Center. He was killed on 9/11 while helping to ensure the safety of others after the planes hit the buildings.

Fabled Enemies then looks at a few other indications that the Bush administration, which has a serious conflict of interest with the Bush family’s tight relationship with Saudi Arabia and the bin Laden family, reined in investigators who tried to look at Saudi financing for terrorist groups like al Qaeda. It includes a snippet from one of Greg Palast’s investigative reports showing that the FBI had been obstructed from investigating Omar and Abdullah bin Laden for their involvement in a suspected terrorist organization.

It spends a bit of time looking at the story of Robin Wright, who went public about an FBI operation called “Vulgar Betrayal” that revealed Saudi financing of terrorist groups and that U.S. banks looked the other way as terrorist money flowed through the financial system. The FBI responded by demoting and trying to silence him.

Echoing an aspect made famous by Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, Bermas notes that members of the bin Laden family were collected by private charter jet and whisked out of the country immediately following the attacks.

Bermas then moves on to look at the military intelligence operation “Able Danger” that reportedly identified hijackers, including Mohammed Atta, prior to 9/11. Although it was given the operation files the 9/11 Commission Report is silent on the matter and agents who have tried to come forward to bring this information to light have been gagged.

The video then moves on to discuss one of the great unanswered questions of 9/11, that, although receiving widespread attention on the Internet, has not been given a similar amount of attention by documentaries dealing with 9/11. Bermas does a good job of helping to correct that by going into some detail about the uncovering of a huge Israeli intelligence operation within the United States.

He begins with the story of the five Israelis seen celebrating the smoking trade center towers who were later arrested and deported after it was revealed that at least a couple of them were Mossad agents.

Bermas then looks at the story of the Israeli “art student” spy ring that was blown wide open in a four part series by Carl Cameron on Fox News. Numerous Israeli intelligence operatives operating under the cover of students selling art had targeted government officials, including members of intelligence and law enforcement agencies, prior to 9/11. The operation was discovered and 60 or more operatives were rounded up and deported.

In one of Cameron’s reports, he looks at how U.S. investigators had looked at the Israeli company Amdocs, which does the billing for most U.S. phone companies. It was feared that billing data could easily end up in foreign hands. Investigators were similarly concerned with another Israeli company, Comverse Infosys, which was responsible for wiretapping for U.S. law enforcement agencies. There were indications that information obtained from wiretaps was being leaked and the fear was that a “back door” in the Comverse system allowing the company access was being or could be exploited.

Bermas makes a leap of logic here. Fox News reported that investigators of the Israeli spy ring were concerned about a connection to 9/11, but that the information linking the Israelis to 9/11 was classified. From that, Bermas asserts that the Israelis were tracking the 9/11 hijackers. From Cameron’s reports and other information this is not an unreasonable assumption, but Bermas takes it a step further, asserting as fact that Israel had warned the hijackers. This is perhaps the most serious weakness in the video.

Another under-reported aspect of 9/11 is the story of former FBI contract translator Sibel Edmonds, who has been gagged for trying to go public with information she obtained while working for the FBI that there were agents within the government acquiring nuclear technology to be sold on the black market. Bermas does not spend a lot of time educating viewers on her story, but, importantly, does introduce it to those who may not have been familiar with Ms. Edmonds before watching Fabled Enemies.

Bermas also addresses the matter of the head of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency Mahmud Ahmed having authorized the transfer of $100,000 to hijacker Mohammed Atta just prior to the attacks. Ahmed was in Washington on September 11th, where he met with his CIA counterpart, George Tenet. He was having breakfast as the planes crashed into the towers with Bob Graham and Porter Goss, who would later chair the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11. This was a vital piece of the puzzle that had been grievously excluded from 9/11 documentaries until 9/11 Press for Truth, perhaps the overall best 9/11 film to date, corrected that situation.

Graham later said, “I was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States. I am stunned that we have not done a better job of pursuing that,” adding that there is credible evidence that the terrorists were assisted “by a foreign government.”

Bermas takes the opportunity here to observe that this is a further demonstration of how the 9/11 Commission was a whitewash, but neglects to inform viewers precisely why this is so; the Commission report, despite having received the information on Mahmud Ahmed, stated that there was no such evidence and, incredibly, that the question of who financed the terrorists “is of little practical significance.”

But he demonstrates the absurdity of considering the Commission a real investigation into 9/11 by noting other aspects of its ridiculousness, such as by featuring former Commission member Max Cleland, who wanted the Commission to subpoena the FAA, Norad, and the White House. But the White House would review any documents and choose a minority of them to be shared with the Commission. Only a minority of the Commission members selected by the White House would be allowed access to those documents. And only information cleared by the White House could be shared by those selected individuals with the rest of the Commission.

While demonstrating the corruption and incompetence of government officials, Bermas also presents courageous leaders like Cynthia McKinney and Dennis Kucinich standing up and speaking out. This is an important note as the video then turns to the question of prior knowledge of the attacks and the warnings that had been received in advance.

Vice President Dick Cheney is shown warning others in government to “be very cautious not to seek political advantage” by “making incendiary suggestions” about the Bush administration, like suggesting that “the White House had advance information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9/11.”

Fabled Enemies goes a long way towards showing the ridiculousness of Cheney saying there was no information that could have led to the prevention of the attacks.

Bermas then gets into the numerous military and intelligence exercises that were taking place on the morning of 9/11, including drills which simulated the hijackings of airplanes, and shows evidence of how these exercises served to confuse FAA flight traffic controllers and to delay the NORAD response. Bush is shown saying, “No one in our government … could have imagined flying airplanes into buildings [pause] on such a massive scale.” Bermas does a good job of demonstrating the absurdity of that statement as well, including by showing that one or more of the drills held on 9/11 actually simulated that exact scenario.

Fabled Enemies next spends a considerable amount of time on the alleged “threat” to Air Force One, granting that “threat” more credibility than it perhaps deserves in an attempt to insinuate that Cheney or someone acting under him had leaked information to terrorists enabling them to target Bush. Viewers would have been better served had this dubious speculation been omitted and other more credible and well documented arguments granted more favor.

Next, the anthrax attacks are briefly discussed; another aspect of 9/11 deserving more attention than it has received in documentaries on the subject.

Bermas sensibly concludes by saying that it is not a revolution, but a restoration of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights that is required.

In the end, I was pleasantly surprised with Fabled Enemies. The final edition of Loose Change, a huge improvement over its predecessors, had apparently benefited from the knowledge and fact-checking of David Ray Griffin, who served as a consultant on the that video. Fabled Enemies does an even better job of sticking more to the facts and drawing reasonable conclusions, which might perhaps be in part the influence of producer Alex Jones.

Fabled Enemies also covers a much broader range of the many aspects of 9/11 requiring further investigation than most other films on the subject. This is one of the benefits of having dealt only briefly with WTC 7 and no time at all with the other towers’ collapses, events which have been exhaustively covered in numerous other videos, have in many regards served only to discredit the 9/11 Truth movement, and which have regrettably overshadowed the countless other important pieces of information about 9/11 that researchers have brought to light.

Jason Bermas does the 9/11 Truth movement a great service by choosing to finally bring much of this important information into one place and presenting it in a medium that can effectively reach a wide audience.

You can visit the official Fabled Enemies website and from the site, you can click to watch the full film on Google Video or purchase the DVD.

Upset by Monday’s news, Dr. Suzanne Ross, Co-Chair of The NYC Free Mumia Coalition argued: “The courts, from Judge Albert Sabo’s outrageously biased rulings and court decorum; to Pamela Dembe’s ridiculous rulings, including her disregard of the significance of Sabo’s infamous ‘I’m going to help them fry the Nigger’ remark; to the PA Supreme Court’s rubber stamping of Sabo’s and Dembe’s rulings; to Judge William Yohn’s refusal to examine the question of innocence, to the Third Circuit’s ‘topsy turvy’ violations of their own precedents in considering the Batson issue so that they could deny Abu-Jamal the trial he is entitled to, have all shown a callous disregard for the life of a man who is obviously innocent, and have done everything in their power to assure that Mumia Abu-Jamal will never see the light of day from other than the twisted prism of a prison. This last decision is yet another outrageous chapter in a 27 year history of a conspiracy to imprison, kill, and silence Mumia Abu-Jamal.”

With the court’s PCRA rejection, Abu-Jamal’s upcoming appeal to the US Supreme Court of the Third Circuit decision (the filing of this appeal is due by Oct. 20 unless a 60-day extension is requested) is now more important than ever, because this is now his last chance for a new guilt-phase trial. Fortunately, this crucial moment for Abu-Jamal coincides with two new media projects that expose injustice in his case that extends well beyond the narrow issues being considered by the courts: the British film In Prison My Whole Life and the book The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, by J. Patrick O’Connor.

Both projects merit extensive coverage from the mainstream media, and are being utilized as tools by Abu-Jamal’s supporters for both education and fighting what they see as a long history of mainstream media bias against Abu-Jamal. Supporters are currently organizing for a major demonstration in Philadelphia on December 6, organized in solidarity with other actions around the world.

The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, by J. Patrick O’Connor

Acclaimed historian Howard Zinn has written that “J. Patrick O’Connor’s new book, The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal is based on a meticulous review of 12,000 pages of court transcripts, legal briefs, police records and an exhaustive examination of the constitutional violations perpetrated by America’s criminal ‘justice’ system. His evidence makes a powerful case that Mumia Abu-Jamal should be granted a new trial, and having been cruelly kept on death row for 26 years, he should be immediately freed.”

In Framing, O’Connor criticizes the media, who he says “bought into the prosecution’s story line early on and has never been able to see this case for what it is: a framing of an innocent and peace loving man.” As explained in a recent interview, O’Connor argues that the actual shooter was a man named Kenneth Freeman, who was Billy Cook’s business partner and who O’Connor argues was a passenger in Cook’s car when it was pulled over by Officer Daniel Faulkner the morning of Dec. 9, 1981. Freeman was mysteriously found dead in a Northeast lot (reportedly naked, gagged, hand-cuffed, and with a drug needle in his arm) the day after the infamous May 13, 1985 police bombing of MOVE, leading O’Connor to conclude that “the timing and modus operandi of the abduction and killing alone suggest an extreme act of police vengeance.”

Despite the importance of Framing, and a timely NY Times article that spotlighted the book’s release in May, the mainstream media has virtually ignored O’Connor’s book. Supporters of Abu-Jamal are fighting back against this media blackout, and on October 3, author J. Patrick O’Connor began a week-long book tour in the SF Bay Area, which followed his tour of New York City and Philadelphia in June. Click here for a compilation of radio shows, interviews with, and articles by & about O’Connor — including this video interview at Philadelphia City Hall on the day of the book’s release (WATCH PARTS 1, 2, and 3).

The Sundance Channel Acquires New British Film About Mumia

Scheduled to premiere on The Sundance Channel on December 8, 2008, the new film, titled In Prison My Whole Life has been officially endorsed by Amnesty International, who in 2000 published a major report calling for a new trial. Amnesty UK Director Kate Allen said: “It’s shocking that the US justice system has repeatedly failed to address the appalling violation of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s fundamental fair trial rights. . . . We hope that the film’s viewers will back our call for a fair retrial for Mumia Abu-Jamal — and also support our work opposing the death penalty in the US and around the world.”

In Prison character and filmmaker, William Francome was born on the night of Mumia’s 1981 arrest. Responding to the Sundance acquisition, he said: “Mumia’s case and the issues surrounding it are still highly important and need to be analyzed . . . It is so important that a trusted high quality broadcaster like Sundance has taken up the film, putting it at the fingertips of millions of Americans.”

On October 10, there is a special press conference, reception, and screening of In Prison at Theatre Pathe Vaise in Lyon, France, featuring the former French First Lady, Madame Daniele Mitterrand, producers Colin Firth & Livia Giuggioli-Firth, Abu-Jamal’s lead attorney Robert R. Bryan, representatives of Amnesty International, and a message from Mumia to be read to the audience. In Prison has already been shown at many prestigious film festivals including The Times BFI 51st London Film Festival and Rome’s International Film Festival in 2007, The Sundance Film Festival, in January, 2008, and this September at NYC’s Urbanworld Film Festival, and at the CR10 prison abolitionist conference in Oakland, CA.

An October, 2007 interview with Francome, and a September, 2008 interview with co-producer Livia Giuggioli Firth, revealed that In Prison features 1) the first interview ever with Billy Cook, and 2) a presentation of the crime scene photos recently aired on NBC’s Today Show, featuring an interview with the photographer Pedro Polakoff, and the German author that recently discovered them, Michael Schiffmann.

Mumia’s brother Billy Cook was at the scene on Dec. 9, 1981, after Officer Faulkner pulled Cook’s VW car over. Interviewed in the film, Cook denies the accusation that he struck Faulkner in the face, from which he allegedly instigated the documented beating by Faulkner. Cook shows In Prison’s interviewers the scars from the beating, which are still on his head today. “They arrested me for assaulting him, but I never laid a hand on him. I was only trying to protect myself,” says Cook, who also reports that before he was beaten bloody with the police flashlight, Faulkner “was kind of vulgar and nasty. And if I remember correctly he threw a slur in . . . ‘Nigger’ get back in the car.”

In Prison features the first interview with press photographer Pedro Polakoff, along with German author, Dr. Michael Schiffmann (University of Heidelberg), who discovered Polakoff’s photos (never seen by the 1982 jury) and featured them in his new German book Race Against Death, published in Fall, 2006. William Francome argues that the photos “were purposefully ignored by the prosecution and the DA’s Office,” because the DA knew that the photographs “could have done their case some damage in court.” (For more on the photos, go to Journalists for Mumia’s website: Abu-Jamal-News.com)

Appealing The Third Circuit Ruling to The US Supreme Court

On July 22, the Third Circuit Court ruled against Mumia’s en banc appeal requesting that the entire court hear his appeal, instead of just the three-judge panel of Thomas Ambro, Anthony Scirica, and Robert Cowen, who previously ruled against a new guilt-phase trial on March 27, 2008. Ruling against three different appeal issues, the court refused to grant either a new guilt-phase trial or a preliminary hearing that could have led to a new guilt-phase trial for Mumia. However, on the issue of racist jury selection, also known as the Batson claim, the three judge panel of split 2-1, with Ambro dissenting.

The 1986 Batson v. Kentucky ruling established the right to a new trial if jurors were excluded on the basis of race. At the 1982 trial Prosecutor McGill used 10 of his 15 peremptory strikes to remove otherwise acceptable black jurors, yet the court ruled that there was not even the appearance of discrimination. In his dissenting opinion, Ambro wrote that the denial of a preliminary Batson hearing “goes against the grain of our prior actions . . . I see no reason why we should not afford Abu-Jamal the courtesy of our precedents.”

Mumia will be filing an appeal of this ruling with the US Supreme Court by the deadline of Oct. 20, unless he applies for a 60-day extension. The District Attorney has the same Oct. 20 deadline to appeal the Third Circuit ruling regarding the ‘overturning’ of the death sentence, if they choose to do so.

On March 27, the three-judge panel unanimously affirmed Federal District Court Judge William Yohn’s 2001 decision overturning the death sentence. Citing the 1988 Mills v. Maryland precedent, Yohn had ruled that sentencing forms used by jurors and Judge Sabo’s instructions to the jury were potentially confusing, and jurors could have mistakenly believed that they had to unanimously agree on any mitigating circumstances in order to consider them as weighing against a death sentence.

Now, if the DA wants to re-instate the death sentence, the DA must call for a new penalty-phase jury trial where new evidence of Mumia’s innocence can be presented. However, the jury can only choose between a sentence of life in prison without parole or a death sentence.

Or, the DA can appeal this ruling to the US Supreme Court by the deadline of Oct. 20. The DA has not stated whether or not it will: (1) appeal this to the US Supreme Court, or (2) accept the Third Circuit ruling and either request a new sentencing trial or accept life in prison without the chance of parole.

US Supreme Court Rejects Mumia Abu-Jamal’s PCRA Appeal

On Monday, October 6 (in a ruling unrelated to the above-mentioned appeal of the 3rd Circuit ruling), the US Supreme Court rejected Mumia’s Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) appeal, which was asking the courts to hear newly discovered testimony from Kenneth Pate and Yvette Williams (read the affidavits here). The appeal had been filed in July, after it was rejected by the PA Supreme Court in Feb, 2008, and in 2005 by Philadelphia Judge Pamela Dembe.

Philadelphia journalist Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time, an independent investigation into the Abu-Jamal case. Responding on Monday to the US Supreme Court ruling he said: “One of the travesties that is part of American death penalty jurisprudence, and that contributes to the inescapable conclusion that it can never be fair or foolproof, is that the bar for getting a new hearing based upon new evidence is set almost impossibly high. So for example, even though we have in these two affidavits evidence that a key witness at trial to an alleged confession had been pressured or lured into lying on the stand, and that a second alleged eye-witness had been pressured and induced into claiming she was a witness when she actually wasn’t one, the US Supreme Court rules that it will not even review the matter or order a lower court to do so. And so it is possible that Mumia Abu-Jamal, a man who could in fact be innocent of murder, will either die or be left to rot in jail for the rest of his life while he could be the victim of police witness tampering and prosecutorial misconduct.”

Another Philadelphia journalist was dismayed by Monday’s ruling, and hopes it is not an indication of how the court will respond to the upcoming, separate appeal of the 3rd Circuit ruling. Having covered this story since 1981, Temple University professor and Philadelphia Tribune columnist Linn Washington, Jr. argues that, “the Williams revelation by itself at least deserves a formal hearing . . . as does the jury selection discrimination issue. However, state and federal courts continue with the pattern in the Abu-Jamal case of circling the wagons to shut-out any evidence exposing the major flaws of the 1982 trial and that jury’s guilty verdict.”

Let’s take a closer look at these two rejected affidavits that shed light on the broader issue of fabricated evidence used to convict Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Kenneth Pate’s Affidavit and the Fake “Hospital Confession”

Kenneth Pate is the step-brother of hospital security guard Priscilla Durham, who testified at the 1982 trial to hearing Abu-Jamal confess at the hospital, to shooting Officer Daniel Faulkner. Pate now states in an April 18, 2003 affidavit that Durham confided to him during a telephone conversation “around the end of 1983 or the beginning of 1984″ that she had actually lied about hearing the alleged hospital confession.

Pate states that Durham told him on the telephone that “Mumia was all bloody and the police were interfering with his treatment, saying ‘let him die.’ Priscilla said that the police told her that she was part of the ‘brotherhood’ of police since she was a security guard and that she had to stick with them and say that she heard Mumia say that he killed the police officer, when they brought Mumia in on a stretcher.”

Even before Pate’s affidavit, Durham’s account was very suspicious.

The alleged “hospital confession,” where Mumia reportedly declared, “I shot the motherf***er and I hope the motherf***er dies,” was first officially reported to police over two months later, by hospital guards Priscilla Durham and James LeGrand (Feb. 9, 1982), PO Gary Wakshul (Feb.11), PO Gary Bell (Feb.25), and PO Thomas M. Bray (March1).

Only two of these five witnesses were called by the DA: Priscilla Durham and Gary Bell (Faulkner’s partner and “best friend”).

Priscilla Durham and Gary Bell

Durham testified in 1982, and added for the very first time (not reported to the police on Feb.9), that she had reported the confession to her supervisor the next day, making a hand-written report. Neither her supervisor, nor the alleged handwritten statement was presented in court.

Instead, the DA sent an officer to the hospital, returning with a suspicious typed version. Sabo accepted the unsigned and unauthenticated paper despite both Durham’s disavowal (because it was not hand-written), and the defense’s protest that authorship and authenticity were unproven.

Gary Bell testified that his two-month memory lapse resulted from him being so upset over the death of Faulkner, that he forgot to report it to police.

Gary Wakshul: ‘the negro male made no comment.’

Police Officer Gary Wakshul was not a prosecution witness, and on the final day of testimony in 1982, Mumia’s lawyer discovered Wakshul’s statement from Dec. 9, 1981 (Mumia’s supporters cite this late discovery as another example of incompetent representation–to which defense attorney Anthony Jackson testified about at the 1995 PCRA hearings).

After riding with Abu-Jamal to the hospital and guarding him until his treatment, Wakshul reported: “the negro male made no comment.”

When the defense immediately sought to call Wakshul as a witness, the DA reported that he was on vacation. On grounds that it was too late in the trial, Sabo denied the defense request to locate him for testimony.

Subsequently, the jury never heard from Wakshul or about his contradictory written report. When an outraged Abu-Jamal protested, Judge Sabo cruelly declared to him: “You and your attorney goofed.”

At the 1995 PCRA Hearings, Wakshul testified that both his contradictory Dec. 9 “the negro male made no comment” report and the two-month delay were simply bad mistakes. He repeated his earlier February 11, 1982 statement given to the police IAB investigator that he “didn’t realize it had any importance until that day.” Wakshul also testified to being home for his 1982 vacation — in accordance with explicit instructions to stay in town for the trial so that he could testify if called.

Mysteriously, just days before his PCRA testimony, Wakshul was savagely beaten by undercover police officers in front of a Judge in the Common Pleas Courtroom, where Wakshul worked as a court crier. The two attackers were later suspended without pay, as punishment. With the motive still unexplained, the beating was possibly used to intimidate Wakshul into maintaining his “confession” story at the PCRA hearings.

Regarding the alleged confession, Amnesty International concluded: “The likelihood of two police officers and a security guard forgetting or neglecting to report the confession of a suspect in the killing of another police officer for more than two months strains credulity.”

Yvette Williams’ Affidavit and Cynthia White’s False Testimony

Yvette Williams’ July 8, 2002 affidavit, is the just latest evidence discrediting the prosecution’s star witness at the 1982 trial: Cynthia White.

Suspiciously, no official eyewitness even reported seeing White at the scene, and White is the only “witness” to report seeing alleged eyewitness Robert Chobert’s taxi cab parked behind PO Faulkner’s car.

Amnesty International documents that key DA witnesses Chobert (an arsonist on probation, driving his cab without a license) and White (a prostitute facing multiple charges) “altered their descriptions of what they saw, in ways that supported the prosecution’s version of events.”

Importantly, Williams’ account of 1) White being coerced by police to give false testimony, and 2) Police seeking out even more false testimony, is strongly supported by the testimony of Veronica Jones (at the 1982 trial and the 1996 PCRA) and Pamela Jenkins (at the 1997 PCRA).

The New Affidavit

Yvette Williams declares: “I was in jail with Cynthia White in December of 1981 after Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot and killed. Cynthia ['Lucky'] White told me the police were making her lie and say she saw Mr. Jamal shoot Officer Faulkner when she really did not see who did it . . . Whenever she talked about testifying against Mumia Abu-Jamal, and how the police were making her lie, she was nervous and very excited and I could tell how scared she was from the way she was talking and crying.”

Explaining why she is just now coming out with her affidavit, Williams says “I feel like I’ve almost had a nervous breakdown over keeping quiet about this all these years. I didn’t say anything because I was afraid. I was afraid of the police. They’re dangerous.”

Pamela Jenkins’ 1997 PCRA Testimony

At the 1997 PCRA hearing, former prostitute Pamela Jenkins testified that 1) Police tried pressuring her to falsely testify that she saw Abu-Jamal shoot Faulkner, and 2) In late 1981, Cynthia White (who Jenkins knew as a fellow police informant) told Jenkins that she was also being pressured to testify against Mumia, and that she was afraid for her life.

As part of a 1995 federal probe of Philadelphia police corruption, Officers Thomas F. Ryan and John D. Baird were convicted of paying Jenkins to falsely testify that she had bought drugs from a Temple University student named Arthur Colbert. Jenkins’ 1995 testimony about Colbert and others she falsely testified against, helped to convict Ryan, Baird, and other officers and to dismiss several dozen drug convictions.

At the 1997 PCRA, Jenkins testified that this same Thomas F. Ryan was one of the officers who attempted to have her lie about Mumia!

The Attempts to Silence Veronica Jones

Veronica Jones (a former prostitute who was working at the scene) first told police that she had seen two men “jogging” away from the scene before police arrived. Then, as a defense witness at the 1982 trial, Jones denied making the statement, but started to describe a pre-trial visit from police, where “They were getting on me telling me I was in the area and I seen Mumia, you know, do it. They were trying to get me to say something that the other girl [Cynthia White] said. I couldn’t do that.” Jones then explicitly testified that police offered to let her and White “work the area if we tell them” what they wanted to hear regarding Mumia’s guilt.

The DA moved to block her account, calling her testimony “absolutely irrelevant.” Judge Sabo agreed to block the line of questioning, strike the testimony, and then ordered the jury to disregard Jones’ statement.

Later, at the 1996 PCRA, Jones testified that in 1982 she had been coerced by police to recant seeing the two men jogging away, but resisted police pressure to falsely testify that she saw Abu-Jamal shoot Faulkner.

Intimidation of Jones continued at the PCRA. Before she testified, Judge Sabo threatened her with 5-10 yrs imprisonment for admitting perjury. After testifying, he allowed NJ police to handcuff and arrest her for an outstanding arrest warrant on charges of writing a bad check.

Outraged by Jones’ treatment, even the normally ‘anti-Mumia’ Philadelphia Daily News reported that: “Such heavy-handed tactics can only confirm suspicions that the court is incapable of giving Abu-Jamal a fair hearing. Sabo has long since abandoned any pretense of fairness.” (Read more about Jones, and watch a new video-interview with her)

Organizing for Dec. 6 and Beyond

German author and co-founder of Journalists for Mumia, Michael Schiffmann responded to Monday’s ruling from his home in Heidelberg. Emphasizing that these two affidavits are important enough to merit a PCRA hearing, Schiffmann says, “there’s just one point I want to stress. Right-wing and FOP commentators will claim that the Williams and Pate affidavits were hearsay anyway. But this isn’t true. If someone reports a crime committed by him/herself to me, that’s called a statement ‘against one’s own interest,’ and if I report it to the police or testify to it in court, my report or testimony is admissible. Of course, both statements are highly relevant: White and Durham were main pillars of the prosecution. If they admitted to other people that they lied in court, the testimony of these other people should be heard.”

“Now we will have to redouble our efforts to ensure that the US Supreme Court grants the petition for writ of certiorari Mumia’s lawyer will be filing later this month or in December, if given a 60 day extension,” says Schiffmann. Please visit FreeMumia.com for the latest updates on organizing for December 6, and if you can, download (and print out in your community) our two new info flyers just completed:

1) A condensed legal update based on this article, and 2) A flyer summarizing the key points from The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and promoting the West Coast Book Tour.

The film was anything but praised by the critics. The Sun gave the film one star and wrote: “the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine isn’t exactly the obvious choice of topic for a comedy – which is perhaps why this film is about as funny as a suicide bombing.” “By the end,” wrote Christopher Tookey of the Daily Mail, “I felt as though I had been carpet-bombed by comedy’s answer to Vladimir Putin. But, on second thought, Putin is funnier.”

These are pretty harsh words for critics to write about a film. However, unlike the devastated critic, who didn’t hold back from putting the film down, I regard the film as an important document and another step towards a comprehensive understanding of the Jewish world, Jewish identity, Jewish tribal operation and Jewish power. As much as You Don’t Mess with the Zohan seems to be a sloppy infantile film, it is also a pretty interesting take on Jewish Diaspora identity, its vision of Israel and itself.

The Peace Seeking People

The plot of the film is rather simple, it has two main focal points. One is engaged with the exposure of the ‘vulnerable human being’ behind the Israeli military killing machine. Zohan, the Israeli counter-terrorism expert, once left to be himself, is transformed into a peace loving feigale (a derogatory Yiddish term for gay male) hairstylist. This line of thought is there to reassure us that Israeli crudeness and brutality is just a manifestation, deep inside they really are ‘softies’. This fits nicely into the ‘Sabra narrative’. Israeli natives tend to associate themselves with the Sabra cactus fruit; spikes on the outside but soft and sweet inside. Considering the fact that Adam Sandler, the main person behind this film, is a devoted Zionist fundraiser, the very intention of presenting the Israelis in such a light shouldn’t take us by surprise.

The other focal point proposes an optimistic possible reconciliation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As we follow the story, we come to realise that the Palestinian and Israeli communities in the film are set into a conflict by an American real estate tycoon. The film may try to suggest to the naïve viewer that it is actually American hard capitalism that sets Arabs and Jews onto unnecessary fire. This banal vision is rather popular amongst a limited number of Jewish Marxists and Jewish leftists that are scattered within the anti-war and the anti-imperialist movements. Apparently, such a reading of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suggests that the crime that is committed in Palestine by the Jewish state in the name of the Jewish people may have nothing to do with the Jewish people at all. It is all down to ‘hard capitalism’, imperialism, colonialism, and so on. The Jews are actually nothing more than just innocent victims. Within such a banal reading, the Israelis who starve millions of Palestinians and drop bombs upon them from airplanes decorated with Jewish religious symbols are doing so because they are set to kill by some remote ideology named ‘American capitalism’. Within such a ludicrous reading of the conflict, Israel and its supportive Jewish lobbies are ‘victims’ rather than the protagonists of devastating genocidal policies. Again, considering the fact that Sandler is a Zionist fundraiser, such a lame intellectual intent shouldn’t take us by surprise. The fact that some Jewish so-called ‘leftist campaigners’ succumb to such a deceiving view is either pathetic or worrying, it is all matter of personal taste.

Unlike The Diaspora Jew

In the very early part of the film we meet Zohan during his military phase. At that promising stage, Zohan is no doubt an entertaining grotesque caricature of Israeli military macho. In between his deep obsession with humus and love of cheap 1970’s disco, Zohan manages to kill efficiently and mercilessly. Unlike the Disapora Jew who is ‘led like cattle to the slaughter’, Zohan is the embodiment of fierce masculine omnipotence. He leads others to the slaughter. Fear is beyond him. As he operates behind enemy lines, he mocks his clumsy Palestinian enemies and gives them a crash course in Zionism just before he smashes them to pieces.

Zohan is literally unkillable. He stops bullets with his fingertips. He goes through walls and escapes rocket-propelled grenades by twisting his body, predicting the rocket path. With Zohan and his kind around, the Holocaust and Jewish suffering become a remote irrelevant historical chapter. All that obviously has very little to do with the Israeli reality. In the light of Zohan’s bravery, it is the new Jew, the incarnated Biblical Samson, who inflicts pain on others.

As interesting as one commentator has suggested, for the first time in a Jewish American film, the Shoah is not mentioned even once throughout the film. As I myself mentioned on several occasions in my previous writings, Israeli historical epos cannot easily integrate the Holocaust into the Israeli heroic ‘self sufficient’ narrative. One cannot be both a victim and a macho at the same time unless operating in a schizophrenic mode. Within the emerging Zionist religion, the Jew – who dropped God and reformed himself as an alleged ‘authentic being’, learns to believe in himself. However, the melting pot between the Israeli and his Diaspora brother leads towards an integration of these two opposing poles of heroism and victimhood. Consequently, Israeli society is maturing into one of inevitable collective schizophrenia. The Israeli cannot decide anymore whether he is a victim or an oppressor. Within such a conflicting mode, Zohan comes about as a heroic character. He is a fighter, he believes in himself, he is aware of his powers and his almightiness. At least, this is the impression he gives in the first few minutes of the film. It won’t take long before we learn that even the Zohan is slightly confused.

But it goes further, Zohan is also pretty effective with the girls. Unlike the Diaspora urban Jew protagonist Larry David who is pretty pale and hopeless with the girls and in general, Zohan Dvir, the Sabra is a socio-erotic animal. He is the ultimate male super hero. The film starts with Zohan’s triumphant march on Tel Aviv’s beach. He is followed by the camera, panning over the gazes depicting the mass yearning of sexually aroused, well-tanned Israeli bikini-clad girls. It won’t take long before we learn that Zohan is also a well-endowed man. Not more than a few minutes into the film, Zohan is caught in his underwear, exposing what seems to be an overwhelming gigantic member. Indeed later we happen to learn that his substantial bump is actually due to pubic hair rather than real content of flesh and blood.

However, the march of masculinity doesn’t last long. Subsequently we learn that Zohan is far from being happy in his role as an omnipotent killing machine. He wants to live a different life. Once fulfilling his dream of becoming a hairstylist, a new identity is emerging, the Israeli caricatured macho disappears and a grotesque effeminate gay caricature takes its place.

The once hairy Judeo-Rambo is now a well-shaved, light headed, buttock-swinging, silky-smooth kind of boy.

In NYC, Zohan changes his name to Scrappy Smooth. Though his initial attempt in getting hired at an upscale hairstyle salon proved to be unsuccessful, he eventually lands in a struggling Palestinian salon run by a beautiful young woman (Emmanuelle Chriqui) in downtown Manhattan. The Palestinian salon is located in an area populated by Israeli electronics and clothes shops and some small Arab businesses. Needless to say, Sandler’s presentation of Israeli immigrants’ lowlife in NYC is far from being respectful. The Israeli electronics shopkeepers are shown as a bunch of dedicated swindlers who are set upon deceiving their naïve American customers.In the Palestinian beauty salon Zohan is not allowed to do a thing but sweep the floor, and he does it for free. However, as time goes by he eventually becomes a hairstylist after gratifying a very mature lady with a satisfactory haircut and backroom sexual service. Not before too long Zohan’s reputation spreads among the elderly women of Manhattan. “Besides the sex, he gives a pretty good haircut,” confesses one. The Palestinian beauty salon becomes a smashing success and it’s all thanks to Zohan, one-time Israeli killing machine, but now an enthusiastic sex services provider.

Zohan’s assimilation within his new environment is far from being instant. As much as Zohan is quick to change his name and his own haircut, his accent and behavioural code keep him behind. Noticeably, it is his penis that makes the transformation significant. In his early career has a hairstylist, his male organ operates as an extension of his business career. Zohan gives each of his elderly customers a rather inclusive gigolo service. Though watching an elderly woman being turned on by a young man may as well be a subject for a comedy, in practice, Zohan operates as a male prostitute. The message that comes through is clear, in the eyes of the Israelis, the penis is instrumentalised and commodified. However, once falling in love with his beautiful Palestinian boss, it eventually occurs to Zohan that his organ may react to feelings. Seemingly it takes almost the full length of the film before the omnipotent Sabra Zohan becomes a true Diaspora Jewish impotent ‘Larry David’.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Apparently all through the film, both the Arabs and the Israelis are under some severe pressure inflicted by Walbridge, an American real estate tycoon who wants to wipe the entire neighbourhood out and build a huge mall there instead.

Not before too long Walbridge hires the services of some ‘anti-Semite’ Islamophobic gang who are gladly committing themselves to jeopardising the fragile relationship within the Israeli-Palestinian community. Miraculously, towards the end of the movie, a cosmic enlightenment is embarking within the struggling community. The Israelis and the Palestinians reveal that it is Walbridge who sets them to fight each other in the name of ‘American capitalism’. Once they expose the plot, they end up fighting together against the American tycoon and his mercenaries. Not only do they fight, they even manage to win. Zohan, the Israeli counter-terrorist and Phantom (John Turturro) the Islamic Jihad terrorist fight side by side against the anti-Semites.

As banal as it may sound, the tendency to recruit Palestinians to fight the Jewish Marxist wars (against capitalism) and Jewish tribal wars (against the ‘anti-Semites’) is symptomatic also to the Jewish Marxists within the Palestinian solidarity movement who insist that this is exactly what the Palestinian Solidarity campaign should engage with: as if Palestinians are short of battles to fight. Should it take us by surprise that Adam Sandler, a prime Zionist fundraiser and people who do their campaigning labelling themselves as Anti-Zionist Jews share the same agenda? Not at all. Once operating under a Jewish flag, the interests of the tribe come first. As much as we expect a Zionist to promote tribal interests, recruiting the Palestinians to serve Jewish tribal interests is on the verge of gross.

Bearing in mind that I have very little admiration for American capitalism or any other form of money-orientated culture, I would still argue that blaming capitalism for the crimes committed by the Jewish state is rather deceptive. The ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population (Nakba) in 1948 was actually perpetrated and committed by a devoted Jewish ‘leftist’ Zionist leadership that had barely anything to do with ‘hard American Capitalism’. The massacre in Kafar Kasem had nothing to do with hard capitalism either. The 1967 expansionist Israeli extravaganza had very little to do with America. As much as Zionist apologists and Marxist Jews want us to believe that America and colonialism are to be blamed, I would forcibly argue, that it is actually the other way around. American capitalism has become a Zionist vehicle. If this is not enough, American soldiers are fighting and dying in the Israeli wars. Currently it is Iraq but as we learn from the press the AJC is planning to extend the war to Iran.

This should not take us by surprise. As Marx pointed out already in 1843, America is the Jewish promised land, it is an haven for ruthless materialism and it is hardly surprising that Jews who were traditionally urban people (due to some historical circumstances) have managed to flourish within that culture and to settle within its elite. As much as America attracted waves of East European Jews in the late 19th century, it attracts Israeli youth, Zohan included. America is the Israeli dreamland, and NYC is Tel Aviv’s wettest dream. NYC is where a Jew can celebrate his symptoms. Whether it is in an Israeli Electronics Store or as a male prostitute gratifying grannies in a backroom of a small downtown salon.

The Racist SubtextAs much as Sandler insists upon presenting us with America as a place that lets people cross the divide and find a way towards peace, it is pretty shocking that he himself didn’t manage to recruit either Arabs or Palestinians. Clearly, not many Arabs would agree to perform in a Zionist propaganda film that present Palestinians as foolish, illiterate terrorists and suggests that they engage in some goat shagging.

But it goes much further, Sandler clearly differentiates between Zohan, the Ashkenazi Jew, commando hero, and the lowlife Israeli immigrant to America who ends up in an electronics shop. In the film Zohan speaks a uniquely invented dialect that is made of an amalgam of Yiddish, Hebrew and English. Sandler clearly associates the Zionist heroic epos with Ashkenazi culture while referring to the lowlife Israeli immigrant culture in the Arab Jewish culture. Sandler tries to emphasise the racial similarities between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In one dialogue a Palestinian complains, “everyone hates us,” the Israeli electronics shopkeeper answers, “yes, everybody hates us also, but just because they think that we are you.” What Sandler may have failed to realise is that in America Arab Jews and Palestinians can live together because they are sharing some fundamental cultural assets. They simply have a lot in common. Similarly, Peace will occur in the Middle East when Arab Jews realize that they have far more in common with their Palestinian brothers rather than with the Ashkenazi bloodthirsty aristocracy ala Peres, Rabin, Begin, Ben-Gurion, Olmert, Sharon, Netanyahu, Livni and so on.

A Last Word

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is not an intellectual film, it doesn’t pretend to be. It is not a source of an historical truth either. The film is just an intense two-hour glimpse into a Jewish tribal mind. It may not tell us what the tribal Jew is, but it clearly throws light over the complex relationship between the tribal Jew and Israel. It suggests to us how the tribal Jew may see himself and want to be seen. It lets us peep into Sandler’s mind and suggests how he regards Israel, the Israelis and himself accordingly.

We can easily notice how much admiration Sandler holds towards the omnipotent Israelis yet we can detect how much he scorns the Israeli crudeness. It won’t take a genius to gather that Sandler, like many other Jews, is confused by Israel and the Israelis. May I suggest that he has good reason. As much as he seems to detest the Israeli electronics shops and the swindler culture associated with it, in the near future we will all see many more of them scattered in our Western capitals. Somehow, we all better get ready to mess with the Zohans.

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.

But the most telling analogy is with Iraq and its ill-fated invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Kuwait indeed had been a province administered from Baghdad for millennia, so Saddam Hussein understandably coveted it, as Saakashvili does Ossetia. Hussein was convinced that the US had given him the green light after he had spent 10 years fighting the US’s latest bete noire, Iran , just as Saakashvili was given a similar ambivalent go-ahead to invade Ossetia . Even Townsend admits, “I think they misunderstand our eagerness and enthusiasm and think we are going to be behind them for anything.” Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin said it best: “It is hard to imagine that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili embarked on this risky venture without some sort of approval from the side of the United States.”

Taking this line of argument to its logical conclusion, perhaps the Americans encouraged the Georgian president in order to test the Russian reaction and to observe the preparedness of the Russian military. Yet another analogy with the present crisis is the 1930s Japanese occupation of Manchukuo. They made an incursion at Nomonhan to test the Russians. After General Zhukov destroyed their attacking force, they decided to leave the Russians alone, despite subsequent pleas by Hitler.

Saakashvili’s strategy is also reminiscent of the Israeli conquest of 1948: by bombing the civilians he shows he wanted to have Ossetia without its native Ossetians. To this end he bombarded the capital, Tskhinvali, causing half the residents to crossed the mountains to the Russian side. Fortunate for the Ossetians, and unlike the Palestinians, they had a reliable patron.

Georgians are noted for their fiery nationalism, but it’s not clear that this time they are lining up behind their rash president. Former Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze has said that Georgia made a “grave mistake” by advancing into South Ossetia. The witty Shevardnadze, who is also a former Soviet foreign minister, said the crisis would not cause a new Cold War, as “the new Cold War has long since been instigated by the USA , through the Americans’ so-called missile defence shield in the Czech Republic and Poland.”

Referring to Russia ’s incursion into Georgia , President George W Bush said that invading a sovereign country that poses no threat is “unacceptable in the 21st century.” John McCain echoed this: “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations,” as if this is all some ghastly 20th century mistake, and as if the last eight years have witnessed a blossoming of world peace. In fact, the 21st century has already involved lots of nations invading other nations, though predominantly by the US and NATO. And given the anti-Russian policies by the US and its new clients in the recent past, the likely annexation of South Ossetia to the Russian Federation could well be followed by Abkhazia and Sevastopol.

It is not inconceivable that Crimea, eastern and southern Ukraine — all of which are predominantly Russian — could follow suit. None of these potential annexations would require much force, nor would they be surprising, and would certainly not be pretexts for the US launching WWIII. In an interview with Forbes magazine in 1994, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, eulogised by the West only a few weeks ago for his fanatical anti-communism, called for “the union of the three Slavic republics [ Russia , Ukraine , Belarus ] and Kazakhstan .” He explained that Lenin had given up several Russian provinces to Ukraine and in 1954, Khrushchev made a “gift” of the Crimea to Ukraine. “But even he did not manage to make Ukraine a ‘gift’ of Sevastopol , which remained a separate city under the jurisdiction of the USSR central government.” Belarus and Kazakhstan are already so close to Russia they could be considered part of the federation, but Ukraine is playing Saakashvili’s odious game of cozying up to the US and NATO, and is thereby creating an atmosphere where Russia will have to do something to protect itself.

Solzhenitsyn’s prescription included withdrawing all Russians from Central Asia and the Caucusus, and is impracticable. Despite Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s admiration for him, it is unlikely that Russia will ever abandon the latter or repatriate millions of Russians from the former. On the contrary, Russia has a residual “imperial” duty: as the successor of the Soviet Union, it is duty-bound to protect Russians living throughout the ex-Soviet Union. Nor can Russia allow Saakashvili to ethnically cleanse the Ossetians, if only for practical reasons: fifty thousand refugees from South Ossetia would destabilise the northern Caucasus . But the essential point about the arbitrary borders under socialism and the migration of nationalities to and fro for many decades makes a mockery and potential tragedy of treating the new “republics” in terms familiar to the West.

Ignoring this fundamental reality has caused inestimable suffering already in the former Yugoslavia, as Solzhenitsyn predicted long before Srebrenica, Kosovo and now Ossetia . Unfortunately, Bush et al are operating on autopilot, as even reluctant German Chancellor Angela Merkel, on her lightning visit to succour Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, defiantly announced, “Georgia will become a member of NATO if it wants to — and it does want to.”

Employing its own perverse logic, Poland quickly finalised an agreement to host the infamous US missile “defence” shield. The US administration even dropped its supposed opposition to supplying short-range Patriot missiles, which are highly mobile and can be redeployed easily to counter, say, Russian missiles responding to a US strike, a point which was not lost on Russia. So it should surprise no one that a senior Russian general said that Poland had just made itself a target of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

To add fuel to the nuclear meltdown, NATO wannabee Ukraine announced on Saturday that the demise of a bilateral Russian-Ukrainian defence agreement earlier this year “allows Ukraine to establish active cooperation with European countries” in missile defence. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said Kiev could invite European partners to integrate their early warning systems against missile attacks. This is yet another blatant provocation of Russia , which has no intention of starting a war, but has a nuclear arsenal ready to reply to any first strike, a policy which the current US administration embraces.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has also ordered commanders of Russia ’s Black Sea fleet, based in Sevastopol, to seek permission before moving warships and aircraft. Moscow said its commanders would disregard the order as its forces answer solely to the Russian president.

The current upping-the-ante is both childish and dangerous. Russia is not weak and in disarray any longer, and could very easily — and with excellent historical justification — annex Sevastopol and even the entire Crimean peninsula, where Russians and Tatars constitute 70 per cent of the population and which was a part of Russia since the time of Catherine the Great. At the same time, Russia is not belligerent or warlike, unlike a certain other superpower, and foolish “presidents” of “republics” would be wise to recognise they must live side-by-side with this powerful nation, and make the best of it, not the worst. In case this point is still not clear, if Ukraine stops its provocations, it need have no worries of any loss of “sovereignty”.

The duplicity of the West is everywhere in this current crisis. Even French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s cease-fire proposal signed by both Georgian and Russian presidents was a ruse. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov revealed that the document that Saakashvili approved did not contain an introduction that had been endorsed by Russia, South Ossetia and the other breakaway region, Abkhazia. Meanwhile, US military planes are flying in “aid” and the US has announced it will henceforth have a permanent presence in Georgia.

Because of the very real threat that Georgian troops, backed by their American friends, could easily try again to destabilise things, the Russians are understandably unwilling to abandon the western Georgian city of Gori, which has a military base.

Tellingly, Bush referred Friday to efforts to resolve the conflict not with the Group of 8 industrial nations, which includes Russia , but with the G-7, using the designation of the group before Russia joined. Ousting Russia from the G-8 has been a keystone of McCain’s foreign policy for years.

Bush et al don’t realise that apart from the Baltics, which had two decades of independence before WWII, these ex-Soviet states are not really states at all, but fiefdoms of the most odious part of the former Soviet elite, now trying to play western-style electoral politics, with disastrous consequences. By pretending otherwise and threatening Russia for its understandable security interests, the US is playing with fire. “What worries me about this episode is the United States is jeopardising Russian cooperation on a number of issues over a dispute that at most involves limited American interests,” said Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute in Washington .

By opening NATO to bits and pieces of the SU and Yugoslavia, by pushing Russophobic, vengeful Polish and Czech governments into hosting missiles which can be easily aimed at Russia, the US should be prepared for the possibility of a greater Russia, just as it should be resigned to a rump greater Serbia, which would include Serbian enclaves in Kosovo. This is what so far defines 21st century realpolitik.

Military defeat may actually be very good for the Georgians. The first thing the Georgians did when they became independent after the 1917 Russian Revolution was to expel all Armenians and confiscate their property. After WWII, Georgian Joseph Stalin expelled the Chechens from the Caucusus and the Germans from Prussia. The Ossetians and Abhkaz had good cause to distance themselves from Georgian chauvinism. We can only hope that the fiasco in Ossetia will let the Georgians — and the Ukrainians — rethink their attitude towards all their neighbours, including the Russians.

Some have argued that Batman is an allegory for neoconservatives, the folks who wanted to invade and occupy Iraq come hell or highwater under the pretense of fighting terrorism by spreading democracy in the Middle East. You could even go so far as to see Batman as Bush, a crusader willing to break the law because the institutions charged with enforcing them are too corrupt to do so themselves.

However, I think The Dark Knight’s politics are much more complicated than that. The Joker’s goal is to break Gotham’s heroes in order to rob the city of all hope. He is the criminal world’s answer to Batman, the anti-Batman if you will, dedicated to ensuring that vice, crime, sin and fear rule Gotham’s streets again. Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler, labels him a “terrorist” and says, “some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

In a conversation over dinner, District Attorney Harvey Dent tells Bruce Wayne “either you die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.” That sums up both the Joker’s goal and the theme of the movie.

Joker succeeds in corrupting Dent by getting corrupt cops to kill Dent’s girlfriend, Rachel (whom Bruce Wayne also loves). Thanks to Batman, Dent survives an explosion set up by the Joker but the left side of his face is horribly disfigured, and he takes on the name Two-Face. Two-Face goes on a rampage against all those he deems responsible for Rachel’s premature death – the corrupt cops, the mob boss, and eventually, Batman and Lt. Gordon. Instead of dying a hero, Dent becomes corrupt by violating his own principles and taking the law into his own hands in his desperation to stop the Joker. Even before his transformation into Two-Face, Dent threatened to shoot one of Joker’s goons unless he gave him information on the Joker’s whereabouts.

Joker’s attempt to corrupt Batman proves far more difficult. He tells the people of Gotham that he will continue murdering people until Batman takes his mask off and reveals his true identity. After he kills the police commissioner, a judge, Dent’s parents, and comes close to killing Dent and the mayor in broad daylight at the commissioner’s funeral, Bruce Wayne decides he can’t take it anymore and will reveal his identity. Doing so would destroy Batman’s mystique as a hero and make it impossible be a billionaire playboy by day, crime-fighter by night.

Dent beats Wayne to the punch and claims that he’s Batman, setting a trap for the Joker, who willingly walks into it. After Batman saves Dent and Joker is arrested, Rachel and Dent are whisked away by corrupt cops to warehouses on the opposite sides of town, bound and gagged, and explosives are set up next to them.

To save Rachel and Dent, Batman attempts to get their locations by brutalizing the Joker in an interrogation room after he blocks the door to prevent the cops from getting in to stop him. Later on, Batman taps the cell phones of every single person in Gotham (millions of people) and turns them into sonar devices so he can find the Joker’s location. This is where it seems like Batman is aping the Bush administration in the “war on terror.”

However, this is also where the analogy falls apart. Batman manages to stay true to his one rule, don’t kill anyone, and the cell phone spying system is immediately destroyed after the Joker is apprehended after Lucius Fox, Batman’s gadget-maker, threatened to resign. This stands in stark contrast to the open-ended nature of the so-called “war on terror” and the destruction of the very freedoms that Bush claimed to be protecting after 9/11. In The Dark Knight, there is no parallel to the administration’s exploitation of 9/11 to achieve its long held goals to invade Iraq and expand executive power at home.

Furthermore, the Joker is not simply a maniacal mass murderer hellbent on creating chaos for his own sake. He’s also something of an intellectual and a social critic. For example, he tells Harvey Dent:

Nobody panics when they expect people to get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It’s fair.

Throughout the movie, the Joker is constantly exposing society’s hypocrisy and forcing his victims to make horrendous choices to expose their “true nature.” He threatens to destroy a hospital if an individual isn’t killed within the hour, and sure enough, a mob forms outside the building to kill the man. Even a police officer assigned to escort the individual tries to shoot him because the officer is worried about his own wife who is in a hospital.

When Joker gives Batman the location of Harvey and Rachel, he lies about who was where, tricking Batman into thinking he was saving Rachel when in fact he was saving Dent. When people evacuate the city on ferries, Joker rigs them both with explosives, and tells each ferry that they have the detonators for the other ferry and that by midnight, if one group has not blown the other up, he will blow up both groups. (This is a modified version of prisoner’s dilemma.) He dresses hostages up as clowns and tapes machine guns to their hands in the hopes that police snipers will shoot them instead of his goons who are dressed as hostages, making the snipers guilty of judging books by their covers.

One of the most emotionally powerful and politically significant moments in the movie is the resolution of the scene with the people stranded on the ferries rigged with explosives. Heated arguments on each ferry amongst the passengers (one ferry is loaded with civilians, the other is loaded with convicts) climax with a vote on the passengers’ boat. The majority vote to blow up the prisoners but the most vocal proponent of blowing up the other ferry backs down at the last minute. On the prisoners’ ferry, a big, muscular black convict tells the captain of his boat to give him the remote detonator so that he can do what should’ve been done 10 minutes ago. Just when you think the prisoner is going to hit the button and save his boat, he throws the detonator out the window, goes back to his seat, and sits quietly.

When neither boat blows the other up, Joker is furious that he was wrong in his assessment of society’s “true nature” that people are at a basic level willing to cut each other’s throats if that’s what it takes to survive. The people on the ferries proved that they are just as capable of solidarity as they are capable of being greedy, even in life-and-death situations where the rational choice is to blow someone else up to save yourself.

Joker tells Batman, “you complete me,” and he isn’t lying. While Joker is funny, spontaneous, bloodthirsty, and not bound by any rules, Batman is humorless, predictable, and torn by acting outside the law in order to enforce it while at the same time adhering to a strict moral code. What they have in common is that they both don costumes, and they are both very driven, methodical loners, excellent at reading people’s strengths and weaknesses.

Given all this, it’s safe to say that the Joker is no bin Laden, Batman is no George W. Bush, and The Dark Knight is not the “War on Terror.”

The irony is that at the end of the movie, Joker does win, although not in the way he imagined. While Batman sticks to his moral code and refuses to kill the Joker, Batman tells Gordon to blame him for the murders Dent committed so that Gotham City can have an untarnished White Knight, a legitimate hero who played by the rules and put the bad guys in jail. Dent died a hero to Gotham while Batman lives to become the villain despite not breaking his moral code. He is the Dark Knight.

So what is all the fuss about? If you haven’t seen the film, here is a brief summary, with a few necessary spoilers. After the events of Batman Begins—which concluded with Bruce Wayne/Batman buying up and privatizing all the shares of his slain father’s company and teaming up with honest Lieutenant Gordon to battle crime as a wealthy corporatist playboy duce by day and a fear-inspiring vigilante by night—Wayne and Gordon are joined in their crusade against crime by new golden-boy D.A. Harvey Dent. The men form a “band of brothers” to crush the mob, but their plan goes awry when a madman called the Joker shows up preaching a doctrine of anarchic violence and absolute resistance to all forms of order.

The Joker gets himself hired by the mob to deal with Batman and Dent and complications ensue, some of them hinging upon Dent and Wayne’s homosocial erotic rivalry: Rachel Dawes, Dent’s new girlfriend, is Wayne’s long-lost love, and she spends her brief screen time torn between the two men, before being brutally dispatched in a glaring instance of the “women in refrigerators syndrome,” a sexist literary trope identified by feminist comic-book readers in which male authors kill, maim or de-power strong female characters as a woman-devaluing plot device.

The critics are evidently bowled over by the film’s “ambivalent” portrayals of high-tech adumbrations of warrantless wiretapping (when Batman rigs up a super spying system based on sonar readings from Gotham citizens’ cell phones to stop the Joker), superheroic enhanced interrogations (when Batman threatens to beat the life out of the hostage-holding Joker) and debates about the advisability of democracy itself when the barbarians are at the gates, to quote a speech from Dent recalling the Romans’ dictatorial practices. And indeed, as a tribute to the film’s supposed complexity, some critics believe the film to be advocating the suspension of democracy in a time of terror, while others see it as endorsing a liberal skepticism about leaders’ claims to free reign during a “state of emergency” which is often those very leaders’ own creation.

However, ideology in a fictional narrative does not always express itself at the explicit level of that which the narrative seems to support or reject; it works in more subtle and insidious ways, and often functions by exclusion. That is, a text like this film presents a menu of choices from which it then invites the viewer to select, and we can locate the trace of pernicious ideology not in the choices themselves but rather in what the authors choose to leave off the menu.

What’s on the menu in The Dark Knight? The same thing that’s on the two-party American political menu, year in and year out.

First we have Batman and Dent representing opposite poles of so-called democratic politics. Batman, operating outside the law to protect the defenseless people, represents a kind of Bush/Cheney figure, doing what he has to do for the good of the homeland. Dent, on the other hand, along with Rachel Dawes, who chooses to be with Dent in the end, is an idealistic but by-the-book type who is nevertheless pragmatic enough to collaborate with a vigilante like Batman if it’s necessary to get the bad guys. In other words, a post-political Barack star.

The film really tips its ideological hand in the Greek-tragedy-like arc of these iconic characters’ development: Dawes, the most liberal of all the “good guys,” dies at the hands of the Joker, while the liberal pragmatist Dent, scarred in a fire, abandons his ideals and embraces the Joker’s ethos of chaos—in other words, we are left in the cold embrace of Batman if we want to be secure.

But what of the Joker himself, with his advocacy of terrorism and chaos, his speeches lifted from the adolescent repertoire of might-is-right conservative anarchism à la Sade, Nietzsche, Marinetti et al.? As liberal-hawk ideologue Paul Berman showed in his 2002 Terror and Liberalism, a figure such as this can very easily stand in propagandistically for “America’s enemies,” hence Berman’s insistence, for example, that Palestinians constitute not an oppressed and exploited, diverse and divided group trying to resist its enemies in various ways, some more defensible or ethical than others, but rather that they are a fundamentally irrational, chaotic and lawless cult of death. Thus, the Joker offers only the wild, amoral, killing life beyond the protective (and expansionist) borders of “democracy,” aka corporatist imperialism.

The moral is as old, and as conservative, as Hobbes: we can live in a wild, murderous wasteland or a lawless, authoritarian police state. It doesn’t matter which of these options the film presents as more appealing or fun; all that matters is that no other options—e.g., left-wing anarchism, participatory democracy, decentralized communism, democratic socialism etc.—present themselves.

It will be objected here that the left-wing critic is rigidly ideological and tone-deaf to the visionary powers of art. But actually these charges would more accurately be leveled at The Dark Knight itself, with its airless, humorless, joyless rush through murkily-filmed scenes of tiresome mayhem and its clunkingly obvious characterizations. I’m not opposed to art, not even Hollywood art, and I’m not doctrinaire. For a nice counterpoint to The Dark Knight, see its underrated box-office competitor in the super-hero, comic-book sweepstakes, Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Guillermo del Toro’s uneven fantasia at least relaxes its pace long enough for lyrical or idyllic moments that allow the audience space for reflection; also, while it can’t be taken for a feminist statement, it features powerful, heroic women characters who ultimately save the day. Finally, for all its silliness, Hellboy ends with its paranormal heroes realizing that the U.S. government, for which they’ve been working, ultimately opposes itself to the difference and diversity they represent, and they turn in their badges. Compared to The Dark Knight, this is radicalism itself—a sorry comment on our society.

But The Dark Knight is best understood not in the company of other blockbuster fare; rather, it should be placed alongside two recent popular and populist left-liberal books that can illuminate its themes. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explains that, over the last three decades, capitalists have gone on the offensive to defend and expand their holdings by exploiting, and in some cases, engineering catastrophes which so stun and demoralize populations that they find themselves unable to prevent their commons and their public treasuries from being transferred to private hands. Susan Faludi provides a cultural companion to Klein’s materialist economic history in The Terror Dream; Faludi shows how the American political class, including many self-proclaimed liberals, seized the September 11 attacks as an opportunity to reanimate the genocidal American frontier myth in which the lone, virile, violent male is called upon by a barbarian horde attack from outside to protect his dependent, virginal and powerless women. Thus the conquest of the material commons by capitalist elites requires ideologies of control that can best be summed up by the eternal right-wing cultural program: family, faith and fatherland.

Those who think this will all somehow magically improve after the election of the Harvey Dent-like Barack Obama, himself a two-faced authoritarian capitalist with a gift for co-opting progressive rhetoric, have another thing coming. Batman enhances his own material power by way of the Joker’s shocks to Gotham’s system, while the death of Rachel Dawes shows us why we need a hero—because if “we good men” do not control women, then “those bad men” will. And the baddest bad man, the Joker, reveals to us that freedom is a dangerous delusion and an insane temptation. It’s difficult to have much hope for a better future when audiences and critics are falling so hard for this example of Hollywood’s shock doctrine and its terror dream.

Claude Marks is the director of The Freedom Archives, a San Francisco-based organization. Through the website and email list-serves, it provides a valuable resource documenting both revolutionary struggle and police state repression. Freedom Archives also creates high quality audio and video documentaries, including the recent video about the San Francisco Eight, titled Legacy of Torture.

Legacy of Torture can be viewed online, as well as the previous films Voices of Three Political Prisoners (featuring Nuh Washington, Jalil Muntaqim and David Gilbert), Charisse Shumate: Fighting for Our Lives, and Self Respect, Self Defense & Self Determination (featuring Mabel Williams and Kathleen Cleaver, introduced by Angela Davis).

Hans Bennett: You are a former political prisoner. Please tell us about your case.

Claude Marks: My co-defendant, Donna Willmott and I were indicted in an escape conspiracy involving Puerto Rican Independentista, Oscar Lopez, who was serving time in USP Leavenworth on charges of seditious conspiracy. The case was part of an ongoing set-up by the FBI, involved a snitch inside the prison, and clearly targeted the Puerto Rican Independence movement and its supporters. We and a collective of folks were underground until our negotiated surrender in 1994, and the two of us served prison sentences.

HB: Why did you start the Freedom Archives?

CM: I have done radio and radical media since 1968 and been part of creating radical news and political radio for many years. Myself and many collaborators secured and maintained our programs which spanned over 30 years. When I was in prison, I re-connected with many of these people and we started discussing how valuable it would be to preserve and re-purpose this radical political history and culture as well as how to make it accessible. We founded the Freedom Archives when I got out and have been building its reach and impact. We try to produce a couple of documentary audio CDs and/or video documentaries every year. We provide materials to others who are interested in this history and culture. We also focus our efforts on working with younger people in order to pass on this legacy. We say: “preserve the past, illuminate the present, shape the future!”

HB: Your recent film Legacy of Torture documents the case of the San Francisco 8.

CM: The prosecution of the SF 8 is about criminalizing the history of the Black Liberation Movement, the Black Panther Party, and delegitimizing resistance to racism and oppression. The government, both state and federal, is keen on legitimizing torture and warning activists today and into the future that the stakes are high if you are committed to fighting for a more just and humane world. The case itself rests on alleged confessions obtained under acknowledged torture and has been thrown out previously on that basis.

The structures of capitalism and imperialism rest on hundreds of years of land theft and genocide and sexual oppression. They will use any and all means to maintain their hegemony. So this prosecution is designed to discourage active dissent. Stemming from the old COINTELPRO (Counter-intelligence program), this case signals a new form of COINTELPRO.

COINTELPRO was exposed and condemned by congressional investigators in the 1970s and was officially disbanded — but no agent or agency was ever held accountable for the assassinations, false charges and imprisonment of leaders, or the disorganization and neutralization of movements and organizations that they unleashed. This prosecution is part of today’s COINTELPRO along with the stepped up “Green Scare” prosecutions, the ongoing political use of grand juries (like the current one targeting the Puerto Rican Independence movement), the condoning of torture and indeterminate imprisonment in Guantanamo, the extraordinary rendition programs and secret prisons, the mass imprisonment of largely Black and Brown people, the ongoing repressive presence of police in communities, and the denial of the release of many political prisoners who have served decades inside cages.

It is our job to re-build a movement that will confront them and make them look bad. They act with perceived impunity when they defy human rights laws, scoff at the Geneva conventions, wage wars throughout the world justified by their own lies, and belittle the violence and human suffering that they are responsible for. The international communities perceive this, but we have a special role to play within these borders – to be part of holding the misrulers and torturers responsible! Their arrogance and criminality and our organizing will bring them down one day!

HB: What film are you working on now?

CM: A film called COINTELPRO 101 that introduces people to the history of government counter-intelligence while tying it to today’s reality — the world of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. The film will be an organizing tool, an opening of the door to those that have no knowledge of this history.

We hope that people can use this video as a basis for re-opening hearings on COINTELPRO and for holding people and agencies accountable for state violence directed at people’s movements. We hope that we can build a stronger movement to win the release of long-held political prisoners, those targeted by COINTELPRO who remain captives of the government. We also want to give people hope that we can work to transform the world and build a more humane society.

HB: Any film-makers you’d recommend?

CM: Costa Gavras and Ousmane Sembene.

HB: Any particular books?

CM: History, History, History! Not the BS in textbooks (see what AK Press is putting out)!

HB: Anything else to add?

CM: I am optimistic. People, especially younger generations, know that this monster is wrong. Our ability to work across generations is important, but especially for us older folks, we need to give up the reins and support those striving to live and create significant challenges to the monster. We need to connect fighting against racial and sexual oppression to saving the planet and fighting against US hegemony. A brighter future is possible if we are willing to make sacrifices. As Che always used to say: hasta la victoria siempre!

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/the-freedom-archives-an-interview-with-claude-marks/feed/ 0 http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/06/sex-sans-the-city-a-post-marxist-preview/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/06/sex-sans-the-city-a-post-marxist-preview/#comments Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:00:24 +0000 Susie Day http://www.dissidentvoice.org/?p=2249 Many capitalist roaders say the Left is out of touch with popular culture. Well, I say NYET to that! Here, for instance, is an episode of Sex and the City that I translated for my Marxist-Leninist study group, so that we may better throw off our Tiffany chains.

[SCENE I: Chic, Upper West Side restaurant]

SAMANTHA: [Striding in elegantly and sitting at table where the girls are waiting] Greetings, comrades! How glad I am that I — sexy, 50-year-old blonde girl, being fabulous and having much sex with men — meet you in favorite haute bourgeois bistro for sex talk. Look at dick of sultry, ethnic waiter — is not fabulous?

MIRANDA: [Rummaging impatiently through briefcase] Waiter dick unimportant for proper ordering, comrade. I, being caustic, hard-driven attorney with bright red hair, styled to evoke Great Mistakes in Hedge Trimming, no have time for frivolity. Must get back to office to shill for corporate capital –

SAMANTHA: Ooh, “shill” — sounds sexy, comrade!

MIRANDA: It is, comrade! Today, I defend sexy Fortune 500 Company owning Indian Point — nuclear power plant making much electricity for city — from selfish, unsexy officials who warn of nuclear disaster. My logic: Why upset capitalist system?

CHARLOTTE: [Sighing pertly] For myself, comrades, I — token person of dark hair color — esteem the finding of Perfect Monogamous Soul Mate as most high goal in consumerist free market society. This is exalted dream for which masses labor, regardless of increasing work hours, fear of layoff, dwindling surplus profit, endless war — and possible nuclear disaster. Heedless, heedless masses!

CARRIE: [Flexing highly toned abs, set off to perfection by jaunty, $5,000 Christian Dior ensemble resembling clothes of Carmen Miranda after werewolf attack] Ah, comrades — how good it is to exploit our lives in my column, earning many thousands of dollars more than other writers who, unlike me, have college vocabulary and knowledge of world history! [She signals waiter]

Greetings, comrade bit actor of exotic descent who is destined to receive five dollars each time this episode is played in rerun! Please give us four of your most costly watercress omelets, removing yoke and other caloric nutrients. Hurry — before more radioactive groundwater leaches from Indian Point into Hudson River!

CHARLOTTE: Comrade! This is too much food! Is not anorexia neoliberal pre-condition for true female happiness?

CARRIE: You are mistaken, comrade. We must order many expensive things — regardless of whether we shall actually consume them — so that our power may grow! Profit motive of late capitalism dictates terms of feminine value and we must obey.

CHARLOTTE: Agreed.

MIRANDA: Carrie, I am loving of your shoes!

CARRIE: They are foot-warping, spine-crippling Manolo Blahniks, costing $765! You see, comrades, glamorous allure of destructive footwear comes not only from physical sacrifice to wearer, but also from labor of anonymous, underpaid peasants who toil in abusive, outsourced factories. It is suffering of all classes that creates societal clout of Manolo Blahnik — brand name you can trust!

ALL: [Toasting] Carrie is our leader! Long live vanguard of post-industrial alienation from means of production!

[SCENE II: Carrie at home. Posed on her bed in the adolescent contortions of a 12-year-old with a stamp collection, she types on her sleek Mac laptop, now available online for under $13,000.00. Her voiceover narration:]

CARRIE: Later that night, I wonder why virile mogul boyfriend, Mr. Beeg, refuse to commit. Could this mirror my own sublimation of need for basic human contact into acquisition of designer commodities?

[Close-up of glowing computer screen, as Carrie types:] “Commodity fetishism: good or bad — and what if meltdown occur at Indian Point?” [Suddenly, sirens blare; horrific explosion is heard]

[SCENE III: Back at stark ruins of Manhattan bistro; the stunned, disheveled four are staring, in bleak, Chekhovian fashion, into a dimming sun setting over the roiling Hudson.]

MIRANDA: Men are annoying.

CARRIE: Men are peegs.

SAMANTHA: I try lesbian sex. Too much talk.

CARRIE: Gay men better. Make good pets.

CHARLOTTE: I, with Jewish husband, for whom I convert, have adopted child from faux-Communist country. Husband is kind; we are happy. Yet we never speak of Palestine.

MIRANDA: Please halt unsexy talk of Middle East, comrade.

SAMANTHA: Say, does anybody know why we are only four left alive after tragic — and totally unexpected — disaster at Indian Point?

CHARLOTTE: Perhaps something about Carrie’s shoes?

CARRIE: Correct, comrade! Thanks to healing power of Manolo Blahniks — commodity onto which we magically project desire to survive — we are, for now, protected.

CHARLOTTE: [Clutching stomach] Comrades, I don’t feel so good.

CARRIE: You must believe, comrade — believe in the brand.

MIRANDA: Must get her to shoe store, quick!

SAMANTHA: Ooh, “store” — sounds sexy, comrades…

[Holding one another up, they hobble off in search of Fifth Avenue.]