Neo-Nazis in Germany are applauding the repression of protests in Iran and publishing statements supporting the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his hard-line government.
Two extremist parties, the NPD and DVU, have managed to contort their racist thinking to embrace the Iranian leader because Ahmadinejad openly advocates the elimination of Israel – and presumably has no plans to move to Germany.
The NPD website defended Ahmadinejad against what it called a “media attack on the Iranian people’s spirit,” referring to widespread doubts being expressed about the president’s reelection and described him as the “true leader of his people,” according to public broadcaster ARD.
The DVU website carried the message: “Congratulations on your reelection Mr President.”
Censorship in Iran, which makes listening to music a risky business, and outlaws dancing in public, is praised by the NPD, which says the music could be considered decadent and subversive.
The contradiction between this opinion and the complaints the NPD makes when neo-Nazi music containing illegally racist lyrics are banned by the German government does not seem to have occurred to the party’s members.
Germany’s fascists first took to Ahmadinejad when he said he wanted to destroy Israel, and then in 2006 organised a conference for Holocaust deniers.
Meanwhile, the Islam Conference taking place this week in Berlin condemned the violence and abuse of human rights in Iran, with a statement signed by all associations taking part aside from the Central Council of Muslims in Germany.
The council said it had a policy of not making statements about events in other countries, but called for both sides in Iran to come to an agreement and allow freedom of opinion.
“Chain-of-light” demonstrations are planned in cities across Europe on Thursday night to show solidarity with the Iranian people and commemorate those who have been killed recently during demonstrations.
Organisers in Berlin have taken the title, “A light to show hope. Thousands of lights show themselves” for the demonstration which will take place for an hour from 9:30 pm in front of the Gedächtniskirche in the centre of the city. Similar demonstrations are set for Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Paris, London and Rome.
On June 9th, a few days after Obama made his appeal to Muslims worldwide from Cairo, André Aciman wrote an op-ed piece in the N.Y. Times that tried to balance the expulsion of Palestinians with that of Jews from Arab countries:
The president never said a word about me. Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century. With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) “proud tradition of tolerance” of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.
Nor did he bother to mention that with this flight and expulsion, Jewish assets were — let’s call it by its proper name — looted. Mr. Obama never mentioned the belongings I still own in Egypt and will never recover. My mother’s house, my father’s factory, our life in Egypt, our friends, our books, our cars, my bicycle. We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own. Take away our things and something in us dies. Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn’t die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.
Although it is entirely plausible that such things happened to Egyptian Jews, they did not happen to the Jews of Morocco in exactly the same way, at least based on the plot line of “Where are you going, Moshe?”, a movie I reviewed on December 12th. Despite the fact that the movie was directed by an Arab, there was no attempt to cover up for hostile acts against Jews that dovetailed with Zionist attempts to lure them to Israel. I wrote:
Moroccan director Hassan Benjelloun describes how Jews were pressured by Zionists into emigrating to Israel in 1963, two years after the death of King Mohammed V left the country in an uncertain state. His film is set in the small village of Bejjad, where the Jews enjoy warm and cordial relations with their Muslim neighbors. The only threat to their well-being comes from an ascendant group of fundamentalists who are anxious to close down the only bar in town that is run by Mustapha, an easy-going Muslim who enjoys serving alcohol to his patrons while they enjoy musical performances by local talent, including Moshe, an elderly Jew who plays the oud and sings in his native language: Arabic.
After Mustapha is hauled before the local sharia, he defends himself by referring to a Moroccan law that allows the sale of alcohol to non-Muslims, which Bejjad has in ample number at least for the time being. However, as each busload of Jews departs for Israel, Mustapha’s anxiety increases. His only hope is to convince Moshe to remain in Bejjad, a feasible project given the oud player’s affection for his Muslim friends and neighbors.
I was motivated to delve deeper into this subject since I had noticed more and more that the expulsion of the Jews had become a talking point of the hard-core Zionist right. They liken the “transfer” of Arab and Jewish populations to that which occurred after Turkish independence when Greeks were driven from Izmir (Alexandria) and Turks were driven from Greece. Or the division of India and Pakistan. Of course, what is missing from this formula is any recognition that Palestinians had no homeland like Greece or Pakistan that was the equivalent of Israel. Instead, they ended up in refugee camps. In a feeble attempt to engage with this reality, the Zionists blame the Arab countries for not “accepting” them.
For a movie that adheres to the Aciman and Zionist establishment analysis, you can watch “The Last Jews of Libya”, which is available for $36 from Brandeis University, although I doubt that many of my readers will want to spend that kind of money for propaganda.
This 50 minute documentary is shown occasionally on the Sundance cable channel and I first caught about 15 minutes or so of it a couple of months ago. I found it so off-putting that I switched to the Cooking Network. But after reading the NY Times op-ed piece, I resolved to borrow this movie from the Columbia University library and watch it to the bitter end in order to help me prepare this post.
I have also had a look at a book titled “Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries” by Michael Fischbach that helps put the question of Jewish expulsion from Arab countries into historical context, and particularly how this played out in Libya. I strongly recommend Fischbach’s book, which can be read in sizable extracts on Google.
In his introduction, Fischbach distinguishes between two sharply opposed interpretations of the Jewish experience in Arab countries. The first has been referred to as the “myth of the interfaith utopia” by Mark Cohen in his “Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages”. While I am generally opposed to utopian schemas, there is something to be said for how Arabs treated Jews historically, especially in comparison to Christian Europe as I tried to point out in my article “Under Andalusian Skies”.
Diametrically opposed to the “interfaith utopia” is one that describes Jewish life in Arab countries as perpetually plagued by anti-Semitism, a view that might be likened to Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” in which the persecution of the Jews is reduced to some sort of essentialist narrative that can only be relieved by the creation of a heavily armed Jewish state.
As it turns out, one of the primary exponents of this reductionist view that Cohen calls the “neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history” is Maurice Roumani, the Libyan Jew who is the principal interviewee in “The Last Jews of Libya”, whose family history constitutes the bulk of the documentary directed by his sister Vivienne Roumani-Denn. The script was based on their mother’s memoir.
Fischbach cites a World Health Organization pamphlet by Maurice Roumani that traces Arab anti-Semitism back to the 7th century with the origins of the Muslim religion:
What then are the roots of anti-Jewish discrimination in traditional Islam? We must begin with the founder of Islam, with Muhammad…Arab oppression of Jews is not, therefore, a post-1948 phenomenon.
One of the most striking things about “The Last Jews of Libya” is its open Eurocentrism. Over and over again, the Roumani family is depicted as identifying with European culture and a feeling of alienation from Arab society. It is especially jarring to see this expressed as a fondness for the Italians who made Libya a colony during WWI, and all the more so when the fondness continues under Mussolini’s rule. Mussolini is depicted in the movie as not all that bad until he teamed up with Hitler who pressured Mussolini to toe the anti-Semitic line.
Large parts of Maurice Roumani’s “The Jews of Libya: coexistence, persecution, resettlement” can be read on Google and I would refer you to the chapter titled “Mussolini, Fascism and Libyan Jews” to get a sense of the film’s outlook on Mussolini (Maurice Roumani served as historical consultant on the movie). It describes the attitude of the Jewish community in Libya as one that provided a “warm welcome” to the occupying powers and that has this startling description of the relationship of Italian Jews, to whom the Libyan Jews were closely linked with culturally and politically, to Italian fascism:
When Mussolini first established the nucleus of his Fascist Party Facci di combattimento on March 23, 1919, Jews already made up a significant portion of his support base. In fact, for over one hundred years, Jews stood staunchly behind the Italian Nationalist movement because they traditionally belonged to the bourgeoisie and anti-socialist movements.
Although “The Last Jews of Libya” makes no reference to Arab resistance to the Italian occupation, one can only surmise that the Roumanis would have cheered on the Italian army’s efforts to stamp out the revolt led by Mukhtar Omar that was dramatized in the movie “Lion of the Desert” (which can now be seen online). In my review, I noted:
The Italians colonized Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia as part of an attempt to get up to speed with their more “advanced” Western European rivals who had a toehold in Africa for some time. Mukhtar was a leader of the Senusi people who lived in the Cyrenaica region in Eastern Libya before it had become a modern state. Described as Bedouin in the film, they appear to have the same kind of fiercely independent streak as the Algerian Kabyle (Berbers) who challenged the French in Algeria in the 1950s.
When we first meet Mukhtar Omar in the film, he is giving lessons in the Quran to young boys in a Senusi village. Throughout the film, the character’s religious faith goes hand in hand with his determination to resist the occupation. His Islamic beliefs in the brotherhood of man also lead him to avoid treating Italian prisoners with the same kind of cruelty that his own fighters endured.
His main adversary in the film is Gen. Rodolfo Graziani (Oliver Reed), who was hand-picked by Mussolini to quash the Senusi rebellion and who eventually succeeded. His methods included herding the Senusi into concentration camps and erecting a long barbed-wire fence between Libya and Egypt in order to cut off supplies. Historians estimate that between 30,000 and 70,000 Senusis were killed by the occupiers. With a population numbering about 185,000 in 1923, we are talking about a slaughter of epic proportions.
It is shocking to think that people such as the Roumanis would have felt an affinity with Italian fascism in light of these crimes. It certainly undermines Maurice Roumani’s attempt to portray the Jews as the exclusive victims of Italian fascism in Libya once Mussolini had linked up with Hitler.
From the standpoint of the makers of “The Last Jews of Libya”, the only evil worth considering is that which has been done to the Jews. While acknowledging the crimes carried out against them in Arab countries after 1948, we must return to Fischbach’s chronicle for the details of what actually took place in Libya. In late 1948 the American consul in Tripoli Orray Taft Jr. reported to Washington:
There is reason to believe that the Jewish Community has become more aggressive as the result of the Jewish victories in Palestine. There is also reason to believe that the community here is receiving instructions and guidance from the State of Israel. Whether or not the change in attitude is the result of instructions or a progressive aggressiveness is hard to determine. Even with the aggressiveness or perhaps because of it, both Jewish and Arab leaders inform me that the inter-racial relations are better now than they have been for several years and that understanding, tolerance and cooperation are present at any top level meeting between the leaders of the two communities.
After Libya became independent in 1950 the nationalist aspirations of the country exploded and rapidly became identified with the Nasserism. Continuing conflicts between Egypt and Israel were reflected in Libya where the small but wealthy Jewish community decided that it was best to pull up stakes and emigrate, either to the U.S. or to Israel.
The Roumani family moved to the U.S., a country that the young Maurice Roumani felt a strong identification with. The movie reveals that he sought employment opportunities at the Agency for International Development but was turned down only because Libya blocked Jewish employment there. Finally, he took a job in the personnel department at the American Embassy and made regular visits to the U.S. Cultural Center where he found himself mesmerized by Life Magazine and American movies. He entered Brandeis University in 1960 and soon helped the rest of his family relocate to his beloved new country. In a note that is understandably given short shrift in the movie, we learn that his father feels alienated by American society and returns for a while to Libya.
Maurice Roumani emigrated to Israel in 1972 where he is very active in Zionist affairs.
Although there is no recognition in “The Last Jews of Libya” of the social forces that led a Maurice Roumani (or an André Aciman for that matter) to embark on a latter-day exodus, there is little doubt that Arab nationalism in its less admirable aspects was partly to blame. However, even if the Arab states had acted in a saintly fashion, it was likely that an exodus of the most privileged layers of the Jewish population would have occurred nonetheless as Fischbach, a Jew himself, pointed out:
Other sectors, populations, and regions in the Middle East and North Africa fared less well from the spread of modernity from Europe and the West eastward and southward into the region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Traditional weavers could no longer compete with the cheap, machine-made European cloth now being imported into the Middle East. Merchants in inland cities like Aleppo suffered when the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 shifted trade patterns. Muslim businessmen tried to compete with Christian and Jewish colleagues who had special access to European businessmen, possessed European citizenship, or received protections via the Capitulations [treaties that allowed non-Muslims to be exempt from local law.] The traditional intelligentsia—the clergy (in all religions)—was threatened by the growth of a new, Western-educated, secular class of intellectuals and bureaucrats. Traditional Muslims were upset by the emancipation of former second-class minorities like Christians and Jews, religious communities that sometimes were benefiting from, and being “protected” by, the very intrusive Western forces that were creating such systemic change to the wider socioeconomic, political, and cultural milieu of the region.
This makes more sense to me than blaming whatever Mohammad said or did in the 7th century.
Fortunately for the state of Israel, the backwardness of the Arab governments helped make it easier for the Zionists to stampede the Arab Jews into wholesale flight from their homelands. By 1967, there were no Jews left in Libya, for example. With over 800,000 Jews in Arab countries, their migration to Israel was essential to the Zionist project in light of the Judeocide taking place in Europe.
Once the Arab Jews settled in Israel, they found themselves subject to discrimination from fellow Ashkenazi Jews that in some ways was worse than what they had ever endured from Arabs. Israeli journalist Arye Gelbaum wrote:
This is the immigration of a race we have not yet known in the country. We are dealing with people whose primitivism is at a peak, whose level of knowledge is one of virtually absolute ignorance and, worse, who have little talent for understanding anything intellectual. Generally, they are only slightly better than the general level of the Arabs, Negroes, and Berbers in the same regions. In any case, they are at an even lower level than what we know with regard to the former Arabs of Israel. These Jews also lack roots in Judaism, as they are totally subordinated to savage and primitive instincts. As with Africans you will find among them gambling, drunkenness, and prostitution … chronic laziness and hatred for work; there is nothing safe about this asocial element. [Even] the kibbutzim will not hear of their absorption.
So pronounced was the racism directed against Arab (or Mizrahi in Hebrew, the term for Eastern) that it produced a radical movement in Israel during the 1970s that named itself after the American Black Panther Party.
The movement began early in 1971 in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem, in reaction to perceived discrimination against Mizrahi Jews, which they considered to have existed since the establishment of the state. The Black Panthers felt that this discrimination could be seen in the different attitude of the Ashkenazi Establishment towards the olim from the Soviet Union. The movement’s founders protested “ignorance from the establishment for the hard social problems”, and wanted to fight for a different future.
At the beginning of March 1971, the Israel Police denied the Black Panthers a permit for a demonstration; the Panthers ignored this decision and proceeded with the demonstration illegally, protesting the distress of the poverty, the gap between poor and rich in Israel, and the ethnic tensions within Jewish Israeli society. The movement successfully built a base of supporters, both in the public and in the media.
On 18 May 1971, “The Night of the Panthers”, between 5,000 and 7,000 demonstrators gathered in Zion Square in Jerusalem in a militant protest against the racial discrimination. The demonstrators even demanded to change the name of the square to Kikar Yehadut HaMizrah (Eastern Jewry Square). This demonstration was also held without police permission. The security forces which came to disperse the demonstration encountered an angry mob who threw stones and Molotov cocktails. Both police and demonstrators were injured in the clash; 20 were hospitalized, and 74 demonstrators were arrested by the police.
Prior to the demonstration, representatives of the Panthers had met with Prime Minister Golda Meir on 13 April, who characterized them as “not nice people”. She saw the leaders of the movement as lawbreakers and refused to recognize them as a social movement. The violent protest of 18 May brought the government to discuss seriously the Panthers’ claims and a public committee was established to find a solution.
Unfortunately, this movement died off just as it did elsewhere, including the U.S. Given the bleak political situation in Israel, where progressive voices seem virtually extinct, it is too much to hope for any kind of revival any time soon. Most Israelis who are fed up with the system generally vote with their feet and move to a less brutal environment like New York City.
In the best of all worlds, the social transformation that ultimately will relegate capitalism to the dustbin of history will make it possible for Arabs and Jews to go through another “exchange”, one in which the Jews of Libya, Morocco, Egypt and elsewhere can live in the lands where they have a 2000 year history while the Palestinians return to their homeland as well. Any measures short of this will certainly prove to be of a transitory nature.
Two years into Roza’s university studies, debate among the students ceased. Disappointment with Khatami and his unfulfilled promises muffled their voices. Roza kept reading on her own, spending her afternoons in the university library. One day, as she skimmed through a dictionary of political ideologies, she reached “S” and read the entry for socialism. She was astonished: “This was what I had always believed in, without knowing it!” Excited, she searched the Internet for “socialism” in Farsi: the hits were uncountable. Even more excited, Roza sent emails requesting further information to all the Iranian socialist groups she could find (15, at the time), but only one responded to her questions – an Iranian man living in a Scandinavian country. An intensive correspondence followed, as he advised her about further reading; now she calls him “my mentor”.
At home, by her bed, she gingerly lays out the books she has been able to buy: Capital in Farsi, Mandel’s Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, a bulky volume on the history of the Tudeh party. They are in mint condition:
They were so expensive I don’t dare to make any notes in them. I use a notepad instead, and reading Marx is very difficult, so I do what I used to do in chemistry: I set up formulas. When I had first become a socialist, I wanted to get the message out, I wanted all my student mates to know. I touted the books, scribbled slogans in the toilets, pasted a picture of Marx on my folder so it would be clearly visible for anyone passing by in the corridor… until my mentor told me: “Are you mad? Don’t you know that being a socialist carries the death punishment in Iran? Are you not aware that the regime executed thousands of Leftists in the 1980s?” I decided to be more discreet.
In the early months of 2004, word of a planned May Day demonstration in Tehran was circulating. On a blog, Roza had come across some like-minded students in her city and they decided to go. For months, Roza spun a yarn for her parents to get their permission. At the demonstration, “the first communist I met, I fell in love with. I was walking around there in the crowd at the industrial zone, enraptured … .” Some of her high hopes were, however, quickly dashed. Enrolling in Komiteye Hamahangi, she was challenged by men and their patronising attitudes: “‘Who are you, are you a real worker?’, they would say. And when I asked about the revolution they would not respond. I would ask ‘What do you mean by “abolishing wage labour”, what is it supposed to look like in real life? Either one works and gets some money for it, or one works and gets a bag of rice and a chicken – what is it that you want?’ They didn’t specify.”
Roza has some criticism for those she calls “middle-class feminists” as well. When she married her “communist”, Roza ensured herself of absolute equality in the marriage contract – equal right to divorce, shared custody in case of divorce, the right for her to travel or work without permission from the husband – but this, she states emphatically, is not all there is to feminist politics: “The middle-class feminists here are only interested in equality with their own men. They don’t bother to contact working women, to try find common ground with them, even though they are suffering a much worse oppression. Poor women here are completely dependent on their men and can do nothing if they are raped or beaten. They have no economic safety net whatsoever.”
After her encounter with organised feminism and socialism in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Roza took up writing herself. Her computer is now filled with Marxist classics downloaded from the Farsi-language division of the Marxist Internet Archive, as well as her own short stories, essays and commentaries on subjects ranging from the Khatonabad massacre to the merits and demerits of Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi. No money to buy a printer, her eyes ache from all her onscreen work.
In 2004 and 2005, Roza Javan reached some fame in the virtual networks of the Iranian diaspora and the progressive communities inside the country. She’s the webmaster of two sites in Farsi; one feminist, one socialist: “Many students are curious about socialism and enter into intellectual trajectories similar to mine, now that they have no illusions left about reformism. But they are starved, they have no food for their thoughts! They don’t know where to turn, there is no organisation capable of reaching out to them, it is difficult to find others of the same mind. Dictatorship means stalemate.”
“Brain-drain” is one of the most universally recognised problems of Iran, and the government is anxious to stem the tide of students, numbering in the thousands, who leave the country every year immediately after examinations. Emigration is the most popular route out of the post-reformist deadlock. To Roza, however, it is unthinkable: “As a young girl, my biggest dream was to take off the hijab, put on a short skirt, and run with the wind in my hair. Not even such a small dream can come true in this country. But I will stay. We need a new revolution to get our freedom.”
At the time of this writing, in spring 2006, Roza Javan and her husband live somewhere not far from the capital. She runs her two websites, but keeps a low profile, feeling the heat from recent political developments. Her pseudonym alludes to Rosa Luxemburg. Javan means young: the young Rosa.
When I returned from covering the Iranian elections recently, I was surprised to find my email box filled with progressive authors, academics and bloggers bending themselves into knots about the current crisis in Iran. They cite the long history of U.S. interference in Iran and conclude that the current unrest there must be sponsored or manipulated by the Empire.
That comes as quite a shock to those risking their lives daily on the streets of major Iranian cities fighting for political, social and economic justice.
Some of these authors have even cited my book, The Iran Agenda, as a source to prove U.S. meddling. Whoa there, pardner. Now we’re getting personal.
The large majority of American people, particularly leftists and progressives, are sympathetic to the demonstrators in Iran, oppose Iranian government repression and also oppose any U.S. military or political interference in that country. But a small and vocal number of progressives are questioning that view, including authors writing for Monthly Review online, Foreign Policy Journal, and prominent academics such as retired professor James Petras.
They mostly argue by analogy. They correctly cite numerous examples of CIA efforts to overthrow governments, sometimes by manipulating mass demonstrations. But past practice is no proof that it’s happening in this particular case. Frankly, the multi-class character of the most recent demonstrations, which arose quickly and spontaneously, were beyond the control of the reformist leaders in Iran, let alone the CIA.
Let’s assume for the moment that the U.S. was trying to secretly manipulate the demonstrations for its own purposes. Did it succeed? Or were the protests reflecting 30 years of cumulative anger at a reactionary system that oppresses workers, women, and ethnic minorities, indeed the vast majority of Iranians? Is President Mahmood Ahmadinejad a “nationalist-populist,” as claimed by some, and therefore an ally against U.S. domination around the world? Or is he a repressive, authoritarian leader who actually hurts the struggle against U.S. hegemony?
Kaveh Ehsani, Arang Keshavarzian and Norma Claire Moruzzi
June 28, 2009
(Kaveh Ehsani is assistant professor of international studies at DePaul University. Arang Keshavarzian is associate professor of Middle East and Islamic studies at New York University. Both are editors of Middle East Report. Norma Claire Moruzzi is associate professor of political science and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago.)
The morning after Iran’s June 12 presidential election, Iranians booted up their computers to find Fars News, the online mouthpiece of the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus, heralding the dawn of a “third revolution.” Many an ordinary Iranian, and many a Western pundit, had already adopted such dramatic language to describe the burgeoning street demonstrations against the declaration by the Ministry of Interior that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the sitting president, had received 64 percent of the vote to 34 percent for his main challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi. But the editors of Fars News were referring neither to the protests, as were the people in the streets, nor to the prospect that the unrest might topple the Islamic Republic, as were some of the more wistful commentators. Rather, the editors were labeling the radical realignment of Iranian politics that they wish for. This realignment would complete the removal of the old guard, as did the “first” revolution of 1978-1979, and consolidate the rule of inflexible hardliners, as did the “second revolution” symbolized by the US Embassy takeover of 1979.
Whatever history’s verdict on the desiderata of Fars News, neither the institutional structure nor the political culture of the Islamic Republic will emerge unchanged from the crisis following the 2009 election. The stakes are nothing less than these: Should the protesters persevere, the limited traditions of political and civil rights and citizen participation in the Islamic Republic may be considerably strengthened. Should Ahmadinejad and his supporters prevail instead, the political system in Iran may lose all remaining meaningful traits of a republic.
As in 1979, or in 1997, when the “reformist” cleric Mohammad Khatami captured the presidency, or in 2005, when Ahmadinejad won his own (highly contested) landslide victory, the Western media has been caught off guard by events on the Iranian stage. The crudest analysts insist upon seeing an epic battle between the government and “the people” — but neither of these actors is unitary. Others, writing from left, right and center, extrapolate theories from the supposed characteristics of the dramatis personae. Hence “the opposition,” urban, educated, technologically savvy and broadly supportive of Mousavi, is said to be arrayed against the poor, exaggeratedly pious peasants and plebeians who back Ahmadinejad. Such interpretations are also far too simple. They fail to explain why the election campaign was so competitive and why the popular reaction became so virulent once the scale of the fraud employed by the regime to fix the election for Ahmadinejad became evident.
The conflict over the 2009 election has sent multiple, cross-cutting fracture lines both through the core of the regime and through Iranian society.
In reviewing the events of Bloody Sunday one is struck by the combination of naive patriarchal faith in the tsar and the fierce armed street fighting against the tsarist rule. The first day of the Russian revolution brought the old Russia and the new face to face with startling force and showed the death agony of the peasants’ age-old faith in “Our Father the Tsar”, and the birth of a revolutionary people, the urban proletariat. No wonder the European bourgeois newspapers say that Russia of January 10 is no longer the Russia of January 8. No wonder the cited German Social—Democratic newspaper[1] recalls how seventy years ago the working-class movement started in England, how in 1834 the English workers held street demonstrations to protest against the banning of the trade unions, how in 1838 they drew up the “People’s Charter” at monster meetings near Manchester, and how Parson Stephens proclaimed “the right, of every man that breathes God’s free air and treads upon God’s free earth to have his home and hearth.” And the same parson called on the assembled workers to take up arms.
Here, in Russia, too, a priest found himself at the head of the movement; one day he appealed for a march with a peaceful petition to the tsar himself, and the next day he issued a call for revolution. “Comrades, Russian workers!” Father Georgi Gapon wrote, after that bloody day, in a letter read at a meeting of liberals. “We no longer have a tsar.
Today a river of blood divides him from the Russian people. It is time for the Russian workers to begin the struggle for the people’s freedom without him. For today I give you my blessing. Tomorrow I shall be with you. Today I am busy working for our cause.”
This is not Father Georgi Gapon speaking. This is the voice of those thousands upon thousands, of those millions upon millions of Russian workers and peasants who until now could believe naively and blindly in the Tsar Father and seek alleviation of their unbearable lot from Our Father the Tsar “himself”, who put the blame for all the atrocities and outrages, the tyranny and plunder, only on the officials that were deceiving the tsar. Generation after generation of downtrodden, half-civilised, rustic existence cut off from the world tended to strengthen this faith. Every month of life of the new, urban, industrial, literate Russia has been undermining and destroying this faith. The past decade of the working-class movement has produced thousands of advanced proletarian Social-Democrats who have consciously broken with this faith. It has educated scores of thousands of workers in whom the class instinct, strengthened in the strike movement and fostered by political agitation, has shattered this faith to its foundations. Behind these scores of thousands, however, stood hundreds of thousands, millions, of toiling and exploited people, proletarians and semi-proletarians, suffering every insult and indignity, in whom this faith could still survive. They were not ready for revolt, they could only beg and plead. Their feelings and their mood, their level of knowledge and political experience were expressed by Father Georgi Gapon; herein lies the historic significance of the role played at the beginning of the Russian revolution by a man who, but yesterday unknown, has today become the hero of the hour in St. Petersburg and, as a result, in the entire European press.
It is clear now why the St. Petersburg Social-Democrats, whose letters we quoted above, at first treated Gapon, as they could not help doing, with distrust. A man who wore the cassock, who believed in God and acted under the august patronage of Zubatov and the secret police, could not but arouse suspicion. Whether he was sincere or not in rending his cassock and cursing the fact that he belonged to that vile social-estate, the priesthood, which robs and demoralises the people, no one could say with certainty, beyond those who knew him well personally, that is, a mere handful. Only the course of historical events could decide this, only facts, facts, facts. And the facts decided in Gapon’s favour.
Will Social-Democracy be able to gain the lead of this spontaneous movement? our St. Petersburg comrades asked themselves with concern, seeing the swift irresistible growth of the general strike, which is involving unusually broad strata of the proletariat, seeing the magnetism of Gapon’s influence on the “backward” masses who were so ignorant that they could be swept off their feet even by an agent-provocateur. And the Social-Democrats not only did not encourage any naive illusions with regard to the possibility of peaceful petitioning but, on the contrary, opposed Gapon in argument, openly and firmly defending all their views and their tactical line. History, which the working-class masses were making without Social-Democracy, has confirmed the correctness of these views and the tactical line. The logic of the proletariat’s class position proved stronger than Gapon’s mistakes, naïvetés, and illusions. Grand Duke Vladimir, acting on behalf of the tsar and invested with all the power of the tsar, undertook by his executioner’s exploit to demonstrate to the working-class masses the very thing that the Social-Democrats have always demonstrated and will continue to demonstrate to them through the printed and spoken word.
The masses of workers and peasants who still retained a vestige of faith in the tsar were not ready for insurrection, we said. After January 9 we have the right to say that now they are ready for insurrection and will rise. By his massacre of unarmed workers “Our Father the Tsar” himself has driven them to the barricades and given them their first lessons in barricade fighting. The lessons of “Our Father the Tsar” will not be lost.
It remains for the Social-Democrats to see to it that the news of the bloody days in St. Petersburg is spread as far and as wide as possible; to rally and organise their forces still better and popularise still more energetically the slogan they have long since advanced: general armed uprising of the people.
The forms taken by the historic events of January 9 could not, of course, have been foreseen by anyone. The priest whom history had so unexpectedly placed for a few days at the head of the working masses imposed the imprint of his personality, his views and his priestly status on the events. The real content of these events was concealed from many eyes by their form. But the inner significance of January 9 goes far beyond the symbolism of the procession to the Winter Palace. Gapon’s priestly robe was only a prop in that drama; the protagonist was the proletariat. The proletariat began with a strike, united itself, advanced political demands, came out into the streets, drew to itself the enthusiastic sympathy of the entire population, clashed with the troops and set off the Russian revolution. Gapon did not create the revolutionary energy of the workers of St. Petersburg; he merely released it, to his own surprise. The son of a priest, and then a seminarian and student at the Aeligious Academy, this agitator, so obviously encouraged by the police, suddenly found himself at the head of a crowd of a hundred thousand men and women. The political situation, his priestly robe, the elemental excitement of the masses which, as yet, had little political consciousness, and the fabulously rapid course of events turned Gapon into a “leader.”
A spinner of fantasies on a psychological subsoil of adventurism, a southerner of sanguine temperament with a touch of the confidence man about him, a total ignoramus in social matters, Gapon was as little able to guide events as he was to foresee them. Events completely overtook him.
The liberals persisted for a long time in the belief that the entire secret of the events of January 9 lay in Gapon’s personality. It contrasted him with the social democrats as though he were a political leader who knew the secret of controlling the masses and they a doctrinaire sect. In doing so they forgot that January 9 would not have taken place if Gapon had not encountered several thousand politically conscious workers who had been through the school of socialism. These men immediately formed an iron ring around him, a ring from which he could not have broken loose even if he had wanted to. But he made no attempt to break loose. Hypnotized by his own success, he let himself be carried by the waves.
But although, on the very next day after Bloody Sunday, we ascribed to Gapon a wholly subordinate political role, we all undoubtedly overestimated his personality. With his halo of holy anger, with a pastor’s curses on his lips, he seemed from afar almost to be a Biblical figure. It seemed as though powerful revolutionary passions had been awakened in the breast of this young priest employed at a Petersburg transit prison. And what happened? When the lights burned low, Gapon was seen by every one to be the utter political and moral nonentity he really was. His posturing before socialist Europe, his pathetic “revolutionary” writings from abroad, both crude and naive, his return to Russia, his conspiratorial relations with the government, the pieces of silver dealt out by Count Witte, Gapon’s pretentious and absurd interviews with representatives of the conservative press, and finally, the wretched betrayal which caused his end – all these finally destroyed any illusions concerning the Gapon of January 9.
We cannot help recalling the shrewd words of Viktor Adler, the leader of the Austrian social democrats, who, on reading the first telegram which announced Gapon’s departure from Russia, said: “A pity … It would have been better for his name in history if he had disappeared from the scene as mysteriously as he had come upon it. We would have been left with a beautiful romantic legend about the priest who opened the floodgates of the Russian revolution. There are men,” Adler added with the subtle irony so characteristic of him, “whom the role of martyrs suits better than that of party comrades.”
When I first got word of the Jared Diamond/New Yorker magazine scandal, I could not help but think of Napoleon Chagnon and the Yanomami. Just around the time that the Marxism list was launched, a big fight broke out among anthropologists over Chagnon’s fieldwork with the Amazon rainforest Indians provoked by the publication of Patrick Tierney’s “Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon”. Sides were drawn in the profession between those pro and con Chagnon, who at least unlike Jared Diamond had professional qualifications in the field. In doing some preliminary research on the Chagnon-Tierney dispute, I have learned that some experts in the field without any apparent axe to grind have faulted his research.
I plan to revisit the controversy in light of what I have learned about evolutionary psychology, particularly through my reading of Jared Diamond’s “The Third Chimpanzee” but want to start off by posting some excerpts from the fifth edition of Chagnon’s “Yanomamo”, a book that was titled “Yanomamo: the fierce people” in its initial publication in 1977. Given all the controversy his research has generated, it is understandable why he would have dropped the fierce people, especially since the global perception that they are facing extinction. It would be like writing a book in 1940 titled “The Aggressive Jew”.
The excerpts below are not intended to be an introduction to Chagnon’s work, but only passages that struck my eye for obvious reasons except for the last, which I will explain beforehand. For a useful presentation of Chagnon’s approach, I have made available an article from the 1988 Science magazine titled “Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a Tribal Population” at http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/chagnon.pdf.
1. Chagnon meets the Yanomamo:
My heart began to pound as we approached the village and heard the buzz of activity within the circular compound. Mr. Barker commented that he was anxious to see if any changes had taken place while he was away and wondered how many of them had died during his absence. I nervously felt my back pocket to make sure that my notebook was still there and felt personally more secure when I touched it.
The entrance to the village was covered over with brush and dry palm leaves. We pushed them aside to expose the low opening to the village. The excitement of meeting my first Yanomamo was almost unbearable as I duck-waddled through the low passage into the village clearing.
I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips making them look even more hideous, and strands of dark-green slime dripped or hung from their nostrils—strands so long that they clung to their pectoral muscles or drizzled down their chins. We arrived at the village while the men were blowing a hallucinogenic drug up their noses. One of the side effects of the drug is a runny nose. The mucus is always saturated with the green powder and they usually let it run freely from their nostrils. My next discovery was that there were a dozen or so vicious, underfed dogs snapping at my legs, circling me as if I were to be their next meal. I just stood there holding my notebook, helpless and pathetic. Then the stench of the decaying vegetation and filth hit me and I almost got sick. I was horrified. What kind of welcome was this for the person who came here to live with you and learn your way of life, to become friends with you? They put their weapons down when they recognized Barker and returned to their chanting, keeping a nervous eye on the village entrances…
As we walked down the path to the boat, I pondered the wisdom of having decided to spend a year and a half with these people before I had even seen what they were like. I am not ashamed to admit that had there been a diplomatic way out, I would have ended my fieldwork then and there. I did not look forward to the next day—and months—when I would be left alone with the Yanomamo; I did not speak a word of their language, and they were decidedly different from what I had imagined them to be. The whole situation was depressing, and I wondered why I ever decided to switch from physics and engineering in the first place. I had not eaten all day, I was soaking wet from perspiration, the bareto were biting me, and I was covered with red pigment, the result of a dozen or so complete examinations I had been given by as many very pushy Yanomamo men. These examinations capped an otherwise grim day. The men would blow their noses into their hands, flick as much of the mucus off that would separate in a snap of the wrist, wipe the residue into their hair, and then carefully examine my face, arms, legs, hair, and the contents of my pockets. I asked Barker how to say, ‘Your hands are dirty’; my comments were met by the Yanomamo in the following way: They would ‘clean’ their hands by spitting a quantity of slimy tobacco juice into them, rub them together, grin, and then proceed with the examination.
2. The Yanomamo make a fool of Chagnon:
At first I tried to use kinship terms alone to collect genealogies, but Yanomamo kinship terms, like the kinship terms in all systems, are ambiguous at some point because they include so many possible relatives (as the term ‘uncle’ does in our own kinship system). Again, their system of kin classification merges many relatives that we ’separate’ by using different terms: They call both their actual father and their father’s brother by a single term, whereas we call one ‘father’ and the other ‘uncle.’ I was forced, therefore, to resort to personal names to collect unambiguous genealogies or ‘pedigrees’. They quickly grasped what I was up to and that I was determined to learn everyone’s ‘true name’, which amounted to an invasion of their system of prestige and etiquette, if not a flagrant violation of it. They reacted to this in a brilliant but devastating manner: They invented false names for everybody in the village and systematically learned them, freely revealing to me the ‘true’ identities of everyone. I smugly thought I had cracked the system and enthusiastically constructed elaborate genealogies over a period of some five months. They enjoyed watching me learn their names and kinship relationships. I naively assumed that I would get the ‘truth’ to each question and the best information by working in public. This set the stage for converting my serious project into an amusing hoax of the grandest proportions. Each ‘informant’ would try to outdo his peers by inventing a name even more preposterous or ridiculous than what I had been given by someone earlier, the explanations for discrepancies being “Well, he has two names and this is the other one.’ They even fabricated devilishly improbable genealogical relationships, such as someone being married to his grandmother, or worse yet, to his mother-in-law, a grotesque and horrifying prospect to the Yanomamo. I would collect the desired names and relationships by having my informant whisper the name of the person softly into my ear, noting that he or she was the parent of such and such or the child of such and such, and so on. Everyone who was observing my work would then insist that I repeat the name aloud, roaring in hysterical laughter as I clumsily pronounced the name, sometimes laughing until tears streamed down their faces. The ‘named’ person would usually react with annoyance and hiss some untranslatable epithet at me, which served to reassure me that I had the ‘true’ name. I conscientiously checked and rechecked the names and relationships with multiple informants, pleased to see the inconsistencies disappear as my genealogy sheets filled with those desirable little triangles and circles, thousands of them.
My anthropological bubble was burst when I visited a village about 10 hours’ walk to the southwest of Bisaasi-teri some five months after I had begun collecting genealogies on the Bisaasi-teri. I was chatting with the local headman of this village and happened to casually drop the name of the wife of the Bisaasi-teri headman. A stunned silence followed, and then a villagewide roar of uncontrollable laughter, choking, gasping, and howling followed. It seems that I thought the Bisaasi-teri headman was married to a woman named “hairy cunt.” It also seems that the Bisaasi-teri headman was called ‘long dong’ and his brother ‘eagle shit.’ The Bisaasi-teri headman had a son called “asshole” and a daughter called “fart breath.”
And so on. Blood welled up to my temples as I realized that I had nothing but nonsense to show for my five months of dedicated genealogical effort, and I had to throw away almost all the information I had collected on this the most basic set of data I had come there to get. I understood at that point why the Bisaasi-teri laughed so hard when they made me repeat the names of their covillagers, and why the ‘named’ person would react with anger and annoyance as I pronounced his ‘name’ aloud.
3. The Yanomamo as “specimens”.
(I doubt that Chagnon consciously intended to dehumanize the people he was studying, despite his initial horror at their appearance, but I was struck by his comparison to them as the slime that lives within crustaceans below. That speaks volumes about the mindset of certain anthropologists.)
In this chapter I will discuss the daily social life and social organization of the fanomamo from several vantages, for there are, indeed, a number of acceptable land widely used approaches to the understanding of social organization in primitive (societies. I will focus primarily on the fascinating problem of village fissioning lamong the Yanomamo and how this reflects the ‘failure of solidarity,’ the inability lof villages to be held together by kinship, marriage, descent from common ancestors, and the ephemeral authority of headmen such as Kaobawa. It would appear that primitive societies can only grow so large at the local level—the village in this lease—if internal order is provided by just these commonly found integrating mechanisms: kinship, marriage, and descent.
I will also counterpose two points of view that are widely found in the field of I anthropology. One of the approaches is the “structural” approach, which focuses on 1′ideal models’ of societies, models that are constructed from the general rules of (kinship, descent, and marriage. These are highly simplified but very elegant [models, but they do not address the actual behavior of individuals in their day-to-Iday kinship roles, their actual marriage practices, their life histories, and why [individuals simply cannot ‘follow’ the ideal rules. The second approach is the statistical models’ approach, which is usually based on large numbers of actual I behavioral and genealogical facts, but yields less elegant, less simplified models. However, such models conform more to reality. I prefer the latter, for they lead to a more satisfactory way to understand individual variation and therefore the ability to predict social behavior. To be able to engage in this approach, one must, of course, [know what the “ideal” patterns are that people’s behavioral choices deviate from. A poignant way of illustrating the difference in these approaches is an anecdote I once heard the famous French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss use to justify his interest in ideal models and ’structures.’ He likened social and cultural anthro–pology to a kind of science that studies crustaceans. It is legitimate, and even meritorious, he said, to concern oneself with the shell of the organism itself. ‘ Levi-Strauss preferred to consider the shells: They are attractive, symmetrical, pleasant to handle, and pleasant to think about. But he acknowledged that there were other ways of studying this life form. One could focus on the slimy, amorphous, rather unpleasant animal that lives in the shell—such as an oyster or snail. That, too, was a legitimate and meritorious endeavor, and he had no objection if others pursued that kind of approach. The issue, of course, has to do with the extent to which the shell and the amorphous animal inside it make much sense when considered alone and separately. My own view is that the animal inside the symmetrical shell is not as amorphous as it appears and itself has some structured integrity. I also believe that there has to be some kind of causal relationship between the animal and the type of structure it generates in the form of an elegant shell. The shell in this analogy is ’social structure.’ The amorphous animal inside it is ’social behavior.’ Once the question is posed, ‘What causes the animal to produce the elegant, symmetrical, shell?’ then a great variety of possible answers—and theoretical issues—comes into play. These are questions about causes of human behavior and, in turn, how that behavior—acts, thoughts, sentiments found among individuals in particular cultures—is shaped by and reflects realities such as demographic facts, physiological differences between males and females, and the evolved nature of the organism itself.
It was probably 1956 when my classmate Joan Seleznow invited me to listen to the new 45’s her father had been stocking in his hardware store. Now these weren’t pistols, but 7-inch pop records that were played at 45 rpm, as opposed to the 12-inch 33-rpm mostly classical records.
I remember the records to this day. She first put on Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly” and followed up with Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill”. I told her that I loved the sounds. They were nothing like the insipid songs that were featured on the weekly television show “Hit Parade” like “How Much is that Doggy in the Window”.
But she saved the best for last: Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”. I didn’t know it at the time but Big Momma Thorton, who recorded the song before Elvis, was an African-American like Fats Domino and Little Richard. That being said, the song was written by a couple of Jews, Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber.
A few months later I joined the RCA record club and got Elvis Presley’s 33-rpm debut album, which had “Hound Dog” and his other greatest hits that still had the immediately recognizable influences of African-American rhythm-and-blues and white country-and-western.
26 years later. I was at a Christmas party thrown annually by ACI, the consulting company I worked for before going to Kansas City to get a factory job under the direct orders of the Socialist Workers Party. When that project failed, I came back to New York to live a life free of politics. A couple of hours after the party began a professional DJ began playing the latest hits, music that I was largely unfamiliar with since my tastes ran mostly to jazz and classical.
As I was sitting in a chair nibbling on an hors d’oeuvres and thinking about politics (I never succeeded in becoming apolitical), the strains of an irresistible pop tune came over the powerful sound system. It was Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You”. I was hooked on the spot and bought “Off the Wall”, the album that contained this song and which was considered his breakthrough record, as well as one that marked a departure from the more explicitly African-American sounds of his Motown work.
Elvis Presley was only 42 when he died in August 16, 1977, 8 years younger than Michael Jackson. But in some ways both were dead spiritually and artistically long before their physical death. It is not just a coincidence that both succumbed to heart failure, if you see the heart as a metaphor for the soul.
But for the two superstars, the heart was broken by essentially the same kinds of abuses to the body. In Elvis’s case, obesity and prescription pain killers. In Michael Jackson’s case, it is very likely that anorexia and prescription painkillers did him in. In some ways, anorexia is the obverse of obesity in the sense of reflecting an unhealthy relationship to food.
Elvis’s reliance on painkillers was well established. He kept a physician’s handbook next to his bed and thumbed through its pages looking for the latest medication that his doctor would prescribe without qualms. He took these drugs to help him to sleep and very likely to ward off the depression that accompanied his sense of failure. But in Elvis’s mind, the fact that he had a prescription differentiated him from the ordinary junky who had scrounge up his next fix on the street. So much so that after enlisting in Richard Nixon’s antidrug campaign, he showed up for a photo op stoned totally out of his mind on painkillers.
Michael Jackson had been addicted to painkillers going back at least to 1993, when he canceled a tour in order to go into rehab. Given his spaced out demeanor in interviews over the years, one must only conclude that he was whacked out on drugs much of the time—not to speak of his retreat from reality overall.
A couple of years ago I had a wisdom tooth pulled and got a prescription for Vicodin in case I had any lingering pain, which thankfully I had no use for. But later on after overdoing it with my barbells, I developed a backache that I thought the Vicodin might relieve. Boy, did it ever. An hour after taking a pill, not only did the pain go away, I felt a sense of bliss that I had never experienced with pot or cocaine. Who knows, if I were as rich and powerful as Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, I might have found some unscrupulous doctor to write me prescriptions at my pleasure.
That is the lesson of success, I suppose. The more you enjoy, the more temptations lie in your path. For the two superstars, it was not just drugs. They were able to construct Xanadus at Graceland and Neverland that shielded them from reality.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
This was just the kind of poem that only Samuel Coleridge, a fellow junky, could do justice to.
From within these Xanadus, the two Kubla Khans of pop music could satisfy every whim, from drugs to feasting—or in Jackson’s case not eating at all. They could also satisfy their sexual fantasies by exploiting their celebrity to lure nubile girls or young boys into bed
In Albert Goldman’s gripping but hostile biography of Elvis, we learn that he would send out his crew to Las Vegas or Nashville hangouts in search of virginal-looking women. The older he got, the more obsessed he became with screwing virgins. He had a neurotic aversion to sexually experienced women, particularly those who had given birth. Not long after Priscilla Presley gave birth to Lisa Marie, Elvis stopped having sex with her.
In some ways, I can believe that Michael Jackson did not have sex with the 12 year olds who shared a bed with him. So obviously in full retreat into a Peter Pan fantasy world (even to the point of calling his mansion Neverland), Jackson might have gotten sufficient pleasure just from this kind of infantile “pajama party” wish fulfillment. But even if he did have sex with underage boys, one must question society’s willingness to condemn him and not Elvis Presley. If Elvis got a 16 year old girl drunk and then had sex with her, there is nothing particularly “normal” about that either.
The picture that emerges about Presley and Jackson is one of the tendency of power to corrupt. Lord Acton’s dictum was applied mostly to states, but it applies to individuals as well. They surrounded themselves with sycophants who never had the nerve to tell the Kings that they were jeopardizing their health. Telling the truth might have cost someone a job.
But isn’t that what bourgeois society is about ultimately? Both Jackson and Presley came from working class families. Joseph Jackson was a crane operator at US Steel in Gary, Indiana while Elvis’s father was a sharecropper before becoming a truck driver. The two pop stars not only climbed their way out of their class roots, but became as wealthy as many ruling class figures at their pinnacle.
Elvis was fortunate enough to have a shrewd manager in Colonel Tom Parker who invested the singer’s income wisely even as he squandered his natural talents as a singer.
But Michael Jackson was not so fortunate. Once his career took a nosedive, he continued to spend money as if he was still on top. They report that he might have had $500 million in personal debt the day he died, which puts him in good company considering the state of the American economy.
It would appear that cultural and economic decay go hand in hand.
About 5 years ago, when I first began kicking around the idea of retiring, a friend suggested that I supplement my social security income by writing for money, especially movie reviews. Since I have written 418 movie reviews on the Internet and have been a fairly long-term member of New York Film Critics Online, a group composed mostly of professional reviewers, I suppose that I could have gotten my foot in the door at one or another print or web based publication.
But after seeing the initial reviews of Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” on Rotten Tomatoes, I was reminded why that idea did not seem that attractive on further reflection.
Village Voice:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a bewildering, noisy, sloppy, cynical piece of work, a movie that sneers at the audience for 147 minutes and expects us to lap it up as entertainment — and be grateful.
MSNBC
A cinematic avalanche in which Michael Bay eschews anything resembling plot or characters and instead screams at the audience’s eyes for two and a half hours.
I think I would rather take a job as a Walmart’s greeter than be assigned to sit through movies like this.
By contrast, I watched a movie titled “8 Behind the Wheel” last night courtesy of the producer, director and screenplay writer Trace Burroughs. I would estimate that the movie cost less to make than an hour’s worth of production costs when “Transformers” was being made. But in terms of quality, there is no comparison. “8 Behind the Wheel” is far scarier than any Hollywood horror movie since the characters are so ordinary (including a pizza delivery girl), but once you get inside their heads, you realize how sick they are. Not that sickness in itself is sufficient to entice you to watch a movie. In the case of this low-budget movie, the appeal is in how Burroughs takes various forms of sexual and homicidal obsessions and turns them into something that at its most inspired approaches Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground”.
Dispensing with convention, the 8 characters are involved in very little dialog between each other and very little action, which is understandable since they are driving automobiles all by themselves late at night in what appears to be a fairly desolate suburban landscape. As they drive along, they begin to think to themselves about a number of preoccupations in a stream of consciousness manner that becomes more and more disturbing as the film progresses, not the least of which includes the ravings of a serial killer to himself as he seeks his next victim.
Just as is the case in the bigger budget “coincidence” movies like “Babel” or “Crash”, these characters are related to each other in some fashion and are destined to cross paths at the end of the movie. By the time that moment arrives, it is practically anti-climatic since most of the drama has already transpired within their isolated heads.
Once again Iran has captured world attention. The 10th presidential election period has presented a new element in Iran’s politics not seen in the previous exercise of universal suffrage in the country: massive mobilization of the people. This became evident throughout the election period in the larger than usual crowd gatherings at election rallies in support of the current president, Mr. Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad, and his main challenger, Mr. Mir Hussein Mousavi. All social strata were drawn into this process to one degree or another. The election turnout has reportedly surpassed 80 per cent.
The electoral process in Iran set the people in motion on divergent paths; live TV political debates among the candidates became heated, but absent from the debate was any substance with regard to empowering the people to deal with social, economic, and political problems. The need for the organization of students, youth, women, national-ethnic groups, and working people of the city and the countryside that would unite the entire country’s political tendencies is the only recourse for maintaining national unity. Action organizations like shoras (councils) can act based on broad consensus in the interest of the country’s sovereignty and meet the needs of populations in economic, social, political and cultural areas. Instead of offering any real prospect for self-organization of populations, each candidate claimed to be a better manager, a better servant of the people of Iran.
The debates did not have any national or international focal points. Each challenged the other’s statistical numbers and figures with regard to inflation or this or that economic indicator; credentials of various known personalities and the validity of university degrees of others were questioned or defended. There were personal attacks and finger pointing before TV audiences, estimated at one point as high as 50 million in a country of nearly 70 million.
Nearly all of the world’s people, who are overwhelmingly wage laborers and peasants, endure oppression. Of course, societies vary considerably in both the degree and openness of this oppression. Sweden is no doubt a less repressive nation than is the United States, and the latter is less coercive than is Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless, the lot in life of most persons is to be subjected to the control, in one way or another, of a minority of their fellow human beings.
Ordinarily, we suffer abuse in silence, fearful of what might happen to us if we protest or not able to pinpoint exactly who or what is making us miserable. However, sometimes the power of the minority breaks down. It may suddenly lose legitimacy, or it may be defeated by an organized struggle. Then all hell can break loose. The grievances held in check for so long are brought into the open, and the multitude demands that they be addressed. Violence is not uncommon in such circumstances. When China’s peasants helped the Chinese Communists defeat their landlord exploiters, and when it was no longer possible for their former superiors to punish them, they took sometimes horrible vengeance against the land owners who for centuries had treated them little better than animals.
Iran is a tyrannical society. It is organized theocratically, run by religious zealots, who use their power, backed by armed might (regular military forces and special militias dedicated personally to the religious elite), religious authority, and the prestige they have inherited from their role in the overthrow of the Shah, the long war with Iraq, and defiance of the United States and its allies, to elicit or compel obedience from the worker and peasant majority. Unions are illegal; women are especially oppressed; government spies and morality police keep a strict watch over personal behavior; media are tightly controlled and sometimes blocked; and certain groups are favored economically—notably the Revolutionary Guards—to keep their loyalty.
Despite efforts by Iran’s leaders to keep photographers off the streets during post-election protests this month, many vivid images have emerged. The one posted here, above, is the one I found most chilling, poignant and evocative.
By now, many outsiders can identify the man whose picture is on the right-hand side of this protest sign. He is Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reported loser in this month’s presidential election. The elderly gentleman in the other picture is unfamiliar to most non-Iranians. He and his fate, however, lie at the historical root of the protests now shaking Iran.
The picture shows a pensive, sad-looking man with what one of his contemporaries called “droopy basset-hound eyes and high patrician forehead”. He does not look like a man whose fate would continue to influence the world decades after his death. But this was Muhammad Mossadeq, the most fervent advocate of democracy ever to emerge in his ancient land.
Above the twinned pictures of Mossadeq and Mousavi on this protest poster are the words “We won’t let history repeat itself.” Centuries of intervention, humiliation and subjugation at the hand of foreign powers have decisively shaped Iran’s collective psyche. The most famous victim of this intervention – and also the most vivid symbol of Iran’s long struggle for democracy – is Mossadeq. Whenever Iranians assert their desire to shape their own fate, his image appears.
The dilemma faced by commentators of all kinds, not just bloggers, on the Iranian protests can be summarised by a single, annoying portmanteau word: instapunditry. The pressure to take a view prematurely in such a situation can only produce a series of stock responses, either based on CNN filtered news, or speculation from various samizdat-style websites, or material provided by the Iranian media itself. And after all, while these protests had precedent in previous student and workers rebellions, the sheer scale of upheaval had no precedent in the entire history of Islamic Republic. How to relate to that?
It has been possible to be both eloquent and consistent only be relying on an analysis made for a different situation that seems to fit. Thus, right-wing bloggers have tended to interpret the events in terms of the ‘colour revolution’, involving a relatively smooth transfer of power from a weakened, no longer hegemonic ruling bloc, to a pro-US faction. symbolised by a striking advertising symbol – the purple finger, the green fingers, etc. A few left-wing commentators look at it the same way, but simply reverse the value significations. It is a handy ready-made template, and if it were an accurate reading, then the protesters would have been little more than useful idiots for a comprador elite. But there is little evidence that anything like this is happening. The most we have seen is some bizarre rumours about Israel trying to promote a ‘twitter revolution’ (probably put about by Twitter, you know). Similarly, prefabricated ideas about Ahmadinejad representing the uneducated poor and Mousavi representing the articulate middle class, have been ubiquitous on all sides. And just the same, they have turned out to be wrong.
