You canʼt separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
– Malcolm X (1925-1965)
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,…”
– Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
In politics the choice is never between good and evil but between the preferable and the detestable.”
– Raymond Aron (1905-1983)
Freedom from dictatorship is a human right. A global recognition of this right in modern times is Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Dictatorship is the captivity of a people’s political rights, and is thus an analog of slavery, which is the captivity of their personal freedom. Assisting popular rebellions against dictatorship is always a defense of human rights. Dictatorships, being inherently unjustifiable, can never claim self-defense in their efforts to cling to power; the only act they can justify is self dissolution.
Dictators hold unwilling supporters through intimidation, and willing supporters through promises of material gain and social elevation. Supporters of a dictatorship facing a popular uprising can never claim equal consideration in world opinion to the rebels opposing them, because such supporters are complicit in violating human rights by helping impose a dictatorship.
Doing what is right is not always convenient, and tolerating what is wrong is often temporally advantageous. So, despite the intrinsic illegitimacy of dictatorships, democratic nations may accept normal relations with certain of them because it is convenient politically and profitable commercially. Maintaining a foreign policy of such amoral practicality is never an honorable argument against assisting a foreign rebellion against dictatorship that has won public sympathy. Let us celebrate the few times international actions are taken because they are the humanly decent thing to do.
Later, our propagandists will easily recall the imperfections of motive and execution by our governments, and that data will then fuel the competition to define and exploit the historical record of the events. Though annoying, this is of minor importance compared to the immediate and most worthy goal: defending human lives and human rights.
The likelihood in late March of 2011 that a significant loss of life would be inflicted by Muammar Gaddafi’s jet bombers, artillery, armored troops and security forces in Benghazi was too real a prospect to ignore without then becoming complicit in the outcome, by omission. Gaddafi had vowed to “bury” the rebels, and we can be sure that after a Gaddafi victory a thorough purge of Libyan society would have occurred to ensure no embers of dissent remained to ignite another popular outburst of lèse majesté. Clearly, without outside assistance — minimally, a large infusion of heavier weapons — the lightly armed militias defending the western approaches to Benghazi would have been rolled back, and the anti-Gaddafi revolt crushed.
Since the crew that runs MR today, except for Michael Yates, has embraced a version of “lesser evil” politics in which you have to hold your nose and back al-Assad because the opposition is worse (at least if you cherry pick the facts), it is useful to remember that it wasn’t always this way.
Baathism came to power in Syria in the form of a military coup in 1963. There were shake-ups within the Baathist system that finally put Hafez al-Assad into power in 1970 as part of a general purge of the left-wing of the party. After he died, his son—the current dynast—assumed power. So basically we are dealing with Baathist rule, in one form or another, for the past 48 years. This is bourgeois nationalism in its dotage, just as it was in Mubarak’s Egypt and Qaddafi’s Libya. For people who have some understanding of the dynamics of such societies, it would be very clear that the popular movements in all of these countries are seeking an end to decade upon decade of arbitrary rule, with its torture, its suppression of a free press and all the democratic rights that the Bolsheviks fought for under Czarism. How sad that a leading socialist journal stands on the side of the latter-day Czars of the Arab world.
Apparently Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff had the ability to see through the bourgeois nationalist con games of the Middle East, at least on the evidence of an article titled “The Coups in Iraq and Syria”, written by Tabitha Petran, that appeared in the May 1963 Monthly Review.
Petran minces no words, beginning her article as follows:
The recent coups in Iraq and Syria realize the six-year-old Eisenhower Doctrine’s goal of anti-Communist “Arab unity” under United States protection. The coups’ authors are the international oil interests, the U.S., and their local placemen—the Baath and Arab Nationalist (Nasserist) parties, assorted militarists and feudal left over from Hashemite rule in Iraq, and in Syria elements from the right-wing of the Moslem Brotherhood.
She dubs Baathism as an amalgam of demagogy and petty-bourgeois social reforms that is “widely regarded as an instrument of American imperialism”. It is so interesting to see the final dregs of this system being hoisted on the shoulders of John Bellamy Foster, John Mage and Yoshie Furuhashi.
Petran’s article decries the wholesale slaughter of Communists in Iraq, a crime that no longer tends to bother the MR group based on Furuhashi’s grotesque attempts to provide ex post facto excuses for the slaughter of radicals in Khomeini’s Iran in the early 1980s. These “divisive” elements obviously stood in the way of creating strong states that might become part of counter-hegemonic blocs. Back in the early 60s apparently, MR magazine viewed class criteria as having priority over that kind of leftist realpolitik.
It’s not much different with Iran, a country whose government rises beyond the level of “lesser evil” and achieves the kind of hallowed status that once brought tears to the eyes of a Communist when watching a newsreel of Stalin receiving a bouquet of flowers from a Red Scout. Much of MRZine’s propaganda on behalf of Syria is most certainly related to what it feels are the geopolitical interests of Iran, as if the Middle East was a chessboard. Questions of the class struggle are of no consequence for these leftist versions of Metternich.
If you go back through the MR archives, you won’t find any such malarkey about Iran. Typical is a March 2001 article titled Clerical Oligarchy and the Question of “Democracy” in Iran. Co-authored by Saeed Rahnema and Haideh Moghissi, it starts with a sentence that amounts to a stake that can be driven through MR’s heart today:
For more than twenty years the Islamic regime in Iran, along with its extensive repressive apparatuses, has created an impressive array of ideological and economic mechanisms of control to construct an Islamified civil society and build consensus for the establishment of a theocratic state.
The article calls attention to the “thugs” who attacked students, women, and newspapers that differed with the government even if only within the framework of clerical rule. These are the same kinds of thugs who broke up street protests after the last election, being cheered on by MRZine.
The concluding paragraphs of the article call for a strengthening of the secular opposition in Iran and other initiatives that would break the power of the Guardian Council and other fixtures of permanent clerical rule. In referring to this goal, the article seems to foretell the objectives of every mass movement in the Arab world today:
Such developments will create real possibilities for the century-old movements for democracy, freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, respect for minority rights, women’s rights, economic development, and social justice to succeed. Such objective circumstances favoring action by the secular left will almost inevitably arise, if the existing equilibrium, or “the balance of fear”–a popular term used to define the hesitation of various factions within the ruling bloc to strike the final blow–continues. This impasse within the Islamic reform movement will undoubtedly intensify the push for radical change and will give the secular opposition a chance to actively participate in the struggle for establishing–as a first step–a secular democratic state in place of the existing clerical oligarchy.
According to the White House, Osama bin Laden was shot to death during a raid on his compound when he “resisted” the raid team.
Also according to the White House, bin Laden was not armed when confronted by the raid team.
Which raises the question: How did bin Laden resist the raid without a weapon?
Asked about this issue at his briefing Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said “resistance does not require a firearm.” He declined to elaborate further.
Reporters pressed Carney, who noted that the SEAL team had been prepared to capture bin Laden if possible. (White House Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan said at a briefing Monday that “if we had the opportunity to take bin Laden alive, if he didn’t present any threat, the individuals involved were able and prepared to do that.”)
He then said the team “met with a great deal of resistance,” adding that many people in the compound were armed.
Carney said the raid led to a “highly volatile firefight” and said those involved in the raid “handled themselves with the utmost professionalism.”
“He was killed in an operation because of the resistance that they met,” said Carney, who referred further questions to the Pentagon. “We are trying very hard to provide as much information as we can,” he added.
Carney also said one of bin Laden’s wives was in the room with bin Laden when the raid team arrived. He said she rushed a member of the raid team and was shot in the leg — but not killed. Carney did not provide any detail about the actions taken by bin Laden when the SEALs arrived.
Asked to provide clarity on the issue on Monday, all a senior official would say is that “more details may emerge.”
The White House initially claimed that bin Laden used a woman as a human shield and was “firing behind her,” but it later changed its account of what took place
There have been two mysteries about my family origins that have preoccupied me from an early age. The first had to do with my last name, something I got the answer to about 20 years ago. Despite the Latinate sound, it is a Yiddish word that means the counting house of a tax farmer, a “court Jew” from the feudal era who collected taxes from the peasants for the royalty and received a cut. It was prevalent in the Slutsk region near Minsk in the mid 1800s. I learned about this from one of the Czarist annals in the YIVO Institute in NY.
The other mystery is how my maternal grandparents ended up in Kansas City, Missouri where I was born in 1945. Why didn’t they come through Ellis Island and end up on the Lower East Side like my paternal grandparents? A few years ago, when my mother was still alive, she told me that she understood that they came in steerage on a ship that landed in Galveston, Texas and from there they went to Kansas City, where they knew nobody. Why in the world would they book passage on a boat going to Galveston and why would they pick Kansas City of all places, where there was a vanishingly small Jewish community?
Ironically, it was a disgusting attack on the BDS student movement written by Kenneth J. Stern appearing in the Bard College Spring 2011 alumni magazine that solved this riddle for me. Stern, an attorney, graduated Bard 10 years after me and is now the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) director on anti-Semitism, a job that mostly involves writing garbage like the article in question. As a Zionist ideologue, Stern makes the same kinds of hasbara arguments you hear ad nauseam from Abraham Foxman, Malcolm Hoenlein and disgraced Bard College trustee Martin Peretz. In doing some background research on the AJC in order to help me respond to Stern, I discovered that Jacob Schiff, the German-Jewish Wall Street financier who founded the AJC in 1906, was worried that if too many Yiddish-speaking and “culturally deprived” Eastern European Jews flooded major cities on the Eastern seaboard like New York, it might create a backlash of anti-Semitism.
The answer was to disperse the vulgar riffraff throughout the United States in accordance with what would become known as the Galveston Movement. Schiff’s attitude toward Eastern European Jewry reflected the class and ethnic prejudices of the German-Jewish haute bourgeoisie that included financiers like Schiff, the Ochs family that owned the New York Times, and the rest of what Stephen Birmingham called “Our Crowd”. This is the same filthy rich and reactionary milieu that funds the AJC today and that Leon Botstein sees as his natural allies. In his own attempt to emulate the Galveston Movement, Botstein “dispersed” anti-Zionist professor Joel Kovel from his job at Bard College. Fortunately, Joel landed on Morningside Heights rather than Kansas City.
Before getting into the sordid history of the AJC, a word or two about Stern’s article would be useful even though the article is third-rate hasbara at best. Titled “Anti-Semitism and Education”, Stern makes the customary amalgam between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, something that is losing traction at your better colleges and universities, Bard of course being at the bottom of the barrel in terms of engagement with Middle East realities. In the article, Stern complains about pro-Palestinian professors at Columbia University “mistreating” pro-Israel students, an obvious reference to the harassment of Joseph Massad. Massad was hounded by Zionist students, including a veteran of the IDF who brought a video camera to class to catch the professor making anti-Semitic comments. Columbia president Lee Bollinger, whose commitment to academic freedom is real rather than verbal like the Pecksniffian Botstein, stood up for Massad, who is now tenured.
Stern’s other target is Evergreen State College, the school that the martyred Rachel Corrie attended. He claims that when a motion was made to divest from companies that did business with Israel, swastikas started showing up on campus. It turns out that the swastikas were drawn on the walls of bathroom stalls. If one uses such evidence as a litmus test for whether a school is anti-Semitic, then what would make of an incident at Bard College this year when the Anti-Racist Discourseʼs Black History Month presentation was vandalized in the Campus Center? Two photos were defaced, three were torn down, and a statement was removed. One would not judge Bard College on the basis of such isolated and anonymous deeds, so why judge Evergreen? Obviously, Stern has an ideological agenda that transcends the need for truth.
Stern claims that Jewish students at Evergreen were so intimidated that they were afraid to meet with him on campus and would only gather at a synagogue to avoid the neo-Nazi mobs that had apparently made this liberal arts haven a home. Stern, who has a flair for this kind of cheap demagogy, claims that Jewish parents would call him to ask whether they should send their students to Columbia with the same kind of trepidation “as if they were sending their child to Gaza”. What a shocking analogy. The IDF bombs Palestinian colleges in Gaza while Columbia hires Palestinian professors who defy the received wisdom of Zionist students? That is equivalent? What an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak.
Jacob Shiff was a partner at Kuhn, Loeb and Company. Interestingly enough, he was an anti-Zionist. As a founder of the American Jewish Committee, today one of the country’s most aggressive defenders of Israel, he would likely be absolved by the current leadership for being acceptably anti-Zionist as opposed to the dastardly young radicals of today, many of whom are Jewish.
Schiff became appalled by the conditions of life in the Lower East Side around the turn of the century, calling it a “disgrace to the name of the Jew”. Although this was primarily a reference to crime (this would soon become the spawning ground of people like Dutch Schultz and Meyer Lansky), Schiff made it clear that he also objected to the “peculiarities” of his Eastern European brethren. In “Jacob H. Schiff: a study in American Jewish leadership”, Naomi Wiener Cohen writes:
A symbol of the alien and hence un-American Jews who by sheer force of numbers warned of the ultimate “judaization” of New York, the ghetto appeared to threaten the security of the older settlers as well as the newcomers.
The main solution to this problem was to assimilate the newcomers by helping them learn English and to spread them throughout the country in places like Denver and Kansas City where they would not achieve the critical mass sufficient to arouse hatred from their Christian neighbors. I wonder if anybody ever explained this to my grandparents when they were told that they were headed for Galveston rather than Ellis Island.
It was not sufficient to wean them of their strange language, the guttural and uncouth Yiddish language that was also considered as an unfortunate relic of the ghetto in the Zionist state. They also had to be weaned of their unfortunate reliance on political protest, a typically Eastern European way to fight racism.
In “Not without honor: the history of American anticommunism”, Richard Gid Powers asserts that one of the primary aims of the AJC was to fight “Jewish Communism”. This job was assigned to Louis Marshall, an AJC leader and corporation lawyer who was president of New York’s prestigious Temple Emmanuel. Powers cites an October 20, 1918 cable by Marshall:
The American Jewish Committee deem it a duty…to express their horror and detestation of the mob tyranny incompatible with the ideas of a republican democracy which is now exercised by the Bolshevik government as being destructive of life, property, and the personal and political rights of the individual…The Lenin-Trotsky Cabinet has several members of Jewish ancestry…which led to the erroneous assumption that the Jews of Russia were identified with this bloodthirsty and irresponsible group. The Jews of Russia in overwhelming proportion are not in sympathy with the doctrines and much less the methods of the Bolsheviki.
As should be obvious by now, Leon Botstein and Kenneth Stern are the direct descendents of the red-baiting German-Jewish bourgeoisie. Not every AJC leader, by the way, went along with this crude anti-Communism. Judah Magnes, a leader of Reform Judaism, resigned in protest. He was more honorable than the Zionist scoundrels who would eventually assume leadership of the AJC as the wiki on Magnes reports:
Magnes’s responded to the 1929 Arab revolt in Palestine with a call for a Binational solution to Palestine. Magnes dedicated the rest of his life to reconciliation with the Arabs; he particularly objected to the concept of a specifically Jewish state. In his view, Palestine should be neither Jewish nor Arab. Rather, he advocated a binational state in which equal rights would be shared by all, a view shared by the group Brit Shalom, an organization with which Magnes is often associated, but never joined. When the Peel Commission made their 1937 recommendations about partition and population transfer in Palestine, Magnes sounded the alarm:
With the permission of the Arabs we will be able to receive hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews in Arab lands [...] Without the permission of the Arabs even the four hundred thousand [Jews] that now are in Palestine will remain in danger, in spite of the temporary protection of British bayonets. With partition a new Balkan is made [..] New York Times, 18 July 1937.
In “Galveston, Ellis Island of the West”, Bernard Marinbach reports that Kansas City was by far the largest eventual destination of the Eastern European and Russian Jew who had arrived in Galveston. In Kansas City, the AJC helped to get the Jewish Educational Institute off the ground. This was one of those places where the immigrant could learn the English language, a skill that would allow them to be accepted as a True American. My grandmother, however, never managed to take classes there, being too busy peddling dry goods from door to door just as she did in Poland. When she died at the age of 87, she had mastered maybe 100 words in English and preferred to speak in Yiddish. I managed to have conversations with her despite the fact that I only knew about 100 words of Yiddish.
One of the people who went through the training class was Isaac Don Levine, who developed a hatred of Bolshevism as deep as the AJC leaders. Levine was a red-baiting columnist for the Hearst press and eventually provided testimony against Alger Hiss in a landmark Cold War legal case. This of course is the same Alger Hiss who was a family friend of Leon Botstein and in whose name an endowed chair was created at Bard College that Joel Kovel occupied for many years until he became an un-person for agreeing with Jacob Schiff and Judah Magnes on the need to oppose Zionism.
Although my grandmother found no time to study at the Jewish Educational Institute, my mother certainly did. This is where she came in contact with Irving Levitas, a self-described labor Zionist who became her guru and life-long friend. When he was dying of cancer, she looked after him in my upstate New York home. Levitas, like Levine, was a hardened anti-Bolshevik but would have no use for ratting people out like Isaac Don Levine.
Irving Levitas’s brother was one Sol Levitas who ran the New Leader in the 1950s, drawing upon CIA funding of the sort described in Frances Stoner Saunders’s “Who Paid the Piper”. Like Levine, he was one who took part in the witch-hunt against Alger Hiss. His son Mitchell, who was editor of the NY Times Sunday Book Review for many years, was incensed when he learned that the Tamiment Library at NYU had taken up the cause of Alger Hiss’s innocence. As a board member of the Tamiment Institute that had published New Leader in the ’50s and provided initial funding and archival material for the library, Mitchell Levitas spoke for the anti-Communist board members when he said, “To have the Hiss banner flown from the Tamiment flagstaff was just an insult.”
In keeping with the spirit of Mitchell Levitas and the general remolding of Bard College as a place where the ravings of a Kenneth Stern could be sanctified in an alumni magazine, Botstein has recast the Alger Hiss chair as a voice for the Isaac Don Levines and Sol Levitases of the world. Instead of having a radical like Joel Kovel, the seat is now held by Jonathan Brent, a hardened anti-Communist scholar whose primary goal is proving that American radicalism, particularly the wing associated with the CPUSA, was nothing more than an espionage network. This, of course, is like Ronald Reagan naming James Watt Secretary of the Interior, a creep who would have turned every national park into a lumber plantation if he could have gotten away with it.
This is a website for a book that was co-written by Jeff St. Clair and Joshua Frank. The excerpts I have read on Counterpunch are so good that I was inspired to contribute $50. I urge others to visit the website and chip in as well.
The code name for Bin Laden was “Geronimo.” The president and his advisers watched Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, on a video screen, narrating from his agency’s headquarters across the Potomac River what was happening in faraway Pakistan.
“They’ve reached the target,” he said.
Minutes passed.
“We have a visual on Geronimo,” he said.
A few minutes later: “Geronimo EKIA.”
Enemy Killed In Action. There was silence in the Situation Room.
The Big Question: Who was Geronimo, and why is there controversy over his remains?
By Guy Adams
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Why are we asking this now?
The US government has been dragged into a bizarre legal battle between descendants of the Apache leader Geronimo and a secret society of Yale students called Skull and Bones, whose members allegedly raided his grave during the First World War. Yesterday, the Justice Department asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed in February, on the 100th anniversary of Geronimo’s death, seeking to recover the legendary warrior’s remains and re-bury them near to his birthplace in the Gila Wilderness of southern New Mexico.
The legal action, by 20 descendants of Geronimo, claims a group of Skull and Bones members, including George W Bush’s grandfather, Prescott, took his skull from Fort Sill in Oklahoma in 1918. The artefact has allegedly been stored in a glass case at the organisation’s clubhouse in New Haven, Connecticut ever since. The Justice Department became involved because Barack Obama and his defence secretary Robert Gates are named alongside the Skull and Bones society as co-defendants, due to the fact that Geronimo was initially buried on public land.
So who was Geronimo?
For much of his lifetime, Geronimo was considered the greatest terrorist in America. These days, he’s feted as a fearless guerrilla fighter, whose famously brave troops were the last American Indian force to hold out against the United States.
Born Goytholy, meaning “the one who yawns,” he took up arms when his wife, children and mother were massacred by Mexicans in 1851. His nickname stems from daring retaliatory raids, when he led men on cavalry charges, often into a hail of bullets. Legend has it that victims would scream a plea to St Jerome (hence “Jeronimo!”) as they died.
Geronimo evaded capture for more than three decades. Though wounded countless times, he was never defeated, and his men are perhaps the most effective light cavalry force in military history. They numbered no more than a couple of hundred at any one time, but are said to have killed more than 5,000 enemies.
Why did he fight?
Geronimo was a member of the Chiricahua Apache tribe whose homelands in the deserts of New Mexico were annexed first by Mexico and later by the United States during its expansion into the south-west during the 19th century. His insurgency was part of a wider rebellion by Native Indians against their treatment by white settlers, who carried out what in modern terms might be called ethnic cleansing: removing tribes from ancestral territories and (in some cases) placing a bounty on their scalps. Geronimo’s success was down to old-fashioned derring-do, and sheer good luck. Because of repeated close shaves with mortality, many followers believed he was resistant to bullets. His men were adept at using their opponents’ technology – including rifles and pistols – against them.
How was he captured?
After more than 30 years the US General Nelson Miles tracked Geronimo to Arizona. The rebels were exhausted after decades on the run, and their number had dwindled to just 36 men, many of whom (including their leader) had taken to heavy drinking. In the autumn of 1886, Geronimo negotiated a tactical surrender, agreeing to lay down his arms on condition that his followers would be allowed to disband and return home to their families. But the US reneged on its promises, and promptly took Geronimo and his troops into custody. They spent seven years in prison in Alabama before being transferred to Fort Sill, where they lived out the rest of their days in a form of open prison.
What became of him?
Ironically, Geronimo’s fame only grew during his year in captivity. He became a local celebrity, charging visitors to Fort Sill to have their photo taken with him, and keeping a stock of autographed cards and other souvenirs to sell to tourists. In old age, he was constantly interviewed (for a small fee) by the US press, and took part in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Circus, where performers recreated his most daring battles. He was a star attraction at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, and had a prominent place in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905.
Having embraced capitalism, Geronimo also took up the white man’s religion, converting to Christianity saying he believed it to be “better than the religion of my forefathers.” He joined the Dutch Reformed Church in 1903, but was expelled four years later, apparently for gambling. He died in 1909, at the age of 79.
What happened to his remains?
Three members of the Skull and Bones society, including Prescott Bush, were stationed at an artillery school at Fort Sill during the First World War. In a bizarre prank, they are rumoured to have dug up his grave, and taken his skull and femurs back to their alma mater.
Why does this matter?
Although unproven, the alleged desecration of Geronimo’s grave carries significant political baggage. Like Chief Sitting Bull, who defeated General Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn, Native Americans view him as a symbol of their people’s righteous rebellion against white colonialists. Geronimo is also firmly embedded in the US psyche as a symbol of bonkers bravado. Paratroopers shout his name after leaping from aeroplanes, apparently as part of a tradition that began in 1940, when they prepared for their first mass jump by watching the film “Geronimo.” In a scene based on one of its subject’s many narrow escapes – and mimicked by generations of schoolchildren – the movie’s hero yells his own name as he leaps from a cliff into a river to escape capture by approaching soldiers.
What is the Skull and Bones?
Adding to the intrigue is long-standing public fascination with the Skull and Bones society, an organisation of privileged Yale Students whose alumni include both Presidents Bush and John Kerry. The club, founded at the Ivy League school in 1832, selects 15 new members each year. They are sworn in at the “Tomb,” a windowless campus clubhouse which is purported to hold the skulls of a range of famous figures, including Che Guevara. During the initiation ceremony, recruits are apparently required to kiss the skull of Geronimo, which is said to be held in a glass case near the door, and take a solemn oath to support fellow members.
Since the society is secret – it has never clarified the exact contents of the “Tomb” – some regard it as vaguely sinister. Others say it is a harmless networking organisation. In this respect, it is perhaps best described as an upmarket version of the Freemasons.
What happens next?
The lawsuit by Geronimo’s descendants was filed in a federal district court in Washington DC, and seeks: “to free Geronimo, his remains, funerary objects and spirit from 100 years of imprisonment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Yale University campus at New Haven, Connecticut and wherever else they may be found.”
Presuming the case isn’t immediately thrown out – and the political ramifications of doing so would be enormous – the court’s immediate next step must be to determine if the Skull and Bones society really does own Geronimo’s disputed skull.
Does the Skull and Bones society really have Geronimo’s skull?
Yes
*The Skull and Bones has repeatedly refused to discuss the skull, still less surrender it for DNA testing
*A letter written in 1918 by a society member says it gained possession of it
*A history of the society written in 1933 claimed that Prescott Bush ‘engaged in a mad expedition’ at Fort Sill to obtain Geronimo’s skull
No
*Geronimo’s grave was miles from where Prescott Bush was stationed
*The exact location of Geronimo’s grave was unmarked at the time of the alleged theft
*Historians say that, while the Skull and Bones may very well have a Native Indian’s skull, it is unlikely to be that of Geronimo
I have finally gotten around to seeing “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, which received New York Film Critics Online award for best documentary of 2010 even though some critics view it as a mockumentary in the style of “Catfish”. The movie has been described as a satire on art world trendiness, one of my favorite topics. Since it addresses the question of “truth and fiction” in documentary film—the chief obsession of Jane Gaines, the self-described Marxist film professor whose class on documentary film I dropped like a hot potato after finally realizing where she was going—I felt I owed it to myself to have a gander.
After weighing in on this highly regarded film that has a 98 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I will say a few words about “Cinema Verite”, the HBO fictional treatment of the making of “An American Family”, the 1973 PBS documentary about the Louds of Santa Barbara. If cinéma vérité implies a detached fly-on-the-wall approach to its subject matter, then “An American Family” was anything but. As is the case with “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, you are dealing very much with a staged reality, even if director Banksy would never admit it as such.
Perhaps the biggest problem for me was the presence of Thierry Guetta in practically every moment of Exit. Guetta is a Frenchman who shortly after opening a vintage clothing store in Los Angeles became obsessed with videorecording. He began recording almost continuously but without any clear purpose in mind. Eventually he became focused on street art after learning that his cousin Invader was working in this idiom. To describe Guetta’s observations as banal would be the understatement not just of the century but from the time when the universe originated.
Soon afterwards he hooks up with Shepherd Fairey, the artist whose Obama Hope poster was credited for generating broad support for the politician now understood to be nothing more than a swindler. In keeping with the tainted character of the 2008 campaign, the Associated Press sued Fairey for using one of their photos without permission. In the world of street art, such “sampling” has generated legal complaints on the same scale as in the hip-hop world where it originated.
Even Fairey has seen fit to call in the law when his own intellectual property is at stake as the Boston Globe pointed out in February 2009:
What do you do if you’re a street artist turned marketing phenom who uses other people’s images when someone uses one of your designs? If you’re Shepard Fairey, apparently, you call your lawyers.
Fairey, of Obama HOPE poster fame, is defending himself against charges he infringed on an Associated Press copyrighted photo in making the poster. He’s also been criticized by artists for using others’ work without attribution (see background here and here). His lawyers claim in the AP case that he is protected by fair use provisions of the copyright law.
It turns out, however, that the activist art appropriator is a wee bit more sensitive when it is his images that are being “repurposed.” An Austin, Texas, artist named Baxter Orr made a parody of Fairey’s Andre the Giant design, adorning it with a SARS mask and the title “Protect Yourself.” Last April, Fairey mobilized his legal team to send Orr a cease and desist order threatening legal action against him.
It should be added that left-of-center politics, even if it is of the tepid pro-Obama variety, is de rigeur for the ambitious street artist. Fairey has built up a resume that shows he is against the Evil Corporate World, although one critic is less than impressed.
As if Wal-Mart didn’t have enough controversies to deal with, imagine the consternation in the PR war room when news hit that the retail giant was selling t-shirts bearing a Nazi SS skull. As the story unraveled, it turned out that Wal-Mart’s designer had ripped off the image from pop art superstar Shepard Fairey, whose reference for the Gestapo logo was 1960’s “biker culture.” Oops.
Using the international notoriety of his global “Andre the Giant has a posse” street art campaign as a platform, Shepard Fairey has leveraged his prolific output and iconic, anti-authoritarian style into a mini-empire. Through his ObeyGiant company (Motto: Manufacturing Quality Dissent Since 1989), he churns out screen-printed posters, clothing, and limited-run merchandise including skateboards and laser-engraved watches. His other design company, Studio Number One, specializes in branding, promotional campaigns and “identity systems” for corporate clients including Mountain Dew, Virgin, and Honda. He is also founder and creative director of Subliminal Projects art studio in Los Angeles and uber-hip Swindle magazine. His audience and the value of his work has surged in recent months on the popularity of his now-ubiquitous Obama posters.
Although Fairey “didn’t get bent out of shape” about Wal-Mart ripping him off, he originally launched his ObeyGiant clothing line because he saw that the Urban Outfitters chain was selling “bootlegged” shirts with his Giant logo. “To see it in there, just ripped off, knowing that somebody just made a bunch of money selling the t-shirts to Urban Outfitters, and here I am, just barely being able to pay my rent was definitely upsetting to me,” Fairey told me during an interview for Mother Jones. “The reason I get pissed off about stuff like that is because I didn’t build up the resonance for that image just to hand it off to someone to exploit.”
This irony is not lost on Lincoln Cushing, an art historian and author who recently brokered a royalty agreement between Fairey and the estate of deceased Cuban artist Rene Mederos over a design of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos that Fairey essentially swiped and slapped his “Obey” logo onto. When confronted, Fairey was quick to cut a check to Mederos’s family, but Cushing described the Mederos episode as a common dynamic. “Many U.S. artists don’t seem to treat the intellectual property rights of third world artists the same as fellow U.S. artists,” Cushing said, and added that artists aren’t the only ones willing to steal from those still isolated from the U.S. economy. “For many years the web-based sales catalog of Barnes and Noble marketed over 30 unauthorized digitally-reproduced ‘Cuban posters.’ I contacted them many times about dealing with this properly, and they never responded.”
Eventually Guetta hooks up with Banksy, the super-secretive British street artist who is credited with having directed the film. Throughout the film, Banksy’s face is obscured underneath the hood of a sweatshirt and his voiced is altered as well. After Banksy allows the obsessed fan Guetta to follow him about on his nightly graffiti expeditions with a video camera, he warms up to him all the while sensing that Guetta is a fairly shallow person more enamored of the “scene” than the ambitions of the people involved with making art. It must be said that between the two men, it is a nose-and-nose race to determine who is the winner in a banality contest.
When Banksy sees a moment or two of Guetta’s utterly unwatchable documentary on street art based on his voluminous collection of tapes, he proposes a reallocation of responsibilities. Banksy will now make the movie (hence, “Exit Through the Gift Shop”) and Guetta will transform himself into a street artist.
The final half-hour of the film recounts Banksy’s well-publicized splash into the Los Angeles art scene with a 2006 show titled “Barely Legal”, a reference to the constant threat of arrests for defacement that such artists have to put up with. It is also a reference to the “outlaw”, and even revolutionary self-image, that people like Shepherd Fairey and Banksy cultivate as the NY Times reported on the show:
Earlier this month Banksy surreptitiously placed a blow-up doll dressed as a Guantánamo detainee inside the fence of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at Disneyland, where it apparently remained for more than an hour before park officials shut down the ride and removed it. Recently he also smuggled 500 altered versions of Paris Hilton’s new CD into record stores around Britain and placed them in the racks.
All of those stunts are featured in a video that loops continuously at the show, which also includes two large rooms displaying stenciled images on canvas, sculptures and mixed-media productions, like the panel van with the notice on the back, “How’s My Bombing?” and an 800 number that links to a Navy recruiting office in Phoenix.
All of this is arranged around a sort of mock-self-loathing, elephant-in-the-room theme, or, as Banksy puts it in a handout: “1.7 billion people have no access to clean drinking water. 20 billion people live below the poverty line. Every day hundreds of people are made to feel physically sick by morons at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing something about it. Anybody want a free glass of wine?”
It turns out that Guetta accompanied Banksy to the Disneyland expedition and was detained by security guards for his effort. In keeping with the generally low-level intellectual quality of the film, much more is made of the melodrama of being interrogated than the purpose of putting a blown-up doll dressed as a Guantánamo detainee on Disneyland property. One supposes this is in the nature of street art subversion, to make people ask, “what was that about?” than to really change minds.
All in all, the street art of people like Banksy and Shepherd Fairey has the same aspirations as the Biennial Exhibits at the Whitney Museum in New York that is filled with all sorts of “transgressive” flourishes that are meant to establish the bona fides of the artists while remaining marketable to hedge fund managers.
I am always reminded of my stint at Goldman-Sachs in 1986 when the dining room was filled with such artwork, including Barbara Kruger’s photos with messages like “I shop, therefore I am.”
In no time at all, Guetta learns the street artist ropes and begins his new career as Mr. Brainwash (MBW). After his “work” attracts attention, he decides to mount a major exhibition in the style of Banksy’s “Barely Legal”. Called “Life is Beautiful”, it displayed mostly works by experienced artists who created works according to Guetta’s specifications. In fact, Guetta is never seen once making art in the entire film and many critics assume that Banksy is the real creator, using Guetta as a stand-in for his own persona. What conclusions can be drawn from this? As the Times article above reported, there is an element of self-loathing in Banksy’s ongoing project. If you are going to satirize the market-driven art world, a shmuck like Guetta does provide a certain usefulness since he detracts attention away from the real conmen like Fairey and Banksy.
For Roger Ebert, the possibility that Exit is a hoax only serves to heighten its fascination. I, on the other hand, grew weary with the whole premise. For me it was just another exercise in post-modernist irony that is as dated as the overheated art market of the mid-1980s and the Wall Street super-profits that kept it going.
“Cinema Verite” was co-directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the same team responsible for the memorable “American Splendor”, based on Harvey Pekar’s work, as well as the not so memorable “The Extra Man” that I reviewed recently.
It recreates the making of “An American Family”, a PBS documentary series on the Loud family of Santa Barbara that aired in 1973 and that literally spawned “reality TV”. Arguably, there would be no “Housewives of…” today without the PBS antecedent, for better or for worse obviously (I am a fan of The Housewives of Atlanta–Orange County housewives forget about it.)
The show was watched by millions, including a number of 1960s radicals who saw it as a symbol of the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family that could not hold up under the pressures of the Vietnam War, gay liberation, feminism and all of the other deep changes occurring in American society. In a NY Times article on the show, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard is cited as having described the PBS series as “a symptom of our altered relationship with reality, characterized by ‘dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV.’” As is the case with reality shows today, the people being filmed don’t matter how degraded they appear, as long as the camera is rolling.
The patriarch was Bill Loud, a Republican voter who cheated on his wife Pat both before the filming began and during. Tim Robbins plays him ably and Diane Lane is also very good as Pat. Lance, their eldest son (played by Thomas Dekker), was an out-of-the closet gay and the first gay ever to appear on television and who died of AIDS in 2001 at the age of 50.
The main connection this worthy film has with the “truth or fiction” preoccupation of film school critical studies is its revelation that producer-director Craig Gilbert (James Gandolfini) manipulated the Louds in order to create compelling television. For example, after Bill Loud drags him along to meet one of his lovers, an aspiring actress who might be impressed with Gilbert’s show-biz credentials, Gilbert tattles on him to Pat, thus leading to a series of escalating incidents that would lead to her announcement on the show that she wants a divorce. It turns out that Gilbert also manipulated her into making that announcement despite her intentions to keep it off-camera.
As a sign of how far we have progressed since the original airing of “An American Family”, its useful to recall how a NY Times article by Ann Roiphe described Lance Loud’s “flamboyant, leechlike, homosexuality” and openly wondered why his parents showed no “open horror” at his sexual orientation.
It took a gay liberation movement to finally put a stake in the heart of this kind of open homophobia.
“Exit Through the Gift Shop” can be rented from Netflix, “Cinema Verite” is available on-demand from HBO; “An American Family” unfortunately is unavailable.
