After having seen four narrative films and one documentary this year based on jazz musicians, I am prompted to offer some reflections on the films and on the state of jazz today. Once called America’s classical music, there are obvious reasons to be concerned about its future. Whether or not you believe that it is our classical music, we should all understand that its artists have never benefited from the kind of institutional support that is given to opera, ballet or the symphony orchestra. Except for Jazz at Lincoln Center, musicians have to fend for themselves, working in nightclubs where conversation between hedge fund managers and their dates compete with horn players trying to convey transcendental insights over the chord changes of “A Night in Tunisia”.
Let me start with my own connections to jazz that run as deep as those to Marxism and film, the other two passions in a long and largely quixotic lifetime. In the summer of 1961, just before I headed off to Bard College for my freshman year, I sat at a table in a pizza parlor in the Catskills enjoying a pie with my buddies when someone put a dime in the juke box to play a tune that left me thunderstruck: Miles Davis playing “Summertime”. That it was on a juke box in 1961 should tell you something about the difference between now and then.
After finding out more about Miles Davis, I began taking jazz records out of the well-stocked Bard music library and became conversant in the music of the day, which was arguably jazz in its classic period with hard bop and the West Coast style prevailing but with the avant-garde making its first appearances. In my freshman year, I heard the Paul Bley quartet in concert featuring saxophone player Pharaoh Sanders whose “sheets of sound” paved the way for the New Thing a few years later. As New Thing icon Albert Ayler put it, “Trane was the Father, Pharaoh was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost”.
I just returned from our annual meeting. These were the awards voted by our members, followed by the ballot I submitted on Friday.
New York Film Critics Online members held their annual awards meeting on December 11, 2016, at the Furman Gallery inside Lincoln Center.
The following awards for films that opened in 2016 were voted:
Picture – Moonlight Director – Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Actor – Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Actress – Isabelle Huppert, Elle
Supporting Actor – Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Supporting Actress – Viola Davis, Fences Screenplay – Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Breakthrough Performer – Ruth Negga, Loving
Debut Director – Robert Eggers, The Witch
Ensemble Cast – Moonlight Documentary – 13th
Foreign Language – The Handmaiden
Animated – Kubo and the Two Strings
Cinematography – James Laxton, Moonlight
Use of Music – Justin Hurwitz (composer), La La Land
Top 12 Films
Arrival (Paramount)
Fences (Paramount)
Free State of Jones (STX Entertainment)
Hell or High Water (CBS Films)
I, Daniel Blake (IFC Films)
Jackie (Fox Searchlight)
La La Land (Lionsgate)
Loving (Focus Features)
Manchester by the Sea (Amazon/Roadside Attractions)
Moonlight (A24)
O.J.: Made in America (ESPN)
Toni Erdmann (Sony Pictures Classics)
My ballot (NYFCO members are asked to submit 3 choices even if you are allowed to submit less than 3 and even abstain. The higher the number, the higher the preference. A NYFCO committee winnows out the top choices of members that we vote on at our meeting.)
New York Film Critics Online 2016 Awards Nomination Ballot
Breakthrough Performance (name actor/film)
1. Taraji P. Henson / Hidden Figures
2. Anton Yelchin / The Green Room
3. Keegan-Michael Key / Don’t Think Twice
Supporting Actress (name actor/film)
1. Gillian Jacobs / Don’t Think Twice
2. Aunjanue Ellis / Birth of a Nation
3. Carmen Ejogo / Born to be Blue
Supporting Actor (name actor/film)
1. André Holland / Moonlight
2. Armie Hammer / Birth of a Nation
3. Kevin Costner / Hidden Figures
Screenplay (name film)
1. Free State of Jones
2. Touched with Fire
3. Don’t Think Twice
Cinematography (name film)
1. Touched with Fire
2. Birth of a Nation
3. Moonlight
Use of Music (name film)
1. Touched with Fire
2. LaLa Land
3. The Lobster
Debut Director (name directors/film)
1. François Ruffin / Merci Patron!
2. Craig Atkinson / Do Not Resist
3. Johanna Schwartz / They Will Have to Kill Us First
Director (name directors/film)
1. Ken Loach / I, Daniel Blake
2. Paul Dalio / Touched with Fire
3. Nate Parker / Birth of a Nation
Actress (name actor/film)
1. Katie Holmes / Touched with Fire
2. Natalie Portman / Jackie
3. Taraji P. Henson / Hidden Figures
Actor (name actor/film)
1. Nate Parker / Birth of a Nation
2. Luke Kirby / Touched with Fire
3. Ashton Sanders / Moonlight
Ensemble Cast (name film)
1. The Green Room
2. Don’t Think Twice
3. Denial
Picture (name film)
1. Free State of Jones
2. I, Daniel Blake
3. Don’t Think Twice
Foreign Language (name film)
1. Fireworks Wednesday
2. Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
3. The Unknown Girl
Documentary (name film)
1. Peter and the Farm
2. Art Bastard
3. Homeland: Iraq Year Zero
Animated Feature (name film)
1. Tower
2. April and the Extraordinary World
When two screeners submitted to NYFCO members for consideration as best film of 2016 happen to deal with racism against people of color who are gifted mathematicians if not outright geniuses, your first reaction might be to consider it a coincidence. But upon further reflection, despite all of the gloom about the election of Donald Trump, the film industry still sees such stories as eminently marketable rather than Rambo retreads. Not only are the films marketable, they are first rate.
“Hidden Figures”, which opens everywhere on January 6th, 2017, tells the story of three African-American women who worked for NASA in the 1950s and who had to deal with both racial oppression and sexism. Of the three, Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) receives most of the attention. Now 98, she calculated the launch window for the 1961 Mercury mission. As the daughter of a lumberjack in segregated West Virginia, she had many obstacles to overcome. Although I have little use for President Obama, I thought he exercised good judgement when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
While its venue was in art houses last April, where features generally make a fleeting appearance unlike the Multiplexes that will screen “Hidden Figures”, my readers will certainly want to take advantage of “The Man Who Knew Infinity” now on Amazon streaming. This is the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan (played by “Slumdog Millionaire” star Dev Patel), who grew up poor in Madras, India and demonstrated a mastery of mathematics from an early age. Working as a lowly clerk after the fashion of Bob Cratchit, his supervisor was struck by a notebook of formulas he kept, so much so that he encouraged him to send letters with a sample of his work to universities in England. After Cambridge don G. H. Hardy (played to perfection by Jeremy Irons) reads the material, he invites Ramanujan to come to Trinity College and fulfill his dreams. Like NASA, however, the institution is racist to the core and almost crushes Ramanujan into the dust.
While both films have most of the well-trod inspirational elements you would associate with such tales, they rise above the genre and soar. This is mostly a function of their faithfulness to the historical context, informed to a large extent by the well-researched books they are based on. Written this year, Margot Lee Shatterly’s “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race” was sparked by conversations she had with her father, who was an African-American research scientist at the NASA-Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia where the women in “Hidden Figures” worked. As for “The Man Who Knew Infinity”, the source material was a book of the same name written in 1991 by Robert Kanigel, who worked as an engineer before becoming a free-lance writer in 1970. In 1999, he became professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he helped start its Graduate Program in Science Writing, which he directed for seven years. So clearly, we are dealing with authors who are very much wedded to the stories they write about.
In addition to Katherine Johnson, the other two Black women facing discrimination at NASA are Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe). Vaughan was the supervisor of the West Area Computers section at NASA that despite the name consisted of African-American women whose job it was to do tedious calculations and check the mathematics of other employees, almost like fact checkers at the New Yorker Magazine. Known as “computers”, they had to be much more rigorous than those working for a magazine since the lives of astronauts depended on it. The West Area was segregated from the main buildings at in Hampton—separate and unequal. The women could not even use the bathrooms on the main campus or even the water fountains. When Katherine Johnson ended up working with the white scientists, she had to walk a quarter-mile to return to the West Area to go to the bathroom. When Mary Jackson decided to become an engineer to get away from the drudge work of being a human computer, she found out that no college in Virginia would accept a Black person. Undaunted, she took a night class in a high school after winning a legal case to gain such a right.
In some ways, the film will remind you of “The Imitation Game”, which was also about a crash program run by mathematicians and engineers. But unlike “The Imitation Game”, “Hidden Figures” is much more of a human drama since there is a daily battle by the women to be recognized as equals to whites and to men. In the most stirring scene in the film, Katherine Johnson explains to her boss (played capably by Kevin Costner) that she disappears a couple of times a day from her desk in order to go to the bathroom in a segregated area. Appalled by the waste of time and the disrespect to a fellow worker, he goes around NASA and tears down all the signs indicating facilities for the “colored”.
As another coincidence, the film climaxes with the successful orbital flight of John Glenn (Glen Powell) in 1962. Glenn died two days ago at the age of 95. When NASA used electronic computers for the first time to calculate his orbit around Earth, Johnson was called upon to verify the numbers because Glenn refused to fly unless Katherine verified them first.
When Ramanujan arrives at Trinity College, he is met by racism from every quarter. Even his champion G.H. Hardy mixes well-intended paternalism with jibes about sending him back to India if he doesn’t make the grade.
In many ways, Hardy is a more interesting character than Ramanujan because he is constantly being forced to reckon with the disjunction between his prejudices and the reality of the young man in front of him who he finally acknowledges as the Mozart of mathematics—a man who could penetrate to the heart of a math puzzle and solve it as easily as Mozart could write a sonata.
In one scene, Ramanujan is sitting in a lecture that Hardy has pressured him to attend in order to compensate for ostensible deficiencies in his autodidactic training. When a professor asks him why he is not taking notes, he replies that it is not necessary since he understands the material on the blackboard completely. Not believing him, the professor goads him into explaining what the formulas on the blackboard are about. Nonplussed, Ramanujan arises from his seat, goes to the blackboard and provides a sophisticated solution to the problems being posed by the professor. This does not result in congratulations but instead being thrown out of class for his perceived arrogance. Apparently he doesn’t know his place.
Unlike nearly every film I have seen about scientific matters or chess, this is one that makes very clear what made Ramanujan such a genius. He was the first to crack the “partition” problem that the film elucidates.
Take the number four. There are four ways to calculate the number of paths to that number using simple mathematics:
1+1+1+1
2+2
2+1+1
3+1
4+0
But what if the number was 3,789,422 instead? Was there any way to use a formula to arrive at the number of ‘partitions’ and bypass manual calculations? This is a problem that has vexed mathematicians forever until Ramanujan solved it. I have no idea what the practical application of such a formula would be but Ramanujan, unlike most men at Trinity College including Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam) who were atheists, was deeply religious and once told Hardy that god gave him the insights to solve such problems. For him, solving math problems and praying complemented each other.
The Wikipedia entry on Ramanujan, who died of TB at the age of 32, is most informative:
During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations). Nearly all his claims have now been proven correct. His original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime and the Ramanujan theta function, have inspired a vast amount of further research. The Ramanujan Journal, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, was established to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan.
Deeply religious, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity: “An equation for me has no meaning,” he once said, “unless it expresses a thought of God.”
After seeing both of these films, I could not help but be reminded of one of the main reasons I became a socialist in 1967. When it is such a battle for the women of “Hidden Figures” or Ramanujan to rise to the top, think of all those who were not fortunate to be given a chance. What a waste of humanity when class divisions require a mass of workers to be treated little better than a horse or any other beast of burden. I put it this way in my review of a documentary about Ousmane Sembene, the brilliant Senegalese film director who was thrown out of grade school for assaulting an abusive teacher:
I became a socialist in the 1960s largely on the belief that capitalism held back civilization by preventing a large majority of the world’s population from reaching its maximum potential. If the children of Asia, Africa and Latin America could enjoy the same benefits of those in rich countries, especially a top-notch education and the leisure time to develop innate talents, that could enhance the possibility of a great artist like Picasso or the scientist who could find a cure for cancer emerging out of formerly neglected regions.
Saul Bellow once asked tauntingly “who was the Zulu Tolstoy” in an obvious dismissal of African potential. Considering the career of filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, who is the subject of the great documentary “Sembène” that opens on November 6th at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, you would conclude that the potential is enormous, held back only by what Andre Gunder Frank once called the development of underdevelopment.
I walked out of a film screening tonight for the first time in years. Usually when I walk out, I don’t bother saying anything about the film for obvious reasons. But “The Ardennes” was so aggravating that I feel obligated to warn my readers since it is Belgium’s nomination for best foreign film for the upcoming Academy Awards.
To start off, I went down to the Flanders House in the NY Times building near Times Square on the assumption that it was a documentary about the Dardennes brothers who I hold in the highest regard for their social drama focused on the plight of Belgium’s workers and underclass. To some extent this was the result of not reading the publicist’s notes carefully enough:
When looking at what other film critics have to say about the film, I was struck by what Variety’s Ben Kenigsberg’s reference to such a misunderstanding:
Pity the filmgoer who expects the Dardenne brothers when meeting the brothers of “The Ardennes,” a Belgian Christmas story in which sibling betrayal is resolved in increasingly brutal fashion. Closer to the absurdism of Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges”) than to some of first-time feature helmer Robin Pront’s acknowledged models (Tarantino, the Coens), the movie is slow to reveal its nastier elements, appearing for two-thirds of its running time to be merely an absorbing, low-key drama about a troubled family reuniting after one son’s release from prison.
I didn’t stick around long enough to see the film through its paces but I have little use for Tarantino or the Coen brothers nowadays. But the little use I do have for them would not be extended to Robin Pront. My impression is that any filmmaker described as Tarantino-esque nowadays is recycling material whose shelf life was exceeded a decade ago.
The story has to do with two brothers, one who works in a car wash and the other who has just been released from prison. The film telegraphs its intention early on that these are low lives that have zero likability, especially Kenny—the one who has just been released from prison—and who sports a Nazi/hipster hairdo as reported on in the Washington Post:
Kenny in “The Ardennes”
Ten minutes into the movie, Kenny is back at home with his mom who warns his brother that she won’t put up with their nonsense any more. As a clear sign that the director intends to make the character look unpalatable, he is seen in his bedroom watching violent video games at night and then masturbating. After watching this, I got myself ready to bolt for the door.
One morning, as Kenny is going out his mom asks him anxiously about his plans. With a Nazi hairdo, he could be up to anything. He answers that he is going out to rob a bank. A joke but certainly one that anticipates the film’s trajectory.
It turns out that he is looking up his old girlfriend—an ex-junkie—who he locates in her Addicts Anonymous meeting. After taking a seat, he listens to one of the group members, an African immigrant in a wheelchair, telling the others how grateful he is to be drug-free. After he finishes speaking, the counselor asks the others what they feel grateful about. Kenny raises his hand and after being called on delivers a racist tirade against the African about whether he is grateful for not living in the bush anymore, drinking filthy water and relying on handouts from the Belgians.
At that point I put on my coat and headed for the door. With all the shitty news about pinhead racists having their champion in the White House and the near victory of a truly fascist party in Austria, the last thing I needed was to watch a character like Kenny in action for another hour and a half.
The irony is that the Dardennes have exactly the opposite sensibility of the young hustler Robin Pront, who is 30 years old and knows where the action is financially in the film industry. The gansta sensibility of the Tarantino genre will always attract investors since they know that mindless violence generates ticket sales among a better-educated market niche that has no idea how degraded they become by sitting through such a film.
Both in their sixties, the Dardenne brothers, have made films for the past 38 years, all of them with a moral and political sensibility that differentiate them from just about everybody making films today. As I wrote about “The Unknown Girl”, their most recent film, it examines the moral dilemmas facing people living in Belgian society where the possibilities of acting honorably are constrained by the capitalist system.
The unknown girl referred to in the title is a seventeen-year old prostitute from Africa who buzzes to be let into the medical offices of Dr. Jenny Davin an hour after office hours have closed. Since her office is in a poor neighborhood in the outskirts of Lieges with more than enough patients to make regular hours exhausting in themselves, the refusal to open the door does not seem particularly portentous.
Yet again, Belgium has passed over the latest film from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, “The Unknown Girl,” which played in competition at Cannes and will screen at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival. Instead, Belgium is submitting rookie director Robin Pront’s “The Ardennes,” a robbery-gone-wrong thriller that debuted at last year’s TIFF in the Discovery program and has been nominated for 10 Ensor Awards (September 16). It also made the shortlist for the European Film Awards.
I strongly urge New Yorkers to see “Merci, Patron”, a laugh-out-loud radical French documentary that has the power of a Molotov cocktail.
Described by the FIAF (French Institute Alliance Française) publicist as a Michael Moore-inspired documentary that “takes on the fashion industry, globalization, and the richest man in France in an entertaining, personal look at one of today’s biggest issues”, it will be screened one night only on Thursday, December first at 7:30pm in FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street (between Madison & Park).
Yes, it is inspired by Michael Moore but only so far. There is an obvious similarity to “Roger and Me” since the film starts off with Fakir journalist François Ruffin trying to meet Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH—the luxury goods conglomerate that originally started as a merger of Louis Vuitton and Moet Hennessy but grew to include many other products marketed to the wealthy. Like Roger Smith, Arnault gives Ruffin the cold shoulder.
One of the companies LVMH absorbed was Kenzo, which like nearly all the takeovers engineered by Arnault resulted in French workers being fired and production moved to low-wage Poland. Ruffin hones in on a group of workers in northern France who were made redundant in the Kenzo takeover. Like the auto workers in Flint, they are facing a grim future—particularly Serge Klur and his wife Jocelyn, a late middle aged couple. They have been reduced to penury and are in danger of losing the house they have lived in for thirty years.
The film revolves around Ruffin working with the Klurs to extort money from Arnault to put it bluntly. Unless he pays them the money they need to pay for their house and to help Serge get a permanent job, they will send letters to newspapers and left politicians bringing attention to their plight, making him look like a greedy bastard. Not only that, they will crash one of his glitzy fashion shows with workers from Goodyear, who were notorious for battling the cops in an effort to save 1,200 jobs in 2013.
Any resemblance between Ruffin and Moore is purely coincidental. It has not only never occurred to Moore to use a film as a tool for workers struggles; he continues to think in utopian terms about how the USA can become more like the “enlightened” French. In his 2015 “Where to Invade Next”, Moore interviews French children who are eating a healthy free lunch and asks the question why can’t the USA do the same. Needless to say, Moore has never paid attention to people like the Klurs nor taken his camera crew to the Calais Jungle where refugees were trying desperately to reach England.
Moore had high hopes for Barack Obama, who he obviously believed would become the European social democrat Fox News warned future Trump voters about. Ruffin has no such illusions. In one telling scene, he shows France’s Obama—the arch-neoliberal François Hollande—surrounded by LVMH executives in some publicity event flattering those who have imposed austerity on the French working class. He states that there is not much the Klurs can expect from the likes of Hollande.
Ruffin has little in common with the pro-Democratic Party comedians like Moore or the sorry lot that are seen each night on Comedy Central or HBO. He is an editor at Fakir magazine, one that I had not heard about previously. The money to make the film came from Fakir subscribers. Maybe Jacobin could think in terms of using its expanding empire to fund similar efforts.
Some commentators credit “Merci, Patron” as inspiring the Nuit debout movement, a protest against legislation designed to make the French labor market more “flexible”. Arnault, who is the richest man in France and the 12th richest person in the world, clearly understood what he was up against when he stated the following about the film: “LVMH is the illustration, the incarnation of the worst, according to these extreme leftist observers, of what the market economy produces.” If there’s hope for the French, let’s hope for ourselves as well.
Just by coincidence, two documentaries about people with Asperger Syndrome premiered this November. Showing through December 1 at the Metrograph in New York, “Off the Rails” is a portrait of Darius McCollum, an African-American famous (or infamous to the authorities) for commandeering NY’s subway trains and buses, often under the assumed identity of an MTA employee. There is also “Asperger’s Are Us” that can be seen on ITunes and Amazon. It follows four young men with Asperger’s who perform together as a comedy group and who were initially drawn together because telling jokes was one of the ways they could break out of their isolation. In an odd way, McCollum’s obsession with trains was his way of connecting with people, especially when one of his joy rides would make the front-page news. Perhaps joy ride is not the right term since McCollum’s sole interest was in following MTA regulations to the letter, often more conscientiously than any employee.
It was nearly 35 years ago when New Yorkers learned of McCollum’s maiden voyage in the NY Times:
RIDERS UNAWARE AS BOY, 15, OPERATES IND TRAIN
By WOLFGANG SAXON
Published: January 31, 1981
A 15-year-old Queens boy took over the controls of a subway train Thursday night and operated it as its passengers rode unaware for six stops from 34th Street to the World Trade Center, transit authorities reported.
Both the boy and the motorman were arrested. The motorman, Carl Scholack, 46, said he had permitted the boy to take the throttle because he had become ”violently ill,” according to officials. He was suspended from duty pending an investigation.
The train set out from 179th Street in Jamaica on the IND’s E line at 11:25 P.M. with Mr. Scholack in charge, the police said. They said Mr. Scholack, who has been with the Transit Authority for 13 years, told them he had let the youth take over alone at 34th Street, having tested his ability over a two-stop stretch in Queens.
The idea, investigators said, was for the boy to guide the train, which was carrying about a dozen passengers, to the Chambers Street/World Trade Center terminal. He was then to start the return run to Jamaica with Mr. Scholack waiting at 34th Street to resume control.
Officials declined to identify the youth, but other sources named him as Darius McCollum of South Jamaica, a student at a technical school. Officials said his parents had previously asked to have him declared a juvenile in need of supervision. He reportedly picked up a knowledge of subway equipment and signals while ”hanging out” at the Jamaica yards.
If this was his only arrest, he might have been a footnote but as soon as he got out of jail, he surrendered to his obsession many times to the point where he would end up spending half his life behind bars.
Except for appearances by sympathetic lawyers, psychiatrists and social workers who have been involved professionally keeping him out of jail, McCollum is on camera explaining how became so inexplicably devoted to assuming the identity of a subway or bus operator. You’d think that if you were facing five years in Sing Sing, it would be for robbing a bank and not doing the kind of work that made Ralph Kramden miserable for free.
McCollum is a genial sort who does not seem that troubled by all the years he has spent in penitentiaries. Like a drug offender who has just been released from prison, he always returns to the habit that cost him his freedom. Is it possible that he only feels free when he is operating a subway train or bus?
Like drug addicts, there was never any reason to lock McCollum up since he was suffering from a mental illness that compelled him to return to the scenes of his crimes. In the United States today, the prisons are filled with drug addicts and the mentally ill—a symptom of a society in terminal decay. After one of his releases, McCollum landed an internship working for the MTA museum in New York and was doing an exceptional job—no surprise given his encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s transportation system. As soon as the MTA found out, they told the museum to fire him. Once he lost that connection, it was inevitable that he would begin taking over trains and buses again. So, who is mentally ill? McCollum or the men in suits who were ready to crucify him? That is the question posed by this compelling documentary.
Unlike Darius McCollum, the four men in “Asperger’s Are Us” live fairly conventional lives as the children of white middle-class New England suburbanites. They met more than a decade ago at a camp for children with Asperger’s and discovered that they all liked to make jokes.
Like McCollum, there is not much in the way they speak or behave that would give you the impression that they were on the autism spectrum except for those moments when they get stressed out. When they are rehearsing at one of their homes, the youth who lives there begins to pace nervously because his parents are there. Like most people with Asperger’s, he is not comfortable with intimacy. In another scene, we see his father touching him affectionately in the kitchen—something that it took a long time for him to accept.
The film follows the four around as they rehearse for their yearly theatrical appearance that shows the influence of Monty Python. They readily admit that they are indifferent to the audience response since their real goal is to bond with each other doing what they enjoy. As they laugh at each other’s antics, you would mistake them for any four undergrads, which in fact is what they are or will become. One of them has been accepted into a year-long program at Oxford and we learn in the closing credits that he won an award for his academic performance. He is now working on a PhD on the Nordic model for combatting sex trafficking.
Ironically, one of them has the same obsession with trains as McCollum but was able to put it to productive use. His hobby, which involved gaining a detailed knowledge of the national train network, led to him work on a master’s degree in transportation planning.
Both films will help you understand Asperger’s better even if both lack the talking head expertise of psychiatrists. A quick look on the Internet revealed that there are some well-known people with the illness (if you want to call it that) including Dan Ackroyd.
Considered a milder autism spectrum disorder (ASD), it differs from others by allowing relatively normal language and intelligence. It is estimated that 31 million people suffer from Asperger’s globally and there is no “cure” as such. Wikipedia states: “Some researchers and people on the autism spectrum have advocated a shift in attitudes toward the view that autism spectrum disorder is a difference, rather than a disease that must be treated or cured.”
As is the case with cancer, some experts believe that environmental factors have led to an increase in the number of all autism cases, including Asperger’s. Given the drift of late capitalism, you can be assured that the environmental factor will multiply exponentially as corporations seek profits over well-being. That’s the real madness when you stop and thing about it.
Last night the African Diaspora International Film Festival (NYADIFF) opened in New York City. Based on the three films I had an opportunity to see in advance, I strongly urge you to visit their website and look for schedule information for those and other films that are intended to present such “films to diverse audiences, redesign the Black cinema experience, and strengthen the role of African and African descent directors in contemporary world cinema” as the organizers put it.
If you were like most on the left, including me, the idea of a biopic about Toussaint Louverture would be inextricably linked to a project associated with Danny Glover after he received $18 million from Hugo Chavez in 2006 to begin such a project. From the looks of http://www.louverturefilms.com/, it appears that the film will never be made since in Glover’s words the company started with Chavez’s money is now dedicated to a somewhat different agenda:
Louverture Films produces independent films of historical relevance, social purpose, commercial value and artistic integrity. Taking its name and inspiration from the leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture – famous for always creating an “opening” in the face of enormous obstacles – Louverture Films partners with progressive filmmakers and producers around the world and particularly from the global South, and pro-actively supports the employment and training of cast and crew from communities of color in the United States.
As it happens, you can still see a biopic about the man whose feats CLR James celebrated in “The Black Jacobins” as part of the NYADIFF. Made for French TV in a two-part series in 2012 and directed by Phillipe Niang, a Frenchman of Senegalese heritage, this is a tightly paced historical drama with excellent performances that should be on the “must see” list of anybody trying to understand the difficulties of the colonial revolution. In many ways, the struggle led by Toussaint Louverture prefigured the chaos in Syria today with its intractable divisions and meddling by outside powers.
Niang could have easily made a film that was 1800 minutes long rather than 180 and it still would have only scratched the surface of the Haitian revolution—or more properly speaking the one that occurred on the western half of the island called Hispaniola that was divided between Spanish and French rule. Known as Saint-Domingue, it was the Pearl of the Antilles to the French and just as key to the mother country’s prosperity as Jamaica was to the British.
When the rebellion began in 1791, Louverture made tactical alliances first with the Spanish and then with the French but only in the interests of the underlying principle of abolishing slavery. Jimmy Jean-Louis, a Haitian actor who turns in a tour de force performance of Louverture, is adept at portraying the complex relationship between his character and all the elites he is forced to compromise with in order to achieve his ultimate goal. Not only does he have to deal with outside powers, he has to balance clashing interests in Saint-Domingue, including those of the slaves, the Mulattos (the term used by the characters in the film as was the case historically) and the white plantation owners—some of whom were British.
Since this is a biopic, Niang used a narrative device that ties together all of the important stages of Louverture’s struggle against slavery. Jailed in France, he is visited by Pasquier, a cop sent by Bonaparte to find out where he has supposedly buried a vast treasure accumulated during his brief rule. This entails recording the details of Louverture’s life in the hopes of finally finding out the secret hiding place of the treasure, which eventually leads to a Citizen Kane Rosebud type ending.
Sitting in his cold cell, the ailing ex-General tells his life story that function as a series of flashbacks in the film. Most of it is true, even though it hardly conforms to the image that most of us have of Toussaint Louverture. I found myself consulting “The Black Jacobins” throughout the film just to make sure that Niang wasn’t making things up.
For example, in part one we see Louverture serving as a junior officer to Georges Biassou, an early leader of the revolt who is depicted in the film as a capricious drunk. Even if Niang’s portrait was overdrawn, James described him this way: “Biassou was a fire-eater, always drunk, always ready for the fiercest and most dangerous exploits.”
If there’s any value to Niang’s film, it is that it will spur audience members to study Haitian history, starting with CLR James’s classic. I plan to read it as soon as I can since its account of events in Louverture’s reign jibes with the film, as far as I can tell from a brief foray into “The Black Jacobins”. If you had the idea that James’s classic was some kind of hagiography, you will learn that for him Louverture was a combination of Trotsky and Stalin.
In part two of the film, we see Louverture—now a governor who has declared himself President for Life—inviting plantation owners back to Haiti and imposing forced labor on the former slaves after the fashion of the American south following the end of Reconstruction. As was the case in the cotton belt, former slaves in Haiti preferred to work on their own small plots rather than pick sugar cane. The film depicts Louverture directing his soldiers to impose labor discipline on a white-owned plantation. James writes:
His regulations were harsh. The labourers were sent to work 24 hours after he assumed control of any district, and he authorised the military commandants of the parishes to take measures necessary for keeping them on the plantations. The Republic, he wrote, has no use for dull or incapable men. It was forced labour and restraint of movement. But the need brooked no barriers.
His nephew Moïse, whose mother was killed by white rapists, was much more like the Louverture of our imagination. Played effectively by Giovanni Grangerac, he is constantly pressuring his uncle from the left—a Jacobin to his uncle’s Girondist in effect. Fed up by the refusal of Louverture to go “all the way”, he leads a Nat Turner type revolt that eventually is crushed by Louverture’s troops and lands him in front of a firing squad. James writes about Moïse’s resistance:
And in these last crucial months, Toussaint, fully aware of Bonaparte’s preparations, was busy sawing off the branch on which he sat. In the North, around Plaisance, Limb, Dondon, the vanguard of the revolution was not satisfied with the new regime. Toussaint’s discipline was hard, but it was infinitely better than the old slavery. What these old revolutionary blacks objected to was working for their white masters. Moïse was the Commandant of the North Province, and Moïse sympathised with the blacks. Work, yes, but not for whites. “Whatever my old uncle may do, I cannot bring myself to be the executioner of my colour. It is always in the interests of the metropolis that he scolds me; but these interests are those of the whites, and I shall only love them when they have given me back the eye that they made me lose in battle.”
Although I can recommend seeing this film without reservations, I would be remiss if I did not mention the highly critical review by historian Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall. Titled “Happy as a Slave: The Toussaint Louverture miniseries”, her article regards it as “well-intentioned” but bordering on Margaret Mitchell territory:
While Niang likely did not realize he was doing so, the film papers over the brutality of slavery. Violence against slaves is almost non-existent. Even in isolated instances (such as an invented scene where Toussaint’s chained father drowns; another where his invented sister reports being raped; and another in which mob of angry colons chases Toussaint), the film is quick to contrast bad whites with kindly slave-owners. Whippings are completely absent; work on the plantation looks peaceful and bucolic.
Yes, all this is true but one-sided. Niang probably didn’t see the need to portray slavery as brutal since this would have been assumed at the outset. Instead the focus is on Louverture’s heroic struggle to abolish slavery and to win independence for his nation against what turned out to be insurmountable odds. I say this on the day that Fidel Castro died, a man that CLR James would have likely regarded as the Toussaint Louverture of the 20th century.
On the surface, “Seasons of a Life” sounds like a Lifetime movie. A lawyer and his wife are dealing with her inability to become pregnant and adopt a baby boy. To help the couple raise him, they hire a sixteen-year-old nanny—a poor orphan–who the boy adores.
So does the husband but on a different basis. When the wife takes a business trip, he forces himself sexually on the nanny and continues to do so whenever the wife is away. This leads to her becoming pregnant and a refusal to have an abortion that the lawyer insists on her having. After the baby boy is born, he applies pressure once again on the vulnerable young woman to put the baby up for adoption that he will have first dibs on through prior agreement with the adoption agency’s chief.
The nanny in Horatio Alger fashion gets great grades in high school and wins a scholarship to college and then into law school. Once she is established, she shows up at the man’s home and announces that she plans to sue him for custody of her child.
This is not exactly a film I would have sought out but since it was made in Malawi by a Malawian director, I decided to watch it and am damned glad I did. This is a film that will tell you far more about the ascending middle class in Africa than any Thomas Friedman column plus it is a well-written and well-acted old fashioned tale of the sort that might have starred Bette Davis. Strongly recommended.
Finally there is “Youssou N’Dour: Return to Gorée” that chronicles the great Senegalese singer’s attempt to bond with African-American musicians in a kind of pilgrimage to the New World.
Located near Dakar, Senegal, the island of Gorée was one of West Africa’s major slavery depots. The film begins with N’Dour reflecting on the great injustice done to his homeland and his hopes for a new project involving various musicians whose ancestors might have departed from this terrible place. He will visit the New World to gather together a diverse group of musicians who share a common identification with Mother Africa.
After being joined in Senegal by his pianist Moncef Genoud, a blind Frenchman born in Tunisia, the two depart for the U.S.-the first stop Atlanta, Georgia. There they meet the Harmony Harmoneers, a local gospel group that he watches performing in church. Despite his affinity for their music, he stresses the need to avoid references to Jesus in their performances together. The songs that he is recruiting fellow African descendants to sing with him have to do with children getting a good education, not being saved by Jesus. Without making any obvious points about their religious differences, we see Youssou praying toward Mecca in his hotel room later.
Next stop is New Orleans, where N’Dour looks up drummer Idris Muhammad and bass player James Cammack. Muhammad, a devout Muslim like N’Dour, is like a number of American jazz musicians who were drawn to a religion in which racial discrimination does not tend to rear its ugly head. The enlarged group now wends its way to New York, where they pick up jazz vocalist Pyeng Threadgill, who is the daughter of avant-garde musician Henry Threadgill. A reception for Youssou N’Dour includes a special guest, Amiri Baraka, who reflects on the importance of African identity for him when he became politicized in the 1960s.
Ultimately the musicians arrive back in Dakar where they hear a local griot lecture on the injustices committed at Gorée. Idris Muhammad and Pyeng Threadgill are shown bonding with local musicians and ordinary citizens.
Throughout the film, we see Youssou N’Dour in performance in a setting somewhat different from the customary Afropop context. He has obviously developed a new affinity for jazz and meshes well with his ad hoc band gathered together for the occasion. The band is eventually joined by the Harmony Harmoneers in a performance that illustrates how music is the universal vocabulary of humanity.
When I posted my movie consumer’s guide for 2012, among the recommended films was “Sleepwalk With Me”, a quirky “indie” film based on the real life career of Mike Birbiglia, a self-deprecating, mildly amusing standup comedian who is a sleepwalker. Among the things we learn about him in this modest work is that unless he spends the night in a sleeping bag atop a bed, there is a chance that he might walk out a second story window as he once did.
After getting an invitation from a publicist to see his latest film “Don’t Think Twice”, I was eager to see it based on his earlier work. On one level, it is the same kind of breezy entertainment as “Sleepwalk With Me” but on a higher level it is a dark and deeply perceptive meditation on the phenomenon that William James described in a letter to H.G. Wells in 1906: “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.”
Birbiglia stars as Miles, the founder and director of an improvisational comedy group called The Commune that performs in a theater named Improv for America. While there is nothing overtly political about the group’s performances, their improvisational techniques suggest a certain kind of value system familiar to those of us who lived through the 60s:
1/ Say Yes: Always accept your partner’s cue on stage to move the improvisation forward.
2/ It’s All About the Group: The individual is subordinate to the collective performance. Stardom is frowned upon.
3/ Don’t Think: This is about getting out of your head and acting on your impulses. It is also a reference to the film’s title, one of Bob Dylan’s most famous songs that we hear in the closing credits of the film.
Two documentaries under consideration here are devoted to the careers of exceptionally talented men. “Mifune: The Last Samurai” that opens at the IFC Center in New York on Friday is as much a documentary on director Akira Kurosawa since most of Mifune’s career entailed starring in Kurosawa’s films such as “Seven Samurai”, “Rashomon”, et al. “Magnus”, that opened last week at the Village East theater and that unfortunately I did not have a chance to review until now, will be playing for another week. It traces the career of Magnus Carlsen, the number one chess player in the world today and perhaps the greatest ever. With both Mifune and Carlsen, there’s not much to say about them as human beings outside of their mastery of their respective crafts. But if you like me are passionate about film and chess, they offer great pleasure.
Both Mifune and Kurosawa were swept into the net of Japanese militarism during WWII, an inevitable fate for nearly all Japanese men. The son of a photographer, Mifune served in an aerial photography unit of the air force where he took photos of Kamikaze pilots. For his part, Kurosawa made propaganda films during the war. When the war ended, Mifune was desperate to find work in a ravaged country. His parents had been killed during the war but he had no idea how, when or where. Trying to exploit the photography skills he had acquired during the war, he applied for a job as a cameraman at Toho studios but because his application had been misfiled, he was funneled into a room where actors were auditioning for a “new faces” competition. Among the judges was Akira Kurosawa who was taken aback by Mifune who performed with abandon without having any training as an actor. He described him as “a young man reeling around the room in a violent frenzy … it was as frightening as watching a wounded beast trying to break loose. I was transfixed.” Mifune lost the competition but Kurosawa found himself a new leading man.
Kurosawa was born in 1910 and his father came from a long line of samurai. Although Japan had long dispensed with feudalism, his father was steeped in samurai culture and liked to walk around the house wearing traditional garb with his hair in the distinctive topknot. He ran a gymnasium and built the first indoor swimming pool in Japan. He also worked to popularize baseball in Japan. The young Akira Kurosawa was not particularly athletic and found himself more attracted to the graphic arts.
Before the Japanese state had converted itself into an authoritarian war machine, Kurosawa traveled in CP circles as a youth. Some of his early student works were “socialist realism” exercises. After WWII began, he went to work in the Japanese film industry turning out propaganda films that glorified test pilots and female factory workers. One assumes that his early training in socialist realism acquitted him well, just as it did American CP’ers in the film industry.
Kurosawa was extremely rueful about his role in all this. Perhaps shame motivated his desire to create a new kind of film for postwar Japan, one that would criticize a society that had become adrift. Although it no longer celebrated martial values, it still lacked a higher purpose. His youthful leftist beliefs combined with his family’s aristocratic sense of ‘noblesse oblige’ led to the creation of distinctly Kurosawan type of film, one in which a lone individual struggled to define a personal ethos against a callous and self-centered society.
Toshiro Mifune was perfectly suited to playing such roles. Director Steven Okazaki has masterfully assembled some of the greatest moments of Mifune performances in Kurosawa films and provided commentary on them from film scholars and directors Stephen Spielberg and Martin Scorsese who revered the Mifune-Kurosawa tandem as I did when I first saw “Yojimbo” as a Bard College freshman in 1961.
You also hear from actors who performed alongside Mifune and members of the production staff who have fond memories of the actor who was charismatic both on and off the set. There’s not much to say about him as human being except that he liked to drink and drive fast cars, sometimes at the same time. Like Magnus Carlsen, he was something of a cipher when he was not performing.
Like Kurosawa, Mifune’s career took a nose dive after the Japanese film industry became transformed in the 1970s. Influenced by Hong Kong cinema, the typical character was a yakuza or a cop. Like the Hollywood western, the samurai film had gone out of fashion even if arguably the modern western film was influenced heavily by Kurosawa films, especially “The Magnificent Seven” that was a remake of “Seven Samurai”. The Spaghetti Western also paid tribute to Kurosawa and Mifune in Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars”, a remake of “Yojimbo”.
After Kurosawa and Mifune parted ways, Mifune became a studio executive churning out forgettable samurai movies for the movie theater and television. He also made occasional appearances in American movies such as “1941”, Stephen Spielberg’s neglected comic masterpiece about the mounting hysteria over a feared Japanese invasion.
Like just about every narrative film or documentary I have ever seen about chess, there is zero explanation of the games that take place in “Magnus”. I doubt that anybody who has never played chess would want to see “Magnus” but for a patzer like me, there was some disappointment in seeing the film conforming to norms. There is not much drama in the furrowed brow of a Magnus Carlsen or a Viswanathan “Vishy” Anand, who Carlsen unseated in the 2013 world championship match but perhaps it would be too much to expect for commentary on the games since they are conducted at such a high level.
All that being said, I found the film engrossing since in his own way Carlsen is as compelling a personality as the certifiably insane Bobby Fischer. Born into a middle-class Norwegian family, he is described as introspective and lost in thought as a young boy. When his father bought him a children’s atlas, he sank deeply into the book’s statistics such as population and land mass. In some ways, he might appear as someone with Asperger’s but in nearly all respects he led a normal life except becoming totally consumed by the game of chess.
Tall, well-build and handsome in a sort of gnomish way, Carlsen is a diffident personality with not that much to say outside of chess. This makes him a lot less compelling than Fischer who was aggressively outspoken and paranoiac.
What makes “Magnus” interesting is the contrast it draws between the intuitive style of Carlsen and the highly technical, computer-based game of Vishy Anand. At one point, Carlsen says that he relies on his intuition even to the point of sacrificing a pawn. In all my years of playing chess on my Macbook, I have never won a game after going down a pawn. Indeed, in the two or three thousand games I have played, I have only won about a dozen times.
Anand was the first grandmaster to fully exploit computer chess. The film points out that he used ChessBase to simulate games that helped him to fine tune his tactics, often spending an entire day sitting in front of a computer to work out problems.
Before the match with Carlsen began, he had a team of ten expert players in his entourage simulating games with Carlsen so as to be better prepared for him. That Carlsen managed to win is a vindication of genius over technique even though Anand was a great champion in his time.
Although I enjoyed “Magnus” thoroughly, I am still holding out for a film about chess that can give me as much pleasure as watching this. In the final analysis, the drama in chess is not about the men or women at the board but the board itself.
As I stated in my review of “Barry” on Counterpunch, this is the time I begin to receive those middle-brow films that Hollywood studios submit for consideration to members of New York Film Critics Online for our annual awards meeting in early December. Like “Barry”, “Denial” is just one of those films—a holocaust movie that is inevitably greeted as an object of reverence. It deals with the Deborah Lipstadt-David Irving trial that took place in England twenty years ago and that was now a blur in my mind even if I certainly understood that the film would depict holocaust denier David Irving as a villain. I also understood that he would get his comeuppance in the film just as happened in the actual trial.
My aversion to holocaust movies was like that of British playwright David Hare who once wrote:
I have no taste for Holocaust movies. It seems both offensive and clumsy to add an extra layer of fiction to suffering which demands no gratuitous intervention. It jars. Faced with the immensity of what happened, sober reportage and direct testimony have nearly always been the most powerful approach.
As it happens, David Hare wrote the screenplay for “Denial”. As I will explain, his decision flowed from some very unusual aspects of the trial but before that I should give you some background. Since you are probably aware that Europe has some very stringent laws against holocaust denial, including a three-year prison term that Irving once received in Austria in 1992 (he was released after serving one year), you might assume that it was Irving who was on trial. However, in this instance Lipstadt was the defendant. Irving was suing her and Penguin publishers for libel. Lipstadt’s 1993 “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory” was a scorching rebuttal of Irving and other deniers, including Robert Faurisson who Noam Chomsky defended on a free speech basis.
After Faurisson was relieved of his duties at the University of Lyon, Chomsky signed a petition on his behalf. He argued that if MIT scientists could conduct research even if it was used to “massacre and destroy”, why would the right of a professor to earn a living be denied even if he was guilty of nothing except of defending such practices in his spare time. Going beyond the free speech criterion, Chomsky’s added: “I have nothing to say here about the work of Robert Faurisson or his critics, of which I know very little, or about the topics they address, concerning which I have no special knowledge” raised hackles, as did his characterization of Faurisson as “a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort”.
This led French Marxist antiquities scholar Pierre Vidal-Naquet to write a pointed reply to Chomsky. Even on free speech grounds, he found the petition dubious. It stated that Faurisson had been prevented from conducting research in public libraries and archives, an allegation that Vidal-Naquet found baseless. Furthermore, Faurisson’s books on the holocaust have been published without interference and he has given interviews on two occasions to Le Monde. Addressing Chomsky in sorrow just as much as anger, Vidal-Naquet writes in “Assassins of Memory”:
The simple truth, Noam Chomsky, is that you were unable to abide by the ethical maxim that you had imposed. You had the right to say: my worst enemy has the right to be free, on condition that he not ask for my death or that of my brothers. You did not have the right to say: my worst enemy is a comrade, or a “relatively apolitical sort of liberal.” You did not have the right to take a falsifier of history and to recast him in the colors of truth.
Even though Lipstadt was on trial, she was never called as a witness. Since she was probably the world’s leading expert on holocaust denial, why not call on her expertise? In “Denial”, a book timed to the release of the film that reprises her 2006 “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier” with new material, Hare explains her absence from the witness stand and what challenge that posed to his screenplay. Her lawyers had decided that if she was a witness, Irving would have the license to force her to dredge up rebuttals to every detail of his own toxic take on concentration camp history. Despite her absence from the witness stand, her chief counsel Richard Rampson (played ably by Tom Wilkinson) shredded Irving’s credibility with an obvious mastery of the facts.
For Hare, the facts of the case made it difficult for Rachel Weisz, who was playing Lipstadt, to make a bravura performance in the final scene as we have become accustomed to in courtroom dramas such as Tom Hanks in “Philadelphia” or Gregory Peck in “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Her character—to be honest—was written and directed as if she were an annoying and intrusive presence getting in the way of the defense attorney’s winning strategy. It was also a directorial mistake to have her speak in a grating Queens accent that New Yorkers will be all too familiar with, even if that is the way the real Deborah Lipstadt speaks.
In addition to Rampson, Lipstadt relied on the pro bono services of Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott), who had written “T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form”, a book based on his PhD dissertation. Julius’s degree was in literary theory even though it was pursued more as an avocation than anything else. Played by Andrew Scott as a somewhat imperious figure, he not only opposed Lipstadt taking the stand but having holocaust survivors testify as well. He thought they would be traumatized by Irving’s aggressive and hectoring style.
Irving himself is played against type by Timothy Spall, a British character actor generally assigned likable roles such as the wizard Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter films. It reminded me of Patrick Stewart playing the neo-Nazi gang leader in Jeremy Saulnier’s “The Green Room”. As is generally the case with Spall, his performance was outstanding. He captured Irving’s reptilian character as if he came out of a crocodile’s egg.
I recommend “Denial” without qualifications both for its intrinsic interest as a sober and informed account of a deep-seated malaise that will find fertile ground now that ultraright tendencies are given full rein. It is also a first-rate film benefitting from David Hare’s artistic and political assets. Along with Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, Hare is a voice of the British left theater. In 1983 I saw a performance of his “Plenty” on Broadway about the disillusionment of a woman who had worked for the French Resistance in WWII and who had never adjusted to bourgeois society once returning to civilian life. It is the greatest play I ever had the pleasure of seeing on Broadway.
A Guardian review of his lecture collection titled “Obedience, Struggle and Revolt” notes:
The title of the volume comes from a Balzac quotation, listing the three paths in life available to the young. Obedience, he said, is dull, revolt is impossible and struggle is hazardous. Of those outcomes, it is clear that Hare fears dullness the most. He grew up in the 1950s, an era ‘stupefyingly uninteresting and conformist’. Hare’s commitment to forging social change, while fed by left-wing doctrine along the way, was clearly born of revulsion at the torpor of postwar Britain. Nothing is more dangerous in his eyes than the ease with which our society slips back to a default position of supine deference to the establishment.
Notwithstanding Marine Le Pen’s banishing her father from the National Front for holocaust denial and other anti-Semitic affronts that undermine her ambitions to rule France, such views are still promoted by Jobbik in Hungary. The UKIP in Great Britain has formed a bloc with Polish holocaust deniers to secure seats in the European Parliament.
Despite Putin’s reaching out to groups like Jobbik and UKIP, he has criminalized holocaust denial in Russia. His close ally Boris Spiegel introduced the bill that became law in 2013. One might consider Spiegel’s understanding of genocide as flawed based on his accusing Georgia of this crime during the 2008 South Ossetia War, another one of those flare-ups in which the Kremlin reasserts its imperial privileges.
As for Trump, who is America’s version of UKIP’s Nigel Farage, he never tweeted anything in this vein as far as I know but his foreign policy adviser Joseph Schmitz has a thing about Jews. McClatchy reported that he bragged about forcing Jews to leave the Pentagon when he was Inspector General between 2002 and 2005. He also claimed that concentration camp ovens were too small to kill 6 million Jews, per John Crane, a Pentagon official who worked with Schmitz. (The ovens were used for getting rid of corpses, not as a way of creating them.)
Probably the worst offender was Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who convened a conference on the holocaust in 2006 with invited “experts” such as David Duke and Robert Faurisson. Long before Iran intervened on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, this act was sufficient to force me to break ranks with the Islamic Republic that was being lauded as “more socialist” than Venezuela by MRZine’s Yoshie Furuhashi.
Speaking of socialism and holocaust denial, I ran into an appalling defense of David Irving on the alt.politics.socialism.trotsky (APST) newsgroup in 1998 when it was well on the way to having nothing to do with Trotskyism. A character named Neil Gardner, who claimed to support Trotsky’s Marxism, was using APST to defend Irving, Leuchter, Faurisson et al:
All dangerous authoritarian tendencies are imposed from the top down. We live in a chaotic world in which it is all too easy to misjudge events and media accounts. Degenerate tendencies within society are merely manipulated by those in power to further their ends. Neo-Nazism is a dead duck because the US and German ruling classes have for the last 50 years collaborated. Maybe we should be criticising the Germans for being too apologetic of US foreign policy. Racism and interethnic tensions remain a real threat, although we would be foolish to ignore the transformation of Western European and North American societies since the 1950’s. We are all human beings. Today the racism exhibited by our ruling class is no longer based on the colour of one’s skin (though most Blacks and Asians in the world are still significantly poorer than most Whites) but on cultural superiority. All is forgiven if one accepts American ways and believes the mainstream US media.
As the ruling class approaches a crisis of values, advocating free market economics and relentless growth and prosperity for all with obvious contradictions, fringe rightwing sects of the disillusioned millionaires begin to fill gaps but will never be embraced by international capitalism until it breaks down into warring gangs. The likes of the ADL and B-naith have everything in common with rightwing white supremacists. Their methods are the same.
In this entangled web, we should cherish free speech and open debate on all subjects. Religious fervour should be used to uphold poltically motivated propaganda. Not for the first time, the ruling classes cloak their devious actions with pseudo-progressive actions. Bombs on Afghanistan are justified by the repression of women by the Taleban. Bombs on Sudan are justified by the repression of Christian Sudanese.
Whether Fred Leuchter is a qualified bio-chemist or not, is not the issue. His thesis has not been conclusively refuted and no irrefutable evidence of the alleged gas chambers have been provided.
Before rendering my own opinion on holocaust denial, it is worth clarifying Lipstadt’s views on holocaust denial. To start with, she is opposed to all bans on its advocacy and argues that it is necessary to combat the ideas rather than making them illegal. And even more importantly, she has lashed out at Israel for using the holocaust as a justification for its persecution of the Palestinians.
Speaking to a synagogue in London in 2014, Lipstadt told the audience uncomfortable truths as reported in the Camden New Journal:
IF there is one thing the eminent world Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt isn’t – she isn’t a dry-as-dust academic.
She is not afraid of causing waves as she showed in the last few minutes of a question-and-answer session at the packed Hampstead Synagogue in West Hampstead, on Thursday when she criticised Israel over its conduct of its war on Gaza.
The professor told the more than 300 guests – among them many leading members of the Jewish community, including survivors of the Holocaust – that the Israel government had “cheapened” the memory of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews by using it to justify the war on the Palestinians. She also seemed to liken the war as an act of “genocide” against the Palestinians.
Although I believe it is important to challenge holocaust deniers as I did on APST, there is little reason to believe that people such as David Irving constitute an existential threat to Jews. Unlike the 1930s, it is the Arab and the Muslim who will be scapegoated by the ultraright as the forces of reaction grow stronger.
Last Tuesday Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a key member of Trump’s transition team who helped write racist immigration laws in Arizona and elsewhere, stated that they had discussed creating a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.
Meanwhile Carl Higbie, a former spokesman for a major super PAC backing Donald Trump said on the following day that the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was a “precedent” for the president-elect’s plans to create a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.
This led Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), to denounce the Trump proposal: “I pledge to you that because I am committed to the fight against anti-Semitism that if one day Muslim-Americans are forced to register their identities, that is the day this proud Jew will register as Muslim. Making powerful enemies is the price one must pay, at times, for speaking truth to power.”
This led Morton A. Klein, the leader of the Zionist Organization of America, to defend Trump as a friend of Israel and to take exception to Greenblatt’s attack on Steve Bannon as an anti-Semite and implicitly his opposition to the idea of registering Muslim immigrants:
It is painful to see Anti-Defamation League (ADL) president Jonathan Greenblatt engaging in character assassination against President-elect Trump’s appointee Stephen Bannon and Mr. Bannon’s company, Breitbart media. ADL/Greenblatt essentially accused Mr. Bannon and his media company of “anti-Semitism” and Israel hatred, when Jonathan Greenblatt/ADL tweeted that Bannon “presided over the premier website of the ‘alt right’ – a loose-knit group of white nationalists and anti-Semites.”
As someone who has been critical of the ADL, particularly when Abraham Foxman was running the group, I am willing to let bygones be bygones if Greenblatt continues his attack on the alt-right administration that while not likely to repeat the Third Reich despite its worst intentions still promises to be the most reactionary gang running the government in American history.
In the next four years, the assaults on democratic rights and the rights of minorities to live without fear from an out-of-control government will bring together many individuals and groups that have never had anything in common before. It will be incumbent on the left to think creatively about the kind of united front that eventually forced the USA to pull out of Vietnam—of course in common with the resistance itself. The Trump gang is utterly counter-revolutionary and it is up to us to forge a united revolutionary front that can stop it in its tracks.
