Why'd it have to be snakes?

Some things I enjoy now were acquired tastes. Horror, for example, I mostly disliked throughout my formative years. But I've loved globe-trotting adventures since I was little. I grew up reading Verne, Stevenson, May and Haggard, even though I didn't realise the horrid colonial subtext at the time. So when I first watched the Indiana Jones films - late: around the time the retroactively reviled Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out - I enjoyed them tremendously.

So I was pretty delighted when the local semi-arthouse cinema did a one-off screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). The first of the Lucas-Spielberg films involving Harrison Ford's adventurer archaeologist had been the one I enjoyed least (except for that belated fourth film, which nobody seems to count): I knew it was good, but the earlier incarnation of the franchise couldn't quite match the finely honed machine of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). So I watched it again, had an enormous amount of fun and left with a furrowed brow over all the problematic stuff in it.

Set in 1936, the film opens as Dr Henry 'Indiana' Jones (Harrison Ford) is exploring an ancient site somewhere in South America. Improvising his way around wicked traps, Indy manages to snag a golden idol despite the treachery of a local hired hand (Alfred Molina). He promptly finds himself relieved of his prize by his rival, the ruthless French archaeologist Belloq (Paul Freeman), barely escaping with his life. Back in the States, Indy is given a new mission by the secret service. It seems that the Nazis are digging in Egypt, having tasked Belloq with finding the Ark of the Covenant. To reveal its exact location, though, they need the Staff of Ra, which is in the possession of Indy's old patron Abner Ravenwood, last known location...

... Nepal, where after Abner's death his daughter Marion (Karen Allen) keeps the headpiece of the staff. The problem: Marion is none too keen on Indy after he broke her heart ten years previously. Fighting for their lives against goons led by giggling Nazi sadist Major Toht (Ronald Lacey), though, does something to repair the lost trust, and the pair make it to Egypt with the staff. There, they link up with local digger Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) to infiltrate the Nazi excavation, and hopefully locate the Ark before the Führer's men do.

What struck me as a tiresome flaw during a recent viewing of Star Trek Into Darkness is a virtue here: Raiders of the Lost Ark is gloriously propulsive, barely letting up from start to finish. Even exposition tends to be loaded with background action: take the dinner at Sallah's, where Spielberg and Lucas throw poisoned dates into an already fun dialogue scene. After the US-bound table-setting the film does not slow down until the dénouement, although Lawrence Kasdan - he of The Empire Strikes Back - is a smart enough writer that by the time the relentless action scenes finally get a little wearying, he switches to a lower gear so that the film's climax is heavy on tension but light on fisticuffs.

The film's idea of appropriate race relations.

The cast is uniformly great. Harrison's perpetually exasperated adventurer archaeologist is of course iconic, played here perhaps with a little more meanness than in subsequent offerings; Denholm Elliott's Marcus Brody is such a delight that it's no surprise Last Crusade expanded his role. I must admit I have a massive fictional-character crush on Allen's Marion, and I hope my judgment is not too terribly clouded by that, but: what a fantastic character! When introduced, at least: Marion drinking a local under the table, then holding her own in a battle against Toht's henchmen is pretty awesome. Unfortunately, Kasdan's screenplay proceeds to defang her. Being put into dresses, in fact, becomes a plot point, and she's an increasingly distressed damsel relying on Indy for rescue and basic common sense.

That's the real problem with Raiders of the Lost Ark: based on 1930s adventure serials, the film somehow sees fit to just bring in all the racism and misogyny of that period instead of challenging it. Marion's demotion is the least of it, alas. The film's racism is ugly and pervasive. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom takes a lot of flak for racism, and deservedly so; but its predecessor is no better by any real yardstick. Its non-white people, to be sure, are not crazed murdering cultists: they are mostly childlike innocents requiring the kind guidance of the white man. A narrative in which white people are masters and Egyptians mere labourers is never seriously challenged (see the image above). Worse, the ambiguous South Americans are treacherous, lazy and cowardly and, in the case of the indigenous warriors Belloq has allied himself with, primitive and superstitious. It's totally unnecessary and leaves a terrible aftertaste.

Despite that, too, being mostly associated with its immediate successor, Raiders is pretty brutal, featuring multiple unpleasant deaths, mostly bloodless though they may be (and in one infamous scene involving a Nazi bare-knuckle boxer and an aeroplane propeller, it's decidedly not bloodless). There's violence against animals as well, including a whole mess of snakes being doused with petrol and set on fire, and an unfortunate monkey. It's better than an Italian cannibal film inasmuch as it's not real, I suppose, but far from pleasant or called for. Like Tintin in the Congo, Raiders presents the killing of animals is harmless entertainment, and the thought that it might be something else never crosses the film's mind.

If that doesn't sour your appreciation, though, Raiders of the Lost Ark is overflowing with joys. Norman Reynolds's production design is just wonderful: the Ark marries an ancient feel with art-déco chic in just the right way, while the South American temple is a laundry list of wonderfully executed tropes. (Who doesn't love ancient traps?) More than anything, it shows what the people involved were best at: Spielberg, at being the greatest blockbuster director of his generation; Kasdan, at marrying drama and action-comedy; and Lucas, at taking a step back and using his genius for production without directing himself, a lesson he sadly did not heed in later years (see also: Jackson, Peter).

It's such a delightful film that its less savoury aspects are a whole lot easier to overlook than they might be. With the double-whammy of Empire and Raiders, Kasdan clearly had a winning streak in the first half of the eighties (even Return of the Jedi, weighed down by merchandise-friendly teddy bears and material rehashed from Star Wars, is ultimately well-written, devastatingly so in some scenes). Raiders of the Lost Ark is tremendously good fun: populist but not stupid, hilarious without being tasteless, and action-packed without directing that violence at the audience in the manner of twenty-first-century action films.

Remove all the bars that keep us apart

I wish  I knew how it would feel to be free
I wish I could break all the chains holding me
I wish I could say all the things that  I should say
say 'em loud, say 'em clear
for the whole round world to hear.

I wish I could share all the love that's in my heart
remove all the bars that keep us apart
I wish you could know what it means to be me
Then you'd see and agree
that every man should be free.

I wish I could give all I'm longing to give
I wish I could live like I'm longing to live
I wish that I could do all the things that  I can do
though I'm way overdue I'd be starting anew.

 - Nina Simone 

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, 
   because the LORD has anointed me 
   to proclaim good news to the poor. 
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, 
   to proclaim freedom for the captives 
   and release from darkness for the prisoners, 
 to proclaim the year of the LORD's favour 
   and the day of vengeance of our God, 
to comfort all who mourn, 
  and provide for those who grieve in Zion— 
to bestow on them a crown of beauty 
   instead of ashes, 
the oil of joy 
   instead of mourning, 
and a garment of praise 
   instead of a spirit of despair. 
They will be called oaks of righteousness, 
   a planting of the LORD 
   for the display of his splendour... 

Instead of your shame 
   you will receive a double portion, 
and instead of disgrace 
   you will rejoice in your inheritance. 
And so you will inherit a double portion in your land, 
   and everlasting joy will be yours. 

- Isaiah 61:1-3, 7

The earth a common treasury for all

I believe that the earth was created for all people, not just some. Not just the 'right' people. Not just the people with guns and money. When there is a conflict between the powerful and the disenfranchised, the oppressor and the oppressed - say, coal miners striking for better pay and conditions - there's only one side you can be on without losing your integrity, forever. To be neutral in such a situation is to side with injustice.

Forgive that grandiose introduction, gentle reader. You see, the only grounds on which anyone could criticise Harlan County U.S.A. - indeed, pretty much the film's only feature to have attracted condemnation - is that it refuses to even pretend neutrality in the manner of certain other documentaries: it stands squarely on the side of the miners. But that is a strength, not a weakness. A neutral film about the Harlan County War would be an immoral monstrosity.

Its passionate partisanship is a key part of Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning 1976 documentary, but the film is also an artistic marvel. After a terrific sequence showing the everyday work routine of coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky (Kevin Keating's cinematography in this scene alone would have made him a serious awards contender in a better world), the film's story begins with the miners at the Brookside Mine and Prep Plant affiliating to the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in 1972. The miners demand the same contract other UMWA members enjoy, but Eastover Coal, owned by Duke Power, won't budge. Thus begins an extended strike.

The conflict escalates when the company uses Basil Collins and his hired thugs to keep the road open for scabs by setting up a machine gun and intimidating the pickets with clubs and firearms. Collins is the sort of character who'd have to be invented if he wasn't real: venal, brutish, egotistical and racist, he's exactly the man you want for your dirty work. As one reviewer noted, the film doesn't tell us what became of him: 'I don't say this because I worry about the man's welfare; I just want to know he’s dead so I can sleep at night.'

The sheriff and the courts are on the bosses' side, but the company scores an own goal when a young miner called Lawrence Jones is killed by a shotgun blast, leaving behind a sixteen-year-old wife and five-month-old daughter. (This leads to the film's most harrowing scene, in which a grieving and angry miner points out bits of Jones's brain matter on the asphalt.) Eventually the bosses fold and the Brookside miners get their UMWA contract.

Barbara Kopple and her team lived with miners' families for years, observing almost every aspect of their political organisation. In the cinéma vérité style the film adopts, the camera is not a neutral observer but an active participant; Kopple makes no effort to hide the numerous moments in which her presence affects events, leading, for example, to Collins attempting to conceal a pistol in his trouser pocket. In a celebrated scene, the pickets are attacked before dawn by the gun thugs, shots are fired, and Kopple is pushed to the ground with the camera.

'Know that nigger?', yells Collins in reference to an African-American picket. 'That "nigger" is a better man than you'll ever be', replies a miner. Traditional structures of marginalisation and domination among the strikers break down. 'We done make every colour when we went in; you all be look the same when you came out', says a black miner about the thick layer of coal dust and grime on their faces at the end of a shift. 'We's all brothers when we out', replies his white colleague, and the easy banter and obvious affection between the men gives the lie to the drivel Blue Labour and the Heil feed us about working-class racism.

Not, of course, that all's rosy among the workers. Kopple does not gloss over the internal conflicts and personal recriminations that break out when the going gets tough, but the community emerges strengthened as it is transformed by struggle. Patriarchy takes a back seat when women, who turn out to be more energetic than the men, begin to coordinate the strike. Chain-smoking Sudie Crusenberry, a mother of two whose husband is retired with black lung, reignites the flagging struggle; Lois Scott becomes the effective leader before long, brave enough to face down Collins and his thugs and with righteous wrath to spare.

Even though the strike is victorious, Kopple ends Harlan County U.S.A. on an ambiguous note. As the reform movement within the national leadership of the UMWA crumbles, the miners realise they may be banned from conducting future strikes without approval at the national level. But Kopple's point is that the struggle itself - the Luxemburgian dialectic of spontaneity and organisation we see operating throughout Harlan County U.S.A. - is crucial even when it is defeated. As one of my favourite passages in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath puts it (forgive the gendered language and philosophical idiosyncrasy):

For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back... This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live - for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live - for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know - fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe. (Ch. 14)

Kopple never once abandons her story's particularity for the great forward march of history, but she does focus on the miners' political organisation at the expense of their personal lives. Considering she lived with her subjects, it's remarkable how rarely we see children or the inside of people's homes. There are, instead, a lot of meetings and interviews with several generations of Harlan people, from veterans of the vicious struggles of the 1930s to the teenage wife. 'The union' and solidarity have been fought and died for, and as a result they're deeply embedded.

Life in Harlan was hard even in the 1970s, before Reaganomics took their toll; in the film, the county looks like a third-world enclave inside the West. The legacy of neoliberalism was to bring the Global South home, globalising sharp contrasts between the rich and the poor. Kopple's miners have no confidence in government: they're fully aware that they'll only get what they fight for themselves. Call it all things held in common; call it democracy. Call it freedom: the freedom countless people have fought and died for through the ages, their names forgotten because they robbed, evicted and bombed no-one.

I love you, Dr Zaius

For some reason, 1968 was a standout year for science fiction. It saw the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barbarella (granted, one of these things is not like the other), and it also gave the world a third sci-fi classic: the amazing, entertaining and profound Planet of the Apes, whose glory could not be sullied by inferior sequels.

A bit of sullying was done by Tim Burton's widely disliked 2001 remake, but even that film raked in mountains of cash; and thus it was that 20th Century Fox held on to the franchise rights and eventually put into production a prequel variously titled Caesar, Caesar: Rise of the Apes and Rise of the Apes before being released as Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

That clunky final title proves that Hollywood executives firmly believe that you, gentle reader, are too thick to comprehend precisely which apes they might be talking about; and so we're all on the same page, Sean O'Neal will now explain:

'Not just any apes, mind, but specifically, those apes with the planet - the one from those movies - whose planet will now rise, metaphorically speaking, to replace that earlier, non-ape planet. Of course, none of this would have been necessary had Tony Danza and Danny DeVito not stolen Going Ape! all those years ago.'

The opening sequence prefigures what makes Rise of the Planet of the Apes special. A chimpanzee group is wandering the African jungle, and before we know it they're ambushed by humans; several apes are caught in nets and dragged off. This could be a standard scene, but it's notable for how totally subjectivity is reversed: the chimpanzees are subjects, persons, while the humans are faceless goons; and the visual quotes director Rupert Wyatt lifts from the famous scene of apes on horseback chasing human hunter-gatherers in Planet of the Apes underline the constant dialogue between the prequel and the original.

The captured chimpanzees end up at the labs of the horribly named Gen-Sys corporation, where scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) has just developed a new type of genetic therapy. ALZ-112, which repairs and improves brain function, may prove the longed-for and - hopes Will's boss, Jacobs (David Oyelowo) - lucrative cure for Alzheimer's. Of course, chimpanzees being imprisoned and studied by humans is a neat reversal of the situation Charlton Heston found himself in in the original, but I think 'constant dialogue' above summed it up pretty well.

The study's most promising test subject, a chimpanzee called Bright Eyes (Terry Notary), breaks free, attacks several handlers and, among much destruction, is gunned down by security guards just as Will is presenting his findings to the Board. Obviously, this disaster means no-one will ever fund Will's project again, and the chimpanzee handler, Franklin (Tyler Labine), is told to put down all the apes; but when Franklin discovers that Bright Eyes had given birth just prior to seemingly running amok, he can't bring himself to kill the infant, and Will agrees to take it home.

Not a chimpanzee.

Within a couple of years, the chimpanzee, now named Caesar (Andy Serkis), has grown to maturity. Caesar, having benefited from the gene therapy his mother received while he was still in the womb, exhibits signs of extraordinary intelligence, including sophisticated sign language and a fully developed sense of self. Meanwhile (there's a lot of 'meanwhile' after the first act), Will has been successfully treating his father (John Lithgow) with ALZ-112, stemming the progress of his Alzheimer's, but after a few years antibodies have started developing. Will manages to persuade Jacobs to fund the development of another, better drug.

Meanwhile, Caesar attacks Will's neighbour (Joey Roche) and is confined to a primate shelter run by the pragmatic John Landon (Brian Cox) and his sadistic jerk son Dodge (Draco Malfoy). After having a tough time at first and becoming disillusioned with Will, Caesar eventually escapes, discovers the new ALZ-113 and takes it back to enhance the intelligence of his fellow apes. Who rise.

In truth, the human characters in this film exist for two purposes only: to set the plot in motion, and to react with shock/sympathy/speciesist arrogance to the apes' actions. (It's fitting that the non-human primates are listed first in the credits.) The lead isn't Franco, and it certainly isn't Freida Pinto, whose character is entirely superfluous to the film but exists because she's just so pretty. No, our hero - anti-hero, perhaps, but the film doesn't really make that case - is Caesar, and after the latter two Lord of the Rings films and Peter Jackson's King Kong, everyone knows that if you want your humanoid computer-generated characters portrayed right, you get Andy Serkis.

Serkis gives the best performance in the film, an earnest and subtle portrayal of a person who comes to realise that he has the power to liberate his kind and change the world. He's part Moses, part Che Guevara, and totally awesome. The other actors portraying apes come close, though, creating wonderfully rounded characters like the aggressive alpha male Rocket (Terry Notary again), solitary gorilla Buck (Richard Ridings), Methuselah Koba (Chris Gordon) and gentle orangutan Maurice (Karin Konoval). The last of these is my favourite character in the film, not only because I adore orangutans but also because his name is a shout-out to Maurice Evans, the hero who portrayed the greatest character in the history of cinema: Dr Zaius of the original film.

The best, most humane decision they ever made was not to use a single real ape in filming: every one of them is an actor's motion-capture work rendered in CGI, and it's quite beautiful, including the truly insane amounts of fur they had to create. I've resigned myself to the fact that on a large scale, CGI will never look as real as practical effects, which are real: compare the orcs (latex and make-up) to Gollum (CGI) in the Lord of the Rings films to see the difference. But CGI allows the creation of almost-real-looking things you could never do with old-school effects - and, as in this case, it helps avoid a great deal of unnecessary suffering caused by enslaving our fellow primates to perform for our amusement.

The dialogue Rise of the Planet of the Apes conducts with the original shows, though, how much our perception of great apes has changed in forty-odd years. In one of the film's key lines, Landon tells Will that '[t]hey're not people, you know'. The 1968 film argued that actually, they kind of were people, and how would you like it if someone locked you in a cage and studied you? (The analogy to racial slavery was unmistakeable.) The prequel, by contrast, sets out the apes' irreconcilable strangeness. Where the original's actors portrayed their apes as furry people, in 2011 they're all animal, aggressively physical, dextrous climbers, moving on all fours. (Caesar, of course, mostly walks on his hind legs, marking him as the leader.)

We're less certain of the similarities between us and our closest living relatives now, much more aware that we were and still are projecting aspects of ourselves onto great apes. (We did that even before we knew we have a common ancestor: see the medieval and early modern characterisation of the monkey as a clownish caricature of human beings.) In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, they're fascinating but often strange and violent. Wyatt films them to remind us that, pace decades of juvenile chimpanzees being cute on TV, an adult male of the species can grow 1.7m tall, has the strength of several people, and is prone to solving problems by violence.

It is, I should mention, a gorgeous film. Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie (of the Lord of the Rings films, King Kong, and I Am Legend, proving again the producers knew to get the best people for this project) uses colour to accentuate the apes' personhood at the expense of the literally paler human characters, while Wyatt's direction is brisk and fleet, stylish but not showy, and filled with references to killer animal films from King Kong to The Birds without ever being obnoxiously post-modern. While parts of the film are silly and overblown, certain concessions have to be made to the twenty-first-century blockbuster. Otherwise it's delightfully old-fashioned, entertaining and thoughtful.

In praise of the Red Army

This post touches on a couple of issues regarding the Eastern Front (1941-45) that have irritated me recently. There's a popular perception of the German-Soviet War, refuted in numerous academic works, that runs roughly like this:

(1) Soviet forces overwhelmed the Wehrmacht by sheer numerical superiority: essentially, a four-year zerg rush.
(2) Hitler caused a great number of German setbacks by procrastination, recklessness, and stubbornness (e.g. a fixation on Stalingrad, the failure to cross the Neva in 1941, etc.)
(3) The Western Allies decided the outcome of the war when they invaded Normandy.

In Germany (3) is uncommon thanks to a general awareness that the Eastern Front consumed the vast majority of the war effort. (All my grandparents lost siblings in the Soviet Union; my grandfather fought as part of Army Group North from 1942 to 1945 and was a Russian POW until 1949.) (1) and (2), however, are widespread beliefs.

It's not difficult to see why. When German generals wrote their memoirs in the fifties, they were eager to exculpate themselves from responsibility for total defeat. Instead they blamed Hitler, who was unlikely to find vigorous defenders, and conveniently dead sycophants like Keitel. Of course Hitler was a bad commander-in-chief, terrible both at military judgment and at managing personal relationships with his generals; but in truth a number of people in the OKW would have found themselves with egg on their faces - like Franz Halder, who confidently noted that '[i]t's not too much to say that the campaign against Russia has been won within fourteen days' in July 1941. Collectively, the German generals easily displayed as much arrogance and short-sightedness as the Austrian corporal.

The Soviets, as pictured in German and Anglo-Saxon popular perception, were inferior to the Wehrmacht in everything but numbers. This sort of claim is at least partly a hangover from Nazi war propaganda: what was the Soviet Union but Asia's endless hordes threatening to overwhelm Western civilisation (the line adopted by the Nazis when they attempted to transform an opportunistic war of conquest into a pan-European crusade against 'Bolshevism' in 1942-43)? A few men, hopelessly outnumbered but superior in virtue, natural nobility, as well as technological and operational genius, fighting to the last against slavering barbarians - why, it's exactly the sort of romantic Thermopylae tripe the Nazis loved until the very end (see Kolberg).

In this racist fantasy the Soviets of course had to appear as the direct opposite of the noble Aryan: countless faceless goons (even though, as in the Battle of Kursk, numbers and losses were much more even than is commonly supposed), incapable of anything but mass charges (despite brilliantly executed operations like Operation Uranus and strategic offensives like Operation Bagration), indifferent to losses (there's some truth to this one, owing to the extraordinary situation of the Red Army in 1941-42, but from 1943 the Soviets were much more careful with their manpower), barbaric in their treatment of civilians (ignoring, like all empires, the systematic atrocities the 'civilised' troops committed against the populace).

It goes without saying that the Red Army was the decisive force in the war. Nazi Germany did not fall because it ran out of oil, and certainly not because of the Allied carpet bombing of German civilians: it perished because 80% of its armed forces were engaged and destroyed by the Red Army, and its conquered territories were occupied by the Soviets. In this the USSR was of course helped by supplies provided by the Western Allies; but it was Stavka that in extraordinarily difficult circumstances planned, and millions of Soviet soldiers that executed, the campaigns that brought European fascism to its knees.

In the First World War, Germany defeated the Russian Empire committing only a third of her forces. It's not to excuse Stalinism to note that Uncle Joe's assessment of the need to catch up in industrial development was spot on. By the 1940s the Soviet Union had become an industrial powerhouse. Soviet equipment was often of equal quality (the notorious German realisation, early in the war, that their tanks were inferior to the T-34 was not an isolated incident), but the Nazis' disastrous decision to focus on quality over quantity squandered what technological edge they did have, massively exacerbating the industrial disparity - another instance of Nazi racism digging its own grave.

It's true that in the early phase of the war - roughly, from June 1941 to the second half of 1942 - the Red Army did not have the strategic initiative and, faced with rapidly advancing German armies, indeed attempted to stop the Wehrmacht by resorting to human waves and other desperate tactics. The result, despite intermittent success, is well known: losses so devastating similar tactics could not be contemplated due to manpower depletion alone from 1943 onwards (although Zhukov did some 1941 re-enactment in the 1945 Seelow Heights and Berlin campaigns).

Instead, having recovered from the initial shock, the Soviets relearnt the doctrine of deep battle their theorists had developed in the 1920s and 1930s. Deep battle, superficially similar to 'Blitzkrieg', is designed to break through to an enemy force's rear and occupy its territory. Unlike the Germans' unhealthy obsession with encircling and annihilating enemy forces (a fascination which, while going back to Clausewitz, was certainly favoured by Nazism's prejudices), the Soviet doctrine envisaged not physically destroying an enemy but confusing him, throwing him off-guard, and breaking his ability and will to act at an operational and strategic level.

Early attempts to put deep battle into practice were not unqualified successes, but from Stalingrad onwards the Soviets perfected the strategy, revolutionising the Red Army at every level. It was most impressively displayed in Operation Bagration, launched two weeks after D-Day. The offensive destroyed far more German forces than the Battle of Normandy, brought the Red Army to the borders of the Reich and, most importantly, shattered Army Group Centre and left the Wehrmacht in shambles. Before Bagration, German forces on the Eastern Front had been well-organised; afterwards, the Wehrmacht never achieved the same coherence and was soon forced to throw together Kampfgruppen, improvised formations of whatever was at hand in a sector.

In short, Soviet forces defeated the Wehrmacht because, from late 1942 onwards, they were the better army. Of course numerical superiority, present in most situations, helped, and so did the Soviet Union's greater industrial output. But all this would have counted for nothing had the Soviets not gained the skill necessary to disorganise and defeat the Wehrmacht at a strategic, operational and, yes, tactical level. The stereotype of an ignorant mass driven to the slaughter by callous commissars does a disservice to the bravery, motivation and skill of Soviet soldiers.

Fascism and the EDL

I analyse the ideology of the EDL in Ceasefire:

Paradoxically the EDL not only tolerates, but encourages the participation of fascists, as well as adopting the marching styles and clothing favoured by British and continental neo-fascists. Yet its officials ape the rhetoric of the most successful ‘national-populist’ European parties. In other words, the EDL appears to adopt the garb of fascism but not the substance. Unlike the BNP and most traditional fascist groups, the EDL has no strategy for winning power. It hopes, instead, to influence political elites through highly publicised rallies and marches, and listening to David Cameron it appears they haven’t been entirely unsuccessful.

Why I won't condemn the riots

As unexpected as the riots in England's cities were, the response was tediously predictable. Beside the hang-'em-high fulminations of the right-wing press, media consensus from the Guardian to the Telegraph was to deplore 'mindless', 'senseless' violence by 'feral youths', 'thugs', and so on. We're used to this: it's how they've talked about all clashes on Britain's streets since Millbank (and long before that).

The BBC's stance, too, was well-rehearsed. Their reporting was thoroughly on-message, narrowing the issue at stake to 'Is the police response effective or not?' The most distinctive characteristic of such reporting on Tory Britain, however, was that from Diane Abbott to Nigel Farage, anyone who had a microphone shoved in their face was asked to condemn the rioters before anything else.

Those who did not do so with sufficient force ran into trouble with their interviewers, as Darcus Howe found out. It's a test of loyalty: agree with our political elites or become a non-person, an Other as far as the media are concerned. Such ideological rigidity rather gives the lie to our liberal democracy's self-professed openness.

David Starkey's racist comments, on the other hand, were not condemned as vigorously. (Toby Young's incompetent attempt to exonerate Starkey is typical of the 'He wasn't racist' crowd.) I don't think Emily Maitlis gave Starkey a free pass: she challenged him repeatedly. The historian may simply have been ignorant: he confused Jamaican Patois with Textspeak and saw rap as the reason for the riots (one might ask him about the role of rap in 1790s riots).

But there's something more malicious and calculated here. Starkey consistently attempted to racialise the debate, reducing debates about gang culture (valid by themselves) to questions about 'black culture' (and Owen Jones was spot on when he pointed out that by 'white' Starkey meant 'respectable'). Of course, the last forty years have seen a change in the discourse: instead of skin colour the Right now talks about culture, understood as a fixed quality innate to human beings, not a constantly changing process influenced by all sorts of factors, i.e. dialectically. Thus the sign 'culture' still points to the signified 'skin colour', but without embarrassingly blatant racism.

There's the first reason we shouldn't condemn the rioters: the racist vocabulary in which they are being execrated. Starkey is only making explicit what has been implied in much of the condemnation: the rioters are, pardon my Disney, savages, barely even human. Here's Max Hastings's astonishing tirade:

The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame... They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries. They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong. They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. (emphasis mine)

Hastings goes on to express regret that looters were not shot, and complains about their antisocial refusal to watch the royal wedding. Disadvantaged young people are constructed as an utterly alien and contemptible Other. This isn't new: the people we now dismiss as 'chavs' were once Burke's 'swinish multitude' and the Victorians' 'vicious, semi-criminal' urban poor. To smear an entire segment of the population as the forces of chaos is hardly ethical.

Secondly, this demonisation both ignores and facilitates neoliberal 'reforms'. The Right initially insisted that any attempt to search for root causes amounted to an endorsement, and with good reason: such a search might uncover that youth club closures left young people with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It might find that 20 per cent of youth and half of young black people are unemployed, or that black people are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white peers. By moralising looting and demonising the young such inconvenient facts can be ignored, while their 'feral' nature can be used to justify the attacks on jobs and services this government is anxious to push through.

Thirdly, the condemners keep bad company. The moralism now echoing through the Commons, from people who cheerfully defrauded the taxpayer, is nought but rank hypocrisy. David Cameron enjoyed smashing private property in his youth. The BNP and EDL racists now coming out of the woodwork to act as Freikorps are using understandable fear and anger to preach a message of hate. Frankly, I don't want to agree with these people on much at all.

Lastly and perhaps controversially, looting shows a response to real injustice, however poorly expressed. I hold that any attack on property is political - it claims that 'this should not belong to you'. What sort of politics this expresses depends on the situation: after all, imperialism or the current looting of the public sector are also attacks on the property of others. But the riots attacked a system in which corporations and the rich running them control the vast majority of human wealth, expropriating and withholding them from the majority. Ultimately, looting is an unhelpful, sporadic, localised response to this general malaise: a much better response would frankly be to expropriate all capital.

In refusing to condemn the riots, let's not fall into the trap of claiming they were not terrifying and destructive to many people, few of them wealthy. It's in the nature of riots that most of the people hurt will be subaltern, not the elites. But that doesn't mean we should collude in demonising the rioters: it means that we should argue for better working-class politics and engage with frustrated young people in building resistance movements. Riots are counter-violence, but ultimately they do little to hurt ruling-class violence. For that, we need revolutionary politcs.

'Host populations'

Will Hutton thinks that the left needs to smarten up its attitude towards immigration. The argument: the far right is gaining ground across Europe. The notion that 'the left must make the case that immigration is a force for good – it makes Europe richer' is 'denial'. If we are to win the debate on immigration, the left must argue for 'a good capitalism that will drive growth, employment and living standards by a redoubled commitment to innovation and investment' and 'accept that immigration offends basic attitudes to fairness' by allowing immigrants to 'get benefits without paying anything into the collective pot'.

Let's set aside that the likelihood of a 'good capitalism' is slim. Let's also set aside that Hutton is a liberal who has a deep fear and distrust of 'the mob'. His argument is a fairly standard one, one that has been repeatedly touted by the last Labour government and is now being championed by Maurice Glasman: in order to prevent a violent, barbaric racism we must embrace a legal, enlightened racism. In other words, we must wean racists from the racist far right by showing them their demands are being addressed.

But I really feel the need to seize on the term 'host population', which Hutton uses quite casually. It hardly needs saying that this phrase has two meanings, and this ambiguity serves the right. First, a host is someone who puts up guests and looks after them. Second, a host is the victim of a parasite. That, of course, is how the far right (fascist or otherwise) perceives 'the British': as a host body (the nation as an organism) that is being sucked dry by foreign leeches. Using a term like that is to walk right into racist discourse. One can only advise Hutton to stay away from it.

Out-Torying the Tories

David Blunkett, of cursed memory, has just announced that the Labour Party must learn from the recent election results:

We did do extremely well in areas where we were fighting the Liberal Democrats. The challenge however - given the at least temporary demise of the Liberal Democrats across the country - is to take on the Conservatives. Whilst in cities like Sheffield, we had to fight the Lib Dems, we have got to actually win over Tory supporters and non-voters. That's the challenge. There are some very substantial lessons to be learnt if we are going to win in four years' time.

 So Blunkett suggests two priorities: (a) winning over Tory supporters, (b) winning over non-voters. The second is clearly a substantial issue. Labour lost five million voters between 1997 and 2010, the vast majority of them working class. Did these people choose to vote Conservative instead? Hardly; the Conservative vote has not recovered substantially since 1997 (and is in fact in decades-long decline). The majority has, rather, simply stopped voting. So Blunkett is right: the Labour Party, if it wants to get back into power, needs to connect with non-voters. How is it to do this? My suggestion would be to take its own name seriously and actually represent the working class again, to end the abominable situation in which none of the three main parties advocate working-class interests even half-seriously.

But appeal to Tory voters? One is reminded not only of 'Blue Labour', but also of the despicable attempts to appeal to racism during the Blair/Brown years. Not only is this repulsive, it's also pointless: if voters want nasty policies, they'll vote for the Nasty Party, not the semi-skimmed New Labour version. The electoral base of the Tory Party includes groups who are unlikely to ever vote Labour (the upper reaches of the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, certain petty-bourgeois layers), although there is of course working-class Tory support. I'd suggest that the only way the Labour vote will recover is to become a genuine social people's party. Yes, the great and the good won't like you anymore; but surely it's worth ending the pathetic Milibandian attempt to be against the cuts, but not too much?

La Revolución, exploitation style

By way of an introduction: Machete is awesome, of course. I mean, look at the poster. Or at the announcement, in the movie itself, that 'Machete will return in Machete Kills and Machete Kills Again'. Or the fact that Machete is not a nickname, but the protagonist's birth name. If you type 'Machete' that many times, it stops looking like a word. In any case: Machete is awesome, by which I mean to convey that I more or less squealed with giddy delight throughout the film.

Machete Cortez (Danny Trejo) is a former Mexican Federale ('CIA, FBI, DEA, all rolled up into one mean fucking burrito', according to one character) who has fallen foul of drug lord Rogelio Torrez (Steven Seagal). Now Machete works as a day labourer in Texas - until, that is, he is hired by Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate far-right anti-immigration senator John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro). But he's double-crossed: one of Booth's gunmen wounds McLaughlin in the leg and shoots Machete to guarantee the senator's re-election. Now Machete must take revenge and uncover a conspiracy involving a racist vigilante organisation headed by Von Jackson (Don Johnson) - a task in which he's aided by honest immigration cop Sartana Rivera (Jessica Alba), his brother, a priest (Cheech Marin) and a network helping illegal immigrants run by Luz (Michelle Rodriguez).

Ultimately the film comes down to a showdown between the vigilantes and Mexican immigrants. It's awesome, but it's also the one part of the film that director Robert Rodríguez treats without any irony. 'La revolución', as Luz calls it early in the film, is of course a fantasy - the marginalised and maligned immigrant working class rising up to overthrow the oppressive order, symbolised by racist paramilitaries. But it's an immensely gratifying and empowering fantasy, in tune with Frantz Fanon's assertion that the colonial subject's desire is not for equality but for the defeat and death of the coloniser. That Rodríguez takes such a clear stance is not self-evident in a B-movie; but at a time when immigrants are under fire (sometimes literally) both in the US and in Europe it's something to cheer every leftist's heart.

That, then, is politically pleasing to me; but what about other aspects of the film? Does Machete reinforce patriarchy, for example? For Machete most certainly does 'get the women', as the trailer promises - seven by my count, excluding his wife who is murdered roughly three minutes into the film. That the male gaze predominates in Machete I cannot deny. But I'd like to protest that the topic is treated ironically: with respect to sixty-six-year-old Mr Trejo, it is not quite plausible that Machete is irresistible to every woman in sight, and Robert Rodríguez makes not the slighest attempt to make it plausible. It's merely another homage to the conventions of 1970s exploitation films, in which heroes would womanise like nobody's business.

It's all a delight: the performances from an all-star cast (Rose McGowan was left on the cutting room floor) are over the top in just the right way. The villains stand out, from Jeff Fahey's magnificently purry drug dealer to Don Johnson as a murderous redneck ('There's nothing I'd like better than to see that Mexican dance the bolero at the end of a rope'). I don't need to mention that Michelle Rodríguez is bad-ass as usual (nay, more so than usual), and even Jessica Alba manages not to grate. Lindsay Lohan, as a 'nun with a gun', has a small but functional part. Of course, Machete is intensely violent. If you're squeamish about the severing of limbs, I recommend you do not see this. Nonetheless, if you have seen something utterly vicious like last year's Piranha, rest assured Machete is less depraved than that. Meaning it is still quite depraved. Be that as it may, Machete is ultimately a full-throttle thrill-ride, bloody and sexy and hilarious. A guilty pleasure, of course - but oh, how very pleasurable.

In this series: Grindhouse (2007) | Machete (2010) | Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

Nach unten wird getreten...

Thilo Sarrazin hat sein Ziel erreicht: er ist zum Impulsgeber für die Politik geworden. Groß war das Geschrei zunächst: krudester Biologismus! Pseudowissenschaftlicher Murks! Fast sofort aber hieß es, der Bundesbanker spreche echte Probleme an: zu schrill sei nur seine Sprache. Angela Merkel verlangte öffentlich eine Debatte ohne Tabus, die sie als Kanzlerin eigentlich führen und nicht bloß fordern könnte. Analysierte der „Spiegel“ letzte Woche noch den „Provokateur“ Sarrazin, fragte das Magazin in der nächsten Ausgabe, „warum Deutschland an der Integration scheiterte“.

Der Konsens, Sarrazins Kritik sei überspitzt, enthalte aber ein Körnchen Wahrheit, ist keineswegs neutral: in ihm spiegelt sich ein Weltbild, das der Wirklichkeit kraß widerspricht. Die Kanzlerin gab den Ton bereits vor. Integration dürfe keine Einbahnstraße sein, sagte Merkel. Die deutsche Gesellschaft habe sich um die Integration ihrer ausländischen Mitbürger bemüht. Die aber sollten nun auch das Ihre tun.

Dieses Schema erinnert verblüffend an das Muster, nachdem eine andere Bevölkerungsgruppe besprochen wird: die Ärmsten. Auch diese gelten der Regierung und der ihr freundlich gesinnten Presse als starrsinnig und kulturell degoutant. In ihrer „spätrömischen Dekadenz“ (so der Außenminister) schlügen sie, trotzigen Kindern gleich, die großzügigen Hilfen des Staates aus, um mit ihren stetig wachsenden Kinderscharen die Sozialsysteme (also Sie, liebe Mitbürgerinnen und Mitbürger!) zu belasten. Sie lebten parasitär in ihren selbstgewählten Ghettos auf Kosten der Allgemeinheit in Saus und Braus. Einwanderer wie Arbeitslose seien undankbar und schotteten sich aus moralischer Verwerflichkeit und zweifelhaften religiösen Vorstellungen von einer Gesellschaft ab, die sie gerne mit offenen Armen aufnehmen würde.

Die Wissenschaft nennt das „negative Integration“: mehrere Gruppen, die eigentlich ganz verschiedene Ziele verfolgen, werden geeint, indem man auf Minderheiten hetzt. Dazu gehört: die gewünschte Gemeinschaft wird als großherzig und hilfsbereit, die Minderheit als feindlich und fremd hingestellt. Was dem Bismarckschen Reich Polen, Sozialisten und Katholiken, das waren der Bundesrepublik nach dem Zusammenbruch des zuvor die Allgemeinheit bedrohenden „Weltkommunismus“ zunächst Asylanten, dann, als deren Zahl ob abschreckender Maßnahmen immer weiter sank, die Nachkommen der Gastarbeiter.

Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft bröckelt. Die sozialen Unterschiede werden immer schärfer. Während wenige an der Spitze sich über staatliche Wirtschaftsspritzen freuen dürfen, schwindet die Mittelschicht, und immer mehr Menschen müssen mit immer weniger auskommen – übrigens nicht nur bei schlechter Wirtschaftslage: schon vor der Finanzkrise stagnierte das Realeinkommen der meisten. Die Schaffung von Randgruppen ist dabei eine bewährte Herrschaftstaktik. Der steigende Druck, die Angst, die Wut äußert sich überall. Da könnten sich die spätrömisch Dekadenten gegen ihre Herren wenden. Lieber schiebt man denen die Schuld zu, die noch weniger haben.

Natürlich ist es Unsinn, den Armen und Arbeitslosen ihre Lage selbst zuzuschreiben. Niemand wird ernsthaft behaupten, Millionen weltweit hätten entnervt gekündigt, als die Finanzkrise begann, nach dem Motto: nun habe ich aber keine Lust mehr. Darauf läuft dieser Randgruppendiskurs aber hinaus. Er grenzt die Verlierer dieser Gesellschaft aus, schiebt ihnen die Ausgrenzung in die Schuhe und verlacht sie dazu noch. Wer so denkt, hilft den Westerwelles und Ackermanns.