russian revolution

April 13, 2015

Public Service

Jack Graham bourgeois ideology, capitalism, herbert hoover, ideology, pbs, propaganda, russian revolution, scottsboro 1

Might as well put this up too…

Been watching a PBS documentary about the Scottsboro Boys. The narration does everything it can to infantilise the Communists who got involved, to downplay their contribution, to chalk it up to cynical opportunism, to suggest their involvement did more harm than good, etc.

The basically accurate account of events makes it clear, however, that it was the involvement of communists (and other people who got involved because communists made the case an issue) which ultimately led to the Scottsboro defendants getting even the meagre amount of justice and freedom they did.

Towards the end, the narration says “not protests or marches or newspaper articles but simply time itself” brought Alabama to free most of the defendants… which, if you stop to think about it, is an absolutely out-fucking-rageous thing to say. As if just waiting for a while would’ve freed the defendants by itself. As if the Alabama ‘justice system’ would’ve seen the light eventually even if nobody had ever kicked up a ruckus about it. As if the Alabama racists didn’t need to be opposed and fought and exhausted and embarassed into submission.

The message is clear: don’t fight injustice, or protest about it, or write about it, or do anything that could be considered political agitation. That’ll just make you a cynical opportunist doing more harm than good – like the Communists. Just shut up and wait. Time and the system will heal all problems. Then we can look back on it all nostalgically, with a sense of our own modern-day superiority, and call what happened a ‘tragedy’ (the title of the documentary is ‘Scottsboro – An American Tragedy’).

Also been looking at another PBS documentary about what a humanitarian Herbert Hoover was. This is the guy who basically tricked loads of people into contributing to a charity scam. People donated to his fund to relieve starvation in wartime Belgium. But he charged the Belgians for the food and denied relief to areas that couldn’t pay.

He pulled a similar trick with the Russian famine after the Civil War. The documentary refers to this as a natural disaster exacerbated by the policies of the Bolsheviks. Of course. But the famine was the big deal it was, and the Bolsheviks were forced to take some of the measures they did (some of which were disastrous) because the famine came after (and partly as a result of) the Russian Civil War, which was basically a West-sponsored attempt to unseat the new Bolshevik government. The Americans and the British (largely owing to the agitation of Winston Churchill… who was rather fond of using famines as political tools) not only invaded Russia themselves, but also sponsored the invasion of Russia by a bunch of counter-revolutionaries who were essentially proto-fascists. They rampaged through Russia using tactics that put the much-more-talked-about ‘Red Terror’ (which was defensive) in the shade.

Hoover took advantage of the famine to attack Bolshevik Russia. He hated the new regime because it had cancelled deals he had planned in Tsarist Russia (along with a British capitalist partner) which would have made him one of the richest men on Earth. …

July 23, 2014

Koba the Ape

Jack Graham bourgeois ideology, culture industry, dawn of the planet of the apes, hegemony, ideology, liberalism, reductionism, revolution, russian revolution, stalinism, state capitalism 8

Post-Spoilerocalyptic.

I went to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Banalities first: A well-crafted film. Cogent and coherent in terms of aesthetics and plot (though there is a pleasingly bathetic moment when, following lots of atmospheric shots of apes engaged in social interaction, one ape suddenly addresses another in sign language as “Maurice”). Nicely acted by the principles.

Now.

In The Dark Ape Rises, the ‘good’ ape leader is Caesar and the ‘bad’ ape leader is Koba.

Caesar is the reasonable one, the compromiser, who wants peace with the humans. Koba is the nasty one who can’t let go of his resentment of humans, who doesn’t trust them, who betrays Caesar and launches an all-out war against the humans.

Thing is, Koba is fucking awesome. Because, unlike Caesar, he understands that when you have the oppressor on the floor, you don’t help him up and dust him down. No. You stand on his neck.

Here’s Koba, riding straight at the enemy (who are armed with rocket launchers by this point) while simultaneously holding (and firing) two machine guns instead of the reins of his horse. Caesar never does anything this fucking spectacularly brave and principled in the entire course of the movie.

It reminds me of what Philomena Cunk once said in reference to the revolution advocated by Russell Brand. She worried about it until she realised that it was a revolution in the mind… which is safer than a real revolution because nothing actually changes.

Revolutionaries are all very well, you see, until they actually start doing anything, or – horror of horrors – winning. You’re allowed to be a radical or a rebel or a firebrand, as long as you are a noble failure. That’s why Rosa Luxemburg – through no fault of her own, may I stress – is sentimentalised, whereas Lenin is the epitome of evil.

There’s been much comment from the critiots that this film is good because there are no fully good or bad characters, and everyone means well. Bollocks. Koba might be portrayed as doing what he thinks best, at least part of the time, but he clearly becomes the bad guy. He even dies the traditionally spectacular/poetically-just villain death.

Koba is certainly a bastard. You see, he immediately turns into a psycho when he becomes a political rebel from Caesar’s benevolent dictatorship. As usual, inhabiting a zone outside moderate compromise with the status quo and the oppressors is an instant ticket into psychological instability and evil. The radical is, by definition, an ‘extremist’, and the extremist is, by definition, both a fanatic and a nihilist, a dangerous utopian and a cynic, a zealot and a self-interested machiavel, a demogogue and an autocrat.

Caesar isn’t the only ape in the film with a name that recalls a famous political figure from human history. …

November 10, 2011

Amnesia Day

Jack Graham arc of infinity, capitalism, first world war, holocaust, imperialism, nazis, poppies, remembrance day, revolution, russian revolution, second world war, wwii 2

I don’t wear a poppy. Laurie Penny has written a very good article, expressing many views that I agree with, here. I don’t engage in the silence at 11 o’clock either. I know that most ordinary people who do observe the silence and wear the poppy do so for sincere reasons. But I myself cannot stomach it. I think my reasons are less intellectual and more to do with the sheer, physical revulsion I feel at the hypocrisy on display in images like this:

What’s the collective noun for warmongers? A troop? A collateral? Well, whatever. There they stand, doing their best sincere and sombre faces. All guilty of sending people off to fight and kill and die and maim and be maimed in order to protect the interests of the American empire and neoliberalism’s access to markets. And wrapping it all up in the rhetoric of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘freedom’. The poppy, the cenotaph, the silence, the ‘Ode to Remembrance’… I can’t help but see it all as cynical and calculated. As ideology. As an attempt by a warmongering, imperialist state to normalise the idea of war, to appropriate our memories of loved ones lost or ruined in wars fought for the interests of others, to associate the wars that ‘our’ country is currently fighting with wars from the past that we’ve been carefully taught to perceive as ‘moral’ and ‘necessary’, to control our responses to the latest news from Iraq and Af-Pak.

Mind you, it’s more than just a straightforward bit of reactionary spin; these days people are more anti-war (at least in broad terms) than just about ever before, so the old rhetoric of patriotism is, while not dead, certainly less user-friendly than it used to be. Remembrance Day still carries jingoistic connotations for many, but for many more there is a need for a different perspective. There are several different social and political perpectives overlaid upon each other in our cultural understanding of Remembrance Day. A common variety of liberal spin on it is to remember the ‘pointlessness’ of, say, World War I. To tut and shake one’s head at a war now culturally understood by many to be a kind of outbreak of mass insanity (see the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth), or an illustration of how bad our system used to be, or a bleak but romantic tragedy about sensitive poets. It’s the great noble failure… perhaps with some cynical, port-swilling, incompetent generals to sneer at and blame for the whole thing. (It’s been packaged and sold to us in this way, as has Vietnam to Americans.) And, of course, there’s the redeeming moral clarity of the ‘good war’ that followed it, the anti-Nazi war, the war that stopped the holocaust, etc.

What’s lost in all this is real history.

Both wars were brutal squabbles between rival imperialisms, competing for territory and markets. WWI wasn’t a failure by the criteria of the British ruling class at the time; it was a success. The British empire ended up with more territory than ever before. …