Category Archives: History and Politics

Film, History and Politics, Male Film Directors

Stalingrad (1993) Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 (1999)

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Was the German soldier an ordinary man trapped in an evil cause? Was General Von Paulus and the German Sixth Army “stabbed in the back” by Hitler and the German high command? Was the kessel on the Volga in the Winter of 1942 and 1943 the first real “death camp?”

Fedor Bondarchuk’s 2013 rewrote the Battle of Stalingrad as a victory of right-wing Russian nationalism over German nationalism.

http://writerswithoutmoney.com/2014/03/24/stalingrad-2013/

Stalingrad (1993) Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 (1999) rewrite the victory of Communism over Fascism as the agony of General Von Paulus and the Germany Sixth Army.

Stalingrad (1993), which was directed by the German filmmaker Joseph Vilsmaier, follows in the tradition of the better American films about Vietnam. Like Olive Stone’s Platoon or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Stalingrad centers the war on a group of likable everymen trapped in a hell not of their own making. The film opens in sunny Italy. We meet Lieutenant Hans von Witzland, a proper young man from an aristocratic Prussian family, and Sergeant Manfred “Rollo” Rohleder, a veteran of the Africa Corps. At first, we are led to believe that von Witzland is a Nazi. He refuses to pin a medal on the rough-looking Rohleder when the latter refuses to button up his collar during inspection. “Heroes aren’t late,” he says to Rohleder and his friend Corporal Fritz Reiser. But once we get to the frozen steppe along the Volga, we realize that von Witzland’s proper, “by the book” Prussian militarism actually means the opposite. He’s an old school German conservative who violently objects to Russian prisoners being abused. He hates the Nazis. Fritz Reiser, who’s played by the French actor Dominique Hororwitz, is a tough-minded realist who’s determined to survive at any cost. That Reiser is played by the very Jewish looking Horowitz sends a clear message. Von Paulus’s soldiers were not all Nazis. Like Americans in Vietnam, they were just soldiers with rotten leaders.

We meet two German captains.

Once again, we follow the convention pioneered by Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front, and revived in American Vietnam War films in the 1980s. Captain Hermann Musk, played by the Czech actor Karel Heřmánek is a hard man but a good officer. He’s respected by von Witzland, Reiser, a teenage recruit named “GeGe” Müller, another soldier named Müller and Otto, played by Sylvester Groth. Captain Haller, on the other hand, Dieter Okras, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Chris Hedges, is a straight up Nazi.

As the battle, and the Winter, wear on, von Witzland and his platoon realize that their real enemy isn’t the Russians. It’s Captain Haller, and the high-command back in Berlin. The climax of the film comes when von Witzland and his platoon take a Russian factory, but are quickly surrounded by the Russian army. They escape through the sewers (echoing the classic Polish war movie Kanal), where Emigholtzone, of von Witzland’s platoon, is severely wounded. Von Witzland, Reiser, and Rohleder, like any good soldiers, refuse to leave their comrade on the battlefield. They drag him through the sewers to a German field hospital, where they hold a German orderly at gunpoint. “Save him,” they demand.

Holding an orderly at gunpoint to save a comrade, of course, is what any good soldier would do. You don’t fight for your country. You fight for the guy on youur left and on your right. In an American film, they’d be let off with a stern warning and sent back to the front. But this is the German army at Stalingrad, led by the incompetent and worse. Von Witzland and his platoon are transferred to a punishment detail disarming mines. They’re doomed and they know it, but it really doesn’t matter. Their goal now becomes twofold. On the one hand, they want to stay alive. But on the other hand, they want to avoid becoming war criminals. They fail in both. After Captain Haller orders them to shoot a group of Russian civilians, von Witzland and Reiser are horrified, but they go through with it anyway. Later, they get their revenge. They “frag” Haller, after he threatens to kill them for “looting” some chocolate dropped by the Luftwaffe into the kessel, and take over a bunker filled with food and drink for senior German officers.

They also find a Russian woman named Irina, played by Dana Vávrová, the film director Joseph Vilsmaier’s wife. She not only looks like Anne Hathaway. She speaks fluent German. Von Witzland, who we realize by now is not only a good man trapped in a bad cause, but a hero, refuses to let Reiser, Rohleder and Otto rape Irina. There’s little danger of it anyway. The three men are desperate to have a woman one more time before they die, but they’re also in no mood to frag von Witzland, or the severely wounded Musk. Otto, unable to deal with the war crimes he’s been forced to commit, kills himself. “Heil Hitler” he says, just before he puts a gun in his mouth and blows his brains out. Rohleder takes Musk back to the front, where they meet a long line of German POWs with their hands in the air. Irina offers to help von Witzland and Reiser escape the Russian encirclement, The walk through the snow. Just as they appear to have made it behind the Russian lines, Irina is shot by Russian soldiers. Von Witlzand, who’s now too weak to go on, dies in Reisers arms. The snow covers both their bodies, the Prussian aristocrat and the working-German soldier, faithful to each other in death.

While Vilsmaier’s film may ignore the heroism of the Russian soldiers who defeated fascism at Stalingrad, he certainly captures the hell of the war on the Eastern front. Stalingrad may not have the same technical virtuosity of Saving Private Ryan, but it does show mass, industrial warfare for what it is, the assembly line destruction of the human body. Von Witzland and his platoon live in filth. They don’t have enough to eat. Getting wounded is essentially a death sentence Indeed, one of the strongest scenes of Stalingrad takes place in the field hospital where Reiser holds the orderly at gunpoint. It’s a meat factory. We can almost smell the burned, rotting flesh. We hear the unanswered groans of the dying German soldiers. It’s as close as a film can get to the Ninth Circle of Hell.

Once you’ve read Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943, you realize that even Vilsmaier’s film only gets part of it.

Antony Beevor’s idealogical point of view is more or less the same as Vilsmaier’s. Paulus was a mediocre general out of his depth against Russian masters like Zhukov. The German Sixth Army was betrayed by the high command in Berlin. Beevor had access to newly available Soviet documents in the archives that were opened up after the fall of communism. His main contribution to history seems to be documenting the extent to which the NKVD coerced Russians into the war against Germany. Beevor certainly documents the Stalinist terror against ordinary Russians well enough. But he fails to address two things.

1.) Why the Russians fought on so heroically at Stalingrad in 1942.

2.) How the NKVD’s coercion of ordinary Russian soldiers in 1942 compares to the French capitalist army’s arbitrary mass executions in 1917.

Where Beevor’s book really shines is in the same area Vilsmaier’s film does. Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 portrays the German kessel (cauldron) on the Volga as the first death camp. Hitler and the German high-command’s callousness towards their own soldiers is every bit as horrifying as their callousness towards the lives of Jews and Slavs. That Beevor seems to believe in a moral equivalence between Stalinism and Nazism in no way lessons the power of his writing. The vast, minute descriptions of starvation, of massive lice infestations, the effect of the climate on the human body, the sheer incompetence of Hitler and the German general staff puts us in the boots of a German private at Stalingrad. It’s as effective an anti-war book as I’ve ever read. Like Vilsmaier, Beevor’s message for all of us is “disobey your leaders. Trust in your own judgement.”

But it’s still not the whole story. Indeed, after Bondarchuk’s Putinite travesty and Beevor and Vilsmaier stating the obvious – war is hell — I still want to see someone make a film about how and why the Soviet Union (the Soviet Union not Russia) saved the world from the Nazis at Stalingrad. Maybe Oliver Stone can give it a try. He’s already made an excellent documentary about the eastern front. Maybe he can make a film about Stalingrad.

History and Politics

Family of Secrets (2008)

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I first became aware of Russ Baker’s history of the Bush family during the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Baker, an investigative journalist who has written for the Christian Science Monitor and the Village Voice, had dug up an intriguing, but little known historical anecdote. George H. W. Bush had almost certainly been in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Yet to this day, he “cannot recall” what he was doing.

The Kennedy assassination, Baker argues, was a coup d’etat against the most liberal President of the 20th Century. John F. Kennedy was not the centrist cold warrior of the mainstream historical consensus. On the contrary, he and his brother Robert were a serious threat to what Eisenhower termed “the military industrial complex.” Even though John Kennedy allowed the Bay of Pigs operation to proceed — it had been designed under the Eisenhower administration — he fired Allan Dulles, the powerful and extraordinarily well-connected CIA director, after it failed. He eventually intended to demand FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s resignation. Least known, but perhaps most important of all, he campaigned to repeal the “Oil Depletion Allowance,” a United States government handout to the oil industry that allowed capital investment in drilling or mining to be written off as a “wasting asset.”

While George H. W. Bush later developed a reputation as a moderate Republican, in 1963 he was involved in some way with each and every one of John F. Kennedy’s right-wing enemies. In vast detail, Baker makes a very strong case for three things. First, George H. W. Bush was involved with the CIA long before being named as its director in the 1970s. Second, the CIA and the Texas oil interests have always been closely intertwined. Third, the Bush family had close ties with the man who was almost certainly Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA handler, the White Russian exile George de Mohrenschildt.

I don’t think Baker’s circumstantial case tying George H. W. Bush to the Kennedy assassination would hold up in a court of law. He is confident that “Poppy” Bush at least knew of the conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy. He strongly believes that Bush also had a hand in George de Mohrenschildt’s death. In 1976, de Mohrenschildt had written a terrified letter to then CIA director Bush essentially asking him to “call off the dogs” — de Mohrenschildt had been talking more openly to journalists about Oswald and the Warren Report – but was coldly rebuffed. A year later, after Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, approached him for an interview, he blew his brains out with a shotgun. Baker suggests that it wasn’t a suicide, that a man named Jim Savage, who had ties both to the oil industry and to the Bush family, murdered de Mohrenschildt. But he never proves anything beyond a reasonable doubt, or even comes close.

Russ Baker’s frustration at the ability of the Bush family to keep their fingerprints off the Kennedy assassination, and to manipulate the “official story,” is palpable. It’s part of the reason Family of Secrets goes off the rails in the second half. Unable to make any single accusation stick, Baker piles on detail after detail. He overwhelms the reader with an avalanche of information about the Bush family’s ties, however tenuous, to almost every important event of American history after 1945.

Baker argues, for example, that Watergate was not what it seemed, that, like the Kennedy Assassination, it was a coup against an elected President. Nixon had also threatened the Oil Depletion Allowance. His account of the “Townhouse Operation,” a campaign ostensibly about raising money for Republican Senate candidates, but in reality a plan to muddy up Richard Nixon’s reputation, is fascinating. He succeeds in tying it to Texas oil money but not to George H. W. Bush. It’s fairly well-known that the Watergate burglary was intentionally amateurish, that Nixon suspected the CIA and the Cuban exile community was trying to frame him, but, once again, while Baker raises strong suspicions about George H. W. Bush, he never quite puts him at the scene of the crime.

Baker’s claims about the Bush family become so broad, yet so shallow, the book gets tedious. The more he piles on, the thinner it gets. Family of Secrets ends up as just another liberal rant about George W. Bush. It’s all familiar. George W. Bush’s National Guard service, or lack there of, was crucial to the 2004 Presidential campaign, but by this point, Baker sounds like a Daily Kos diarist circa 2005. If you want a quick, well-written introduction to the travesty that was the George W. Bush administration, the final chapters of Family of Secrets work pretty well. But we’re a long way away from the book’s intriguing first half.

Was Kennedy murdered by a nexus of the CIA, the Texas oil interests, and the Bush family? The first half of Family of Secrets proves that it’s certainly possible, even likely. The second half proves almost in spite of itself that we’ll probably never really know.

Perhaps the book’s biggest flaw is Baker’s lack of attention to what the Kennedy family thought. If, as Baker argues, the Bush family was at least partly behind it the assassination, why didn’t the Kennedys expose them. You can’t just murder the two favorite sons of a ruling class family without at least some consequences. Perhaps the Kennedys knew no more about the Bush family’s ties to the events of November of 1963 than the American people. But what if they did? What if they covered up for the Bush family and the CIA out of class loyalty, out of some sense that exposing the truth to the American people would undermine the social order? That would be the most interesting story of all.

History and Politics

Orientalism (1978)

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The most famous work of the renowned Palestinian American scholar Edward Said is both a survey and a polemic, an introduction to the academic discipline of “Orientalism,” and an argument that it should be reformed or abolished. Said, who had an endowed chair in Comparative Literature at Columbia University, rose to the very top of the academic profession. Yet Orientalism is an argument against the academic mindset. Said’s ideal is not the social scientist, but the novelist,not the professional sociologist, but the liberal humanist.

The word “Orientalism,” like the word “hacker,” is misunderstood. So we need to be clear exactly what Edward Said means by “Orientalism” and “Oriental.” In the United States, an “Oriental” is a person from the Far East. In France and in the United Kingdom, however, the “Orient” usually refers to the Middle East, to Egypt and Palestine more than it does to China and Japan. “Orientalism,” in turn, does not simply mean “racism” or “Islamophobia.” Rather, until the post colonial era, “Orientalism” was an academic discipline just like English or History. The Department of “Near Eastern Studies” at Princeton, for example, was founded in 1927 as the “Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures.”

http://www.princeton.edu/nes/

Not every Orientalist is a coarse racist, a Bernard Lewis or a Daniel Pipes. Nevertheless, even though Said admires scholars like Richard Francis Burton and Louis Massignon, he also argues that the academic discipline of Orientalism has traditionally been in the service of empire. In vast, and often mind numbing detail, he traces the beginnings of the Orientalist outlook back to its roots in the ancient world. He then proceeds to examine the process by which the Orientalist mindset became codified as a profession, and then how the profession of Orientalism became subordinated to British and French, and then American imperialism. If Economics is the codified ideology of capitalism, then Orientalism is the codified ideology of European domination of the Middle East, of the British and French scramble to control the Suez Canal and the route to India, and of the American need to control the supply of oil.

A key event in the development of the Orientalist mindset was Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. The French, having lost most of North America, hoped to secure their control of Western Europe by outflanking the British in the Middle East. To seize Egypt meant to block the route to India. To control the Eastern Mediterranean meant to threaten British sea power. For Napoleon, however, control of the Middle East meant more than simply the control of the Nile Delta. It meant French domination over the way Europeans saw the Islamic world, French control over the origins of Western Civilization. As such, Napoleon brought with him to Egypt an army of scholars to rival Murat’s cavalry and the Old Guard. He wanted to use the soft power of ideology to control Egypt and Syria. The end result was to subordinate the study of history and of languages to the hard power of economic and military necessity.

Many of the scholars Napoleon brought with him to Egypt were students of the French Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy, a pioneer in the study of Arabic and the Middle East.

“It was not only because he was the first president of the Societe asiatique (founded in 1822) that Sacy’s name is associated with the beginning of modern Orientalism; it is because his work virtually put before the profession an entire systematic body of texts, a pedagogic practice, a scholarly tradition, and an important link between Oriental scholarship and public policy. In Sacy’s work, for the first time in Europe since the Council of Vienne, there was a self-conscious methodological principle at work as a coeval with scholarly discipline.”

In de Sacy and even more so in his successor Ernest Renan, Said argues, we can see the main characteristics of the European approach to the Middle East. For the Orientalist, the Middle East is not an empirical reality to be investigated with an open mind, but a projection of the European imagination onto the Arab world. Islam is not a diverse, often contradictory, evolving reality like Europe. Rather, it is the eternal “other,” a closed off system that exists, not in Egypt, Palestine, Syria or North Africa, but, rather, in the mind of the European Orientalist. The Semitic world is removed from history, and put into a glass case in the British Museum. Like Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe, Sylvestre de Sacy, Ernest Renan, and their successors travel to the Arab world and find nothing but their own heart of darkness.

‘In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. Direct observation or circumstantial description of the Orient are the fictions presented by writing on the Orient, yet invariably these are totally secondary to systematic tasks of another sort. In Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert, the Orient is a re-presentation of canonical material guided by an aesthetic and executive will capable of producing interest in the reader. Yet in all three writers, Orientalism or some aspect of it is asserted, even though, as I said earlier, the narrative consciousness is given a very large role to play. What we shall see ‘is that for all its eccentric individuality, this narrative consciousness will end up by being aware, like Bouvard et Pécuchet, that pilgrimage is after all a form of copying.”

As the Middle East becomes the Orient, an essentialism born of empire, becomes, in effect, a lens through which all Europeans, even the most intelligent and radical, view the Arab world. Karl Marx, for example, made an initial attempt to understand the Middle East on its own terms. But he eventually fell into the Orientalist’s mindset. How different history would have turned out, Said suggests, had he been able to overcome the intellectual limitations of Orientalism. Marx might have provided the intellectual tools necessary to overcome the ideology of empire in the Arab world. But he didn’t. It’s a testament to intellectual power of the Orientalist outlook that even the author of Capital got straightjacketed by de Sacy’s and Renan’s essentialism, by the world view born of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and of the long domination of the “Orient” by the west.

“The quotation, which supports Marx’s argument about torment producing pleasure, comes from the Westostlicher Diwan and identifies the sources of Marx’s conceptions about the Orient. These are Romantic and even messianic: as human material the Orient is less important than as an element in a Romantic redemptive project. Marx’s economic analyses are perfectly fitted thus to a standard Orientalist undertaking, even though Marx’s humanity, his sympathy for the misery of people, are clearly engaged. Yet in the end it is the Romantic Orientalist vision that wins out, as Marx’s theoretical socio-economic views become submerged in this classically standard image.”

Arabs and Muslims, the “Orient,” pushed itself back into history during the First World War. The French and British, now allies, scrambling for position as the Ottoman Empire cracked up, allied themselves with the Arab revolt against the Turks. The Turks, in turn, defeated the British at Gallipoli, and established their own secular nationalist state under Ataturk. The process continued after the Second World War with the independence of India and the rise of Pan Arab nationalist under Nasser. But western imperialism and Orientalism live on. Edward Said died in 2003 during the darkest days of the Bush administration without getting to see an independent Palestine. American and Zionist imperialism has replaced British and French imperialism. The need to control Saudi oil has replaced the need to control the Suez Canal.

American Orientalism has become, if anything, more of a self-enclosed and self-enclosing worldview than British or French Orientalism. After 9/11, every right-wing, low-IQ American became a vulgar Orientalist, quoting out of context snippets from the Koran in the comments section of his local newspaper’s website. Bookstores were lined with works by Hirsi Ali and whatever Israeli “terror expert” the media was pushing at the time.  What’s more, Said argues, while Arab radicals once tapped into Marxism, anti-imperialism, and secular nationalism to re-establish the Orient as a subject of history instead of merely the object for western contemplation, the Arab elites — who are now largely educated at American universities — have begun to adapt the Orientalist mindset for themselves.

But Said does suggest a way out.

Throughout his book, hovering behind his survey of the academic discipline of “Orientalism,” is Said’s own discipline of Comparative Literature. If Orientalism is essentialist and sealed off from experience, dogmatic, racist, Islamophobic, and, in the end, subordinated to empire, the novel, liberal humanism, and philology — the study of languages — are searching and open ended, a way back into history. The key distinction, Said argues, should not be east vs. west but history vs. mythology. We need more literary criticism (Said himself began his career as a critic of Joseph Conrad), more empathy, more history, less academic pseudo-science.

“One of the striking aspects of the new American social-science attention to the Orient is its singular avoidance of literature. You can read through reams of expert writing on the modern Near East and never encounter a single reference to literature. What seem to matter far more to the regional expert are “facts,” of which a literary text is perhaps a disturber. The net effect of this remarkable omission in modern American awareness of the Arab or Islamic Orient is to keep the region and its people conceptually emasculated, reduced to “attitudes,” “trends,” statistics: in short, dehumanized. Since an Arab poet or novelist—and there are many—writes of his experiences, of his values, of his humanity (however strange that may be), he effectively disrupts the various patterns (images, cliches, abstractions) by which the Orient is represented. A literary text speaks more or less directly of a living reality. Its force is not that it is Arab, or French, or English; its force is in the power and vitality of words that, to mix in Flaubert’s metaphor from La Tentation de Saint Antoine, tip the idols out of the Orientalists’ arms and make them drop those great paralytic children—which are their ideas of the Orient—that attempt to pass for the Orient.”

The method behind Said’s examination of Orientalism can be applied to other academic disciplines. The intellectually straightjacketed worldview that gave us Orientalism doesn’t begin and end in the Middle East. We should examine every area of study, every well-funded, established field of intellectual endeavor. Why, for example, do we presume study “English” in American universities? Does the typical American with an English degree know how the discipline was codified? When it was first taught? When it was first offered as a degree? How about Economics? Why do we study economics as if it were a pseudo-science outside of history? Why do we study Milton Friedman and not Marx? What interests does the discipline of Economics serve? Why do we study “Political Science” and not “Politics?” Why don’t people study “Classics,” once the core curriculum at English universities, in American universities? What about the American university as a whole? How did the expansion of higher education under the GI Bill and during the Cold War serve the needs of the American empire?

Said’s “Orientalism” should be read by every high-school senior before he gets to college. Agree with his conclusions or not, it’s worth learning his methods. It’s a thoroughgoing preparation for getting the most out of an undergraduate education, a course in critical thinking. If the “Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures” at Princeton is now the “Department of Near Eastern Studies,” if Joseph Massad, Said’s colleague at Columbia, is now perceived as more of a threat to Zionism and the American empire, than a tool in the service of Zionism and the American Empire, if the Palestine Solidarity and the BDS movement have become almost mainstream, then Orientalism, Said’s book from 1978, in no small way contributed to the new way of thinking, to the cracks in the once dominant “Orientalist” mindset. Any book that powerful deserves to be studied.