Category Archives: Film Reviews

The Black Panthers – Vanguard of the Revolution

Posted on by
Reply
Black Panther Party

Black Panther Party

Considering it’s almost 50 years since they were formed (and almost 40 years since they all but disappeared off the scene) it was about time that someone made a documentary of an organisation, and the mass mobilisation it encouraged, that was such a dominant force in national politics in the United States for the latter half of the 60s. Whether the Black Panthers were actually the vanguard of the revolution is another matter but, at least, for a short time it shock the American establishment (and a lot of white people) to the core for a short time. This mobilisation of significant numbers of young black men and women coming at the same time as the anti-Vietnam War movement would have caused some to think that the revolution was just around the corner.

In some ways the two struggles had close connections. American imperialism was attempting to maintain oppression of the poor in South East Asia whilst in the home of the beast the black population were suffering an oppression little different from antebellum days and violence against black citizens was an everyday occurrence and deeply ‘institutionalised’ – to use a term that became current in the 21st century.

Watching (after so many years) the images of indiscriminate beatings by the police against black people, of all ages but predominantly of the young – beat them whilst young to frighten them for the rest of their lives – it’s no wonder that the beginnings of what became the Black Panther Party was predicated upon self-defence. A loophole in local ordinances in Oakland, California, meant that – as long as the weapons were carried openly – young black men could attend and ‘observe’ those incidences when their brothers and sisters were being abused by the police. One of the pertinent comments in the film here was how the whites felt intimidated (even thought the forces of the state were on ‘their’ side) – how much more must the black population must have felt when this was a situation they lived through everyday, everywhere, all of their lives.

It was no surprise that such a movement attracted many who had previously considered themselves marginalised. And the movement grew, fast, perhaps too fast. And this was accepted by those in the ‘leadership’ at the time and still around today. There was no control, no selection process, no vetting, no monitoring of those who wanted to join the movement, so no one really knew what their motives were. (As I write this I’m reminded of another, recent documentary, this time about efforts to fight against the drug cartels in Mexico (‘Cartel Land’) which also had a problem of being able to identify ‘which side were some of the members really on’?)

But if the honest people in the Black Panther Party (BPP) didn’t know what they were doing the state, especially in the form of J Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), knew exactly what was on the cards. This new, mass movement potentially had the ability to shake the racist state to its foundations.

Hoover sent out instructions that this organisation had to be destroyed and that any tactics could be employed. Infiltration and the use of informers and traitors (easily recruited when false charges – or even real but minor charges – could incur long, long times inside) was considered to be the best means to achieve this and the tactic became so successful that at times the BPP members didn’t know who to trust. A (white) defence lawyer in the case of the New York 21 – framed for dozens of charges, all of which were thrown out after months of incarceration and a trail lasting weeks – even asked, in court, if the FBI hadn’t actually created the BPP in the first place.

And no one should be surprised about that. If movements against the capitalist state don’t have a clear view of where they are going the capitalist state always does – it will do anything whatsoever to maintain that social system, and in the process will lie, misinform, create confusion, use intimidation, spend whatever it might cost (the money of the people being used against the people!), kill if needs be.

The problem is that social movements such as the Black Panthers have never realised and accepted this truth, a truth established centuries ago, and thus continue to make the same mistakes of those in the past, never seeming to learn from past mistakes and ending up either being ground down or totally destroyed. If this film has anything to offer, other than a reminder to those of us around at the time and as an educational tool for the young, it’s the reinforcement of the idea that we must learn from, and understand, history.

Hoover did the job he was paid to do. Contemptible as he was as a human being he knew where his interests lay. There’s no point in arguing that it wasn’t fair, that the FBI was doing something illegal, it’s the winners of the war who decide on the justice or legality of actions taken during that war.

The lack of a real programme (as opposed to a list of ‘demands’) from the start meant that the BPP moved from self-defence to social welfare (in the provision of breakfast clubs for school children, free health clinics, food banks, etc., those basic welfare measures that any decent state would provide for its least well off) to eventually getting involved in the electoral system that perpetuates the system of oppression in the first place – the argument being if you can’t challenge the state then try to ‘reform’ it from within. How many have been bought off by that idea in the past and how many to be bought off in the future?

The foremost representatives of the BPP in the early years were Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver. These became the public voice of the organisation and the black jacketed, black beret wearing, pump-shotgun toting young black men, wearing dark glasses, became the poster boys of the ‘revolution’ – images that anyone old enough at the time will remember. However, one of the surprising pieces of information (for me) that came out in the film was that by the end of the 1970s the majority of its membership were young women. A few spoke for the party but the majority, if in the media at all, were depicted due to their hair and dress choices rather than for anything they might have to say. It seems to have been accepted that if the BPP wanted to change certain aspects of the society in which they lived misogyny was not one of them – the Black Panthers were not in the forefront of female liberation.

Black Panther Women

Black Panther Women

As one of the survivors said in the documentary they were young, idealist and enthusiastic. Those attributes were at the same time positive and negative and had an impact on what they did and how the organisation developed – or not.

Having no uniting idea of what to do the party went from dealing with one crisis to another, surviving one attack to the next one, going from setback to setback. For most of its existence it appeared to be like a rudderless ship, just going where the forces of nature took it, without direction, without destination, without a goal. It’s all very well for people to stand up against the oppression and exploitation under which they live but unless they know what they are fighting for (rather than merely knowing what they are fighting against) any movement will eventually run out of steam.

(We have seen examples of this in recent years, e.g., the anti-City of London/Wall Street, anti-austerity movements throughout the capitalist countries and the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ in many of the countries of Northern Africa. If you have no viable alternative to offer to the people then the old state will re-take the positions of power that might have been under threat for a very short period of time – is austerity less austere in countries such as the UK? In which Arab country are the vast majority of people better off now than they were prior to the mass mobilisations of 2011?)

Because the party had no organisation what developed was a cult of leadership. As the state stepped up its efforts to destroy the party first Newton and then Seale were imprisoned. Cleaver ran away to Algeria where he set up the international section of the party. Although the arrests of the leaders, and the campaigns for their release were beneficial in gaining publicity for the BPP, and also an increase in its membership, this only exacerbated the lack of unity rather than strengthening the group. People joined but they didn’t really know what they were joining.

Before Newton was imprisoned he posed as some modern-day African tribal leader, an image which appeared everywhere at the time, and the campaign to release him almost certainly had the effect of reinforcing his own individual importance in the movement on his release. He later expelled all and sundry, seemingly on a personal whim and basing his decision on nothing other than his own criteria and without reference to any others still in the dwindling organisation. Drugs fuelled his paranoia and megalomania and to those around him just before his death he was considered clinically insane.

Huey Newton

Huey Newton

Cleaver took the opportunity to get out of the country when a warrant for his arrest was issued and subsequently led the international section of the party, first in Cuba and then, on a more permanent basis in Algeria. He was then invited to countries that were attempting to construct socialism (such as China, North Vietnam and North Korea) giving him a lot of personal credibility but it’s uncertain what he really had to offer. When the existence of the People’s Republic of China wasn’t officially recognised and whilst B52s were blanket bombing Hanoi from miles up in the sky there was a PR reason for those two countries to align themselves with a movement that could possibly destabilise the United States – but surely they must have known that they were dealing with dilettantes? (Cleaver was to become a born again Christian in the 1980s and even supported Ronald Reagan for President – when Reagan had been governor of California when the BPP was started there in reaction to the violence of the state’s law enforcement against the black population.)

Seale seemed less of a loose cannon but wasn’t able to take the organisation any further despite this. In 1969 he came to world-wide fame when, because he refused to stop interrupting proceedings in the trial of the Chicago 8 (following massive demonstrations around the Democratic Party Convention of the previous year) he was ordered to be tied to his chair and gagged by Judge Julius Hoffman. He was later sentenced to 4 years imprisonment for 16 charges of contempt of court (3 months each) after the same judge ordered that he be ‘severed’ (i.e., no further proceedings to be taken against him on the charge of conspiracy) from the original charge – so he was found in contempt of a court where he shouldn’t have been in the first place. The American judicial system not considering that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way it was being used against the people of the country. On release from prison Seale ran for mayor of Oakland (really the home base and place of origin of the Black Panthers). He got close to victory, but not close enough, and demonstrated the basic flaw within the organisation. You can use the word ‘revolution’ but if you don’t know what it means, and what it entails, you will become nothing more than a reformist.

Bobby Seale in court

Bobby Seale in court

Those involved at the time state the lack of proper leadership that could hold the organisation together as being a problem but none of them, in the film, were able to come up with a solution or even, in the 1970s, give any indication what the party was doing to overcome these perceived weaknesses. All they could see as a solution was the slotting into the vacant space left by the previous leadership of Fred Hampton. However, instead of looking at past failings and trying to follow a more ideological and structured development of the party he just carried on with what had become a culture of the ‘cult of the personality’. Hoover feared the rise of a ‘messiah’, a charismatic leader that could overcome the schisms within the BPP, for many at the time Hampton was that ‘messiah’ – but only for a short period of time, the state were going to see to that.

Hampton is shown where he got an audience to repeat, time and time again, the phrase, ‘I am …. a revolutionary’. That’s all very well and good and it must have created a good atmosphere in meetings of people who considered themselves alienated and disenfranchised within the general society of the United States – but it did nothing other than that. Through all the problems the BPP had gone through in its relatively short existence there was never a consideration that, perhaps, what they had been doing had faults and instead of looking at those mistakes and trying not to repeat them they just went on along the same road.

They also, despite innumerable lessons to the contrary, never understood to what extent the State would go to ensure that they wouldn’t even achieve a modicum of success. In the early hours of the 4th December, 1969, in a flat in Chicago, the US State carried out what can only be described as an assassination of Fred Hampton.

William O’Neal, a FBI stooge and informer, had achieved the position of being Hampton’s bodyguard. He was so close to the leadership and had such freedom to move around that he was able to gather information so accurate that the FBI were able to recreate a life-size mock-up of the flat so they were as familiar with the layout of the apartment as those staying there. O’Neal also spiked a drink that Hampton took late the night before so that when the place was raided in a pre-dawn raid he wasn’t aware of anything.

As is not unusual in these circumstances the FBI stated they were only defending themselves but all indicators are that only one shot was fired by any of the Black Panthers – and that was an impulse shot by the Panther on security duty in his death throes. The apartment was riddled with bullet holes and two bullets were put into Hampton’s head at close range. Arresting all the others that survived the attack under spurious charges (later dropped) meant that the FBI was in total control of the situation.

Lie, stonewall and generally create a confused situation was the tactic. What the truth was, and whether it came out or not is not important as long as it happens at some time in the indeterminate future. It wasn’t until 1982 that compensation was paid out by the state, an implied admission of guilt, but by that time the heyday of the Black Panther Movement was long a thing of the past.

Soon after this there was a shoot out in the Oakland, where the Panthers started and always had their largest support. One of the best parts of the film was when one of those Panthers trapped in the building, running out of ammunition and totally surrounded with no way of escape, felt for the first time in his life, totally free, ‘truly alive’. All those that had survived the shoot out were convinced they would be summarily executed if they went outside (they weren’t, almost certainly due to the large media presence and with everything being broadcast live throughout the country). So they had nothing to lose, they had arrived at a time when they had nothing to lose but their chains, a situation which took all the years of oppression off their shoulders.

The BPP existed after this but everything was to go downhill from then on. Those who joined drifted away, either because of fear or the realisation that as they were organised at that time the BPP couldn’t really offer any alternative to the traditional, system orientated parties and organisations.

The Black Panthers as an organisation never accepted, or even realised, the importance of Lenin’s statement in ‘What is to be Done?‘, possible his most important work on party building that ‘Without revolutionary ideology there is no revolutionary movement’. Many wore Mao badges on their berets but didn’t take on board any of Mao’s thinking, any of Mao’s philosophy, strategy and tactics, any of Mao’s experiences of fighting a revolutionary war.

The spur that caused the formation of the Black Panthers was the treatment of black people at the hands of the state, the beatings and the killings, is still endemic within American society to this day. Together with any sense of justice. The list gets bigger all the time, whatever a (black) President promises. From the killing of Taryvon Martin by a so-called security guard, to the recent killings and the resultant demonstrations and mini-riots in Ferguson, St Louis, following the shooting of Michael Brown, to the murder of Oscar Grant (later made into a feature film, ‘Fruitvale Station‘), and other abuses by police officers throughout the United States – often captured on video at the time – all these incidents all go to show that nothing has really changed in the last 50 years.

Not a time for the revival of the Black Panthers but perhaps a time to reassess both the positive and negative experience of those heady days of the 60s and this film can be part of that discussion.

Fruitvale Station

Posted on by
1
BART Fruitvale Station

BART Fruitvale Station

Fruitvale Station (2013) – dir Ryan Coogler

I’m still trying to work out what Fruitvale Station, the film about the ‘accidental’ shooting (in the back whilst being pinned down on the platform) of Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day 2009 is trying to tell me. The film takes its name from the station on the Bay Area Rapid Transport (BART) system where this all took place.

It’s one of those films where there’s no need to shy away from talking about the ending as it’s about an actual event and the fact that a young black man ended up dead is well-known. I say ‘well known’ but I don’t know if that is really the case.

I tried to work out why I had no memory of the incident but then realised that at that time I was in China and followed events from the perspective of that country. However, even there I think I would have been aware if the reaction on the streets was such that had followed the criminal outcome of the trial of the police officers in the Rodney King case.

Yes there had been some reaction on the streets, both peaceful and more angry, but it was contained by either the organisers or the authorities. Perhaps when such events are happening all the time it gets difficult to expect people venting their anger in public. What it almost certainly does create, on the other hand, is a simmering anger where an increasing proportion of the public feel alienated from the society in which they live.

(Here it might be worth mentioning that, each year, something like 400 people die in the United States at the hands of law enforcement agencies. That’s quite an horrendous figure but we in the ‘non gun-toting’ United Kingdom should be careful about taking the moral high ground. It’s reckoned that about 50 people die in police (and other security forces) custody each year. Here they are rarely shot (although incidences of shooting are on the increase) but are more likely to be suffocated or crushed to death. What we should remember is that the population of the United States is 5 times that of the UK so living here is an even MORE dangerous activity than in the gun happy US of A when it comes to contact with the law.)

Although Oscar (as were most of the others who were detained after an altercation on the packed train as people were heading back home to the Bay Area after seeing in the New Year in San Francisco) was black that didn’t seem to be the main reason they were picked out from the crowd – although ‘institutionalised racism’ is never to be discounted, even in police forces with a substantial number of black or ethnic minority officers.

Inept transport police, whose attitude was aggressive and threatening from the start and, not surprisingly, on the receiving end of abuse from those who felt themselves to be falsely accused and detained, ended up killing Oscar by a single shot to the back, which punctured a lung which the hospital surgeons couldn’t put right.

There are similarities to the Rodney King case in the fact that the whole incident was recorded by tens of camera phones and the whole affair being posted on YouTube even before he was dead the next morning. But in our society even that is not enough to convict the police as the one who shot Grant was eventually convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served about a year and a half in gaol.

The forces of the state getting away with murder is nothing new but in countering this fact of life and demanding justice it’s no good in changing the victim into a saint and cry ‘it’s not fair’.

Oscar Grant wasn’t an angel. Why should he have been? Unless you get a lucky break it’s hard for working class children of whatever colour to have it easy in the United States. Figures show that their income has barely managed to stand still in the last 20 to 30 years, long before the most recent capitalist crisis and even during times of ‘prosperity. The ‘American Dream’ is a lie and the sooner the US working class recognise that the better it will be for them and – as their country is never backward in attacking and invading other countries – much of the rest of the world.

However, here the film makers decide to show that despite all the odds and the difficulties he was facing that on the very day before he was to die violently at the hands of the American state he was really going to turn over a new leaf. So the injustice he suffered was greater because he was trying hard ‘to get his life back’? This is a superficial approach and is no way to demand justice. If he had been really ‘bad’ does that mean the police were justified in killing him?

Rodney King wasn’t, by all accounts, the most likeable of characters but what was important in his case was the way that the State rallied around to distort the justice system to ensure that their agents and toddies would be kept from harm. The result was that Los Angeles burnt in 1992.

Investigating the case further I discovered that the family, within days of his death, had put in a ‘wrongful death claim’ against the BART with a compensation claim of $25 million – this was later raised to $50 million. Now, so soon after the event the family would have been vulnerable to all the legal vultures that descend in such circumstances, where the percentage fees for large claims are irresistible.

However, the family stuck with this claim and Grant’s daughter received $1.5 million and his mother $1.3 million EVEN before the case was resolved in court. Why is it that whenever things go wrong in capitalist society the loudest cry seems to be ‘compensation’. (It is interesting to note that $3.8 million is exactly the same that Rodney King got when he sued the city of Los Angeles.)

What the companies the size of BART pay out is chicken feed and in order to make sure there is no loss to the company they will merely put the price of a ticket up a cent or so. What it does do, on the other hand, is give the impression that any wrong can be righted if enough money is on the table.

A foundation has been established in Oscar Grant’s name to help those who are victims of such ‘injustice’ and perhaps some of the money from the compensation claims have gone to pay for its expenses. That doesn’t make the taking of the money any more acceptable.

If, as the film seeks to portray, on the day before his murder Oscar really was trying to find a way to provide for his family he surely wasn’t thinking that his death would be the quickest way to secure his goal.

The Railway Man (2013) – dir. Jonathan Teplitzky

Posted on by
Reply
British POWs on Burma Railway

British POWs on Burma Railway

The Railway Man concerns a surviving POW of the Japanese who was forced to work on the Burma Railway (of Bridge Over the River Kwai fame) and his post traumatic stress at his treatment, manifesting itself more than 35 years after the event.

As one of the other survivors says ‘war leaves a mess’. A bit of an understatement but obviously true but our realisation of that fact doesn’t make us any less likely, willing or even enthusiastic to send an ever-increasing numbers of men and women into conflict zones.

If the autobiography upon which the film is based, as well as the film itself, was arguing, if nothing else, that ‘war leaves a mess’ then surely we should be doing all we can to prevent such a mess from being created in the first place. This is especially so in a country that has been playing fast and loose with war since the disgrace and national shame of the Malvinas War of 1982.

Since then another Prime Minister, with an equal eye on history, has indulged his fantasy of long-lasting fame and, faced with gutless, opportunist and pusillanimous politicians and a weak population who oppose initially but support when ‘it’s our boys (and girls)’, has taken us along a road of never-ending conflict. When GW declared (probably the only true thing he ever said) that the ‘war against terror’ doesn’t have an end even he, I’m sure, didn’t expect that conflicts would be sprouting throughout the globe like poppies on the pockmarked, once agricultural, areas of Belgium.

So, I suppose, I’m asking what’s the purpose of this film (or any such like), this story of a personal tragedy?

Is it to ‘remind us’ that the British were the ‘good guys’ in the 1939-45 war? Is it to say, in the long-held Hollywood tradition, that the love of a good woman will bring resolution and redemption? Is it to say that revenge isn’t necessary and would probably have an even worse effect on he who perpetrated that revenge (as was the main point of the most recent film about South African apartheid, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom)?

Because the whole idea of forgiveness is ludicrous if we allow the circumstances where such acts of barbarity can be committed to exist in the first place.

It’s the same about post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In WWI it was described as shell shock and treated as a weakness and very often as an excuse for cowardice. This was the case even in the years following the war when damaged men were seen and written about throughout Western European society (I’ve never read or heard about the effects the war might have made on those soldiers from the British colonies of the time, from India and Africa).

Now it’s a recognised illness and has been (although grudgingly by the state) accepted as a consequence of conflict since the United States invasion of Vietnam in the 1960s. However, in those major wars the majority of the soldiers involved were conscripts, not all, but the majority. For me that paints a different picture. To forcibly take a young man from his home environment, send him to a strange and exotic land where he’s invariably like the proverbial fish out of water, expect him to kill, commit atrocities in the name their particular State, and put his own life on the line it’s not then surprising if some of them go doolally.

However, what I do find difficult to accept is the present tranche of the military that have, are or will be fighting in this never-ending war against terrorism. OK, it might be acceptable for the first to have gone into Afghanistan in 2001 and even some of those who were part of the invasion force in Iraq in 2003 but the ‘War on Terror’ has been going on for near on 13 years now.

As most private soldiers on the front line are in their late teens or early twenties some of those would have been in their first years of primary school when the wars started and when the first casualties of PTSD they would have been in their first years of secondary school. Before they joined up weren’t they aware that ‘war leaves a mess’? Were they so blinded by state propaganda and their bloodless experience of playing video games that wars hurt people? That their friends might not make it back? That innocent men, women and children are often casualties of war? That they might see done, or even do, things they would not have thought themselves capable before leaving home?

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have relations of the military killed in these conflicts declaring, proudly, before the press (and in that way justifying the military aspirations of the State) that their son/daughter ‘died doing what they loved’, when what they did was kill people. Psychopaths and serial killers can’t get away with that excuse so why can State sponsored killers? On the other hand some will say that they have been permanently scarred psychologically by their experiences of war. They should have known better BEFORE taking the Queen’s shilling. They should have gone into it with their eyes wide open.

In some respects by their supposed ‘suffering’ they are negating the real horror and suffering of those who were forced, against their will and better judgement or conned into believing in a greater ideal of King and Country and whose mutilated bodies became part of the mud of Flanders fields. The adverts appearing on TV and cinema screens at the moment romanticise the military and have the same effect of deluding the young people who are still lining up to join the army.

One the other things this film sparked off in me was an investigation into the roots of waterboarding. Due to the publicity of its use in the last 13 years or so, primarily against Al-Qaeda suspects but probably against anyone the Americans don’t like, I held the general idea it was a relatively recent innovation in the treatment of people over which you have absolute power. It couldn’t be further from the truth and, if you think about it, the roots had to lie in the past.

Why? Because it’s low tech, cheap and needs only a few items which are always to hand.

It’s use is documented by the Spanish Inquisition, which began in the 15th century, but there’s no reason to believe it wasn’t used long before that. It was used by the Inquisition to extract confessions of consorting, fornicating and generally being a servant of the Devil and, as is the nature of torture where people will say anything to make it stop, thousands admitted to whatever they were being accused. This fact, however, didn’t stop the United States Army from institutionalising this treatment as a form of ‘enhanced interrogation’.

In the Spanish-American War, which started in 1898 and which spread to war over the control of the Philippines, it was a regular form of treatment of prisoners and a sketch of the procedure was even carried on the front page of Life magazine, dated 22nd May 1902 – so no real reason for the Americans to be shocked about its use. There was even an army manual about it.

And the Americans took the practice to those places it sent soldiers during the 20th century. I thought I knew quite a bit about the invasion of Vietnam but I hadn’t come across mention of the practice before. (Notice, in the picture below, the smiles on the faces of the perpetrators.) So waterboarding became torture just for the fun of it more than 40 years ago and continues as such to this day.

Water boarding in Vietnam

Water boarding in Vietnam

One of the ‘niceties’ of waterboarding is it doesn’t actually cause any physical harm. If the body is angled so that the head is lower than the body it’s impossible for a person to drown. The trick is the victim thinks they are. It’s this fine distinction which allows the likes of Donald Rumsfeld to have made typically contradictory statements over the procedure and its effectiveness as a means of gaining information, specifically about the whereabouts and eventual assassination of Osama Bin Ladin.

But it all depends on who is being waterboarded in the first place. The now replaced Republican officials of the Bush-era have been reportedly joking at their parties about all sorts of war crimes. However, in 1947 a Japanese soldier was sentenced to 15 years in gaol for waterboarding a US citizen – I don’t have any more information. The British Army used it against Republicans in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and its inconceivable it wasn’t used against anti-colonial movements in Africa prior to that.

Finally on this matter. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times for his supposed involvement in the September 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York. It is reported the US intelligence forces gained 10 pieces of information from Abu Zubaydah, but nothing that was world shattering showing either he knew nothing or he was really tough.

Tougher, it seems, than US Navy Seals. Someone with a sense of humour in the US Defence Department thought it would be good to introduce waterboarding into the training programme. On average the recruits lasted 14 seconds. After a while it was decided this part of the programme was not particularly good for morale.