Gaddafi is Dead.

As the old order has been obliterated in Libya it appears the country is passing through a zero-level of violence onto which the bourgeois framework of law and order can be constructed. The term 'law-creating violence' was used by Walter Benjamin to signify such instances of violence which underpin the enforcement of laws later on. In the battle to take Sirte, Muammar al-Gaddafi has been captured and killed. Before that it was clear there had been numerous civilian casualties and the killing of black men suspected of being mercenaries working for Gaddafi. Perhaps we should bare in mind that each advance made in civilisation is an advance in barbarism, as such an advance arrives head-to-foot in blood it heralds new possibilities of emancipation. The real problem is whether or not the enormous suffering was worth it in the end. It seems thoroughly doubtful that the effects of colonialism, slavery, genocide, war and capitalist exploitation can ever be compensated for in Africa. So we might be best to note a profound historical sense of tragedy here.

The new regime defines itself by its exclusion of Gaddafi, this is a basic aspect of the state as sovereignty constitutes the political body in its inclusion of people. The state holds the monopoly over the power to declare an exception, to suspend normal legal guarantees and deny basic rights to people. The situation might be extended across an entire society in the case of a state of emergency and even a civil war as the expectations of normal everyday life no longer apply. The state divides the people into those who qualify as fully human and those with the lesser status of bare life. The qualified life of politically recognised people is adorned with forms of meaning derived from political recognition and representation. This is what the bare life is devoid of, in fact the difference might be aptly described as the difference between being a human bodily organism and being recognised as a citizen or a person in the moral sense. These are the people who can be carted off to be tortured in Uzbekistan, as well as be killed at home in the middle of the night.

The Roman Empire had a word for an outlaw who could be killed and their property seized legitimately by anyone - homo sacer. The life of a homo sacer cannot be taken in ritual as a sacrifice, as the person has been expunged from society to a realm where all civil rights and civil religious functions are in suspension. To be more specific, the homo sacer resides on the boundaries of political and religious law which means the homo sacer is at once included and excluded from law. Only in the way that the individual has been excluded by law does that individual continue to be included. It is not law but the realm of valued life that the individual is excluded from when they become homo sacer. These people can't be sacrificed to the Gods because they belong outside the recognised terrain of valued life and there is nothing left in them worth sacrificing. To sacrifice such an individual would be sacrilege and for that reason they can be killed with impunity.

The power to distinguish between bare life and recognised life arises from the sovereignty claimed by the state. We'd like to think that the establishment of a liberal society of law based on rights and freedoms would inoculate society of these practices. But it seems that, at best, it just means everyone is potentially a sovereign as well as a homo sacer. It may be that in any state everyone is at risk of being declared a homo sacer. It is interesting that the Western media reached for the old label "mad dog" to describe Gaddafi, as states have traditionally relegated groups of people to bare life by rendering them to the level of animals with labels such as savages, feral, scum etc. It is quite a leap for Gaddafi to go from sovereign to homo sacer, from qualified life to bare life as he was deprived of his political status and reduced to a hunted man. This came about as the Transitional National Council laid claim to sovereignty as Berbers in the West of the country sought revenge against the regime which had brutalised them.

The death of Gaddafi, as homo sacer, is convenient for NATO and the Western governments that supported him even as he helped maim, mutilate and murder 1.2 million people in Sierra Leone. We can go back to moralising about the Lockerbie Bombing with the Colonel out of the way. The Left can theorise about what could have been in Libya if the revolution had not been "corrupted" while the Right will bask triumphantly in the light of a country set ablaze by over 30,000 bombs. The revolution in Libya might herald a bourgeois democracy in North Africa or at least a moderated form of the old regime. Potentially Libya could become a wonderful holiday destination for white people, whether or not that would lead to less poverty and injustice in the country is another matter. The fact that the rebels initially called for economic justice as well as freedom and democracy has been lost amidst the media hype over yet another "humanitarian intervention". Coverage of the Arab Spring shifted to the Libyan Civil War as it provided a normal narrative for the West, so who cares about what's going on elsewhere?

See also:

The Autumn of the Colonel

We are the People!

Gaddafi's Greatest Hits

The Lesson of Mobile Phones.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the rage and condemnation expressed through mobile phones and laptops about the riots in London, never mind the use of phones to coordinate looting, is that there is a hidden lesson about history in the production of mobile phones. The lesson of mobile phones is a historical one, whenever we send a text or a tweet we should remember that the relation between barbarism and civilisation is synchronous not sequential. It is true that the establishment of states is accomplished through violence, but it should be noted that the development of civilisation is entwined with systemic forms of violence. How does the advent of the mobile phone demonstrate this? The Congo has long been important because it is rich in key resources such as coltan, cobalt, copper, diamond, uranium and gold. It was uranium that was extracted from the Congo that was used to make the atom bombs which the US then used to bomb Japan. Later on, copper became fundamental to the running of the Cold War.

The value of coltan has exploded in recent years because it is essential to the production of mobile phones, laptops and games, thus the cheap extraction of coltan became vital for the consumer boom in the West. Zimbabwe, Angola, Uganda, Chad, Libya and even Rwanda have sought to seize control of the precious resources. Behind them Western companies and consumers were looking for new goods. The interests of foreign corporations are at once a threat to, and in harmony with, the interests of the war lords that have been dominant since Mobutu fell. The war lords control territory with militias that include drugged children, the deal to give China access to the vital minerals in exchange for a railway and highways is a threat to the interests of war lords who maintain control through the broken state of affairs in the Congo. But at the same time these war lords have business deals with multinational corporations that are given the right to start mining without paying any taxes and with minimal complications.

In the meantime over 4 million were slaughtered in the Congo in the last decade or so. In a period of just 18 months the Rwandan army made $250 million just on coltan. The accumulation of the material resources necessary for our daily lives is not that distinct from barbarism, capitalism is indebted to feudalism and slavery in that each of them provided the material preconditions for the explosion and development of capitalism in the last couple of hundred years. We can discuss violence on the streets of London because of a bloodbath in Africa, which the majority of us aren't even aware of and feel no responsibility for at all. Every advance in civilisation is an advance in barbarism, bringing in it's wake new possibilities of emancipation and often arrives coated head-to-foot in blood. The price of the material advantages we enjoy is blood and misery. It is not clear whether we can ever make-up for the immense suffering, unimaginable misery and innumerable generations of people born into filth and squalor; only to amass the material resources that might provide the preconditions for a better existence.

Fascism, Regular not Decaf.

The media was somewhat disappointed to find that the slaughter of Norwegian civilians on Utoya Island and the bombing in Oslo was not perpetrated by Islamists. Instead it turned out to be just another angry white man out to "liquidate" an entire generation of future politicians. Oh and he's a fan of Geert Wilders who made contact over the web with fascist groups such as the English Defence League and wanted to make a stand for Europe as a Judeo-Christian civilisation. It is a testament to the state of affairs in Europe that we often hear the political heirs to Hitler and Mussolini calling for a defence of Judeo-Christian values. How dare these people even speak of the Judeo-Christian civilisation?! It is time for us to seriously think about the resurgence of the radical Right with it's promise of an alternative modernity devoid of the class struggle and affirmed through the nation. It is no coincidence that we have witnessed this resurgence just as the economic crisis of 2008 has left us stagnant, bankrupt and disillusioned.

A recent poll conducted by Searchlight has found that 48% of the British people would vote for a radically right-wing political party if the violent xenophobia, football-related thuggery and proto-Nazi regalia was ditched. So we want Hitler without the Holocaust, a decaffeinated fascism. The growing support, which is probably exaggerated, is the result of the financial crisis and the subsequent recession. Similarly, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation has found that 30% of people believe Germany is over-run with immigrants and another study found that 13% of the German people would welcome the rise of a new Führer. So Angela Merkel has announced the "failure" of multiculturalism as Nicholas Sarkozy has banned the Islamic veil and expelled the Roma, whilst Silvio Berlusconi has imposed a state of emergency to combat illegal immigration among other things. The approach of the British government has been to lay into multiculturalism as a "state-sponsored doctrine", to the joy of the BNP and the EDL, in favour of a "muscular" liberalism.

In Europe we find there is a silent rehabilitation of Fascism going on, where Fascism is being defended as not as bad as National Socialism and we are encouraged to forgive Mussolini but not Hitler. The Hungarian government has reformed the laws against Fascist propaganda to outlaw Communist propaganda and Nazi propaganda. All National Socialists are Fascists, but not all Fascists are National Socialists. Thus, Fascist propaganda has been given the green light in Hungary. Just as the UK has introduced an immigration cap and rails against multiculturalism, in order to avoid the horrors of the "extremes" of racism we must resort to a "reasonable racism". This is no better than the way Robert Brasillach came up with a notion of "reasonable anti-Semitism" during the Nazi occupation of France. When we excavate the ideas that lurk behind this attack we should begin in mainstream conservatism and outward to fascism. So we can go from the timid opposition to multiculturalism and political correctness to the militant rejection of Islam and cultural Marxism.

There is no vaccination for Fascism, we can't hold it off with a "moderate" racism that will accomplish the same ends without the Gestapo. As Richard Seymour has pointed out we can still read about the "failure" of multiculturalism that led to the attacks in The New York Times and in The Atlantic how the massacre is a "mutation of jihad" whereby a white man goes ape as a Muslim fanatic would in order to prevent the coming Islamization of Europe. So these outbursts can be avoided if we just act to dismantle multiculturalism in a more 'moderate' way. It is not the case that the Muslim disposition to kamikaze style attacks was "transmitted" into the innocent mind of a blond white European which caused this horrifying atrocity. The worrying presupposition remains Brasillachian in that the radical Right represents the legitimate grievances of working-class people and we must find a "reasonable racism" to resolve such grievances. The media are looking to reconstitute the same line that these events could have been avoided if Norway had been tougher on immigration.

Now we find that the BBC are apprehensive to refer to the Norwegian perpetrator as a "terrorist" and has opted for references to "acts of terror" in Norway in order to maintain the self-serving definition of terrorism, e.g. if you have a beard and you're yelling something in Arabic when you blow yourself up you're a terrorist mate. The euphemism of "international terrorism" pops up to remind us of the threat of al-Qaeda rather than the threat posed by far-right maniacs who have access to firearms and explosives. The commentariat has really showed itself up this time, which set the agenda of the media and the limits of the discussion over the attacks until the murderer surrendered peacefully. The Sun spared no time at all to run the headline "Al-Qaeda Massacre: Norway's 9/11". On Fox News John Bolton stalled until the full facts were known, remaining sceptical until it was proven that it was an angry white man and not a Muslim. The shock-jock Michael Savage went on an appalling rant against Muslims and specifically spewed hate against Muslim immigrants in Norway.

On Newsnight we watched as Jeremy Paxman asked the most feeble of questions to EDL leader Stephen Yaxley Lennon. The line of the EDL has basically been swallowed by the mainstream media, that the grievances of the working-classes are being expressed through a fascist reaction to immigration. So the massacre in Norway is an inevitable bi-product of multiculturalism as white people react to the Islamization of Europe. The only way to avoid more violence is to restrict immigration, put a stop to multiculturalism, political correctness and the fundamentalist practice of Islam. This is the same line that Glenn Beck tows on his radio show. And yet the millionaire funder and strategist of the EDL Alan Lake has said "Apparently, in a long screed Anders Behring Breivik posted on line, he did this attack to protest against the way that Islam is taking over large parts of Europe. By attacking the leftist politicians that are enabling this, the chickens have actually come home to roost – although I’m sure it won’t be depicted that way."

This is Vietnam, the Movie!

First to Go, Last to Know.

After 20 bloody years of US military intervention in Vietnam, the war ended and the country was united. The understanding of the war is that it was undertaken to prevent the spread of Communism from North Vietnam. However it was South Vietnam that was the major target of US aggression in the early years of the war. The Diem regime, which was installed and supported by the Eisenhower administration, was overthrown at the behest of the US in 1963. Even still it is the only war which the US did not come out of officially the victor. But it was a success in that the currents of independence in the region were crushed and Vietnam was prevented from emerging as a positive model of independence. To help soothe the wounds of this loss Hollywood has pumped out flicks like The Deer Hunter and Platoon which depict the American experience of the war. Oliver Stone tells us the first casualty of war is innocence, not the Vietnamese who died first, whilst Michael Cimino tells us that the Vietnamese liked to force American POWs to play Russian roulette - a lie of proportions fit for the Third Reich. These films take the side of the aggressor, not the victim.

Full Metal Jacket is in part a deviation from this trend. It is not a tissue of lies rarefied by the American national anthem, a tear sodden tale of lost innocence or a roid-pumped theme park for the white man to go "wild" in. Essentially the range goes from the jingoist celebration of violence to the shibboleths of liberal cinema, which see the need for thousands of deaths for the sake of a character arc. But it is still a film which takes the view point of the aggressor and, in doing so, inevitably sides with the oppressor. Where the Vietnamese perspective should be, there is only the American experience. The central focus of Full Metal Jacket is the process of training and indoctrination through which civilians are turned into killing machines - complete with nom de guerres like Cowboy and Joker - which is a way for the soldiers to be humanised for the audience. By contrast the Vietnamese are presented as faceless drones all too deserving of a death at the hands of American troops. The only real appearances made by the Other are of Vietnamese women, again only as prostitutes and killers.

The work of Stanley Kubrick is far too complex and so polysemic that to write it off so soon would be to ignore his ingenuity, greater discussion is required. Rob Ager argues that the scenes set in Vietnam are a satirical take on pro-war propaganda. Joker is writing for Stars and Stripes and in one scene the Chief Editor bluntly instructs the team on how to distort the coverage of the war. Behind him a banner reads: first to go, last to know. Joker and Rafterman enter the field to cover a platoon in battle, but they are part of a propaganda outlet and therefore we get a biased take on the story. Take the first battle of the film. It is an unbridled display of firepower and machismo, which quickly subdues the invisible enemy, which necessitates a piece of 1960s surf-rock soon after. The surf-rock continues to play as we see Joker's camera team filming the platoon in battle, the soldiers are lying down as if using concrete rubble for cover from enemy gunfire. But the camera men are not shot and are undeterred to carry on filming, there was no danger from enemy fire and the platoon was putting on a show for the press. A soldier even shouts "This is Vietnam, the movie!"


The "verfremdungseffekt", a distancing effect, which keeps the audience aware that the story is not of reality but an artefact of it. It keeps the audience in a state of heightened awareness, that prevents a emotional attachment with the story and keeps the theatrical set up from "naturalising" what appears as so unnatural. The dialogue of the soldiers is risible, particularly evident in a set of mock-interviews, contrasted with the serious and tragic nature of warfare. Before all of this we have observed the indoctrination process and not to mention the cynical instructions to rewrite a story and give it a "happy ending, say one kill". The satirical battles of previous scenes are cut away to make room for real combat as the squad descends into cowardice when faced with a sniper - who picks them off, one by one. After Cowboy's death the remaining members of the Lusthog Squad seek revenge on the sniper. Joker is caught off guard as his weapon jams and the sniper turns around - it's a woman! But she is swiftly gunned down before she can do him any harm and Joker puts her out of her misery.

The Shadow of White Men.

In the scene in which Joker and Rafterman cover a recently unearthed mass-grave, an atrocity committed by the Vietcong, a Colonel states "We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out." The depiction of the Other in the film is not just a simple case of "faceless drones" but of shadows which represent what the American troops have repressed as part of their training. This is down to the Jungian influence on co-writer Michael Herr, which made way for the concept of the Shadow - consistent of repressed weaknesses and instincts . The enemy is almost always to distant to see in battle, and when the enemy can be seen they are depicted as faceless silhouettes. It could be that the silhouettes of Vietcong killed in the film represent the weaknesses and instincts that the American soldiers have repressed as part of military training. Back at the mass-grave, the bodies of the deceased have been covered in lime and have been laid out in a similar symmetry to the recruits sleeping in their beds in previous scenes.

The objective violence of war is absent and filled by the subjective violence suffered by American soldiers. The suffering of the Vietnamese remains in the background and only occasionally comes to the forefront of Joker's story. The unearthed mass-grave is a crime committed by the Vietnamese against other Vietnamese, but similar crimes are absent in the film or only arise in allegorical forms. As is the case with the shooting at the end in which it is still Joker's perspective which matters and, like the prostitutes, she was asking for it and her death will be his burden to bare. We should build on the interpretation of the Vietnamese as a kind of Shadow for the Lusthog Squad and conclude that the women in the film are the realisation of man's guilt. This radical anti-feminist theme goes back to Adam and Eve, woman is conjured up out of man's desire and so if man "cleanses" himself woman will cease to exist. This is man's lowest mythology. In killing the Shadow the Lusthog Squad "purge" themselves of such desires and thus absolve themselves of guilt. 

There are plenty of Vietnamese who die at a distance in the film, but Vietnamese women are given greater screen time (out of the victims). Out of these women two of them are prostitutes and the third is a soldier who wastes three marines before being killed herself. Three soldiers killed for each appearance of women, one of whom is also killed, the cost of their sins is implicit and we might even interpret the sniper's killings as a form of violence which differs from the objective-subjective distinction. Similar to the Biblical locusts which comes seemingly out of nowhere, a means without an end, the divine punishment for man's sins - divine violence. The Benjaminian divine violence should be understood not as the vengeance of the People's Will, but as a sovereign decision to act made on the assumption of absolute solitude. The decision to risk one's life and strike blindly against the oppressor, enacting the point of non-distinction between vengeance and justice. It is Judgement Day for all the rape and carnage so flippantly indulged in by the Squad. Tragically the swarm of locusts is cut short as the sniper is wasted.

We could view the sniper as a vanishing mediator for Joker, a necessary even in his arc and we might generously note that in the context of a satire on pro-war propaganda the kill is necessary. The kill is the "happy ending" demanded by the Chief Editor, it is the inhumanity of Joker's institutional role - that of a war correspondent - revealed by Kubrick for the viewer to judge. So the death of the woman was a necessity in the narrative. In the ending we watch as Joker and the Lusthogs march onwards and childishly sing, oblivious to the depravity of their actions. Joker's mind turns to fantasies of a home-coming fuck with a "Mary Jane Rottencrotch". It does not seem as though this conclusion required the killing and that might be a testament to the meaningless and absurd nature of war. But it still feels too generous to Kubrick, the indifference of Joker at the film's conclusion is hardly noteworthy. Though Kubrick was interested in the indoctrination of young men which turns them into killers, it cannot be glossed over, this is not the side of the victim.

Ablution of the Oppressor.

When Joker encounters the first of the two prostitutes he remarks that half of Vietnamese prostitutes are members of the Vietcong. This comment is not meant seriously but hides a certain truth which is expanded on later. In the scene in which another prostitute is encountered, this time by the Lusthogs and we might infer that the death of the sniper is actually an allegory of the gang-rape of this prostitute by the soldiers. In war sexual deviancy and gang-rape are not uncommon, for instance in the Second World War Russian soldiers committed mass-rapes in Eastern Europe. The Vietnam war was no different and so we can make the assumption that the prostitute was subject to gang-rape by the Lusthog Squad. The sniper is taken by surprise, but Joker's weapon jams  and he can't fire and has to take out a smaller handgun while taking cover from her retaliatory gunshots. It is then that the sniper is cut down in a blaze of gunfire by Rafterman. When viewed as an allegory this scene changes and becomes particularly despicable.

We can see as Joker is about to pull the trigger, the peace symbol on his jacket is concealed behind his collar as he turns slightly. The shot fired is on the surface a crime which he has participated in, at the same time it symbolises his part in the sexual humiliation of the Other and the merciless destruction of Vietnam. In defence of Joker we might point out that he is a reluctant participant in this crime, there is nothing inherently monstrous about him nor malicious about his intentions. It is just a by-product of the indoctrination process and so on, which of course may well be true. There is still the troubling mystification of the victim, a killer yearning to be killed as a prostitute yearns to be fucked. Joker is devoid of a basic level of decency in the end, there is no grand reflection on his part in all of this. The juxtaposition of the sniper sequence and the scenes involving prostitutes may be an intentional hint on Kubrick's part, it is impossible to tell, that the sexual degradation of the Vietnamese in this way is equal to killing them. Again, this feels too generous but it is a possibility.

We could also read the sniper's death at Joker's hands as an allegory for the role he played in Pyle's descent into madness and eventual murder-suicide during the training scenes. It might even be a direct allegory of the scene in which Joker takes part in the beating of Pyle with soap bars. Out of the guilt for his conformity in beating a fellow cadet emerges the Other - a Shadow of this guilt that must be "cleansed" - which functions as a vanishing mediator. Once it has challenged Joker and he rises to that challenge, it can cease to exist. The challenge is the divine violence of luring the Lusthogs one-by-one to a drawn out death. But just as he failed to disarm Pyle, and "stomp" his guts out, Joker also fails to waste the sniper when it finally comes down to it. There is a sense in which Hartman took Joker's place in the murder-suicide which Joker was unable to prevent. We might go further to say that the sniper took Joker's place in being killed and that is the greatest humiliation for Joker. Note that the focus is still on the suffering of oppressor, even as he commits murder or fails to do so.

From this only a fractured normality can be restored, things will never be truly the same, in the aftermath. A reversion to youthful memories of Disney cartoons and immature sexual fantasies, coupled with the indifference to the magnitude of war crimes, is ultimately where the American troops are left. The indifference is all that is left over after the guilt has been "cleansed" and the Vietnamese, in all forms, no longer need to exist. A lot like the flushing of a toilet, shit is problematic only when there is a blockage and once this blockage is gone we can continue as normal. This is the horror of war cinema. The Other is just the filth conjured up by the American desire to fight Communism, promote democracy and freedom etc. The consequent guilt can only be "purged" with a full bucket of fake blood, strident imperial arrogance and persistent self-pity. The crimes can be recognised only to reassure us that we were the true victims all along. The Other can then be flushed away, it is no longer needed once it has served it's purpose in the narrative.

Reflections on Day X.

A Day of Action.

A series of walkouts followed by occupations and demonstrations rushed across the nation on Wednesday. The participants were ordinary students, including the pupils of secondary schools and colleges as well as from universities. It has been estimated that around 130,000 people took to streets across the country that day. 18 universities have gone into occupation. There were trade unions, leftist parties, activist networks and student unions involved but the vast majority had not been mobilised by any union or political party. It was down to the social networks through which activist networks have sprung up in recent months and word of the cuts agenda spread. But most of all it was the way that thousands of people acted to defend a basic tenet of social democracy - universal education. The unifying cause of the demonstrators was to stop the cuts to education and the raising of tuition fees. In other words, to prevent the Coalition from taking us towards an educational system that is much more unequal than it is today.

There was a heavy police presence at many of the demonstrations, it was a show of strength that the police were prepared and would not be embarrassed by a few rowdy students. The march, that I was involved in personally, from ULU on Malet Street to Trafalgar Square was guided by police escort - two vans led the way until a portion of the demonstrators broke-off and made a run for it and the police were soon in pursuit. The rest were led through an alternate route to Trafalgar but then down towards Parliament where the “kettling” commenced. It would last for many hours without much food or water and freezing weather. The mood of police ranged from hostile to sarcastic at best. There were many teenagers there who were still doing their A-levels and even GCSEs, one girl asked me why we - university students who would not be affected by the trebling of tuition fees - cared enough to stand alongside them. It's a good question. Here's the answer: this is our society and it would be immoral to reap the rewards without defending it for others to reap also.

Nearby bus-stops and a police van soon became the subject of the rage of some “kettled” students. Students climbed on top of the van as red smoke bombs were hurled about, firecrackers were set-off and music blasted out throughout the crowd. At risk of reverting to the good student-bad student dichotomy, it has to be said that the majority of demonstrators there understood why the police had left the van behind. The back doors had been left unlocked and the contents, including blankets and riot-gear, were soon utilised by activists. It was bitter cold, food and water were scarce as the pub weren’t letting anyone in without an ID - not a student ID but a passport, a press pass or drivers' license. It was clearly bait to give the right-wing press just what it wants, lots of shots of young people desecrating public property. Just like the demonstration on November 10th, the “violence” condemned by the media and the NUS was vandalism, there was violence at the march and it was the police on horseback who were charging on civilians.

As bus-stop was set ablaze in one part of the street, protesters sang songs, danced to music or simply huddled around the fires for warmth in other parts. The firecrackers were set-off before sunset because no one really thought we would be there for as long as 8 or 9 hours. The police eventually provided two toilets, which were kept behind the line of police so many relieved themselves against the local architecture. It became apparent that only the press were allowed to come and go, no protesters were allowed out unless they were 12 or younger or had a medical condition. The word ‘Revolution’ was sprayed in red onto a wall as a few students ascended it to escape the “kettling”. Veteran activists climbed onto walls and gave speeches, seeking to inspire the next generation not to be deterred by the unpleasant side of protest and to continue to actively resist these cuts.

The demonstrations of ‘Day X’ have roused talk of a return to the radicalism of ’68 and the kind of grass-roots action that toppled Ted Heath and later helped shunt Thatcher out of government. Those administrations collapsed under the pressure of industrial action and the transition of demonstrations to riots. But it is sad to note that the student movement is becoming factional. The way in which Aaron Porter and the NUS have distanced themselves from student activism, particularly demonstrations and occupations, is divisive and destructive. For the sake of unity Porter should at least be in solidarity with the students who demonstrated on ‘Day X’ and occupied buildings across the country. The next two days of walkouts, occupations and marches will take place on Tuesday and Sunday this week. Aaron Porter should be behind the student activism in full-swing to further the cause. Hopefully he’ll act in the best interests of students this week.

The American Experience.

The First Casualty of War.

 

Ricky Gervais once joked that the Second World War may have the best ending but the Vietnam war has the best sound track. He was referring to the horrendous use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese as less "entertaining" than the music of the 1960s. In doing so, whether intentionally or not, Gervais highlights the way war has been reduced to the realm of entertainment today. As we all know, since the end of the Vietnam war there have been countless efforts to immortalise the conflict on the big screen for all to see. The best of these films are often listed as Platoon, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. The Kubrick film being my personal favourite. But there are problems with the so-called anti-war films that have focused on the war which raged from the early 60s under JFK to the mid 1970s under the caretaker administration of Gerald Ford.


The problems of films like First Blood and Missing in Action are self-evident, as such films do not pretend to be anything more than a shallow display of steroid-fuelled jingoism and a mere excuse for a angry white man to go "wild". The problems of films that claim to show us the true horror of war are not often discussed in the same light. Even though the films, which take a less "positive" look at the Vietnam war, have made false depictions of the Vietnamese. One such instance being in The Deer Hunter where American POWs are forced to play Russian roulette for the pleasure of sadistic Vietcong. Thus, justifying the ruthlessness which Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken demonstrated in gunning them down to escape. It is the scars, both physical and psychological, of war that are depicted in the film. But only the scars inflicted on the minds and bodies of American soldiers.

Let's look at Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's take on the Vietnam war, which was an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Conrad's novella takes place in the Congo Free State, a private-colony of the Belgian King Leopold II, and the characters are working for a trading company which brutally exploits African workers. Apocalypse Now takes place in war-ravaged Vietnam and Cambodia, the main characters are soldiers. It is Cambodians who replace the Africans as the brutalised people, but also as "primitive savages" who worship Kurtz as a God. In Apocalypse Now Kurtz recalls a humanitarian trip to inoculate children for polio in a Vietnamese village, the Vietcong went into the village and then hacked off the arms of the inoculated children. Kurtz wept at the sight of the pile of little arms, before learning to admire the will of the Vietcong to commit such atrocities. Kurtz says "If I had 10 divisions of those men, then our troubles would be over very quickly."

The emphasis on the American experience of the war is a characteristic that practically all films on the Vietnam war share. The Vietnamese experience is severely neglected, even though it was 6 million Indochinese who died during the war. Not only is the war depicted from the side of the aggressor, it is the subjective experience of the war by soldiers carrying out the invasion which is the focus of such films. The objective violence of war, which is inherent to war regardless of the existence of any particular person, which becomes subjective violence in war films. Subjective violence in the sense of violence as impacting directly on individuals, violence which is partly dependent on the existence of an individual. Take Platoon the mass-killings and fraggings that take place is all part of Charlie Sheen losing his innocence, which is the "first casualty of war" according to the film's tag line.

Far from actually taking a moral position on the war these films actually obfuscate the important issues of the war. Instead opting to focus in on the perpetrator's traumatic experience, which enables the ethical and political background of the conflict to be suppressed. Why was the US in Vietnam? This question goes unanswered in most, if not all, American war movies. The fact that it was the events at Pearl Harbour that drove the Europeans out of South-East Asia and by the early 1950s colonial powers were struggling to maintain power.  Around this time the US government supported the French in their bid to regain dominance over Indochina. This attempt failed and the US ended up backing a nationalist regime in the South of Vietnam as the North was taken over by communists. In the 60s, the US moved to destroy all currents of independence in Vietnam - whether communist or nationalist - to prevent a "domino effect" across South-East Asia. 

In We Were Soldiers, which was dedicated not just to the Americans who fought at Ia Drang but also the Vietnamese who died there, the fall of French colonialism in the region is depicted in the opening scene. The problem in the ambush of French soldiers by Vietnamese rebels is that it is the Vietnamese who remain faceless aggressors and the French who are the victims of the assault. This goes as far as portraying a Vietnamese man literally stabbing a French officer in the back with a bayonet. It is the French who are overwhelmed, disarmed and executed mercilessly. This scene is supposed to explain how the Vietnam war "began", but it takes one battle out of context. The battle of Ia Drang was one of the last in the First Indochina war, which spanned 8 years and ultimately brought an end to over 60 years of French colonialism in the region.

It is as if the American film industry is obsessed with Vietnam in particular because it is commonly perceived as such a loss for the US and a pointless waste of American life. Not because it was fundamentally wrong and immoral, but because almost 60,000 Americans died in a senseless war. Never mind the 6 million people slaughtered all over South-East Asia, not just from Vietnam but Laos and Cambodia as well. It could also be argued that the US succeeded in its goals in Indochina, most currents of independence were eradicated and these countries were reduced to satellites of China. In that sense, the Vietnam war was no loss for the US and the thousands of Americans who died in the war did die for a cause - an immoral cause. The Americans were not the victims of this war, the people of Indochina were. Thus, a film about the Vietnamese experience of war is well over due.

The Strong Silent Type.

"Pain and truth? I'm a fat fuckin' crook from New Jersey." - Tony Soprano

Tony Soprano often refers to Gary Cooper as the consummate American male, strong and silent, focused and not emasculated by confession. Tony says in one therapy session that Cooper "wasn't in touch with his feelings, he just did what he had to do". Cooper was a staunch anti-communist and was famed for playing cowboys, an imitation of the mass-murderers who led a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Native American population. He equates the identity of the American male with unaccountability. The genocide of the Native American tribes was not confronted in American society until the 60s and 70s. It is made clear throughout the show that the characters prefer to focus on the subjective violence - violent acts committed against them - and do not confront the objective violence - the violent acts which they are responsible for, as a way of sustaining their life styles. After watching all the episodes of The Sopranos it is clear that murder is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to the human suffering that these mobsters are responsible for.

In a flashback to the early 1970s, Tony watches as his Uncle Junior and father Johnny Boy take Francis Satriale into the back of his pork store, there his father chops Satriale's pinkie off with a meat cleaver. This act of extreme violence is aesthetically symbolic of castration - with all of it's Freudian connotations. Later on in the episode, Tony has a conversation with his father, explaining his reasons for cutting off Satriale's finger, the music playing in the background is reminiscent of the Westerners of the late 1960s. The prepubescent Tony later suffers his first ever panic attack, as his father cuts up the pork before his eyes, just after seeing his father dancing with his mother. He once confides in a therapy session that he was told that he was as a child, that his father was in Montana living as a cowboy, when in fact Johnny Boy was in prison. Tony experiences great existential despair and anxiety as he has such enormous "shoes to fill". At the same time, he experienced impotence as his father handled the meat cleaver so swiftly.

In the first episode of the second season, we see Tony driving along in his SUV and listening to heavy metal music. Along the way he passes dilapidated warehouses and rundown buildings, obliviously, as if Tony does not want to acknowledge the destruction his "journey" has brought upon the community. But when his car's radio begins to malfunction during this journey Tony becomes enraged and begins hitting the dashboard, he eventually suffers an anxiety attack and passes out, crashing his car. Tony was overwhelmed by feelings of intense rage triggered by a minor disruption in his journey. As if it were a desperate attempt to avoid facing the destructive consequences of his actions - his true responsibilities. These responsibilities Tony has avoided since childhood, as his father had done before him, which was expected of him as he chose to follow in his father's footsteps.

It is often said that The Sopranos brings us to fall in love with character whom we would find totally abhorrent if we encountered them in reality. Tony Soprano is one character in a long line of fat working-class lovable oaths, like Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin, that American popular culture has produced over the years. It is his many flaws that make him so human and what helps the audience sympathise with him. This is why we constantly put up with his despicable behaviour, as does Dr Melfi and most of his loved ones. It could be down to the Judeo-Christian values which remain dominant in Western society generally - which set a low standard for human nature - and as a consequence of them we generally do identify with flawed characters.

Perhaps, such characters appeal to the parental instincts of the audience. Fat, helpless, unable to resist gratification, these are much like the features of babies, which are innocent and in need of guidance. It could be our desire to protect and guide the weak of this world that is behind our shared compassion for such oath-like characters. There are allusions to this during the course of the show. Gloria Trillo referred to a guerrilla in the zoo as looking "innocent" like a baby, since the term "guerrilla" has been used as a euphemism for Mafia thugs in the past, this may be an insight into her, as well as our own, fascination with Tony and other men like him. In the episode Amour Fou, Carmela is at an art gallery with Meadow where they view The Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, which depicts Saint Catherine kneeling down and kissing the hand of the Baby Jesus who is being held by the Virgin Mary. Meadow comments "She's marrying a baby. Good luck." to which Carmela replies "We all do." But does not just imply Tony is a "big baby", it puts him in the place of Christ - a martyr.

In his sessions with Dr Melfi it is revealed that as a sociopath Tony mimics empathy by showing affection for animals and babies. Melfi later concluded that Soprano, due to his sociopathic personality, was an untreatable case after reading The Criminal Personality, a particularly damning case study. Though, Tony had previously summed it up, we just didn't want to listen, "Pain and truth? I'm a fat fuckin' crook from New Jersey." This effectively ended the fantasy of Tony redeeming himself and becoming a reformed character, it effectively ended the hopes of the audience. But on an even deeper level it is as if this realisation, is a recognition of the "con" played against the audience. The therapy sessions provide what the show lacks, narrative, Dr Melfi is the presence of the audience in the show. She is fascinated with Tony Soprano, a gangster, like the audience and like the audience she is ultimately "conned", charmed by a sociopath and the tricks he's mastered over the years.