Harvesting Our Souls : Review

I’ve been reading a book which for reasons entirely beyond the author’s control, is rather apposite right now. I decided to review it as a blog entry and not as a review – because I have so much to say on the subject beyond what the author does.

In the last couple of weeks, major clashes have broken out in the state of Orissa between Hindu groups and Christians – most of whom are tribal people who converted relatively recently. These are far from the first clashes between the two groups. The only difference is that this time the Christians weren’t the ones at the receiving end. And the reason for the clashes? Evangelical Christianity had raised tensions on either side. We’ll get back to the reason in a minute. 

You must understand that despite all claims to the contrary, Christianity is not a recent arrival in the Indian subcontinent as a whole.

It arrived in the first century of the current era (it’s claimed the Apostle Thomas himself brought it, but since there’s no way to prove that, there’s no need to place any relevance on that bit) and never got much in the way of converts. It stayed restricted for well over a thousand years to small pockets on the coasts, even though Christians were never persecuted or restricted in preaching. It was just not a typically “Indian” religion, I guess, and because Christians took such care to keep themselves apart from Hinduism they weren’t submerged in the Hindu pantheon as most other foreign imports were. Still and all, Christianity in India is a good two millennia old, older than Christianity in Western Europe. It’s as Indian a religion as any, by that criterion. However, as I said, it remained restricted to the coasts – until the Dutch came along, and then the Portuguese, the French, and most of all the British. The Portuguese had already begun trying to convert the Mughal Emperor Akbar (who had a lot of fun, if reports are to be trusted, stringing their priests along) to Catholicism, but their possessions in India were small and even there the conversion efforts weren’t too successful.

The real push for Christianity came in the mid-nineteenth century when British power was expanding exponentially in the Indian subcontinent. The earlier British were all too happy to “go native” – they took local wives, put on Indian clothing, learned Indian languages, and sometimes converted to Islam as well. But as British hard power increased, the British came to think of themselves as a superior master race ordained by god to rule “lesser breeds without the law”; and, naturally, the master race’s religion had to be superior to that of the subject people.

One of the major triggers behind the War of Independence of 1857 was the increasing attempts at conversion by Christian priests of Hindus and Muslims; the British got such a scare as the result of that conflict that the thrust of conversion was directed away from the mainstream religious groups towards the marginalised – the many tribes and the lowest castes of the country.  

I live in a state where about 70% of the population is Christian (and about 54% of the population of this town is Christian). Since Christianity is a relatively recent arrival (since the mid-nineteenth century) in these parts (and even later in other parts of North East India) it might repay study if we see how the religion has affected the large part of the population who converted to it…

In Meghalaya (the state where I live) much, but far from all, the population of the majority Khasi tribe has been Christianised – mostly by Catholics. The original Khasi religion, Niam Tre, still exists, though, and still has a substantial number of adherents, and the Khasi culture hasn’t been totally obliterated even among Christians. Things are different in the two states targeted by Baptist missionaries, Mizoram and Nagaland, where virtually the entire tribal population was converted to Christianity and the original culture (with the exception of tribal dances) was ruthlessly suppressed (even the traditional Mizo drum was banned). I guess that’s an indication of the differences between the Catholic and Baptist ways of doing things.

Now there comes a time when you hit the law of diminishing returns – when virtually all the people of an area have been converted, further conversion efforts are pretty much a waste of energy. The majority ofIndia’s Hindu population had proved remarkable in its resistance to conversion; Islam in any case prohibits Muslims from converting to anything else; and no one seriously minded so long as Christianity inIndia remained restricted to the periphery, the North East and the extreme south. But the missionaries, starved of subjects to convert, then turned to the tribal peoples of the heartland. That was kind of hitting close to home.

You see, the most identifiable political trend in India in the last two decades has been a move towards right wing Hindu fundamentalism, a trend that has had a precursor in Weimar Germany in the 1920s when the Nazis were just getting started. Any right wing fundamentalist movement, of a necessity, needs a target. The Muslims already were a target. But the problem was that the Muslims constitute enough of a chunk of India’s population that they can’t be completely ignored – and they can hit back. The Christians were a much softer target.

As it was, resentment levels were already high against evangelical Christianity and converts even in states like this one where religious clashes are as yet unknown – the average Niam Tre believer has only contempt for the Christian convert. This is despite the fact that missionary Christianity is on the back burner here. The Hindu fundamentalists had much more of a fertile ground for exploiting resentment in the heartland where the missionaries were much more active. There were many clashes, culminating in the burning alive of an Australian missionary cum social worker, Graham Staines, and two of his children in 1999 by a mob led by a Hindu fundamentalist known by the nom de plume Dara Singh.  

While the Indian constitution allows freedom to preach and propagate one’s religion, conversions by “coercion, fraud or allurement” are banned in many states. It happens, though. I know of one case myself. An elderly woman who was the only non-Christian in a village near this town was under considerable social pressure to convert. When she refused, mysteriously, every night stones would be flung at her house. The village church’s priest advised her to convert so he could pray for her and banish the evil influence. She converted and – hey presto! – the stoning stopped. Now is that a miracle or what?

Answer: what.

Why should the missionaries be so desperate to convert, anyway? Because conversion is big, big business. Despite the formal Christianity necessary for political office, Europe has about abandoned Christianity if church attendances are anything to go by…and this means that church collections are way, way down. Every little bit helps. With further economic recession looming in the West, the only place to go is Asia. At the same time, missionary funds come on the basis of headcounts – how many people a missionary manages to convert will determine how much money he will receive. I know of one pastor of a church called the Evangelical Free Church of India who uses the funds he receives from the parent church in the US to buy a fleet of SUVs and go for vacations abroad every year – and at the same time makes his “flock” turn over a percentage of their earnings to him as a tithe. It’s all about the money, honey.

The author of the book I’m reviewing is a politician by the name of Arun Shourie, one of the more intelligent and more articulate writers of the extreme Hindu right. The book is called Harvesting Our Souls and aims to expose the missionary agenda. Shourie does a pretty good job, if you read the book from a Hindu right wing viewpoint, of carrying through his stated aim. Fortunately, I’m a neutral in this, being an atheist. Still, I admit, so long as Shourie sticks to eviscerating the missionaries he does an excellent job, and his research so far as Christianity is concerned is immaculate. I’d give him four stars on those points, but only on those points.  

Shourie starts off with a review of anti-Christian “incidents”, including the Staines murder, which he, predictably enough, tries to downplay or even argue is the fault of the victim – because he, Staines, carried out conversions, he deserved, the implication goes, to be killed. He goes into detail about the motives of missionaries and why they tend to target the poor and illiterate rather than the well-educated who might be inclined to ask questions.

Shourie then gets stuck in with gusto into the Bible, exposing the many, many inconsistencies, discrepancies, and flat-out contradictions in this book which allegedly came from God direct (as the missionaries still claim), as well as the myth of the Virgin Mary. On this point I’m in total agreement with him. The versions of the Bible available in India to the layperson never, ever, mention any of these contradictions, nor do missionaries of my acquaintance (Catholic or Protestant) admit of them in public.

After that Shourie goes on to discuss the Old Testament’s blood-soaked deity (whom he’s careful never to refer to as YHWH or to talk of his chosen people as “Jews”; being a Hindu fascist he’s an extreme admirer of “Israel” and has no desire to annoy any “Israeli”) and this deity’s tantrums towards his own people. He ends with a brief discussion of the plight of converts: their social condition remains broadly unchanged.

Central to Shourie’s thesis are several assumptions, some of which are completely, demonstrably false, and some of which are at the least highly contentious. His core assumption, of course, is that Christianity is a “foreign” religion – which it is not – and that somehow or other Christians cease to be Indian or begin to have extra-territorial loyalties.

It is true that many Christians during British rule (though much less than all) wanted the Raj to last because being Christian, they thought, gave them status and they feared being submerged in a Hindu sea. But the Raj is six decades in its grave and surely anyone still hankering after that time should have died or left by now.

It’s obvious, of course, that if national law conflicts with religious law, the former should prevail: this is a point that Shourie makes. But his suggestion isn’t the Chinese model where the church is taken over by a national body independent of movers and shakers abroad, like theVatican for instance. Of course he doesn’t suggest that model: Shourie never misses a chance to take gratuitous potshots at China. Shourie doesn’t really make a suggestion – he leaves it to the reader to draw the conclusion that Christians are foreign fifth columnists who must be crushed.

As I said, this book is pitched towards Hindu readers who already hold right wing views. It isn’t meant to be read by someone with a critical mind. Unfortunately, in my case…

The next assumption Shourie makes – in fact he repeatedly and explicitly states it – is that while the Bible was compiled over centuries by a variety of authors, Hindu gods (whom he always calls “our gods”) like Rama and Krishna apparently have existed for much longer. This is poppycock. Each of those Hindu deities evolved slowly over time, and Krishna is of actually more recent origin than Christianity. So much for research where one’s own side is concerned!

Shourie finds fault with some segments of the Christian church for “Indianising” rituals by removing footwear, prostrating before the cross, using incense, and the like. Apparently instead of appreciating an attempt, however belated and limited, to try to indigenise itself, this is seen as a grave threat. It is. It might make Christianity more acceptable to the people, and to the Hindu fundamentalist, what could be worse than that?  

The next error in Shourie’s polemic isn’t really an error. It’s part of the Hindu fundamentalist agenda. All these millennia, mainstream Hinduism didn’t bother about the sects and the small religions of other peoples. The tribes had religions which had nothing to do with Hinduism (like Niam Tre, which I mentioned) and they were left alone. Since the Hinduism of the upper castes is highly resistant to change or conversion (the typical Hindu belief is that all religions lead to the same source) the missionaries were trying to convert among the tribes with their small, isolated religions. Suddenly, in these last couple of decades, the Hindu fundamentalists have declared that these people are all Hindus and must be “brought back into the fold” by re-conversions. It’s like Hitler discovering the trials and tribulations of the Volksdeutsche, the German expatriates of Eastern Europe.

What Shourie, of course, never attempts to answer is why people should want to convert at all. Surely not all of them were “coerced” or “allured” towards Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism? Surely there is a vast amount of resentment among the people at the bottom of the Indian caste system and among those altogether outside its limits, like the tribal people? Maybe it would make more sense to address these problems than rape nuns and burn priests alive? If you read Shourie, the question isn’t even approached. Nor does he try to think about why Hindu organisations don’t try and match the undoubted social services the missionaries provide in areas where there are no schools or hospitals or anything at all.

As I said, I’m a neutral, so I kind of enjoyed reading this book and watching one set of beliefs I detest take on another set I despise. “A plague on both your houses”, I said, and would have reached for the popcorn if only there hadn’t been real humans dying.

Oh, and the overall rating? Four stars for taking the Bible apart. Zero stars for everything else. Verdict? Two stars.    

Fifteen Minutes

 

Let’s picture a hypothetical situation.

Imagine you are a soldier of a country under attack. You did not choose to serve in the army; you were called up, impressed into service, like it or not.

Now imagine that your country is being overrun by the enemy, blown away by a storm of steel and high explosive against which none of the striving of your army or your allies has availed anything.

All right so far?

I have just been re-reading the Roads To Freedom trilogy of Jean Paul Sartre (the man in the photo, in spectacles). This is not meant as a review of the trilogy – frankly, I don’t feel myself equal to that task. All I can say about these three books is that they are an account of France at peace and war, France in the late thirties and in defeat in 1940, as seen through the eyes of a small number of characters.

Of them the most important by far is Mathieu Delarue, by no means a hero, a man who conspires in the first part of the trilogy (The Age of Reason) to try and force an abortion on his pregnant girlfriend. In the second part (The Reprieve) he is just one of the many characters who hope to find a way out of going to war, in the days of Munich, September 1938, which ended with the British and French handing over Sudetenland Czechoslovakia to Germany. And in the third (and by far the best) part of the trilogy, Iron In The Soul,  war – the war from which they had got a reprieve in 1938 – comes round, in all its destruction and defeat, and confronts each individual with the choices he must make.

Mathieu Delarue – teacher of Philosophy in school, no political leanings, conscript and telephonist in a second line unit; Boris, child of émigré Russian parents, determined to die in the war so he will not have to grow old; his much older lover Lola, singer in a cabaret; Brunet, warrant officer in the French army, Marxist; these are just a few of the human characters who populate Sartre’s pages. Most of the stories are open ended. One does not know what happens to Gomez, former general in the Spanish Civil War, trying to find a job in America; his wife Sarah, trapped on the road among refugees as the Germans storm through France, as are Mathieu’s brother Jacques and his wife Odette; Boris, who decides to try and get to England rather than marry Lola and settle down to domesticity; his sister Ivich, who got herself pregnant as an act of revenge against her own family, and now hates her husband so much she hopes he will be killed; Phillippe, stepson of a French general, army deserter and potential suicide; Marcelle, Mathieu’s former girlfriend, who mysteriously vanishes after the second part of the trilogy; and her husband Daniel, closet homosexual and mental sadist, who rejoices as Paris falls to the Nazi jackboots. Sartre, deliberately, leaves these people with the choices they make.

Only two of the major characters’ stories have some kind of closure: Brunet, and Mathieu Delarue.

So. You are this conscript. You are this conscript in a unit which has never faced any combat, part of the staff of a headquarters which has fallen back constantly as the army retreats in defeat and disorder. Then, as the government falls apart, your national capital is captured by the enemy, your president sues for peace, and your unit is threatened by the advancing enemy, your officers abandon you and leave you to your own devices. What do you do then?

This is what Sartre, himself a fighter in the French Resistance (that is, a terrorist, by  the logic of Bushist rhetoric in Iraq) says happened to Mathieu. His fellow soldiers collapsed in confusion and drink, without orders, sinking into an apathy so great they did not even attempt to melt away into the countryside and try and find their way to somewhere with hope. He watched their degeneration, not being able to take part in it, and detested by them for his “aloofness”. A fellow soldier, Pinette, a clerk in the same headquarters unit, desires to have at least one crack at the enemy. Mathieu is not enthusiastic; he tells Pinette that it would be just throwing away his life for nothing. While morale totally collapses, the last remnants of a fighting unit, comprising soldiers (like the exhausted poilu with his head resting on his hands in the photo above) retreat into the village where Mathieu and his companions are stationed, and the officer in charge – a lieutenant – decides to make a last, suicidal stand there. Pinette – ignoring the pleas of his amour, a postmistress – decides to volunteer to join the lieutenant’s troops. Mathieu, trying still to dissuade him despite his own conviction that he has no right to stop him, watches as Pinette selects a rifle from a pile. And then, suddenly, he stoops down and picks one up himself.

What is the result of this choice? Mathieu could have remained with his own unit; apart from Pinette, the rest were just waiting for the Germans to arrive and had no desire to fight, preferring to drown themselves in alcohol and wait for the end of the war after which (they were sure) they would be allowed to go home to their families. Mathieu could have joined them in the building where they were confined by the lieutenant so they would not get in the way during the coming battle. He could have maintained his contempt for them, and his distance, and waited it out. Instead, he – whether on impulse or a deep-seated decision arrived at earlier and only now made conscious – picked up a gun to join in a battle whose end was foreordained and which could only result in his death.

Let me make a digression here: in 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, I kept reading accounts of Iraqi soldiers who would fight desperately, sometimes charging American armoured columns with no more than AK47s and grenades. I remember the admiring comment of an American soldier: “They aren’t scared. Isn’t that something? They are not scared.” Of course the official American story was that these Iraqis were fanatical “terrorists”, leading to a caustic comment from one British commentator: “In my day this was called heroism, but then what do I know?” It was not evident then, of course, that Iraq would become a graveyard of the American imperium. Most Iraqi troops, believing that resistance was useless, had just quietly gone home (with their weapons) while the government fell apart. But even so, Iraqis who must have thought their country doomed to defeat chose to fight to certain death.

It is just as the Japanese who chose to fight till the end even as their country crumbled to defeat, individual soldiers sometimes taking on brigades and divisions; or the Germans who were still fighting on the eighth of May, 1945, after knowing that their government had already signed the capitulation. In each case, the definitive factor is the choice of the individual to go on fighting despite the knowledge (or belief) that the effort is futile in the long run (compared to the fighting of those who still think their side will win, despite their individual sacrifices, like the Soviet soldiers who held on to the last man in 1941-42).

Calling these mean and women “dead-enders” is missing the point. It comes down to a simple personal choice; what is one’s view of oneself in relation to the world? Is one of the view that one must, in order to find mental peace, sacrifice oneself to some ideal, or is it that one would rather stay alive for the sake of nation or society or personal ambition or whatever? Is death when it comes to be courted in order to bring oneself the peace of having done one’s conception of duty? For surely no duty forced Mathieu to fight. It was not his unit that was fighting; his unit had never fought and were locked up indoors to await the Germans and be taken prisoner. It was the choice of an individual. Purely personal.

To get back to Sartre’s story: Mathieu and Pinette, with three other soldiers, were stationed on top of the church tower to provide covering fire to the other troops. After the lieutenant had ordered the civilian population of the village to leave (Pinette ignoring the pleas of his girl, who just that afternoon had lost her virginity to him, to come down to her) Mathieu and his group had known that they were on the tower for good. If they came down, they would be fired on by their own side. So they sat up top and slept in turns while they waited for the Germans to turn up, the other three (combat veteran all) saying Mathieu and Pinette must be insane to join in a battle when they could have sat it out.

What of Brunet, in the meantime? Brunet had been part of a fighting unit; as all his men fell (and despite the usual impression that the French put up no fight against the invading Boches in 1940, as many as 92,000 French soldiers died fighting) he retreated till he could retreat no more. Exhausted, hungry, and unable to go farther, he stumbled into a cellar in the same village where – unknown to him – his old friend Mathieu had taken up position in the church tower to fight to the last. In the cellar he found a French civilian family which ordered him to get out because – they said – the Germans would kill them all if they found him there. Brunet ignored their bluster and went to sleep.

Meanwhile…

As dawn broke, Mathieu woke to find the Germans cautiously probing their way into the village. A pair of motorcyclists made the first reconnaissance, and they were allowed to withdraw in good order so as to tempt the Germans into the killing ground. When the German columns came in, the ambush was sprung and fighting erupted.

Up on top of the church tower, Mathieu and Pinette had been given the task of lookouts. Mathieu saw and shot dead German soldiers trying to sneak up on the other French positions:

He fired. The man gave a funny little jerk and fell on his stomach, throwing his arms forward like someone learning to swim. Mathieu found the sight amusing. He fired again, and the poor wretch took two or three strokes, dropping his grenade which rolled on the roadway without exploding. He lay quite still, inoffensive, grotesque, smashed. “I’ve put paid to him,” said Mathieu in a low voice: “I’ve cooked his goose.” He looked at the dead man, and thought: “They’re just like everyone else.”

It was in fact Mathieu, the man who joined in the battle on the impulse of a moment, who fought and fought well; Pinette, who had wanted at all costs to fight, cracked up as the fighting began and achieved nothing at all.

As the initial shooting slackened, and German corpses littered the road, Mathieu thought they were doing pretty well and had held out a long time. He was astonished when one of the other men there pointed out that just three minutes had elapsed since the motorcycles had passed.

Mathieu’s excited mood suddenly collapsed…for years he had tried, in vain, to act…his intended actions had been stolen from him. But no one had stolen this! He had pressed a trigger, and, for once, something had happened, something definite…He looked with satisfaction at his dead man…his handiwork, something to mark his passage on earth. A longing came to him to do some more killing. It was fun, it was easy.        

Shades of Cho Seung Hui there? Cho made his choices too…

Of course Mathieu’s actions achieved nothing. The Germans made their way to the other buildings, threw grenades inside, and killed all the other resisters. Even the soldiers of Mathieu’s unit, who had been kept locked up so they would be safe while waiting for the Germans to take them prisoner, were grenaded and some were killed where they were. Their decision not to fight did not save them.  

And then the Germans turned their attentions to the men in the church tower. They brought up an artillery piece and began shelling.

The gun fired two shots in rapid succession. They heard a dull shock above their heads, and a shower of plaster rained down on them from the ceiling. Chasseriau took out his watch.

“Twelve minutes.”

“Not too bad, twelve minutes,” said Chasseriau. “Not at all too bad!”

One by one, the shells begin to strike home. Chasseriau is killed.  

Mathieu, seeing him fall, felt no emotion. This was no more than the beginning of his own death.

The tower begins to fall in on them.

He was still firing when the roof fell on top of him. A beam struck him on the head. He dropped his rifle and fell. Fifteen minutes! – He thought in a fury, I’d give anything just to hold on for fifteen minutes! The butt of a rifle was jutting from a pile of splintered wood and broken tiles. He seized it….Mathieu was alone.

“Christ!” he said out loud. “No one shall say we didn’t hold on for fifteen minutes!”

He made his way to the parapet and stood there firing. This was revenge on a big scale. Each one of his shots avenged some ancient scruple…This for the books I never dared to write, this for the journeys I never made…He fired, and the tables of the Law crashed around him – Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself – bang!...Thou shalt not kill – bang!...He fired: he looked at his watch: fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. Nothing more to ask of Fate now except one half-minute…He fired. He was cleansed. He was all- powerful. He was free.

Fifteen minutes.    

So, that was all a man’s life came down to – the imperative to hold on for fifteen minutes, only to prove something to oneself (because obviously Mathieu’s fifteen minutes would mean nothing to the Germans). Nothing more, nothing less. It is obviously entirely personal; the result of the decisions a man or woman makes writes out the course of his or her life.

Who can say whether he or she is wrong?

Brunet emerges from his cellar just in time to be taken prisoner and watches as the church tower, Mathieu and all, finally collapses under bombardment. He joins one of the prisoner columns as in the third of the pictures above. His motive is not survival, as such; he sees, now, that dying is not the best way to serve his cause, and among the prisoners who gladly gave themselves up, secure in the fantasy that they would be released in a month or two, he looks for other communists and for those who can be “salvaged” by being taught about ideology and communism. Mostly, he looks in vain. But till the last, as the prisoners are on a train to PoW camps in Germany, he does not give up. It’s a different sort of determination.

And who can say whether Brunet is wrong?

The other prisoners gave up in order to survive a lost war and find a new life in a post conflict world, where they would be needed to reconstruct what the war destroyed, and to go back to their families.

Who can say that they are wrong?

Sartre was an existentialist as well as a Marxist. His idea is that one makes one’s own choices and finds one’s own path in life from the choices one makes; we are all locked in the search for our own fifteen minutes.  

Somewhere I had said that one’s life and death are one’s private property, and that one ought to have the right to choose the manner of one’s death. And the manner of one’s death is one’s own business. Its meaning is most important to oneself. What others think of it is of no importance whatever, when you come down to it.

Only the individual can appreciate his or her own fifteen minutes.      

The War Of The Worlds: Review

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Category:	Movies
Genre:	Science Fiction & Fantasy

Now just how stupid do we have to pretend to be? I shall not repeat the storyline here, because you all know it; but I'll make a few points:
1. The aliens have been under the earth for perhaps millenia, but they have never been detected, even when the city was being built over their head, subways, sewers, and all - not to talk of cities all over the globe.
2. These aliens suddenly - without any prior reconnaissance of the planet to determine conditions - decide on an invasion, when they could have done this at any time over the last several hundred years.
3. In all these years, they have somehow avoided contact with earth microbes, yet these selfsame microbes manage to infect them (just you try and get infected by a tobacco mosaic virus and see what I mean. Germs evolve with the hosts.). (Here I have a quarrel with Wells' original story too, but he was writing in the scientifically more innocent 1890s.His Martians lived on a planet without microorganisms; yet they did not become extinct from organic material being locked up in nondecaying corpses.) Or else did they ride down with the lightning? How?
4. These tripods can resist missile strikes but not an axe to the tentacle (what a stupidly exact copy of the Jurassic Park velociraptor scene before this) or a hand grenade (does Spielberg in this day and age still pretend Cruise can pull out grenade pins with his teeth? Tom needs an urgent dental appointment!).
5. The tripods can't catch Cruise however fast he runs and would rather probe with tentacles than simply blast his basement down on him. Not to talk of their suction mechanism being defeated by people pulling on each other. And that sphincter...
6. The aliens? Don't make me laugh. Wells' original round, gravity-crippled Martians were infinitely better, despite their lack of a digestive system and sanguinivorous habits. And while we are on the subject, just what the hell are the aliens doing, invading us? What do they want? Where do they come from, and why does no one ask this obvious question? Wells at least attempted an explanation.
7. All cars...but, predictably, the one Cruise hijacks...are disabled by the aliens, as are phones, mobiles, lights...yet the videorecorders work! And later military vehicles have no problem either! Wonderful!
8. How did Cruise's son make it to Boston before him?
As for the much-touted special effects, the lightning storm is simply ludicrous and the street crater is pure "Godzilla". And as for the tripods, spare me. How much running and screaming is too much? Blecchh.
Overall: sucks, sucks, sucks. 

9 Rota (Devyataya Rota) ("9th Company") : Review

Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

This is a film based on the Soviet war in Afghanistan and is set in the late eighties shortly before the Soviet withdrawal. The film takes a close look at the personnel of one particular unit, 9th company (9 Rota). The personnel were conscripts and the early part of the film goes into the details of their training. Unfortunately, it fails to show some well known facets of Russian military life like the hazing of recruits by senior conscripts, or the drunkenness that was so common officers confiscated even cologne from soldiers to stop them from drinking it. The training is certainly physical and brutal, with plenty of violence. There are scenes reminiscent of "All Quiet On The Western Front" but the trainers seem oddly humane in the end, certainly enough for the sergeant to cry at the prospect of sending his trainees into battle. (And there is also a scene of female frontal nudity, which makes one wonder why the film is only certified as 12 years and over.)
The troops arrive in Bagram airbase near Kabul just in time to see a Soviet plane being shot down by an Afghan Mujahideen missile. I thought this scene looked good cinematically but was historically a dud. By that stage in the war all Soviet planes were using diversionary flares as a matter of course, and this plane used none. Anyway, this is the introduction they have to war.
Later - and this is part of a real historical episode - 9th Company was sent to the epicentre of the battle at a height of 3234 metres (named later "3234") to cover the retreat of forces. An attack in a village by a child leads to Russian multi barrel rocket launchers destroying it...I could actually feel the anger that would make one do something like that, the desire for revenge. For me this was the high point of the film.
Later the company takes up position in a base in the mountains. Here is where most of the fighting in the film is located, with scenes of extreme violence towards the end resulting in the deaths of virtually the entire company fighting a frontal mujahideen assault.
About this assault: I did not like it. The Afghans attacked like zombies, walking in lines into the Russian guns and still making it through...and the Russians made no effort to call in airpower until it was virtually all over.
I'm told the Director, Fedor Bondarchuk, had ulterior motives of distorting the truth about Afghan War and the actual event is fictionalised. Bondarchuk is alleged to be a man who used his connections to avoid service in Afghanistan, then direct and cast himself in a hero role in a movie about the conflict he did everything possible to avoid. Again, I can't answer for the truth of this. I'm just repeating what I heard.
High points: Good acting, overall. Excellent filming of the awful Afghan landscape: how can anyone ever want to live in a place like that? Better storyline than "Platoon", though the two are comparable.
An interesting thing: in the actual battle for Hill 3234, in reality, only 6 of 39 Soviet soldiers from 9th company were killed. There were over 200 dead on the opposite side. In fact, during the filming of the movie, the actors were introduced to their original characters whenever possible for them to get a feel of the role.

Savior (sic): Review

Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

I've just been revisiting an old favourite movie, the Bosnian Civil War film "Savior" (sic).
It's about an American mercenary (played by Dennis Quaid) called Guy who is in Paris when his wife (played in an utterly forgettable cameo by Natassja Kinski, who still gets major mention in the credits, for some reason) is killed by a terrorist bomb. He runs off to the French Foreign Legion after shooting up the local mosque and ultimately ends up on the Serb side in the Bosnian Civil War, where his hatred of Muslims sees to it that he can shoot a Muslim boy trying to retrieve his goat from across a barrier on a bridge (on the Serb side of the barrier); and to be fair, a flashback shows a friend killed by a grenade thrown by a child.
Later - amid scenes of war wreckage - Guy is asked, with another soldier, Goran (who has hacked off a Muslim woman's finger for her ring), to take charge of a young Serb woman, Vera (played brilliantly by Natasa Ninkovic, who gets a place on the credits far below Kinski) and deliver her to her home in a village. The woman is pregnant by a Muslim rapist and on the way, in a tunnel, Goran kicks her repeatedly in the belly until she has a premature delivery. Unable, after all he has been through, to tolerate the scene, Guy shoots Goran, and takes the mother and child on by himself. He discovers soon enough that not just does Vera speak English but also that she hates her newborn daughter because of her part Muslim blood. Vera initially refuses to feed the baby (and there is later a poignant scene of her trying to squeeze milk out of a dry nipple, probably the least sexy breast exposure I've ever seen in a movie) and Guy has to change the baby's diapers (keeping the car keys with himself so she doesn't drive off).
Although they make it to her house, her father throws them out, telling her she has been dishonoured by the Muslims and it would have been better if she had killed herself. But Goran's relatives then prevail on Vera's dad and her brother to chase them to get revenge. Vera's mother has given them some milk which she drinks when Guy is away washing diapers - in the absence of a nipple, Guy uses a condom on the feeding bottle to feed the baby. Vera does find some love for her daughter, in a moment when she is about to throw the baby out of the car - but then the father and brother catch up and shoot and injure Guy, Vera throwing herself on top of him to protect him (no, this scene is not corny). Vera's dad is about to shoot them both when the brother dissuades him.
Vera and Guy go on, trying to get out of the country, witnessing among other things a hanged Orthodox priest and a destroyed church, not to speak of Croat paramilitaries taking away her father and brother at gunpoint (Quote here:
Guy: "Sorry about your Family."
Vera: "It's war"). The typical Hollywood movie would have had Guy rescue the men in a blaze of machine gun fire. Here, they just watch. Injured Guy is ultimately taken in by an elderly couple who get him back to some kind of health. When the trio goes on, Guy and the baby hide in an old boat while Vera tries to find transport to the city. She is brought back with other civilians by Croats who proceed to hammer and shoot the civilians to death in a shallow river. The baby begins to cry, but Vera begins to sing a lullaby and the baby stops crying. After the murders are over, a chance sound brings the Croats to the boat. In his fear, Guy nearly smothers the baby. Fortunately, a cat arrives and the Croats think it is it that made the sounds and go away. Somehow, Guy and the baby make it by bus to the city controlled by the UN (paying with a necklace) and here he abandons the baby in a UN ambulance with a note on her saying "Vera". But another passenger, a woman, finds the child and in the last, elegiac scene, joins Guy on the waterfront with the baby, just after he has torn up his soldier's identity card.
This is a film of humanity and makes the point that there are losers in war on all sides. No black or white, everything is in shades of grey. No wonder a Bushie (or, then, proto-Bushie, since this film was released in 1998) audience would never have appreciated it. And - thankfully - no romance was artificially created between Vera and Guy. That would have ruined it.
A wonderful film, all told, but for the irritant over Kinski's position on the credits.


Starring: Dennis Quaid, Nastassja Kinski, Stellan Skarsgard, Natasa Ninkovic, Pascal Rollin
Directed by: Peter Antonijevic, Ivana Stevens
Produced by: Cindy Cowan, Oliver Stone, Janet Yang 

The Forgotten Soldier: Review

Category:	Books
Genre:	Biographies & Memoirs
Author:	Guy Sajer

I'm playing safe by categorising this book as a memoir, because I have no proof that it is fiction - even though I'm convinced it is.
Briefly, it purports to be the memoirs of a French boy with a German mother, Guy Monminoux, who joined the Wehrmacht (the conquerors of his native country, let's not forget) in July 1942 under his mother's maiden name, Sajer (incidentally I only found out the man's real name on the net. Nowhere in the book does he state that he joined under his mother's maiden name, or for what reason). Or did he join the Luftwaffe? He seems not to be sure of this, any more than he is of the reason he joined up, which is never explained. He claims to have tried for aircrew training (on Junkers 87 Stuka dive bombers, but unexplained as to whether he wanted to be a gunner or pilot) but to have been rejected (again for reasons unexplained). After this he was assigned to the Wehrmacht (oh really? Not to Luftwaffe ground crew?) as a driver in the Rollbahn (transport division). Here he gives some highly coloured accounts of his experiences delivering supplies to the front in Russia. After the death of a comrade in Russian strafing he volunteers for the Gross Deutschland infantry division, gets leave, and falls in love with a German girl in Berlin while apparently spending most of his free time digging out bodies from bombed buildings.After the leave he rejoins the Gross Deutschland, undergoes "brutal" training with a Hauptmann Fink and serves with the division for the rest of the war on the Eastern front, coming out alive through incredible scrapes. He fights through Kursk, Kharkov, Kiev, Romania, East Prussia, and Memel, finally surrendering to the British at some unspecified time which was apparently early April 1945 or thereabouts. He was almost immediately released because of his French father (ha! fat chance!) and sent home, doing a brief stint in the French army as expiation for his sins.
Even at first reading, there are many reasons why I doubted the veracity of the book. Sajer's account is so obviously pitched to a Cold War audience where the Germans, but for their leadership, are good guys and the Soviets (usually called "Bolsheviks") are cruel, uncivilised, stupid, and fit only to be mowed down, winning only because of superior numbers, that it can't be taken seriously by any knowledgeable person.
Even at the outset, in winter 1942, Sajer claims, (nearly a year after the Red Army had smashed the Wehrmacht outside Moscow and at the very moment when it was destroying the Nazis in Stalingrad) "The Red Army had as yet done nothing but retreat". Oh yes? Weapons are described very inaccurately, with descriptions of Soviet T34s destroyed with consummate ease by German 37mm anti-tank guns (these 37mm guns were so useless the Germans called them "door knockers") or Panzerfaust rockets which hit them on the glacis plate (where the armour is thickest and least penetrable). Apparently Sajer did not read Guderian or Halder before writing of his imagined battles. Nor did he bother to find out that a German Tiger tank had three men in its turret, not two.
Then, his accounts of the incredible sufferings of his group can strain anyone's credibility. It seems more of a recounting of the most dramatic accounts he could find of the Eastern Front, stitched up end to end and personalised. I challenge anyone to read his account and imagine them living through all of it.
There is a highly contemptible introduction by Doris Lessing, who talks of the fact that Jews don't seem to find any mention in Sajer's book, but goes on and on of Sajer's description of Russian "cruelty" toward the retreating Germans in 1944-45. Sajer says not a word about the treatment meted out by the Nazis to the Soviet populace, Jews or otherwise. Excellent accounts of the Nazi atrocities in the Soviet Union, which dwarfed anything seen in East Prussia, can be found in "Barbarossa" by Alan Clark or "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich" by William J Shirer. Sajer also - wioth Lessing's enthusiastic approval - vents his spite on Partisans, who were merely resisting the invasion of their land.
Now, as I said, all this was on first reading. I had at the time no idea that others - including in particular a serious military historian, Lieutenant Colonel Edward L. Kennedy, Jr. (in the pages of "Army History" the official publication of the U.S. Army's "Center of Military History") - have pointed out even graver discrepancies, including these:
1. Sajer says "We each received the famous insignia of the Gross Deutschland division, with its divisional title in silver Gothic letters on a black background. The band remained on my sleeve until 1945 when the rumor ran though our scattered ranks that the Americans where shooting any man with a divisional name instead of a number. At that moment of hasty judgment they might very well have shot a nobody from the Gross Deutschland or the Brandenburg as easily as a hero from the Lebenstandarte or Totenkopf. "
As Kennedy points out, Sajer claims these patches were worn on the LEFT sleeve, but Gross Deutschland patches were worn on the RIGHT sleeve. Sajer seems to have a superb memory for which direction the wind was coming, the exact time of day, and so on, but he can't remember the slightly important detail of which sleeve he wore the patch he wore with pride? Or is there something else here, a Freudian slip? It was SS divisions which wore patches on the left sleeve, and SS divisions often took Frenchmen and Belgians into their ranks...
2. No record of either Sajer or his respected commander, Hauptmann Wesreidau, killed by a land mine in 1944 in Rumania, can be found in the Gross Deutschland records that exist today. OK, I agree that the records might be incomplete. But Sajer gives not a single complete identity except for the man killed in strafing, Ernst Neubach - and he was a member of the Rollbahn, not the Gross Deutschland; and a man called "the veteran", also identified as August Wiener. Neither can be located on the rolls as far as I know. All his other characters have just one name: "Hals", "Lensen", "Olensheim", "Pferham", "Frosch", and so on.
3. Sajer goes on and on about food shortages, and being abandoned by the Wehrmacht to forage. But as long as the units were in contact at all, genuine Wehrmacht veterans agree, food was always supplied, however bad it was in quality.
4. Sajer claims to have served with the Siebzehnte Bataillon (17th Batallion) of the infantry division Gross Deutschland, but the Gross Deutschland simply had no such batallion. Most German divisions did not have unit numbers that went that high. The Gross Deutschland certainly didn't.
Of course it is possible that parts of this book might have some truth in them...
Sajer may have fought in Russia as part of the German army, but he may not have been a member of the Gross Deutschland. He may have instead have been with the Waffen SS, or been a part of something that he does not want to be called to account for today.
Either way, his account is suspect. Racy reading, but not convincing to anyone who knows a bit of the reality.

City of God (Review)

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Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. What do you think of when you hear that name? Copacabana Beach? The Carnaval with its lovely mostly-nude dancers? The scenes we saw on Hollywood films? Or something else...
This film is about the something else.
The denizens of one of the favelas of Rio, notorious for drugs and gang violence, were partly resettled in the sixties in a new housing project in Rio, called City of God. By the early eighties it was one of the most dangerous places on earth, riven by violence and crime - some of that crime being committed by the police who were supposed to prevent it.
The film is seen through the eyes of the narrator, Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), a poor and none too brave young man who has the (mis)fortune to be blessed with a keen photographic sense. Both directly, as seen through his own eyes, and indirectly, narrating offscreen, he brings to life the savage violence of a very savage City.
There are many characters, and the events of the film span several years, but because of the unrelenting pace and the shifting of the perspective to the "stories" of the various characters, there is none of the slowness and (dare one say it) the monotony of the typical film of this sort.
It opens with what would seem a comic scene, a group of armed gangsters chasing a chicken through the streets...until they come face to face with a rival gang, Rocket caught in the middle. From there it abruptly cuts to the origins of the City, with people being brought in to their ramshackle little township with its red earth roads. Crime begins almost immediately, and the protagonists make their first appearance as juveniles, a nascent gang called the Tender Trio (one of whom is Rocket's elder brother) robbing a brothel, the people who were robbed all ending up mysteriously dead.
The movie is divided into three chapters, each bleaker and more appalling than the one before; they parallel the intertwining destinies of Rocket and one of his childhood playmates, Li'l Dice (Douglas Silva). In the first part, the Tender Trio rob the brothel and their gang disintegrates; only one of the three survives to escape. It becomes known only later that it is Li'l Dice who (not allowed to join in the robbery and kept as lookout) shot the robbed hookers and their clients.
After growing up and changing his nickname to Li'l Zé (Leandro Firmino da Hora takes over the role), he ascends into a trigger-happy drug dealer and local kingpin, who enjoys killing and takes over rivals by eliminating them. Li'l Ze is incidentally MY candidate for top acting honours here. The only thing keeping his crazier impulses in check is his lieutenant Benny (Phellipe Haagensen), a smart, good-hearted gangster with a hippie sensibility who eventually decides to abandon the criminal life. He is shot dead accidentally in the course of his own farewell party.
The final third, set in the early 1980's, finds Li'l Zé's empire threatened by an even younger crew of pre-teenage gangsters called the Runts (some of them only 9 and 10), who disregard his authority. It all builds to a showdown between Li'l Zé and a rival band led by Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge), a peaceful bus conductor who turns to gang war for revenge after Li'l Zé rapes his girlfriend and shoots his brother.
If this was a Hollywood flick, it would end with the heroic Knockout Ned destroying the evil Ze. Instead, Knockout Ned's effort merely makes the bad far worse, with open gang war and children joining the two sides just for the hell of it, wielding guns they hardly know how to use. And it is at this time that one is forced to confront the question of who is worse, Ze or his enemies. I never could decide, myself.
Rocket, meanwhile, makes a godawful and comic mess of his own foray into crime (he lets one potential victim get away because the man was "too cool", for example) and when his photos of Ze's gang get published (accidentally, he fears he might get murdered for them) he ends up as a sort of court photographer for the publicity-famished Ze. The last, blood-soaked scenes of the film are mostly seen with Rocket as eyewitness and reporter.
"City of God" was shot in the streets of Rio with hand held cameras and a mostly nonprofessional cast. This adds immensely to its value as a film, giving a grainy touch of reality to its scenes.
It's riven with violence, such as the scene where a little boy is given the choice of being shot in the head or foot by Ze. As the foot-shot kid hobbles away, Ze orders him not to limp. And so on.
Extremely highly recommended, but not if you're squeamish. 

Hotel Rwanda: Review

I wish to place it on record that since writing this review (on 1 January 2007) my views on Rwanda have undergone major transformation. I also wish to put it on record that Mr Paul Rusesabagina has characterised the current Rwandan government as a dictatorship and that he cannot enter the country now due to the threat to his life.

Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

"When a country descended into madness and the world turned its back, one man had to make a choice"

That is the tagline of what is billed to be the true-life story of Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu hotel manager in Kigali married to a Tutsi named Tatiana (played by Sophie Okonedo), trained in Belgium and running the four-star Hotel Des Milles Collines in the capital city of Kigali, Rwanda in 1994, during the period when Hutu Interahamwe militia, aided and abetted by the Hutu Rwandan Army, murdered up to a million people, Tutsi and Hutu, men, women, and children.
The film begins with Clinton expressing his "concern" over Bosnia, and segues to a brief voice over from Hutu radio talking about the untrustworthiness of the Tutsis who have signed a ceasefire in their rebellion against the Hutu President Juvenal Habariyama,. All this is in pitch black, before the cameras come on.
When the story begins, Paul, played by Don Cheadle, is on his way with a Tutsi driver to pick up cigars from Cuba with which to bribe a Hutu Interahamwe militia chief to give him food and liquor for his guests. The leader asks him to join the militia and gives him a tribal multicoloured cloth. On the way back, this cloth saves his driver from being murdered by a Hutu gang, when Paul brandishes it to proclaim "Hutu power".
Later, they watch while a Hutu army unit arrest a Tutsi neighbour at the dead of night and listen to the screams of the man's wife, but are powerless to do anything to intervene. Paul's Tutsi brother in law talks about how his Hutu friend has warned him to flee while there is still time; but it is too late already, the President is killed in a plane crash, and the Hutu radio proclaims that the time to "cut the tall trees" has arrived. The country explodes in violence, Paul bribes an army officer to let him take his Tutsi wife and their children, as well as all their surviving neighbours, to the hotel, which is under nominal UN control. The UN is represented by a force of just 300 men in the entire country, under the control of a Canadian Colonel Oliver (Nick Nolte) who is forbidden to open fire even in self defence. As he says, he's there as a peacekeeper, not as a peace maker, and there is no peace to keep.
As the country explodes into genocide, there is an interesting interview with a US State Department spokesman who is asked whether or not it is a fact that he has been ordered to preface the word "genocide" every time with "acts of". He hems and haws and ultimately says that he will just say that he implements his orders as best he can.
As more and more moderate Hutus and desperate Tutsis gather at the hotel, and "cockroach" hunting Hutu militias wander outside, a European military force arrives...only to remove only the foreign (read white) guests, and leave the rest of the people to die. France and Britain demand the removal of the minuscule UN force as well.
Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a journalist and photographer, asks Paul if he did right by airing footage of a massacre.
“If people see this they’ll say ‘Oh, my God. That’s horrible,’” he explains to Paul, “Then they go on eating their dinners.”
Colonel Oliver points out just how little Paul and his people mean to the rest of the world. “You’re not even a nigger,” he tells him, “You’re an African.”
An African explains to Phoenix' character early on the difference between Tutsi and Hutu. The Belgians decided to create a collaborator class during their colonial days (like the Kurds and some Shias in Iraq today). So they picked out tall, fairer Rwandans with aquiline noses (they actually measured the noses) and put them in positions of authority, calling them "Tutsis".
This leads to one of the moments of black humour in the movie.

Journalist (Joaquin Phoenix): (To pretty girl) "Are you Hutu or Tutsi?"
Girl: "I'm Tutsi."
Journalist (referring to other pretty girl): "And your friend is a Tutsi as well?"
Second girl: "No, Hutu".
Journalist (to African interlocutor): "But they could be twins."
(African shrugs)
Journalist (to first pretty girl): "I'd like to carry on this conversation later in my room."

That girl is later abandoned by Phoenix when the evacuation of foreigners happens.
When Paul and his assistant attempt to make a run to buy more supplies, he finds himself running over piles of bodies in the road in the fog. This is supposed to be the high point of the movie, but I felt it was a poor copy of the similar but more gruesome scene in "The Killing Fields" about the Cambodian genocide.
An attempt to evacuate some of the people trapped there is betrayed and the convoy, which includes Paul's wife and children (Paul elected to stay behind at the last moment), somehow makes it back to the hotel.
How Paul and his charges survive later is a mix of Paul's skills at bribery, flattery, and, later, the threat that only he can save a Hutu general (Bizimunga) from a war crimes trial. The hotel's Belgian owners would have liked to close it down. Only Paul, interacting with the director (Jean Reno), and lying through his teeth when necessary, keeps it going and even enlists some help through the French who armed and aided the Hutu army.
There is a scene where a Red Cross worker describes the murder of a Tutsi girl. "She cried saying 'Don't kill me, I promise I won't be a Tutsi any more'," she says with tears in her eyes.
I won't give the ending away, except that it's happy...sort of.
There are a few points of criticism of the film. It is not explicit in its depiction of blood and mayhem, preferring machete swinging lunatic militia to make noises rather than actually use their machetes. Also it glosses over the action of the Catholic Church, which often aided and abetted the massacres (a Catholic priest was recently jailed for helping murder 4000 Tutsis trapped in a church) - all Catholics in the film are either window dressing or moderately heroic priests and nuns. But then it's an American film and the director needed to maintain his ratings and his audience.
The massacres ended with the victory of the Tutsi rebel army and the Interahamwe and Hutu Army fleeing - leaving behind them a million Tutsis and Hutu moderates dead. For a tiny country like Rwanda, that's even worse than it sounds.
So is it a film about the good Tutsis versus the evil Hutus? Sorry, it isn't.
Especially if you look at the recent history of Rwanda and Burundi. In Burundi the Tutsi always lorded it over the Hutus and there is a Tutsi military dictatorship in power now. In Rwanda, while the massacres targeted Tutsis, Hutus who were either pro-Tutsi or neutral suffered too at the hands of the Interahamwe. Even the film shows how the army was really not in full control over the Interahamwe militia and called them "crazy men".
After the takeover, the Tutsis set up a de facto Tutsi dictatorship with a figurehead Hutu president. It was no representative government of both sides.
After the retreat from Rwanda, the Interahamwe set up bases inside what was then Zaire and conducted raids into Rwanda in order to massacre Tutsis and Hutus who wanted to just get on with life. Then, Rwanda's Tutsi army joined with the Zairean rebels of Laurent Kabila and invaded Zaire, expelled the American-supported criminal dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, and imposed Kabila (who was later murdered by his own palace guard and succeeded by his son) as President. Things soured almost at once when Kabila showed himself as not being a Rwandan puppet. The alliances suddenly shifted, Rwanda again invaded Zaire (now Congo) to dethrone Kabila. The Interahamwe then switched to Kabila's side. Angola sent troops to support Kabila, while Uganda sent troops to the Rwandan side. The horrible Congolese civil war, where some 90% of the atrocities can be laid at the door of the Rwandans and Ugandans, continues to this day.
So, it's NOT a clear cut fight of good versus evil. I think it's clear enough from the film, where Paul is a Hutu and it's mentioned that there were Hutus among the more than 1200 people he sheltered at the hotel.
All in all: excellent, but could have been improved if the director had been a little braver.
I just wonder if it might have been different if Rwanda had had oil.

Threads: Review

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Category:	Movies
Genre:	Other

Mushroom clouds...
I've just spent the evening watching, online, the unedited version of a remarkable film - the British TV movie, "Threads", made way back in 1984, a year after the similarly themed American film "The Day After". That film I’d watched back in school, in that same year, and come away unimpressed. It was so obviously sanitised.
Now, I’ll admit Threads is sanitised, too, but it’s at least a far more honest and upfront account of what might happen in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. It’s set in the British industrial town of Sheffield, near a major NATO base, and in the background of a major standoff between the US and the USSR (remember this was made in 1984) over…Iran. The movie opens with the lives of average working class people and their average lives, with the usual problems of a young man, Jimmy Kemp, whose girlfriend Ruth is pregnant and whom he wants to marry, while his nosy younger siblings and parents complete the family picture.
The film switches from a narrative style to a documentary with voice overs and onscreen titles, which is why I can’t really classify it as anything than “other”. As the Kemp family plays out its dreary life amid the airless drudgery of an industrial town, there are reports of nuclear exchanges over Iran, shrill threats from both Moscow and Washington, and Britain loyally following in its lord and master’s footsteps to certain ruin. Peace activists who argue for sanity are heckled and arrested, people are warned not to attempt to flee to safety because their homes would be appropriated to shelter homeless people and local authorities in places other than their own areas would refuse to feed or shelter them.
Finally a full scale nuclear exchange takes place, with some 3000 megatons of nuclear warheads used, Sheffield is hit by a single warhead. Most of the city is blasted flat, with fires raging afterwards and the authorities in charge of emergency services themselves being destroyed in their protected bunker. As the survivors emerge into their new, ruined world, it is to find that they have neither food, shelter, nor assistance. What is left of the government does not even manage to distribute what food there is, preferring to open fire on desperate, starving people. The pregnant Ruth manages to flee, along with refugees who drop dead from radiation sickness all around her, finally being reduced to eating raw meat from a sheep that may have died from radiation itself, convincing herself it probably was protected by its coat from the worst radiation.
As smoke clouds fill the sky, agriculture collapses, fuel stocks disappear, millions of corpses lie undisposed of because it is impossible to find the fuel to cremate them or even run bulldozers to bury them, while digging so many graves by hand is impossible. As the population of Britain plunges towards medieval levels, the smoke clouds clear to reveal a sun whose rays are much richer in ultraviolet radiation now that the ozone layer has been so badly damaged by the nuclear blasts. So the survivors are now exposed to increased cataracts and skin cancers, not to speak of birth mutations, along with the other hazards of living in a post holocaust environment. Ruth dies of exhaustion and overwork years after the nuclear war, leaving behind a daughter who grows up in a world where civilisation has broken down utterly, and who, raped, gives birth to her own child at the very end of the film.
The film itself is well crafted. It was made by the BBC, which was forced to keep it off the air for years after showing it just once, because it was deemed “alarmist” (I guess people might feel the price of being America’s stooge wasn’t worth the peril). Once the nuclear blasts take place, the scene shrinks to Sheffield itself. There is no more discussion of what happened to the US or USSR or to Iran, the bone of contention. Intelligent, that.
The scenes depicting the nuclear blasts themselves are, I must say, not as well made as those depicted in the otherwise infinitely inferior The Day After (except for the scene where urine runs down a woman’s leg as she sees the nuclear flash, which I admit I enjoyed). But the aftermath, with its scenes of shattered wreckage, rats feeding on charred corpses, and the like, are far better than in the American film. Also, the heavy smoke clouds, the hopelessness of the survivors, the utter lack of Hollywood heroism as they die quietly one by one, all this is affecting in a way no “mainstream” movie would dare to emulate. (I just wish they’d depicted cannibalism, though. I’d think it would be inevitable under such conditions.)
It has its drawbacks. It’s typically 1980s in milieu, with nary a non-white face anywhere on screen, yobs with long hair, roll-necked pullovers and glottal incomprehensible accents, but there’s nowt abaht that we kin do anythin’ abaht now, innit?
And there are a few glitches. Nuclear blasts would have destroyed the city so thoroughly that the scenes of refugees fleeing for the countryside are unlikely to ever actually take place. In 2002 I had written an article for Eastern Panorama magazine on nuclear warfare where I’d pointed out that all the scenarios for a post exchange world assume that people live to suffer the consequences. But in cities most people would not; and those who were in this film watching the nuclear flash would be cremated by the flash itself, or burnt in the fires that will follow. Also, the depiction of the government’s (represented by impossibly clean shaven soldiers and policemen) incompetence after the attack presupposes that there is a government left to be incompetent. Something that would, I submit, be unlikely, at the very least.
There are a few glitches that are at least forgivable. Ruth’s daughter, born after the holocaust, has clearly visible silver amalgam fillings in her upper molars, for example.
Now that nuclear weapons are again being thought of as usable, in fact we may see them being used within a matter of weeks, over that same nation of Iran, it’s time that we revisit films like these. Propaganda claiming that nuclear weapons are somehow sanitised and harmless except to the actual, immediate, targets is unlikely to stand up to the visual shock these images provide. I know, of course, that this movie will never be shown in a world where Picasso’s Guernica was covered up so Colin Powell could spout his lies to the UN in peace. Or if it was shown, it might be used as counter-propaganda (“Do it to them before they do it to us”).
The thing is, once you let the genie out of the bottle it doesn’t necessarily go quietly back. And like Frankenstein’s monster, it can turn on its creator.
The movie can be seen here

Not recommended if you're squeamish, though.

Cast:Karen Meagher ... Ruth Beckett
Reece Dinsdale ... Jimmy Kemp
David Brierly ... Mr. Kemp
Rita May ... Mrs. Kemp
Nicholas Lane ... Michael Kemp
Jane Hazlegrove ... Alison Kemp
Henry Moxon ... Mr. Beckett
June Broughton ... Mrs. Beckett
Sylvia Stoker ... Granny Beckett
Harry Beety ... Clive Sutton
Ruth Holden ... Marjorie Sutton
Ashley Barker ... Bob
Michael O'Hagan ... Chief Supt. Hirst
Phil Rose ... Medical Officer
Steve Halliwell ... Information Officer 

Jarhead: Review

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Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

If there is one film that encapsulates the idiocy of the military experience, it is this. Beginning in the late eighties in the brutality of a Marine recruit's training, most of it takes place during the build-up to Operation Desert Storm and during the actual course of that "four day, four hour, one minute" operation.
It starts off like, and could have become, a standard Hollywood genre war film of the type parodied in MAD Magazine - the tough sergeant, the gentle boy, the bullying recruit, the clean cut protagonist who is muddled by what is going on, they are all there; the only figure missing is the chaplain mouthing platitudes, but there are enough crucifixes on view to make up for that. However, the director (Sam Mendes) takes pains to make sure it does not go that way.
The film is based on Anthony Swofford's 2003 book about his own experience as a Marine in Kuwait. I have no idea (not having read the book) if the book's account has been played around with, but it's still a compelling watch.
Brief story: the soldiers (pumped up for action by cheering as American helicopters on "Apocalypse Now" bomb and rocket a Vietnamese village) arrive in Saudi Arabia unsure of where they are, unsure of the difference between Saudis, Kuwaitis, and Iraqis, and are met by a Lt Colonel who tries to pump them full of zeal for combat. Then they wait, and rehydrate, and masturbate, and wait some more, spending their time on scorpion fights and discussing the infidelities of their girlfriends. Bizarre things happen - they are made to play American "football" in chemical warfare suits in the blazing desert sun for the benefit of a TV crew, they burn drums full of faeces as a punishment (a similar scene to one in "Platoon", but much more explicit). Finally they do go to war...where their first combat experience is being strafed by USAF A10 Warthog ground attack aircraft. The rest of their war consists, as one man says, of "walking over a lot of sand". There are gruesome depictions of charred Iraqi corpses in the Highway of Death, which make Swofford throw up, and blazing oil wells whose smoke make the day turn to night. Then - more walking over sand, anmd at last a chance for Swofford ( a trained sniper) to shoot an Iraqi officer, the culmination of his training and waiting for action, his chance at revenge against the system. But he is denied permission to take the shot because it would give warning of an imminent air strike. And then there is more walking. And, before he can fire a shot, the war is over.
There are so many ways this film scores over vainglorious Hollywood garbage like "The Three Kings" and "Courage Under Fire". There is really no heroism at all, and all there is, at the end, is a return to civilian life where no one fits in. Of course there is the delicious irony of contrasting this movie to the prolonged defeat the Americans are going through right now in Iraq.
And as for why they all went through this, it was Swofford's remark to a TV interviewer which pretty much summed it all up:
"I am 20 years old and was stupid enough to sign a contract."
No wonder the Bush worshippers did not like this film.
You reap what you sow, baby.