Two Short Films

 Links to two short films arrived by email this week.

The first came via the NY Times with this op-ed and attached video.  The film, by Belgian professor Matthias de Groof, has apparently been getting a big reception at various festivals. It is a remix of a 1957 film, "Under the Black Mask," by a Belgian multidisciplinary artist, Paul Haesaerts, for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. From what I can gather, that film was also considered groundbreaking in its time for the way it showcased Congolese masks. But viewers today have come to understand the narration and much of the imagery as patronizing and racist.  

The idea for this new film was to take those sections of the original where the masks are looking directly at the viewer and let them speak to us. The words the masks are given to speak come from a 1950 essay by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire. They have been translated from French into a Congolese language, Lingala.

I was initially captivated, especially by the connections in the text between museums and colonialism, but then I started wondering about the project itself:

• Why would a white Belgian art professor imagine that he is the one to “fix” the errors of a white Belgian filmmaker of a previous generation?

• Why would Congolese masks choose to speak in the words of a West Indian, no matter how anti-imperialist he was in 1950?

• Why would the masks choose to speak in Lingala, a language that emerged from a Belgian colonialist pidgin?

• Why would the masks choose to speak in the voice of an Afro-Belgian spoken word artist instead of the voice of a Congolese?

And that brought me to a more basic question:

Is the imagery itself colonial?

The masks are stolen, taken from their country of origin by a notoriously violent colonial regime and brought to Belgium. They are also ripped from their original context, displayed originally as artifacts of the primitive and then as primitive art, rather than being danced in live ceremony in their communities of origin. Why would we think that the filming of them is innocent and not itself racist? Why wouldn’t the way they are lighted and the way they are shot be just as problematic as the voice-over of the 1957 film? 

The cinematography strikes me as elegiac, much like the famous and still-popular photography of ES Curtis. Those photos of Native America were explicitly made to document a people before they disappeared. But the people defied their erasure and are still here with us. Curtis's subjects were posed, not caught in their living, often with clothing and objects provided by Curtis himself. He airbrushed objects that didn't suit his intention of capturing "authenticity." They are often portrayed in soft focus and moving away from the camera, as if they are actually disappearing in real time before our very eyes.  

Curtis's photos have remained popular among people who think they value Indigenous people and culture. But they retain their racism in their very imagery. I think the same is true of this "new" film of Congolese masks.

The second film is a comedy called "The Anne Frank Gift Shop" which came via articles from the online magazine Kveller and from GQ. It shows a PR team, including an influencer, meeting with the heads of the Anne Frank Museum in order to pitch ideas for educating a younger generation about Anne Frank and about the Holocaust itself.

As both articles explain, the film's comic idea of "marketing" the Holocaust as a "brand" is intended to convey the serious idea that we must never forget. I struggled with it in several ways, some of which emerged for me from the Kveller article before I even watched the film.

• The writer describes the Anne Frank house as “sacred space.” Everything about the film's solemnity regarding that house reinforces that notion. I understand that people who read her diary and identify with her have an encounter with their emotions about her when they actually stand in the space in which she hid. But the idea that this is sacred, like Mt. Sinai, or the Temple Mount, gets to the core of what I think of as “Holocaust Judaism.” I define that as the notion that the Jewish people's greatest contribution to humanity over the last 3000+ years was dying in our millions: not Torah, not Mishnah and Gemara, not literature, not ethics… death, and only in the last century. And calling the Annex a sacred space isn’t just a single poorly-chosen phrase. It is reinforced by the author’s statement that the director was brought up to “revere” the Holocaust, which is a strikingly inappropriate thing to revere.

• Another angle on this is the discussion of the mourners’ Kaddish. In the film the comedy is broken and things become serious when a member of the PR team suggests that this prayer be recited every day at the museum and then the actors recite it around their table. The article inaptly describes the Kaddish as “eulogizing the dead.” In fact it is a ninth-century hymn praising God which serves various purposes at different times in the liturgy and - unlike the film's portrayal - can only be recited in a congregation with at least ten adult members. Long before I noticed Jewish people centering the Holocaust I noticed the people who attended synagogue only to recite the Kaddish for mourners or running in and out on Pesach, Shavuot, and Shemini Atzeret just in time for Yizkor, a memorial service included in the worship on those festivals and on Yom Kippur. I used to think of this selective attendance as a form of ancestor worship. I think it may be worse, but - like Holocaust worship -  it is certainly a variant of Judaism that valorizes death over life. And that idea of Kaddish is so common among so many Jewish people who clearly recite the words as dolorous sounds without ever questioning their meaning or why they are important to those mourning an immediate family member.

• The film also shows a preoccupation with a survey that shows that young people can’t come up with the correct number of Jewish deaths at the hands of the Nazis. The idea, of course is that anyone who can't say "six million" somehow doesn't know that a massive genocide took place. In the film Chris Perfetti’s character actually shows why the number doesn’t matter. For the purposes of a survey, like any multiple-choice question, it just allows us to clutch our hands in horror about ignorance. But this is a real survey and so is the hand clutching. There is something deeper about the importance people give to that number. We have come to refer to “the six million” as a kind of shorthand. Using that number minimizes the actual history and all the events leading up to industrialized murder. But using that particular number allows us to treat genocide as if it is our unique possession. 

• This idea that genocide belongs to us alone has been a problem for a long time. First, because it erases horrors that have been perpetrated on others. In fact that essay by Aimé Césaire used as a voice for the Congolese masks is explicitly about the sudden astonishment of Europeans at the Nazi Holocaust because mass murder was now being committed against other Europeans, instead of Black and Brown people. But second, because it pretends that we Jews can only be victims and never perpetrators of genocide. Here we are, three months after the October 7 attacks. Israel has spent this entire time murdering Gazans in their tens of thousands, uprooting them from their homes, destroying their cultural institutions, and then bombing them in the “safe spaces” they were instructed to move to. But no, according to both author and director, we are still victims. The director tells us, "I just feel like now it’s arriving in this time where we’re reminded what’s at stake.” I really wish I thought he meant this as a challenge to Israel. But the flip side of Holocaust Judaism is IDF Judaism, the worship of Israeli military might. Which is, not coincidentally, also a death cult.

The film itself rises above slapstick in the way that each character receives moments of grace along with moments of bumbling and mockery. Like any good art in can be interpreted by each of us according to what we bring to it. I suppose I could choose to believe that when the character tells us that we are condemned to repeat history if we don't learn it, she is warning us against this Israeli Holocaust against Gaza. But I don't believe that's what the filmmakers have in mind. I don't believe that at all.

Both of these films position themselves as art in favor of humanity. I just don't believe that either filmmaker has as inclusive a view of humanity as they think they do.

Whose Genocide?

In my historical novel Though An Army Come Against Us I repeatedly describe a pattern by white Americans of projecting their own racist violence onto the Native, Black, and Mexican people they murdered. For example when Ezekiel Payne prepares to leave a burning Black Tulsa, he reflects on a life time of observing white racist violence:

The lynchings were always followed by panicked reports in the white press of armed Black men on the way to exact vengeance. Back in ’07 the whites of Henryetta had nearly fled the town because they feared that the 1300 rounds of ammunition they had stockpiled would not be enough to stop the 35 armed Black men they heard were coming for them: more than seven 5-round magazines for each imaginary invader! In the case of Okemah, they said it was the entire town of Boley, ten miles away, that was supposedly coming to kill the white people, and – Ezekiel supposed – outrage their women. Sheriff Dunnegan armed every white man in Okemah, prepared for an attack that – like the one expected in Henryetta – never came. From that day on, Okemah was a sundown town.

It was the consistency of this pattern, from town to town, from state to state, that made Ezekiel think that all these white folks were actually reading from the same secret script. But sometimes he had an even darker thought. Sometimes he imagined that white guilt and white fears were so strong – and so uniform – that it resulted in these common patterns of violence and blame. What if white folks were so filled with guilt and shame for their own crimes that they imagined an army of Black people retaliating against them because it would have to be so in any just universe? What if white folks had to bar Negroes from their towns because they couldn’t look them in the eye after the atrocities they had committed against them? What if white folks imagined that colored folks were impervious to bullets because they knew their own actions were demonic and thought God himself was sending avenging Black angels to destroy them? And – finally – what if those loathsome postcards of their victims that they all kept as souvenirs were meant to reassure them that these Black angels were, in fact, mortal?

We still see this today when the press fearfully speculates after a police murder about protests “turning violent,” as if they have already forgotten the violence that people are protesting!

And now I see the US Congress and various universities worrying about calls for genocide against my Jewish people? In the last two months alone the Israeli military has killed roughly 20,000 Gazans and Israeli civilians have murdered over 250 West Bank Palestinians. More than half the homes in Gaza are gone, along with universities, churches, and mosques. Israel has control over food, water, electricity, and communications. It has advanced weapons: warplanes, warships, missiles, nuclear warheads. It is systematically pushing Gazans from more portions of what is, after all, a 25-mile by 8-mile strip, leaving them nowhere to go.

This is the genocide. Worrying about a genocide of Jewish people is either a guilty projection or a conscious misdirection.

I will always be proud of my heritage and religion. But I am increasingly ashamed of the atrocities committed by some who claim to share them. I am increasingly ashamed of the willful blindness of others who deny that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians and - instead - insist that we are the ones who live in fear.

Jewish values demand an end to the genocide.

Israel goes full Schutzstaffel in Gaza

 Okay, sure, complicated. 

The Israeli prime minister is on trial for bribery and fraud. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis had been protesting in the streets for months against his move to undermine the country’s court system. 

The Minister of Justice (and Deputy PM) opposes Palestinian residence anywhere in Israel or the territories it has illegally occupied for the last 56 years, despite signing treaties to protect and safeguard a Palestinian state. He drafted the law undermining the courts. He hobnobs with organized crime figures.

The Minister of National Security has repeatedly pulled his gun on unarmed Arabs and then told arrived police officers to shoot them. He leads hate marches through Arab neighborhoods. His personal hero is Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli American terrorist who shot 154 Ramadan worshippers in a Hebron mosque, killing 29 of them. His slogan is, “We are the landlords,” apparently meaning that he is allowed to do anything to Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories.

Even before October 7, extrajudicial violence by Israelis against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank had accelerated under this new government. This included shootings and beatings; burning of homes and olive groves; and vandalism and destruction of infrastructure, especially water lines and cisterns. 

This prime minister and his government absolutely ignored the intelligence reports that Hamas was preparing a major attack on Israel. It told the Border Patrol to shut up about what they were seeing and just do what they were told. Incompetence? Stupidity? Underestimating the sheer scale of the attack Hamas was planning? Actually hoping for the attack so they could use it to halt the demonstrations and launch a genocidal attack on both Hamas-controlled Gaza and the West Bank? I’ll bet on all of the above.

Now Israel’s paid apologists are feeding the infosphere with endless reminders of the sheer horror of the Hamas raid - 1200 massacred, over 200 taken hostage - as if that justifies their own massacre of 15,000 Gazan civilians (as of yesterday) and another 250 Palestinians in the West Bank. As if that justifies the absolute destruction of churches, mosques, medical centers, office buildings, and apartment houses by advanced munitions. As if that justifies the forced relocation of Gazans to the southern portion of the 25-mile long coastal strip, and - now - the orders to evacuate the south!

But Israeli propagandists don’t only rely on the truth of the Hamas massacre. During the pause in their military operations for prisoner exchange they insisted on differentiating the hostages held by Hamas from the prisoners held by Israel, arguing that the latter were all convicted murderers. That is an easily disproven lie because most of the people released by Israel were administrative detainees, people who had never been charged with any crime at all, and certainly never tried in any court. 

Among the best known is Ahed Tamimi. She first gained international notice in 2012 when she was 11 for trying to stop an Israeli policeman from arresting her mom during a peaceful march against the occupation in their village. The story of that village and the Tamimi family can be found in The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine by American freelance journalist Ben Ehrenreich.  Last year she published her own memoir, They Called Me a Lioness.

When Ahed was 16-years old she was caught on video slapping an Israeli soldier. That soldier had just shot her younger cousin with a rubber bullet from close range, putting him in a coma. She served eight months in Israeli prison, during which she was able to complete high school and earn her diploma. The Israeli poet Yehonatan Geffen wrote of her in 2018:

,את, אהד תמימי
,אדומת השיער
,כמו דוד שסטר לגולית
תהיי באותה שורה עם
.ז'אן דארק, חנה סנש ואנה פרנק

An English translation reads:

You, Ahed Tamimi,
The red-haired,
Like David who slapped Goliath,
Will be counted among the likes of
Joan of Arc, Hannah Senesh and Anne Frank.

In November Ahed was arrested again when her Insta was hacked and somebody put up a hateful post against all Jewish people. Characterizing her as a convicted murderer of Jews is more than a stretch. 

The Israeli military is pursuing a calculated policy of emptying Gaza of Palestinians: by mass murder, by threats of mass murder, and by evacuation orders followed by mass murder. This is genocide. It is genocide regardless of what you say about the Hamas attack that preceded it. It is genocide regardless of whether you believe the Israeli government invited that attack on purpose or through arrogance and stupidity. If you believe that Israel has some special historic right to commit genocide, then you have learned nothing of Jewish law, religion, ethics, or history.

This week the US Army overturned the convictions of 110 soldiers of the Black 24th Infantry for a “riot” in Houston in 1917. The new judgement came 106 years late for the 19 men who were hung. It came late for those who were imprisoned, too.

The full story doesn’t fit in a Facebook post. It includes Houston Police invading a

Black woman’s house and dragging her out half dressed because they lost track of an unrelated man in a foot chase. It includes a Black soldier arrested and beaten for asking those officers to allow her to put on some clothes. It includes Black Military Policemen who were ordered to patrol unarmed because white Texans were offended even by the sight of Black men in uniform, not to mention carrying their weapons. It includes a Black MP beaten and shot for asking white police the whereabouts of that arrested soldier.

This story is not a major plot point in my historical novel Though An Army Come Against Us. It is more of a looming and ongoing presence in the lives of my characters: a concern that everybody has on their minds.

Lt. Flipper c. 1877

H.O. Flipper, who by that point (as in real life) was working as an engineering consultant and confidential informant for Senator Albert Fall, reported to him (in my novel) about the reasons for what he described as the “mutiny”:

“First, is the abusive behavior toward them of white Houston, and especially the Houston Police Department. In my presence a white police officer bragged that in Texas the fine for killing a vulture is $25 but killing a n----- only costs $5. The mutiny itself began when two white police officers pistol-whipped and shot a colored military policeman for asking where they were holding a soldier they had arrested.”

Flipper in 1923

His second reason is the incompetence and racism of the men’s own (white) officers. And Flipper suggests that if he (a West Point graduate) were reinstated in the Army, he could immediately make the 24th a better unit.

My character Major Walter Loving was - like the real Walter Loving - a Black military band leader who is recruited at the outset of the First World War by Military Intelligence to report on the readiness of the Black regiments. In the novel he visits Camp Des Moines, where African American non-commissioned regulars and college graduates who volunteered were trained as officers. In the novel he writes to headquarters:

Walter Loving, c. 1890

“You asked in your letter of 16th last how the candidates are responding to the mutiny by some members of the 24th Infantry in Houston. A few dozen members of the class here are detached from the 24th for this training and everybody else relies heavily on them for both facts and opinion. The most important source of both appears to be a young Regular Army sergeant named Osceola McKaine. He corresponds both with members of his own battalion, who remained in Columbus, New Mexico throughout, and with some in the Third Battalion, including Corporal Charles Baltimore of I Company, the Military Policeman whose beating and arrest by Houston police precipitated the affair.  Sgt. McKaine’s version is that Cpl. Baltimore’s arrest was an example of race prejudice by local law enforcement, but that marching into town to free him was both a gross dereliction of duty and bad for the Negro race. He has urged all his questioners to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States by excelling as officers and thereby to make a case for just treatment.”

Osceola McKaine was a real-life person. It is my fictional McKaine who addresses
a contentious gathering in Charleston, South Carolina on this subject, saying:

Osceola McKaine, by Orlando Rouandl

“The 24th Regiment in Houston is not an abstraction or a debater’s point to me. That was my unit. I served alongside those men. They are my comrades and my friends and if they are executed, then I will mourn them personally and by name."

Near the end of the novel my character Joey Quintana, a union organizer, is imprisoned at Leavenworth for opposing the war. He had previously been deported from Bisbee, Arizona along with about 2,000 striking copper miners and held in an Army camp guarded by… the 24th Infantry. And who does he re-encounter?

“He worked, as usual, with his cellmate, Gabriel
Joyner, #12252. The other prisoners were always surprised to learn that Joey and Gabriel knew one another prior to their incarceration. They asked where a Negro soldier crossed paths with a Mexican-American union organizer. Neither ever elaborated. Joey would sometimes say they met over a card game, but nothing more. Both Gabriel and Joey found it too painful to think about the fate of the other players who had been at that table.”

#12275 Jessie Sullivan

And a couple of pages later we find the inmates singing to make the work go by more easily:

"When Ralph’s song was done, Jessie Sullivan picked up the lead. Sullivan had been a career soldier, a corporal in the 24th Infantry with Joey’s cellmate, Gabriel. Nineteen of their barracks mates were executed in secret for the so-called 'mutiny' in Houston against racist police violence. Jessie, like Gabriel, was spared that. Now he was inmate #12275, sentenced to life in prison.  He led them in the army song, 'Mama, Mama Can’t You See?' The prisoners liked the soldier songs: they were new every day, with lyrics that made them laugh about where they were and what they were doing."

I wrote Though An Army because I believe we cannot understand our present without knowing our past. We are in a moment where white supremacists and monopoly capitalists alike are actually passing laws against the teaching of history. But history like the Houston, Texas affair of 1917 with the 24th Infantry and the Brownsville, Texas affair of 1906 with the 25th Infantry were really never taught. The mass court martial in the one case and the mass discharge without trial in the other, like the mass sedition trials of IWWs, were never really taught.

I published Though An Army in the fall of 2019. I am still hoping to find my readers.

• Chanting “Stop the Steal!” while working for months around the clock to steal a Presidential election.
• Harping endlessly on Hillary Clinton’s communication of State Department business on a private email server while stealing secure documents and storing them in a hotel.
• Accusing the grieving parents of murdered schoolchildren of being “crisis actors” while hiring actors to be on camera cheering at one’s events.
• Tirelessly insisting on the guilt of Hunter Biden and the complicity of his father while Jared Kushner’s new equity firm gets a $2 billion infusion of cash from the Saudi crown prince, a transfer that the prince’s financial people advised him was unjustiable as an investment.
• Denouncing “cancel culture” while banning books from libraries and entire subjects from school curricula.
• Using an expanded definition of religious freedom to take away the rights of women and gay people.

Is there a pattern in this?

When Capitalists Whine about Class Warfare

 Forty-two years ago, August 5, 1981, Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers who were striking for a pay increase, a reduced work week, and improved retirement benefits. They had endorsed Reagan’s 1980 election campaign because he promised to support them, but instead he fired them all. The entire union membership lost their jobs; EVERYONE was replaced. Firing strikers instead of negotiating with them encouraged large private employers to do the same: at Phelps Dodge in 1983, at Hormel in 1985, at International Paper in 1987. 

Twenty percent of salary and wage workers were represented by unions in 1983; today that proportion is ten percent. Forty years of attacks on workers haven’t been confined to union members. Real wages are down. Benefits have vanished. Even social security is under attack. This represents forty years of ONE-SIDED CLASS WARFARE… attacks by the capitalist class on all of us. 

Now, when people speak up about the massive robbery that “tax reform” has accomplished by freeing the wealthiest of paying any taxes at all, the rich cry, “Class warfare!”

When people ask that the federal government enforce existing safety regulations that would reduce the number of train derailments, chemical spills, and fatalities to rail workers and civilians, the freight companies cry, “Class warfare!”

When workers vote to bargain collectively, employers cut their wages and cry, “Class warfare!”

The next time you hear some politician complaining that a call for justice is “class warfare,” remember that they always endorse class warfare when it is waged by the wealthy against everyone else.

The Likud Coalition's Attack on the Israeli High Court is an Assault on Palestinians

 The open fascists of Israel’s governing coalition like to pretend that their attacks on the High Court are actually in support democracy of democracy. They ask why unelected judges should be allowed to overturn the will of the people (by which they mean, of course, those who are allowed to vote) as expressed by the Knesset the people  [sic] elected. They are especially exercised by the standard of reasonableness, which - until this week - allowed the Court to block government decisions that the judges deemed unreasonable. But Justice Minister Yariv Levin gave away the game in a speech to the Knesset. Instead of providing examples of times when the Court blocked the people’s will, he offered these five examples that he felt demonstrated how the failure of the reasonableness standard:

• In 2018, bereaved Israeli families from Parents Circle – Families Forum and Combatants for Peace Tel Aviv invited bereaved Palestinian families to join them in observing Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day) at a ceremony in Tel Aviv Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman barred those Palestinian mourners from entering Israel on the grounds that a joint ceremony was a “display of bad taste.” He characterized it as equating the murdered with the murderers. The Supreme Court overruled him and allowed the joint remembrance to take place.
• That same year Lara Alqasem, a 22-year old student at the University of Florida with Palestinian grandparents, arrived in Israel to continue her studies at the Hebrew University. She was refused entry, her student visa was canceled, and she was interned for two weeks on the grounds that she had previously been in an organization that supported boycotting Israel. The Court agreed with Hebrew University and with hundreds of Israeli and US professors that she should be permitted entry and they overruled the Interior Ministry.
• In 2002, three Palestinians - Kipah Mahmad Ahmed Ajuri, Abed Alnasser Mustafa Ahmed Asida, and Amtassar Muhammed Ahmed Ajuri - were accused of complicity in bombing attacks in Israel. The military commander of the West Bank ordered them relocated to Gaza and all three sued. The Court had no problem admitting conclusions of guilt that could not be supported by evidence because the source of that evidence was declared secret. The Court had no problem with the forced relocations of two of the three. But it overturned the third deportation (Abed) on the grounds that he was guilty only of being the brother of a bomber who had refused to loan him his car and gave him a ride instead.
• In 2021 Computer Science Professor Oded Goldreich of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot was selected for the Israel Prize in Mathematics for his work in computational complexity. Minister of Education Yifat Shasha-Biton refused to give him the prize on the grounds that he signed a letter to the German Parliament saying either - depending on whose story you accept - that support for boycotting Israel is not, by itself, antisemitism; or that they shouldn’t provide financial support for the settler college, Ariel University. The Court ordered Shasha-Biton to give him his prize, saying it is meant to be a reward for excellence in scholarship, not loyalty to the government.
• In 2018, Professor Yael Amitai, a neurobiologist at Ben Gurion University, was named to the board of the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development, which is a fund for distributing research grants. Minister Ofir Akunis blocked that appointment on the grounds that Dr. Amitai signed a petition in 2005 supporting Israeli soldiers’ right to refuse to serve in the occupied territories. The Court asked Minister Akunis to reconsider.

On their face, these decisions affect both Israelis and Palestinians. It is definitely worth noting, though, that their weight and consequences differ. On behalf of Israelis, the Court intervened in cases where they were being denied academic honors, or the right to invite guests to a celebration. On behalf of Palestinians (or Americans of Palestinian descent) the Court intervened in their forced relocation and in the refusal to admit them into the country. As important, even the cases involving Israelis concerned Palestinian rights: including them in a joint bereavement ceremony, acknowledging that opposing an illegal occupation is not a crime, acknowledging that opposing that illegal occupation is not antisemitism. It should be clear from this that, at least for now, the motivation for the attacks on the Court is to give the government impunity in attacking Palestinians.

Israelis are not wrong in protesting a partisan parliamentary attack on the independent judiciary. It would be good if they recognized that behind this attack on their individual rights is an assault on the entire Palestinian people.