Author: John Grant

The film The Act Of Killing is the big buzz in the world of cinema. The documentary about death squad killers in Indonesia in 1965 has to be one of the oddest films in recent memory. Imagine a filmmaker, in this case 38-year-old Joshua Oppenheimer, handing over control of his film to a handful of psychopathic killers so they can re-enact how they murdered their countrymen and -women.

The result is a riotous confusion of genres that both exacerbates and delights the senses and the mind. At the showing I saw in Philadelphia, several comments afterwards were critical and dismissive of the film — as in, how dare this guy give such a powerful venue of expression to such loathsome human beings.

It was a very good point.

Anwar Congo, center in hat, and his killer pals driving in Jakarta. At right, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer.

It’s like someone handed over the reins of a film production crew to Boston mob butcher Whitey Bulger and said, “How did you do it, Whitey? As we just heard in testimony in your trial, how did you strangle that young woman while her stepfather watched? Here, use this young woman volunteer and re-enact it for the cameras. Then, we’ll get the stepfather to re-enact how he dragged her dead body down to the cellar and extracted all her teeth with pliers. It’ll be great! And, Whitey … this is performance art, so have fun doing it. Smile a lot.”

That absurd scenario begins to get at the bizarre cinematic artifact Joshua Oppenheimer has wrought on film. The only difference is the Indonesian death squad killers who were strangling people and chopping off their heads did those deeds back in 1965 for political reasons, not Boston mob priorities. For me, that makes all the difference, turning a self-indulgent, macabre glorification of crime into a unique and politically potent work of genius.

 
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
– D.H. Lawrence

 
The moderate conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote a column titled “Men on the Threshold” employing a famous image of John Wayne in the 1956 film The Searchers as a symbol of the American male worker facing a growing crisis of unemployment.

Brooks certainly has the right to do what he likes with such mythic imagery. And he writes, “Classics can be interpreted in different ways.” But in this instance, in the name of truth and justice, he should be brought up on charges of premeditated and aggravated misuse of myth.

David Brooks and Ethan Edwards "on the threshold"

Ethan Edwards is considered Wayne’s best acting role. There’s none of the usual John Wayne swaggering big-man nonsense with sidekicks like Dean Martin or Fabian. Here, he’s a mean and cruel sonuvabitch who sets out with a younger man across the barren Texas plains to find a girl kidnapped by Indians whose family they had massacred. The search lasts seven years. We learn he intends to kill the girl (Natalie Wood) once he finds her, since she has been ruined by becoming the sexual mate of an Indian.

In the end, Edwards softens enough to return the girl to her family. In the famous scene at the end, Edwards stands silhouetted in the doorway of a rough home with the dusty Texas plains behind him. While the family is rejoicing and welcoming its lost daughter back into the fold of civilization, Edwards stands alone, apparently unable to enter. As the popular interpretation goes, his hard cold-bloodedness was what brought the girl back to civilization, but that same violent temperament won’t permit him to fit into the domestic scene inside. He turns and walks off, presumably to find other frontiers.

No argument, this is a powerful image of American history and Manifest Destiny from a truly magnificent classic film. But, let’s not kid ourselves and New York Times readers, it has nothing to do with the plight of American male workers in 2013. It’s a case of expropriating a classic, tough masculine image from popular culture to represent a theme Brooks wants to emphasize. At best, it’s facile; at worst, cynically opportunistic.

 
We now have clarity from a full-bird colonel in judicial robes that Bradley Manning is to be charged with “aiding the enemy.” OK, not much of a surprise here. Colonel Denise Lind’s ruling seems pretty predictable.

Her ruling may make things simple for all the right-leaning pod-people who salute everything a field grade military officer says, but for the rest of us, it raises a profound and rather perplexing question: Exactly who is the “enemy” in this case?

Court martial scene with Colonel Denise Lind, lower right, and Pvt. Manning in drawings by Clark Stoeckley

The military and intelligence agency brass and their enablers will tell you it’s some nefarious and nebulous network called al Qaeda, which we should all know by now is a substitute for our old Cold War enemies and fictional entities like Spectre in the original Ian Fleming spy pulps. That is, al Qaeda has become The Boogie Man.

American patriots on the right will get no argument from me that there are, indeed, people and affiliations that mean real harm to Americans (including me) and that we need to protect ourselves from them. But that doesn’t address the question whether al Qaeda and other “terrorist” groups are being exploited as the boogie man for the convenience of the Pentagon, the CIA, NSA and demagogues like New York Congressman Peter King.

I fear a lot of “the hunt for al Qaeda” narrative is standard militarist fear-mongering employed to justify embarrassing and often illegal secret behavior that would shrivel up if it were really exposed to the light of day. Boogie men like al Qaeda are also useful to advance the careers and interests of the usual gang of capitalists and oppressive wealthy dominators that made this nation what it is today — the nation that Bill O’Reilly was wondering the other night might be going down the tubes like Old Rome.

 
When people think of Florida, they think of oranges and pink flamingos, palm trees and beaches, the blue-green ocean. They think of Disney and margaritas. … But it has a feral heart, a teeming center that would rage out of control if not for the concrete and rebar that keeps it caged.
 
-Lisa Unger, from Black Out
 

As I watched the trial of George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, and absorbed the verdict of six White or Hispanic women jurors, my involvements with race in Florida as a kid all rushed front and center in my mind. The trial was an amazing racial lightning rod saturated with the unpleasant legacy of race in America, especially in the South. It seems appropriate that it unfolded in Florida, which has become the nation’s most bizarre and confused state.

Given this, it’s easy to understand why Seminole County Circuit Judge Debra Nelson sternly kept race out of the trial. In the end, while it may have tempered sensationalism in her court, the decision feels like an example of the problem itself and very much a real shortcoming of the trial. The way things work, thanks to the double jeopardy issue, the State cannot appeal the verdict. Had it gone the other way, appeal geniuses like Alan Dershowitz had already begun working the angles for a lengthy appeal process, like he was ready to do for O.J. Simpson and did for Claus Von Bulow.

As it stands, the only appeal process George Zimmerman has to face is possible threats to his life. His security concerns are no doubt serious; one might say, while he may have “walked,” it might be prudent if he walked fast under an assumed name to a secret location.

Judge Debra Nelson, Trayvon Martin and Trayvon's mother, Sybrina Fulton

The most amazing thing about the trial was that the dead victim seemed to be the one on trial. I was often confused which legal team was the “prosecutor” and which one was the “defense.” It felt to me that the defense attorneys, especially Don West, were acting like prosecutors, while the prosecutors were acting like defense lawyers. As it turned out, the real prosecutors were acting pretty ineffectually in that role. You had to wonder whether this might be because it’s anathema to prosecutors to seriously question the actions or motives of a police officer or — in this case, a “wanna-be cop.”

In an interesting footnote to the case, George’s father, Robert Zimmerman, a full-time magistrate from 2000-2006 in Virginia, wrote an e-book entitled Florida v Zimmerman: Uncovering the Malicious Prosecution of My Son George in which he calls the Congressional Black Caucus a “pathetic, self-serving group of racists… advancing their purely racist agenda.” He also writes that the NAACP “simply promotes racism and hatred for their own, primarily finical [sic], interests.”

It was a typical US government response to favorable facts-on-the-ground rooted in violence. Once the military coup in Egypt had been accomplished and the first democratically-elected president of Egypt and many of his allies had been arrested and all sympathetic radio stations had been shut down, the US State Department released a statement expressing US condemnation of any future violence.

While the dirty deal was going down President Obama played golf and Secretary of State John Kerry went sailing off Nantucket. It was a bit like the The Godfather when Don Corleone is shown in church and the sequence is inter-cut with scenes of men being shot dead in bed and sputtering as they are being garroted.

This is not a particularly novel turn of events — just especially dishonest and dishonorable. It seems to be the way the US does coups in the 21st century. The days of crude coups like Iran (’53), Guatemala (’54) and Chile (’73) are long gone. Today, it’s done with great coordinated finesse thanks to a sophisticated international secrecy network vis-à-vis American taxpayers and the rest of the civilian world. As citizens, all we get is public relations that expresses great concern for the control of violence … once the favorable facts-on-the-ground have been established.

Scenes from post coup Egypt
 

Currently, members of the Freedom and Justice Party, the name of the Muslim Brotherhood’s and ousted President Morsi’s political party, are furious. They should be. The New York Times reports that the party is planning to organize escalated demonstrations across Egypt. Many fear where this coup will lead. A 23-year-old female law student told The Times that her Islamist neighbors had started shaving their heads, which sounded ominous. “Everyone’s worried about a civil war,” she said. The body count is now rising.

We’re all aware of the reputed Chinese curse about living in interesting times. Upheaval seems to be in the air. According to Wikipedia, the interesting times curse was linked with a second, more worrisome curse: “May you come to the attention of those in authority.”

If a young computer nerd like Edward Snowden can access so much secret information concerning US citizens’ lives, what’s to stop some righteous NSA employee with the moral intelligence of Adolf Eichmann from accessing the same material and, in collusion with a para-military cabal of like-minded and armed patriots, deciding someone (me!) is a national security threat in need of neutralization?

Admiral William McRaven, head of Special Operations Command, a special ops killer and mob killer Whitey Bulger

Paranoia? Maybe. But I see it as paying attention and having the historically-based imagination to understand we’re no longer in Kansas — that we actually live in Oz and Toto has been declared a terrorist. The basis of Franz Kafka’s absurd world, of course, is that what you know about yourself doesn’t matter if powerful, secretive elements act hostilely against you based on what they think they know about you.

At an anti-Iraq War demonstration in Philadelphia some years ago, a Civil Affairs cop took me aside and told me the FBI had just called him about me. He seemed to be warning me so I could clean up any suspicious behavior. Since I was exercising my first amendment rights, I felt I had nothing to hide. But, then, I began to wonder why exactly some FBI drone thought I might be a threat and how dangerous for me such a person might be.

It all distills down to Power versus Truth and which one is the lodestar for one’s actions. The Obama administration’s current obsession with crushing whistleblowers is clearly about Power and assuring the bloated national security apparatus he oversees retains all its accumulated Power. This is done by controlling access to the Truth.

In his 2011 book The Future of Power, Joseph Nye, Jr. says we live in an age of the “diffusion of power” in which the nation state is no longer the only game in town. “Transnational actors” of all sorts — corporations, terrorist networks, affinity groups, media and entertainment forces — all vie for power and attention. The fact our lives are overwhelmed by computers, social media and the forces of economic globalization is central to this diffusion. I would argue that US militarism and the burgeoning police state has become a power center in its own right separate from whatever “The United States of America” is — and that this militaristic power center is more and more driven by its own self-aggrandizing impulses.

The nonviolent antiwar/peace movement is, then, arguably a countervailing power center within the land mass that is the United States of America. Unfortunately, this power center has yet to reach any kind of critical mass analogous to how frustrations with corruption are being manifested in Brazil and Egypt. The cruel truth, it’s hard to get anywhere in today’s world unless you’re rich or well armed.

Watching the US Senate Armed Forces Committee wrestle with the issue of rape and sexual abuse in the military opens a whole range of related issues concerning sex and war that will likely not be addressed in the Senate.

First, there’s the world of militant Islam, against whom for over a decade our most war-friendly leaders have put us on a war footing. For many, Islam itself has become the new boogie man to replace the communism of the Cold War era. One critical factor in this war is how the Islamic world sees the treatment of women.

I first encountered this difference when as a young man I was traveling in Turkey. I was amazed at the young American women travelers who wanted to hook up with me and even wanted to share a room. Unfortunately, I soon realized it was not my prowess they were interested in. They sought protection from the incessant fondling and groping that Turkish men felt entitled to with young American females. These women clearly feared the possibility of rape.

I concluded, perhaps rashly, that Muslim men tend to take what they see as their male, masculine rights seriously and see liberated western women as a flagrant provocation.

Police break up anti-rape protesters in India

The New York Times recently reported cases of public rapes in Rio de Janeiro. There have been similar rapes (some that ended in murder) in India and elsewhere with huge street protests in India. The point of The Times article was the irony that such sexually aggressive male behavior was occurring in Brazilian society as that nation approached first-world status. Brazil is planning to host the 2016 Summer Olympics and it recently elected a woman, Dilma Rousseff, as president.

“We’re living a schizophrenic situation, in which important advances have been made in women reaching positions of influence in our society,” Rogeria Peixinho, from the Brazilian Womens Network, told The Times. “At the same time, the situation for many women who are poor remains atrocious.”

 
PREFACE
 
Asked by veterans from the Vietnam Veterans of America inmate Chapter 466 in Graterford state prison to be the official speaker for their Armed Forces Day event on May 18th, the following was given as a speech. Members of VVA Chapter 466 were in attendance, along with a host of friends and supporters of the chapter, some who are quite conservative veterans. Several Graterford staff and security officials were in attendance. Pennsylvania Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel was invited and had committed to attend the Armed Forces Day event, but at the last minute he had a conflict and did not show up. Wetzel worked his way up from a corrections officer and was given the top prison job in May 2010 by conservative Republican Governor Tom Corbett. A copy of the speech has been sent to Wetzel’s office and to other officials in Harriburg. During these years, I have become acquainted with a number of decent, hard-working Graterford officials and staff employees. The following remarks were written with all these individuals and parties in mind.

As a Vietnam veteran and member of Veterans For Peace, I have worked with the VVA chapter and other interested groups for a number of years as an advocate for prison reform in the area of veterans. Of particular interest to me is recognition of the mitigating factor of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Pennsylvania’s draconian life-without-parole sentence in which the only way out is a coffin or a commutation. And in the current political climate in Pennsylvania commutations are rare and tend to be given as a governor is leaving office.
 

It is a great honor to speak here today for Armed Forces Day. I must say, when I was asked to be the speaker today I was a little surprised. While I’m very much an American, I am not a flag-waver.

So I’m not going to give the usual Armed Forces Day speech that praises our military for preserving our freedom here in America. Everyone has heard that one many times before.

Since I’m speaking to a mixed audience of prison inmates (most of them veterans), prison officials and other distinguished guests, I want to talk about the Armed Forces and incarcerated veterans.

Graterford Prison outside of Philadelphia

Like others in this room, I’m a Vietnam veteran. But that identification really doesn’t tell anyone much other than triggering stereotypes.

I joined the Army in 1965 a week out of high school. I had just turned 18. My father had been a PT boat captain in the south Pacific, and my brother was in the Army infantry at the time. I ended up as part of the Army Security Agency, was sent to Vietnam and was assigned, first, to the 25th Division, then to the 4th Division, both headquartered in Pleiku. I was a fairly intelligent kid, but, frankly, very naïve. I was trained in Morse code to work as a radio direction finder.

I was what we called — and pardon the obscenity — a REMF, or rear echelon motherfucker. Still, I ended up working in forward areas in support of large infantry operations. I was at a firebase near the famous Ia Drang valley where a year earlier Commer Glass fought as a young soldier. I was dropped by helicopter on remote mountaintops near the Cambodian border with a half squad of grunts to protect my sorry REMF ass. It was all pretty amazing experience for a young kid just out of high school.

 
I saw the masked men
throwing truth into a well.
When I began to weep for it
I found it everywhere.
– Claudia Lars (El Salvador)
 

Those of us who have struggled for peace and justice over the past decades don’t have much to celebrate these days. But the news from Guatemala that a female judge — Yasmin Barrios — was able to successfully manage a trial in that benighted nation and convict former President Efrain Rios Montt of genocide is something to rejoice about. It suggests it’s no longer business as usual in Latin America — especially vis-à-vis the United States.

The big stick of North American imperialism from Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan appears to be dwindling in size. The sentencing of a Guatemalan president to 80 years in prison for employing scorched earth tactics against native Mayan Indians is an amazing milestone — and an incredible story to boot.

Following a 1954 US-directed coup that overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz for his efforts at agrarian reform, the tiny Central American nation descended into a condition that can only be characterized, for the native Mayan people, as a state of Hell-on-Earth. The fact that President Rios Montt undertook his systematic slaughter of many thousands of Mayan peasants with the endorsement of Ronald Reagan only makes the conviction that much sweeter.

.

In the photograph, at left, Ronald Reagan, “the Great Communicator,” meets with Rios Montt, who is holding a document titled “This government has the commitment to change.” At the time, Reagan said Rios Montt was “a man of great personal integrity and commitment” who wanted to “promote social justice.” At right, is a line of bodies from one of the Guatemalan army’s massacres of people who, no doubt, were deemed “communists” and, therefore, inhuman and justifiably slaughtered like vermin.

Army General Efrain Rios Montt became president of Guatemala thanks to a coup in March 1982. He was, then, deposed by another coup in August 1983. This was a time when Mr. Reagan was hypnotizing the American people with his aw-shucks, soothing Hollywood narcotic speech tones.

It was the summer of 1981. I was working on an ambulance in Philadelphia, transporting a cancer patient to a hospital for radiation treatments. The man was in his sixties, and I felt he knew his days were numbered.

In my conversations with the man, it came up that I was a Vietnam veteran. He told me he was in the CIA in Saigon in the early 1970s.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I delivered bags of money. That’s pretty much all I did in the end. I was a bagman. I’d get an order to carry a bag of money to some character somewhere in Saigon. And that’s what I did.”

We both smiled grimly, as if to say, our war had turned out to be a moral debacle.

So it was a case of déjà-vu when I read in The New York Times that the CIA has for some time been delivering “bags of money” to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. You can be sure they were also delivering bags of money to a host of other nefarious actors in the corrupt mix of people loyal to our cause in Afghanistan. Afghan writer Qais Akbar Omar calls it “ghost money” and writes, “If ghost money were going to the people who needed it, Afghanistan would have a lot fewer ghosts.”

My dying, ex-CIA friend, it seems, was one in a long tradition of bagmen in US imperial history. Now, of course, we must also have bagwomen to provide the strategic sugar to accompany the salt of our bombing campaigns.

When I returned from Vietnam I began reading a lot of history, from Bernard Fall’s great books on the French Indochina War to Robert J. Lifton’s early work on PTSD, Home From The War. I had been a 19-year-old radio direction finder in the mountains west of Pleiku locating Vietnamese radio operators so our forces could kill them and all the men and women in their units with artillery, aerial bombardments or infantry search & destroy missions. I have their blood on my hands, indirectly.

The legacy of European colonialism in the world

From my reading, I realized too late I was the “bad guy” in Vietnam and that the Vietnamese had never done anything to me or, more important, to my country. In fact, the Viet Minh were our ally and critical in helping us fight the Japanese toward the end of World War Two. After the war, like the Indians, the Indonesians and others colonized by European powers, they had had enough of colonialism and wanted to control their own destiny. Naively, they thought the US would help them in that goal. Looking back from 2013, it’s clear if we had left them alone — had not killed two to three million southeast Asians over ten years and devastated the nation — the Vietnamese would have ended up exactly where they are now, like their regional enemy China, a hybrid socialist/capitalist state. All we did was slow them down.