The great John Pilger, “Truth shall set us free” —

“There is a hunger among the public for documentaries because only documentaries, at their best, are fearless and show the unpalatable and make sense of the news. The extraordinary films of Alan Francovich achieved this. Francovitch, who died in 1997 , made The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie. THIS destroyed the official truth that Libya was responsible for the sabotage of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. Instead, an unwitting “mule”, with links to the CIA, was alleged to have carried the bomb on board the aircraft. (Paul Foot’s parallel investigation for Private Eye came to a similar conclusion). The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie has never been publicly screened in the United States. In this country, the threat of legal action from a US Government official prevented showings at the 1994 London Film Festival and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 1995, defying threats, Tam Dalyell showed it in the House of Commons, and Channel 4 broadcast it in May 1995.”

Great article on the impact and effect of fiction and other arts — a view of aesthetics and social change: “How We Deal with Disease” by Iman Kurdi —

 

“We learnt much more from seeing Mark Fowler on our screens every week than from reading hundreds of leaflets or seeing a public information film. Partly this is because when we are entertained, we are stimulated and this makes us more open to respond to what we are shown. Good fiction leads us to respond both emotionally and intellectually; there is a sense of intimacy. Particularly in long-running fiction like a soap opera, we feel involved, we don’t feel informed: We understand.

“Fiction is undoubtedly powerful in conveying a message to its audience.”

Standout British filmmaker joins boycott of Israel

(Daily Star staff) 

Ken Loach, the critically acclaimed British filmmaker who won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has lent his support to the cultural boycott of Israel, according to a personal statement issued late last week…. 

Loach won the Palme d’Or for “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” set in the Irish War for Independence. He is one of the UK’s most controversial directors, in no small part because he is a die-hard leftist. Previous films include “My Name is Joe,” “Bread and Roses,” “Hidden Agenda” (which examined the British government’s “shoot to kill” policy during its troubles with the IRA) and “Land and Freedom” (which explored the political rhetoric at play during the Spanish Civil War and offers probably as complex and critical an insight into notions of resistance as Jean-Luc Godards’ “Ici et Ailleurs,” about Palestinian fighters in the early 1970s) “Hidden Agenda” and “Land and Freedom” won smaller awards at Cannes.

Nouvo Noir: Mystery and detective fiction is increasingly concerned not just with solving the crime, but with digging into the injustices of society

By Anne-Marie O’Connor

Once upon a time, American popular fiction was full of stories of social inequality and great injustice. Consider the fiction of writers such as John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair, what might be called social realism.

Today, such themes may be less common in mainstream best-sellers, but they are alive in well in popular genre fiction – especially in the areas of crime fiction and mystery….

Dahr Jamail interviews Ray McGovern:

I like to refer to what my four-year-old granddaughter said when she saw me on TV. When it was all over she went to my daughter and said, “Mommy, that was grandpa. That means the other people are real too.” Now, that’s sort of cute on the surface, but think about what that means. If you don’t know someone in the picture, the other people aren’t real too. And we’re deprived even of the pictures of the carnage that’s going on in Iraq, and now in Lebanon. And we have to fess up to that and realize that unless we get our hearts involved in this, as well as our minds, we’re not going to be able to stand up and do our duty as American patriots and face down this situation and say to our government, “Enough. Enough. No more carnage. Bring our troops home from Iraq. And reign in this Israeli government that is using your helicopter gun ships, your fighter-bombers, your tanks, etc.”

Brief overview of Upton Sinclair’s life and work.

Ryan Bigge reviews US!

Jay Parini reviews US! — “a lark of a novel” by Chris Bachelder:

“Sinclair was the ultimate muckraker, the scourge of capitalists and greedy politicians, and a vibrant man of the left, when there was a left. Now he’s at the centre of a larky novel by Chris Bachelder. With his first novel, the inimitable Bear v Shark, Bachelder stepped unabashedly into the limelight, full of postmodern pizzazz. He has put his cleverness, and his unusual narrative skills, to good use in US! – a romp of a book (the word “novel” almost doesn’t stretch to include such a work) in which the great muckraker comes alive, again and again, dug up by his admirers, who need him desperately. Alas, he is assassinated again, too – over and over.”

“In Renewed Fight, ‘Redskins’ Refuse to Change Offensive Name” — by Catherine Komp

Oliver Stone, 9/11, and the Big Lie

By Ruth Rosen

When World Trade Center ended, I left the theater tense, my muscles aching. The superb directing and acting, coupled with still hardly imaginable scenes of death and destruction, had sent painful muscle spasms up my back, evoked tears, and left me, yet again, with searing and indelible images of that hellish morning.

I felt disoriented in the bright sunlight of a Northern Californian afternoon. As my mind regained its critical faculties, however, another kind of shock set in. I suddenly realized that Oliver Stone’s movie reinforces the Big Lie — endlessly repeated by Dick Cheney, echoed and amplified by the right-wing media — that 9/11 was somehow linked to Iraq or supported by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein….

Politics in Art by Hank Kalet — the Middle East and political poetry:

“We live in an age when it’s hard / to write about basic things / like a kiss or eating cheese,” Mr. Weiseltier writes in “Cheese.”

The accumulation of small details in his poems is set against the larger world of violence, one that perpetuates itself, violence begetting violence, a cycle that he refuses to fall into – “don’t dare say / that my blood permits you to justify your wrongs.”

 In 2020, Politics as Unusual  — review by Yvonne Zipp

Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico’s greatest living writer, has created a corrosive satire [the novel, The Eagle’s Throne] set in 2020. The Mexican president has angered the United States by denouncing its invasion of Colombia. In retaliation, US President Condoleezza Rice has wiped out Mexico’s communication systems, cutting the country off from the rest of the world. (Even the carrier pigeons have been poisoned.)

Otto Penzler with some thoughts on popular fiction: 

Charles Dickens, most of whose books involve murder, kidnapping, blackmail, robbery, and other crimes, wanted to change society; his novels were more instrumental in shining light on the wretched state of the poor in Victorian England than all the pamphleteers, speech-makers, and journalists of the era combined. Irritated with anti-Asian racism, Earl Derr Biggers created Charlie Chan, a wise and likable Chinese-Hawaiian policeman. John le Carré has in recent work attempted to show that Western democracies were as morally depraved as Eastern Communist regimes. Carl Hiaasen, for all the humor in his novels, has been on a mission to identify the catastrophic damage being done to Florida’s environment.

From “Two Thumbs Down“

by Robert Newman 

 

What significance that Tony Blair confessed to Jon Snow that he had never heard of Mossadegh, the elected Iranian prime minister we overthrew? If things have disappeared down the memory hole then it must be with good reason.

But I think that, rather than do gags about 1066, Nelson, Napoleon – virgin territory though that is for the comedian – it’s more exciting to talk about the Black Panthers. Not only am I interested in history from below, but I was also flukey enough when researching the show to have direct access to unpublished first-hand oral accounts of the Black Panthers from which I quoted directly. Also, the Black Panthers just happen to be the most important social movement of the 1960s; FBI chief J Edgar Hoover described them as “the single greatest threat to the internal security of the United States”. That’s pretty amazing, I think.

In No Planet B – The History of the World Backwards, I wanted to explore what the Panthers might have achieved were it not for the FBI’s murderous campaign against them. And I wanted to explore that because I believe such grassroots revolutionary movements are the only political force that can stop climate change, because capitalism has no Plan B. Again, abstruse stuff of purely academic interest, as happily all such urgent imperatives only exist way over yonder on Planet B.

The Legacy of the Cultural Front: An Interview with Alan Wald

“Alan Wald teaches at the University of Michigan and is the author of seven books including, Writing from the Left and Exiles from a Future Time. He is a member of the editorial boards of Science & Society and Against the Current. He also edited The Radical Novel Reconsidered series published by the University of Illinois Press, which includes Burning Valley by Philip Bonosky.”

The Sunkist Utopian

Brenda Wineapple

One hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his gut-churning exposé of the meatpacking industry that schoolchildren still read today in their history classes. A well-merchandized sensation, it sold 100,000 copies in the first year, millions after that, was almost immediately translated into seventeen languages, spurred an uptick in vegetarianism, greased the way for the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug acts, and transformed its 27-year-old Socialist author into a celebrity. Teddy Roosevelt called Sinclair a crackpot but invited him to the White House, and meatpacking magnate J. Ogden Armour offered Frank Doubleday, The Jungle‘s publisher, a huge advertising contract if he would suppress the book….

From the article by Andrew Buncombe: 

Charlie Chaplin’s classic black-and-white movie Modern Times highlighted the exploitation and horrendous conditions faced by US factory workers during the Depression. Venezuela’s leader Hugo Chavez believes it is as relevant today as it ever was.

Charlie Chaplain in ‘Modern Times’

At factories and meeting halls across Caracas, Mr Chavez’s government has been showing the film to workers to expose what he believes are the evils of capitalism, and cement support for his socialist administration.

“I definitely think that what he is doing is to show the workers there what capitalism is about,” said Gregory Wilpert, editor of venezuelanalys.com. “It is to reinforce the socialist ideas that his government has recently been proclaiming.”

Officials said the 1936 silent film starring Chaplin, Paulette Goddard and Henry Bergman, has been shown about 1,000 times since January in 14 different states to educate workers who have little knowledge about their health and safety rights in the workplace. One Venezuelan official said that 1,500 workers died and thousands more were injured annually in factory accidents. One scene in the movie shows Chaplin’s character, the Little Tramp, being pulled through a huge machine as he seeks to tighten a bolt.

“Once inside the factory, workers had no meaningful rights,” Richard Shickel, a film critic, told The Los Angeles Times. “It was very relevant in the moment it was released, a time of social unrest and the emerging US labour movement.”

In Venezuela, business owners are outraged….