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Aisha points to a peace movement in malaise

Most people have now seen the cover of the August 9th issue of Time magazine, which depicts a portrait of Aisha, the 18-year-old Afghan girl who had her nose slashed off by Taliban butchers for the “crime” of fleeing her husband’s abusive family. But while the atrocities alluded to by the photo are repugnant, the response, or lack thereof, from much of the “peace movement” has been a close runner up in its wantonness.

What responses have been forthcoming seem to imply that much of the peace movement has morphed into a sickly, jaundiced figure; a sad shadow of what it once was.

For example, an article by Daisy Hernandez in Colorlines, through bizarre twists of logic, suggests that the picture “obscures the horror of war,” and “conforms to an aesthetic beauty we’re familiar with from women’s magazines.” Hernandez goes on to compare the article unfavorably to an exhibit on war photography at the World Erotic Art Museum and agreeably adds that critics “are accusing Time of exploiting Aisha to gather support for Obama’s futile war in Afghanistan.”

According to a letter co-signed by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, the cover is “outrageous, pro-Afghanistan-War propaganda cover art” produced by a managing editor campaigning “for his outrageous pro-war spin campaign.” (Never mind that the managing editor said he was not explicitly in favor of the war, that he wanted only to add the plight of women into the conversation!)

Most of the rest of the left has been silent.

But really? You’ll have to excuse me if, when I see a terribly butchered woman on the cover of a magazine, my thoughts don’t immediately turn to hatred of some U.S. imperialist war machine or the western bias of women’s magazine aesthetics. You’ll have to excuse me further for taking a little while to feel a terrible awe that this monstrous cruelty could be inflicted on anyone, especially someone so young.

Is this what the left has been reduced to? The left, which purports to stand for the rights of the individual, for freedom from, among other things, the brutality of sexism? Let’s be clear: a woman only eighteen years of age—a young woman who, in different circumstances would be looking forward, maybe starting college—fled a forced marriage out of a fear for her life. When she was found, her in-laws cut off her ears and Taliban supporters slashed her nose from her face.

The left are opposed to the war. People get that; we are not dealing in rocket science when trying to figure out how the peace movement feels towards U.S. policy in Afghanistan. But what does become confused and muddled is whether or not anyone really cares about the fate of women like Aisha. It certainly doesn’t seem that they do when articles denounce the editor of Time before they denounce the Taliban.

There are good points valid to the national conversation on the war that the left can insert. Time’s editors were trying to get the conversation on women’s rights, and how the war affects them, going. Instead of calling the national newsweekly warrior filth, mightn’t it be better to jump into the conversation? Left organizations on the ground, like the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, make these points all the time. To them, the religious fanatics and the U.S. occupation are twin evils, but the former won’t be destroyed before the latter leaves. But what would these heroic women fighters say to comfortable Americans who fret about how Aisha’s hair was styled?

It shouldn’t be hard for the left to make a clear and concise argument against the Afghan war, as RAWA does. But those “peace” forces—and you can’t really honestly call yourself a peace force if you don’t speak out against the mutilation and subjugation of women—who ignore the plight of Aisha; who after viewing her disfigurement very quickly move on to the subject, as Hernandez does, of whether or not her hair was put into a “western” style so as to curry favor with American men—are destroying the context in which the left can fight for peace—and be proud while doing it.

Put simply, if you’re going to oppose the war and be taken seriously (by people other than the racists who merely don’t want to spend money defending brown people), you need to answer the question posed by Time: what does happen after the U.S. leaves?

And you have to come up with a satisfactory answer.

Hitch-22: When the left moves right

Book Review

“Hitch-22”
By Christopher Hitchens
2010, Twelve press, 448 pages, $26.99 (hardcover)

The name Christopher Hitchens is, to many on the left and right, a dirty word. In lining up with the Bush administration on the war in Iraq, the former Nation columnist shocked much of the left, and his militant atheism has inspired animosity among many conservatives. Still, in his new memoir Hitchens comes off as a man of principle.

Reading Hitch-22, it becomes apparent that the principles that motivated Hitchens’ perceived move to the right are, paradoxically, the same principles that for many years kept him on the left. He makes a case for all of the things for which the left should stand: dedication to the rights of the individual; hate for repression; love of freedom of speech, press and conscience; and, above all, human solidarity. He argues that the left has abandoned these things in all but lip service.

Perhaps most interesting for my readers will be Hitchens’ description of how he moved from his early Trotskyism to support the Bush administration’s Iraq war. While it’s obvious that members of the Bush had differing agendas in Iraq, Hitchens was motivated by a left-ish revulsion at the Saddam dictatorship.

Hitchens admits that in the 1970s he was mistaken in defending the Ba’ath Party-run state as socialist. But he went to Iraq in 1991 as a war correspondent – for a war he opposed (the first Gulf war) – and began to see Iraq’s horrifying conditions from within.

Unlike Hitchens, I opposed the 2003 Iraq war (though I have more mixed feelings about it now). But his arguments for American action offer a sort of moral test. He observes that sometimes the “wrong people” get it right, and vice-versa. If you disagree with the war, it’s incumbent upon you to make sure that you don’t fall in with wrong people who happen to say something “right.” Are you opposed to this war because you genuinely don’t believe that it will lead to less rather than more human misery? And remember that Pat Buchanan was a loud voice against this war – as well as the war against Hitler.

It used to annoy me that Hitchens, when he debated the Iraq war, would often pick as his adversaries easy pickings like the multi-faced ex-MP George Galloway who, when in Los Angeles or New York talked about the virtues of peace, and when in Damascus told the people of Syria how lucky they were to have Bashir al-Assad as their dictator. So why did he do it? He argues that he debates people like Galloway not for an easy win, but because they represent to him what is wrong with the modern left in the West: far too many are for “peace at all costs,” whether or not that means more suffering for more people, or argue that the United States is always wrong. Remember Cindy Sheehan, once the darling of the antiwar movement, who went on to say, like Buchanan, that all wars are wrong, including our Civil War, which ended slavery, and World War II, which defeated fascism?

Hitchens tries to reconcile certain basic values with the left, and then explains why he felt he had to leave it – though he’d argue that he still is overall a man of the left.

Why, he asks, did so few on the left jump to defend novelist Salman Rushdie after his life was threatened by a fatwa issued by Iran’s clerical rulers? Do civil liberties not matter on the left? Or why after 9/11 did some on the left dismiss the human horror and talk coolly about chickens coming home to roost? Aren’t these positions a caricature of anti-imperialism?

While many have spit vitriol at Hitchens for “selling out,” would it not be more useful to see if there are things we do that alienate people who are in many ways brethren, i.e. they support the same future outcomes we hope for? For example, why is it that whenever I write something remotely critical of ostensibly socialist or progressive governments or movements, I begin to receive hate mail telling me that I’ve somehow “objectively” strengthened the hands of warlords? Isn’t it possible that if you don’t criticize what is anti-human and pro-misery, you make yourself look foolish to many intelligent, progressive-thinking people?

Hitchens’ life story is intertwined with politics, as he points out, and much of the book is written as an argument – always with the suave prose Hitchens is known for. Still there’s more than that to the book; it is a memoir after all. Refreshingly though, even when writing about the most harrowing of subjects, Hitchens doesn’t play vulgarly on the sentimental. His first chapter deals with his mother and her suicide, and it captures the emotions he felt, without descending into melodrama.

The memoir’s dramatis personae like a who’s who of 20th century literature: Kingsley and Martin Amis, Robert Conquest, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, and others fill the volume’s pages; the book is worth its price if only to read bawdy limericks written by Amis, Conquest, and Rushdie.

Hopefully, Hitchens will recover soon from his recently disclosed illness (he’s mentioned that he’s “truly touched” that religious people have been praying for him) and continue his provocative writing.

Totalitarian household: a review of “Dogtooth”

Giorgos Lanthimos’s “Dogtooth” captures the physical and moral damage that occurs when what is perhaps the ultimate insult is visited upon otherwise healthy human beings: that of being held in physical and mental slavery under the pretense that it’s for their own good.

While this form of bondage seems absurd at the individual level, it is all too common at the national, under different names: the totalitarian state, the security state and so on. It is notable that this film comes out of Greece, once ruled by a military dictatorship. The director, however, in several interviews stated that the film is not about Greece or any other specific country, but about a form of control overall.

All one has to do is to replace the Kims in North Korea or the mullahs in Iran with a quietly lunatic mother and father, and the captive populations with three extremely homeschooled siblings and the result is “Dogtooth.”

While the worst aspects of this control are undoubtedly the physical and emotional pains caused to their people, the most insulting is the behemoth absurdity that all this is done for the protection of those enslaved – a point “Dogtooth” makes abundantly clear. The parental characters, who live a middle-class life, have chosen to raise their children, a boy and two girls, in total isolation. Told that anywhere beyond the perimeter of their property is mortally dangerous, the children (actually, one has to remind oneself, youth of about late high school or early college age) live their life in ignorance of the outside world. Even “watching a video” means watching older home movies.

In one scene, the youth find a cat and, having never seen such a creature, they kill it with garden shears. The parents use this as a pretext to reinforce the notion of the outside world’s perils, explaining to them that cats are but one of many threats on the other side of the fence. The father cuts his clothes to pieces and covers himself with fake blood upon returning home, explaining that he was the victim of feline savagery and that a fabled older brother, foolish enough to have left their home before birth, had been killed by the feline beast.

One can see the obvious parallel: the North Korean state, personified by the Dear Leader as a doting parent, warns not against cats outside of its borders, but “American jackals.” There, as in any other totalitarian society, to keep the given order, the truth must be stretched far beyond the breaking point. The point is exemplified often by Lanthimos. Throughout the film, the children see airplanes and hope for them to “fall.” Not actually wishing for an air disaster, or even possessing the knowledge of what such a thing is, they believe that planes sometimes fall out of the sky onto their lawn, only to be picked up and used as toys.

In an Orwellian twist, words themselves are redefined by the parents: whenever an outside word is heard, the parents quickly create a definition. Thus, a “zombie” is a small flower and a “carbine” is a white bird.

While Lanthimos does finds humor here and there, the tone of the film’s realism is one of banal dreariness, broken by bouts of the repulsive as we see the moral degradation inherent in such an order. But as wretched as the lives of the characters are, and as depressing as the film is, Variety‘s review got it wrong in comparing Lanthimos’s work to that of the Danish director Lars von Trier, whose films are increasingly nihilistic.

Quite the opposite is the case with “Dogtooth.” Underlining what we’ve seen recently, for example in news from Iran, the film portrays a totalitarian system fraught with instability: the household order nearly disintegrates when one of the daughters acquires copies of “Rocky” and “Jaws.” And while the parents are able to quell the initial turmoil through a form of loving violence common in, say, Saddam’s Iraq, the entrance of this outside culture puts a crack in the system’s foundation. Coerced with ignorance and brute force into bondage, the kids nonetheless stumble towards and sacrifice for eventual freedom.

Lanthamos draws a far more hopeful, and realistic, picture of human nature than von Trier: While the Iranian regime has banned public displays of dissent, arresting, and likely torturing, hundreds of protesters, over the past few months, the people of Iran have begun to rise against theocratic rule.

Be warned, this film is not for everyone: full nudity, abuse, graphic sex and incest round out a cavalcade of the perverse. But good art is often ugly art: the sheer horror portrayed in Picasso’s Guernica does nothing to undermine its greatness. Those who have the stomach to sit through “Dogtooth” will find a better understanding of, and a deeper animosity towards, the totalitarian.

Photo: Scene from “Dogtooth.”

Dogtooth
Directed by Giorgos Lanthimso
2009/Greece, NR yet in U.S./NC-17-like ratings in several countries, 94 min.

Sex, Violence, and Videotape

Princess
Directed by Anders Morgenthaler
Starring Thure Lindhardt, Mira Hilli Møller Hallund, Stine Fischer Christensen
Run time: 90 minutes
Released to DVD from Palisades Tartan

If the old adage “fight fire with fire” is true, then it would likely follow that one must fight sexual violence with sex and violence. Danish director Anders Mergenthaler seems to have taken this to heart with his award-winning 2006 feature Princess, finally available to American audiences on DVD.

This film, innovatively composed of both animated and purposely low-quality live-action video, bombards the viewer with graphic sex and even more graphic violence; paradoxically, though, its core purpose is quite obviously to take on the sex industry, notorious for its exploitation of young women.

The narrative involves August (voiced by Thure Lindhardt), a reverend returning home after years of missionary work to find that his sister Christina (Stine Fischer Christensen) has died of a drug overdose. Christina, it seems, was used and abused by the pornography industry: while August is unable to escape seeing “Princess” everywhere-on magazine covers at the convenience store to posters in his unnamed city’s red-light district-Christina lived with her five-year-old daughter Mia (Mira Hilli Møller Hallund) in a festering brothel.

The reverend isn’t simply sad, however; he’s overcome by guilt. He was abroad preaching the word of the Lord while his little sister was being routinely exploited on film, all the while sliding further into a wretched life of addiction. Plagued by “what if?” questions (What if he had stayed? What if he had done something to stop the madness in the beginning?), he takes Mia from the brothel to live with him.

We, along with August, learn through various quirks in the child’s actions (any viewer who isn’t disturbed in a very deep way by one scene in particular should probably be mentally evaluated) that she’s been sexually abused by Pleben, one of the managers of Paradise Lust, the company that filmed/exploited Christina. With all of this, August seamlessly switches from unassuming reverend to bloodthirsty vigilante, and the viewer is left to decide if he or she will sit in horror-or cheer on our decade’s Travis Bickle.

Mia is a particularly tragic character: raped by the time she’s five years old, she’s simply unable to understand a world without sex and violence, or the possibility that the two aren’t inextricably intertwined. In what is either the most enjoyable, or deeply disturbing-or both-scene in the film, little Mia takes revenge on Pleben. One doesn’t know whether to cheer her or to recoil when she destroys the instrument he used to violate her with her own instrument, the business end of a crowbar. (Your reviewer chose the former reaction.)

While subject matter that couldn’t seriously be explored in an American production (think Moodyson’s Lilya 4-ever) is typically Danish, the film’s dominant format, animation, is not. One can’t watch the film and not think of Japanese anime. Perhaps, however, there is a point to this. While it can in no way be said that all anime is pornographic, it is nonetheless the genre that brought the world the unfortunately not-illegal sub-genre of tentacle rape porn. But this wicked dark side of anime (a side that occupies a very large portion of the whole) is part of the industry at which Morgenthaler is taking aim. Indeed, is it possible to even consider seriously the idea that “erotic Japanese anime” such as The Rapeman doesn’t, in some not-very-small-at-all way, contribute to the dehumanization of, and violence against, women?

While animation is the dominant style, there is some live action. August himself used to film everything, apparently, including his discussions with Christina and the incident that made it necessary that he become Christina’s guardian. August’s videos are shown to the viewer as scratchy, old VHS-style live action. This adds a certain ugly but necessary rawness to Princess.

There are those who will be offended by Princess, but these people are either prudes or porn producers. The prude will be offended, no matter what the context, by the sex and violence, and the porn producer will be offended by the notion that he is in the same category as any other sex predator, whether they be john, child molester or rapist.

While it’s hard to think of a way to console the typical porn producer (or to conjure up a desire to do so), the prude should take note that not all sex is evil, and violence on film isn’t in itself an atrocity. We wouldn’t condemn Picasso’s Guernica for showing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, and we shouldn’t condemn Morgenthaler for doing the same for the victims of exploitation. Also, Princess doesn’t condemn graphic sex; why should anyone care if that’s filmed and shown, so long as the performers are consenting adults who’ve made the choice to appear? The problem is that most of the performers in the sex industry aren’t there by choice; most sex film producers are driven by greed, looking to find someone new to exploit. (Lest we be accused of over-generalization, it should be made clear that there are those, albeit a small minority, who make socially conscious adult films.)

In Morgenthaler’s words, “to enjoy a porno film one must either be very dumb or be able to abstract from the fact that one is watching real people.”

For those of us who are neither prudes nor porn producers, and are able to deal with watching explicitly ugly material, Princess, which opened the Director’s Fortnight in 2006 at Cannes and won the prize for best film at the Catalonian International Film Festival in 2007, is well worth the time.