Yesterday 07:07 PM
(This post was last modified: Yesterday 07:20 PM by C C.)
As a side note, those who feel that the female assassins or crime gun-women and bombers in today's movies/shows are ludicrous fictions or comic book exaggerations... Need to sample actual history like the Red Army Faction or watch the fairly accurate 2008 film about that left-wing organization (trailer at bottom). Radical egalitarianism really does break down the most obstinate gender barriers (and also truly desperate conventional wars of the past).
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The allure of Eden on Earth
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-allur...-on-earth/
INTRO: When Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another was released last year, some critics and online pundits took issue with how the film portrayed the members of the French 75, the fictional group of socialist revolutionaries fighting against American imperialism and authoritarianism. One character ends up killing someone during a robbery gone wrong, and in an effort to stay out of prison, she turns to the military man she’s been sleeping with for help. Real revolutionaries, the detractors wrote, would not snitch on their comrades to avoid a prison sentence, they would not kill a security guard, and they would not abandon their children to go on the run.
What started as a marginal grumble soon came to include professors, political consultants, and high-profile members of the new American left. It was part of a larger nostalgia for the great groups of “resistance” and political radicals of the late 1960s. When campus protests were organized against Israel’s war in Gaza, they were modeled directly on Vietnam war-era campus takeovers. And then of course there was Beyonce, dressed as a Black Panther, performing at the Super Bowl.
But people in revolutionary groups did do all those things, and more. A few recent releases and reissues have me thinking about this mythologized period of revolution, and the hangovers that followed. Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, published this January, documents the various leftist groups that embraced violent resistance in the hopes of bringing on revolution. Many of the men and women who waged armed combat were true believers in socialism and the Palestinian cause, but some just got pulled in by charismatic leaders like Carlos the Jackal and Andreas Baader, and others were just enchanted by the violence and spectacle of it all, eager for an opportunity to blow up a shop or take a plane full of people hostage.
Principled people like Ulrike Meinhof, a journalist who abandoned her children and husband to join the Red Army Faction and fight for revolution, were outnumbered by the likes of her collaborator Baader, whom Burke describes as “spoiled, arrogant, and lazy.” Baader took credit for other people’s work, quoted Marxist rhetoric to get laid, and waged campaigns of humiliation and manipulation on fellow members of the group. Other groups were similarly run into the ground, starting off fighting for “revolution”—vaguely defined—and ending up in drug trafficking or assassination-for-hire schemes.
Burke focuses mostly on revolutionary groups in Europe and the Middle East because they were the most active, long-lasting, and interconnected. German groups collaborated with Palestinian networks, Japanese revolutionaries showed up in North Africa. Trinidadian novelist and journalist Shiva Naipaul focuses on the Americans, who were less interconnected and less effective: “the children of a prosperous middle class [who] exploded into a semblance of a revolt. They were well nourished, they were more or less educated, they were sentimental, they were spoiled, they were bored, they were looking for kicks, they were touched with half-digested idealisms, they were scared of dying in a war in Southeast Asia.” These were the young people who protested Vietnam, amassed guns and bombs, blew up a few buildings, did time in prison, and then—some of them at least—became tenured professors at prestigious universities.
That is not to say that their protests were not valid. As Burke documents, there existed a real desire among those active in European leftist groups to liberate Palestine, root out the legacy of Nazism in Germany, and bring an end to imperialism and exploitation. Naipaul is clear about the entrenched racism, police brutality, and warmongering that drove young Americans into organizations like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. But their methods were nonsensical, their goals were impossible, and their organizations were infiltrated by egomaniacs, psychos, and informants.
There’s an uncomfortable scene near the end of Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy (first published in 1980 and reissued this year by Outsider Editions) in which he visits Huey Newton at the Black Panther headquarters in Oakland, California. It’s the late ’70s at this point, so Malcolm X and MLK have been assassinated, Cointelpro has been unleashed and uncovered, and the massacre at Jonestown has just happened. The Black Panthers have been decimated and reduced to a few social programs—providing buses so that loved ones can visit family members in prison, establishing a small school, offering some health clinic hours.
Newton and Bobby Searle had originally written the Black Panther manifesto, which Newton claims took them only 20 minutes to compile. “We want full employment for our people,” the manifest read. And: “We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society.” They are mostly utopian ideas that would take decades to implement, but they are being presented by people who, when going on armed patrol, have agreed to go down fighting in any confrontation with the police.
Naipaul writes that “none of [these demands] were realizable. Only the truly powerless could be so detached from reality, could write a manifesto in twenty minutes that demanded everything.” Less than a decade after their encounter, Newton would be dead, shot by a member of a rival Marxist Black empowerment paramilitary group... (MORE - details)
The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) ... https://youtu.be/OJal4tCQlpM
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/OJal4tCQlpM
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The allure of Eden on Earth
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-allur...-on-earth/
INTRO: When Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another was released last year, some critics and online pundits took issue with how the film portrayed the members of the French 75, the fictional group of socialist revolutionaries fighting against American imperialism and authoritarianism. One character ends up killing someone during a robbery gone wrong, and in an effort to stay out of prison, she turns to the military man she’s been sleeping with for help. Real revolutionaries, the detractors wrote, would not snitch on their comrades to avoid a prison sentence, they would not kill a security guard, and they would not abandon their children to go on the run.
What started as a marginal grumble soon came to include professors, political consultants, and high-profile members of the new American left. It was part of a larger nostalgia for the great groups of “resistance” and political radicals of the late 1960s. When campus protests were organized against Israel’s war in Gaza, they were modeled directly on Vietnam war-era campus takeovers. And then of course there was Beyonce, dressed as a Black Panther, performing at the Super Bowl.
But people in revolutionary groups did do all those things, and more. A few recent releases and reissues have me thinking about this mythologized period of revolution, and the hangovers that followed. Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, published this January, documents the various leftist groups that embraced violent resistance in the hopes of bringing on revolution. Many of the men and women who waged armed combat were true believers in socialism and the Palestinian cause, but some just got pulled in by charismatic leaders like Carlos the Jackal and Andreas Baader, and others were just enchanted by the violence and spectacle of it all, eager for an opportunity to blow up a shop or take a plane full of people hostage.
Principled people like Ulrike Meinhof, a journalist who abandoned her children and husband to join the Red Army Faction and fight for revolution, were outnumbered by the likes of her collaborator Baader, whom Burke describes as “spoiled, arrogant, and lazy.” Baader took credit for other people’s work, quoted Marxist rhetoric to get laid, and waged campaigns of humiliation and manipulation on fellow members of the group. Other groups were similarly run into the ground, starting off fighting for “revolution”—vaguely defined—and ending up in drug trafficking or assassination-for-hire schemes.
Burke focuses mostly on revolutionary groups in Europe and the Middle East because they were the most active, long-lasting, and interconnected. German groups collaborated with Palestinian networks, Japanese revolutionaries showed up in North Africa. Trinidadian novelist and journalist Shiva Naipaul focuses on the Americans, who were less interconnected and less effective: “the children of a prosperous middle class [who] exploded into a semblance of a revolt. They were well nourished, they were more or less educated, they were sentimental, they were spoiled, they were bored, they were looking for kicks, they were touched with half-digested idealisms, they were scared of dying in a war in Southeast Asia.” These were the young people who protested Vietnam, amassed guns and bombs, blew up a few buildings, did time in prison, and then—some of them at least—became tenured professors at prestigious universities.
That is not to say that their protests were not valid. As Burke documents, there existed a real desire among those active in European leftist groups to liberate Palestine, root out the legacy of Nazism in Germany, and bring an end to imperialism and exploitation. Naipaul is clear about the entrenched racism, police brutality, and warmongering that drove young Americans into organizations like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. But their methods were nonsensical, their goals were impossible, and their organizations were infiltrated by egomaniacs, psychos, and informants.
There’s an uncomfortable scene near the end of Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy (first published in 1980 and reissued this year by Outsider Editions) in which he visits Huey Newton at the Black Panther headquarters in Oakland, California. It’s the late ’70s at this point, so Malcolm X and MLK have been assassinated, Cointelpro has been unleashed and uncovered, and the massacre at Jonestown has just happened. The Black Panthers have been decimated and reduced to a few social programs—providing buses so that loved ones can visit family members in prison, establishing a small school, offering some health clinic hours.
Newton and Bobby Searle had originally written the Black Panther manifesto, which Newton claims took them only 20 minutes to compile. “We want full employment for our people,” the manifest read. And: “We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society.” They are mostly utopian ideas that would take decades to implement, but they are being presented by people who, when going on armed patrol, have agreed to go down fighting in any confrontation with the police.
Naipaul writes that “none of [these demands] were realizable. Only the truly powerless could be so detached from reality, could write a manifesto in twenty minutes that demanded everything.” Less than a decade after their encounter, Newton would be dead, shot by a member of a rival Marxist Black empowerment paramilitary group... (MORE - details)
The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) ... https://youtu.be/OJal4tCQlpM