Watched The Weather Underground last night. After the first viewing, my first thought was that it would be a good film to show in class to talk about a variety of issues. It first and foremost provides a less sanitized understanding of both the social situation and the popular(?) response of the 1960s. Normally this era is spoken about with simple platitudes and commonplaces--or not spoken about at all: I am reminded of the student in Unit III last year who, when writing a history research paper on events in the 1960s, claimed that there simply wasn't much written about that time period because "everyone was so drugged out they don't remember anything."
For that, this film at least gives a bit of a greater understanding of what was going on (though I don't actually know what was going on, just trying to piece it together myself 40 years after the fact.) Either way, it seems like a fairly important bit of history, however one feels about it. There are certainly parallels today with other "revolutionaries" like Tim McViegh and his Turner Diary reading National Alliance pals who want to overthrow the overly "colored" government of America, redistribute wealth "back" to the white population. In fact it is sometimes striking to see the way that some of their rhetoric seems to gel fairly well, depite the fact that the latter are overtly racist--even praise racism as a positive attribute--and see Leninism (or Bolshevisim) as another part of a Jewish led conspiracy to take over the world from "white civilization," both of which are tenets exaclty the opposite of those espoused by both the SDS and the "Weatherpeople" (as Todd Gitlin refers to them, in his politically correct way).
But here is where I think the film fails to be anything more than a simple propaganda film for the Weathermen. While it certainly introduces some compelling arguments about a different kind of society and problems with this one, there is this elephant in the room that no one is really talking about. P. Smith always tells me that Americans will readily believe many Marxist ideas as long as you don't call them that. This is almost surely true with most Liberal Americans, and even some of the Neo-liberals, so long as one doesn't see the state as a vehicle for those changes. It is also probably true that you could read many of the tenets of traditional conservatism without callnig it as such and get as many people in agreement. In both cases, however, it seems to do little good to provide the ideologies as if you just came up with them. The film makes only passing references to what the FBI called the Weathermen's "Marxist-Leninist conception of armed struggle." If the goal of the film was to inform people about the movement, to clarify its place in history and not just provide a somewhat redeeming explanation of its actions, this seems like an essential element to include.
By obscuring the Leninist and Maoist background of this movement it really does a disservice to history in a variety of ways. First off, many of the national liberation movements that are discussed in the film as the revolutionary context in which this takes place were motivated by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movements. Of course, if we were all being honest, these ideas wouldn't be a challenge to Modernity and the enlightenment that produced the revolutions in the US, France and elsewhere--the US Revolution being the 0nly revolution in the history of the world that we can use as an example of the "right" kind of revolution. The irony of history is that in the place of these Marxist-Leninist-Maoist traditions which were actually strongly in the western tradition, we are now facing a decidedly anti-modern version of revolution in the Whabbist Islamists. (I'm sure that there is more to it than just being anti-modern, but that is the party line here in the USA.)
Nevertheless, by leaving out this detail, by almost wholly obscuring the communist background of these movements--not only in their theory, but also in the co-presence of many other similar movements--the film removes it from that tradition of struggle, which, for better or worse, seemed to be coming to fruition at that historical moment. It also makes it seem like all of these movements were solely motivated by the historical circumstances that existed at the time. Though this is true to an extent--and the film certainly begins to show the energy of the moment, if only from a certain perspective--it is surely the ideas espoused by "Professional revolutionaries" in almost every country struggling for independence that motivated the particular direction of that struggle.
I understand completely the reason for not highlighting this aspect. And I am ambivalent about the effect that it would have had overall. By not including a discussion of Marxism-Leninism, one therefore doesn't have to go to the trouble of explaining it as an ideology. This, of course, would surely be necessary if the discussion was to be of any value to a contemporary audience. The past century has produced a common sense--both through the ideological apparatuses of capitalism and the astounding repressiveness of much of the communist world-- about Marxism that is so aversive to even considering it as a theory or an idea in itself that to introduce it as something that seemed like a legitimate idea at the time would necessitate another 30 minutes of explanation. This explanation, in order to be effective, would have to include the historical successes and failures of both nominally communist and capitalist nations; it would have to make clear the stakes of the struggle; it would, in effect be an whole other movie. And, as much as the film seems to be giving the Weathermen too fair of a shake, it wouldn inevitably come off as a communist propaganda film to American audiences if it tried to mention Marxism as anything other than the greatest (or now second greatest) evil the world has ever known.
Of course this understanding was also present at the time and would explain much of the FBI's crazed and unlawful (gestapo? dictatorial?) actions in pursuing these dissidents. They somewhat correctly believed that these students had ties to the world communist struggle (though they might have had ideological ties, there don't seem to be any material ties) and, again, ironically, seemed ready to quell dissent in anything other than a "free speech zone" kind of way with surprising amounts of surveillance, suppression and even murder, maknig their difference from the communist police one of only degrees. But pointing out that this group was ostensibly communist and the FBI was operating with a Cold War mentality does much to illuminate why they felt it so necessary to go to these extreme measures. Not only does this help us to understand those actions, but it also serves as a warning to us today when there are already roundups of Muslims and still Daniel Pipes, a widely read columnist and a member of the presidentially-appointed board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, wrote just yesterday (quoting from an article of "late 2001:"
"Individual Islamists may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers."
Militant Islam is the enemy; even its slickest adherents need to be viewed as such.
This is the ideological climate that we live in today and it isn't all that different from that in which the weathermen and the black panthers were operating. And it seems that this repression on the part of the FBI had as little to do with the actual ideologies employed by these militants than it was a simple response to their militancy. And this militancy was only a problem in so far as it was gaining popular support. In that regard, it is as much a warning of things to come as it is a document of what was going on in the 1960s and 70s. In other words, I think that, with the proper background, this film could surely be included in one of the weeks of Unit III--perhaps the one on ideology.
No comments:
Post a Comment