My Boy Jack (2007)

“If our brief is to tell the truth but a truth that is bearable to the British people, do we dilute the figures?”

Whenever I watch films concerning WWI, I always find myself wondering what sort of madness gripped the world for this period of time. Not that wars have become more acceptable or less absurd, but the depictions of trench warfare of WWI always bring out the sheer insanity of war, and then, of course, there’s the death toll of around 20 million.

The film My Boy Jack is the story of one soldier who was killed in WWI. The soldier is 18-year old Jack, the only son of Nobel Prize winning British writer Rudyard Kipling (David Haig). Directed by Brian Kirk (who also plays the role of Kipling), the film centers on the Kipling family dynamic. Father Rudyard Kipling hobnobber with the King can’t wait for the shooting party to begin in France. His attitude spreads to his only son, Jack (Daniel Radcliffe), and the two of them agree that Jack can’t miss the action.

Jack, however, is rejected by the military for his extremely poor eyesight. While some families would use their position and influence to excuse their children from war, Rudyard Kipling pressures the army to take his son. Jack is as blind as a bat without his spectacles, and military personnel grasp the inherent danger of placing Jack in charge of enlisted men, but Kipling, who was never a military man, coerces and bamboozles his acquaintances until he gets what he wants–his son in a uniform.

My Boy Jack illustrates the peer pressure afoot in wartime. There’s one scene of Kipling speaking and inciting his audience at a war rally, and there’s one great scene when Jack is drinking in a pub with his best friend, Ralph. Although the subject of Jack’s lack of uniform is not addressed directly, Jack obviously feels very uncomfortable and out-of-place surrounded by soldiers while he’s in civilian clothes.

Thanks to his father’s determination and influence, Jack is commissioned in the Irish Guards. There’s a firm hierarchy afoot with 17 year-old Jack in charge of a platoon of Irish volunteers, and we see that ever-popular tradition of the upper classes herding the peasants into war and slaughter. One segment of the film focuses on Jack’s determination to improve his marksmanship, and of course, there’s a bitter irony here as the training these military schools provide (his friend Ralph attends Sandhurst) implies that there’s some special skill required for being a target on the fields of France.

Even though Rudyard Kipling was privy to the horrendous casualties lists (one day leaves 458 officers and 11,161 enlisted dead), he still urges his son on. This, of course, raises the question why do parents feel it’s their ‘duty’ to pressure their beloved children to enlist? What is it about a flag and rabid patriotism that casts the normal aspects of responsible parenting aside as children are urged and pressured to cast sanity to the winds and throw their young lives at hopeless lost causes? The film does an excellent job of portraying Kipling as a saber-rattling, bastion of the British Empire–an armchair warrior who lives subliminally through the imagined future heroic exploits of his son, and of course, Jack, conditioned to live up to his father’s notions of the glories of Empire, doesn’t struggle against his father’s illusions, but instead buys all the patriotic notions of war hook, line and sinker.

The film juxtaposes some great scenes of Kipling’s gorgeous country home in Burwash, East Sussex with the muddy trenches in France along with Jack Kipling’s inglorious death at the Battle of Loos the day after his 18th birthday. When the Kipling family first learn that Jack is missing, they begin an exhaustive search to find him.

With its tight focus on the Kipling family, many issues raised by the film pass unchallenged. While the Kipling family suffered a devastating tragedy, this tragedy was shared by millions of families who did not have the means to search for their lost sons. In light of his son’s death, Kipling doesn’t analyze or confront his role in the War Office where he helped craft propaganda and was indirectly and collectively responsible for sending millions of men–sons, brothers, husbands to their deaths. Kipling’s guilt largely rests on the idea that he facilitated his son’s death by using his influence to get Jack a commission, but then the family veers away from that notion by emphasizing that this was what Jack wanted. However, given his father’s rabid patriotism and thwarted military ambitions, just how much was 17-year old Jack’s choice and how much was conditioning?

While the film treats all of its subjects with poignant sensitivity, the film ends with Kipling reciting his poem, My Boy Jack written for his dead son, and there’s no argument that Kipling loved his only son (at one point he asks: “How could I condemn my son to oblivion?”). But in spite of Kipling’s grief, there’s the idea that he still didn’t really get it. A few accusations fly from Jack’s mother and sister, but they are buried under the poem’s line “Except he did not shame his kind” and the idea remains that Kipling shoved aside the utter senselessness of his son’s death and grieved ultimately with the consolations of ‘noble’ sacrifice and duty to king and country.

Libby, Montana (2004)

“The inclination of public agencies to protect the worker at any expense (usually the employer’s) seems to be a firmly entrenched political phenomenon which should be considerable concern to us.”

I was telling an acquaintance about the documentary Libby, Montana when he stopped me and said, “wait a minute. Where did you say this happened?” I wondered if perhaps he hadn’t heard me say the title–but no, it wasn’t that; he just couldn’t align the idea that an ecological nightmare occurred and was covered up for decades in the state that many Americans consider a pristine paradise.

Libby, Montana begins with a casual mini tour through the small town of around 2600 residents. It looks like a nice place, and it’s certainly breathtakingly gorgeous. But there’s a horrifying story here–a tale of corporate greed and deceit that left a legacy of death and disease for Libby’s inhabitants.

Libby’s main industry was logging, and the mine was just a “sideline” when Vermiculite was first discovered. As the logging faded, a strip mining operation–the Zonolite Company–sprang up in town. In 1963, through an exchange of stock, the mining company merged into W.R.Grace and was the area’s major employer offering steady work for the town’s inhabitants. Libby became the provider of 80% of the world’s Vermiculite. 12-13 railroad cars a day were loaded with the stuff, at a rate of 200,000 pounds per car. Business was booming; dust filled the air and the lungs of the workers, their families and other town residents. But back when the mine officially began in 1919, no one really understood what they were dealing with. One interviewee explains that in the 50s and 60s Vermiculite was viewed as a miracle product; residents layered it on their gardens to improve the soil, and there were even attempts to bake cookies with it as an ingredient. Unfortunately the ore Vermiculite from the Libby mine also contained elements of Tremolite asbestos.

Well you can’t blame people for fooling about with asbestos before they knew just how deadly it was. Reminds me of the way people started drinking liquid radium back when they thought it was a miracle elixir.

But internal memos from W.R. Grace reveal that the company heads were fully aware of the deadly effects of the asbestos-contaminated Vermiculite, and that the workers were deliberately left in the dark about their deadly exposure to asbestos. The company required annual x-rays and even maintained charts of death and disease rates as they tracked just how many people died and what the chances were of plant workers dying of Asbestosis (92% if you worked there for 20 years). And even though the company heads were fully aware that the asbestos-contaminated Vermiculite was a deadly material as far back as 1956, they kept on working the mine, exposing their workers, polluting the community, and reaping huge profits for decades.

Footage includes some extremely painful interviews with various EPA employees and ex-W.R. Grace employees and their families. One worker recalls how he didn’t even know that Tremolite was a form of asbestos. Another worker tells how he went to see a doctor who identified him as a resident of Libby by just the state of his lungs. There’s some fascinating archival footage of mine manager, Earl Lovick squirming when questioned about his knowledge of the health hazards: “some things shouldn’t need to be explained” he argues, “You don’t need to tell an employee not to touch a hot iron.” I don’t quite get Lovick’s analogy between not touching a hot iron and air-born asbestos dust, but apparently the analogy worked for Lovick.

In the potent fusion of state and corporate interests, we also see how politics fits into the picture. The governor is pressured into visiting Libby to listen to the town residents both for and against naming Libby as a Superfund site. While she offers to pray for the residents, Ronald Reagan appoints J. Peter Grace (CEO of W.R. Grace) and the Grace Commission to conduct a report on Cost Control –an ‘investigation’ into waste and inefficiency in Federal government. (Grace was a member of the Council for National Policy–a Conservative ‘think tank’ which includes many other notable members such as Jack Abramoff, Jerry Falwell, Oliver North and Milton Friedman).

And of course, there’s always the question, who gets the bill for all this? The EPA wrestles budget problems, and the town’s residents wrestle one another. So the film follows the money trail as fingers are pointed and billions disappear. From directors Drury Gunn Carr and Doug Hawes-Davis, the co-founders of Missoula-based High Plains Films.

Manda Bala (2007)

“Organized crime has entered the very centre of power.”

“Tell me a place in the world where politicians are not sons of bitches” observes Jamil, a jaded policeman from Sao Paolo’s anti-kidnapping division in the excellent documentary Manda Bala. Admitting that there are not enough police to protect the wealthy elite in San Paolo, Jamil’s job is to solve kidnappings; he’s just one part of the chain of corruption and crime in a place where the phenomenally rich and extremely poor rub shoulders. But here in Sao Paulo, with the “world’s largest private fleet of helicopters,” the wealthy often take to the skies, negotiating the city through a series of roof top helicopter landing pads. This is one way–perhaps the only way–in Sao Paolo to avoid confrontations with the poor.

Manda Bala (aka Send a Bullet) examines the nature of corruption and class division through a handful of Sao Paulo residents. There’s an affluent plastic surgeon who specializes in reconstructing ears removed by kidnappers, and there’s a man who owns and operates a frog farm. A kidnapping victim describes her ordeal at the hands of brutal kidnappers, and although she remains remarkably calm when recalling how her ear was carved off of her head, there’s the sense that the veneer of tranquility is brittle and ready to shatter. Also included in the film is an interview with a balaclava-clad kidnapper who very succinctly describes why and how he developed a career from kidnapping and maiming the wealthy. Remorse is beside the point; to the kidnapper it’s a matter of survival. Establishing networks of accomplices, the kidnapper argues that he returns a chunk of the loot to his own impoverished neighbourhood–a ghetto in Sao Paolo. Obviously after a number of these lucrative crimes, the kidnapper could afford his own sprawling estate in the country, but instead he chooses to remain with his own people.

Other segments include a man who, for the camera, is known as Mr. M. He describes the need for bulletproof cars and takes a course titled: “How to Drive Your Bullet-Proof Car and Avoid Getting Kidnapped.” With grainy footage of various brutal kidnapping tapes interspersed with the interviews of Sao Paolo residents, we begin to get the idea that Sao Paolo is not for the faint of heart. But what is the thread that binds all these Brazilians together? The film makes it perfectly clear that crime and corruption begins at the top, and referring to the corrupt political system, one man argues the choices are simple: “you either steal with a pen or a gun.”

In a country in which politicians are free from civil courts, elected officials run amok with so called public funds, lining their own fat foreign bank accounts while laundering money through various mythical public projects. The film follows the career of a politician who “became a gangster not a governor.” Jader Barbalho–a student leader under Brazil’s military dictatorship went to law school and rose through positions in the government. As a senator, it’s charged that his government programmes looted the country–ensuring, of course that the rich (Jarbalho in this case) stay richer and the poor stay…well, poorer. This section of the film establishes that the food chain of crime and corruption underlying Brazilian society is responsible for the horrendous conditions in Sao Paolo. One interviewee who attempted to force Barbalho to answer for his crimes asks: “do judges in Brazil see people in the same way or do they have difficulties in sending to jail people of their own class?” And this is, of course to anarchists, a rhetorical question.

Another interviewee seems at a loss to explain exactly why Barbalho remains untouchable for his crimes: “I am embarrassed that we have politicians that have stolen so much public money to make themselves rich while people remain in extreme poverty and yet they keep electing them.” Perhaps the answer to that one is that some votes are bought and paid for.

From director Jason Kohn, this fascinating film’s tagline is “When the rich steal from the poor…the poor steal the rich.”

Bending The Bars by John Barker

“News came through that a con on C wing had been murdered by screws in the block beaten to pulped pulp then hanged to cover it up, a suicide story. It seemed too cynical to be true. I knew screws could be brutal but this was too much, all my deepest fears congealed.”

In the 1970s, a group called the Angry Brigade claimed responsibility for a number of actions in Britain–including the bombing of the home of employment minister Robert Carr. After other bombings, arrests took place followed by the longest conspiracy trial in the history of the British legal system. At the conclusion of the trial of the Stoke Newington Eight (this refers to the eight people eventually tried for conspiracy and weapons possession) twenty-three-year-old John Barker received a ten-year sentence for his role in the Angry Brigade. Deemed a Category A prisoner–A Danger to the State, Barker was locked up and rotated through several British prisons. After completion of seven years of this sentence (1971-1978), Barker was released. Bending the Bars is a collection of essays covering those seven years inside.

The book is not a memoir in the strictest sense. This is not a chronological account of day one forward until release–although the book does end with Barker walking out of prison. Instead this is a collection of essays highlighting some of Barker’s experiences in prison. Barker states that “the cops had framed an guilty man,” so there’s no self-pity–but there is a strong analysis of exactly what it’s like to be caught in the net and tossed into a system that attempts to manage and control Barker and his fellow cons. In spite of some very hard times, in the foreword, Barker states that his “time inside was the golden age of such prisons…. Since that time we have endured Mrs. Thatcher, Michael Howard and Tony Blair, all keen on punishing people who are not ‘Hard-working families who play by the rules’ as Blair put it. Prison is almost exclusively for working class people who do not ‘play by the rules’.”

Barker argues that prison is “like an experiment in social control” with a purpose under New Labour “to destroy what remains of collective solidarity amongst cons.” Indeed Barker cites many examples of protest solidarity amongst prison inmates, and it’s clear that to the Barker and his fellow cons, they had to stick together. The sense of unity amongst cons prevails–from Barker’s contacts with the Irish prisoners to the odd con rumble, but the cons attempt, for the most part, to retain the sense that their collective situation and condition warrants solidarity. Indeed it’s quite clear that when the cons stand together, they are at their strongest. In-fighting and the odd snitch weaken their solidarity, and tension and frustration erode friendships at times.

The first essay Early Days: Brixton covers Barker’s “comprehensive tour of misery”–his initial adjustment, his boredom, and the realization that in prison you can’t control even a tiniest detail of your own life. Everything is subject to routine–when you get up, when you go to bed, and Barker describes the feeling of power prisoners experience when they execute a seemingly minor act of independence. On the receiving end of the system, Barker recognized that “a sadist in the Home Office” dreamed up many of the conditions inside the prison (Derrick Jensen’s book Welcome to the Machine goes into the subject of prison design in some length). Barker’s argument that some sicko had to have had a hand in designing the prison and its systems of control is a point made repeatedly throughout the book–from the petty humiliations, the “shit parcels,” and the sweat box. On one occasion, the prisoners are ordered to make a large number of prison beds for Saudi Arabia, and on another occasion, the cons gather to watch a film that just happens to have a death row, execution sequence. “Asylum mode” cube shaped cells at Long Lartin Prison seem designed with a clinical interest in isolation in mind, and Barker wryly notes that he “could do without the deluxe shitting service but did not want to live in a box.” In this regimented, depersonalized and isolated world, with privacy stripped away, small kindnesses carry great weight.

The thing I found most surprising about the book is that Barker’s sense of humour prevails. In spite of confinement, in spite of losing someone he loved, he conveys moments of joy, and relates many amusing conversations amongst the prisoners. For example, in the chapter Manoeuvres, Barker recalls a conversation about Pavlov–a touchy subject given the situation. One con enrolled in an Open University course on behavior proceeds to defend Pavlov as a man who “was just describing the facts.” Barker answers: “But the facts as you call them came out of a set-up. The dog didn’t need the fucking bell to eat his dinner.” In another chapter, a con “had this thing about spaceships.”

Bending the Bars comes across as a remarkably honest, direct and unpretentious record of some of Barker’s experiences. This is not an account written by a cynical, hardened, angry individual. Instead, Barker comes across as an accepting individual who learns to cope with imprisonment, who fights depression and despair. He notes guards who seem to have some sort of standard of behavior and guards who are just sadistic and have an unhealthy enjoyment of their jobs. Included are some fascinating observations about the Irish prisoners, and this brings up the issue of hunger strikes. Barker includes his thoughts on the hunger strike as a tactic and notes that while he was willing to join such a motion in solidarity, “we didn’t believe in it as a tactic because it seemed to assume that the other side were ultimately humane people.” I’d never thought of it in those terms before.

The book makes it clear that the notion that prison is supposed to ‘rehabilitate’ inmates is ludicrous. It’s all about punishment, power, and control–although Barker did get to make a few pillowcases. On another note, I wish the book included some sort of glossary. I was able to infer meaning into some terms used, but in other cases, I had no clue what some words meant.

On an aside note, and to reiterate Barker’s observation that “prison is almost exclusively for working class people who do not “play by the rules” Z Magazine January 2008 pp. 23-24 included the “Prison Challenge Quiz.” If you haven’t seen this and are interested in the subject, get your hands on a copy. Anyway, question 12 asks: Which crime will get a stuffer sentence?

a. embezzling $5,000,000
b. stealing a doughnut.

In case you made the mistake of using common sense to gauge your answer, I’ll include the answer; it’s b: stealing a doughnut. A man pinched a doughnut. This was shoplifting, but pushing a shop worker in the process turned the incident into armed robbery. That would normally have netted a 5-15 year sentence, but a prior record could bring a sentence of 30 years to life.

The million-dollar embezzler, on the other hand, an Enron conspirator pled guilty to helping himself to more than 5 million. This landed a 6-year sentence but good behavior could shave off 2 years.

If you are interested in reading more about The Angry Brigade, I recommend Anarchy in the UK: The Angry Brigade by Tom Vague and The Angry Brigade: The Cause and The Case. Britain’s First Urban Guerilla Group by Gordon Carr.
 

The Unknown Soldier (Der Unbekannte Soldat) 2006

“We see by the gathering of the NPD that not everybody has received the lessons of history.”

The documentary The Unknown Soldier from Michael Verhoeven covers the controversy stirred by the exhibition Crimes of the German Wehrmacht. The exhibition’s premise was to reveal the role of the Wehrmacht in the systematic extermination of the Jews. According to exhibition organizer Hannes Heer, and many fellow historians who share his view, it was simply not possible for 6 million Jews to be eradicated without the explicit assistance of the Wehrmacht (”The SS could not have carried out this crime without the help of the German Army”). There’s the feeling that charging the Wehrmacht (and by extension the average German soldier) with crimes of extermination somehow “broke the taboo” on the subject.

The original exhibit opened in 1995 and then was closed in 1999 in order to answer charges that some of the photographs were faked. The exhibition reopened in 2001 after an investigation revealed that some of the documentation contained inaccuracies, but that there were no forgeries and that the overall presentation was correct.

When I heard about this documentary, I didn’t immediately grasp the level of controversy involved–after all, it makes perfect sense to me that the German Army assisted the SS. The filmmaker captures the outrage of the emotional crowds outside of the exhibition. Members of the fascist NPD (National Democratic Party) gather outside of the exhibit–along with old soldiers, their surviving family members, and riot police. Many of the old soldiers spew forth fascist venom, and some of the sons and daughters of deceased Wehrmacht soldiers hug photos of their fathers stating categorically that they were heroes who do not deserve to have their reputations tarnished.

Interviews are included of various historians who argue both sides of the controversy, and in the middle of it all, Hannes Heer is accused of having a Commie agenda.

The film includes some amazing archival footage, and some of it is quite brutal–mass executions and graves. Some of the most damning evidence is found in footage from the Ukraine. Of course, detractors argue that the photos of the German soldiers in front of mass graves are just proof of guilt by circumstance, and they argue that the Soviets executed the Jews and that the Germans just found the graves. Another argument is that the bodies were from allied bombing raids and that they were dragged out of the rubble and used for propaganda. But this doesn’t explain away all the evidence (or the letters sent back home), and then there’s the fact that there were 3.4 million Soviet POWs in 1941, and by the spring of 1942, 2 million were dead. The film argues that “a strong infrastructure of collaboration” existed between the SS and the Wehrmacht, and to me–a non-German whose father did not fight for the Wehrmacht, it seems obvious. But then again I have no emotional stake in nursing an image of my father as a WWII hero.

One of the most interesting parts of the film reveals how various section commanders reacted to the order to execute Jews. The film touches on the idea that officers could refuse orders to execute Jews but that for the average soldier, this failure to follow an order meant death. The idea of soldiers who deserted rather than follow out orders is mentioned. To those of us who are non-German, it’s probably a lot easier to accept the idea that the Wehrmacht had a role in the extermination of Jews. But then again ALL soldiers have opportunities to off civilians. War isn’t pretty, and so it seems in some ways the horrified reactions to the German exhibit are a reflection of the idea that wars are heroic and clean cut. You know, the good guys against the bad guys, but common sense should tell us that war creates opportunities for mass murder. Just look at some of the abuses that are leaking from the current debacle in Iraq–Abu Ghraib, Haditha and the murders in Mahmoudiya of an entire Iraqi family.

The film could have used a few clips about the forced enlistment of men into the Wehrmacht. For example, between 1941-1944 140,000 Alsatians between the ages of 17-38 were forced to enlist and most were subsequently sent to the Russian Front. Some tried to escape (most were shot), and several officers refused to enter the SS (they were shipped off to a concentration camp). One of the most interesting aspects of the film, and one that was perhaps not emphasized quite enough is the idea of “The Unknown Soldier.” While the film goes into the history of this symbolism, it hints that the term can mean something else entirely–the horrendous brutal murders that take place by “unknown” perpetrators–soldiers whose uniforms create anonymity and whose crimes remain unsolved, but it should also refer to those few soldiers who refused to cooperate and died for their defiance.