Part 3 of Post-Second World War film and the rejection of Western imperialism
See Part 1: Post-WWII Film and the Rejection of Western Imperialism;
and Part 2: Critical Attitudes to Israeli Colonialism and the Diversity of Nazi Victims in Popular Culture.
Despite this post WWII anti-racist evolution in the public’s popular cultural sphere, documented in these previous articles, Western corporate news has insisted on throwing its weight behind the latest incarnation of the imperialist model, spinning a renewed fiction of a progressive benign civilising mission. For example, no matter how many Aghan mothers protested the Western forces’ habit of killing their children, or even Satrap President Karzai’s subsequent condemnation of these many acts, the former UK Chancellor, then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has still been given appearances on BBC and other news programs in which he has been allowed to justify these events along traditional nineteenth-century racist ‘white man’s burden’ Western saviour lines.
It is a dark irony given Brown’s performative declarations about educating Afghans that he abolished free higher education and a mandatory student grant in the United Kingdom in order to continue financing Thatcherite tax cuts to the rich, leaving more people in debt simply for having aspirations to learn than at any time in our postwar history. Similarly, when imperialist prime mover Tony Blair gives a UK interview, references to his many dead and tortured victims are censored, obscured behind a fake narrative of ‘modernising’.
More recently, as deaths in Gaza have gone past the official 43,000 mark—with the true number likely being significantly higher—political elites and their corporate media mouthpieces have similarly thrown their weight behind defending the mere 70+-year-old Western colonialist project in the Middle East.
Thirty-three years ago, the allegation that newspaper proprietor Robert Maxwell and journalist Nick Davies were working for Israel was a major international scandal; now the corporate media’s monolithic service to Israel is such that, on British news shows in particular, no one is allowed to mention that Israel is in historical terms a recently invented colony based on a nineteenth-century white colonial ideology called Zionism and supported by Zionists, or even reference these terms or mention the word ‘genocide’ in relation to Israel’s annihilation of Gaza.
Ironically, Hollywood—bucking emerging global popular cultural sensibilities with little critical success—has twice previously attempted to sell Israel’s invention as a Western ethnocentric colonial adventure, fronted by blonde leading actors who often had a background in the American frontier settler genre. Now violent events in the Middle East are written up as if they were started by the retaliation of the conquered rather than by the initial actions of the settler-conquerors. Just as the millions killed in India resisting the British were smeared as members of death cults and Kenyan Kikuyus were pejoratively referred to as Mau Mau, Palestinians in resistance are dehumanised as barbarian Hamas terrorists. Yet while their actions may be brutal, even cruel, history tells us that anti-colonial activism following colonialism is an historical inevitability, and that its participants frequently learn their brutalities from their conquerors.
Anti-democrats spreading democracy?
At the forefront of Britain’s support for Israel is the new Labour prime minister Keir Starmer. Like his recent predecessors Blair and Brown, Starmer has totally inverted the party’s politics and culture, which have historically been anti-racist, anti-imperialist and (domestically) democratically socialist—a culture largely restored under traditionalist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Historical popular cultural representations of Western democracy and the emerging postwar decolonisation consensus tell us something very different than current ‘invented tradition’ political orthodoxies. For example, the British film Guns at Batasi (1964) was released in the same year that Labour was about to form a government that would later keep Britain out of the Vietnam War. Set in Africa, it echoed contemporary decolonisation concerns. The following is a montage of three of the primary characters: Captain Boniface, played by Errol John, is partially the film’s heavy, but is allowed to articulate the grievances of empire’s Indigenous victims. Richard Attenborough, the Regimental Seargeant Major, is the orthodox British imperialist, and theatrical Dame, Flora Robson represents the then public expectation of a Labour MP. Strident, socialist, anti-authoritarian, feminist, supporting Indigenous self-determination and usually from working-class origins, her character was reputed to be modelled on politician Barbara Castle.
Nor was this representation unusual. English-Australian actor Peter Finch portrayed a left-wing Labour MP in No Love for Johnnie (1961) and Jack Shephard a socialist Labour MP in TV’s Bill Brand (1976), and in Fame is the Spur (1947) Michael Redgrave portrayed a left-wing MP who tragically sells out his principles, alleged based on Ramsey McDonald—the nearest thing Labour had to a neoliberal Prime Minister in its first hundred years. Redgrave had also portrayed a left-wing Labour activist in The Stars Look Down (1940), arguing the case for Nationalised Public Ownership. One celebrity example of those who supported Labour was Dame Sybil Thorndyke, who—unlike current leader ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer—as a Labour socialist refused to publicly use her privileged title. As recalled here by her director Waris Hussein, and reflecting the many grassroots anti-imperialist groups such as ‘Freedom for Africa’ and Arab Nationalism etc, that had links to Labour, Thorndyke supported India’s independence movements.
Labour’s fundamental political paradigm—these historical identities, values and grassroots affiliates—have, along with hundreds of thousands of members, now been purged from the party. Many past Labour leaders could not now get into it; given that the peace group Stop the War has also been banned, presumably past CND leader Dora Russell and her philosopher husband Bertrand Russell would also not gain membership.
This is part of a global phenomenon. Corporate lobbying money has gone into progressive political parties, followed by carpet baggers. The Clinton insurgency in the Democrat Party in the United States supported Ronald Reagan’s tax agenda by destroying Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Program. In the United Kingdom, Blair and Brown supported Thatcher’s tax breaks, destroying the achievements of past Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments. Investment banker Emmanuel Macron and his cronies spent their period in the French Socialist Party attempting to subvert the maximum working week, restrictions on directors’ pay and taxes on the rich. Independence—the fundamental function of Scotland’s SNP party—has mysteriously stalled. And national political leaders have further been corrupted by the other facet of the Western corporate lobbying scandal—the carrot of potential career advancement within the hegemony of the US global empire. Put simply, the imperialist West, often against the wishes of its populations, is claiming to spread liberal democracy abroad while suppressing it domestically.
The United States, Israel & the global saviour narrative
The BBC purports to be a public service broadcaster. The reality is that its Director General is appointed by the government, its staff are vetted by government security services before appointment and it’s funded by a compulsory tax on households called the Licence Fee, making it really a state-affiliated broadcaster. One recent startling example of its service to power was the TV mini-series Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World?, in which Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh presented the recent history of US imperialism sympathetically from the point of view of White House officials—in one episode of whom bemoaning not being able to bomb Syrians—in the manner of a melodramatic West Wing episode. Perhaps a more fitting starting-point for such a series would be Should the US Empire Be Bought to Justice?, given its imposition across the world of numerous fascist regimes, death squads and assassination tactics, and the use of weapons such as Napalm, Agent Orange and depleted uranium munitions. Suffice to say, the BBC series did not confront the US arming of Israel either.
Which raises the question, can the US-led Western saviour narrative even live up to past policies from the Second World War era of segregation, anti-miscegenation laws and lynchings? Part 2 of this series of articles presented documentary clips from The True Glory (1945) and an episode of The World at War, ‘The New Germany’ (1973), which, contrary to ethnic-exclusive pro-Israel narratives, represented the diversity of Nazi victims. Here are clips from Austrian-Jewish Hollywood director Billy Wilder from his 1945 documentary Death Mills, followed by the episode ‘The End and the Beginning’ from the series The Time to Remember (1964) and a sequence from the ‘Nemesis’ episode of The World at War (1974).
Like the famous poetic sentiments of Martin Niemöller and previous examples from Part 2 of this series, these clips, without preference, list the full range of concentration camp inhabitants, with Wilder’s film in particular noting that people became victims ‘because they refused to become Nazis, because they were Russians, Poles, Belgians, French, Czechs or Jews’. However, they also show the US-led allies forcing local Germans to either inspect, sometimes bury, death camp victims or attend screenings of footage of the industrialised slaughter. In essence, the message was that you cannot be innocent while your prosperity is based on other people’s oppression. Consequently, in the decades following the Second World War, there would be some understanding among the public media that oppressed colonised peoples in places such as Algeria and elsewhere would inevitably go after soft targets. Given that Gaza has been cited as the world’s largest concentration camp, periodically bombed by Israel’s military, this raises the issue that if US-led global power were really benign, then far from arming Israel, it would be forcing Israelis, as penance, to wade through the bodies of their victims. Secondly, on the issue of soft targets, while not minimising the suffering of the Israeli dead on 7 October 2023, it is worth recalling that those who had insensitively staged a music festival at Sukkot were a mere three miles from the Gaza border. Professor Norman Finkelstein imagined himself as a Gazan presented with this scenario:
Since Israel implemented the blockade [seventeen years ago], 99 percent of the people of Gaza have never left the territory. They’ve been trapped in that densely-populated hell hole—five miles wide, 25 miles long. Nobody’s allowed in, nobody’s allowed out. They’ve been trapped there for their whole lives. And as we saw on the weekend, when some of them break out of this hellhole, they see who they view as their incarcerators dancing at a music festival; they’re celebrating a holiday. I can imagine feelings of desperate hatred overwhelming me.
So what do more recent productions tell us about even the ‘Golden Generation’ of US militarism that has frequently been represented in reference to the Second World War? Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) features a treacherous German POW who functions as a ‘beard’, or rationale, for the film’s admission that US GIs killed prisoners. Fury (2014), a film about a US tank crew in the Second World War starring Brad Pitt, represents the same practice. There is also an odd scene in which Pitt, portraying the tank commander, and his youngest crew member trade fresh produce for sex and a cooked meal with young German women. The rest of the crew then turns up, and there is a very resentful and angry subtext to the rest of the scene, which seems to be implying that the crew would’ve expected the women to be handed around for gang rape. Historian Miriam Gebhardt has cited, using birth-rate documentation, 190,000 rapes by American soldiers during the Second World War.
Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremburg (1960), which featured in Part 2 of this series, makes the point that aspects of the oppressions of Nazi law and professional practice can also be found in America’s. In 1955, Kramer directed a melodrama, Not As a Stranger, about the problems that arise when money is interlinked with medicine. The difficulties of anti-Semitism in the profession are also invoked in a single scene. Kramer would later produce a film directed by John Cassavetes about the need to educate the less abled, and the fact that the United States had been sterilising the ‘disabled’ features in a particularly severely shot scene in A Child Is Waiting (1963). In essence, historically there was some acceptance that there was never a convenient idealised binary between the best and worst of the Western national ruling-classes. Yet these US-led classes now claim global dominance.
Postscript
Richard I’s thirteenth-century massacre of the Middle Eastern inhabitants of the city of Acre featured in a clip from Robin and Marion (1976) included in Part 1 of this series. Two thousand women and children were cut apart on the plain outside the city by crusaders looking for internally hidden valuables. The victims, outnumbered Indigenous soldiers who fought to save them and failed, and their local sovereign Saladin, were all Arab Muslims. Palestine had had a predominantly Arab identity since the seventh century—that is, since roughly the mid-point of the Saxon incursion into the British Isles, and before the Viking and Norman invasions. Acre is now in colonised northern Israel. At the time of the Crusades there would have been no locals there who looked like Kirk Douglas, the star of Cast a Giant Shadow (1966). This is because religion doesn’t conform to established notions of race. Just as there are numerous ethnicities in the Protestant Church of England, similarly there are Western Jews, African Jews and genuine Middle Eastern Jews. The current Israeli PM, who calls himself a Middle Easterner, is from a Polish family called Mileikowsky whose name, as part of settler ideological zealotry, has been changed to Netanyahu. If Palestine had not fallen into British hands during the First World War, the Zionist plan followed might have been the Ugandan Scheme, which would mean Netanyahu or somebody white and like him would now be calling himself an African leader. Yet invoking a variant of Blackface critique regarding Israeli ethnic colonial entitlement is painted as offensive.
Critical Attitudes to Israeli Colonialism and the Diversity of Nazi Victims in Popular Culture (PART II)
Gavin Lewis, 23 Nov 2023
In support of Israeli exceptionalism, the reality of the eugenicist Nazi regime and the diversity of its victims have been re-spun as purely anti-Semitic.