#to end their exploitation are now complicit in genocide and that they actually need the guiding hand of liberalism to maintain order | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

vanishingmoments · 4 months

Text

I was reading through Nas Al Sudan's template email to send to US senators and house representatives and it actually is pretty informative on what is going on and what actually needs to be rallied for more specifically than "stop the violence":

"Dear *recipient's occupation* *recipient's name(s)*, My name is *sender's name* and I am your constituent in *sender's state*. I am writing to you nearly eight months after intense fighting broke out in Sudan on April 15th, 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), leading to what the UN has recognized as a humanitarian nightmare. Over 12,000 people have been killed and an estimated 5.1 million have been forcibly displaced within Sudan since the beginning of the conflict and an additional 1.2 million outside the nation, with Sudan now constituting the world’s largest and fastest growing internal displacement crisis. Due to the targeting of journalists in Sudan and limited access to international networks, however, please take note that these numbers likely fall short of the actual devastating truth.

Fighting between the SAF and the RSF has impacted all 18 provinces, crippling infrastructure, placing between 70% and 80% of hospitals out of service, and resulting in grave violations of human rights as violence, abuse, and exploitation of women and children reach unprecedented levels by way of killing, maiming, child recruitment, sexual violence, and arbitrary detention. Furthermore, the RSF is complicit in all of these crimes, including the accusation of genocide in West Darfur, which the ICC has opened an investigation into, and the entry and occupation of homes along with looting, raping, and killing of residents - the result of which are horrific stories, videos, and images shared by witnesses and survivors who are unable to address the anxiety, depression, and PTSD of their experiences - as they remain forgotten in an environment of daily conflict. Beyond this, the humanitarian toll of this conflict is horrifying, with the United Nations terming the current situation in Sudan a “humanitarian catastrophe.” Today, millions of Sudanese people, particularly in Khartoum, Darfur, and Kordofan lack access to basic services, such as food, water, shelter, health, and education. 7.4 million children lack access to safe drinking water and are at risk of waterborne disease and 3.4 million children under the age of five are at high risk of diarrheal diseases and cholera. Furthermore, the WHO and UNICEF have announced that disruptions of health and nutrition services in Sudan could cost over 10,000 young lives by the end of 2023. In addition, an estimated 19 million children are currently out of school in Sudan, and as this crisis continues, these numbers will only worsen.

Thus far, international mediation efforts have utterly failed at achieving any sort of understanding between the two warring forces, with the SAF and the RSF blatantly disregarding commitments to de-escalate fighting, minimize civilian harm, and refrain from disproportionate attacks. Clashes between the two groups have continued and expanded throughout the nation, with the war now approaching its eighth month with no end in sight to bring a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The second round of Jeddah talks conducted in late October clearly failed to produce any sort of negotiations on bringing an end to the conflict, and the UN’s decision to end its political mission established after the 2019 revolution to aid with the transition, UNITAMS, sends quite a clear message that the international community has abandoned hope for Sudan’s future.

The Sudanese people have played no part in this conflict; two forces currently fight to rule a country, neither of which were chosen by its people. It was the international community, including the United States, that waysided the civilians and legitimized the rule of the military, accepting the coup on October 25th, 2021 that laid the groundwork for this war with the belief that it would lead to personal gain. Now, the international community, and more specifically, the United States, bears a responsibility to the Sudanese people and its large Sudanese diaspora to provide humanitarian relief to civilians and to apply pressure to help mediate an end to the conflict. Today, the revised 2023 Sudan Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP), updated in May of 2023, just a month into the conflict and devastation, requires $2.6 billion to provide life-saving multi-sectoral and protection assistance to 18.1 million people in desperate need through the end of this year. As of December 6th, $989.3 million has been donated, with the US contributing roughly $546.5 million. This total constitutes a mere 39% of the level of need estimated nearly 7 months ago, and means that the global community has quite simply failed to meet even a fraction of the level of humanitarian assistance required in Sudan, with the UN estimating 24.7 million people need humanitarian assistance in Sudan, 6.6 million more Sudanese individuals in need than the 18.1 million target the Sudan HRP accounts for in its $2.6 billion goal.

In short, Sudan needs more humanitarian aid funding, at a much more rapid pace, to close in on the gap of the increasing humanitarian assistance needed among Sudanese people. In comparison, though Sudan’s humanitarian toll has surpassed that of Ukraine, the United States has provided over $3.9 billion exclusively in humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, which is over 7 times that provided to Sudan, not to mention the amount provided in military, security and financial aid, which altogether has topped $76.8 billion. Similarly, last month the House of Representatives authorized an emergency $14.5 billion military aid package to the Israeli occupation, a number aside from the $3.8 billion contributed annually, thereby signalling support for and contribution to the active genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, over 15000 of whom have been killed by the occupation force’s assault since October 7th. Thus, given the fact that the United States clearly bears ample funding for foreign aid and its complicity in the perpetuation of the crisis in Sudan, the United States has a moral obligation to address the humanitarian crisis in Sudan.

I call on you, *recipient's name(s)*, for tangible support of the Sudanese people - ensuring they receive equitable and just support rather than falling victim to selective empathy or inadequate differentiating systems. Below are our demands:

1. Appoint a Special Envoy. The U.S. Government, either through a Presidential Appointment process or through Congressional legislative actions, should appoint a Special Envoy for Sudan to ensure the prioritization of direct negotiations for humanitarian assistance, peace negotiations, and engagement with neighboring countries. The Envoy will advocate for accountability of all parties responsible for committing crimes against humanity and war crimes against Sudanese civilians.

2. Call for an immediate ceasefire. The U.S. should utilize effective pressure to support a broad international coalition to achieve an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, a monitoring mechanism, safe corridors for humanitarian aid, and resumption of suspended aid operations.

3. Increase development and humanitarian aid to NGOs operating internally in Sudan focused on food and medical aid distribution. The United States government should ensure the safety of food and medical aid to the Sudanese people through NGOs such as the World Food Programme and the Red Crescent. Sudan is on the brink of famine with 43% of the population suffering from acute food insecurity - 6.3 million of which is a direct result of the conflict - and diseases are spreading. The United States government should work to ensure the safe passage of humanitarian aid convoys.

4. Apply the Arms Export Control Act and Enforce International Traffic in Arms Regulations and Export Administration Regulations on Sudan. The U.S. Government should strictly enforce current legislative tools, like the Arms Export Control Act, and enforce governmental mechanisms to prevent the export and proliferation of military-relevant items directly and indirectly to Sudan, including preventing the illicit flow of arms to non-state actors and private military companies.

5. Work on the international level to expand the UN Arms Embargo on Sudan and Consider Additional Mechanisms. The U.S. should utilize its role as a permanent member of the UNSC to reaffirm, renew, and expand the existing UN arms embargo and other sanctions on Darfur, Sudan to include the entirety of Sudan, key individuals in SAF and RSF, and human rights violators. The Sudanese people believe in freedom, peace, and justice. They gave their lives to bring about democracy in the nation, and the international community, and more specifically, the United States betrayed them through the legitimization of military forces. Will you act now, *recipient's name(s)*, to ensure that the United States government is supporting the Sudanese diaspora in the US by meeting the requirements stated above before the crisis further worsens?

#tumblrs indent formatting thing doesn't let you use more than 4096 characters so i'm not bothering to do that for the quote

7 notes · View notes

susandsnell · 4 years

Text

per the request of @nothingunrealistic, Society Has Progressed Past The Need For Novels Set During WWII With “Other People Suffered Too” Narratives.

Boy oh boy are there a disturbing amount of novels, particularly and very intentionally aimed at impressionable middle-grade readers (or more advanced readers of a younger age!) that have the sympathetic German protagonists. I’m talking about the stories where the lead character is almost invariably H!tler Youth, or at the very least down with the whole thing. Characters who only get the inkling that hey, maybe this N@zi propaganda is a bad idea because their Jewish friend (whose pain and suffering is used as a cheap and manipulative tearjerker/award bait, but who’s never developed or humanized or heaven forbid focused on) is suffering.

I’m talking about Friedrich, whose protagonist thinks the Jungvolk is just a fun game. He participates in Kristallnacht and helps destroy his Jewish best friend’s store, but while it’s ~not excused, the novel tries to wave it off as saying “well, it’s mob mentality, anyone would’ve done it”, completely handwaving the personal responsibility anyone could’ve (and many people did!) taken to prevent genocide and fight their government when wrongs occur as “human nature bad” and people just having no choice but to do “bad things in a bad situation”. But hey, he’s poor, I guess, and also in danger because of the war going on and German civilians suffered too~ because of war, and he learns a lesson because his Jewish friend gets murdered in the end. Poor kiddo. I’m talking about the fucking Book Thief (which inexplicably gets a lot of Jewish organizations’ promotion), which utterly exploits the Holocaust for the pain and suffering of goyishe German characters who get up to such charming pastimes as quirky blackface, and who treat literacy/literature as the solution to fascism (spoiler: it’s not!). While the Death personification will always be well-written, once again, mean old human nature is blamed by Death himself, which is frankly just a copout when it comes to accountability. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and the everlasting innocence of German people when it came to the Holocaust, personified through the protagonist’s innocent friendship with yet another one-dimensional Jewish victim, the tragedy of the book happening yet again because of a goy’s relation and proximity to the horror, but not its true victims. I could go on and on about the countless examples, the N@zi romances, and so on and so forth, but I think I’ve been exhaustive enough.

Plain and simple, much in the way we’re inundated with books by white authors about white protagonists who Learn Not To Be Racist while characters of colour, most frequently Black characters, aren’t developed or humanized (and indeed it’s no mistake both types of books frequently find their way onto school curriculums), this shit is propaganda. It minimizes the true horrors of the situation, or equating the struggles of those complicit, benefitting, or perpetrating to their own victims. It tries to ‘both-sides’ genocide, to show “other people suffered to”, and to humanize people committing some of the most inhuman acts in history while simultaneously offering either less humanity/development for Jewish victims or finding the quirkiness (shudder) in their situations, always minimizing their voices and perspectives. It therefore diminishes the truth and does not truly educate about WWII, because it prizes ‘unity’ over culpability and responsibility. It’s one thing to depict, say, the Righteous Among the Nations actually taking a stand to right the wrongs and save people (although even hiding-a-Jew stories can fall into some unfortunate traps described above), it’s another entirely to try and find the humanity in, and hence the absolution for, those who did nothing good.

It aims to alleviate guilt with cop-outs about ‘human nature’ being the culprit (which poses interesting questions about the humanity of genocide victims who would never do such things), and the fact that it’s taught to kids under the guise of balanced understanding is disgusting and serves to do nothing but to speak over the actual voices of survivors and their descendants in literature, and further dehumanize Jewish people. Sometimes, we really don’t need to see the other side. Some perspectives are not valuable, and the fact that the gentile-kid-in-N@zi-Germany perspective is so pushed doesn’t feel like an accident at all. The “other point of view” argument in this type of work’s favour is a flimsy one at best, because why do we rarely see the “other point of view” being a Romani protagonist, or a disabled protagonist, just to name a few examples? And when these books do exist, why do curriculums prioritize the humanization of complicity narratives?

It’s one thing to demonstrate and try to learn from how people, especially young people, can be duped by government propaganda and accept evils, but more often than not these narratives fail to do that effectively, or otherwise fail to condemn it effectively except look how sad the gentile is. I was disgusted by this in middle school, and I’m disgusted by this now, and I really hope the way this is taught changes in the future because it absolutely normalized this part of history to non-Jewish classmates of mine. “Explain not excuse” just doesn’t cut it any longer.

#bookcourse #tw shoah #holocaust tw #tw: holocaust #blackface mention #ask to tag further #ok to reblog #goyim you can interact but I've got my eye on you

5 notes · View notes

hotelconcierge · 6 years

Text

HYPOCRISY IS BAD, BUT YOU’RE WORSE

“I like the Walrus best," said Alice, "because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.” “He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: contrariwise.” “That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn't eat so many as the Walrus.” “But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum. This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, “Well! They were both very unpleasant characters—” (Through the Looking-Glass)

This is a moviepost—extensive spoilers follow for Death Proof, Jackie Brown, and Inglourious Basterds—and I wrote it mostly because I wanted to talk about some movies. But first, a topical tie-in:

There is always an outside that a person considers unworthy of life...The individual progressive or racist may never say that the outside is unworthy of rights, but they feel it. This is what is meant by that line from Inglorious Bastards when the character of Lt. Aldo Raine says; the "Nazi ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of a jew-hating, mass-murdering maniac and they need to be de-stroyed!"

Here we have a thirst to destroy the perceived inferior, except instead of a racist seeking the end of Jews it is the progressive liberal seeking the genocide of racists. That's irony.

And understand what is happening here. Aldo Raine is really a proxy for Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino is the one speaking, not Brad Pitt. The man is very left-wing and he wrote the script. That move is essentially an exposition of the directors [sic] politics.

The above quote is taken from The Anti-Puritan. Exactly what it sounds like: dude read three Moldbug posts and now thinks he can write. The specifics of this guy’s bad opinions are not that interesting—would you believe that even the videogame industry has been corrupted by cultural Marxism?—but perhaps something can be learned from the framing:

A climate scientist drives to an important summit on global warming. On the way there, he fills up his tank with gas. The only reason oil companies are in business and climate change is occurring is because of people like him who fill up their tanks with gas. Their payments make climate change possible. The payments are the reason Exxon, Shell and BP exist.

A feminist complains about the cis het patriarchy. Her boyfriend, whom she spreads her legs for, is tall, strong, confident, manly, and "dominant" in every way. Fucking dominant men is the reason they exist, the reason they will continue to exist, and the cultural incentive to become dominant...She and billions of other women perpetuate "the patriarchy" with their sexual choices. Patriarchy exists because of them.

A college professor complains about McDonald's. She has eaten fast food from a burger restaurant recently. She, and millions [of] others, are the reason McDonald's exists. (Source)

Let’s accept that there’s a lot to unpack here and move on. Focus instead on the form of the argument: tu quoque, again and again. The feebler the discourse the more accusations of hypocrisy (Bush Lied, Barack Hussein’d) because hypocrisy doesn’t require knowledge of anything but pre-algebra logic. Even a child can identify a contradiction: “But mom! You said—!”

This is precisely the skull malformation that has constricted discussion of the protestors who identify as “Antifascist Action” and are derided as the “alt-left.” Antifa has already become a perennial non-issue where all opinions are based on anecdote and there are plenty of anecdotes to go around; no one has skin in the game, anyone can upvote, and measurable achievements are dwarfed by spikes of indignation like hypertensive hemorrhages into America’s brain. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t been watching the stock prices of PP, NRA, PETA, and BLM.

Antifa now faces the two attacks that were long ago formulated against other activist groups. One: antifa is composed of violent morons who carry upon them body and pubic lice species yet to be classified by science. Two: antifa is counterproductive to their stated goal, e.g. getting to whack-a-mole pamphleteers is actually a powerful incentive to suffer for fashion.

I suspect both criticisms are true, but whatever—does the first imply the second? Is violence bad even when it is effective? Because if it isn’t, then claiming that “antifa are thugs too!” is worse than useless. Your opponent can simply reply, “So what? Nazi ain't got no humanity.” And now that you’ve cried wolf, that guy won’t listen when you claim that, in this instance, violence might not work. So you better be damn sure about your answer: what price should be paid for the sin of hypocrisy?

There is always an outside that a person considers unworthy of life...

Quentin Tarantino has dedicated his career to answering this question.

QT has seen too many movies for it to be any other way. If you consume enough art across epoch and genre, you can’t help arrive at the Susan Sontag #redpill that content doesn’t matter all that much. All art is genre fiction no matter the pretensions and our lizard brain judges accordingly. Sure, thematic analysis is fun to play with after the fact, but if a movie has the right tropes in the right places—femme fatales, tough muchachos, pretty pictures, happy ending—well, you can convince yourself of just about anything.

Take, for example, Death Proof. Genre: exploitation/slasher. Synopsis: hot babes go for a night out, ex-stuntman stalks and runs ‘em down in a death-proof car; stuntman rinses and repeats with another girl gang except they turn the tables and Mortal Kombat his thoracic spine. Rating: extremely badass, you should check it out, anyone who tells you different is a pleb.

Namely: some people complain that the movie has too many scenes of girls talking and that their QT-isms are an unrealistic depiction of an actual group chat. The characters bicker lewdly, if that’s a thing, alternating between weirdly masculine sex-as-status teasing and pledges of undying affection, the verbal equivalent of a catfight, which is maybe how a creepy foot fetishist would imagine female dialogue, but...

Nope, still pleb. Tarantino wasn’t the first guy to invoke this trope, it’s part of the DNA of the slasher genre, as old as Jamie Lee Curtis getting razzed for her virginity in Halloween. Misogyny, maybe, but also content is a spook. Slasher movies have to fill 70 minutes before the eponymous slashing, and they also have to make you care about the outcome of said slashing without humanizing the characters so much that you get all Marley and Me when they die.

What’s the secret? Status games, the less nuance the better. Boys would watch paint dry if you said it was a grudge match. Catfighting is no different than the elaboration of powers in a shonen manga or the suspicious glares exchanged between heist movie protagonists: it creates tension. Different value systems have been described, there can only be one, now you’re rooting for process of elimination to reveal the truth. No—you identify with that process. Hail Gnon. You could make a movie with men playing status games and being killed off by women and men would still find it hot; I know this because of female horrorcore rappers but also because this movie is called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and it’s 10/10. Incidentally:

This is referenced again in the final scene of the film, in which the viewer cheers on our group of heroines as they beat to death a pleading, injured man.

Here’s the hot take: tote bag feminists are wrong to think that drawing boobs on Powergirl is a male attempt to diminish her power. On the contrary, the more vampire slaying the better. Sexualization is an attempt to gain access to female power: if she wants The Phallus badly enough, she might just lend her power to you. Obverse: men are idiots for thinking that the existence of rape fantasies means that women secretly want to be raped. There’s an image floating around the manosphere about that terrorist with a heart of gold, Ted Kaczynski, who was gauche with ladies in the free world but deluged in love letters upon his incarceration. Before you can say medium = message, someone tragically rendered celibate by their 23andMe results will point to this as proof that women “only want serial killers.” Newsflash: Kaczynski is serving eight life sentences without possibility of parole. Do you think the fangirls didn’t know that? Rape fantasies (theoretically “hot”) are qualitatively different than being raped (“unimaginably horrific”) because you construct the former, can turn it off at any time. The fantasy victim is assaulted by a terrible power, but the person who selects and controls that power is...

Of course it is, cough, problematic, that slasher movie girls display power through HPV vaccinations while male zombie apocalypse survivors soliloquize on whether suicide is inevitable in the absence of God. But once you sexistly set up that women should be valued by their sin, the wages = death equation is not in and of itself misogynistic. No, it’s just inevitable: sex-as-status tension can only be relieved in two ways and one of them is frowned upon in theaters. Film crit cliché and Kraftwerk song, I know, but: watching a movie renders you impotent—you can’t interact with the sexy image on the screen—except through what the camera will allow.

That’s why you are complicit in the murders that occur in the first half of Death Proof. The ex-stuntman—old, a teetotaler, star of TV shows long forgotten (and played by once-famous Kurt Russell)—is as impotent as you are, capable of getting a deleted scene lap dance but zero penetration, and when he gets in his car to commit vehicular homicide x4, he looks at the camera and smiles. Because you’re right there with him, waiting for the money shot. It would be nice to fuck, but you’ll settle for a murder. Except when it actually happens, played four times for your amusement, it’s horrible—a face melted off by a tire, a wet leg flapping in the street. Throw in a Wilhelm scream. Wasn’t that what you wanted? Are you not entertained?

It’s all perspective, my man. For all the short shorts and naughty words, the girls plan and backup plan ways to prevent unwanted sexual advances; two of them have boyfriends and one is texting a crush trying to seal the deal; they discuss and decide against inviting the opposite sex to their lakeside vacation. But that’s not what you see from the outside. That’s not where your attention is drawn, wandering the club and editing your .jpg of grievances. For you, dancefloor means sex, choker necklace means slut, and being a slut means she would never sleep with you. That’s a personal insult. And that means that nothing else matters.

Which is insane. This isn’t an argument for or against promiscuity, the point is you don’t even know promiscuity looks like. You know symbols, and for that matter, why those symbols, where did you learn those? Brazzers? If you’re gonna be mad at a thing you should at least be mad at the thing itself, not at whatever fucked up fetish you’ve imposed on reality.

There’s a scene midway through the movie where QT tips his hand. The second girl gang is lounging in a car, one of them dangling her feet out the window. The ex-stuntman approaches, you assume his perspective, and maybe because it’s an old grindhouse film...

...but the color goes out, and everything is black and white.

Which, speaking of:

Jackie Brown is first and foremost a movie about being extremely cool all the time (you should watch it). The plot is an excuse: briefly, Pam Grier (airline stewardess), Robert Forster (bail bondsman), Samuel L Jackson (arms dealer), Robert De Niro (ex-convict), Bridget Fonda (stoner surfer chick) and a couple Feds each try to nab a briefcase holding $500K.

Jackie Brown is secondarily a movie about how race shapes each and every human interaction, but that description makes it sound like a Very Special Episode, and that couldn’t be more wrong. The movie is gleefully amoral, in fact lapses from pure MacGuffinism are treated as intolerable weakness, e.g. Jackson to De Niro:

ORDELL: You know what your problem is, Louis?

Louis doesn't say anything, he just puts his hands in his pockets.

ORDELL: You think you're a good guy. When you go into a deal you don't go in prepared to take that motherfucker all the way. You go in looking for a way out. And it ain't cause you're scared neither. It's cause you think you're a good guy, and you think there's certain things a good guy won't do. That's where we're different, me and you. Cause me, once I decide I want something, ain’t a goddam motherfuckin' thing gonna stop me from gittin' it. I gotta use a gun get what I want, I'm gonna use a gun. Nigga gets in my way, nigga gonna get removed. Understand what I'm saying?

Apparently not, because De Niro later makes this mistake and gets popped.

For these characters, race is just another weapon. When Jackson meets Forster for the first time, he lights a cigarette, puts his feet up on the desk, and taps out the ash in a partly full coffee cup. Then he points out a photo of Forster with a black employee. “Y’all tight?” “Yeah.” “But you his boss though, right?” “Yeah.” “Bet it was your idea to take that picture too, wasn’t it...?” In their second encounter, Jackson, trying to get bail for Grier, pulls the same trick:

ORDELL: Man, you know I'm good for it. Thousand bucks ain't shit.

MAX: If I don't see it in front of me, you're right. It ain't shit.

ORDELL: Man, you need to look at this with a little compassion. Jackie ain't no criminal. She ain't used to this kinda treatment. I mean, gangsters don't give a fuck - but for the average citizen, coupla nights in County fuck with your mind.

MAX: Ordell, this isn't a bar, an you don't have a tab.

ORDELL: Just listen for a second. We got a forty-year-old, gainfully employed black woman, falsely accused -

MAX: Falsely accused? She didn't come back from Mexico with cocaine on her?

ORDELL: Falsely accused of Intent. If she had that shit - and mind you, I said "if" - it was just her shit to get high with.

MAX: Is white guilt supposed to make me forget I'm running a business?

But Forster—male lead, the “good guy”—plays his version of the race card and flips the script.

Example 2: Bridget Fonda, surfer gal, plots to betray Jackson, who “moves his lips when he reads,” "let's say he's streetwise, I'll give him that.” But Jackson knows that she sees him that way, it makes her predictable, which is why he can keep her around: “You can’t trust Melanie, but you can always trust Melanie to be Melanie.”

That’s not the half of it. Jackson talks a soon-dead man into getting in the trunk of an Oldsmobile, houses a homeless addict in Compton and tells her it’s Hollywood; he lies effortlessly, and when drafting your fantasy friend group you should be aware that people who lie effortlessly do it because it’s fun. Threatening someone gets you an automaton who will system 2 your demands and nothing more. Deceiving someone gives you control over that person’s soul. So Fonda’s stoned delusions of manipulating him—which in fact make her easier to manipulate—are part of her appeal. Translated: “She ain't as pretty as she used to be, and she bitch a whole lot more than she used to...But she white.”

Except Fonda is manipulating him. She’s spent her adulthood as the side piece for Dubai businessmen and Japanese industrialists who—though she doesn’t even speak the language—get off on the fact that she’s a haughty blonde who thinks she’s better than them, thinks she can manipulate them. But since they’re paying for rent and weed, doesn’t that mean...?

Example 3: Pam Grier as Jackie Brown.

youtube

From more Sam Jackson than Sam Jackson to mumblecore for Medicare, Jackie outsmarts everyone and it’s not even close. The Feds lean into their uniforms but she doesn’t miss a beat: urbane dinner guest in one scene, “panicked, defensive, unreasonable black woman” in another. Of course the movie ends the way it does, of course. Jackson steps into a dark room. Jackie screams “he’s got a gun!” And a cop pulls the trigger. You can’t always beat the system, but if you try sometimes, it just might beat who you need.

Why does Jackie win? The canon explanation is that she’s an airline stewardess: her job is to tell people of all origins what they want to hear. The meta explanation is she’s played by blaxploitation star Pam Grier. The gimmick of Grier movies like Coffy and Foxy Brown is their exaggeration of the audience’s favored tropes re: sex and race—say, hypersexuality and fashionable/wearable blackness. But the punchline of these films is that on-screen, Pam Grier with an afro is disguising herself as an high-class escort to fool the baddies: “The gentlemen you’ll be meeting this evening have a preference for…your type.” And then she kills them.

So it’s true that these films let you "exploit” a caricature, but the flip side is that anyone who can turn that caricature on and off gets to exploit you. And that seems to be Jackie Brown’s realist take: not that racism is the Original Sin for which Thou Must Atone—because everyone sees race and is selfish besides—but rather that it makes you a sucker. And the flip side: by capitalism or by meme magic, the world will always conspire to show you what you want to see. Choose wisely.

If Jackie Brown accepts that racism is inevitable, Inglourious Basterds sets out to prove that it’s also kind of fun.

youtube

It’s telling that Inglourious Basterds posters are push-pinned on the walls of fraternity houses right next to Scarface and The Wolf of Wall Street. Three movies, three sets of protagonists who happen to be amoral, masculine, and white. Sounds like a diss, but who are creatine-chugging white boys supposed to look up to? Chris Pratt? You can just tell that guy was grown in a test tube. There’s a reason Tarantino movies are popular and there’s a reason I’m talking about them instead of Buñuel or Tarkovsky and it has something to do with “making intensive use of a major language” and the twenty-somethings desperate to identify with a character named “Bear Jew.” And the above scene is indeed, “sick af.” Goes off without a hitch except when the Nazi says that he got his medals for bravery, and then there’s a split-second of—what, annoyance? Like, stick to the script, asshole. You’re sure as hell gonna get it now.

But I’m sure you’re aware that’s the joke, that once you got Ennio Morricone in the background you can justify anything. The Basterds “ain’t in the prisoner taking business”; they scalp the dead and maim the witnesses they leave alive. There’s no panorama of concentration camp horrors, no humanizing backstory, no evidence of any softness save boyish joy in the art of cruelty. Halfway through the film a young man celebrating the birth of his son is shot dead after surrendering in a Mexican standoff; the Basterds shrug and move on. At the climax of the film, a movie theatre full of Germans is exploded, shot, and burned to death. The modern viewer can’t help but cheer.

youtube

The opening chapter, Colonel Hans Landa vs. the outgroup under the floorboards, sways your sympathies in the opposite direction. No, it doesn’t make you hate the French or the Jews. But the tension—the silence and the ticking and the mounting requests and insinuations—is so unbearable that you can’t help but wish for someone to pull the Band-Aid. And the camera can’t do that. Only characters can. Only the character driving the action, and Landa drives the action in his every appearance. Something has to happen—and like the man onscreen, you cave.

Hans Landa alone seems to understand that he’s in a movie, which is perhaps why he’s so polite, so witty, so manically overacted. Perhaps this is how he sees through the Allies’ tricks and disguises: he assumes everyone else is an actor as well. And perhaps this is the apologia for his crimes: he’s just playing a role. The Basterds loathe the Nazis, but Landa bears no animosity towards the Jews, can empathize with them quite easily—it’s just, he likes to play detective and the Nazis were hiring. Is that really worse? Didn’t both the Walrus and the Carpenter eat as many as they could get?

And so, near the end of the film, when Landa cuts a deal to exchange his Hugo Boss for Levi Strauss, he asks of his prisoners the one question that would matter to a character in a period piece: “What shall the history books read?”

Landa’s argument, of course, is a load of shit.

In Inglourious Basterds, every disguise fails. The British film critic-turned-agent is unable to play the Nazi he’s seen on-screen. The German actress is revealed to be an Allied spy. The vengeful Shosanna is revealed as a sweet Jewish girl; the baby-faced Nazi lusting after her is shown to be a monster. The propaganda film burns. Only Lieutenant Aldo Raine and one Basterd make it out alive, and that’s because they’re American, i.e. monolingual.

Perception is a slave to narrative, but narrative has zip zero zilch nada to do with reality. The author is dead. Was Triumph of the Will a “good movie,” technically proficient and even emotionally moving? Absolutely. Could the director’s intentions have been “good,” apolitical, an attempt at beauty but nothing more? Unlikely in this case, but possible. But was Triumph of the Will “good”?

This is the obvious yet unswallowable truth: sometimes good people do bad things. “Nazi ain't got no humanity”? How many films have Nazis with wives, mistresses, children, pub games, medals for bravery? And yet Lieutenant Raine’s opening polemic is correct: the foot soldiers of the Third Reich worked for a Jew-hating, mass-murdering maniac: they needed to be destroyed. Reality isn’t Disney, where internal beauty works its way external. Reality isn’t even so kind as to match intentions with consequences. The American (Union) soldiers fighting against the Nazis (Confederacy) may have been motivated by every bit as much hatred and bloodlust, and yet they were necessary, they were the good guys. FYI—that’s irony.

“So you’re saying we should punch the alt-right?” Are you an idiot? The Nazis weren’t bad because they were Nazis, they were bad because of the things they did. If you actually think that punching a teenage Kekistani is going to bring down the New World Order, go ahead, but stop pushing the pillow of identity over the mouth of reality.

The goal of the System, the sum of vectors going both left and right, is to keep people arguing about abstractions of violence so they won’t deign to consider the ugliness of pragmatism. The radical left will asseverate that violence is justified, refusing to question whether their particular brand of protest is effective; the alt-right will keep rallying against cropped image lunatics, the finest examples of white genocide the media has to offer, never seriously considering that sometimes people lie on the internet; and “““centrists””” will deduce that since violence is never okay, since everyone is so irrational, nothing can be done. But that’s still a perspective: it’s the perspective of the camera.

Fuck that. This essay is a condemnation of anyone who thinks that the hypocrisy of the outgroup disproves their complaint, of anyone who thinks that good intentions are enough to absolve you from sin:

You don’t get to forget what you are.

47 notes · View notes