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1] I made myself sit through Netanyahu's speech to Congress. I almost made it to the end but the spectacle of all that unbridled toadying was too appalling. This was the highest assembly of a once mighty bourgeois democracy and to see them fawn and leap to their feet to applaud every cliche from the mouth of the butcher was quite revolting. There is no gravitas and no dignity in that place; none at all, even of the conservative kind. Comrades in the US will no doubt be puzzled by why I was so shocked, but I was. 2] I was working late and for some reason or other I had left the tv on droning away in the background in my study and quite suddenly the Northern Irish accent penetrated the cloud of my deafness. I realized it was the film *Hunger* about Bobby Sands, something which I had resolutely refused to watch following Louis' review of the film. I had entered the movie at the scene where the priest was arguing with Sands about the hunger strike. This was probably the crucial political moment in the film. The narrative here dipped into one of the two principal alternatives that the bourgeois propagandists have evolved to deal with the Irish revolution. Instead of the Romeo and Juliet scenario where love is doomed by political bigotry, this had the revolutionary as full of a passionate intensity - the heart with one purpose alone through summer and winter and which turns into a stone that troubles the living stream. Not for nothing did the priest, appalled by Sands'"fanaticism", hastily reach for a cigarette. What sane man wouldn't when confronted with such insanity? Then we had the only explicitly political moment the voice over of Thatcher talking about the gunmen turning on themselves. I heard this statement when it was first made. She said "Faced with the failure of their discredited cause, the men of violence have chosen in recent months to play what may well be their last card. They have turned their violence against themselves through the prison hunger strike to death. They seek to work on the most basic of human emotions—pity—as a means of creating tension and stoking the fires of bitterness and hatred". It was a statement of such appalling cruelty and callousness, that I had always believed that it would be rejected by all people of decency. The film however then proceeded to act as an illustration of Thatcher's statement. The agonizing depiction of how a man starves himself to death then followed. I continued to watch. I do not know why. But in a sense I felt I owed it to the memory of Sands - a memory which was being so scandalously betrayed by this film. Louis has talked of how all the politics of an anti-imperialist struggle were kept from the film. The discussions that Sands had with a man who was presumably his election agent was shown in such a way that Sands could not hear what was being said. Then at the end we had the statements of how he had been elected to parliament and how the demands of the hunger strikers were won. The world wide movement in which millions like my self took part was not mentioned at all. No wonder this film won so many awards. comradely Gary _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
