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From: Paul Kneisel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [pttp] The Internet Anti-Fascist: Fri, 7 September 2001 -- 5:71
(#597)
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The Internet Anti-Fascist: Friday, 7 September 2001
Vol. 5, Number 71 (#597)
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A Note On Forgeries:
Action Alerts:
30 Oct: National Day of Action for Racial Justice in Schools
Web Sites of Interest:
Beyond Prejudice
Book/Movie Reviews:
Charles Lyons (Variety), "Jewison making a "Statement"," 9 Sep 01
Robert Lloyd (LA Weekly), "Deadlyland - Hanks and Spielberg's bloody
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A NOTE ON FORGERIES:
There is no physical violence on the internet proper, so fascists have been
forced to develop different modes of cyberthuggery.
Forgery is one of their methods.
Readers checking the google archives of usenet messages have asked about
several attributed to us.
The fascist tactics in this area follow a particular form:
1) forge articles in the name of an anti-fascist opponent;
2) attack the anti-fascist over the content of the forged messages, as if
they actually represent the anti-fascist's views;
3) consume an enormous amount of anti-fascist time writing individual
responses to each of the attacks.
Some of us sought to respond with a series of simple messages pointing out
the forgeries.
But then the fascists immediately claimed we were "spamming" and demanded
that our ISPs cancel our accounts.
We've tried to get around this quandary by creating a special web page that
explains this and lists some of the forged material.
We hope to add the URL for this page to a number of our other posts, thus
exposing the forgeries without violating any of the formal spam thresholds.
You can read some of the forged material at:
<http://www.anti-fascism.org/page-special-forgery.html>
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ACTION ALERTS:
Learning While Black or Brown: Racial Profiling and Punishment in U.S.
Public Schools National Day of Action for Racial Justice in Schools
WHAT is it?
It's a designated day for organizations around the country to focus public
attention on racial inequality in our public education system and to call
for equitable school reforms. By holding coordinated public actions in
communities across the country, we can amplify and echo the message that
our public policies and spending on schools must reflect a high priority on
racial equity. This event will bring particular attention to racial
profiling and punishment in our schools - the hazards of learning while
Black or Brown.
WHY are we doing this?
The major school policy trends and current spending priorities are failing
to address the widespread racial inequalities in our schools and are, in
fact, exacerbating institutional racism. High-stakes testing and maximum-
security school environments are both essentially punitive measures that
amount to sophisticated forms of racial profiling and punishment of
students of color. These punitive policies also detract attention and
resources from positive reforms that have proven results in improving
educational excellence and equity - such as expanding the pool of high-
quality teachers so that there's a top-notch teacher in every class, and
reducing the size of schools and classes.
WHEN is it?
Tuesday, October 30, 2001.
WHO will participate?
Community-based organizations from around the country and their allies will
participate. The event is being coordinated by the Applied Research Center
in collaboration with the ERASE Partners, a national network of community
organizations working to address racial justice in schools.
WHERE will it be held?
There will be activities in local communities across the country, wherever
community organizations want to raise issues of racial inequities and
racial justice in schools.
HOW do I get involved?
Download the ACTION KIT for the National Day of Action for Racial Justice
in Schools, which includes lots of suggestions for how you can participate:
<http://www.arc.org/erase/dayofaction/action_kit.html>
For further information, please contact:
Tammy Johnson or Jennifer Emiko Boyden
ERASE Initiative
Applied Research Center
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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WEB SITES OF INTEREST:
Beyond Prejudice
<http://www.eburg.com/beyond.prejudice/>
"Prejudices exist. It is an undeniable force within our society, so
prevalent that it can be found within the most open-minded people and
enlightened organizations, subtly taking its toll despite the best of
intentions.
"To recognize the insidious and pervasive power of prejudice is to take the
first step toward defeating it. Assigning blame or guilt, however, will
often yield avoidance, denial, and defensiveness. Understanding that
prejudicial thinking can be greatly diminished through commitment and
education will bring people together to successfully solve this shared
problem. It is toward this end that Beyond Prejudices is committed."
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BOOK/MOVIE REVIEWS:
Jewison making a "Statement"
Charles Lyons (Variety)
9 Sep 01
TORONTO -- Director Norman Jewison, last in theaters with "The Hurricane,"
has committed to shoot "The Statement," a suspense thriller about a French
war criminal.
Based on late author Brian Moore's penultimate novel, "The Statement"
centers on a fugitive in hiding for over 40 years, secretly sheltered by
both the Vatican (news - web sites) and the French government. When his
cover is blown, the net closes in, as this old man becomes a cause celebre.
"It's a terrific cat and mouse political thriller," producer Robert Lantos
told Daily Variety. "It's about the complicity in covering up, at a very
high level, a Nazi war criminal. But it applies to today as well. It
contains something that truly matters in the world in which we live."
Other Moore novels adapted for the screen are "Black Robe," "The Lonely
Passion of Judith Hearne" and "The Luck of Ginger Coffey." He wrote the
screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain."
Toronto native Jewison received Oscar nominations for directing
"Moonstruck," "Fiddler on the Roof" and "In the Heat of the Night," the
first two also garnering him best picture nods. He also received best
picture nominations for "A Soldier's Story" and "The Russians are Coming,
The Russians are Coming."
- - - - -
Deadlyland - Hanks and Spielberg's bloody theme park
Robert Lloyd (LA Weekly)
7 Sep 01
With Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg as executive co-producers, Band of
Brothers, HBO's 10-hour new-fall-season $120-million blockbuster World War
II miniseries, is for all intents and purposes the television sequel to
Saving Private Ryan. (World War II, of course, was itself a sequel; the
third in that series has yet to go into production, though various drafts
have been circulating for years.) In a general way it's also a sequel to
Hanks' last HBO project, the equally long and large From the Earth to the
Moon, which followed his star turn in Apollo 13 as the night, the day. One
feels as if it's a case of boys having too much fun playing to come home.
The series, based on a nonfiction book by Stephen E. Ambrose, who served as
a historical adviser on Saving Private Ryan, follows "Easy" Company of the
506th Regiment, 101st Airborne -- foot soldiers who dropped out of the sky
--
from boot camp to Berchtesgaden, with the Normandy invasion (where they
made the hedgerows safe for the cast of Private Ryan), Operation Market
Garden and the Battle of the Bulge along the way. It's a kind of Greatest
Hits of the European Theater. For a few years now we have been experiencing
something of a renaissance in WWII awareness, as the Greatest Generation
(in the Brokavian formulation) begins its last hurrah, and high-profile
films like Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line and Pearl Harbor apply the
state of their art to more perfectly replicate -- virtually render -- the
actual experience of battle. It's war as theme park -- or as Jurassic Park.
Big ideas and romantic distractions may decorate their chassis, but the
aesthetic that drives these films, Band of Brothers included, is
essentially tech-headed, materiel-obsessed and turned on by things that
blow up and burn.
The pop-cultural shrapnel of the Second World War was also especially
present in the days of my youth, which are approximately those of Hanks,
and nearly of Spielberg. Growing up then it was easily possible, if you
watched TV at all, to know more about World War II, its superficial
outlines and social trivia in any case, than about the war in Vietnam,
which was actually going on. (Korea didn't register until M*A*S*H.) There
were Combat and Rat Patrol and McHale's Navy and the prison-camp comedy
Hogan's Heroes (now showing on TVLand, should you care to make its
acquaintance), and countless reruns of wartime and war-themed films, dramas
and comedies and musicals, on the Early and the Late Shows. When kids
played army, it was the army that fought Hitler and Hirohito; we knew what
PT boats did, what a Luger was.
It was, I am not the first person to notice, the last military action of
which an American could be uncontroversially proud -- in no small part, of
course, because we won -- which is one reason it remains such a viable,
popular subject. (That and the guns and the bombs.) The unassailable
Rightness of the Cause -- putting aside any Allied complicity in the rise of
fascism -- allows for a kind of blank-check righteousness few other
"serious" subjects afford. There is, indeed, a sense here that the men of
Easy Company are beyond criticism; the theme of the series is essentially
These guys are great -- "the toughest, most professional, most dedicated
sons of bitches in the ETO," as someone says. Even when they're shown doing
"bad things," like looting, or shooting enemy soldiers who are attempting
to surrender, or otherwise taking the law into their own hands -- or when it
is intimated, oh so briefly, that anti-Semitism might not be exclusive to
the Nazis -- they are let off, dramatically speaking, with the merest rap on
the knuckles, and having dutifully pointed a finger the film moves quickly
on to the more important business of canonization.
This is not, I should say, a project I would be constitutionally
predisposed to like. Spielberg's work often seems to me a case of
astonishing technique in the service of simplistic ideas (though they are
demonstrably powerful in a populist way). Hanks, who directed one episode
of the miniseries and co-wrote another, has through the happenstance of
casting come to stand in an unsettling way for the American ideal, and has
distressingly lent his hand and heft to the rape of the Washington Mall by
the forthcoming memorial to the veterans of WWII. Saving Private Ryan
seemed to me on the whole a lot of sound and fury signifying a lot of sound
and fury, apart from when it was merely cloying -- which is not to say it
wasn't compulsively watchable. Band of Brothers is erected on Ryan's
foundation: It was shot at the same thousand-acre facility, the former
Hatfield Aerodrome in Hertfordshire; its cast was sent to "boot camp" with
the same retired Marine captain; the theatrical film and the TV movie share
a desaturated image and "documentary"-style camerawork; both employ
something called the "image shaker" for explosion shots, and fast shutter
speeds in battle scenes for a preternaturally crisp, slightly stroboscopic
look, a look that in short order has come to stand for the hyperclarity and
temporal distortions of a hectic, life-threatening situation. (It was used
in Gladiator, too.) As in most movies, the principals are perhaps a shade
too handsome; the dialogue occasionally sounds recycled ("They were good
men"); the camerawork muscles us toward an emotion we should be allowed to
find (or discard) on our own; and the music kills the mood: Michael Kamen's
elegiac score, though fairly restrained, and darn catchy, is never less
than intrusive. And there is finally the obligatory HBO good-looking naked
girl (this must be contractual), which feels obligatory, and disappointing.
Nevertheless, I come to praise, not to bury. I hung in for the duration.
Some of it was sheer admiration for the film craft -- the $120 million is
definitely on the screen -- not just for the "patina of authenticity" Hanks
has said they were trying to achieve, and do, but for special effects that,
falling inevitably short of real, opt for poetry: the air filled with
planes and chutes and flak, for instance, all arranged to be as beautiful,
in a painterly way, as it is frightening. In an old airplane hangar, they
built a forest and filled it with a third of a million pounds of utterly
persuasive fake snow. It is a convincing forest, full of convincing forest
mist and forest light, and yet it is also a fairy tale forest, full of
fairy tale mist and fairy tale light. At the same time, the series feels
more real, more honest than Saving Private Ryan, if only because when
soldiers are killed, it isn't to make a narrative or philosophical or even
emotional point, but because that's really what happened to them. The
series has a satisfying arc, if not what you'd call a story, and it's
pleasurable, if that's the right word, to watch the characters, if that's
the right word, differentiate and grow, if that's the right word. It scores
points as well for expressions of tenderness between men -- weird and rare
on television. I was also happy to see Ron Livingston, a favorite actor
from the small screen (Townies) and big (Office Space), in a large role.
British actor Damian Lewis is Lieutenant Richard Winters, on whose humble,
strong shoulders the series is more or less hung, and he is very good, and
plausibly American. David Schwimmer, the cast's biggest name, no kidding,
plays against type -- which is to say, plays against practically the only
character anyone has seen him play, but which everyone has seen him play --
as an unlikable martinet, and he is indeed unlikable.
And, when it comes right down to it, I am as fascinated as anyone by the
unattainable past, and as keen as you and you and you to see it re-created.
Let me in that theme park! The ride provided here is tense and terrifying,
and perversely thrilling -- the destruction of the Ardennes forest is as
mind-bendingly gripping as anything I've ever seen come out of my TV. The
film, though it celebrates the warrior, is so violent and bloody as to be
implicitly anti-war: Certainly it makes clear just how primitive a business
wars are, or used to be before we invented robots to fight them, and how
much the outcome of this particular war came down to a matter of who had
more meat to throw into the grinder. Band of Brothers is the next best
thing to being there -- well, better, obviously.
* * * * *
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only.
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FASCISM:
We have no ethical right to forgive, no historical right to forget.
(No permission required for noncommercial reproduction)
- - - - -
back issues archived via:
<ftp://ftp.nyct.net/pub/users/tallpaul/publish/tinaf/>
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