--- Sponsor's Message -------------------------------------- FREE digital photo album software. FlipAlbum organizes digital photos/graphics into 3D page-flipping photo albums. You can play music while viewing them, email them & run slide shows. FREE phonecard too! http://click.topica.com/aaaasLbz8SnrbAjwjxa/1011eBookAd1 ------------------------------------------------------------ __________________________________________________________________________ The Internet Anti-Fascist: Friday, 7 July 2000 Vol. 4, Number 56 (#439) __________________________________________________________________________ Movie Reviews: "The Patriot:" The Nazis, er, the Redcoats are coming! Fascism In the News Challenge (Progressive Labor Party), "Racists Attacked!," 19 Jul 00 Bill Swayze and Margaret McHugh ([Newark NJ] Star Ledger), "Protesters shout down white supremacist," 5 Jul 00 Miami Herald, "Jewish vets building defaced: Vandals scrawled black swastikas on a freshly painted North Miami Beach Jewish veterans building over the holiday weekend," 6 Jul 00 Rightwing Quote of the Week: Terroristman, "Bomb the clinics (at night)," 3 Jul 00 Real Political Correctness: American Atheists Newsletter, "Whitehead Terminated After Closed Meeting, Silence From University Committee," 3 Jul 00 What's Worth Checking: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- MOVIE REVIEWS: "The Patriot:" The Nazis, er, the Redcoats are coming! The Nazis, er, the Redcoats are coming! The savage soldiers in "The Patriot" act more like the Waffen SS than actual British troops. Does this movie have an ulterior motive? Jonathan Foreman (salon.com) 3 Jul 00 The week before "The Patriot" opened in the United States, the British press lit up with furious headlines. "Truth is first casualty in Hollywood's War," read one in the Daily Telegraph. Another story, about the historical model for Mel Gibson's character was titled, "The Secret Shame of Mel's New Hero." The accompanying articles complained that the new Revolutionary War epic portrays British redcoats as "bloodthirsty and unprincipled stormtroopers" and "bloodthirsty child-killers." The prizewinning historian and biographer Andrew Roberts called the film "racist" in the Daily Express, and pointed out that it was only the latest in a series of films like "Titanic," "Michael Collins" and "The Jungle Book" remake that have depicted the British as "treacherous, cowardly, evil [and] sadistic." Roberts had a theory: "With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt onto someone else." I can only imagine how much angrier Fleet Street's pundits will be after they have actually seen the movie. "The Patriot" will not open in England until August, but when it does, Brits will see a supposedly authentic historical epic that radically rewrites the known history of the Revolutionary War. It does so by casting George III's redcoats as cartoonish paragons of evil who commit one monstrous -- but wholly invented -- atrocity after another. In one scene, the most harrowing of the film, redcoats round up a village of screaming women and children and old men, lock them in a church and set the whole chapel on fire. If you didn't know anything about the Revolution, you might actually believe the British army in North America was made up of astonishingly cruel, even demonic, sadists who really did do this kind of thing -- as if they were the 18th century equivalent of the Nazi SS. Yet no action of the sort ever happened during the war for independence, but an eerily identical war crime -- one of the most notorious atrocities of World War II -- was carried out by the Nazis in France in 1944. As a film critic for the New York Post, I found "The Patriot" well made and often exciting. But I also found it disturbing in a way that many weaker, dumber films are not. It's not just that it willfully distorts history in a manner that goes way beyond the traditional poetic license employed by Hollywood, it's the strange, primitive politics that seem to underlie that distortion. "The Patriot" is a movie that doesn't "get" patriotism -- in either a modern or the 18th century sense of the word. The only memorable, explicit political sentiment voiced comes when Gibson's character makes the rather Tory comment that he sees no advantage in replacing the tyranny of one man 3,000 miles away for the tyranny of 3,000 men, one mile away. The deliberate lacuna demonstrates a total lack of understanding of, or even a kind of hostility to, the patriotic politics that motivated the founding fathers. You could actually argue without too much exaggeration that "The Patriot" is as fascist a film (and I use the term in its literal sense, not as a synonym for "bad") as anything made in decades. It's even more fascist than "Fight Club," that ode to violence, barely repressed homoeroticism and the rejection of consumer capitalism. "The Patriot" presents a deeply sentimental cult of the family, casts unusually Aryan-looking heroes and avoids any democratic or political context in its portrayal of the Revolutionary War. Instead of such context, it offers a story in which the desire for blood vengeance -- for a son shot by a British officer -- turns Gibson's character into a "patriot." Meanwhile, the imagery piles up: In one scene towheaded preteens are armed by their father and turned into the equivalent of the Werwolf boy-soldiers that the Third Reich was thought to have recruited from the Hitler Youth to carry out guerrilla attacks against the invading Allies. In the film's most exciting sequence, Gibson is provoked by the foreigner into becoming one of those bloodied, ax-wielding forest supermen so beloved in Nazi folk-iconography: an 18-century equivalent of the Goth leader Arminius (aka Hermann the German) who annihilated two Roman Legions in the Teutoburger Forest. The black population of South Carolina -- where the film is set -- is basically depicted as happy loyal slaves, or equally happy (and unlikely) freedmen. But the most disturbing thing about "The Patriot" is not just that German director Roland Emmerich (director of the jingoistic "Independence Day") and his screenwriter Robert Rodat (who was criticized for excluding British and other Allied soldiers from his script for "Saving Private Ryan") depict British troops as committing savage atrocities, but that those atrocities bear such a close resemblance to war crimes carried out by German troops -- particularly the SS in World War II. It's hard not to wonder if the filmmakers have some kind of subconscious agenda. In one scene in "The Patriot," the British regulars murder wounded American POWs. In another, they order the execution of an American soldier captured in uniform. Both were common occurrences on the Eastern Front of World War II, but such war crimes by regular troops "never happened" in the Revolutionary War, says American Heritage magazine editor Richard Snow. (Of course, irregular militias, terrorist bands allied to both sides and Indian proxies did do some very nasty things.) And, sure, spies and traitors, such as Nathan Hale (American) and Major John Andre (British), were hanged. But regular troops on both sides observed the law of war that distinctions should be made between the former categories and uniformed combatants. "['The Patriot'] is inventing a context of atrocities when what really happened was much more interesting," he says. Snow says he understands the outrage in the British press. "I think that [they] should be upset. I would be pretty sore if I saw a British production of Shaw's 'Devil's Disciple' and it had Americans bayonetting the wounded after the Battle of Bennington." The most outrageous of "The Patriot's" many faults is the way Emmerich and Rodat show the British troops committing a war crime that closely resembles one of the most notorious Nazi war crimes of World War II -- the massacre of 642 people (including 205 children) in the French village of Oradour sur Glane on June 10, 1944. The film mimics the horrible event with clear accuracy and turns it into just another atrocity committed by redcoats in 1780. At Oradour, the Waffen SS "Das Reich" division punished local resistance activity by first shooting all the men and boys. Then they rounded up the women and children, locked them in the town church and set it afire. (You can see Oradour today exactly as it was just after the Nazis carried out the ghastly mass-murder -- the French have left it to remain an empty memorial.) There was one major case of British regulars burning a town during the Revolution. It was Groton, Conn., and the troops were under the command of Benedict Arnold. But the houses they burned were empty. Yet in "The Patriot" fictional British dragoons do exactly the same as the real life SS did at Oradour. They lock scores of civilians, most of them women and children, into a church and set it afire. According to both historian Thomas Fleming and Snow, no such incident took place during the Revolution. As Snow says, "Of course it never happened -- if it had do you think Americans would have forgotten it? It could have kept us out of World War I." By transposing Oradour to South Carolina, and making 18th century Britons the first moderns to commit this particular war crime, Emmerich and Rodat - - unwittingly or not -- have done something unpleasantly akin to Holocaust revisionism. They have made a film that will have the effect of inoculating audiences against the unique historical horror of Oradour -- and implicitly rehabilitating the Nazis while making the British seem as evil as history's worst monsters. Of course, Emmerich and Rodat would probably counter that they're just trying to show how nasty war can be. But the fact remains that in the real Revolutionary War the regular armies of neither side behaved in this way -- even in South Carolina in 1780 -- and only the Brits are shown committing unprovoked acts of bestial cruelty. So it's no wonder that the British press sees this film as a kind of blood libel against the British people. To understand the import, just imagine a hugely successful foreign film (French, British, Chinese) about the Vietnam War that depicted Americans using thousands of Vietnamese children for medical and scientific experiments. If the Nazis had won the war in Europe, and their propaganda ministry had decided to make a film about the American Revolution, "The Patriot" is exactly the movie you could expect to see -- minus the computer-generated effects, of course. (Doubters should take a look at Goebbels' pre-Pearl Harbor efforts at inflaming isolationist Anglophobia.) It's just as well for Sony-Columbia that Emmerich, Rodat and Gibson didn't make a film that painted the French, the Chinese or even the Arabs into ur- SS war criminals. If they had there would probably be official government protests, popular demonstrations and boycotts. But they have still told a big lie about the war that brought the United States into existence, one that feeds an even greater lie about the war and the enemy the U.S. and Britain fought half a century ago. It's a shameful way to make money. And it's particularly insidious when a film that goes to such lengths to avoid anachronism in Revolutionary period clothing, weaponry and battle tactics takes such license with the nature of the war. In the past, Hollywood has played with historical details in order to make a narrative more compelling or the look of a film more appealing. But it has been an unwritten rule of the American film industry that you try to hew vaguely to the generally accepted account of how things were in the past. It's hard to define, but there is clearly a point where dramatic and poetic license shade into something much more sinister. If you made a film in which the slave trade was shown as two-sided with Africans shown as raiding Europe for slaves to bring to America, or one in which Jews were shown provoking pogroms by drinking the blood of gentile children, you would have passed that point, even if such films were exciting, well acted and starred Gibson. I don't blame Gibson so much; he's only an actor and it's no surprise when actors either willfully or ignorantly overlook historical accuracy for a good role. (Especially when they receive $25 million for their trouble, as Gibson did for "The Patriot.") But I'd like to introduce Emmerich and Rodat to the families of those massacred at Oradour. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- FASCISM IN THE NEWS Racists Attacked! Challenge (Progressive Labor Party) 19 Jul 00 MORRISTOWN, NJ, July 4 -- Hundreds of workers and youth demonstrated here today against the fascist Richard Barrett and his Nationalist Movement organization. PLP organized local workers from Morristown, and students and teachers from New York and New Jersey to confront this Nazi filth. Barrett and his racist followers called their Fourth of July Rally "Independence from Affirmative Action" day and urged support for the former head of the fascist New Jersey State Police, Carl Williams. Williams is the racist who admitted cops use racial profiling to stop Latin and black motorists. Morristown's liberal bosses and religious leaders successfully extinguished much of the local anger by organizing a candlelight vigil the night before the march, urging everyone to stay home. We leafleted the vigil, struggling with residents to come. Many did show up at the protest. Many immigrant workers, documented and undocumented, came to protest Barrett's fascist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Yesterday cops drove through Morristown's Latino threatening workers with arrest and deportation if they showed up today. But this didn't work, one worker saying, "We have to be here in mass numbers to fight against these racists." When the fascists finally appeared at the Morris County Courthouse, we chanted, "Death, Death, Death to the Fascists!" and "Racist Barrett you can't hide, we charge you with genocide!" We drowned out the fascists and gained support from the anti-racist crowd. People clearly saw how the cops in riot gear protected the Nazis and let them march around the courthouse spreading their fascist message. The crowd gained momentum and chanted, "They march, We march!" Angered by the racists, workers and youths broke through the police barricades. The fascists in blue stopped us with pepper spray and horses. Several people were arrested as the hundreds of anti-racists chanted, "Let them go! Let them go!" PLP organized a group of sixty to march to the precinct, completely shutting down the busy downtown South Street. The cops were caught off guard and rushed to control the situation, but they failed to stop the march. As we strode down the streets, we chanted "Fascism means, fight back!" and encouraged people from the community to join us. Bail money was raised to free those arrested. The students and teachers who participated were militant and committed to fight the battle against fascism. When we charged the barricades, they were ready to go with us to smash the racists. They joined the chant of, "Asian, Latin, black and white, workers of the world unite!" and distributed CHALLENGE and thousands of leaflets to workers. After the protest, workers and students refused to leave until our comrades were released from jail. This showed unity and their support for the Party and the working class. A Newark friend said, "I have a profound respect for PLP. I was impressed by the youth, the leadership, and the planning that went into the action. PLP doesn't just talk, but puts actions behind those words." We need dozens, hundreds and thousands of workers and youth like this to make sure next time the neo-Nazis show up their faces, it will be very very hard for their buddies in blue to protect them. The Fight Against Racist Terrorists from Coast to Coast needs $ Many comrades were arrested on July 4 fighting racism. It cost thousands for bail and legal expenses. We need your help. Send contributions to CHALLENGE Periodicals, 150 West 28th St. room 301, NYC 10001, USA <http://www.plp.org> - - - - - Protesters shout down white supremacist Bill Swayze and Margaret McHugh ([Newark NJ] Star Ledger) 5 Jul 00 More than 300 counterdemonstrators shouted down Nationalist Movement founder Richard Barrett and eight of his supporters during a white supremacist march in Morristown yesterday. Police clashed with protesters and made 10 arrests. Tensions erupted even before Barrett and supporters of his Mississippi- based organization marched around the Morris County Courthouse at noon during his four-hour anti-affirmative action rally. Chanting "Death to the fascists, power to the workers," 25 to 30 members of the Progressive Labor Party kicked over barricades and charged a police line as Barrett was setting up his pulpit atop a white pickup truck on Court Street, leading to the first arrests of the day, authorities said. A second clash erupted as the parade began. Rocks, golf balls, batteries and other objects were thrown at Barrett's group and at police. Two marchers said they were hit, but were not injured. Police used pepper spray to control the protesters, and some bystanders, including a 6-year-old boy, were stung. More arrests were made during the melee. Minutes later behind the courthouse, a third fracas was quelled by police, who doused demonstrators with more pepper spray. Authorities said Anthony Call, 27, of Elizabeth, Romel Espinel, 30, of Jersey City, Gary Poole, 30, of New Brunswick, Justin Blasi, 18, of Summit, and James Granuzzo, 19, of Green Brook were arrested on riot and weapon possession charges. Joan Beckerman, 45, of Brooklyn was arrested on riot charges, police said. Paul Heymount, 55, of Brooklyn was arrested on riot and resisting arrest charges, police said. Adam Stevens, 25, of Brooklyn was arrested on riot, resisting arrest and weapon possession charges, police said. A male and female juvenile, both 17, also were arrested on riot charges and sent to the Essex County Juvenile Detention Center, police said. Various bails were set for the adults, who were taken to the Morris County Jail. Jail officials said last night they expected most to post bail and be released. The 56-year-old Barrett, a former resident of East Orange and a graduate of Rutgers University, contended his rally was a success even though only eight of the anticipated 50 supporters showed. "We were able to conquer the despots who wanted to conquer freedom of speech. Freedom of speech won today," Barrett said. But Morris County Sheriff Edward Rochford said, "The people across the street (from Barrett) won. His message did not get out. You could not hear him." To the jeers of the crowd, an ethnic mix consisting mostly of activists from out-of-town, Barrett attacked Gov. Christie Whitman's affirmative- action policies and the ouster last year of State Police Superintendent Carl Williams. Whitman demanded the resignation of Williams on Feb. 28, 1999, following an interview in The Star-Ledger in which the trooper superintendent linked minority groups to drug trafficking. "No one takes issue with Carl Williams when he said, candidly, that minorities carry on the illicit drug trafficking. He told the truth. In doing so, he was in the company of George Washington, who never told a lie," Barrett said. But Barrett's message was mostly drowned out by the din from counterdemonstrators using bullhorns and blaring rap, ska and punk music on a large sound system. The Morris County Area Clergy had urged people not to attend the rally, saying that it would only feed Barrett's hate message. The religious coalition held a diversity celebration and candlelight vigil Monday night that attracted 1,000 people to a local church and the Green. At the time of the rally, about 150 people gathered at the United Methodist Church on the Green to pray for ethnic and religious tolerance and unity. But counterdemonstration groups like the People's Organization for Progress, which opposes police brutality, and the New Jersey chapter of the National Organization for Women said they cannot ignore the Barretts of the world. Joan Mussa, a member of the Progressive Labor Party from Brooklyn, defended her group's aggressive stance against Barrett. "It's not a pretty picture, but isn't it better that we're out here trying to stop them, trying to run them out of town?" she asked. "We must actively oppose racism wherever we find it," said Lawrence Hamm, chairman of the Newark- based People's Organization for Progress. "If you don't oppose them, you create an environment where they (hate groups) flourish." Hamm led a crowd to the courthouse from the home of Stanton Crew, a black man killed by police last year after a car chase on Route 80. But by attracting a large counterprotest, "he (Barrett) got exactly what he wanted," said Brian Marcus, a member of Hatewatch, which monitors hate groups on the Web. Morristown Police Chief Carol Williams said 267 officers from 20 agencies, including 14 municipal police departments, were on hand to control the crowd. Rochford estimated it would cost taxpayers between $80,000 and $120,000 for yesterday's event. While some of the counterdemonstrators criticized the amount of police force, Morristown Mayor John "Jay" DeLaney said it was necessary to quell the melees. "If they're left to run amok, they'll run amok," he said. Barrett announced his plans in April to stage the rally in Morristown on July 4. Morris County tried to require him to obtain $5 million in insurance and reimburse the towns and county for the cost of police and emergency workers, but a federal judge rejected the county's position. - - - - - Jewish vets building defaced: Vandals scrawled black swastikas on a freshly painted North Miami Beach Jewish veterans building over the holiday weekend. Miami Herald 6 Jul 00 Members of the Abe Horrowitz Post 682 were outraged Wednesday night when they discovered four swastikas scrawled across their headquarters at the corner of Northeast 160th Street and 19th Place. North Miami Beach Police crime scene technicians checked the building for fingerprints. Jewish War Veterans of the U.S.A. has been meeting at the tiny building for 44 years. "We do a lot for the community; they're our friends," said a distraught George Becker, president of the chapter. "For Thanksgiving, we gave away 150 food baskets. We hold bingo games every week at the VA hospital." The building, at 15947 NE 19th Pl., is in the Allen Park neighborhood of North Miami Beach. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- RIGHTWING QUOTE OF THE WEEK: For those who believe that fascism is only a thing of the past Bomb the clinics (at night) Terroristman 3 Jul 00 Monday, 03-Jul-2000 19:16:05 Hey everybody if we wanna end the second american holocaust (abortion) we need to get violent.However to prevent infiltration this job must be left up to phantom cell militia units.I suggest you phantom cells start making plans to bomb your local clinic (do this at night whene nobody inside the clinic because if we kill people doing this we will be hypocrits).You can find bomb making info on the net or you can buy them from your local black market dealer.If you need funding to do this you should rob a bank or preform an armored truck heist.This will seriously help get rid of the barbaric practice of abortion.Another thing you can do is with the recent SUpreme court ruling on bubble zones around clinics is before a pro-life demonstration around a clinic you might wanna bomb a few cop cars to lower police mobility.And if you are actually attending the demonstartion hide a steel tip baton under your clothes and beat the hell out of the cops if they try and arrest you or any other demonstrators.Another action you can take is e-terrorism.Find key information hubs on the net that pro- murder(choice)activists go to, to fight to keep the murder of the unborn legal and crash them or delete them so they cannot fight back!!!Another thing you can do is rob banks and have armored truck heists and give the money to pro-life organizations and candidates.Now I am not saying you cannot use non-violent activism like demonstrating and writing letters but please if you lead a phantom cell militia please use terrorism. Remember our government has gotten violent with the people and we must get violent right back!!! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- REAL POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: It's from the rightwing authoritarians and always has been Whitehead Terminated After Closed Meeting, Silence From University Committee American Atheists Newsletter 3 Jul 00 Despite an international campaign in his defense, freethought historian Dr. Fred Whitehead has been terminated from his post at the University of Kansas. A secret, closed-door meeting took place last week -- not even Whitehead can reveal what transpired -- and there has been no formal notice or public announcement from the university as to a decision. Instead, Whitehead discovered Saturday morning, when he inquired about the status of his health benefits through KU, that he had, indeed, been dismissed. Whitehead is the author of numerous books and articles dealing with freethought history and other topics. He had been with the university for 22 years, and was Assistant Professor in charge of its Medical Center Preceptorship Program. Last year, though, Whitehead received verbal notice that his contract, set to expire on July 1, 2000, was not being renewed. In a formal complaint filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Whitehead charged that his firing was relating to his activism and lack of religious beliefs. He cited the growing "religion friendly" environment at the Medical Center, including its official sponsorship -- despite being a public entity --of questionable conferences claiming to link religious belief and physical well being. Whitehead organized his own seminars questioning those assertions, and he has been an outspoken opponent of teaching creationist pseudoscience in Kansas public schools. The campaign on his behalf has generated hundreds of e-mails, letters, faxes and phone calls from around the world, but the university has remained unrepentant. Last Tuesday's meeting was designed to make a formal recommendation on Whitehead's status to the assistant chancellor of the university. "I haven't received any kind of formal, legal notice from the committee," Whitehead told AANEWS this afternoon. "But on Saturday, when I checked with the university to see the status of my health insurance and other benefits, I was informed that I had been terminated." Worse yet for Whitehead, 55, is the fact that the university has decided to deny him any benefits based on sick leave. "I had 1149 hours accumulated in the past 22 years," said Whitehead. "If I had been kept on and eventually retired, I would have received the sick leave pay, but now they're taking that away from me too." The last of his health insurance benefits expire after July 8. University Discrimination Against Nonbelievers? For Whitehead and a growing number of supporters, the University of Kansas is engaged in blatant discrimination on the basis of faith -- or rather the professor's lack of it. Despite his impressive academic background such as a Fulbright Scholarship at University College in London, England, membership in Phi Beta Kappa and other credentials, Whitehead's dismissal seems to be linked to his activism as a freethought historian and outspoken defender of evolution. In November of last year, Whitehead organized a national event appropriately dubbed "Monkey Business in Kansas" about his state's evolution-creationism controversy. The closest the university has come to providing specifics in its dismissal of Whitehead is a verbal explanation given to him by the Executive Dean of the KU Medical School, that his research "does not fit the mission" of the university. Behind the scenes, though, university administrators have also suggested that Whitehead -- who was making an annual salary of $37,000 -- was being axed because of budget constraints. "That seems odd," he told AANEWS. He cited the fact that the Dean of the school, Dr. Deborah Powell makes a generous $268,000 per hear, while husband, pathologist Ralph Powell, takes in another $182,000 --combined salaries amounting to $450,000 per year, or over a dozen times the annual pay for Whitehead. Local media have been focusing considerable attention to Whitehead's case, and last month the Kansas City Star called for a resolution in the matter and an explanation from the University. Questions are also being raised about the propriety -- and constitutionality -- of the university's sponsorship of seminars which some say are academically flawed and promote religious superstition. Whitehead's supporters say there is growing evidence of a link involving the firing and the "religion friendly" direction of the KU Medical Center and other medical institutions across the country. * * * * * 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. __________________________________________________________________________ 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/> --- Sponsor's Message -------------------------------------- According to the Federal Government, there is a shortage in the United States of over 750,000 high tech workers. 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