The 1959 social revolution in Rwanda saw the deposition of the Tutsi monarchy and aristocracy and the freeing of the majority Hutu population from serfdom. Following this, the Rwandan military became a multiethnic army composed of both Hutus and Tutsis.

Around the globe an ominous build-up of military might is taking place, and it is doing so almost entirely beneath the radar of public attention.

Since 2005, there has been a large scale deployment and stockpiling of advanced weapons systems throughout the territories and seas surrounding Russia, China, and Iran. These include (as a bare outline): major US weapons transfers to Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and India; US Patriot missiles in Poland; an early missile warning system in the Czech Republic; US troops and weapons in Georgia, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Central Asia; US-made Aegis missiles in Taiwan; new US naval deployments in the Black Sea; new US weapons systems situated in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia; a formidable naval deployment in the Persian Gulf including Israeli submarines (bearing nuclear weapons) targeted at Iran; and a host of new US air and ship-based anti-ballistic missile systems located on US fleets throughout the Mediterranean, the Sea of Japan, the Taiwan St., and the South China Sea.

I was going to entitle this essay, ‘Global Affairs Goes to the Oscars’, but truth to tell, I rather doubt I would ever actually attend the Academy Awards even in the unlikely event I was ever nominated for one. I am, after all, chastened in this regard by Guy Debord’s withering critique of the ‘celebrity’, or as he termed them, ‘agents of the spectacle’:
 
“The agent…placed on stage as a star is the opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in himself as well as in others. Passing into the spectacle as a model for identification the agent renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the course of things.”
 
Ouch.
 
Still, who knows? In the movie Papillion the character ‘Dega’ (played by Dustin Hoffman) remarks poignantly and admiringly to a self-sacrificing ‘Pappy’ (Steve McQueen), “They say that temptation to resistance is the true measure of character.” Too true, and who then can guarantee their conduct when confronted in a dark alley with a bona fide temptation? But let me have my fantasy. I am nominated, I win, I refuse the award and retreat to my island redoubt to contemplate in world-weary solitude the politics and poetry of the cinema.
 
Stop, cut, fade to black….No I don’t. That’s not my fantasy. Instead, I storm up onto stage, take the damn award, move menacingly towards the microphone and intone softly if gravely, “Remember, remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why the Academy’s members should not all be bound and shot.”
 
Ah, V for Vendetta. What member of the cultural and political resistance can fail to warm to the memory of this poem to revolution. Who did not feel a forbidden thrill of excitement course through their veins when the Old Bailey was blown to smithereens? That the film was, to boot, beautifully crafted, scripted and acted and yet failed to win even a nomination let alone an award is, of course, testament to the tawdry fact that any film, book, magazine, individual, or issue truly threatening to the status quo is routinely and inevitably given the kiss of mass media death, the death of silence. (By the by, does anyone remember the best pic that year, i.e. 2006? It was ‘Crash’. Totally forgettable.)
 
There are some, naturally, who will say that ‘V’ was merely a ‘cartoon’ representative of some futuristic dystopian fantasy scenario, with but passing relevance to modern Western society. These, however, are likely cut from the same cloth as those who have also for decades claimed that Orwell’s 1984 is passé, no longer relevant; who seem, in short, incapable of grasping the essence of satire, parody and allegory. But then, deliberately failing to see the truth within the literature, the substance behind the caricature, is merely part and parcel of the diseased case history of the appropriately house-broken literary and cinema pundit. Not to worry, we hold our own awards in our hearts.
 
The ‘political movie’ has, of course, a long and illustrious – if highly episodic – pedigree. Some, such as Oliver Stone’s Salvador and JFK are brazenly critical of official realities. Yet others, including Stone’s Platoon, with its glorification of the heroism of the American foot soldier (remember the massacres counter-posed by babies in arms, the Christ-like posture of William Defoe’s character in death, etc), its rendering of the enemy as mere faceless demons (‘gooks’), and its promotion of the myth of Vietnam as ‘error and aberration’ of US foreign policy, are merely closet propaganda films – even if, as in the case of Platoon, damn fine ones.
 
I must admit to holding anti-war films in very high esteem. War is, after all, the ultimate expression of the working man and woman’s tragic and useless sacrifice to interests no where their own. The pinnacle of ruling class exploitation. Cinema that attempts to break the thrall of this age-old mystification gets my vote every time. Here again, though, one has to be on guard for the counterfeit. All Quiet On The Western Front, Gallipoli, Born On The Fourth of July, and Brain De Palma’s Redacted bear the stamp of authenticity. Passchendaele, the Canadian film industry’s recent love-in with the First World War, on the other hand, does not.
 
Needless to say, pure propaganda pieces abound. One of the most egregious that comes to mind is Hotel Rwanda, a film whose message was bought hook, line and sinker both by the media, the wider viewing audience and most of the ‘left’. This despite the fact (amongst a host of others) that the real life hero of the movie, Paul Rusesabgina, completely contradicted the import of the film by stating in an interview with Keith Harmon Snow that the Rwandan ‘genocide’ was, in truth, the result of an invasion by Paul Kagame and his Tutsi forces from Uganda, (backed by the US, and aided and abetted by Canada), and that it was they who did most of the killing. In short, the so-called ‘Rwandan genocide’ of 1994, far from being some more or less random outbreak of African tribal irrationalism, was instead a very calculated Western inspired invasion and coup; a coup whose rationale was the continued fractionation and conquest of the mineral rich Congo region. [See, ‘Hotel Propaganda’, Mayday, Issue #10]. It seems that the victors not only write the histories, they write the films too.
 
There are, naturally, many war films that are neither pure propaganda pieces nor pure anti-war flics. Classics like Bridge On The River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence at least attempt to humanize the ‘enemy’ to some degree. Occasionally, there are even those films that, like the Scarlet Pimpernel through France, slip seemingly undetected by any ‘category’ filter at all. Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, for instance, presents on the surface as just another sensationalist and violent war movie. But look closer and you’ll notice that the script is permeated throughout by piercing and subversive class-warfare style dialogue. Who would have thunk?
 
Indeed, though the overtly political movie is, well, if not legion, then numerous (think of The Candidate, Norma Rae, Wag the Dog, Reds, Malcolm X, etc) my affection extends especially to those big Hollywood flics that manage the art of embracing excellent film-making and good story-telling whilst expressing powerful and barely veiled social critiques as well. Can you think of one? How about The Truman Show?
 
In this ostensibly absurdist drama the hero (played by a delicately anarchic Jim Carey) is raised from birth literally in a gigantic bubble where his every action is filmed and broadcast to a waiting world eager to digest the soap opera life of a ‘real’ person. His wife, his friends, his work, his entire social world is a complete fraud concocted to keep him happy, docile and ignorant.
 
Ask a hundred people – or a dozen film critics – what The Truman Show was about, and that’s pretty much what you’ll get as a response. I know, I’ve done the experiment. But, of course, the Truman Show was nothing of the sort. It was, in fact, a self-conscious allegory of Western society; a metaphor for a media-constructed reality in which everyman is Truman, and where we are all more or less deceived by the official communications institutions – indeed, by all the establishment institutions period – as to the actual goings-on in the world. We live, thus, in a fake informational world where black is white and down is up. The beauty of this film lay in its delightful rendering of an otherwise ridiculous story, combined with the sheer transparency – and profundity - of its meaning and message. A meaning and message, however, which precisely because of its profundity was, for our well-trained media pundits, quite obviously not transparent enough.
 
Actually, what is probably more accurate to say is not so much how few got The Truman Show’s message, as how strenuous was the official media’s efforts to downplay and silence that message. Which brings us to the 2010 Academy Awards ceremony. May I have the envelope please.
 
“And now, for the film of the year whose clear and overwhelming meaning is destined to be totally silenced and / or ignored by the official media, the award goes to…… Avatar!” {Thunderous applause}.
 
 Avatar. A visual feast to be sure, but equally as important is the film’s clear and unequivocal anti-imperialist statement. It is not by accident, then, that director James Cameron chose to portray the military figures in the flic as quintessential US Marine types. There’s no mistaking these macho, super-chauvinist dudes, or the craftily embedded reference to fighting ‘terrorism’ by the chief antagonist. Indeed, for the savvy political theorist, the fact that these military folk work as private contractors for a futuristic mining firm in no way detracts from their association with US/NATO forces especially in light of the knowledge that much of the US military and its services have (as has the entire US government) already been hollowed out and privatized.
 
What also grabbed my attention was the movie’s fixation on sheer technological prowess and overwhelming firepower – especially air power – as deployed against an essentially helpless population. Substitute the people of Iraq or Afghanistan for the Navi of Pandora and the equation is pretty much complete. Throw in a little tinder, a little reminder such as the 27 Afghani civilians incinerated this past week by a NATO air strike and the whole ensemble jumps to life.
 
But fear not, Avatar will win the award for best picture. There will be much ado about the value of ‘art’ and such. Meanwhile the import of the movie will be quietly shelved along with the little golden idols it will have garnered. And like the two yobos who find themselves first buoyed, then merely bored by Truman’s freedom, we’ll simply turn the channel and ask, ‘Where’s the TV Guide?’