Paul, War Film and Palestine

Wednesday 12.07.06 - I heard the news of a death today. Paul a traveller, rough sleeper, peace-making man and occasional rough speaker, died in a public toilet at Market Square on Monday evening. He'd only been back from Mumbai 10 days. I last spoke to him on the previous Thursday and he looked gaunt, worn out and taking prescribed Omeprazole to quiet a troubled stomach. Paul thought he had intestinal worms. He had visited the hospital and was waiting on results from tests for tropical diseases. He certainly had an infection on his feet that he picked up while in India and which didn't look good. From the local press.

The post mortem results showed a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm which was missed at the hospital. Medicinenet.com sees the diagnostic process for this condition as: "Careful feeling of the abdomen by the doctor may reveal the abnormally wide pulsation of the abdominal aorta. This is characteristically felt on both sides of the aorta which is in the midline of the abdomen. Note that even large aneurysms can be very difficult to detect on physical examination in overweight people. Aneurysms on the verge of rupture and that are rapidly enlarging, are often tender."

Paul could, at the best be described as scrawny.

He didn't die alone. Two friends, Richard and Jay were with him and they called the Para-medics who arrived quickly but couldn't save Paul. The Police arrived 4 hours after his death and arrested Richard and Jay on suspicion of murder. They were held for 15hrs. This is the culture of the Police today.

During the summer of last year Paul became the spokesperson for a group of travellers in discussions with the local Council. There had been complaints about them hanging about in Market Square and Paul had been invited to the Council to address them about the problems travellers were facing and what could be done to help alleviate any conflict with the more conservative locals. It seemed to have been a successful meeting and Paul's contribution welcomed. About a week later he was beaten up and arrested by local Police.

Except learning a lot about silk, Paul told me that this latest trip to India was a disaster. He thought he was going to die there. Abandoned by his travelling companion he had to find a way back, via 600 miles in Monsoon rain to Mumbai without money. He made it, and the journey back to Totnes to die in a public toilet.

I'd just read the days headlines when informed of Paul's death, he died the evening before the Mumbai rail network was bombed with 180 people killed, and ten days after leaving that city. Pakistan is being named by India as the place from which the bombings were organised. Three hours later the news is that Israel is making incursions into Lebanon and threatening war following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. Gaza is now the free fire zone predicted at the time of Israel's withdrawl last year. And every hour today, like every other day, another atrocity will be committed in Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramada by an illegal occupying force or their puppet proxies. Not a very good day for life.

While in a conversation with Paul last winter, long before his disastrous trip to India, this articulate, intelligent and self-deprecatingly witty man who liked a drink and a smoke, had told me he had served in the Israeli Army. At that time his world was his comrades and it was only later, long after he had left the IDF and gained wider horizons that he realised how massive was the crime being committed against the Palestinians. He always had a Star of David on him.

Since Paul's death his travelling companion has stated that he was not abandoned and that Paul left the hotel where they were staying and didn't return before the companion left the area after searching for him. Paul told me they did meet up at the consulate in Mumbai by chance and the travelling companion had put up posters asking for any news of him. The fact the poster stated his Israel connection in a city of many Muslims frightened him. To say Israel is not liked throughout the Muslim world because of it's actions is an understatement.

I'd been on my way to the DVD shop to pick up a film I'd ordered the last time Paul and I spoke, when he told me of the disaster that the India trip became. The film was the 1985 cinema release of Elem Klimov's award winning 'Come and See'. A war film by which all other war films are judged and found wanting. Especially the likes of Apocalypse Now!, Platoon or Hamburger Hill. 'Finding Private Ryan' says nothing in comparison and you do not see the on-screen evisceration of human bodies in 'Come and See' - just the aftermath.

Lewis Milestone's 1930 'All Quiet On The Western Front' comes close in its lyricism but Europe had not yet experienced the effects of a racist state's mechanised 'Total War' on civilian populations. The war Milestone used to condemned all war in his Oscar winning film was fought, in Europe at least, between Armies facing each other across trenches. Slaughter it was, but slaughter between combatants and not generally directed against civilians.

'Come and See' is about the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union - operation Barbarosa - and the partisan struggle in Belarus to defeat them as seen through the horrific experiences of a young man. More a boy still in his naive adolescence enduring an extreme rites of passage as the hormones rage.

The boy, Florya, played by 13 year-old Alexei Kravchenko in his first acting role, joins the Partisans where he starts to lose the romanticism of war with the mundane chores of the lower rank squaddie at base camp. He is left behind with others by the commander of the partisans to guard the camp while the main force of partisans goes off and campaigns against the marauding Nazis. The camp is shelled and overrun. Florya, along with a young woman are separated from the partisans and travel through a land visited by horror where ever the Nazis have been.

Florya becomes detached from everyone till befriended by a farmer and taken to his village. A 'Punitive Detachment' of Germans arrive at the village. Everybody is herded and gaoled in the communal, wooden barn including Florya. At a high window an SS Officer appears and says to the incarcerated villagers,

"With no children get out. Right here, out the window. Leave the children. Come. Get out."

(all dialogue from the film is from the dubbed version. There are also subtitles if wanted.)

Florya took the opportunity and escaped the barn. A woman with a young child followed him. The child was ripped from her arms and thrown back through the window whilst she is dragged by her hair to the detachment's commander who reprieves her life for the pleasure of his troops to gang rape. After the child is thrown back into the barn it is set alight and all inside are incinerated while the Nazis joke and laugh, their blood-lust up.

During the Nazi invasion and occupation of Byelorussia in 1943, 626 villages were burnt to the ground with all their inhabitants just as depicted in the film.

In 'Come an See', the Punitive Detachment is ambushed and destroyed by the partisans shortly after the razing of the village and the Nazi commanders captured. Florya catches up with them and denounces the SS Officer from the barn window. The SS Officer in all his hubris then proceeds to espouse the racism at the heart of Nazi philosophy,

"Yes I said that - 'come and leave the children. Get out and leave the children'.

I said that because with the children it starts all over again. You've got no right to be! Not every race, not everyone has a privileged right to exist.

Inferior races spread the contagion of communism. We will annihilate. My mission will be accomplished. If not today tomorrow."

This scene ends with the execution of the Nazi commanders - condemned by their own words and actions.

This is a great film and unfortunately I do not have the space or time here to give enough of a critique of 'Come and See'; its humour; the scene by scene symbolism; the flatness of colour and how it adds texture; the scope of suffering or heroics of the cast and crew; the virtuoso Steadycam work by camera operator Radionov: the deep psychological dramas enacted by a stunning Alexei Kravchenko when still only thirteen; the wonderful Olga Mironova as Glasha; the lack of visuals of bullets or explosions ripping flesh in this blood drenched film - unlike Hollywood its not what you see but what you imagine that makes for the horror.

The DVD is a two disc package with interviews and Soviet historical film from the actual campaign. The interview with the director, Elem Klimov is a must and should be watched as a prologue to the film.

A few quotes from the Klimov prologue;

"If people had stronger nerves our audience would be more numerous."

"In America people can hardly watch this film. I think their problem, they say, 'we have thrillers, but here it's something different. It's real life.'"

The films sensibilities, especially in the early scenes reminded me of a work by another great Russian creative. Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 'A Precocious Autobiography' relayed some of his own youthful experiences during WWII in Russia and the psychological impact on him seemed similar to that of Florya in the film.

The release of 'Come and See' on DVD is apposite. This week, 11th to 15th July 2006 is the 58th Remembrance of the Palestinian Catastrophe - al-Nakba - when in 1948 Palestinian towns and villages were attacked and razed by Jewish terrorist organisations like Irgun or as in Lydda, assaulted by the Israeli Commando Battalion 89 led by Moshe Dayan. By the end of the day at least 250 people had been killed in Lydda, only four of them Israeli Jews. Sandy Tolan at TomDispatch has written a piece of truth on Gaza today and its relation to al-Nakba and The Death March.

What Israel is doing in Gaza, the West Bank and now in Lebanon is justified in the same language of racism as that employed in Byelorussia in 1943.

To make another people 'Other', some quotes from prominent Israelis;

"There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001

Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, "the lives and well-being of Sderot's residents are more important than those of Gaza residents".

Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail."

Dov Weissglas, the Israeli Government's senior political advisor commenting on the economic siege of Palestine, "is like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but they won't starve to death".

"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

" [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.

"The Palestinians would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

"When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.

"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.

"There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969

(The first and last six of the above quotes are available at Whatreallyhappened.com)

These are the racist words that make the racist policy being implemented in Gaza and the West Bank. With the building of industrial zones on the Israeli side of the Apartheid wall the inhabitants of the planned Palestinian ghettos of the West Bank will be cheap, impoverished labour, if not slave labour. The only other end to this road - unless Israel is stopped - is the dead-end of genocide.

From Ramzy Baroud at Palestine Chronicle,

'Racism is "the belief that one 'racial group' is inferior to another and the practices of the dominant group to maintain the inferior position of the dominated group. Often defined as a combination of power, prejudice and discrimination."

This is how the British Library defines racism on its Web site. The above definition hardly deviates from the essence of almost all definitions of the ominous concept. And, indeed, the concept is being fully utilized with Israel's onslaught against the Palestinians, and the international community and media's mild, if not accommodating response to the onslaught.'

The results of this policy when put in action can be seen in the casualties from Gaza. The mutilated bodies of children and annihilation of whole families. To rescue one captured Israeli soldier?

From Dr Mona El Farra in Gaza

Thursday, July 13, 2006
ministry of health statestics,injured and dead in Gaza

Yesterday the Palestinian Mininstry of health officially declared that the number
of martyrs is 82 people and 271 injured from 30 - 6 - 2006 to 12 - 7 - 2006. Among
the martyrs 22 children. The number is expected to increase because there are
still casualties in the intensive care units.

It all seems to be coming together, coalescing, happening all at once. The step up in rhetoric from the neocons about any country that has oil; The police actions in Canada, Miami and Forest Gate all deeply suspect; the report of the de Menezes killing released; the arrest of Lord Levy, bagman and special envoy to the Middle East for blair; Mumbai; Iran continuing, as is their right to develop civilian nuclear power and under the threat of nuclear attack; occupying forces and sectarian atrocities continuing in destroyed Iraq; the destruction of Lebanon; Palestine.

Talking with Paul last autumn - he with his Star of David and me wearing a kaffiyeh - he was emphatic that he had married minor aristocracy with a seat in East Anglia. I have no reason not to believe him. People hit the road for many reasons and the claustrophobic alienation he said he felt amongst those inside the gates of affluence is a better reason than many. Whereas our prime minister, blair is comfortable with the affluence, not alienated at all, in fact he is especially snug with the war criminals he has joined and who infest the affluent international milieu.

blair made a statement a couple of weeks ago about Muslims having a "completely false sense of grievance against the West." This after Britain participated in an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq that is degenerating into a charnel house! A hundred years of meddling in the affairs of the Arab and Muslim world because they sit on the most precious commodity in the world and he comes up with that. The first British regiment mobilised and posted at the outbreak of World War One was the Dorset's and they were sent to Basra. That's right, Basra in Iraq. The regiment is now known as the Devonshire & Dorset Light Infantry, who are raised locally and are again in Basra in Iraq today. They lost a soldier on Sunday 17th July, Cpl John Johnston Cosby from Exeter was killed in action. Another young, well liked family man to die for a blair lie.

For blair to say that Muslims have a "completely false sense of grievance against the West‚" is to accuse them and history of lying. Once blair starts accusing a people of lying he places them in a morally inferior position to himself. In fact the lie belongs with blair and for blair to believe his own lie he has to think himself superior to those he accuses of lying. This is how racism gains hold in the thinking of those who try to justify their war crimes.

blair's response to the latest Israeli atrocities has re-enforced the Anglo-American-Israeli alliance by blaming Syria and Iran for the Israeli attack on Lebanon. (It is a very unequal alliance for us. The British role is basically subservient to the US. British nationals can be extradited to the US by employing the words "we accuse" and with no need to offer any evidence in a British court that the accused may have committed a crime in the US. This is not reciprocated - not that it would be a better state of affairs if it were. It means that American law supersedes, supplants British law. Whoever signed this extradition treaty should be charged with treason. Methinks we are now worse than servants, more like the Greeks to Imperial Rome - slaves.)

It is this international triumvirate that needs to be split if peace is to have a hope of being realised. As Sun-Tzu said two and a half thousand years ago in The Art of War,

"Ultimate excellency lies
Not in winning
Every battle
But in defeating the enemy
Without ever fighting.
The highest form of warfare
Is to attack
Strategy itself;

The next,
To attack
Alliances;"

The strategy of this international triumvirate of war criminals is quite simple - destabilisation in the the world's most important region for energy supplies. They want no more than to Balkanise the entire region along the sectarian lines of religion and ethnicity, the better to control the flow of energy for their own benefit. Small and weak religious or ethnic based states, fractious with neighbours they have warred against in their creation, are much easier to corruptly dominate by an outside power. To achieve this the outside power requires the passive support of their own populations and in making the Arab/Muslim 'Other' they believe they can do it.

The racism that saturates the Israeli policy toward the Arab/Muslim is also trying to be used in Britain by 'people in the shadows'. During a period of sustained national fervour in the build up to the World Cup, the secret police instigated a raid on a house in Forest Gate in an anti-terrorism operation, shooting and wounding an innocent British Muslim. They acted on information supplied by an 'interrogated' imprisoned Asian Muslim with a borderline imbeciles low IQ who knew the people who lived at the Forest Gate house. After a week the wounded innocent was released without charge. Around the same time in Canada a group of Canadian Muslims were arrested and in Miami an FBI sting operation - a set up - netted six poor and luckless Black Americans and Haitians.

I do not believe that the timing of these raids was an accident and that the World Cup had no role to play. An opportunity to exploit the national fervour amongst people so as to try and isolate another race/religion from the dominating culture, to add to making them 'Other' as 'Terrorists', would not be missed by reactionary forces within the state. The arms manufacturers; predatory capitalists; the CIA/MI6/Mossad alliance; some in the military Officer Corps and the higher echelons of Civil Servants; blair; the Carlyle Group; the Murdoch media, the affluent milieu, they all benefit. The wider and deeper imperial war becomes the more they will accrue power to themselves in an attempt to try and control dissent from their civil societies against war.

Late last year there were riots in Birmingham. British Asian Muslims and British Afro-Caribbeans had had a go at each other. A rumour spread that some Asian youths had raped an Afro-Caribbean young woman. After the fighting and rioting ended it came to light that no such rape had occurred. Nobody could find who started the rumour. The instigation of rumour has an important role in a states Psy-ops armoury and exploiting the tensions that do exist between Asian and Black cannot be discounted. To divide two minority groups against each other and in effect exacerbate a race/religious division between poor and poor has always been a tactic of the powerful. Rumour helps.

Most commentators critical of the war have concentrated on refuting the lies that are used to justify carnage, responding to events, yet it is the deceptions that are brought into play prior to the carnage justifying lie being uttered that needs to be challenged. From Sun-Tzu, again;

"The Way of War is
A Way of Deception.

When able
Feign inability;

When deploying troops,
Appear not to be.

When near,
Appear far;

Lure with bait;

Strike with chaos."

(Are the British and American nationals still left in Lebanon the bait, who if harmed would justify an Anglo/American military intervention in support of Israel?)

No other world power can militarily challenge this nuclear armed triumvirate without entering into a nuclear war and our extinction as a species. Anyway I don't fancy a war between competing centres of capitalism now that Russia is launching energy giants like Rosfnet on the London Stock exchange and opening a bourse trading its oil in Roubles in Moscow. I want an end to the global capitalist system. (International currency dealer and billionaire, Soros was complaining about the Rosfnet launch on the front page of the Independent the other day claiming it was immoral. Bollocks. When has capitalism had any morals. All the Russian emergence on the international currency markets will do to Soros is make his dealings more complicated and maybe marginally more difficult. He'll still be affluent and able to distort a nations economy and cause mass unemployment with his currency dealings. His major worry is for the dollars pre-eminence as the petro-dollar and the effect of the Russian launch on the bubble that is the American economy. One prick and .........)

It will take the poor not the rich to stop this war, split the alliance. The poor - those in whose interest peace is a priority and who do not profit from atrocity.

Despite the seeming power of the Anglo-American-Israeli alliance and invincibility of their military, there is weakness there and the weakest link I think is Britain. We are not yet so pervaded with racism as is Israel and we still have mass organisation of the people in the Trades Union movement unlike America. The TU's are not as active as one would like but they still exist and can, if won to anti-racist struggle in solidarity with British Asian Muslim workers, be a decisive force in breaking Britain's alliance with America/Israel. It will still require the TU leadership to step outside the economism that has driven their rationale since the defeat of the Miners in 1984/5 and gain a wider political perspective. Not to be afraid to use their power for the collective, moral good. If the leadership won't do this then the membership at branch level will have to. A tall order but not unachievable.

Almost immediately after the release of the Forest Gate casualty a non-violent demonstration was organised in the area against the police action and which attracted thousands. In attendance were some of the relatives and friends campaigning for justice for the assassinated Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes. Another innocent casualty in the 'war on terror' or the 'long war' as it has been renamed by the neocons.

The way to go. All forms of non-violent action are legitimate in trying to stop the war crimes our leadership are committing around the world. Non-violent mass participatory civil disobedience and direct action are the tools that have traditionally been the means of bringing change to the political landscape when used by the poor and disenfranchised.

Paul was 58, the same age as Israel, when he died. That is a long life for rough sleepers and travellers - living without a roof can cut 30 years off life expectancy.

Before he left for India Paul said he would bring something back for me. Here it is.

Thanks Paul.