Thursday 19 December 2013

When the Levees Broke
(2006)

RATING:100%
FORMAT:DVD



Despite the inordinate length of this documentary, there is not a second of padding here. Moreover, and unusually, the director’s commentary is actually worth listening to.

A documentary about the disaster of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans in 2005 exacerbated by the disastrously slow and unprioritized response of the various federal agencies - with the notable exception of the US Coast Guard. Looting took place not only for the usual materialist reasons but because food, water and medical aid was not forthcoming from the federal government. Looting that even the police took part in as often as they were trying to stop it.

This entire documentary is a searing indictment of the attitude of White America toward Blacks & poor Whites - whose lives count for less than affluent or wealthy Whites. Blacks trying to escape the carnage into White areas were forced at gunpoint to return. It becomes obvious that many White witnesses are desperately trying to conceal their White supremacy behind the shooting of looters; while the Black witnesses are not so surprised at the White response of not taking the storm as seriously as the situation demanded. Here, the White fear of Blacks manifests itself in trying to police the survivors rather than actually help them; using the National Guard as an occupying force rather than a relieving one.

How such a thing could happen in a rich country like the United States beggars the imagination but, when one considers that that wealth was built on the suffering of Blacks, perhaps that is not so surprising. When help finally came, its resemblance to a slave auction is palpable along with the claim that Blacks were “Refugees” (rather than “Evacuees”) as if they had suddenly become stateless in their own land. Along with the odd belief that Black lives were improved by a kind of act-of-god slum-clearance program called Katrina.

The sense here is that Blacks were deliberately allowed to drown by Whites because of an inadequate levee protection system and that dispersing Evacuees to other states was really a way of getting rid of Blacks from New Orleans. The lack of post-Katrina compensation only made things worse - the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is more of a disaster than the storm ever was. The bald-faced lies of the US president regarding Whites’ conventionalized fear of Blacks are summed-up best by Sean Penn: ‘This was America; this was today; and, this was a Third-World scene’. A national embarrassment and a national disgrace where Blacks are viewed as literally picayune by Whites who claim Blacks are natural-born looters, trespassers and that their predicament is their own fault, anyway. The difference between the BBC & CNN reporting was that the former focused on victims; the latter, on the physical destruction - as if there were no victims of consequence.

What impresses most is the desire of so many New Orleanais to rebuild what has been taken away from them both by the storm and the federal government. As well as the largely unshakeable humor of the residents.


Copyright © 2013 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Tuesday 2 April 2013

MPs want immigrant ban to save British jobs
(2013)



As always, Whites want to protect the lazy from their own fecklessness - so long as they are White. The White sense of racial entitlement makes them think they have an automatic right to a job regardless of skills, abilities, experience and qualifications; making it actually unnecessary to possess any of these things to a high degree.

Jobs do not possess an intrinsic nationality, so this means protecting lazy Whites from non-White competition, as well as from the realization that the world does not owe Whites a living.

As with industries protected by high import tariffs, local workers will simply see that, since their jobs are protected, there will be less need for them to actually earn the right to be employed by actually working hard.

Encouraging laziness - in this way - simply undermines any likely economic recovery by subsidising failure, so that White politicians can get easy votes from other White supremacists.


Copyright © 2013 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Tuesday 5 February 2013

Chagrin et la Pitié
[Sorrow and the Pity]
(1969)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:DVD



Inevitably, this film is too long to support its content, but it does exert a morbid fascination. It asks: “What did you do in the Occupation, Daddy?” a question that re-lives the sorrow and the pity of that occupation.

People consider more what they have to lose than to gain, which is why so few joined the Maquis while so many claimed to be members. The greatest pleasure in this film is watching a bunch of aging Frenchmen animatedly reminisce about their days in the Resistance. Essentially a band of misfits who would likely never have come together for any other reason, they found war to be their route to selfhood. War clearly brings out the best in people as well as the worst.

The guilt and shame of postwar France comes from the widespread political collaboration, with the Germans, of Vichy: Essentially rendering themselves a pro-German Axis power. The endemic anti-Semitism of French culture led French police to help the Nazis find Jews and become vigorously complicit in the Holocaust. French laws were even more racist than German ones as genetic murder is an effective means of eliminating the economic and political competition.

As it can be difficult to separate a German from a Nazi, it can be hard to distinguish a patriot from a collaborator. It is all too easy to condemn collaborators, from the outside, but this is morally-complex territory. The fact that France was the only country involved in the Second World War occupied by Nazi Germany to agree an armistice - rather than simply surrender - damns the whole country as collaborationist. Of all the occupied lands, the French were the most conscientious rounders-up of jews for transportation to the gas chambers; leading one to the conclusion that France is as endemically anti-semitic as Germany. This is as good an example as any of the recurrent bouts of European phenotypism that regularly comes to the surface.

The political defeat of France in 1940 was inevitable but the military failure was not since France possessed a more powerful military than Nazi Germany. The Germans exploited this by partitioning France and thus dividing it against itself.

The lack of moral complexity of this documentary is evinced in contemporary issues such as the ethical difficulty of being White in a country unhealthily obsessed with skin pigmentation. Or a Westerner in a world apparently running out of the resources Westerners are squandering.

The ultimate moral issue is food since without it one cannot be a moral entity - the dead are amoral, after all. If the Third World starves, the First will not take the food from its children's mouths to feed it. If a qualified Black is not hired because he is black, the less qualified White then employed would not renounce his post if he learned of this.

Collaboration is more complex than this film admits since the movie never draws any useful parallels with other areas of collaborationist thought and activity.

The occupation of ones homeland is a classic example of discovering what people are really like. They are usually very willing to exploit the unethical advantages of collaboration to obtain financial advantages. A give-me-your-watch-and-I’ll-tell-you-the-time point made more simply and more profoundly in a thriller like Inside Man. The narrow moral focus here is as unethical as the collaboration being condemned.


Copyright © 2013 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Tuesday 29 January 2013

Black Jacobins
(1938)

RATING:100%
FORMAT:Book



A fantastic and superbly-written book about the only successful slave revolt in history that shows just what Blacks can do given the right circumstances and leadership.

This book that gets right to the heart of why Whites approved of African slavery for 500 years. Without the guilt and shame of a typical White historian this is an eidetic view of the challenges posed by White supremacy - then and now; exposing the real reasons for the abolition of racial slavery: Free trade is more profitable than mercantilism since one can then sell to the highest bidder and not just ones own government. As well as the fact the British government’s jealousy of the French making more money than they at the traffic in human misery that the possession of India meant the British need no longer indulge in.

Humanitarianism is absent from this account since a humanitarian country would obviously never have become involved in racial slavery in the first place. The book then comes to the obvious conclusion that White history books simply lie about the ethical role of Whites in the emancipation of African slaves.

What makes this book so readable is the precision with which the writer effectively skewers White politics as quintessentially White supremacist with humor, wit and irony.

The mixture of fear and envy Whites have for the exotic is stressed here through their repeated claim that anything foreign is inferior while being embraced to fund the English (17th century) and French (18th century) revolutions. A supreme irony of history is that both these bids for freedom and statements of the inalienable rights of Man were made possible by a bourgeoisie made rich from African slavery. The moral contradictions of White culture today stem from such institutions as the writer here makes many links between the past and the present.

That the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself never simultaneously abolished the various European empires and the White racism that drove them on is a telling legacy that remains with us to this very day.


Copyright © 2013 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Autobiography of Malcolm X
(1968)

RATING:100%
FORMAT:Book

Purposeful Life

Way above-average story of redemption leading to a strong sense of personal identity and purpose.

This one serves as a valuable source of a role-model in the form of Malcolm X’s life as he salvaged and reconstructed it from the predations of White, Christian culture and proved that it could be done. As inspirational, in its way, as any honest account of the life of Muhammad Ali. They both realized that without self-identification, there can be no self-determination.

The most obvious fact of the book of greatest interest to Blacks, is that bit represents the most politically-ontogenetic experience for Blacks in a White supremacist culture as they try to forge a cultural identity for themselves in the face of mass hostility from those who themselves lack a clear sense of ethic identity.

Growing up in a White culture that demands Blacks was Malcolm X’s quintessential problem as a maturing and sensitive man and was the cause of his many political mistakes during his life - especially the veering from one political extreme to the other. Still, moderation is only for people who choose not to grow up since the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. A moderate knows only about moderation, not about other political positions, so he really knows very little at all.


Copyright © 2013 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Tuesday 8 January 2013

Blacksnake
[Slaves]
(1973)

RATING:100%
FORMAT:DVD



From Russ Meyer’s period of making more serious films in a more serious way in widescreen (eg, Seven Minutes); before returning to make humorous films about serious subjects.

The black slave-trade theme is well handled and the melodramatic performing style successfully brings out the racist emotions of the White characters and the righteous anger of the Blacks.

Anushka HEMPEL makes a surprisingly-sexy racist.


Copyright © 2013 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.