Revolutionaries
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During the winding conversation about counterfactuals, Megan McArdle made a remark almost in passing that is worth revisiting in light of another conversation about the new film, Che, and its director, Steven Sonderbergh. McArdle wrote:
Nor does almost anyone in the United States put the IRA, or its cause in the same mental basket as that of the Northern Irish. Imagine, if you will, a blockbuster film being made about a plucky Arab terrorist leader finally winning freedom for his people by slaughtering large numbers of Israeli/British/French soldiers, along with, of course, any informers or traitors in his own organization. In Irish, it’s known as Michael Collins.
If you grew up learning the mythology of the 700 years of oppression, the Easter Rising and how Collins broke the Castle’s intelligence operation, valorizing Collins doesn’t seem so odd. When Americans watch Michael Collins, if they aren’t already familiar with his story, they already know which side they’re supposed to find sympathetic. All of this is true despite the knowledge that Collins was a violent militant who would have appeared to most British subjects (including a fair number of Irishmen in both north and south) to be a traitor and a criminal, because this is essentially what he was in the eyes of the law. However, unless you grow up with a certain brand of left-leaning politics or learned a similar mythology about Latin American history, it makes little sense to treat Che the same way.
As for the plucky Arab terrorist, it is unimaginable that you would ever see such a film. The conventions on this are quite clear and stretch across decades: when Arabs are fighting with Lawrence on behalf of the British, it is permissible to romanticize their struggle to some extent, and if some Arabs can serve as useful diversions against, say, Nazis in The Last Crusade, they can be portrayed favorably, but there would be no audience (especially at present) for stories about leaders of Arab anti-colonial rebellions. For that matter, you would not even be able to have an adaptation of the life of Michel Aflaq, an intellectual and not a man of violence, much less for any of the people who followed his ideas. Irish republican nationalist-socialist heroes will probably always find a sympathetic audience in the West; Arab republican nationalist-socialists, not so much.
Much of this is a matter of cultural and ethnic affinities, but most of all it is a matter of politics. Lincoln, Wilson and FDR–each of them was responsible for far more deaths and far more destruction than Che Guevara or any of a number of Arab nationalist figures ever was, but two important things separate them in the eyes of the general public: they did not personally kill anyone, and the causes for which their armies killed and destroyed are widely considered to be the just and right ones. That is to say, the exact same moralizing, or rather anti-moralizing, that the ends justify the means that Che used in rationalizing revolutionary violence is employed to praise and sanctify approved figures who authorized much larger slaughters for the “right reasons.” Not only have sympathetic, shoulder-shrugging, anti-moralizing stories been told about these men, but we have built large physical monuments to them (or at least to two of the three mentioned above), which is rather more troubling in its way than silly people who wear T-shirts or directors who minimize the moral failings of their main characters.
We can all give it up for Parnell, though, right?
I think you’re forgetting what Che, Collins, Lawrence and his Arabs, and heroes like Washington had going for them – huge underdog status. This gives them immediate sympathy across the board, regardless of ideology. Of course, a lot of that depends on how you tell the story. The general rule in all political stories, of course, is underdog overcomes overdog and through his sacrifice all live happier, freer lives as a result.
The problem with Che’s story is that once he came into power in Cuba under Castro, he became a merciless totalitarian killer and leader of the government terror squads. Not exactly in keeping with his romantic underdog role. So most sympathetic accounts tend to leave those elements of his story out. Still, the result in Cuba and elsewhere is not terribly inspiring. Hard to make a sympathetic movie about Robespierre or Lenin, even if he did fight against the monarchy and in favor of the peasants, due to that massive dependence on state terror.
Obviously with Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR, the sympathetic part of their story is that they allegedly fought for the common man, or the underclass, for freedom and demoncracy, and against evil, slavery, monarchism, etc. The amount of death that resulted was part of the tragic price paid to ensure these goals were achieved. And they refrained from using state terror to achieve their goals, or at least that’s how the story is told.
It’s harder to tell that kind of story to a western audience about Arafat or even Ataturk. It’s also hard to keep it interesting without a western proxy like Lawrence to identify with. Even in that movie, the Arabs come off as interesting, but not terribly sympathetic.
Could you have pitched a movie about the mujahedin’s battle with the Soviets to the American public before 9/11? Could you do so now? I never saw Charlie Wilson’s War, so I don’t know how it handled the cognitive dissonance.
“Could you have pitched a movie about the mujahedin’s battle with the Soviets to the American public before 9/11?”
Maybe. As most of the mujahideen were Pashtun, even if they received a lot of Saudi and Pakistani aid, I think there was more flexibility in portraying them as freedom fighters of a specifically anticommunist type. Even so, they are much more easily made into heroes because they fought for us. They fit the role of Arabs in the Lawrence story: the noble, oppressed people whom the benevolent Western ally befriends and respects in order to defeat a common foe. Possibly a better question: would anyone ever be able to sell a biopic of Al-Afghani? I somehow doubt it.
Perhaps a better, less loaded question: could you make a film about Aguinaldo and his role in the Filipino War (or just a film about the Filipino War) that would not be automatically categorized as anti-American? He fits the underdog role Conrad mentioned, but he was an underdog against our forces.
It’s a good hypo about Aguinaldo – I actually think several good movies (a miniseries perhaps?) could be made about the Philippine–American War (with a prequel about Bonifacio and the Katipunan?).
I note that there have been reasonably successful movies made with Native Americans (or whatever the preferred collective noun here at AmCon is for people descended from people resident in the Americas pre-1492) as protagonists and the US (soldiers and civilians) as primarily antagonists.
Could you have pitched a movie about the mujahedin’s battle with the Soviets to the American public before 9/11?
Pithlord,
I dont think you watched Rambo 3. may be you should. especially the ending where Sly Stallone waves goodbye to the mujahideen who helped him kill all the evil commies.