What
You're Missing in our subscriber-only CounterPunch newsletter
THE INSIDE HISTORY OF THE
ISRAEL LOBBY
Former top
CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison give CounterPunchers
the real scoop on the Israel lobby and precisely how powerful
it is. Read
how US presidents from Wilson, through FDR to Truman were manipulated
by the Zionist lobby; how Israel bent LBJ, Reagan and Clinton
to its purpose; how Bush's White House has been the West Wing
of the Israeli government; how Washington's revolving doors send
full-time Israel lobbyists from think-tanks to the National Security
Council and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. For all who want a
true measure of the Lobby's power, the Christisons' 8-page dossier,
exclusive to CounterPunch newsletter subscribers, is a MUST read. CounterPunch
Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember,
we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition
of CounterPunch. Please support this
website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains
fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation
for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
"Our film is a little
step in the British confronting their imperialist history. Maybe
if we tell the truth about the past we can tell the truth about
the present."
The leftist British director Ken Loach
has been nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes many times. On
Sunday we finally found out that he makes a great victory speech,
as he drove home the link between the British occupation of Ireland
and today's occupation of Iraq. More importantly, as we already
knew, he makes great films, and 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley'
is perhaps his very best.
The greatness of this tale
of the Irish War of Independence and ensuing Civil War has little
to do with parallels to the present day. Viewers may eventually
find themselves talking with each other about how occupying armies
behave, about the right to resistance, about the relationship
between religion and political violence, and about how all this
relates to present-day Iraq and Afghanistan. But the movie gets
us to that point by treating its immediate subject matter with
unstinting care and integrity, and for two hours the audience
is nowhere except Cork, 1920-22. The texture of life, language,
love and loss are all here, with almost breathtaking, unglamorous
'reality'. The director's famous method, whereby actors are shown
only their own lines, and those only briefly, helps lend this
verisimilitude. Loach's Cork-born star, Cillian Murphy, emerges
quietly but definitively as the finest screen actor Ireland has
ever produced, and also as part of an ensemble of otherwise little-known
performers bringing fully realised individuals to life.
As some critics have noted
bitterly, these rounded characters don't really include the British
troops, but this is not a failing of the film. It is clearly
part of the point being made by Loach and his screenwriter Paul
Laverty: these soldiers have been dehumanised, partly by their
experience in the World War I trenches, but also by the contemptuous
racism that occupation breeds. For them "Irish" is
a dirty word, even in Ireland. The Irish rebels, in contrast,
are at home in this beautiful landscape: we are constantly reminded
that to commit acts of violence in your own home breeds ethical
and psychological dilemmas in otherwise healthy people, and they
make efforts to maintain some principle and even courtesy amid
the carnage.
The carnage and brutality are
brilliantly, awfully portrayed, especially as they continually
revisit one emblematic rural homestead. But what really sets
Loach apart, of course, is his respect for the political agency
of 'ordinary' people. Again and again characters connect their
own lives to wider issues and struggles. And they argue. A Dublin-born
train driver (Liam Cunningham) joins forces with the Cork rebel
column while quoting William Blake and James Connolly and pressing
for a full social revolution in Ireland. A republican court,
led by a rebel woman judge, jails a shopkeeper for charging extortionate
interest to a poor customer in arrears, but the local IRA leader
insists businessmen should be kept sweet because they are needed
to fund the armed struggle. The Treaty sets off more honest,
impassioned argument before it finally sets off more war, this
time setting brother against brother.
What a contrast it makes with
Neil Jordan's absurd 'Michael Collins', which treats broadly
the same set of historic events as the enactment of a psycho-sexual
drama among its handful of prominent protagonists.
Although the various arguments
are well ventilated, Loach's heart is clearly with the left-republicans
who opposed the Treaty. The split in 1922 gave rise, eventually,
to the two largest political parties in the southern state that
was left by partition, Fine Gael (the pro-Treaty side) and Fianna
Fail. Fianna Fail, founded by Eamonn de Valera, has been the
main party of government in Ireland for most of the time since
it was first elected to power in 1932, and its current arts minister
has been quoted as saying, presumably with some glee, that Fine
Gaelers won't like this movie. There is probably some truth in
this: the gut politics of people whose ancestors opposed the
Treaty are likelier to be inspired by Murphy and his ragged republican
band than Fine Gaelers will be by their own more strait-laced,
petty-bourgeois political antecedents.
Nonetheless, the politician's
view says something about the shamelessness of Fianna Fail. The
film portrays that party's anti-Treaty progenitors sympathetically,
sure, but it also portrays them, accurately, as social and economic
radicals who wanted to see the ownership of Ireland and its resources
vested in its people. In 2006 the party is, e.g, helping Shell
drive an unwanted gas production pipeline through the fields
of small farmers in Mayo, with no royalties whatsoever going
to the Irish state or people. Fianna Failers should see this
film and hang their heads when they see how far their movement
has come from its original ideals.
No, though the country is now
knee-deep in corporate money, the story of Ireland in the 90
years since the Easter Rising has not ended happily, and neither
does 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley'. (Indeed, the film's radiance
fades slightly with a stagy moment or two in the last reel, before
an ending of raw, terrible pain and futility.) Nonetheless, it
should be seen not only by Irish people, but by everyone who
wonders about this anti-colonial struggle, so near the imperial
centre, that reverberated through the 20th century; and who also
wants to know how a deeper revolution was almost made here, how
it was halted, and how it might be made again, anywhere.
Harry Browne lectures in Dublin Institute of Technology
and writes for Village magazine. Contact him at harry.browne@gmail.com
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.