A Few Shiny Pebbles

A man named Brian De Palma has made a movie called Redacted, about the Iraq War. (It’s already been discussed a lot on the Internet, in some important opinion pieces, such as here, here, here, here, and here. )

In “’Redacted’ stuns Venice”, Silvia Aloisi writes:

A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family stunned the Venice festival, with shocking images that left some viewers in tears. […] Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it is a harrowing indictment of the conflict and spares the audience no brutality to get its message across.

[…] "The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people," [De Palma] told reporters after a press screening. "The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war," he said. […] "This is a harrowing experience you put the audience through. It is not something you want to go to on a delightful Saturday evening but this message must be put forward and hopefully the public will respond," De Palma said.

Mr. De Palma, there is no doubt that art can carry a heavy freight, but surely when you use a true story to criticize or uncover some evil being done by a group, you have to make certain that the individual event represents characteristics actually borne by the particular group you are criticizing. A single instance can be a powerful condemnation—if properly chosen. “The Diary of Anne Frank”, “Schindler’s List”, film taken at the liberation of a camp such as Auschwitz—these images and stories carry with them a world of unspeakable evil that was done by the Nazis. Their impact is immediate, visceral, and damning. But they condemn Hitler’s Nazi regime because they are the deliberate policies of the Nazis.

The same can be said for the gulags of the USSR, Stalin’s deliberate starvation of millions of Kulaks in Crimea, the slaughter of millions by Mao in China, or by Pol Pot in Cambodia, a terrorist attack on a Russian schoolhouse. The movie The Killing Fields indicts the philosophy of the Khmer Rouge. In a discussion of a hero Dith Pran, this philosophy was described as a “deliberately worked-out philosophy symbolized by the word of 'Angka,' intended to take the Cambodian society back to a primitive community of hunters and gatherers.” This makes the movie a significant statement about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, The Shining Path (of South America), the Islamofascists—they each have a deliberately worked-out ideology, and their ideologies all rationalize and call for using terrorist strategies and tactics.

Just as in the movies mentioned above, De Palma chooses a real story. All right, Anne Frank and Schindler were also based on real stories. De Palma chooses stories and videos from the Internet. All right, we have all seen images and documentary films about the atrocities mentioned above. De Palma chooses a horrible crime, the rape of a girl and the murder of her and her family. Wait!—Here the parallel falls away! In all of the materials mentioned above, the true story, the details, the input to the story, all represent deliberately enacted group actions ordered by their leadership as standard operating policy. But what about the few soldiers involved in the story De Palma gives us? Where is the indicting national policy? What happened when the U.S. Military found out what the soldiers had done? Let’s see. They were arrested and tried for what was truly viewed by the U.S. as a horrible crime:

United States Army Pfc. Jesse Spielman, 23, was sentenced to 110 years in prison […] In the same case, Sgt. Paul Cortez, 24, was sentenced to 90 years in prison, and Specialist James Barker was sentenced to 100 years in prison by an Army judge. […] Another private, Stephen Green, who is accused of being the ringleader, will also be tried in federal court on rape and murder charges. […] The U.S. Justice Department will seek the death penalty if he is convicted.

If De Palma wants to portray rape and murder as an indictment, Saddam Hussein had rape rooms that were his official government policy. But above all De Palma does not want to show how evil Saddam was. It is imperative to his purpose that the American military is not shown to be a liberator. Remember that everything in his film has been deliberately chosen by him to achieve his art. And as my brother Brian says, an artist uses cold marble to represent the human, or tricks of perspective to force the eye to see a three-dimensional world, and thus uses lies to tell a truth, but the political artist often uses a carefully selected truth to tell a great lie.

There are important stories in Iraq and Afghanistan, stories of personal valor and brotherhood, stories of fighting an enemy that wears no uniform and that targets the population as well as our soldiers, stories of liberation, stories of rebuilding lives, stories of the birth of hope. Perhaps a Middle Eastern version of John Hersey’s Pulitzer Prize winning “A Bell for Adano”, a work of slowly learned trust and understanding.

Perhaps De Palma could have chosen a story about an Iraqi young woman who lost her sister and mother in the Saddam Hussein rape rooms. She spends her life hiding. She hears about the 5 soldiers committing rape and murder. Then she sees the way they are arrested, tried and sentenced, and she is so amazed that she starts to have hope for the first time in her life. She starts to help the American soldiers. Her flashbacks could show the official Saddam Hussein rape rooms, and how her family was forced to put her mother’s and sister’s heads on poles outside their house. De Palma could have dealt with rape and murder used daily as a common method of control by a tyrant. He could have shown a great many truths about the war and our military.

Or he could have made any of an infinite set of possibilities that could have sent the cinema audiences walking out of the theaters with the knowledge of a great evil and an admiration for the men and women of courage who are risking their lives to destroy it. He could have created something glorious, something that spoke to the ages about evil and the force of the good. Instead he chose a rape and murder that he intended as an indictment of tens of thousands of innocent men and women who were and are doing what they can to carry out a dangerous and important mission for America and for the future of the world.

De Palma wanted his movie to make people rise up and oppose the war, but the actual effect it will have is to please those who hate America and America’s military. Many young men will see it and find in it a reason to join in the fight against Americans and other “Westerners”. People will die. People will be maimed. Do you remember what happened with just the story that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet? Even though it wasn’t true? Or the people who died because of those cartoons that so many in the Islamic world found obscene? There are so many articles about how many people were murdered for this it is hard to get a final total.

Do you remember what happened when Hollywood producer Moustapha Akkad and his daughter, Rima, attended a wedding at the Radisson in Amman, Jordan. They were murdered by a suicide bomber who just happened to choose that Radisson and that wedding for his moment of “martyrdom”. Like Akkad, De Palma is a world-traveler in a world growing more dangerous as the terrorists try to give birth to an Islamofascist empire, but his ego clothes him in a false security. The fact that he opposes the war will not protect him. None of the terrorists cared who was on the planes on 9/11. None of them cared who was on the London subway, or on the bus, or on the Spanish trains, or at the wedding in Amman, or on Bali, or who would have been on the airplanes some planned to take down over the ocean, or at the site planned for in Germany, or in France, or in Thailand, or at in any site intended for terrorist action.

The people De Palma will please most are the same people who right at this moment are planning another terrorist atrocity, another bomb set loose amongst children, another airplane or train or bus torn apart. It is they who will leave the theaters smiling, they who will prize the DVD.

Because Redacted is the embodiment of a terrible lie about the American military.

Such lies nourish the evil, and give them renewed strength.

Such lies live only to darken the world.

Trackposted to Nuke's, Perri Nelson's Website, , Faultline USA, The Populist, DragonLady's World, Pirate's Cove, The Pink Flamingo, The Bullwinkle Blog, and Conservative Cat, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.