RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Thursday night as the ball drops in Times Square, millions of Americans watching on TV will join the revelers in Manhattan to celebrate the new year. For other Americans, alas, the arrival of Jan. 1 will mark only the beginning of another year behind Iranian bars.

It’s long past time to bring these men home.

At last year’s White House welcome for Bowe Bergdahl—the soldier who walked away from his combat post in Afghanistan and will soon be tried for desertion and misbehavior before the enemy—President Obama did manage to refer to other Americans “unjustly detained abroad” who also “deserve to be reunited with their families.”

So what has happened since? Last summer, scarcely a year after that Rose Garden ceremony, Secretary of State John Kerry announced a nuclear deal with Tehran. The agreement puts the Iranians on a path to a bomb and releases billions of dollars that had been frozen by sanctions. But no American walked free. When asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” about these prisoners, Mr. Kerry answered this way:

The fee for screenwriter for The Revenant must be the highest ever paid if you count the actual number of words in the script – for the overlong mid-section, the film is virtually silent. Alejandro Inarritu, the recent Oscar winner for Birdman, has fashioned a tedious survival epic out of difficult circumstances, harsh injuries and heavy breathing. The plot can be summarized in two sentences: Mountain guide leading fur trappers is repeatedly mauled by a huge bear, is left to die, survives that, starvation, a tempestuous body skim down some rapids, along with a Thelma and Louise soar off a cliff on horseback, landing in a tree, then falling to the ground. Despite all of the above plus the trauma of seeing his only son killed, he lives to trek across the snowy wilderness, eat raw buffalo meat. carve a protective bed out of a horse carcass, listen to the spirit of his dead Indian wife, attack the man who murdered his son and ultimately recognize that only God can exact revenge. Most of this becomes predictable as soon as we see Leonardo de Caprio stir from his comatose state and realize that this movie is more superman cartoon than biography. Even though there was a man whose life provided the inspiration for this film, he’s less a realized individual than an avatar of legendary mountain men. We know he’s better than most because he married an Indian woman and loves his half-breed son; also, because he leaves the ultimate job of executioner to someone else in a burst of spiritual awareness.

Two Muslim Presidents. Two speeches celebrating the anniversary of Prophet Muhammad’s birth. Two very different messages.
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, on two different occasions ((Dec. 22 and Dec. 24) iterated his call for “changes in approach” that would bring Islam peaceful coexistence of all races, religions and doctrines. He stated: “No one should define someone by their appearance or religion.”

Sisi insisted Muslims should acknowledge that times have changed and, therefore, Islam has to be modernized.
He called again upon the religious scholars at al-Azhar, the highest institute of Sunni Islamic learning, urging them, “Refute the malicious ideas and warped interpretation. Dispel the perplexity of minds and hesitation of hearts. Change all this into an established faith that tolerance does not contradict with religion and that accepting the other does not oppose faith and that the best of people is the most who benefits them all, not benefits Muslims only.”

A surge of confusion

After the February 2006 Sunni bombing of the Samarra Golden Mosque, the US proved unable to hold back the tide of Shia retaliation. The UN estimated that, during 2006 alone, Shia death squads had slaughtered some 34,000 Sunni, many with exemplary cruelty.

Iraq’s Sunni leaders, awakened to the reality that far from cowing the Shia while punishing the Americans they were now in danger of their very lives. They offered to stop killing Americans if the Americans could stop the Shia from killing them. The US government set about doing that. This was “the surge.”
Ruins of Samarra Mosque

Ruins of Samarra Golden Mosque

Note well, however, that the US had offered the Sunni a similar deal in 2004. At that time, the Sunni still thought that they could beat both the Americans and the Shia. By 2006, they were begging for their lives.

But the US government, far from driving a hard bargain, chose to see their request for something approaching an alliance against the Shia as the “awakening” of the Sunni populations’ inner “moderation” and rushed to empower its leaders with money and weapons.

The US choice to neglect the massive fact that fear of the Shia had led the Sunni to stop fighting Americans fit all too well with the US foreign policy establishment’s perennial, ignorant, practice of categorizing foreigners as “moderates” or “extremists” (aka. good guys and bad guys). That practice eliminates the bother of learning what foreigners actually have in mind.

Reality vs. romance

On Jan. 1, 2015, Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al Sisi told Sunni Islam’s leading scholars gathered at Cairo’s Al Azhar University, its leading temple of knowledge, that they had been leading Islam on a course disastrous for itself and leading to war with the rest of the world.

He said : “ You, imams, are responsible before Allah … that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years … is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world … Is it possible that 1.6 billion [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution.”
The Disney version

The Disney version

That is reality. It is also reality that no such revolution is in the works, in part because the West continues to deal with the Sunni world by trying to appease it, romance it, seduce it.

Imagine the predicament of an Islamic scholar at Al Azhar who agrees with al Sisi: what could he say to Saudi or Qatari royals, or to the citizens Mosul or Raqqa — never mind to young people besotted with blood and enjoying their slaves that might cause them to turn against Daesh/ISIS?

Robert Holub’s topic arises from an historical accident: the triumph of the Nazis in the early 1930s meant all competing German readings of Nietzsche (then the preeminent figure in German culture) were suppressed and he was enlisted in the service of National Socialism, which has tainted him ever since with anti-semitism. In one respect, Holub is admirably clear: “[T]here is no question that [Nietzsche] was unequivocally antagnostic toward what he understood as anti-Semitism and anti-Semites” (125; cf. xiv, 208). Yet, Holub argues, Nietzsche is still guilty of “Judeophobia,” that is, of displaying a “negative bias towards Jews and Judaism” (xiv; cf. 209). Curiously, the book tries to make the case largely through letters and unpublished material—as well as a good deal of innuendo and speculation—rather than systematic engagement with Nietzsche’s actual philosophical work, until the final chapter. We consider, below, the evidence adduced and the sometimes astonishing inferences Holub draws from it.

In an illuminating first chapter, Holub documents the different receptions of Nietzsche prior to the Nazi era, noting that leftists were attracted to Nietzsche because of his “rather vivid expressions of contempt toward the institutions of middle-class society, which they also rejected” (3). As Nietzsche’s fame grew, those on the German right faced the dilemma that “his many deprecatory statements about Germans and Germany” made it “problematic” to appropriate his stature for their cause (8). Early German commentators, like Adolf Bartles, even acknowledge “that Nietzsche is no anti-semite” (8). The crucial interpreter for Nazi purposes, however, was Alfred Baeumler, who argued in the 1930s that “Nietzsche’s anti-German remarks must be understood in the context of Bismarck’s rule” (13) and that the praise Nietzsche lavishes on the Jews must be understood “rhetorically…as a foil to the Germans in order to goad them to greatness” (13). In other words, even though Nietzsche hated German militarism and nationalism, it was only Bismarck’s version; and even though he lavished praise on Jews, it was only to inspire good Germans to do better. Backed by the Nazi state, in which Baeumler served as principal Nazi liason to the universities, these tortured hermeneutics prevailed and sullied Nietzsche’s reputation.

The Hateful Eight, billed as “the 8th film by Quentin Tarantino”, has opened in selected cities in 70mm format. I’d thought by this stage that some new young hungry film critics would have emerged who’d like to make their names by having a go at the aging enfant terrible. But, judging from the reviews, that does not seem to be the case. On the other hand, I gather there’s some sort of boycott being mounted by those offended by Tarantino’s recent remarks re black men who get shot by cops. It would be, as they say, ironic were the director to be damaged by a political stance he took off-screen, since as James Wood wrote in The Guardian two decades ago:

Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism, which is to empty the artwork of all content, thus avoiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies… Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest.

James Wood made his observation with regard to Pulp Fiction, but it has held up pretty reliably over the years. “Pulp fiction” used to mean a lurid style of American serial writing so-called because of the cheap quality of paper used. But I would imagine today that far more people recognize it as the name of a famous Tarantino movie than the genre he was riffing off. As a helpful dictionary entry at the start of the movie reminds us, “pulp” has two meanings: aside from the fiction style, it’s also a “soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter”. Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a trio of gangster storylines told in mashed-up chronology, is not pulp in the first sense: writers at, say, The Black Mask (the hardboiled crime magazine, whose name Tarantino intended to borrow for his movie’s title) favored heightened, pacey prose, tense plotting, surprise twists, cliffhanger endings. Quentin Tarantino inclines more towards that second definition: a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter, its constituent parts smoothly mixed and puréed until the whole is as consistent as a light, fluffy scrambled egg — or, as French cinéastes would say, a scrambled oeuvre. Most fiction is a question of weighting : this moment of high drama is more important than that moment of domestic banality. But, once Tarantino’s pulped it, it all comes out the same: tense trigger-cocked stand-offs or long, querulous conversations about what’s in a five-dollar milk shake. In 1994 the latter sequences passed instantly into the language as the acme of cool.

It seems that the U.S., without a Minuteman missile force, would make it easy — in fact tempting — for an adversary such as Russia to take out the entire U.S. strategic nuclear force in one or a series of very limited first strikes.

Under Secretary Perry’s proposal, the U.S. “target set” of nuclear submarines and bombers would consist of five military bases: three for bombers and two for submarines, and a handful of submarines at sea. From over 500 targets today, to fewer than 10. It would be as if the U.S. declared to its enemies, “Come and get us.”

The elimination of the Minuteman missile force, recommended by Dr. Perry, would leave Russia with an alarming ratio — nearly 200:1 — of Russian warheads to American nuclear assets. This disparity could push the strategic nuclear balance toward heightened instabilities.

Another way to look at it is that the Minuteman would cost only 1/3 of 1% of the total current budget of the Department of Defense.

Former Secretary of Defense William Perry calls for the nuclear land based force of 450 Minuteman missiles to be eliminated. He says that the United States does not need the missiles for nuclear deterrence. He also says that, because of Russia’s current reckless and cavalier attitude about the early use of Russian nuclear weapons, he worries that in a crisis, an American President might launch Minuteman missiles out of fear that Russia might preemptively launch a first strike against America’s “vulnerable” missile silos.

A new screen version of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard reminds us that cinematic refractions of the Bard’s most famous plays are never entirely out of fashion. Though Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh (two actor-directors especially associated with adapting Shakespeare to the big screen) never made movies of the “Scottish play,” other eminent filmmakers have. In 1948, Orson Welles gave us a brogue-heavy, noir-inflected version, with himself in the title role. And in 1971, Roman Polanski opted for a highly naturalistic, often graphically violent approach, emphasizing youthful ambition taken to extremes.

But the most nuanced and unsettling screen version of “Macbeth” strays far from Shakespeare’s text, though not its spirit. Directed by Akira Kurosawa— and performed in Japanese—“Throne of Blood” (1957) is frequently cited by cinéastes and scholars as the medium’s finest rendering of any Shakespeare play. Kurosawa has been described as the “least Japanese” of his country’s great film directors, and several of his movies draw on Western source material: Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, even the American crime writer Ed McBain—in addition to Shakespeare, to whom he would return late in life when adapting “King Lear” as “Ran” (1985).

Just after midnight on Oct. 1, 1966, Albert Speer, the former armaments minister of the Third Reich, walked free from Spandau jail. Barely acknowledging Margarete, his long-suffering wife, the mother of his six children and the once-proud bearer of a Nazi award for fertility, Speer faced the flashbulbs and cameras of the world’s media from the back seat of a luxurious black Mercedes provided for the occasion by an old industrialist friend. Condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Speer was saved from the death penalty by an artful defense that separated him from the other Nazi ogres in the dock. He would spend the last 15 years of his life burnishing his image as “the good Nazi.” After three best-selling books and lucrative interviews with Der Spiegel and Playboy, among others, he died in London on Sept. 1, 1981, attended rather conspicuously by a beautiful young mistress, after a long morning of interviews with the BBC and dinner with the historian Norman Stone. Hitler’s closest companion, the architect of Germany’s wartime “armaments miracle,” had seized his time in the spotlight. He had refashioned himself as a postmodern celebrity.
Speer: Hitler’s Architect

By Martin Kitchen
Yale, 442 pages, $37.50

Already at Nuremberg, Speer had presented himself as a penitent prophet of a new age of technocracy. He used his closing statement in the dock to warn the world that the only forces that could “prevent unconfined engineering and science from completing the work of destroying human beings” were “individual freedom and self-confidence.” In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, the conjunction of technology and power had become an obsessive theme of cultural commentary, one that offered Speer two advantages. It put Allied strategic bombing alongside him in the dock while distracting attention from more specific questions about his personal responsibility for the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from Berlin and the murderous exploitation of concentration-camp labor.