First the good news.
Via Spencer Ackerman: the AP is reporting that the concrete barriers in Baghdad are coming down. It’s about time.
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Before catching my return bus last weekend, I used my sister’s Netflix account to re-watch the first half of The Edge of Heaven and was again reminded why Fatih Akin is the best thing in European cinema right now.
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Now, plunging into the crappy stuff.
Jill has a great post up about how the larger culture of misogyny and dehumanization of women enables men like George Sodini by legitimizing their view that women are things they are entitled to possess.
America’s justice system: made of FAIL.
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Hamesha writes from Kabul:
[…]one fears we have bitten off more than we can chew. we have dived headlong into constitutional liberal democracy, with the attendant outcome that we have none of the above: neither rule of law, nor true democracy, nor liberalism. and in the process the masses have come to abhor all of it, because it has not come at their pace, their comfort zone.
Some will say, well duh, this is a tired point, holding parliamentary elections in 2005 was sheer insanity. But if it is such a tired point, why do we always seem to screw up the sequencing of these things?
With no way to rewind history, the task ahead is that of filling Afghanistan’s hollow democratic order with something approximating the real thing. It will be slow-going and, I worry, increasingly dangerous in the near term.
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A few weeks ago I received an email from the refugee resettlement office, inviting me to watch Turtles Can Fly, Iranian Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi’s critically-acclaimed 2005 film about orphans in Iraqi Kurdistan during the weeks leading up to the US invasion.
As much as I enjoy activist get-togethers, I passed on this one. Back in early college, I picked Turtles Can Fly out, pretty much randomly, from the foreign films rack at the video rental store near my sophomore residence hall. Without exaggeration, it was the single most upsetting film I have ever seen (followed closely by Lilja 4 Ever and Osama). Days afterward, I found myself breaking down in the shower.
American films, even pitch dark indie ones, generally shy away from portraying the world as a relentlessly violent and callous place to children. If a child protagonist suffers it is never so much or so viscerally that the viewer feels the need to look away. Turtles Can Fly dispenses with all the sentimentality that surrounds children’s experiences in American cinema and goes well beyond where, say, Spanish cinema goes in this direction.
The film’s main protagonist, Satellite, is the shrewd thirteen year old leader of a tribe of orphans in an IDP camp near the Iraq-Turkey border. The children earn enough money to survive by clearing minefields and selling the unexploded mines. Satellite supplements their income by installing satellite dishes and translating English television news to villagers eager for information about the impending American invasion.
Ghobadi’s film overflows with imagery of bodily and social devastation; the deformed bodies of child victims of Saddam Hussein’s chemical attacks, a toddler’s chubby fingers grasping a razor wire fence, a soldier shooting at the heels of Kurdish children from a sniper tower across the border. Even the sky is merciless. Day after day, it rains on the orphans’ meager existence, muddying their feet and dirtying their leaky tents.
Turtles Can Fly isn’t about underdogs making it against all odds (the title refers to the release of death). Instead, it’s about how even brave, smart, resourceful people get ground into the dust by historical events and material circumstances beyond their control. Ghobadi rejects the (largely American) idea that the human capacity to bounce back from tragedy and trauma is limitless. By subjecting the viewer to the fates of Satellite and the other children, he says don’t be so naive.
The take-away message of Turtles Can Fly is that respecting people like the film’s child protagonists requires a more sober understanding of where agency begins and ends.
It’s an important film, but once was enough for me.
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John le Carré is being put out of business by real life.
A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”
This is one of those stories for which “fucked the hell up” doesn’t even come close.
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Take a look at this.
Transitionland 
Recent criminal statistics from the Berlin police showed that people with ‘Migrationshintergrund’ (as it’s called there), which in Berlin, like in many other German cities, means mostly Turks, were approx 9x more likely than ethnic Germans (everyone knows who they are) to have committed a crime or had contact with the police in a criminal context. When is Akin going to make a film about that?
Link to that stat if you’re going to cite it. Even if it’s a real statistic, statistics don’t tell the whole story. Just think of the racial disparities in American criminal justice.
Also, you’ve clearly never seen anything by Fatih Akin. If you had, you’d know why “When is Akin going to make a film about that?” is a silly question.
I see my comments are showing, so ignore that part of my recent comment.
Actually, I saw his film Gegen die Wand (in German) and did not really think all that much of it. Perhaps I ought to see another.
I could dig up that link, but as I recall it’s a yearly report (from 2007 I think) in PDF format, entirely in German. So unless you can read German it won’t do you much good.
But I think you can take my word for it.
Here is the way I would put it, anecdotally: The average Turkish male in Berlin is more likely to have been in jail during the last year than in a library.
“The average Turkish male in Berlin is more likely to have been in jail during the last year than in a library.”
Hmmm…this reminds me of something, another “anecdotal” way to put it, from another context. Can my other readers help me out?
…the larger culture of misogyny and dehumanization of women…
In what country or on what planet does that “culture” exist?
What’s not so “great” is how ideologues like you (and “Jill”) can take the tragic case of one nutcase and (over-)generalize about it to the point of absurdity. That’s what’s “crappy”. Not to mention laughable.
1) “Jill” is Jill Fillipovic, a real person, and thus does not need her name put in quotes. Google: it’s a useful tool.
2) “In what country or on what planet does that ‘culture’ exist?”
There’s a simple answer to your question: on this planet, and in every country to a greater of lesser extent and in different forms.
Do yourself a favour and read what Jill wrote before you troll.
Why not allow my comments to show?
I did read the post; it was signed “Jill”, and I didn’t feel the need to look into her ID further (I do know how to use Google, but in this case why bother? — I didn’t and don’t really care who Jill is). Since Jill is just a first name, it could be anything — her real first name, or just a moniker. Hence “Jill”.
If you or she really think that there exists in the US — which is where Sodini lived — a “larger culture of misogyny and dehumanization of women”, then you’re both rather extreme.
But there are countries where women are treated less well, generally — e.g. where they are not given the same opportunities as men. But I don’t think that had anything to do with why Sodini did what he did. Read the on-line journal he kept — it still can be found on the internet.
Sodini’s journal –which Jill wrote about– is an example of the mentality the larger culture of misogyny feeds. If you think all women are downtrodden in the developing world and all women enjoy total equality in countries like the US, you need to open your eyes.
…and by ETHNIC GROUP?
That seemed suspect to me, too. Crime stats in Europe are very, very rarely broken down by race/ethnicity, even if they are disaggregated in other ways.
It didn’t post my first comment. Before the ethnic group comment, I had asked whether the German actually tracks LIBRARY ATTENDANCE.
I was going to make a joke, but it was mean.