#too many fucking communist sympathizers

[antikristvs]

Shame I must be so careful about who I follow.

[marxism-transgenderism]

Thots on j moufawad paul

Okay so I'm cross faded so sorry if this isn't very coherent. It's also been awhile since I read his work in full so I'm mainly going on memory and a brief returning glance.

But okay first I like a lot of JMPs work. His very rigorous analysis communist thought is very refreshing especially amongst modern authors. His analysis of the limits of Marxism Leninism and its historical solutions in Maoism is what made me if not an outright maoist, extremely sympathetic. It's still what I return to as a general summation of my problems with ML philosophy, to say nothing of practice.

With that, I really really like his basis in anti colonial philosophy first and foremost with a focus on Fanon. It's very sobering to read a militant north american communist who isn't just advocating for redistributing imperialist wealth.

I frequently recommend the communist necessity to communists like me who were mainly radicalized by occupy and remained stuck in a little euro american bubble of leftist thought cause it's a nice smack on the head telling new leftist to expand their horizons beyond their own immediate reality. But when I do I always recommend it as an intro before moving past him to actually reading people like Fanon, Cabral, and Mariategui.

But okay one of my main problems with his work is that despite his nuance elsewhere he still falls for the trap many other communists fall into of taking their specific communist ideology way too fucking seriously. His determined insistence on clinging to Marxism as a science is hard to take seriously. He plays around with different definitions of science to make his argument in C&R but he still has the same outcome as classic MLs of worshiping one narrow analysis.

This is a petty difference on paper but it leads to horrifically cringey practice. And this can be seen in the groups that were based in or sympathized with JMPs thought in north america in the last few years. Some groups did some good work that as far as I'm aware didn't go beyond some poorly executed college campus level activism before devolving into petty factionalism and occasionally violence. It leads to and is a symptom of an attitude many communists have towards communists that makes them feel like everyone needs to listen to them and only them. It especially sends a chill down my spine seeing other white communists take on that attitude cause it inevitably leads to racist and condescending bullshit.

I know I have some other problems with his arguments in C&R and critique of maoist reason and also his sympathies towards Firestone's work but I have work tomorrow and need to go to bed so I'll just end this by saying I agree with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's blurb in C&R that "even if you disagree with the authors arguments, you will reconsider much of the rhetoric that we take for granted regarding Maoism"

[rametarin]

Frustrating

Folks believe the Russians brainwashed, “those stupid conservatives” into voting for Trump, and thus, “sabotaging the elections.”

My dude. That infantilizes folks you view your enemy and attributes way too much credit to the idea propaganda and shit on the TV dominates and dictates thought. Yes, it may have helped, but it didn’t convince the Trumpers to vote for Trump. It just reinforced it in the most ethereal manner to what they were already going to do.

And yet these people miraculously think either conservatives are mental children, or Putin is a super genius (neither are true) enough that someone shitposting on facebook or on tumblr en masse could sway the entire voter base.

You know what else the Russians have done? And Tumblr confirmed this, themselves. They pretended to be black, stirring shit with posting pro-BLM related stuff and deliberately posting and spreading information on the basis of race and race identity that helped to sow discord and discontent since 2010. They’ve been wagging the dog and MAKING it a big issue through propaganda to compliment the stateside campaigns.

And you know what the Russians were doing before that shit? Giving funding, money and marching orders to Marxists and communist or socialist sympathizers stateside, since the Soviet Union was a fucking thing. This is fact. They do this in every country that has a domestic, sympathetic movement towards their values throughout the late 1800s through the entire 1900s since the Oktober Revolution, and have been empowering guerilla campaigns to silence or destroy political/ideological opposition, take over places numerically and then have phony assed elections to “democratically” decide to be Soviet puppet states, since forever.

They do this shit all over South America, Africa and South Asia. They have for more than a century, now. They were exacerbators and rabblerousers and propagandists and guerillas and saboteurs, feeding every way to create division, discord, disharmony and irreconcilable differences by tricking groups of people with opposing passions to see themselves as mortal enemies.

And the most frustrating part of all of this is the people so willing to believe the Russians all but brainwashed, “the conservatives,” will scream about it being shallow, lies or propaganda that the Russians did similarly to the left-wing in the US (which is comprised of liberals, and liberal-when-convenient Marxist sympathizers that are actually more syndicalist, socialist or communist to platform the democratic party.)

Whether they genuinely believe Russia is what “caused” Trump or they’re sticking to the fiction because acting in bad faith and selective ignorance gets them a narrative they want (LIKE HOW RUSSIA IS ACTING EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY IN A POST INVASION OF UKRAINE WORLD), they will swear up and down the conservatives are stooges of Putin because some publisher said it’s true, but deny every piece of evidence one could put forwards that many left wingers are similarly duped or knowingly on the take.

Russian Imperialism is cold blooded and soulless. It will Courtney Love the fuck out of you and glamourize itself, allowing you to see what you want in it while capitalizing on your hope and desire. Not quite a shapeshifter, but an omitter that will lie to you, engineer circumstances around you, get people that do not value you or your intellect to reinforce the illusion to triangulate your belief, set up consequences for DISbelieving it, and then coerce you to act accordingly. Even when you KNOW what it wants is incorrect, forcing you to participate in its fiction or absolutely ice blooded take is how it keeps control.

The fact that some will acknowledge the depth and power of their manipulations and entrenchment, but only for their conservative enemies, while denying there’s any such entrenchment in American bureaucracy, college tenured professors or counterculture social groups, pisses me off something fierce. God damned hypocrites. The same people that will parrot any story about mean ole CIA destroying, “any BLACK group that teaches self-reliance and community solidarity” while omitting that many of those groups were also breaching Soviet sympathetic socialistic views and values and causes, will deny Russia had any hand at all in that.

[kalereviews8782]

Review: Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White

Enjoyment: 2 / Prose: 2 / Characters: 2.5 / Plot: 2.5

Pros: trans aromantic & autistic representation, communism!

Cons: godawful pacing, muddled themes, too didactic, NOT BELIEVABLE AT ALL (I could not suspend my disbelief here, sorry) (ok now I feel mean listing all of this out)

Fuck, I hate this. I hate that I’m giving Andrew Joseph White a 2 star rating again. As a trans autistic person who vehemently disliked Hell Followed With Us, but loved The Spirit Bares Its Teeth, I was looking forward to another five-star, as I thought White had improved on theming, pacing, and prose. But man, there were a few problems with this one. First, the premise here: Miles, a trans boy, is dealing with a hundred year long violent feud between his family and that of Sheriff Davies, which leads to hate-crimes, murder, political activism, coming out, and more, etc.

Prose-wise, this felt like communist theory (sometimes I’m looking for that, but not here). White dumps paragraphs upon paragraphs of socialist and communist history, facts, and terminology, and repeats the same messages and themes of leftism over and over. Rarely is the reader able to piece things together on their own; no, another paragraph describing socialist history is dropped (even right in the middle of the “action”). Painful and boring reading experience. I want to know the characters, their relationships, their thoughts and feelings, not another textbook-ripped description of a historical event. I think references to these things are good and honestly, I haven’t seen many young adult books this OPEN about communism (that’s why it’s in the pros) but the way it is handled is poor. Speaking of the theming, it also seemed implausible that there is one “bad guy” character here (the Sheriff). That’s not…how things work. There’s usually a group of rich people running the show, not just one guy who is killed and then everyone works together and it’s all good again? What? That’s not how systemic power works. You can’t kill one person and expect change. I also don’t get why you’d go after teenagers and not, like, the people who have power, but OK. Another goodreads reviewer (@mars) describes this point in more detail in their review.

Other points:

*Every character becomes a caricature. The leftist characters are so…well, Tumblr-esque? They all muddled together and didn’t feel like real humans. Same with the “evil” teenagers who, honestly, Miles only thinks for a brief second as “victims” (they’re literally 16 year olds…maybe some more nuance about how they’re children should be discussed? Again, they are pretty garbage humans, but are they really holding all the systemic power in town here? Why would they go after these children and not the Sheriff himself? Seems inefficient but..anyway…). And on this point, I as the reader sympathized with Paul, but it would have been more thematically interesting for Miles to kill him (let him be bad! Let him deal with the consequences of doing something immoral! Instead of having Cooper get all the blood on his hands).

*The Sheriff was so unbelievably evil it made me laugh

*Another point about Cooper and Miles: Miles agreed to killing the other teens with Cooper and then, ten seconds after, Cooper is suddenly a bad guy (?) It just didn’t seem believable how quickly Cooper became the bad guy.

*Saint Abernathy???? What was the point of this ghost? (Don’t answer this; I obviously get the point I just don’t think it was necessary, fun, or well-done)

*Pacing-wise, there was just so much didacticism or sitting around

*Another implausibility is how Miles’s parents don’t freak out when he TELLS THEM THAT HE KILLED SOMEONE????? HUH? They just go “well he must have deserved it” lol what

*And finally, the other implausibility that his parents/family let him go meet up with Noah to “talk” ALONE. Again: what. I hope I’m not the only one here who laughed at this part due to disbelief.

I’m…sorry, I’ll calm down. I’m gonna reread The Spirit Bares Its Teeth (it’s beautiful). I’m still forever grateful that White is out here writing and that teens have these books.

[gaphic]

the fact it actually contains sex scenes ALONE makes it a crucial revitalization of cinema and i mean that 100% unironically, but it's also completely insane to me that people are saying 'we don't need a movie about a white man who killed minorities' when robert oppenheimer was a jewish communist sympathizer who genuinely believed, with good reason, that building the bomb was the only way to defeat hitler

is it a perfect movie? no. but way too many of y'all sound like fucking steven universe haters right now, ascribing absolutely deranged moral weight to a movie you have impossible standards for and were going to hate no matter what

you're not going to see a single valid oppenheimer take on this website btw

[awesomerextyphoon]

A Warrior’s Heart | Phase 1: Welcome – 3

A Hero’s Welcome?

Summary: When someone with a connection to Steve’s past dies, he’s reminded of the promise he made to Dr. Erskine and whether or not he’s failed. Can Ife help him see that he hasn’t?

Characters: Steve Rogers, Ifekerenma ‘Ife’, Abraham Erskine (mentioned), Marlene Erskine (mentioned), Nick Fury, Eliza Maza, Azeneth Ramirez

Main Pairing: Stucky x Black!OFC (Ifekerenma ‘Ife’)

Rating: 18+/Explicit

Word Count: 5,801

Warnings: Depression, Talk of Death, Slightly Cynical Steve, Politics, Smutty Thoughts

A/N: I’m sorry that this so long. I really wanted to try something different with Erskine and the time around CA:TFA. Also, I wanted to explore how Steve would be feeling right after AoU (little bit of a downer, but it will get better). Furthermore, this story will diverge a bit from MCU in terms of Steve’s and Bucky’s abilities. Feedback is welcomed and greatly appreciated. Dividers were by the lovely @firefly-graphics​. Thanks to @sweetkingdomstarlight-blog​ for the beta!

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Early June 2015

“What do you have to report, Ifekerenma?”

Ife pursed her lips together,”Wanda is doing well with her training. Djamila and Nazaret had some sung her praises during their first session.”

It took a few days to convince the team and Fury to let her friends train Wanda. Luckily Nat had her back and Wanda was able to show the compound how much she improved from what Ife was able to teach her. Unfortunately, Azeneth was unable to make it due to being tied up with a BNA mission and relocating to the NYC division.

“That’s good to hear. Have you made made any progress with the others?”

Ife’s eyes casted down in thought. Vision was a no-go for now. Pietro was warming up to her, but he thought she was still suspicious (wasn’t wrong). She didn’t want to try Rhodey yet (too close to Tony). Nat was..difficult; she’ll try again later.

“I’m going to try Steve next. He seems like a safe bet, even with the serum. Hopefully, he won’t catch before it’s time. I will need Erskine’s folder though.”

Eliza’s lips turned upward in a small smile, “Agreed. I’ll have it sent to you within the hour. Best of luck, Ife.”

And with that, Ife got dressed and headed towards the common room.

  Steve leaned back and clasped his hands together behind his head in thought and vexation.

The 21st century must be fucking with him.

Right after Operation ‘Captain Briar Rose’, Steve went to Brooklyn. He could barely find any trace of his old neighborhood. The apartment complex where he and his mother lived was now a ritzy condominium with a Starbucks on the ground level.

All of the places he’d go with Bucky were now soulless veneers filled with empty promises of ‘happiness’ or ‘self-esteem’.

He remembered the time Bucky bailed him out of yet another beating by Arnie and his gang back in 1928. His mother berated him for getting in yet another fight while Bucky’s mom laughed and treated them to ice cream from the local sweets parlor. Bucky’s sisters – Rebecca, Rose, and Annabelle – were making a fuss and bursted out in giggles when Annabelle got ice cream in Bucky’s hair. It was one of the best days that year.

A T-Mobile now stands in its place.

All of his friends and comrades save Bucky and Peggy are dead; he nearly bawled in the middle of briefing when found out that Timothy ‘Dum Dum’ Dugan died and had a cry alone in his quarters afterwards.

Felt shitty about the current state of the country. It seemed as though everything has gotten worse. He found out about the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq Wars. How income and wealth inequality has somehow gotten as bad as, if not worse, than the Gilded Age. Corruption has turned DC and NYC into dog and pony show.

He was furious at all of the politicians and corporations that wanted him to endorse them or their actions. They wanted Captain America’s helmet and shield to mask their heinous acts. They were the same if not worse than Senator Brandt.

Some days Steve wished SHIELD let him stay in the ice. Even worse, there were days he felt that Captain America was for an America that never was.

Nowadays, he felt even more like an anomaly.

It started when he got out of the ice. He felt a lot stronger and faster; only Thor knew the extent of it and he has to hold back a lot when fighting for fear of government asking for more of his blood. Though he suspected Ife and Natasha might be onto him.

He was a lot hungrier than before he went on ice as well. Often time, he would have late night ‘dinners’ (now it's every night), To be honest, he was a bit embarrassed at how much he ate, though the thought of pinning the blame on Ife did cross his mind. It wouldn’t work due to Ife almost never eating with the team and Sam said that he would know if Ife was the culprit. Steve suspected that Ife has been using her connections to restock the food between when he retired to his quarters and before the rest of the team came for breakfast. Also, she kept leaving him fun pop culture facts and media recommendations for the night.

Steve didn’t feel he could go to Dr. Cho since he doubted she had anything to go on in his case.

He did wonder if Ife could help him. She seemed to like helping the team and she was knowledgable about Non-Humans. Wanda’s rapid improvement in her powers and control bolstered his decision.

Sighing, Steve sat up straight in his chair and picked up the letter he received that morning. Marlene Philomena Erskine had passed away and he was invited to her funeral.

It was sad to have yet another link to his past slip from his grasp.

  Steve was finishing up another book to fight off his jitters. It was the night before the operation and he needed to have a few moments of respite from the war.

He was so engrossed in what he was reading that he failed to notice Dr. Erskine entering.

Erskine, for his part, was eyeing several books in Rogers’ makeshift bookshelf: They Odyssey, Of Mice and Men, Murder on the Orient Express, Tender is the Night, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Homage to Catalonia, and To Have and have Not.

“What do you think of the book?” Erskine asked as he sat across the startled recruit.

“Just finished. Y’think it wise to get buzzed before a major operation, sir?” Steve noted when he saw the bottle and two shot glasses on the bed.

Erskine chucked, “Calms my nerves a bit. What did you think of the book?”

Steve pressed his lips together for a moment, “It was a good read. The book had a lot of good points for something written eleven years ago.”

“What truths?”

“Well, for one thing, how technology is used to make the populace happy, but not better. The World Government found a way to get people to willingly trade self-expression, self-awareness, and their happiness for cheap happiness and comfort. Makes you wonder if the US was next, you know?��

Erskine was taken aback by his answer. It was much deeper than most of commanding officers gave if they even read the book.

Though that last sentence was interesting.

“What do you mean next?”

“Isn’t that what happened in Germany?”

Erskine sighed, “Yes and no. Most people here think Hitler came out of nowhere, but he didn’t. Not everyone in Germany was for WWI. There was a 100,000 person march in Berlin, but it didn’t matter since the Social Democratic Party failed to rise to the occasion and went along with war effort. Many were scapegoated for Germany failure, Matthias Erzberger for instance.”

“What about the Weimar Republic?”

Once again, Erskine was taken aback by Steve’s knowledge, “Weimar Germany was a great place to be creative, curious, and make new discoveries. I met my wife, Greta, in Berlin during that time. I made a lot of friends, friends I had to leave behind.”

Erskine frowned as his face darkened,”The terrible thing, my friend, was not that Hitler was dangerous, it was that either people didn’t take him as the threat he was or they wanted to use him for their own ends. The cops and judges sympathized with the Nazi Party to get one over the Socialists and Communists. Industrialists wanted to make money off of the Nazis getting into power. Even the German and International newspapers didn’t cover him with the urgency required.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Ja, and it almost happened here, didn’t it?”

Steve nodded in reference to the America First movement and the German American Bund. He still remembers getting the crap beaten out of him by the Silver Shirts when he spoke out against them a few years ago.

“So why did you choose me?”

“I suppose that is the best question.” Erskine admitted while glancing at Steve’s bookshelf, “What do you think of the Odyssey?”

Steve shrugged, “The adventures were fun, but they were just fantasy.”

“They may not be, Mein Freund. How old do you think I am?”

“Uh, mid sixties?”

Erskine laughed, “You’re too kind. I will be 94 this September,” he smiled noting Steve’s shock, “Things are not always as they seem. I come from a long line of ‘healers’ dating back to before Rome. One of them was able to ‘make a man more’. They inspired me to go into this profession.”

“Making super soldiers?”

“Medicine and bio-chemical engineering.”

“Oh”

“Did you know that you will not be first to undergo this?”

“Who was?”

“His name was Konrad Jager. He was a lot like you: small, frail, but had a great deal of courage and compassion. He was willing to fight Nazis in the streets knowing he’d lose. One day in 1930, his parents begged me to save him as the doctors had given up all hope.

I was woking on a serum that would make the body impervious to all diseases rather than wait for the next outbreak to occur. I thought it would propel the medical field.

The trial worked and he was healed. He became much taller and broader in size as a result.”

Erskine pulled out a picture of himself next to a tall, well-built young man.

“That’s Konrad isn’t it?”

“Yes. I was able to help eight more people through the earlier version of the serum. All but one turned out well.”

“What happened to the one?”

“Ah yes, Eren Kant. He was a shy young man before the serum, but then became more like Hodge: a philander, arrogant, and bit of a bully with a temper. He ‘grew too big for his britches’ as one would say and was arrested by the Munich police. He let his arrogance blind him and he escaped in a way that intrigued Der Fuhrer and was taken to Berlin soon after. By this time, rumors had spread of my work and the Nazis were anxious to be the ‘best of the Aryans’. They were able to get my whereabouts from Eren and sent Schmitt to fetch me, but I was already on my way to Switzerland when he reached my home.”

“How did he get you?”

Erskine slightly jerked his head to the side and back, “A year prior to my attempted escape, I met a man in Geneva who warned of the dangers that lied in Berlin. He gave me his card if I needed to escape. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have waited so long before I made the phone call. I was tipped off by an old colleague of Eren entering Nazi custody.

Everything was set. My family and I were to enter Switzerland by crossing Lake Constance. We made it to Meerburg and the lake was in sight when Schmitt and his agents cut us off.

Schmitt believed that there was a power left behind by the gods. He believed himself to be a leader of a new race of men. He wanted me to ‘perfect the serum’, make him stronger than Eren. He had my children, Klaus and Marlene, taken to the outskirts of town as insurance implying that they would be sent to Dachau if I should fail.

I stalled for as long as I could hoping Schmitt would forget about me, but it was not meant to be. A few years after I was taken hostage, Schmitt stormed into my lab and pointed a gun to Greta demanding I give him the serum.”

“Did it make him stronger than Eren?”

“It did, but it had...side effects. The serum was not ready. Schmitt’s skin turned red and his face became so disfigured that Hitler called him the Red Skull. He killed Greta with his bare hands,” Erskine wiped away a few tears, “and ordered Marlene and Klaus to be sent to Dachau while I was banished to the dungeons.

Fortunately, Agent Carter and the SOE were able to save Marlene and myself. Though Klaus sacrificed himself when the agents could only save one of them.”

“Your son is a hero.”

“I only wish I could’ve told him that myself. But, back to your original question. I chose you because, like Konrad, you are a weak man. You see, the serum amplifies everything; good becomes great and awe-inspiring, bad becomes worse and a nightmare. Men who are strong their entire lives often do not value strength and abuses it. However, a weak man who is compassionate and brave will use it to help others. You were chosen because you had the aforementioned virtues and because you use your mind.

The world does not need perfect soldiers, look where that has gotten us. No, what we need right now are good men.”

Erskine poured out two shots and gave a glass to Steve.

Steve raised his glass, “To the little guys.”

The liquor was just about to touch his lips when Erskine snatched the glass from him, “What are you doing? You have an operation tomorrow. No fluids.”

Steve chuckled as Erskine bid him farewell and good luck tomorrow.

  Ife found Steve in the Common Room hunched over a chair with a letter in his hands. Emotional echoes of gloom came off in waves as she approached him.

“Whatcha looking at, Steve?”

When Steve didn’t respond, she gently placed a hand on his shoulder, “What’s wrong?”

Steve finally turned to Ife, “I received an invite to a funeral. It’s for Marlene Philomena Erskine, Dr. Abraham Erskine’s daughter.”

Ife nodded in understanding; he feels that he failed Marlene by not protecting Dr. Abraham Erskine.

But in fact, he didn’t fail her.

She lived quite the life for a human.

Not long after her father’s assassination, Marlene became a badass mechanical engineer and physicist. Her designs and schematics for transportation vehicles and energy storage/distribution gave the colonizer nations a fighting chance during the Wars Against Colonialism.

Though part of it was because the UA was a little cocky at that point. Marlene sure lit a fire under their ass! Ife can still hear her Aunt Eziamaka pouting at the news of one of UA bases nearly falling into their control.

Marlene’s assistance with the war effort didn’t last long as her gratitude towards the people who saved both her and her father wasn’t enough to overlook the Military’s treatment of some her colleagues.

Her life from there was pretty standard. She became a professor at MIT, got married and had a few kids.

BNA took her off the ‘humans of special interest’ list in 1971.

Thinking back on it, Marlene may have had a better life by her father not making it past WWII.

Though Ife thought it would be wise not to mention this to Steve.

“When is the funeral?”

Steve didn’t raise his head, “It’s in a week.”

“In that case, might I accompany you?”

“Yes...and thank you.”

“No Problem! See you later.” Ife wrapped her arms around him in a quick hug and went on her way leaving Steve slightly bewildered.

  Steve didn’t know what to make of Ifekerenma.

She was always asked the team how they were feeling at what seemed to be the right moment. Shoot, she even talked to custodial staff that few of ever acknowledge. Compassionate to nearly everyone, especially the child hostages during the last mission.

She’s nerdy to the point of Sam jokingly calling her a weeb (anime lover?) when she walked around in an oversized Cowboy Bebop t-shirt once. Wanda mentioned a ‘digital friend’ in her room and caught her mentioning how slow Stark’s tech was much to the amusement of team at Tony’s expense.

Steve’s certain Nat sent Clint a video of the whole thing.

Also, she was what Sam called a ‘Supreme Chef’. He contently patted his midsection remembering the feast she prepared for the team last night. Her cooking would’ve put some of Stark’s gourmet chefs to shame. She asked the team what they liked and she ended up having to create a dinner rotation. Steve was especially touched when she went to an antique bookstore for a recipe that was close to what his mother would’ve made for him.

Furthermore, she would leave out little homemade treats/ snacks at night. Pietro and Sam would sneak some when they thought no one was looking. She even giggled when he accidentally let out a huge belch after an amazing dinner a couple nights ago saying it’s a sign of thanks on her home planet, Avlenia.

Ife always called him Steve; not ‘Captain’ or ‘Cap’ or even ‘Good ol’Century Virgin’ (damn it, Tony!). She never made light of him ‘taking an ice nap’ or asking him about the 1940s in a demeaning way like some reporters and ‘little upstarts on social media’. Somehow, Ife found out about his love of drawing and got him art supplies with a list of recommended artists

She made him feel more like a person and not a symbol or a far off figure who’s emotionless.

Steve felt warm whenever he was around her in a way not unlike Bucky or Peggy though much more like Bucky. She seemed to sense that he was desperate to truly be seen in way that only Sam and sometimes Nat has.

It also didn’t hurt that she was a total knockout. He had the, ahem, pleasure of seeing her out of her uniform and training outfits a few times. She usually wore clothes that were more on the modest side...except for that one time when she wore a Sailor Moon crop top and high-waisted shorts as a dare from Nat. Half of the compound was staring and Steve spent most of the day in his quarters nursing a hard on he was so aroused.

And yet, Ife was one of the toughest women he knew; even Nat was a little scared of her (at least, he thinks). She might be the strongest person physically and she doesn’t take shit from people who badmouth her or the team; Agent Roussel learned that the hard way.

All in all, Ife was...something else, someone he wanted to get close to.

  The day of Marlene’s funeral started out well enough.

Ife spent the early morning making Sam’s request of cinnamon rolls, sausage, omelettes, waffles, and hash browns since he won the raffle of Vision’s turn as he doesn’t eat.

She was handing out everyone’s first servings (didn’t care what happened afterwards) when she felt Steve’s emotional echoes of depression, melancholy, and despair noting how his eyebrows furrowed and how tense his body language was.

She just hoped she could get to him.

  Steve was walking to garage hoping his outfit wasn’t too much.

Nat somehow convinced him into wearing a Highbridge Black Custom Suit with an Eastley Dobbey Blue Shirt, a Black Solid Tie, a Navy Blue Pocket Square, and Ink Black Dress Shoes.

He ‘upped the swoon dial’ as Nat put it. Could’ve sworn he heard Sam snickering.

Steve reached the entrance hoping not to keep Ife waiting when he heard clicking of heels behind him.

He turned around to find Ife looking almost unearthly.

She was wearing a black Ankara (?) dress with a cape that was black on the outside and golden on the inside with various blue, silver, and khaki rectangle clusters. Her hair was mostly contained in a wrap with a few strands framing her lovely face. Her full, plump lips were coated in a Light Plum (?) Matte Lipstick and she wore minimal gold eye shadow.

Her outfit did a splendid job of hinting at her voluptuous curves without needlessly flaunting them like the women who throw themselves at him at press tours.

Ife smiled at him and asked which car were they taking.

Steve motioned to one of the Black SUVs and the two of them strapped in for the three hour car ride.

  Ife sighed and gazed out the window at the scenery. Neither one of them had said anything in the past twenty minutes. Steve wasn’t a fan of most of the music that’s on the radio despite Sam’s best efforts. Ife had to break out her puppy dog eyes to get him to let them listen to some instrumental music from her favorite movies.

It seemed that they weren’t going to say anything until Steve cleared his throat.

Ife, not wanting to suffer in silence, decided break it, “How did you know Marlene?”

Steve raided his eyebrows for a split second, “I didn’t. I just feel like I should pay my respects, you know? I mean, I should attend the daughter of the man I failed’s funeral.”

The last sentence struck a chord with Ife. Emotional echoes of despair hit her like a tsunami.

Tentatively, Ife continued, “How did you fail Erskine?”

“I-I don’t think I’ve fulfilled my promise to him. The country has changed so much since I was on ice. It’s funny; I thought that Brave New World would only have a one of two aspects come to life, but I didn’t see nearly the whole book being right.”

Ife didn’t argue with the last two points. The US was nothing but a never-ending commercial sometimes. People were too busy being ‘happy’ or trying to get the newest thrill to realize that they were living in a sham of a republic.

Though she was concerned about the first sentence.

“What was the promise you made to Erskine? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Steve turned slightly, “To be true to who I am; a good man, not a perfect soldier. To be more like Konrad.”

Ife nodded musing on his answer. Erskine would want everyone he helped to be a good person considering the dangers of such power.

Though she wondered if she knew Dr Abraham’s full history.

Abraham Erskine came from a long line of Homo Magis who specialized in Alchemy . He turned to science when it was clear that his magical powers would never manifest (being only 1/16 Homo Magi). Erskine started working on what would become the Super Soldier Serum in 1920 after the witnessing the horrors of WWI firsthand as a medic.

He made a breakthrough in 1927 when he found what looked to be an old power cell in the attic of his childhood home. Turns out it was a modified Atlantean battery dating back to the 1600s, but whatever.

Konrad Jager was the first of nine volunteers; most of whom went on to fight in the Spanish Civil War with the International Brigades and be part of the German Resistance’s Special Forces during WWII.

Needless to say, they were recruited into BNA’s European Division.

Only Eren Kant was deemed a failure in the end.

Ife shook her head at the info in Erskine’s folder.

Eren was pompous dumbass who broke himself out jail by bending/breaking the bars of his cell after getting arrested for being a player and bully by the Munich Police in August of 1935. His show of superhuman strength got Erskine’s work onto the Hitler’s radar. BNA had to send a cleaner to ‘handle’ Eren before he could get everyone in even more trouble.

She wondered if Konrad and the others would make an appearance.

“What do mean by not staying true to yourself?”

Steve sighed, “It seemed a lot easier to do so in my time.”

Ife wanted to go further, but she couldn’t. Steve was punishing himself up for something he couldn't control and it was tragic.

She hoped that she could actually help him, not for the mission, but for himself.

  They arrived at the venue twenty minutes early. Steve was trying (failing) to fix his tie while Ife was looking as glamorous and poised as can be.

Sensing Steve’s unease, she gave his hand a comforting squeeze, “You’ll do fine,” she whispered as she fixed his tie while not trying inhale his delicious natural scent like a creep (again).

“Let’s go inside.”

  Everyone seemed to stop what they were doing when they entered the venue. Though Ife had to hand it to the guests; no one asked Steve for an autograph or a selfie. She noted several BNA officials and a couple of Earth-based Non-Human big wigs in attendance.

Guess Marlene was popular.

“Ife!” Azeneth shouted as she strode over to from a corner and enveloped her in a hug.

“Azeneth, how are you? I didn’t think you would be back from Mexico City so soon.”

“Well, the mission was short and they wanted me in New York to accompany Eliza here. Now, who is this fine gentleman, Ife?” Azeneth queried while Steve started shifting uncomfortably.

“This is Steve Rogers, one of my new teammates and Ca-”

“Captain America. I know, Ife. I was jesting.”

Ife sighed dramatically while rolling her eyes, “Steve, this is Azeneth. She’s one of my best Earth-based friends.”

“Kickass friend.” Azeneth corrected, “How are you liking Ife? She’s not too much trouble.”

“Stop it, ‘Aze!” Ife playfully hit Azeneth’s shoulder, “Feel free to ignore her, Steve.”

“Hmm, no. I don’t think I will, especially after the stunt you pulled on the first day at the compound.”

Azeneth burst out laughing at Ife’s shocked expression and Steve’s sly grin. She probably would’ve kept goin if not for Eliza cutting into their conversation.

“Excuse us, Mr. Rogers. I’ll have to speak with Ife for a moment. My name’s Eliza Maza, by the way.”

  Once they were out of Steve’s line of sight (Azeneth was keeping him busy), Eliza activated a noise canceller.

“So did anyone die in the attack on the Magic Council?” Ife asked as she made sure Steve wasn’t looking at them.

“No one was harmed, but several books are missing from the library.”

“Shit! Okay. Well, would Dr. Strange be available to assist Wanda with her training? Wong and Nazaret are at the Sanctum and he said that he knew of some spells that could help.”

“I’ll look into it. I should have an answer in a week”

“Okay.”

“Ife, please give me a call when you get back to the compound.”

Ife eyed Konrad Jager, Gregor Eisenberg, Sonje Decker, and Lukas Denhart making their way to Steve. She hoped they weren’t going to drop an info bomb on him today.

“I will.”

  The service was short and sweet as Marlene didn’t want everyone to be bored to tears on her behalf. The crowd got a laugh out that joke.

Afterwards, Marlene granddaughter, Zahara, requested if Steve could stay for a bit. She gave him a beautifully wrapped package.

“My grandmother wanted you to have this. She saw you fighting in the Battle of New York and knew you would know what to do with it.”

“It would be an honor, Miss.”

  Ife thought about her earlier conversation with Steve on the say back. She realized what’s happened to Steve was heartbreaking.

Here was a man who gave up everything for a country that only wants him as a cudgel for their heinous deeds. Someone who, if he hadn’t fallen into the ice, would’ve probably been ruined by the same country he swore to protect. They would’ve labeled him as a communist and destroyed his good name for not immediately getting on board with the next war.

To be honest, Ife didn’t think much of Steve before joining the team. She thought he was just the banner boy for colonizers to feel good; he was the reminder of that brief moment when the US was totally the bad guys (totally being the operative word).

But now?

She saw the toll the helmet and shield had on him. Ife doubted he knew that he was going to be alive for awhile judging how neither Konrad or the others aged a day since they received Serum 1.0 and Steve supposedly got one that was at least 3x as powerful.

She wanted to comfort him somehow, but she was lost on what to do.

When she got back to the compound, she gave Steve a hug and went straight to her quarters to call Eliza.

“Eliza. I can’t do this by myself, and if we’re going to pull this off, I’m going to need some serious backup because the Avengers need some serious help.”

  Fury was going through some mission reports when he heard a knock on his door.

“Come in.”

Oddly enough, Ife was the one to enter the room and not Maria Hill.

“Good Evening, Fury. I have someone who would like speak with you.”

“Well, give me a name and contact info and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Actually,” Ife reached in her pocket for a disc, “I can do you one better.”

Ife tossed the disc into the air and a moon-door portal formed from it. Out came Eliza, Azeneth, and Angela in her gargoyle form.

Eliza gave Ife a quick nod and turned to Fury, “Good Evening, Nicolas Fury. My name is Eliza Maza and we’re from the Bureau of Non-Human Affairs or BNA. I would advice that you lower your weapon. It won’t do you a lick of good,” Fury lowered his gun,” Good. Put Maria Rambeau on speaker, we need to talk.”

  -Somewhere in France-

 Maeve was enjoying her brunch while watching the footage of Eliza officially making contact with new SHIELD and SWORD.

“Well, it looks like it’s time to ‘get the band back together’ as the kids would say.” She chirped to the woman across the table.

“That expression pretty much died in the 90s. No ‘kid’ uses that phrase anymore.” Koronis deadpanned.

Maeve scoffed, “Anyone born after 1800 is a ‘child’ to me. This is what I get for trying not to sound like ‘an old hag’ as you put it.”

“Well, is everything on track?”

Koronis, or Carol, closed her eyes for few seconds, “I see nothing standing in our organization’s way. However, we should have the meeting sooner rather than later.”

“Duly noted. Anything else?”

“The new variable, Ifekerenma, will be more useful to our plans than I originally anticipated.”

“Oh, I do love surprises! I mean, I know how it will end, but I still like to be at least a little surprised. I knew it was a good idea to let Klaue be discovered by Ultron in Istanbul!”

Another woman walked up to the pair,”You wanted to see me, Mistress?”

“Yes. Svetlana, call the others. It’s time to put our plan into high gear. Hell’s Moon is upon us.”

  Steve was having a shitty birthday.

The press was pestering him about the presidential election. Several outlets have called him a sellout and a coward for not endorsing anyone.

He was figuring out the best way to take a shower and hit the hay in less than 30 minutes when he found a beautifully written note taped to his door.

It said to come to Ife room wearing his best dancing clothes.

Ten minutes later, Steve knocked on her door and it instantly opened to reveal a modest dancing hall not unlike the ones he went to with Bucky before the war.

He was so lost in thoughts admiring the place that he failed to notice Ife hovering a few feet from him.

“Happy Birthday, Steve! How do you like it?”

Steve turned to see Ife in a knee-length golden yellow African Wax Print Ankara dress with cold shoulders, ruffled sleeves, and a v-neckline. He didn’t miss the modest view of her cleavage or how her legs looked oh, so smooth in the dress.

Ife, for her part, was super nervous about this. Nat said that people went to dance halls all the time in the late 1930s and 1940s and it took her five days to get the architecture, the music, and the lighting just right.

She hoped that Steve wouldn’t be angry with her.

Steve looked incredibly handsome in his simple dress shirt and slacks. His powerful shoulders, thick biceps, trim waist, and beefy thighs were accentuated by the lighting which made him look like he was glowing.

Ife would’ve drooled if she knew that he didn’t like it when most women would throw themselves at him.

“It’s amazing. Thank you.”

“I’m sorry about the dress. I couldn-”

Steve raised a hand to stop her from going off on a tangent,”You look beautiful.”

Ife felt a flurry of warmth in her core at the compliment.

“So, what would like to do?”

Before Steve could answer, Duke Ellington’s Don’t Mean a Thing starting playing.

Steve stretched out his hand, “Would you like to dance?”

Ife took his had and they glided onto the dance floor.

“Where did you learn to dance?”

“Bucky’s mom made us learn when Bucky started getting attention from the girls at school. She thought it best that we knew how to treat them to a good time.”

“I see,” Ife giggled, “Then she was wise to make take the lessons. Though I’m more familiar with the jitterbug.”

Steve chuckled as they resumed swinging. He hummed a bit as they danced to Ella Fitzgerald, Caro Emerald, Jo Stafford, Billie Holiday, and Gene Krupa.

Ife was impressed with Steve’s dancing skills. What were those women thinking passing him up like that?!

After a couple more rounds of dancing, the music shifted to something more modern but not (it was Howl’s Moving Castle’s Main Theme) , the colors on the walls and ceiling brightened, and several chandeliers formed on the ceiling.

Steve gave Ife a slightly confused look and asked her if she would like to try a waltz this time.

The song lasted a little more than five minutes. Steve was somehow able to lead their movements in sync with the song.

Ife felt her body was aflame with gentle yet commanding touches Steve was giving her. He even lifted her a few times making her feel as though she was flying with how gently he held her.

They were absorbed in their own world they either failed to notice or ignored Nat and Wanda entering Ife room to see if they could have another spa day. Nat even got a few pictures of the two dancing.

Steve gave Ife one last life during the climax and pulled her in when the music came to a close. They were about to come in for a kiss when Ife pressed her lips together and back away.

“We should probably retire for evening. Goodnight, Steve.”

Steve’s shoulders slumped in defeat, but left Ife’s room with a simple goodnight with Nat and Wanda in tow.

Ife frowned. She knew Steve wasn’t in the best place for a relationship and her conscience wouldn’t let her take advantage of that.

[alexanderpusheen]

what frustrates me the most abt this china narrative is that the US created al qaeda and ISIS, those groups are recruiting and causing terrorism in xinjiang, china has been trying to handle the situation with re-education programs often suggested by westerners, and its still being treated as this major human rights violation. there are actually dozens of countries with several robust anti radicalization programs that are just as strict, like singapore, colombia, yemen, bangladesh, saudi arabia, and indonesia. this paper ive linked to was even funded by the DHS so like...why has detaining someone and basically reverse brainwashing them out of being a terrorist been so acceptable for so long but now its an issue? 

if you take issue with chinas program, you have to prove its somehow exceptional to these other programs. since we really dont have any way of knowing what is truth or reality thanks to the enormous disinformation campaign going on, you fucking cant. we dont even know what the programs entail because even googling it gets you exclusively hyperbolic concentration camp accusations. 

what i will say is that relations between the han majority and the uyghur minority have been strained since at least the 80s. link is the notoriously conservative and pro US intervention human rights watch, so dont say im using pro commie sources or anything. every time i do any bit of research on this i seem to find an attempt from major news outlets in the early to mid 2000s or late 20-teens to prove this all started or became dramatically worse now, but things have always been tense. and its not really a surprise that things really got bad after the collapse of the soviet union, an event that was geographically close to china and the xinjiang region and also just like, a fucking major global event in general.

what i find to be very odd is just how dramatically the narrative has changed. the diplomat, one of my favorite periodicals, went from taking very nuanced and balanced positions on xinjiang that i almost completely agreed with to being just as aggressive as outlets like the BBC and CNN in the span of five years. they have eleven pages worth of articles on xinjiang, mostly covering the terrorism and beijings response (which i agree is too harsh) and xinjiang muslims’ relationships to the greater muslim world. 

an example is how this article talks about the conflict at the time which warns of escalating violence as a result of han chauvinism and beijing being unable to deal with the extremism holistically. it points out how there were uyghurs captured among taliban ranks in afghanistan and how many might have even been working with ISIL.

The threat will not be an existential one to the Chinese state, as most Uighurs would prefer a peaceful accommodation. But even if only 1 percent of Uighurs hold extreme views, there are 10 million in Xinjiang and even for a state security apparatus as formidable as China’s, 100,000 or more angry people present a tough challenge.

i think its totally right that china does not allow people in that area to have cars, woodcutting tools, and amonium nitrate (which is used in bombs) is very strictly regulated. i completely agree that this is not how you combat terrorism. most people do not want war and broadly punishing these people is itself a human rights violation that went unnoticed until now.

however, in that same year, the diplomat also published this article about the infamous turkestan islamic party. members of TIP are like, literal jihadists lmfao.

TIP fighters call on the world’s Muslims to join the jihad against Western countries in internet videos. Perhaps most worringly for China, the TIP believes that Muslims may fight locally using various means instead of coming to Syria and Iraq to conduct a “holy war” against the “infidel” Western regimes.  

yeah i definitely want to hear more about what these guys have to say. the article is really good because i think it highly illustrates just how dangerous these people are. theyve killed hundreds of people across china and want to establish a fascist religious state in xinjiang. while the article speaks for itself, i believe the last paragraph really highlights why china is being singled out whereas countries like france and canada are considered allies to muslims for whatever reason:

However, as experience has shown, China takes a passive position in the struggle against global Islamic jihad in Syria and Iraq. Beijing has not sent its troops to the Middle East to fight ISIS and has instead confined itself to diplomatic support for Russia and the United States. The Chinese government uses the attacks of Islamic jihadists to persuade Western countries to support Beijing’s position on Xinjiang and turn a blind eye when the freedom and rights of Uyghurs are harshly suppressed by Chinese security forces. Therefore, China is not perceived by the West as a reliable partner in the fight against terrorism. [emphasis mine]

im just a little surprised to see that a lot of these violent attacks from extremists throughout the years have targeted not just han chinese but also other uyghurs. in the west people do not typically sympathize with terrorists as freedom fighters, even on the left, because we know that no matter how angry or how seemingly justified the violence might seem, terrorism is unacceptable and it grossly misrepresents islam. it is a fascist act because those terrorists often follow an extremely right wing version of islam. also, we know that those who carry out terrorist attacks even outside of the west are middle class and professionals in some way, not poor and marginalized people. the level of nuance afforded to terrorists outside of xinjiang is pretty staggering. 

yet in china, there seems to be this excitement than they are killing chinese people, even if some of those chinese are other uyghers or otherwise muslims. those who carry out attacks in xinjiang dont get any nuance or analysis because theyre justified.

ive referenced the diplomat earlier but this article from 2013 says it perfectly: Call Tiananmen Attack What It Was: Terrorism. except terrorism is bad. and the west wants you to support the uyghurs. and make no mistake, they do not want you to support the millions of uyghurs who want to live peacefully, free of any repression, american or chinese. they want you to support the jihadists randomly blowing up chinese and tourists alike because you are meant to sympathize with their plight.

terrorism isnt something to be romantacized or cheered on. it is something someone or someones do when they feel they have no other option. people do not want to kill even those they feel they have every right to because thats a line you cant uncross. murder changes you, justified or not. see the last chapter of wretched of the earth for this.

terrorism is great, however, for destabilizing a region or a country, and xinjiang is resource-rich. establishing a US-friendly regime, no matter how good they are on human rights, is the goal. the US does not care about muslims. they do not care about human rights. china, also, does not really seem to care about muslims or human rights either. but we’ve seen this since vietnam, and the US has learned since vietnam. the vietnamese were sympathetic. they were minding their business. 

after vietnam, merely being communist isnt enough to warrant invasion. theyre killing their own people. nevermind that bolsonaro kills his own people and no one wants to invade (yet--biden has mention sanctions wrt us which is scary but again, thats got everything to do with making sure latin america is loyal to the west, not HR offenses). korea, although it was before vietnam, was less publicized and learning from vietnam gave the US a valuable lesson: always blame the victim. and thus, the US blames the victims of its violence. even if its ‘justified’, even if its ‘true,’ as was the case with saddam hussein, invading and occupying was the nightmare no one but the imperialists anticipated. because they dont broadcast what occupying forces do to the occupied. i am old enough to remember abu ghraib. have it seared in my memory forever. you perhaps are also old enough to remember, but also think millions of abu ghraibs and guantanamo bays are always worth it, always justified. 

i know people arent going to read this and remind me really rudely that they didnt read it but i want to really emphasize how one of imperialism and colonialisms features is ethnic and racial separatism. how the rwandan genocide couldnt have happened without previous belgian and french rule. how yugoslavia wouldve remained a single country had it not been for NATO. i think its easy to diminish the role of the colonizer in all of this, but it is actually one of its goals: divide and conquer. exacerbate the existing conflicts to the point of genocide. 

and if the west succeeds in balkanizing china, you will get more racism rather than less. you will see more violence against muslim minorities rather than less. they will feel less empowered rather than more. china has to learn that they are also to blame in a way that will be catastrophic for over a billion people. han chauvinism and outright racism must be addressed beyond window dressing.

wrapping up, china is in the wrong here. what theyre doing is racist and humiliating a population that has to be empowered. and the one child rule, even for the han majority, is imo fucking evil lol like sorry tankie tumblr im tankie too but i cannot for the life of me accept that as a good thing.... but i also dont buy the accusations of genocide, because even tho a lot of these articles are kind of glossing over it, china is trying to handle the terrorism in the region. imo theyre feeding into it by getting more han in the area, but also having more han but forcing them to take worse jobs would be a show of good will. idk, this situation is extremely complex and frankly, most uyghers do not want secession. 

i also take extreme issue with people saying that adrian zenz is somehow reliable. not only is he a nazi crackpot, hes also literally the only source for almost all of what we know about this in the west. that is not how you do journalism. i dont understand how people are saying ‘yeah hes an extremely fascist grifter but also i believe him because hes anti communist and also anti china’. thats also not really the point? the point is that hes also the ONLY SOURCE on almost all of this, which is alarming. 

i also find it very startling that in order to keep interest in the story, every few weeks the US has to remind people that the chinese are also doing what the US is doing to women in its own camps. forget that the US is separating minors from parents (since 2008). forget that the US is sterilizing women en masse (since 2017). forget that the US is raping women at the border (since there was a border). forget the US even has camps because now they arent even called that anymore. this is not that ‘you can be angry at two things at once’ but a clearly cynical attempt to get its citizens to forget that the US is detaining, deporting, sterilizing, and raping, and gassing non US nationals. 

they are not ‘your own people.’ they are me. the other. i am an immigrant to the US, currently in my country of birth, so i am the other to you, the american. the chinese are doing the evil crime of killing their own. but the americans could never kill their own because they dont consider black americans to be their own. latin american nationals are not their own. bombing millions globally is not their own. thats always justifiable. there is clearly an element of racism in how these crimes are perceived as more or less evil.

the way immigrants and black americans are brutalized in the US is almost naturalized. like its the way things are supposed to be. you can live with that. its upsetting that you have to hear about antiblackness and the like but you know thats just how life is. you dont necessarily call for the US to be sanctioned or bombed by other countries because you believe in the inherent goodness of white america. but countries like china and iran and north korea deserve to be starved and killed for their crimes. and you can never say ‘maybe bombing and starving a country isnt the answer’ because it means you agree with it. you can never say ‘this is clearly propaganda to make me hate another race so much’ because it means youre a genocide denier. im sorry, but again, i remember iraq in 2003, i remember libya in 2011. i dont buy it.

finally, theres been a lot of attacks on asian people in the US lately and if you cannot see the violent way the US talks about china the country and how that influences people to harm asians within the US then idk what else to tell you. people will really believe this shit and say the chinese are all blood thirsty islamaphobes and thus need to be harmed. ‘im not like that! i defend my asian friends from racism!’ thats nice and all but idk how spreading some sinophobic propaganda designed by the US to make you support some kind of violence against one billion chinese people isnt inherently racist. also its unhelpful because sanctions dont really solve problems. but ive spoken too much.

[365days365movies]

April 4, 2021: The Great Dictator (Review)

It's a 100%. Haven't given one of those in a while!

Here's the thing: this is a great film. Hang the comedy bit, even though it's also a very funny film! This is a great movie, no questions. I actually have no problems with it, and barely any actual commentary, gonna be honest. Fact of the matter is, it's essentially perfect in my book. Maybe it's not actually flawless...but I'm having a lot of trouble seeing any flaws. If you've got any, PLEASE tell me! I'm curious, really.

But OK, why am I even writing this, then? Because I want to close out this Golden Era of Comedy with a post about the end of its biggest star, Charlie Chaplin. Because from here...things are all downhill. And the seeds of that journey can be seen in this film. So, in other words, this post is a film history post. WELCOME TO SCHOOL

Yeah, sorry. If you like these history posts, I hope you like this one! And if not...yeah, that's entirely fair. Go ahead and skip this one! The next movie is Arsenic and Old Lace, so I'll save you the trouble of scrolling down! See you next time!

...

...OK, you still here? Cool, let's do this. Go ahead and "keep reading" for more on Chaplin after this film!

Review: Charlie Chaplin

Chaplin's walking on air, at least in terms of his film career! The Great Dictator will become his best-received film critically, and was a smash-hit in the United States. But that's pretty heavily contrasted with the reception of, well, Chaplin himself. Because unfortunately for him, Chaplin's ideologies would soon VIOLENTLY clash with that of his adopted country of the United States.

First things first, his love life was a mess, as was typical for the film star. His latest significant other was actress Joan Barry, and they separated bitterly (AKA, the only was Chaplin separates from anybody), after having a child together. This relationship would begin the downfall of Chaplin's image, starting in 1942. And that would be due to one of the most irritating, shitty dudes in the history of the FBI: J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover HATED Chaplin, mostly because he was suspicious of him, as he was with EVERYBODY. Fuck Hoover, by the way, dude was a monster. He was also an INSANE patriot, bordering on straight up nationalism. But his hatred of Chaplin revolved around the fact that Chaplin's views were...controversial. I mean, Modern Times was an anti-industrialist film, and that's what the USA was ALL ABOUT at the time. And then, there's...one more thing. I'll get there.

Hoover launched a smear campaign against Charlie, and the Barry case was saddled with an additional allegation: violation of the Mann Act, which stated that it was illegal to transport women across state lines for sexual reasons. It was an attempt to stifle prostitution, and part of a massive moral panic of the time period. It was a bullshit charge, and Chaplin escaped it in trial. But damage had been done to his reputation, and Charlie was about to make it worse.

Shortly after, in 1943, Chaplin would meet his last wife, Oona O'Neill. She was 18, he was 54. Fuckin' OOF, dude. And in 19 years, the two would have EIGHT CHILDREN JESUS FUCKING CHRIST CHAPLIN!!!

Anyway, other than this positive development, the Barry trial had beaten the shit out of him, will-wise. But he began developing a new ambitious film project in 1946, which was called Monsieur Verdoux. This was a black comedy about a bank clerk/serial killer that killed women for money. Which is obviously pretty controversial in a moral panic-stricken America, but that was made worse by Chaplin more overtly expressing his political views...which were violently anti-capitalism! In post-World War II America!

Uh-oh.

In 1947, with the release of Monsieur Verdoux, the film was legit booed at the premiere in the USA. Fuck. Tensions finally came to a head, and Chaplin was "outed" as a filthy, filthy commie! And I put "outed" in quotes because, well...he wasn't. Sure, Chaplin was against capitalism and military nationalism, as well as sympathizing with communist ideals in some cases. He was also friends with suspected communists, and with Soviet diplomats. And that shit's barely OK NOW amongst a pretty big proportion of people in the country. In 1947? WAY FUCKIN' WORSE.

Chaplin was "dangerous and amoral" according to the FBI, and he probably believed in equal rights for minorities too, the FILTHY FUCKIN' COMMIE!!! But, yeah, he was targeted by Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and was nearly listed as one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of filmmakers blacklisted from Hollywood for alleged communist activities. Chaplin escaped that, but was still a major target for the Red Scare.

Chaplin, not giving a fuck as always, now decided upon a new project. Limelight was a semi-autobiographical film, in which he played an aging former vaudeville actor who had lost his popularity and fame, and falls in love with a younger woman. On the nose as always, Chaplin. Also, that's Buster Keaton in the GIF up there! Only time the two ever appeared on screen. Neat, huh?

Chaplin went home to the UK for the film's well-publicized premiere in 1952. And that's when the US Attorney General STRUCK, revoking Chaplin's VISA, and trapping him overseas permanently. Chaplin was banned from the United States, through really shitty underhanded tactics. Fuck, man. Worst part is, it's since been proven that there was no good justification for the VISA to be revoked. But the damage was done, and Chaplin willingly cut his ties with the United States, having been spurned by his adopted country for years.

Loved in Europe and hated in America, Charlie continued making films, with his next film being another semi-autobiographical parody called A King in New York. He also came out not as a communist, but as a straight-up anarchist! He hated government altogether at this point, and it's hard to blame the guy. He really did get screwed. But, ironically, his love life was now quite stable, and his marriage with Oona was happy, by all accounts.

His films were banned in the United States, and Chaplin banned them right back, not releasing his films there, and preventing American journalists from attending its premiere. But even ten years later, Chaplin's filmography began to re-emerge for movie audiences, and his popularity began to rebound. The man was just that good, what can I say? Chaplin made a romantic comedy in 1967, called A Countess from Hong Kong, and starring Marlon Brando of all people! It was his first color film, and...it did NOT go well with audiences, ANYWHERE. It just wasn't well-received, and that film would be Chaplin's last.

In 1967, Chaplin had his first stroke of many. He continued his marriage with Oona, and even continued making another film called The Freak, an ambitious project from what's known about it. Basically, it was about a South American girl with wings, which is interesting. In 1972, after 20 years away, Chaplin was welcomed back to the United States with open arms, and was given an Honorary Academy Award for his insane contribution to the medium since the Golden Age of Hollywood. He was given a 12-minute standing ovation, the longest ever given at an Academy Award ceremony.

Still planning on making his film, he returned home. But the film went on a permanent hiatus by 1977, by which time his health had badly declined. On Christmas Day, 1977, Chaplin was found dead, having suffered a stroke in his sleep. He was 88 years of age, and was buried two days later in Switzerland. And THEN...he was dug up.

Yeah, DUDE'S GRAVE WAS FUCKIN' ROBBED! A couple of guys held Chaplin's corpse for ransom, which didn't work out for them, and he was reburied a few days later, this time in a reinforced concrete vault, where his remains remain to this day.

Charles Spencer Chaplin is one of the greatest actors and filmmakers of his time, and didn't deserve the guff he got from the government. The guff he got from his wives...eh, that he probably did deserve, not gonna lie. Dude wasn't the best husband, or the best dad to at least three of his kids. But in an ongoing effort to separate the art from the artist, Chaplin needs to be appreciated for the mountain of talent that he was, and his films will make him immortal in the annals of film history. Long live the Tramp.

But with him and his influence, the film industry had a place to evolve from, especially in terms of comedy. After The Great Dictator, some comedies felt the freedom to take a bit of a darker tone. And from here on out, we're splitting the timeline by genre, tracking comedy films by the evolution of their respective genres. And we start in 1944, with a film about...MYURDERRRR!!! And sweet old ladies!

April 5, 2021: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), dir. Frank Capra

[suspected-spinozist]

Look, I love Filmstruck, but this is an astonishingly bad take: 

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s when someone brings up a movie that tells a fairly straightforward story and hits you with a, “but you know what it’s really about, right?” Ugh. Unearthing the hidden meanings of movies has become a definite thing in an online culture that rewards hot takes even if they’re not so hot.

Perhaps the all-time champion of this is the 1954 Oscar winner, ON THE WATERFRONT. Not only will people tell you what it’s “really” about, but they’ll ask you to hate it for that very reason.

For context: On the Waterfront was directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, both of whom were “friendly witnesses,”  meaning they named names of suspected Hollywood communists before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. On the Waterfront stars Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, a small-time gangster who risks his life by naming key members of the local mob at a murder trial, making the docks safe once again for decent people. 

Many people believe that Brando’s character is a not-so-subtle stand-in for Kazan - because he almost certainly is. Fererra’s argument is that 1) Kazan began work on the film in 1951, before he testified before HUAC, and 2) the first draft of the screenplay was written by Arthur Miller, a noted communist sympathizer. 

What he doesn’t mention is that Arthur Miller left the film because he was disgusted by Kazan’s testimony, and because they had very different opinions about the message they were trying to convey (this is something of a theme in later Miller/Kazan collaborations; see also After the Fall). Schulberg, another friendly witness, made major changes to Miller’s script. While Miller had written the Malloy character as a hard-bitten investigative reporter, Schulberg made him the younger brother of the mob boss’s second-in-command. The central emotional arc of the film, about the heroic necessity of testifying against one’s friends and family, was added by Schulberg and Kazan after Miller left. 

More to the point, Elia Kazan made no effort to deny what he was doing. He’d been a communist in the ‘30s, when he was heavily involved with the Group Theater. He left, or was forced out - it’s not clear which came first - due to political and aesthetic differences with the party leadership. Kazan remained left-leaning, but felt that he’d been bullied into compromising his artistic vision.  This experience would blossom into a lifelong resentment. Still, he resisted testifying, and only named names after first appearing as an unfriendly witness. It’s hard to pin down Kazan’s psychology at this point. He was certainly too individualistic, or maybe just too egotistical, to make a good party member. At the same time, he had definite leftist sympathies and strong sense of loyalty. 

Personally, I think he testified to save his career. To justify that decision to himself, he had to make it a heroic act. In his 1988 autobiography, he describes his feelings on Oscar night, 1954, when On the Waterfront won almost every major award: 

“I was tasting vengeance that night and enjoying it. `On the Waterfront' is my own story; every day I worked on that film, I was telling the world where I stood and my critics to go and - - - - themselves.”

In other words, critics think that On the Waterfront is about Kazan’s decision to testify before HUAC because Kazan was pretty fucking clear that On the Waterfront was about his decision to testify before HUAC. 

But what really bothers me about Greg Ferrara’s article is the inane dichotomy between people who appreciate the film and those who think it’s just about politics. Let’s be clear, here: On the Waterfront is a masterpiece. It’s one of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen, and among the most beautifully shot. It’s also really clearly Elia Kazan playing out his personal psychodrama in the most breathtakingly narcissistic way possible. (Making Marlin Brando your heroic alter ego in 1954 is one hell of a power move). 

Part of me wishes I hadn’t known all this context before watching the film. All the obvious self-aggrandizement does detract from its - still considerable - emotional force. At the same time, it makes it a much more interesting movie. On the Waterfront is undeniably great, but it’s not the greatest movie to come out of the Kazan/Schulberg collaboration. That’s largely because it’s not very subtle. Brando’s performance is correctly recognized as one of the most important in American cinema, and he manages to give Terry some psychological depth,  but the ethical framework in which he’s operating is painfully simplistic. There’s no question of what the right choice is, or even what motivates him to make it - we’re just waiting for him to get there on his own. 

In the end, the most interesting character in the film is Elia Kazan. It’s fascinating that a director at the height of McCarthyism, in the era of HUAC and the blacklist and the Hollywood 10, could really, genuinely believe that naming suspected communists was an act of courage But he did. And as someone with any experience of leftist communities, it’s not hard to see how he ended up there. If you’re a former member of the Group Theater, best friend with Arthur Miller, moving in circles dominated by communists and ex-communists and fellow travelers, and if the cell you were part of genuinely was kind of authoritarian, and you desperately need to think of yourself as a good person - it makes sense. And it’s much more interesting than anything that happens on screen. 

That might be the real takeaway from On the Waterfront: how easy it is to assume your bubble is the world. Kazan may have been a more perceptive director than he knew. It’s hard not to think that his portrayal of oppressive fear owed something to the social climate of hollywood in the 1950s. In the end, Terry’s decision to testify is an act of trust. He has other motivations - love, anger, revenge - but none of that means anything until he loses his belief in the utter inevitability of the mob. 

[resistfascism999]

Copypasta from @zestychille​ OMG IDK if everyone here gets the Roy Cohn joke in this. Y’all might be too young, or unlearned, and that is ok, but it’s time to learn some gay history. Roy Cohn was known for being a bad man. He was Donald Trump’s Lawyer, but he had MANY even more prominent roles to be remembered. Roy Cohn was a lawyer in the McCarthy Hearings accusing people of being communists during the red scare 2 electric boogaloo. He was one of the most despicable lawyers I have ever heard of, and he helped the government bully an amazing amount of people. They were convicted of being treasonous if found guilty of being communists or communist sympathizers/etc. They targeted liberals, gays, etc. And Roy Cohn secretly fucked men, while making it his life’s work condemning people who would have saved him if the roles were reversed. His life wasn’t all glamour, but he REALLY played the wrong side. Roy Cohn helped get RAEGAN elected in the first place, to champion his fight against the gays. Eventually his train would kick him off though, as he got DISBARRED for being a scumbag who did shit like physically forcing people to sign documents.(among other BS) He lost everything, and it was quite the scandal. Then they figured out he had AIDS when he had to seek treatment, and he died of related complications soon after1. He had been hiding it as long as he could. Him dying of aids was a BIG deal, because if someone regarded by republicans as so influential and mighty for their cause could have been a filthy homosexual the whole time, why then ANYONE could be gay. It was almost as if some people were BORN that way. WHOA. They had never really given that idea any thought, and many of them still deny it. It didn’t save the gay community form the aids crisis, not at all. But it DID play a part RUINING Roy Cohn’s name just before he died of a disease that was disproportionately stigmatized at the time. So when you see Roy Cohn with a communist flag, it’s a big part FUCK YOU ROY COHN YOU LITERAL OOZING PUSTULE OF A HUMAN BEING, and a little part, YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE FOR US ROY COHN YOU STUPID PILE OF SHIT, and a little part, YOU WERE ONE OF US EVEN IF YOU DENIED IT AND YOU COULD HAVE HAD A HOME WITH US IF YOU HADN’T BEEN AN ABSOLUTE SACK OF GARBAGE ROY COHN. Because in the end, Roy Cohn was a gay man who let himself become the scourge of his own people. He spent his life unhappy, both being bullied, and bullying others even harder. And if he had stayed true to his heart and been openly gay, OR EVEN JUST NOT OUTWARDLY ANTI GAY, he not only may have found a better life, but he would have saved the lives of countless people who were condemned due to his championing of hate. This has been a lesson in history some of us let be erased.

AIDS quilts

[justanothercinemaniac]

Epic Movie (Re)Watch #167 - X-Men (2000)

(GIF source unknown [if this is your GIF please let me know].)

Spoilers Below

Have I seen it before: Yes

Did I like it then: Yes.

Do I remember it: Yes.

Did I see it in theaters: No.

Format: Blu-ray

1) Xavier’s opening monologue is not only a great way to set up this individual film, but the now-17-year-old franchise which followed.

Prof. X: “Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.”

2) The very first scene in this film is young Magneto in a Polish concentration camp and I have to say it works absolutely fantastically.

For one thing it creates immediate sympathy for what is essentially the villain of the peace, but more than that it sets the tone for the entire series. Not just the dark tone but the idea that mutants are representative of the oppressed. When the comics were first released in the 60s the parallels were between the Civil Rights Movement, nowadays you can see parallels with the gay community and islamophobia. That is because oppression, intolerance, and bigotry are essentially the same no matter who it is directed at.

3) The introduction to Anna Paquin’s Rogue continues to set the dark tone of the film, as well as Rogue’s key conflict in a simple and understandable way.

4) The government hearing.

The hatred, fear, and oppression seen in this scene should not be as relevant in 2017 as it is. Senator Kelly’s arguments about, “Well we do license people to drive,” is based on fear and fear alone. He is scared but justifies his fear by making other people afraid. Asking a human being to register for being different is undeniably unconstitutional. And the filmmakers are aware that America has seen this play out before.

Senator Kelly: “I have here a list of names of identified mutants...”

Senator Joseph McCarthy [an actual historical figure who instigated the Red Scare in the 1950s]: “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party”

Good, just wait until I do my recap for Good Night, and Good Luck. I’ll have some things to say about Joseph fucking McCarthy then.

5) The relationship between Charles and Erik is - like all the best elements in this film - clearly established from their introduction to the audience.

Erik: “I’ve heard these arguments before.”

We understand that they’re friends, we understand that they both think they have the best interests of their people (mutants) at heart, but most painfully we understand exactly WHY they both go about their revolution through different methods. It is a relationship which will remain consistent and interesting throughout the series.

6) Ian McKellen as Magneto.

(GIF originally posted by @marveladdicts)

There are a number of standout casting decisions made in this film which will stay strong even in the weaker entires of this series, and Ian McKellen is definitely one of them. Unless you’re The Joker, a good villain does not see himself as the villain. Magneto does nothing out of cruelty or malice, he does so for one clear end goal: the superiority of mutant kind. You understand why he goes to drastic measures, even if you don’t agree with him. McKellen is able to consistently make Erik human. The sadness, the determination, the focus, everything that makes this character amazing in the comics, McKellen carries onscreen. A truly brilliant choice which will give us many great scenes to come.

7) Anna Paquin as Rogue.

Rogue is markedly more different than she is in the comics, but I don’t have as much of an issue with that as others do (at least, not in this film). She’s a bit more timid, a bit more scared, which is very human of her and helps the audience sympathize with her. Paquin plays the part remarkably well, carrying Rogue’s pain and conflict well in her performance.

8) Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

Hugh Jackman is the standout element of this film and one of the most perfect examples of comic book casting in the history of cinema. The guy played the part for SEVENTEEN years. Even in weaker X-Men films Jackman’s Wolverine is remarkably consistent. He IS Wolverine. The aggression, the ferocity, the isolation, the pain, the instinct, Jackman captures it all beautifully. But more than that, we explore who Wolverine becomes when we throw him together with other people. We see who he becomes just as he learns who he becomes when he has other mutants relying on him. It’s a remarkable journey to see him not only go through this film but all seventeen years of playing this character. You are not watching Hugh Jackman, this is not a performance. This is Wolverine. Living, breathing, pure, Wolverine. And whatever shortcomings the X-Men series has had throughout its years, Jackman’s Wolverine has always been perfect.

9) This line always stuck with me.

(GIF originally posted by @filmeslut)

This relates very well to the pain Wolverine deals with everyday. Most living creatures go through enough pain they do. Wolverine’s mutation means he lives with his pain on a daily basis. He HAS to. Dying is not an option for him. That is very defining for his character.

10) The fight with Wolverine and Sabretooth does a lot of things well. To start, it’s the first action scene of the film and - while brief - it establishes the strong choreography to come. Second, we immediately see a juxtaposition between Wolverine and the rest of the X-Men as he is more feral in his fighting style while Cyclops and Storm are much more uniform. Finally, it establishes the rivalry between Wolverine and Sabretooth. Something which is a staple of the comics, this rivalry doesn’t get too much time to develop in the film but it is established in small yet meaningful ways. I’m glad they at least did that as opposed to nothing.

11) Logan trying to escape Xavier’s mansion is actually wildly clever. It establishes the geography of the school without letting the audience know. Instead we follow Wolverine as he’s trying to escape this strange place and in the process get the layout of the new world he’s in. Very clever.

12) Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier.

Similar to McKellen’s Magneto, we are able to see the complexities of Xavier’s character through Stewart’s performance. We understand the pain he went through as a child, we understand how he has/is searching for hope for the future. We see the soft sorrow he carries mixed in with this optimism and the struggle he carries to put stock in hope over pain. It’s a wonderful character who - like Jackman - Stewart will get to play for 17 years.

13) If you want any further proof that Hugh Jackman is great as Wolverine:

Logan [after Xavier gives exposition about the X-Men and such]: “Sabretooth? Storm. What do they call you? Wheels?”

At least the last part of that line was improvised, but it is so perfectly Wolverine it fits.

14) The introduction to the Xavier school from a storytelling standpoint (as opposed to just a geography standpoint) is very slick and clean. We’re getting a lot of exposition about Professor X, the X-Men, and the world of mutants in not a lot of time. But it doesn’t dog down the film and we are not bored by it.

15) Ah, the future continuity issues begin...

“When I was 17, I met a young named named Erik Lenscher...”

They seem a little older than 17 to me...

16) Rebecca Romijn as Mystique.

Romijn’s part as Mystique is largely a physical performance, but that does not mean it isn’t an iconic one. Before Jennifer Lawrence would put on the blue skin paint, Romijn would define who Mystique was on screen for all to come. She is able to portray the character’s passion, focus, physical strength, and shiftiness with just a movement. She doesn’t have many lines, but the ones she does have leave an impact.

Mystique [to Kelly]: “You know people like you are the reason I was afraid to go to school as a child.”

17) Magneto knows what’s up.

Magneto: “Mankind has always feared what it doesn’t understand.”

18) Famke Janssen as Jean Grey.

Janssen plays Jean well not only in this film but as she develops over the trilogy. Despite not having the flashiest/most aggressive of powers like Wolverine or even Cyclops, she’s able to hold her own with the rest of the team. She’s confident, competent, but still able to be vulnerable when the story calls for it and has no ego. A strong character actress with a strong character to fit her roll, I am glad for Janssen in this film.

19) James Marsden as Cyclops.

(GIF originally posted by @hughxjackman)

Okay, so I’ve got a handful of issues with how Cyclops is handled in the original trilogy. Not through Marsden’s performance or through his characterization, but more because of a lack of things to do in the plot. However, those issues do not pertain to this film (wait until I get to my Last Stand recap). Although Marsden��s Scott Summers/Cyclops is largely used as a foil to Jackman’s Wolverine, we get to see him in action and lead the X-Men later in battle (like he does in the comics). This film doesn’t peel back too much more than, “Wolverine pisses me off,” but we do get to see Marsden play a caring and competent leader when Wolverine is not in the picture. How he searches for Rogue, the way he handles the team on Liberty Island, Marsden plays all of this great. You understand why Scott is the leader of the team through his conduct and confidence, both things Marsden shows off very well.

20) Hey, remember back when Stan Lee cameos in Marvel movies were, “blink and you’ll miss it?”

21) So Logan straight up kills Rogue when she wakes him up from a nightmare. Like he’d be dead if it weren’t for her mutant ability. And after she does it to save her life she is met by fear and caution from her fellow students initially. And then Mystique disguised as Bobby comes to her and reprimands her. Tells her students are afraid of her, that Xavier is furious and looking to kick her out. How much must that hurt? Like, “Here’s a place where I can be me. Where other people are as weird as I am and where I can be accepted.” And then that’s taken away from her. It’s pulled out from under her feet because people are afraid of her, a feeling which is importantly all too familiar to her at this point. She let her guard down and - even though it wasn’t true and it wasn’t really Bobby - she was so ready to believe the world had turned on her AGAIN. That just...sucks.

22) Charles acting like he doesn’t know how Erik is hiding from his telepathy takes on new meaning in a post First Class world. It is probably easiest attributed to another error in continuity, but my head canon is that Charles is covering for Erik a little in the never dying hope that he’ll do the right thing.

23) Halle Berry as Storm.

I have never loved Berry as Storm, but that’s more because of The Last Stand than anything else. I think I like her best in this film, which is unfortunate because it is where she has the least to do. She’s a bit kinder, a bit more even tempered, wiser and more soulful than she comes off in the sequels. And the keeping of her original accent is a nice touch (I was disappointed to lose that in the sequels). But again, that’s all there’s really to say about her because she doesn’t get much time to shine in this film.

24) The relationship with Wolverine and Rogue is one of my favorite things about this film. These are the two most isolated characters in the film and they’re able to find solace in each other. Logan acts as the big brother/mentor to Rogue, familiar with the loneliness she feels for 15 years. Meanwhile Rogue finds comfort in someone who’s actually going to look after her. This is best seen on the train after Rogue runs away, where Logan leaves the decision up to Rogue. He’s not there to bring her back, he’s not there to pressure her into doing something she doesn’t want, he gives his two cents but will go wherever she wants to. He’s got her back.

Logan: “Come on. I’ll take care of you.”

If there’s one thing I miss most as the series progresses, it is this wonderful relationship between the pair.

25) According to IMDb:

The scene in the train station where a young boy smiles at Cyclops and he smiles back was unplanned. The boy was a huge X-Men fan, and Cyclops was his favorite. The scene originally called for Cyclops to look at the train schedule, but according to Bryan Singer, the boy could not stop smiling at James Marsden. Finally, during one shot, Marsden just looked back at him and smiled, much to the boy's delight. Bryan Singer liked the idea so much, he kept it in the film, and told the actress playing the boy's mother to react the way she did.

(GIF source unknown [if this is your GIF please let me know].)

26) And so it begins...

Magneto [upon encountering Wolverine]: “That remarkable metal doesn’t run through your entire body, does it?”

27) The scene with Magneto, the police, and Charles in the background is something I really enjoy. This is primarily because it is more a conflict between Charles and Magneto than anything else. I was taught in an early film class that if one character can walk away and not be devastated, the stakes aren’t high enough. I think that is the key to this scene. It’s all about stakes. What exactly are Charles and Erik willing to do, willing to sacrifice, all to get what they want? Seeing that play out is wonderful.

28) The fact that Storm stays with Senator Kelly while he dies, holds his hand, talks with him, even after all he’s done, speaks to a wisdom she has that is totally lost in X-Men: The Last Stand (but more on that when I get there).

Kelly: “Do you hate normal people?”

Storm: “Sometimes.”

Kelly: “Why?”

Storm: “I suppose I’m afraid of them.”

The fact she can admit that she hates those who oppress her sometimes is great. Because of course you would hate those who ruin your life! But not letting that hate define who you are is an incredible thing.

29) There is a brief moment where Cyclops is seen distraught over a comatose Professor X, which I think is very telling of their relationship in a way we will (unfortunately) not see again in this set of three films. It speaks to the depths of admiration he has for what is essentially his father figure.

30) One thing the Marvel Cinematic Universe can learn from this film: how to create a great villain in two hours.

Magneto [with Rogue, upon seeing the Statue of Liberty]: “I first saw it in 1949. America was going to be the land of tolerance. Of peace.”

Magneto [about the Holocaust]: “Women and children, whole families destroyed just because they were different than those in power.”

31) I love this.

Wolverine [about the uniforms]: “You actually go outside in these things?”

Cyclops: “Well what would you prefer? Yellow spandex?”

32) This is one of my favorite scenes in the entire franchise.

(GIFs originally posted by @soundsofmyuniverse)

I was about twelve when I saw this film for the first time. I really got comfortable using my middle finger after this scene. And too this day, every time I extend my middle finger, it is just SO cathartic. I may or may not be exclusively typing with only my middle fingers now.

33) Ladies and gentlemen, one of the greatest bloopers in cinematic history.

34) Logan’s fight with Mystique is incredible and reflects some of the incredibly strong solo choreography he will get as the film continues. It is fast paced, enticing, and plays with the concept of a shapeshifter very well (even giving us some GREAT misdirection right before Logan defeats Mystique, since at first we think he’s Mystique when he stabs Storm only to have Storm be Mystique all along).

35) You know how X-Men never stay dead? No? Well Toad does.

Toad [after thinking he killed Storm]: “Don’t you people ever die!?”

36) Oh boy...

That is a line crafted by Joss Whedon after Fox asked him to help iron out the script (one of only two lines of his that made it into the final film). According to the famed writer, he had intended it to be much more tongue in cheek than it was finally delivered as. To this day, it is considered one of the worst cheesiest lines to grace a superhero film ever. Moving on.

37) This was the other line of Whedon’s which made it into the film, and I fucking love it.

Wolverine [returning to the team, only for Cyclops to point his eye beams at him]: “Hey, hey. It’s me.”

Cyclops [thinking he’s Mystique]: “Prove it.”

(GIFs source unknown [if these are your GIFs please let me know].)

38) You know what trope I love more than any others? At least, I’m pretty sure it’s my favorite. When the antagonist’s self righteous behavior gets called out.

Wolverine [to Magneto]: “You are so full of shit. If you were really so righteous it would by you in that thing.”

39) The final fight between Logan and Sabretooth is another strong action set piece in the film, with the use of place (the top of the Statue of Liberty) used greatly. These two are very similar in styles, in ferocity, and it’s fun to see them duke it out.

40) The final dialogue between Charles and Erik is powerful for a lot of reasons. It harkens back to the core conflict of their relationship/dissonance in philosophies, while also reminding the audience that all the problems of the world have not been solved and will have to be dealt with in the future.

Magneto: Does it ever wake you in the middle of the night? The feeling that one day they will pass that foolish law or one just like it, and come for you? And your children?

Xavier: It does, indeed.

Magneto: What do you do, when you wake up to that?

Xavier: I feel a great swell of pity for the poor soul who comes to that school... looking for trouble.

X-Men is a strong start to what would end up being one of the defining franchises of the 21st century. With great performances all around - specifically Jackman, McKellen, and Stewart - as well as reverence for the source material and a powerful tone, X-Men stands up to the test of time because of it’s characters and (unfortunately always) relevant themes of bigotry and bias. A film everyone should try at least once.

[dramaalpaca]

so many idiots who voted for a motherfcking communist party in the first round are planning on voting for the far right in the second round to ‘shock’ and it enrages me. 

those assholes. Voted for a communist party for the first time in their life because they wanted ~a fairer france~ but the moment they don’t get their way they fucking throw a tempter tantrum and vote for that nazi-sympathizing holocaust-denying anti-abortion hate-mongering money-grabbing self-serving pathetic try at an imitation of a human woman because they’re too bitter to see past their own butthurt. Oh well done on your convictions. Don’t worry you don’t sound at all like the biggest hypocrites this side of white priviledge.

I know the other choice is a guy who likes capitalism, but maybe we’ll discuss whether or not capitalism is bad once we’ve stopped a literal nazi from taking the Élysée, yeah??? Ya know, the thing that’s great about Macron is that we disagree with him because he wants to do dumb things that every politician in the history of ever has ever done. Pretty normal things to get agitated over, because that’s how politics work huh, you’ll never find a leader you 100% agree with so you pick the one you less disagree with. At the very least Macron proved he’s capable of listening to people who disagree with him. 

We disagree with Le Pen because she constantly dehumanizes anyone who has a drop of non-french blood in their veins, belittles anyone who disagrees with her in a such a profoundly pernicious way, and is just a deeply mean person who barely knows how to smile without looking like she eats refugees tears for breakfast. But that doesn’t affect you, does it, Mr Straighty Whitey. Go ahead and vote. Maybe once you’ve done that you’ll realize she doesn’t have the slightest idea how to run a country at all anyway and if you thought Macron was friends with the rich, what the fuck are you going to say about a racist idiot who inherited her fortune and keeps stealing money from other institutions anyway. I’m sure that’s the anti-capitalist choice. Good on you... haha, remember how you mocked those stupid Americans who let a guy like Trump take power... you humongous cretin.

[baroquespiral]

The Hidden Hipster History of the Alt Right? (/clickbait)

The fact that “alt lit”, which I had analyzed as the possible aesthetic foundation of an “alt” social movement, collapsed in a series of rape & abuse scandals in 2014 and was almost immediately followed by the emergence of a fascist “alt right” has been giving me really powerful Bad End feels for a while (including worrying about whether the choice point had been my own failure to boost “alt politics” as a yung liberal) the “alt lit” designation started reappearing this past ~season, in the complete absence of anyone I know of consciously writing under it, which was weird  also I’ve been spending time on Twitter lately and realizing that correlation is the tip of the iceberg, which may not even be purely kabbalistic.  In particular, I’ve noticed a growing crossover area between anime communist and anime fascist Twitter - which @nihilsupernum always used to say were the same thing, and I never bought that, but then I was just going on Tumblr examples.  @SisypheanSperg/@Polyphemus_____ (does anyone know what he got suspended for?  I’m too lazy to research) seems like the perfect epicentre of this, and I actually can’t tell what the fuck his ideology is except /r9k/.  All the significant #frogtwitters follow him as do a bunch of /leftypol/ tankies - and what’s interesting is these aren’t Catholic Tank Club-type fascist sympathizers, as far as I can tell, but violent antifa supporters.  their alignment is completely non-ideological and yet they’re also followed and retweeted by a bunch of #frogtwitters.  And what they all have in common is a bunch of formal & generic characteristics common with alt lit - a preoccupation with their “brand”, the “irony/sincerity” dichotomy, insider memes, and tweets that would not sound out of place in a Steve Roggenbuck video.  some of that is purely genealogical - “Weird Twitter”, Something Awful, stoner comedy and 4chan (Steve Roggenbuck once said alt lit is basically 4chan, IIRC) influences.  some of it is generational.  but at this point it’s nonidentical to any single determination.  there is such a thing as a generalized “alt” culture/style/ethos that was, actually, implicit when the kinda dated 90s term reemerged as a cool internet thing - thanks to HipsterRunoff, which used it afaict “ironically” to describe the cultural space around the music scene that had actually been calling itself “indie” for a while.  Hipster Runoff’s writing style was one of, if not the major point of reference for the name when alt lit started calling itself that.  “alt lit” meant not just an alternative to the mainstream of literature but literature that was part of the “alt” subculture Carles described.  the people Carles gossiped about definitely left their basements more often than these Twitter types but there are definitely direct links between HipsterRunoff and “alt” twitter/chan culture: for instance, musical genres ending in “-wave” (again a retro-ism, but vaporwave definitely got it from chillwave, not New Wave directly). so was the ceremonial execution of “alt lit” was not only, as I’ve always held, counterproductive (vulnerable writers from that scene were mostly reuptaken into academia, an equally abusive world where the kind of crowd-based accountability mechanisms that the crisis demonstrated functioning successfully simply don’t exist) but ahistorical?  alt lit was always equated to a constellation of first-order social ties because people these days are pre-emptively embarrassed to periodize themselves, but by now there are too many data points to mistake any such attempt for crackpot self-promotion, nor a question of personal or ideological self-identification per se otoh, even if it’s too broad to be moralized (and the Twitter accounts that fall under this heading are all conspicuously amoral) under a single failure mode (alt right, Tao Lin), “alt” culture as a whole can and should still be critiqued.  Carles himself did as much, not only with the “Alt Report” but with his final pronouncement of the failure of “alt” and call to embrace “auth”, whatever that means: from the problems I see “alt” subculture facing right now, I’m guessing some kind of cultivation of the inner wisdom and resilience (rather than accelerated, hyper-networked “boosting”) necessary to withstand "meme magic”, cybernetic behaviour programming, Spectacle and the stratum of Real Abstraction from which it projects its holograms.  maybe even “getting off the internet” and the charges under which alt lit was condemned apply to the whole.  the “alt” tendency within millennial culture, perhaps best understood as a way of relating online/millennial culture to mass culture and mass politics in general, is the cultural lens of the Young-Boy in relation to Tiqqun’s Young-Girl (I’ll write more on this eventually), and overtly male-dominated (externally and internally) in all its forms (going back to HipsterRunoff, with its “ironic” slutshaming of Young-Girl popstars). all its failure modes branch out from the logic of late capitalist male socialization.  and while people who write and think in male and by extension “alt”-articulated ways (i.e. myself) exist, “auth” lit and politics going forward needs to either synthesize or reject this gendered dialectic.  

[theliterateape]

Meetings with Mayonnaise and White People

by Don Hall

There’s no question that following WWII Communism was a legitimate threat to the United States. Global positioning of military, spies on both sides, nuclear domination was at stake. It was a scary time. Intertwined with the anger and fear was a pernicious thread within that, in response to the national angst, in turn poisoned the reasonable fear with demagoguery. Born from that was the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

There is no question today that the time has come for the United States to deal fairly and effectively with the demonization and wholesale deprivation of black Americans in our country. Both the stories we hear and the data we parse through is a damning indictment of righteous laws written only to be enforced by the bigots who fought so hard against them.

It is hard, however, to see a cause so fundamentally right and long overdue be intertwined with demagoguery.

You’ve recommended Robin DiAngelo’s book on white fragility but you haven’t read it, have you? You regularly use the terms “systemic racism” and “anti-racist” but you haven’t waded through any of Derrick Bell or Ibram X. Kendri, amiright?

When it comes to Critical Race Theory, I was an early adopter. I dove into Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well in 1997. At the time I thought it was interesting but flawed and good red meat philosophy for the college campus.

By 2016 I was twice divorced and living with an avowed anti-racist activist whose godfather was 1960’s radical revolutionary Bill Ayers. I saw America and specifically white Americans as fundamentally racist.

Following the third of three blow out breakups with her I had what was to be my final mentoring lunch with The Moth’s resident Latina storyteller.

“Racist is a term that includes anyone benefitting from a racist system,” I mentioned as the conversation turned to Chicago’s history of gentrification. “Bigotry is individual but all white Americans are racist by definition.”

“Even you?” she asked.

“I’m white so, by definition, I’m racist. I don’t think I’m a bigot, though.”

A month or so later, after coming to the fact that her own personal insecurities and need for a following had sent her head first into a path of radical indoctrination, I unfriended her on social media. All hell broke loose. She had people call and text me with threats of violence. She manufactured several fake Facebook accounts, had them engage her real account with insults, and then claimed I had created the fake accounts. She posted a video of her emoting heavily over the fakeness of my friendship.

One of her most potent missives to her following went something like this:

Don Hall is a racist! He even admitted it to me!! He is a confessed racist!!

I should’ve seen it coming.

Now, if this were the fifties, the HUAC could’ve branded me a communist or at least a communist sympathizer.

“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” 

“No, sir.”

“Have you ever read the works of Karl Marx?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you ever attended a meeting with communists?”

“No meetings -“

“Parties?”

“Parties...?”

“Yes. Meetings with alcohol. And communists.”

“...yeah...”

This guilt-by-association thing was the most damning and pervasive aspect of the HUAC and led to blacklisting, careers destroyed, terrified citizens quickly falling to their knees in supplication and naming names to avoid the stigma of being labeled a Commie.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines McCarthyism as "the political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence." No one subpoenaed by the HUAC was ever convicted of being communist but a fair number were fined and jailed for refusing to play along. With the definition of who was or was not a communist being so open-ended and ill-defined, only those who either declared their fealty to anti-communism or named names were spared.

My guess is that if Senator Joseph McCarthy had had a Twitter account, his damage to the individual lives he publicly destroyed would’ve been a thousand times worse.

Mind you, the #BlackLivesMatter organization has very specific goals and outline them clearly. The Racial HUAC does not include them or, I’d suggest, the vast majority of those out there in protest.

Several arguments today, in the McCarthyism in Blackface, do their best to minimize the damage done. 

There is the thread that claims that those who are publicly accused of racism who then are fired from long-held jobs are just fine. Losing a job isn’t the end of the world, it is argued. I’d argue you go back and stream “The Front,” “Trumbo,” or “Good Night and Good Luck” and tell yourself how fine these people have it.

There is the claim that, in these sorts of cultural shifts, there is always some collateral damage. The term “collateral damage” comes from the Viet Nam conflict as a way to dehumanize and minimize the killing of non-combatants (also a dehumanizing term meaning “innocent people”) and accidental destruction of non-military property. The idea of there being collateral damage in the current culture shift is nice and abstract unless you are the collateral being damaged.

The troubles with our current cultural push is in exactly the lack of specifics and false justifications. Mind you, the #BlackLivesMatter organization has very specific goals and outline them clearly. The Racial HUAC does not include them or, I’d suggest, the vast majority of those out there in protest. While these protests represent a tiny slice of the population (polls suggest that the serious majority of Americans trust the police force and have no interest whatsoever in abolishing it; they are more in tune with the idea of substantive reform) the effect of these marches are showing some measure of progressive gain.

The RHUAC is motivated to upend the power dynamic completely and their means is in a definitive lack of specifics.

Structural racism is both quantifiable and data-proven. Organizational bylaws, economic measures taken, the laws of the land. Corporate hiring practices, diversity initiatives, and funding of public schools. These are structural and we can fix these things.

Systemic racism means that everything in the system of society is racist by default. It is racism in the gaps much like God’s will is divinity in the gaps. Prior to the Enlightenment, when someone couldn’t explain why something happened or offer proof one way or another, it was boiled down to Divine Providence. The Will of God.

Today, when something cannot be explained in terms of racial disparity, it is boiled down to systemic racism. White people are racist so anything that demonstrates a different outcome from black people (and strangely absent from disparities between Latin and Asian people) is, by default, racist.

For example, a common stereotype is that while white people generally prefer mayonnaise, black people generally prefer mild sauce. No big deal. Maybe it indicates that whites are more bland in their condiment choices while black people like things a bit spicier. Under the Derrick Bell theory, this is due specifically to white supremacy. How? Who the fuck knows aside from any difference between whites and blacks is automatically racist.

OK. You didn’t read any of Bell’s work. Here’s a quick breakdown of a few central tenets of his worldview:

Critical Race Theory believes racism is present in every aspect of life, every relationship, and every interaction and therefore has its advocates look for it everywhere. He posits a theory called “interest convergence” which states that reforms in the supremicist system are only created for black people when they also benefit white people thus no reform instigated by whites is to be trusted.

According to Bell science, reason, and evidence are a “white” way of knowing and that storytelling and lived experience is a “black” alternative. Pointing out logical exceptions to that lived experience is a sure sign of systemic racism.

As I wrote earlier, it’s a rather brilliant narrative frame. The RHUAC doesn’t have to define any behavior as racist or not because everything is racist when white. Everything. 

“Are you now or have you ever been a racist?” 

“No, sir.”

“Have you ever attended a meeting with white people?”

“Sure —“

“Parties?”

“Parties...?”

“Yes. Meetings with mayonnaise. And white people.”

“...yeah...mayonnaise...?”

“Are you white?”

In the 1950s most Americans were easily manipulated by the fear of Communism. In schools, children learned to “duck and cover.” The Red Scare was pushed on national media and the blind terror of bucking the system and refusing to play along with the game of public accusations of subversion was too great. This was a threat to the American Way of Life, they were told. Commies could be your next door neighbor, they were told. And they believed.

Today we are faced with another manipulation that far too many right thinking people are buying — that “white” equals “racist” without regard to behavior. To be white is to be fully complicit which is both ludicrous and horrifying to consider. There is a cult mind at play with racial hucksters driving an unrelenting academic campaign to grab power through money and influence. No subpoenas necessary, no Congressional hearings.

I grew up watching the movies about McCarthy and his crusade. I’ve read the manifestos of the zealots behind the Red Scare. I’ve read the theories behind the White Scare. They’re too similar for me.

[popehilarius]

World War Two

On July 16, 1945, the first nuclear bomb was tested in New Mexico. And when we dropped similar bombs on Japan, we’re taught that we did it to save lives. And World War II is seen as a good war. But it was also the bloodiest war in human history with something like 65 million deaths. Almost half of which were Soviet or Chinese. The numbers, by country, are insanity.   

The opening shots of the war happened in 1931, when Japan went into Manchuria. At the same time, Hitler was increasingly ramping up military spending in Germany. And then Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935. When the U.S., Britain and France did nothing, Hitler assumed none of them wanted a war. So he invaded the Rhineland in 1936. Apparently it was a big risk on his part, since Germany would not have been able to defeat a French force at that point.    

There was also zero Allied response to the Spanish Civil War, where Franco ended up creating a fascist dictatorship. Anti-communist corporate leaders in the U.S. hated the Spanish Republic. And American Catholics, along with Hitler and Mussolini rallied to pro-Catholic Franco’s support. Hitler’s Condor Legion bombed civilians in Guernica in 1937, which was one of the first war crimes to capture global attention. It was made even more famous by a Picasso anti-war painting the same yer. 

Ford, GM and Firestone aided the fascists. Texaco’s chairman, Torklid Rieber, was a fascist sympathizer who gave Franco oil on credit and later aided the Nazis. FDR later stated regrets for not intervening, and it led Stalin to believe the Allies had no interest in stopping the Nazis or the global advance of fascism.   

War erupted in China in 1937. Japan took Nanjing and brutalized the people. Germany annexed Austria in 1938. To avoid war, the Allies capitulated to Hitler at Munich and allowed him to take the Czech Sudetenland. Neville Chamberlain was treated like a national hero for his appeasement.    

The Allies also did nothing when the Nazis instituted the Night of Broken Glass on their Jewish citizens. American public opinion finally turned on the Nazi government. But most Jewish refugees were still barred from entering the U.S.

Hitler broke his promise at the Munich Accords and took the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939. To buy himself time, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, where they divided Poland and other areas of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Stalin had wanted a pact with Britain and France, but they would not allow Soviet troops on Polish soil. Then the Nazis invaded Poland, which resulted in Britain and France declaring war on Germany, which actually surprised Hitler. Stalin invaded Poland soon after. Then they went about gaining control of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and beginning mass persecutions. The second World War was officially underway.

Germany conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium. France, which had been decimated by World War I, collapsed after two weeks of fighting in 1940. The anti-Semitic, anti-communist ruling class of France decided to collaborate with the Nazis.     

Hitler began terrorizing England with an air assault. But new prime minister, Winston Churchill, rallied the nation behind him with powerful speeches. And Germany’s failure to conquer England was a turning point in the war and made Churchill a living legend in the UK. 

Americans still wanted no part of this. World War I had made them strongly isolationist. Although attacks on Jews and the fall of France shocked many in the country. And FDR believed that Hitler was bent on world domination, so he started aiding the Allies. He gave 50 old destroyers to Britain and set embargoes on Japan to drive them out of China and delay their access to raw materials. Japan retaliated by joining the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

In 1940, FDR broke precedent and declared for a third term, believing he was the only candidate who could deal with the Nazis. He chose Henry A. Wallace as his running mate. Wallace had been a supporter of the New Deal and his agricultural reforms had helped immensely during the Great Depression. He was also in favor of military mobilization. And through his friendship with George Washington Carver, he was pretty cool, racially. Democratic Party bosses thought Wallace was too radical and eccentric, but FDR gave the 1940 Convention an ultimatum. It eventually took a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt to convince the party bosses to put Wallace on the ticket. But they were not happy about it.    

In 1941, Germany was at the height of its powers and decided to attack the Soviet Union. In Mein Kampf (1925-26), Hitler had laid out the concept of lebensraum, or eastward expansion into the vast and resource-rich Soviet Union. In order to do so, the Slavic and Jewish people would have to be removed to make room for the German master race. So with England no longer a threat in the west, Hitler went after the biggest prize of all. During the Great Purge, Stalin’s paranoia led to the arrest and/or execution of most of his country’s military command. But what Hitler wanted to do to the Soviet people was much, much worse.  

Three million troops invaded the Soviet Union, surprising Stalin. Ukraine fell in 1941 and the Battle for Kiev killed 500,000 Soviets. Those who weren’t killed were turned into slaves. Taking Ukraine also meant taking the Soviet industrial heartland. The U.S. and British thought the Soviet Union would fall, and feared Stalin would make peace with Hitler. Even the communist-hating Churchill had to pledge support for the Soviet Union.    

Stalin desperately wanted Britain to engage Hitler in Europe to force a second front. But the Allies totally didn’t mind the Soviets absorbing most of the punishment from the Nazis. The U.S. and Britain were reluctant to give Stalin supplies. And many Americans (including Harry Truman) would have been perfectly happy to see a Soviet defeat. Nevertheless, FDR eventually sent aid.  

FDR met with Churchill in Newfoundland, with Churchill begging the U.S. to join the war. Roosevelt knew that Congress would have rejected any war plans at that point, so he said he’d supply all aid short of war. And hey, maybe it would provoke a response. But Roosevelt also laid out his vision for the world after the war, with political and economic freedom for 3rd world countries. America would fight the war for self-determination, a New Deal for colonized nations. And Churchill, who loved his empire, knew that the price of American aid would be giving them the world after the peace. FDR’s vision became known as the Atlantic Charter, and it would also become the manifesto for the United Nations. Leadership in the world was slipping from Great Britain to the Americans.    

Hitler, who considered the Japanese to be racially inferior, didn’t bother sharing any of his Soviet plans with Japan or try to get their support. That would have enormous consequences for the fate of the world. If Japan had entered into war against Stalin, the Soviets probably would have been crushed. But Japan wanted an empire of their own and they drove into Indochina in 1941. The U.S. responded by cutting off Japan’s oil supplies, which made them abandon their invasion of Russia and led them to focus on getting oil from the Dutch East Indies. The U.S. base at Pearl Harbor was seen as a possible hindrance to those plans.   

Japan launched a surprise preemptive attack on Pearl Harbor, which led the U.S. and Britain to declare war on Japan. Hitler, who had not even been told about Pearl Harbor, also decided to declare war on the United States, for whatever reason. Big fucking mistake. FDR and Churchill were actually relieved by that. Britain got an ally on two different fronts. And it probably ended up saving Europe.    

Japan began picking off British and American colonies in the Pacific. Thailand, Malaya, Java, Borneo, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Burma. The Philippines was the worst military defeat in U.S. history. The Japanese also stunned the British Empire at their major military base in Singapore in 1942. 80,000 Commonwealth soldiers were taken prisoner in the worst military defeat in British history. If Japan had coordinated at all with Germany, they probably would have gotten India. But the two countries never acted like real allies.

The U.S. counteroffensive was led by Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz. They defeated Japan at Midway, a huge naval victory and a turning point in the Pacific. The U.S. war economy was cranking out weapons. And technological innovations like radar and the proximity fuse also aided in victory. But it was the Bomb that changed the course of history.  

In 1938, German physicists discovered nuclear fission, which would make a bomb a theoretical possibility. That freaked out Jewish scientists in the U.S., who were met with apathy until Leo Szilard got Albert Einstein to write a letter to FDR urging a competing nuclear program. Einstein would later regret sending the letter. But the Manhattan Project was created. And it included scientists like Robert Oppenheimer (an admitted communist), Enrico Fermi and Szilard, who invented the nuclear reactor. In reality, Germany had abandoned their nuclear research in 1942 to focus on V-1 and V-2 rockets. The Americans, however, pressed on. 

In the east, the Soviets were on the verge of collapse with the Nazis about to take Moscow. Stalin pressed the Allies for a second front in France. But Churchill, who had just suffered a great defeat in North Africa, convinced FDR to help in there instead. Churchill was mainly concerned with British oil reserves in the Middle East and access to India through the Suez Canal. With no help from the Allies, the Red Army still managed to reverse the course of the war.

Because Japan had marched south, Stalin could bring Marshal Zhukov’s Siberian division back to Moscow. And much like Napoleon at Moscow in 1812, the Germans were stopped. The Nazis also besieged Leningrad for 900 days but never took it. The Soviets there lived in hellish conditions and the casualties are mind boggling.

Stalin then began the greatest forced migration in human history. 10 million people were moved to the interior to build factories and crank out tanks and planes for the war effort. Facing extermination, the Russian people were determined to fight to the bitter end. 4-8 million Ukrainians and 2.5 million Belarusians died in the war. And when Germans saw that they couldn’t wipe out the Soviet population, they decided to go after their resources instead. Russian oil reserves were in Baku. And Germany getting that oil assured a Russian surrender. But first, the Nazis would have to go through Stalingrad.

Stalingrad is the bloodiest battle in the history of human warfare. The Soviets lost more people there than the British and Americans in the entire war. 500,000 Soviets were killed. Germany lost 200,000. Any Russian soldier who attempted to flee was also killed. 13,000 died that way at Stalingrad, 135,000 throughout the war. Not to mention the millions in gulags or whatever other sick shit Stalin was into. Germany had to withdraw to replace their losses. And the Soviets, with all their new tanks and planes, could finally go on offense.

After a defeat at Kursk, Germany began a full scale retreat on the Eastern Front. And while American myth loves to say that we are the heroes of World War II, it was Stalin and the heroism of the Soviet people who defeated Nazi Germany.

[how2to18]

HIS NAME WAS DANIEL, he told me, eventually. He’d found me stumbling down the highway near the Hungarian-Croatian border on a sweltering day. I still had a vague hope of getting to Budapest, but by that point I’d given up trying to catch a ride and was seriously dehydrated. Seeing a two-liter bottle peeking out from the roadside grass, I’d run across two lanes to have a look. As I unscrewed the cap, the vapor of heated urine rose up and I fumbled the bottle back to where I’d found it. I kept walking, not holding my thumb up anymore, only trying to scout out a spot over the barrier where I could sleep. While I wasn’t looking, Daniel’s shiny new BMW pulled over in front of me and I bumped into it.

The short, bald, muscular man inside, dripping with sweat, started swearing in French. He asked what the hell I thought I was doing. In my own stuttering French, I thanked him for stopping and asked where he was headed. He told me Romania. Running through the map in my head, I asked whether he could drop me off near Budapest. He said he would and handed me a bottle as I got in. I guzzled the water down, and we sped away.

When I caught my breath, I said he didn’t sound like he was French. Speaking in a mix of stilted English and oddly accented French, he told me he was from Transylvania. He’d trained as an engineer, but there’d been no jobs, so he’d joined the French Foreign Legion. I asked whether it was true that they took on criminals sometimes. “Not if you are a fucking psychopath,” he said. “Not if you killed a bunch of people or burnt down a school. If you just robbed a bank, then maybe yes.”

He’d been a paratrooper in the Congo. He wouldn’t tell me anything more. Instead, he told me about his trip, how he’d started in the south of France and had driven to where he’d picked me up, more than 700 miles, without stopping, except for gas. When I pressed him for stories about the Legion, he looked at me with genuine pain. “Do you want me to tell you how I watched my friends die for the first time? How I left them? No! About how it feels to take life? Non, bien sur.”

He went on to tell me about how he’d fought off malaria in the jungle, how he’d refused field medication because “it tears you up inside.” He told me of the deep shame and guilt he felt over the things he’d had to do. I asked him how he’d survived and how he dealt with those memories. “It took great strength,” he said, pointing to his temple. “If you’re so curious, why don’t you join the Legion? Quelle age are you?” I told him I’d just turned 18. “You’re a child,” he said and asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to write. “Another good way to get yourself killed.”

Now you may say I didn’t have the right to ask all those questions. I didn’t have his experiences and couldn’t possibly understand his trauma. Besides, ours was just a passing acquaintance. But we came to an understanding that we were two human beings trying to be good. What gave me license to excavate his shame was my relative innocence, my uncurdled curiosity, my belief that he too was trying to be a good man, and my suspicion that talking might help.

After figuring out that I was originally Russian, he told me he’d found some salvation in the works of Dostoyevsky. He’d read of Dostoyevsky’s epileptic Christ character in The Idiot, a man of limitless good who tragically succumbs to his yearning for goodness. Daniel thought that this character’s sacrifice for the sake of others was a worthy one. I unreservedly agreed. Now, Daniel said, he was raising a young son, named Andrei, like my Russian name. He hoped he too would be a good man.

Daniel’s shame was transformative, constructive. He told me that his favorite novel, the one that most defined the shape of his life since the Legion, was The Brothers Karamazov, about a faithful man sent back into the world to deal with the earthly affairs of his family. Of course, it’s about a whole lot of other things too, but that was what Daniel remembered. He concluded that we were all just trying to help each other to be better.

His compassion — and its pairing with an intense interest in Dostoyevsky — wasn’t exactly surprising or unfamiliar to me at the time. In those days, when I was criss-crossing continents hitchhiking, people would ask me whether I liked On the Road. I’d tell them there wasn’t enough hitchhiking in it for my taste, too much roadtripping. What I really liked was Dostoyevsky. I loved The Brothers Karamazov, loved The Idiot, Demons, Crime and Punishment, everything he’d labored over. And I had a suspicion that, if Kerouac had been asked the same question, his mind would have shot off in the same direction, as would the minds of so many literary hitchhikers.

¤

“What’s the name of that Russian author you’re always talking about — the one who put the newspapers in his shoe and walked around in a stovepipe hat he found in a garbage pail?” Remi Boncoeur asks Sal Paradise in On the Road, sounding more like he’s conjuring up the memory of Diogenes than Dostoyevsky. “This was an exaggeration of what I’d told Remi of Dostoevski,” Sal comments. Remi then goes off about people with faces that deserve a name like Dostoyevsky.

But Kerouac’s allusion has a deeper significance. In certain ways that the writer of history’s greatest hitchhiking novel must have picked up on, Dostoyevsky’s late novels reflect the openness and the vulnerability of standing by a road waiting — hoping — for a car to stop. They reflect the experience of hoping — believing — that the driver will be good.

There’s something about entrusting your welfare to the whims of speeding humanity that is essential to engaging with Dostoyevsky’s radical project, and there’s something about Kerouac that made him particularly successful in that engagement. The two main things Kerouac must have understood about Dostoyevsky, if only because these things chimed with his own life and work, were that there was a powerful yearning for sainthood in Dostoyevsky, a yearning — not necessarily religious, though tinged with Christianity in Dostoyevsky’s case — to be good, to be moral, almost beyond human capacity, and that sainthood is inaccessible without accepting that one must pass through darkness to get there.

¤

A ride through the south of England made clear to me just how essential this darkness was to the saintly paths Dostoyevsky set out on. The car belonged to an engineer who was apocalyptically obsessed with Demons, which may outdo Crime and Punishment as Dostoyevsky’s scariest novel. He picked me up at a service station near Essex where he’d stopped for a cigarette. He gave me a lift because he remembered hitchhiking from his home to Turkey as a young man.

“Nothing will get better until we exterminate the politicians,” he said, not long into the ride. Brexit had just happened and that sentiment wasn’t new to me — I’d heard it all over Britain — though his phrasing was a little more brutal than the standard rhetoric most of his countrymen offered. “We need some sort of natural disaster that will make people realize that they must oppose their government.”

He had a thin, upper-crust accent and an air of almost threatening confidence and intelligence. He seemed unbelievably efficient. His hair had gone gray but his intensity had not abated, or perhaps it had been renewed. He worked for a wind-power company that was based in Denmark and he was going down to London to attend to some offshore turbines.

His politics tended toward the optimistically catastrophic and the catastrophically optimistic. “It’s a system run by the very few,” he said. “We need London or New York to flood. Or even Tokyo. Something to cause a major depression and cause a real change.” I asked him what would come after, whether he was some form of communist. He denounced that as a failed creed. Instead, he brought up the conspiratorial nihilist group in Dostoyevsky’s Demons. He seemed to view them as a kind of example.

That’s funny, of course, because Dostoyevsky, though he was involved with similar groups as a young man, wrote the book largely as a denunciation. The engineer understood this, but nonetheless he sympathized with the violent conspirators. On my next reading of the novel, I was reminded of his fiery spirit and the group came to much more vivid life.

Eventually, he dropped me off, giving me a firm handshake and wishing me good luck. The hard, pouring rain made hitchhiking a chore, so I ran across a couple of traffic circles, hopped a roadside fence, and crossed a creek. As I walked through the woods, scouting for a level, relatively dry spot to sleep, my mind was filled with the radical notions of bygone days.

¤

In that forest, as rain droplets pattered on the surface of my tent and water began to drip through, I thought about how Dostoyevsky’s youthful association with that conspiratorial circle in St. Petersburg finally caught up with him. Consequences burst into his room in 1849 in the form of the czar’s soldiers. Later, as he stood in front of a firing squad with his fellow radicals, the thoughts that passed through his head were exactly what you’d expect. “He felt only a mystic terror,” a friend recalled Dostoyevsky’s description half a lifetime later, “and was completely dominated by the thought that in perhaps five minutes he would be going to another, unknown life.” And yet the bullets did not leave their chambers. They never made that swift journey through his flesh.

Anticlimactically, Dostoyevsky and his co-conspirators were led back to their cells. What happened in his head at that moment, the mysterious and powerful operations of his rare neurons, set him apart from the other men who’d stared down the gun barrels with him. It didn’t take long for most of them to fall apart, physically and mentally, following the shock and terror. Dostoyevsky, however, accepted his fate at that moment, and he allowed it to alter him. “Now, deprivation means nothing to me,” he wrote his brother from the cell, and he would later tell his wife that he sang louder that day than he’d ever sung before, so loud that his voice touched its limits, “so happy was I at being given back my life.”

What followed wasn’t the release and amnesty Dostoyevsky had hoped for, but though he would soon be sent off to serve a horrific sentence in a Siberian work camp, that moment changed him, in some ways, for the better. Dostoyevsky’s biographer Joseph Frank claims that, immediately after returning to the cell, the writer experienced a revelation, a “blinding truth that Dostoevsky now understood for the first time — the truth that life itself is the greatest of all goods and blessings, and that man has the power to turn each moment into an ‘eternity of happiness.’”

This understanding wasn’t limited to his life. It permeated his work. It’s what makes reading him so powerful for people like Daniel, the former legionnaire, and for people like Kerouac and me. “If the values of expiation, forgiveness, and love were destined to take precedence over all others in Dostoevsky’s artistic universe,” Frank continues, “it was surely because he had encountered them as a truth responding to the most anguished predicament of his own life.”

This is exactly the sort of sweeping epiphany that Kerouac tried to build toward in his books, and the experiences and motivations that led to those revelations, though not the same, must have felt comparably powerful.

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Kerouac never faced down a firing squad, not a literal one. But he did live with guilt, and he suffered in ways big and small. The primary cause was the death of his older brother Gerard when Kerouac was four years old. In later years, he explicitly associated his brother’s decline with the rise of his own saintly urges and behavior. “The world was his face,” he wrote, “the flower of his face, the pale stooped disposition, the heartbreakingness and the holiness and his teachings of tenderness to me.” He wrote, in Visions of Gerard, that the death didn’t affect him immediately, but it hit him hard enough that he returned to write about it all those years later.

And yet, unlike Dostoyevsky, who found the merits of suffering in huge, almost melodramatic plots, especially in his earlier writing, Kerouac relegated events of that caliber to the sidelines. The first lines of On the Road read, “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.” This prominently placed split-up haunts all that follows, but it’s never mentioned again. In the original scroll manuscript, Sal’s comment about “feeling that everything was dead” refers specifically to the death of his father. At some point in the writing process, Kerouac chose to emphasize smaller sufferings.

Kerouac found shades of transformative, transcendent hardship in the mundane experiences of travel. They were there for him to explore because travel isn’t just a continuous shock of freedom and joy; it’s just as often an experience full of obstacles and discomforts, of setbacks and confusion. Fundamentally, the overwhelming excitement that makes travel so compelling is caused by gnawing, impatient longing for the next thing, and by not knowing what comes next.

Kerouac doesn’t shy away from these aspects. He writes about scrounging up money, about being pulled over by humorless cops, about missing his friends, about loneliness and being lost. But it’s not depressing because not only does he not shy away from all this, he focuses on each of those moments. By flinging himself on the world, by accepting all that comes at him, whether good or bad, as beautiful, and by focusing on the smaller things, Kerouac’s books begin to touch a sort of sainthood.

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The sun was starting to set and the heat had evaporated by the time Daniel dropped me off on the ramshackle outskirts of Budapest, among the stray dogs and scrap-metal fences. Before he let me go, he made me write down his number, telling me to call him when I got to my friend’s apartment. “I’d like to be sure you’re okay,” he said. But after talking to him, I wasn’t sure he or anyone could ever be fully okay, nor was I sure we wanted to be.

Dostoyevsky and Kerouac were never quite okay. They lived troubled lives, striving toward aspects of goodness, and neither of them lived to grow peaceful and calm, perhaps because they didn’t really want to. Dostoyevsky’s sainthood, to the extent that he achieved it, was hard-won, born of guilt, early onset cynicism, and a lifetime of fuck-ups. Kerouac’s sainthood was shrouded by alcoholism and dissatisfaction. What they shared, and what I think allowed them to experience moments, if not a lifetime, of near inhuman goodness, was a sort of transcendent shame and a willingness to take the good with the bad, to accept the world as they experienced it. I think Daniel experienced those moments too.

Hitchhiking, with all its indignities and discomforts, also forces you to accept those saintly, beautiful moments, if not necessarily to experience some sort of deeper transcendence. Kerouac must have known that. He must have known that the moment you step out with a thumb up, the world can do with you as it likes. He must have known that, to even get to that roadside, you had to believe in the possibility of good, to believe that you can fall in the world and yet, by doing so, paradoxically rise. He must have known that nothing he’d found in literature would prepare him for the surprises and mysteries that the world would throw at him once he gave himself up to it — the difficulties and upsets, and the unexpected joys.

Nothing, that is, except what he’d found in the novels of Dostoyevsky, the secret Patron Saint of Hitchhikers.

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Andrew Fedorov is a writer often found in New York and sometimes found walking across countries. Follow him on Twitter @andrewfed.

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Banner image by Bradley Gordon.

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