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Afghanistan, Hollywood and Representation

“It took just a few years after the US withdrew from Vietnam for some great films to arrive, including Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Deer Hunter (1978). The Covenant and other tentative responses suggest that while filmmakers are now setting their stories in Afghanistan, coming to grips with that conflict on screen may take a lot longer. The Hollywood landscape is more cautious than ever today, and the US too politically divided for movies to risk alienating half the audience.” State terrorism is represented as a victim or a hero.  Kandahar (released in the US on 26 May) is a Gerard Butler action movie about a CIA operative trapped in a dangerous part of Afghanistan with his interpreter. The trailer shows Butler saying "Nobody's coming to save us", a cue for the two of them to battle the enemies and save each other.” “Most films about battles in Iraq and Afghanistan are determinedly apolitical, praising the heroism of the soldiers as a way of sidestepping deeper issues ab
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The Egyptian Revolution’s Fatal Mistake

I wouldn’t use the word ‘mistake’ in the title; as the writer elaborates in the article , it was rather a weakness that stems of the absence of a well-organised revolutionary organisation. In fact, insurrection stopped short of taking the levers of powers. There was not an open general strike to pose the question of power.  “Despite the revolutionaries’ battlefield triumph, little was achieved at the structural level in the centuries-long popular fight against the police state. Unlike what happened with the Stasi in East Germany after the 1989 revolution, Egyptians still know very little about the SSI [the State Security Investigation Service]. The problem for those rebelling against Egypt’s police state was primarily their limited capacity—as well as lack of a strategy and the necessary political imagination. The liberal human rights discourse also reduced the police state to a problem of its repression and illegality, preventing a deeper understanding of its constructive role, its so
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Women and Revolution in the Arab Gulf

South Yemen (when Yemen was divided in two) in 1970: “To quote Tuful Saïd, a woman refugee from the eastern sector whom I met in the western sector in February 1970: 'Here we are fighting on two fronts. The first front, that of revolutionary violence and armed struggle, is the easiest. The second and most difficult one i s where we fight against illiteracy, ignorance and backwardness.' A number of measures resulted from the Second Congress. Slavery was abolished. Education classes in politics and literacy were set up throughout the liberated area. For the first time young children received primary education; and in 1970 a Lenin School was set up just inside the PDRY – People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. In addition to learning history, mathematics, politics and languages, the children shared the tasks of the camp - cooking, cleaning and guard-duty - and had group discussions on the tasks they had to perform. —Fred Halliday in Arabia Without Sultans. “If we name a human being
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