BlacKkKlansman

Review

By Ben Soton

BlacKkKlansman (2018). Director: Spike Lee. Starring: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier and Topher Grace. Certificate 15; 135 mins.

BlacKkKlansman is Director Spike Lee’s latest work based on the memoirs of Ron Stallworth, who in 1979 was the first Black American to join the Colorado Springs Police Department. Initially he is asked to infiltrate the Black Power movement, which was active amongst Black Students in the city. He attends a meeting where the main speaker is Kwame Toure (aka Stokely Carmichael) and becomes involved with a student activist, Patrice Dumas, who bears a sticking resemblance to the US Communist Angela Davis. When Stallworth is told by his boss “not to get too friendly between the sheets” the British ‘Spycops’ scandal immediately came to mind.

But the main thrust of the film is Stallworth’s attempt in impersonate a Klu Klux Klan (KKK) sympathiser. In a series of telephone conversations he convinces the Klan leader David Duke, who is still active in far-right politics today, of his authenticity. For obvious reasons, to attend Klan meetings and ingratiate himself with members a white officer was required. This role goes to Flip Zimmerman, played by Adam Driver (Star Wars, The Force Awakens; Star Wars, The Last Jedi).

Lee uses his obviously outstanding directing skills to the full. The film contains action, humour, suspense and romance, with an obvious political message about race relations in the USA today. In one scene an officer talks to Stallworth about the Klan’s long-term strategy and states that one day they hope to get one of their own into the White House. An obvious reference to Donald Trump.

The film contains a moving scene where an elderly Black man, played by Harry Belafonte, describes the murder by a White mob of his friend in 1916. At the same time members of the local Klan enjoy a slap-up meal and watch Birth of a Nation, a 1915 film that was originally called The Clansman.

The film’s action and suspense centres around Zimmerman’s attempts to avoid and deflect suspicion, and ingratiate himself with the Klansmen. On several occasions Zimmerman, who is Jewish, is forced to out-racist the racists. In a diatribe about the Holocaust a Klan member claims it was faked; Zimmerman replies by stating it was a wonderful thing. This role raises the whole question of identity; at one point he states that he was never really bothered about his Jewishness until confronted with actual anti-Semitism.

The film ends with footage of the events in Charlottesville in 2017, during which a racist drove a Ford Mustang into a crowd resulting in the death of anti-racist protester Heather Heyter. And a now older David Duke is shown addressing a group of racists and praising Donald Trump.

The message of the film is perhaps: “Have things changed that much?”

Who guards the guardians?

Review

By New Worker TV correspondent

This Sunday night political thriller, Bodyguard on BBC1, centres around the relationship between Home Secretary Julia Montague played by Keeley Hawes (Tipping the Velvet, Spooks, Ashes to Ashes, The Durrells) and her bodyguard, David Budd played by Richard Madden (Game of Thrones, Birdsong). Montague, an authoritarian figure with a possible hidden agenda, is loosely based around the disgraced former Tory Home Secretary Amber Rudd, whilst Budd is an Afghan veteran war with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). After Budd foils a terrorist attack on Montague in the middle of Whitehall their relationship becomes sexual.

Watching the programme, I was drawn to an article in this paper about the nature of the capitalist state. It reminded readers that the government is the executive committee of the ruling class whilst containing differences of its own.

The new BBC drama touches upon the competing interests between different sections of the state apparatus – uniformed Police Officers, Special Branch, and the Security Services MI5 and MI6. Montague’s hidden agenda is increased power to the Security Services by side-lining uniformed police force in favour of the much less publicly accountable wing of the state.

Bodyguard also touches on issues related to service veterans. Budd attends a meeting of an anti-war veteran group led by his former comrade Andy Apsted. Apsted, who is badly disfigured and feels he has nothing to live for, tells Budd: “At least you’ve got your face.” The issue of service veterans is one the left has paid little attention to. Some veterans, however, have managed to reach progressive conclusions about the conflicts in which they were involved.

So far, Bodyguard has managed to make good Sunday night viewing. It contains gripping action-packed scenes, with a high level of suspense – whilst at the same time you are left wondering what is really going on. Were the attacks on Montague some kind of set up and part of her agenda?

Last Sunday’s episode had a dramatic ending, and it is unlikely that the series will end favourably to both or either of the main characters.

OLIVER CROMWELL: 1599–1658

Cromwell's statue in Westminster

OLIVER CROMWELL, the leader of the bourgeois English Revolution, died on 3rd September 1658. Cromwell, the MP for Huntingdon, was the leading Parliamentary commander during the English Civil War, which began in 1642 and ended in 1649 with the trial and execution of Charles Stuart and the abolition of the monarchy. The Republic of England, or Commonwealth as it was usually styled in English, was proclaimed soon after.

In 1653 Cromwell became head of state, the Lord Protector. By then the republic Cromwell led included England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, as well as colonies in New England and the Caribbean. During its brief life the Commonwealth became a force in Europe. Culturally it inspired the great poetry of John Milton and Andrew Marvell, and other radical and pacifist religious movements such as the Quakers, who are still with us today.

Oliver Cromwell was succeeded by his son Richard, who was neither a politician nor a soldier. Unable to reconcile republican generals with the demands of the rich merchants and landowners to curb the influence of the New Model Army, Richard Cromwell resigned the following year. The government collapsed. The monarchy was restored in 1660 and the New Model Army was dissolved.

Marxist academics have always recognised the historic role of Cromwell but most bourgeois historians simply dismiss him as an upstart general who made himself dictator, a “king in all but name”, through the might of the New Model Army.

Some Irish nationalists call him a brutal bigoted English invader. Some Protestants, even now, regard Cromwell as a religious reformer who fought for freedom of conscience for all faiths apart from Catholicism, and many in the Jewish community still remember Cromwell as the leader who allowed Jews to live, worship and work in England for the first time since the pogroms of 1290.

But for the bourgeoisie Oliver is best forgotten, even though their ascendancy began when their ancestors took up the gun in the 1640s.

The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia defines bourgeois revolution as “a social revolution whose main task is the destruction of the feudal system or its vestiges, the establishment of the rule of the bourgeoisie, and the creation of a bourgeois state; in dependent and colonial countries the bourgeois revolution also aims at the attainment of national independence…

“…In the early bourgeois revolutions and several revolutions of the 19th century the forces in motion were the bourgeoisie, the peasants oppressed by feudalism, the artisans, and the emerging working class. The bourgeoisie, which at that time played a revolutionary role, was the guide and leader of the popular masses. The bourgeoisie fought against feudal property, but as it itself was composed of property owners, it did not dare to abolish private ownership of land anywhere (although this measure would have met the needs of bourgeois progress). In the early bourgeois revolutions the most revolutionary forces were the toiling lower classes of the countryside and the cities. Bourgeois revolutions achieved their greatest successes when these groups seized the initiative.”

The ruling class abhor revolutionary change today because it threatens their own domination, so they naturally deny that their class ever came to power through it in the first place. For them the English republic is an aberration, a temporary blip in the steady advance of bourgeois progress, which is the myth they teach us in school. If they elevate anything at all it is the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688, when the last of the Stuarts was deposed and replaced by a king of their own choosing. Though not as bloodless as they claimed – plenty was shed in Ireland to put William of Orange on the throne – the establishment of a monarchy that was the gift of Parliament was achieved without the involvement of the masses, which was precisely what was intended.