Listening: Fallen, Evanescence, Audioslave
Mentally Replaying: movies and history
Aches and Complaints: tired & sore

A few weeks ago I was invited to see a research screening of Ghost Soldiers, also called The Great Raid. It's based on the book Ghost Soldiers and I really, really liked it.

Since it's in the Philippines it's a part of the Pacific Theater of World WAr II that I know primarily from my dad's stories. I feel like they got a lot of the parts right. They captured a lot of the simple attitudes of the time, scared kids who trying to act brave and show themselves as men, the women (there were a couple) were all heart because they had to be. The Filipinos take some very important roles that are actually crucial to the story, although it makes sense that they aren't the lead players. The movie does well by the resistence and I even appreciated its stylistic nods at the cinema of the period. The movie (as I saw it, it may change by the time in opens - scheduled for sometime in 2005) opens and closes with newsreel footage and paints the Japanese as sadistic overlords, but they aren't (too) needlessly mean. And quite frankly, the cruelty wasn't as far gone as it could have been. I've heard of worse from my dad about the Japanese treatment of POWs. And the POWs were treated even better than the Filipinos.

I'll just say this: in the movie, the people who died from Japanese cruelty (ie, not in battle) died prettily. That's pretty much not what I heard.

I think the research group had some Filipinos in it, but I'm not sure. There were many people who voiced a great desire to personally kill the Japanese commanders themselves. Truly, when the head Jap cruel guy gets it there was huge applause. Myself, I was hoping to see the extent of the fanatacism of the Japanese. The whole handcuffing themselves to their bolted artillery or the nearest tree, leaping off cliffs rather than be taken captive, etc.

But i was deeply impressed with how they let the guys be religious without making any strident declarations. There's a quiet moment right before the big battle when one of the guys is looking at a prayer card with the picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe and another guy asks about it. It's a quiet, beautiful moment that immediately got me all teared up. There are no atheists in fox holes, as the saying goes.

My dad used to tell me a story of my Uncle Tony, who served in the Army in the Pacific, who was with his unit at a dugout trying to set up a machine gun. The gunner got up to train the sights (I don't think they were anticipating attack, but I don't remember what they were training on) and with a pack! he fell over, dead. He was shot through the forehead. then the next guy got called up and Tony knew if the sharp shooters didn't find the sniper soon there would be two more dead boys and the next wuold be him. The second guy was also shot, and the third one saw a flash and managed to jump and get hit in the chest instead of the head. At this point Uncle Tony was sweating bullets and praying out loud to Our Lady of Guadalupe to spare him. He was called to go to the gun and could barely make himself do it. Just as he got a hand on it he heard a shout and the sharp shooters stood up, pointing. In the distance, hanging from a palm tree, was a dead Japanese soldier who had just dropped his rifle. He had been handcuffed to the tree.

Uncle Tony devoted his life to Our Lady after that.

I'm glad for the movie. I was raised on John Wayne movies and my dad even quipped that we won the war because the Duke helped us out. Ghost Soldiers is more humble. It starts with a point in US military history when our boys had suffered a huge rout and were about suffer even more. It gave a glimpse at island life. The waiting, the jungle, the malaria. Thankfully, it skipped dysentery.

It's a queer thing about movies, with Hollywood always lusting after the next young star this movie tried only so hard to make the actors match up to the actual people who they were portraying in looks. At the end of the movie we saw footage of the actual soldiers, and my God, they really looked like young kids. The actors were 20-something but the soldiers looked like they were 16 if they were a day. A very old 16.

I hope they don't change it too much before releasing it. And I hope you get to see it.

Tonight I'm going to see Motorcycle Diaries and is based on the travel diaries kept by Alberto Granado and Ernesto "Che" Guevara when they were young and traveling throughout Latin America. It's going to be released in October. You can watch a trailer here, though the audio is in Spanish and I think the subtitles are in Protuguese. I assume tonight's showing will have English subtitles. The actors definately speak fast and with Argentinian inflection which will make it harder for me to follow along. Molasses' Spanish-fu is strong, but he doesn't trust it and will get frustrated if they don't have English subtitles.

Anyhow. This morning I woke up to a story on NPR about the rise in interest of Che Guevara. Sometimes as a chic statement, sometimes an actual political ideology. They pound his insistence on seeing the US as the Enemy but they don't go into the things that he really did and how some people thought of him as a hero and their last best hope to escape opression and some people thought of him as a terrorist and threat to peace.

He was both, really. And personally, I'm fascinated by how we've come to the point where we can utter concepts and names of famous communists and not get in trouble if we aren't condemning them. In some circles, sure people still think it's bad, but they're mostly 50 or older.

Modern capitalists who are younger just think you're being silly. The Evil Empire was killed off so anything having to do with communism will obviously suffer the same fate. It's flawed thinking, and that's why I'm fascinated. The Cold War vanquished the Soviet Union, sure, but it didn't have to and just as the corruption of modern, democratically elected officials doesn't indict Democracy, neither does the corruption of old time communist cronies indict the whole of Communism. Or, it shouldn't, anyway.

Anyway, I'm not a big fan of bloody-minded leaders, no matter how good their reasons are. That's why I'm ambivalent towards Che Guevara. It's two dimensional thinking that makes people believe that the only way to come out on top is to fight your way there. It just so happened to work for freedom fighters like George Washington, Michael Collins, Mao Tse Tung, and Fidel Castro. Only time will tell if it works out for the Chechens, Hamas, or Jama'a Islamia.

So I'm not a big one for Che-chic. I can handle that Zach de la Rocha really digs on Che, they're both Marxists and Zach knows his shit. But I start to get annoyed when fans of Rage Against the Machine only know Che's face in black and white. I sincerely wonder how many of them turn around and make snide remarks about communism and worship at the altar of Ronald Reagan. In college the number was depressingly high.

At anyrate, this movie is supposed to be a coming of age. It explains how Che and Alfredo came to believe as they did. I'm not sure how far it goes into their activities, especially Che's revolutionary writing and incitement. I'll have to wait to see Che (staring my man, Benicio Del Toro) for that.

When Che called for revolution he wasn't asking for posters to get pasted on every available outdoor wall. He wasn't saying people should register to vote to try to change the system from within. He wanted the people to become an armed insurrection. To disposess the powers that be of all of their resources, to redistribute all of those resources and kill anyone who got in the way. Government buildings burning, heads on pikes, rape, murder, mayhem, the whole bit. It's how revolutions have always gone since time immemorial and possibly one of the reasons that Che was so influential was because he didn't mince his words. He meant every bit of it.

I've studied the Cuban revolution and it struck me in the class I was in that I was the only one who noticed that poverty dropped away. Once everything was said and done there almost wasn't a poor class of people. All of my classmates, however, noted with some horror how the upper classes lost everything. The rich people in Cuba prior to the revolution were very, very rich. After the revolution some folks were more affluent than others but all the fat cats became... chubby compared to everyone else. If the worst thing that happens to a person during the course of a revolution and the settling down period is they go from disgustingly wealthy to merely well-to-do, then it seems to me that people could get the fuck over themselves and accept the good of the many as what is also good for them.

*shrug* not being intersted in bloody revolution I don't think I'll be calling for Revolución any time soon. I've just wondered a little bit about morals and what fighting is for - not what it's good for, only what it's for. It seems to be for making other people do what you want through intimidation and for destroying (or slowing down) other people when they oppose you. It's supposed to be for self-defense too, but I think there are points where that melds with intimidation.

I haven't chosen pacifism because I'm incapable of violence, and I refuse believe that it's easier than to act violently. I have three brothers for goodness' sake. Acting and reacting with violence first is very, very easy for me. What isn't easy is pulling my fist back before it lands. What isn't easy is facing the girl whose finger I broke in junior high. Pacifism is really fucking hard and it's much, much easier to find "my buttons," to find those excuses that I would fight for. I've never been truly pushed, and I really hope I never will be. It's just too easy.

It's just too easy to start thinking I have a right to anything, any more than anyone else. It's to easy to start thinking I have the right of every situation and do not have to be accountable for my actions.

So I wonder, on the basis of ideology, are freedom fighters right? It's pretty hard to tell the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter and often the reason is because they are one and the same. I cannot support the actions of Hamas or Chechen rebels, not just because they are trying to force the hand of another soverign power, but simply because they are too bloody. They kill innocents.

They do everything revolutionaries do.