Bamboozled

Everything is connected. It's not a profound or abstract thought. It is a simple truth.

At the beginning of the month - before my left eye began feeling as if I was sliding it down onto the point of an upturned knife. Slowly - I went to see "Sucker Punch", a movie in which the sumptuous visuals are deliberately designed to obviate the need for anything but a cursory characterisation or narrative. Being an aesthete it certainly worked for me. Any movie which shamelessly lifts shots from the peerless "Casshern" will always earn bonus points.

Anyway, midway through the vignette where four hotties with submachine guns, samurai swords and tight booty shorts are laying waste to Steam-Powered Zombie Nazis in WWI trenches the Yoda-like Scott Glen, in heavy eye-liner, tosses off the following Malcolm X quote:

"If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."

Once I got home I watched Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" which, in its turn, was inspired by another Malcolm X quote.*

In an oddly powerful film with a very odd look - generated by its being shot on Mini DV digital cameras - the highlights, before the heartbreaking closing montage revealing hollywood's ceaseless celebration of coonery, are provided by the ongoing endeavours of the militant hip hop posse Mau Maus featuring Mos Def, Canibus and Charli Baltimore. I bumped their angry track "Blak Iz Blak" steadily on repeat for three days straight.

A couple of weeks later four elderly individuals are standing outside the High Court, one holding a placard which reads: “Pay up for the British Gulag in Kenya.” As members of the Mau Mau (an acronym derived from Swahili: "Mzungu Aende Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru" meaning "Let the European go back to Europe, Let the African regain Independence.") uprising they suffered systematic abuse at the hands of the invading British who stole their land and gave it to white settlers. The Kenya Human Rights Commission has said 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed and 160,000 were detained in concentration camps in horrific conditions. They want the UK government to accept responsibility for the crimes committed in these British administered camps. The culture of inhuman cruelty amongst the colonial authorities in Kenya is best summarised by the testimony of British officers. Just two:

"Things got a little out of hand. By the time we cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him."

and

"They wouldn’t say a thing, of course, and one of them, a tall coal-black bastard, kept grinning at me, real insolent. I slapped him hard, but he kept right on grinning at me, so I kicked him in the balls as hard as I could. He went down in a heap but when he finally got up on his feet he grinned at me again and I snapped, I really did. I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth and I said something, I don’t remember what, and I pulled the trigger.

His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two Mickeys were standing there looking blank. I said to them that if they didn’t tell me where to find the rest of the gang I’d kill them too. They didn’t say a word so I shot them both. One wasn’t dead so I shot him in the ear. When the sub-inspector drove up, I told him that the Mickeys tried to escape. He didn’t believe me but all he said was ‘bury them and see the wall is cleared up."

A couple of weeks ago David Cameron told Pakistani students that "Britain was responsible for many of the world's problems ... in the first place." He was talking about Kashmir a product of Britain's partition of India in 1947. Also available in this series: the Israel-Palestine conflict and the carve-up of the Middle East and Africa. Naturally, his comments were greeted with bemused indignation by the usual suspects in the right wing press who essentially echoed Gordon Brown's (remember him?) statement that "the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over."

The expressions of support for Gordon's position were predictable. Essentially the argument boils down to this: "Might is Right," and the British Empire was a benign force bringing the backwards, half-witted people overseas the benefits of civilisation. The brutal appropriation of other people's land and resources, and their persistent humiliation at the hands of a racist system of governance are rendered moral actions because of the introduction of an infrastructure.

Imagine you were so taken with my muscular buttocks in tight gold lamé hot pants that you decided to build an ornate ebony tower so you could imprison and rape me on a daily basis, it would be preposterous to claim the beauty of the tower compensated the horror of your crime. So when acquaintances talk about their mates' experiences travelling for a year in Australia and what a great time they've had on Bondi beach I tend to wince, because the genocide committed against Aborigines so that they can put on sunblock and perv at boys and girls in speedos and bikinis is never mentioned. Chandrasonic from Asian Dub Foundation notes:

"I’m sure the happy-go-lucky, ‘matey’ Australian self-image is a psychological construct that makes these crimes more palatable in popular culture.”

It also speaks volumes to the success the elite have had in skewing our reality that their eminence is seen as a natural extension of the status quo, and their selfish plunder is somehow viewed as a benevolent dissemination of civilised values. And despite its multi-ethnic empire, Britain could never bring itself to embrace ethnic diversity at home. Brian True-May's (is his best friend Freddie True-Mercury?) recent comments re "Midsomer Murders" aren't a shock to anyone who has managed to retain any critical faculties. Neither is today's report by Clearcast, which finds that TV advertising is "drastically under-representing" ethnic minority groups as we appear in only 5% of the 35,000 TV ads screened in the UK last year. David Cameron's recent "multiculturalism has failed speech," is just more of the same old same old.

And now ground troops are entering Libya bearing the tattered flag of "humanitarian intervention." Again. Our government couldn't give a flying fuck about the suffering in Libya. Or Iraq. These countries have something in common: vast oil and mineral reserves. When it came to light that the US Government had bought the false testimonies against Megrahi for $4 million per witness to cover up the CIA's involvement in the Lockerbie bombing, DJ Gaddafi wondered aloud why he should have had to pay $2.7 billion in compensation and threatened to extract his refund from the overseas oil companies on his soil. They went whining to their governments and hey presto! Another war we can pay for whilst libraries are being closed.

The tacit compliance of Middle Eastern Princes is bought (The Manchester City owners recently paid for more troops to suppress the protests in Bahrain) while the corporate vampires feast on their people. Libya has a population of about 6 million people each one of whom should be a millionaire many times over. Instead they're impoverished - the domestic economy drained of its wealth.

Tonight I'm watching "Blade."

* "Oh, I say and I say it again. Ya been had! Ya been took! Ya been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok! This is what He does..."