MARCH 31, 2021 - Mitch McConnell's claim that "the filibuster is the essence of the Senate" has been tossed aside by his opponents as bad history, violently inconsistent with how Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison aimed to structure the Senate, and perhaps even unconstitutional. All true. But what McConnell's screed should remind us is that the filibuster has always been the essence of the politics of white supremacy — even as it now poses a broader threat to democracy itself.

McConnell draws on a playbook stretching back to John C. Calhoun, who as vice president in 1841 forged the filibuster into a conscious instrument to block majoritarian democracy as part of his project of creating a durable framework for slavery in a nation he knew would eventually vote against it. Calhoun, generations of Southern senators and now McConnell have shared a determination that majority votes should not be the last word in the United States. Privileged minorities should be able to override the will of the entire people — if their interests are endangered. Yes, Calhoun was focused on slavery and race, but his first filibuster was over national banking. The interest he sought to protect from a national majority was that of the South as a region, extending beyond slavery to issues like tariffs.  

Chuck Schumer's attempts to shame McConnell for being anti-democratic — by seeking to shrink the electorate instead of persuading it — thus land flat on the right. McConnell is tapping into one of conservatism's deep obsessions: How can America avoid majoritarian democracy? And Calhoun, who was twice vice president and twice almost president, devised the precise answer that McConnell is deploying today. When McConnell refers to "consensus," he doesn't mean compromise that generates broad acceptance across divergent perspectives within a single electorate. He means that certain important subgroups — such as those who owned human beings as chattel, in Calhoun's day — should be allowed to veto legislation, however large the popular majority that favored it. Jefferson had asserted, "It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail" but Calhoun twisted this by asking, "Which minority cares the most?"

White supremacists have always been the exemplar of such a protected group. Calhoun devised his doctrine to protect them, calling such a system "concurrent majorities." (He envisaged them as interest groups, not political parties — his major difference with McConnell.)

Calhoun passed the torch to the leaders of the secession movement who then rooted the theory of the Confederacy in the soil of concurrent majorities. The Confederate constitution was thoroughly imbued with Calhoun's doctrine. As the Civil War drew to an end, Jefferson Davis made clear that he would not accept majority rule: "We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority…. Neither current events nor history shows that the majority rules, or ever did rule."

After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Amendments were intended to make America a democracy where the male majority ruled, regardless of race. This vision was subverted, using Calhoun's example, by repeated Senate filibusters blocking legislation to implement civil rights, a power specifically granted Congress by their authors. The justification? That "states" were a protected minority entitled to nullify majority decisions — in other words, the very issue that the Civil War was supposed to have settled!

The deep logic of filibuster and "concurrent majority" theory alike is the grant of white minority rights denied to an African-American minority. Carrying out Calhoun's theory as he envisaged requires deciding, a priori, that one race is entitled to greater deference than the other. (This exact logic led the Supreme Court to conclude, in the infamous Dred Scott decision, that to sustain the rights of slaveowners it was unavoidable to declare that Americans of African descent had no rights at all.) On matters of racial justice, defenders of the filibuster have always argued that reducing current inequalities between two groups required a supermajority, while sustaining inequality required only a robust minority. 

White supremacists sustained this doctrine throughout the 20th century. Civil rights bill after civil rights bill went down in the Senate, throttled by the filibuster and defended with the argument, as Mississippi's Theodore Bilbo put it, that "a mob is a majority; without the filibuster, the minority would be at the mercy of the majority." Bilbo's fears, of course, were not for the rights for the majority of Mississippians — the state was still 50% Black, and during the Jim Crow period, African Americans had been a majority. The all-white political structure was the minority whose concurrence Bilbo demanded.

The broader conservative application of the concurrent majority concept was most clearly articulated by the John Birch Society after World War II with its singular focus on one goal: "America is a Republic, not a democracy. Let's keep it that way." But outside the South, ideological conservatives were too few in the Senate to otherwise abuse the filibuster. 

The conventional wisdom after 1965 was that the debate about white supremacy — and the stain that most Americans thought it had laid on our national identity — had been ended by the civil rights movement, specifically the passage of the Voting Rights Act. But while explicit arguments for restricting access to the franchise by ethnic minorities, the poor or immigrants largely vanished, stripping the filibuster of its obvious racist identity actually made possible its contemporary weaponization.

Insisting on a Senate supermajority had been a challenging, expensive and rare option almost exclusively put in play to defend Jim Crow and white privilege. Now it became a strategic but routine Senate procedure, first deployed by Bob Dole to hamstring the Clinton administration and then by Harry Reid against George W. Bush. Finally, with Obama's election, Mitch McConnell unleashed the full force of the 60-vote loophole and imposed upon the Senate the very supermajority the founding fathers had specifically rejected. The toxin that Calhoun had first injected into the Senate to counter the future threat of majority rule now found its moment. The virus spread.

While the filibuster — the essence of Mitch McConnell's Senate — is the most powerful weapon the right-wing opponents of democracy have seized, Republicans in 2020 are deploying the full panoply of anti-democratic strategies devised over two and a quarter centuries by Calhoun's followers. The most important campaigns being waged by conservatives at this moment emphasize the spread of gerrymandered districts, purged voter rolls, legalized bribery, a politicized judiciary, state pre-emption of local home rule and crippling the executive authority of majoritarian governors, even Republican ones.

Every tool is designed to reduce the ability of the majority to govern. Changing voting rules or Senate processes such that the minority can prevail over the majority is a feature, not a bug. If endless voting lines in minority precincts in Georgia creates an opportunity to influence voters by offering them water, why else is the solution to make offering water a felony, rather than offering those citizens adequate numbers of voting booths?

Yes, the motivations may be — as some Republicans conceded in a Senate hearing last week — that if every American could vote easily, Republicans would lose because they are a minority. But Schumer's complaint about derailing majority rule, for many conservatives, misses the point. Some on the American right doesn't think the majority deserves to rule. Even more of it believes that voting and participation in governance are privileges to be earned, not rights to be protected. That's their understanding of "the consent of the governed." Mitch McConnell now has the Senate that John Calhoun always schemed for. That is the dilemma facing American democracy.

Carl Pope is the co-author of "Climate of Hope: How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet." He is the former CEO and chairman of the Sierra Club. ...Read More

May 24, 2021 - One of the most memorable lies about medieval rape appears early in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster film Braveheart (1995). As he ponders how to entice his English noblemen to live in Scotland, King Edward I declares that it’s time to reinstitute an old custom called prima nocte, or first night. He explains: ‘When any common girl inhabiting their lands is married, our nobles shall have sexual rights to her on the night of her wedding.’ (Just to be clear: this ‘old custom’ is fabricated to embellish a compelling narrative of Scottish suffering under English oppression.)

But did medieval rape culture in Europe really look like the Braveheart scene? And how much has actually changed between the Middle Ages and our own #MeToo era? The answers are surprising, and require a bit of unpacking to understand.

Medieval rape culture was based on several pervasive beliefs about women and sex – that women lie about rape; that they are naturally hornier than men and unable to control their desires; that they habitually change their minds about sex; and that rape must be proved with physical injuries, immediate outcry, repeated identical accounts of the trauma delivered to the proper authorities and copious tears in order to count as ‘real rape’. ...Read More

May 27, 2021 - The poisonous influence of the right-wing social media can in part be measured by the attention it gives to a host of far-right extremists who trade in hate-filled, deplorable and dehumanizing references, and analogies designed to turn politics into shock theater.

The most recent example can be seen in Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s outrageous attempt to suggest that requiring people to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is tantamount to the Nazis requiring millions of Jews to wear fabric stars during the Holocaust. This is just the latest example of the current right-wing assault on truth, history and the public imagination. Of course, Greene is only one of many right-wing shock troops that are fueling the conditions moving the United States into a fascist politics. The power of the corporate and right-wing media gives new meaning to the notion that politics follows culture, especially given the current attacks being waged on social, racial and economic justice.

The war to destroy the public imagination is now waged on many fronts, particularly through those corporate-controlled cultural apparatuses that mold our views of the world. The power to dominate the public is done not only through military force, but also through a corporate-controlled media empire that includes right-wing talk radio, social media, right-wing cable programs, and mainstream platforms that shape knowledge, dominate ideas, provide an emotional base, and filter and control the public discussion of major social issues. Right-wing media empires increasingly provide a culture, language, psychological space and melting pot of conspiracy ideas, all of which provide fertile soil for a fascist politics.

It is worth noting that the spread and resurgence of white supremacy and right-wing populist movements by radio hosts such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson signal the increased power of right-wing media and culture to promote the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of an ongoing attack on truth, rational discourse and enlightenment values. Rather than be dismissed as a source of entertainment or the rantings of fringe elements on the right, Carlson and a number of other Trump-aligned radio hosts provide confirmation of both the reconfiguration of the racial state, and the need for progressives to understand how issues of commonsense, culture, language and social media work to reproduce an upgraded form of fascist politics. As Amelia Mertha points out, “Spectacle is a necessary condition for white supremacy. When it does not manifest in covert forms, white supremacy is the most emphatic and twisted stage show of all.” The consumption and spectacle of Black pain and suffering has a long history in the United States, only now it does not draw large crowds to public lynchings but to media platforms such as right-wing talk shows and the internet.

Carlson has a huge audience with over 3 million viewers and has one of the highest-rated and most-watched cable news programs in the United States. Carlson and his reactionary counterparts flood media space with racist, anti-government and Trump-based lies. They hide the truth in the shadows of a poisonous spectacle. This is about more than the current assault on facts, evidence and truth. Fox News, Breitbart, Newsmax, One America News and other toxic cultural apparatuses represent a new front in the war to use social media to both depoliticize individuals and discredit critics that would oppose white supremacy and authoritarian nationalism.

They also use music, online games, cartoons and videos not only as ideological props to recruit young people, but also as part of an appeal to community and a shared culture with its own language and sense of solidarity, with its false promise of solidarity through appeals to hatred, bigotry, antisemitism, misogyny and racism. As I have said elsewhere, this is the neoliberal dream machine where war, violence and politics have taken on a new disturbing form of urgency within image-based cultures. Violence is not merely reported, it is replayed, stoked for entertainment value, and its new currency is white supremacy ramped up in the service of a fascist politics led by the former president of the United States and his merry band of lackeys.

In sync with this new cultural movement, Trump’s Republican Party, militia groups, QAnon followers, online hate-filled communities and conspiracy theorists, Carlson’s public flirtation with right-wing violence prompted the conservative columnist Max Boot to claim that Carlson “is inciting violence and abetting terrorism. He hits a new low every time he takes to the airwaves.” This is language of the spectacle in the service of a right-wing Republican Party wedded to prospect of authoritarian rule at any cost.

Fascist politics works best amid the merging and constant repetition of ignorance, resentment and hatred. First, it destroys the truth, then the institutions that produce it, and finally anyone who cultivates and expresses critical ideas. Carlson’s presence in U.S. politics is crucial to understand because he is one of the prominent media personalities engaging in a successful politics of depoliticization by encouraging his audience to suspend their critical faculties. He floods the media with lies, promotes the fear of people of color, and produces a constant barrage of misrepresentations, such as his claim that immigrants are making the U.S. “poorer and dirtier.” He has defended the actions of 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two peaceful protesters participating in a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He has railed against the idea of diversity and pushed racist immigration narratives that make him a favorite on neo-Nazi websites such as The Daily Stormer.

Carlson openly touts “white replacement theory, which argues that “‘western’ identity is under siege by massive waves of immigration from non-European/non-white countries, resulting in a replacement of white European individuals via demographics,” as Judd Legum notes. Carlson calls white supremacy a hoax, and shamelessly defends replacement theory knowing full well that it was used as a rallying cry for the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017. The march was organized by a motley crew of racist, antisemitic, heavily armed white nationalists and white supremacist groups, including neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Repeating slogans evoking “similar marches of Hitler Youth,” the marchers yelled, “Blood and soil!” “You will not replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!”

Carlson also denies the source of the violence that took place against the Capitol on January 6, 2021, retreating, Astead W. Herndon writes, “to the ranks of misinformation, claiming it was Black Lives Matter protesters and far-left groups like Antifa who stormed the Capitol — in spite of the pro-Trump flags and QAnon symbology in the crowd.” Carlson’s lies function largely as permission to legitimate his white nationalist and racially inflammatory rhetoric. He uses language in the service of violence against immigrants, Black people and members of the left. Moreover, his embrace of right-wing violence is used in the service of authoritarianism and lawlessness while functioning to encourage a distrust, if not hatred, of justice, equality, social responsibility and democracy itself.

Carlson and many of his media cohorts embrace the unfounded and disproven lie that the presidential election was stolen from Trump. As Michael Gerson observes, the spreading of such falsehoods in the name of cult-like loyalty to Trump may not be the “moral equivalent of fascist propaganda. But it serves the same political function. A founding lie is intended to remove followers from the messy world of facts and evidence. It is designed to replace critical judgment with personal loyalty. It is supposed to encourage distrust of every source of social authority opposed to the leader’s shifting will.”

Moreover, the spreading of the big lie in the age of Trumpism echoes the belief stated by the Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, that the bigger the lie, the easier it was to spread than a small one, and that if spread widely enough, the more like it would be believed. Not only is the most effective propaganda produced through the repetition and saturation of the big lie — evident in the millions who believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen — but it is the foundational element in spreading manufactured ignorance, empowering racist haters and legitimating white supremacy and a range of dangerous conspiracy theories.

Carlson, Trump and their acolytes do more than mark a break from reality; they undermine the formative cultures, civic institutions, and modes of empowering education necessary to equip people with the critical skills they need in order to recognize and resist authoritarian models of power. This fog of manufactured ignorance, reproduced through what Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls a “high-volume diffusion of falsehoods, partial truths, and conspiracy theories,” weakens the individual and society’s ability to resist the pernicious effects of such propaganda. Borrowing from Jason Stanley’s work on propaganda (How Propaganda Works), Carlson promotes a “flawed ideology” that legitimates the dehumanization of other groups while functioning as “barriers to rational thought and empathy that propaganda exploits.”

Carlson operates in the service of fascist agitation, and his aim is to unmoor language from critical reason, while turning politics into theater. He is symptomatic of the new face of fascist agitprop, ensuring that the media transform violence into a cheap spectacle. He has become the symbol of a tabloid politics emptied of social responsibility. Carlson’s racist babble testifies to the inflated relevance in the media eco-spheres of a political theatricality and performance that merges the politics hate with the razzle-dazzle associated with the tawdry underside of the entertainment industry. His racist and nativist dribble spread fascist myths about racial purity and cleansing while urging the faceless masses to buy into a “boiling primordial soup from which more developed and more dangerous forms of fascism might emerge.”

Trading in the politics of disposability, Carlson uses the media to promote what Etienne Balibar calls “production for elimination … of populations that … are already superfluous.” In this instance, an ideology forged in racist contempt, dehumanization and threat of death now functions “as a form of political and economic currency.” The public imagination is now in crisis. Radical uncertainty has turned lethal. In the current historical moment, the forms of pedagogical oppression that now circulate among so much of the right-wing media create ways of thinking and feeling that prey on the fears of the isolated, disenfranchised and powerless.

These neoliberal forms of pedagogy substitute disillusionment and incoherence for a sense of comforting ignorance, the thrill of hyper-masculinity and the security that comes with the militarized unity of the obedient masses waging a war on democracy. The public imagination is formed through habits of daily life, but only for the better when such experiences are filtered through the ideals and promises of a democracy. This is no longer true. The concentration of power in the hands of a ruling elite has ensured that any notion of change regarding equality and justice is now tainted, if not destroyed, as a result of what Theodor Adorno called a retreat into apocalyptic bombast marked by “an organized flight of ideas.”

Violence in the United States has become a form of domestic terrorism; it is omnipresent and works through complex systems of symbolic and institutional control. As the famed artist Isaac Cordal observes, “We live in societies … that use fear in order to make people submissive…. Fear bends us [and makes us] vulnerable to its desires…. Our societies have been built on violence, and that heritage, that colonial hangover which is capitalism today still remains.” Under capitalism in its neoliberal fascistic form, the poverty of the civic and political imagination is taking its last breath.

Authoritarian societies do more than censor and subvert the truth, they also punish those who engage in dangerous thinking. The current plague of racism fueling neoliberal fascism is rooted not only in structural and economic forms of domination, but also intellectual and pedagogical forces, making clear that is education central to politics. It also points to the urgency of understanding that white supremacy is first and foremost a struggle over agency, assigned meanings and identity — over whose lives count and whose don’t. ...Read More

Webinar on Tuesday June 15 organized by Chicago DSA

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZApc-qhqz0uG9whJ8EFIODgZDxOVmYwbF-h 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining ...Read More

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MAY 27, 2021 - For six years, starting in 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti watched from death row as writers argued for their freedom, politicians debated their case, and radicals held protests and set off bombs in their names. They managed to rally support even from people who initially condemned them. But by May 1927, the pair of leftist ideologues had exhausted their options for an appeal. They had little left ahead of them but the electric chair.

Vanzetti contemplated his impending martyrdom to a visiting reporter. “If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure,” he reflected. But now?

"Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as we now do by dying. Our words, our lives, our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all! That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph."

It was an unlikely triumph. Sacco and Vanzetti, ages 29 and 31 at the time of their arrest, came from a background more typically conducive to obscurity and suspicion than to sympathetic celebrity: They were radical, working-class Italian immigrants who advocated for the violent overthrow of political and capitalist institutions in the hopes of building, in Sacco’s words, a world of “no government, no police, no judges, no bosses, no authority.” They had dodged the draft to avoid serving in World War I, refusing to fight for a government they believed to be oppressive.

Beyond that, the crime for which they were convicted and sentenced to death—two murders committed during a robbery at a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920—was not a particularly remarkable one. Even many of their sympathizers acknowledge, to this day, that they may very well have been guilty. But in an era of anti-immigrant, anti-leftist sentiment, their case became an emblem of prejudice in the American justice system—and a rallying point for those who wished to combat it.

In the trial and appeals process that began 100 years ago, the duo’s defense team set out to turn the case into a public sensation, and it undoubtedly succeeded. How much that success truly meant is less apparent. It didn’t save Sacco and Vanzetti; less than four months after Vanzetti spoke about agony and triumph, they were both dead. And the tolerance, the justice, the understanding that he believed himself to be dying for remain, at best, a work in progress.

With their arrest, Sacco and Vanzetti stepped into the center of a firestorm of converging fears, prejudices and swelling radical political power. Nativism and xenophobia were on the rise in the United States. The second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan had formed in 1915, targeting Black Americans, Catholics, and immigrants—including Italians. Anti-immigrant sentiment was gaining traction in more legitimate spaces, too: In 1921 and 1924, while Sacco and Vanzetti were battling the Massachusetts court system, Congress passed restrictive immigration acts intended to stem a post-war influx of “undesirables” and the radical politics they feared might accompany them.

Fear of radicalism “was part and parcel of the xenophobia that was going on at the time,” says Erin Bush, a historian at the University of North Georgia. The Russian Revolution of 1917 had given rise to the first Red Scare, and a slate of assassinations of world leaders since the 1890s—including that of President William McKinley—had further sowed fears of anarchism. In early 1919, a series of bombings enacted by followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani against prominent American politicians and capitalists “put the violence on the front page,” Bush says, making anarchism feel all the more like “a palpable threat to people.”

Sacco and Vanzetti—themselves suspected Galleanists—had met in 1916 at a factory strike Vanzetti helped organize. Over the following years, they were united by their advocacy for workers and their opposition to World War I; they even fled to Mexico together in 1917 to escape the draft. They were arrested for the robbery and murders in Braintree—which police believed were carried out to fund the anarchist groups ongoing efforts to foment revolution— in May 1920. They entered an American justice system that had spent the attacks’ aftermath pursuing and prosecuting leftist leaders, with a particular focus on Italian anarchists not unlike themselves.

Details about Sacco and Vanzetti immediately began to filter into the news: descriptions of the evidence that had led the police to them and, not far behind, the first inklings of their backgrounds and political leanings. “Alleged Red Literature In Vanzetti’s Room,” declared a Boston Globe headline the week of the arrest. “During the war he was in the last draft and left town,” the article observed.

“Chief of Police Murphy of Milford has identified Saco [sic] as one of the agitators in an attempted industrial disturbance in Milford three years ago,” another Globe article read. “He was arrested and paid a fine. It is also said that Saco was included in the draft and disappeared before he was called.”

The case itself, as described in these early accounts, seemed straightforward. Reportedly, multiple witnesses could identify both Sacco and Vanzetti. Police had found them in possession of weapons, and a number of local officers—cited by name in the papers—gave every sense that they were confident of the culprits’ identities.

Maybe for that reason, the case received only limited press during the initial trial, and almost all of that within Boston. But as they fought to overturn the conviction the defense team worked to change that—and did. Vanzetti’s attorney, Fred Moore, was himself an anarchist and began publicly arguing that the two men had been unfairly prosecuted because of their political beliefs. He dispatched a member of his staff to Europe to spread word among communist parties there and reached out to the newly established American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). ...Read More

Last Week: Bill Fletcher on a variety of topics... Facebook link

Tune of the Week: The Traveling Wilburys - 'Inside Out'

The Guardian

For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.

When I started writing a book about this more hopeful view, I knew there was one story I would have to address. It takes place on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. A plane has just gone down. The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.

On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. The boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they have begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.

By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smoldering wasteland. Three of the children are dead. “I should have thought,” the officer says, “that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.” At this, Ralph bursts into tears. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence,” we read, and for “the darkness of man’s heart”.

This story never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?

I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”

The article did not provide any sources. But sometimes all it takes is a stroke of luck. Sifting through a newspaper archive one day, I typed a year incorrectly and there it was. The reference to 1977 turned out to have been a typo. In the 6 October 1966 edition of Australian newspaper The Age, a headline jumped out at me: “Sunday showing for Tongan castaways”. The story concerned six boys who had been found three weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for more than a year. According to the article, the captain had even got a television station to film a re-enactment of the boys’ adventure.

I was bursting with questions. Were the boys still alive? And could I find the television footage? Most importantly, though, I had a lead: the captain’s name was Peter Warner. When I searched for him, I had another stroke of luck. In a recent issue of a tiny local paper from Mackay, Australia, I came across the headline: “Mates share 50-year bond”. Printed alongside was a small photograph of two men, smiling, one with his arm slung around the other. The article began: “Deep in a banana plantation at Tullera, near Lismore, sit an unlikely pair of mates ... The elder is 83 years old, the son of a wealthy industrialist. The younger, 67, was, literally, a child of nature.” Their names? Peter Warner and Mano Totau. And where had they met? On a deserted island.

My wife Maartje and I rented a car in Brisbane and some three hours later arrived at our destination, a spot in the middle of nowhere that stumped Google Maps. Yet there he was, sitting out in front of a low-slung house off the dirt road: the man who rescued six lost boys 50 years ago, Captain Peter Warner. ...Read More

May 14, 2021 - Brutal, sad, funny, and disarmingly sweet-natured, "Riders of Justice" is not so much a revenge movie as a movie about revenge. That might seem like a distinction without a difference until you get to the end of this surprising feature from writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen ("After the Wedding," "Red Road," "The Salvation") and look back on every place that it has taken you. 

The story starts a few days before Christmas in Estonia. A girl walking along a holiday-decorated street with her grandfather spots a red bicycle offered for sale by a street vendor but asks for a blue one instead. The vendor is part of a crime ring and calls an associate, who steals a blue bike belonging to Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), which causes Mathilde's mother Emma (Anne Birgitte Lind) to have to pick her up at the train station, only to have their car fail to start, which causes them to take a commuter train home.

A statistics and probability expert named Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) gives the girl's mother his seat, and shortly after that, a freight train smashes into the commuter train and several passengers are killed, including Mathilde's mother and a tattooed, bald, scowling fellow who was supposed to testify against a fearsome gang, Riders of Justice. Otto saw another man get off the train before the crash, oddly dropping a full beverage and a nearly uneaten sandwich in the trash on his way out, and becomes convinced that the crash was an assassination and the other victims were collateral damage. As it happens, Mathilde's father is a stony-faced soldier named Markus (Mads Mikkelsen, a frequent leading man for the writer/director).

If this were almost any other movie, you'd be able to write the rest of this review yourself. But you soon figure out that this is not the sort of film that sets up the standard elements and switches to autopilot. For one thing, Jensen makes Otto not merely the messenger who sets the tale in motion and then disappears, but a crucial second lead, and part of a trio filled out by a fellow probability expert named Lennart (Lars Brygmann), whose secret manias and aversions are a constant source of plot complications; and a tightly wound, emotional computer hacker named Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro). All three characters are written and performed with such skill that they form a comedy trio: a motor-mouthed intellectual answer to the Three Stooges. Like Mathilde, Markus, and everyone else who passes in front of Jensen's viewfinder, Otto, Lennart and Emmenthaler are given endearing backstories that feed into the script's fascination with fate, chance, justice, karma, and other subjects rarely discussed in films where the hero is a scary bald dude who can snap a man's neck like a shingle.

"All events are products of a series of preceding events," Otto tells an assembled panel of corporate clients who reject an algorithm he and Lennart are trying to sell them. "Because we often have insufficient data, we categorize events as coincidences." His statement echoes through later scenes, including the church service where Mathilde's mother and Markus's wife is laid to rest. "When miracles happen," the priest says, "we often attribute a divine character to them. However, when lightning strikes, when tragedy becomes reality, we have a hard time assigning a return address, and thus we refer to it as coincidence." Once the stooges enter Markus' life, bloodshed follows, but not in a lockstep, predictable way, thanks to the pinball-machine collisions of all the strong personalities involved (particularly Markus's; he's both hot-tempered and lethal, not an ideal combination).

The big question here is whether the train crash was a premeditated crime or the culmination of a series of things that quite simply happened. A large part of the charm of "Riders of Justice" (what an ironic title, in retrospect!) comes from the way that it keeps us guessing as to what side of the equation, so to speak, it'll come down on, or whether it'll take a position at all. What are we to make, for instance, of a seemingly precise calculation by Otto that the odds of that crash with that outcome were 234,287,121 to one? Or, for that matter, the movie's wry awareness that no matter how bad things get, they could always be worse? "Only thing is, after all this crap, it's unlikely more is going to happen," Mathilde tells Otto. "That's not how things work," Otto replies. "A lot of awful things can happen in your life." ...Read More