Celebrating Steinem

Question: What’s more tedious than Gloria Steinem?

Answer: Multiple Gloria Steinems.

On January 26, a film entitled The Glorias premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. In it, Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, Lulu Wilson, and Ryan Kira Armstrong all play Steinem at various ages. In addition, Steinem herself shows up toward the end of the picture, playing herself.

This goes on for 2 hours and 19 minutes.

The film was directed and co-written by Julie Taymor, who previously helmed the hilarious, raunchy Mel Brooks film musical The Producers. But The Glorias could not be further removed from Mel Brooks territory. By all accounts, it’s a solemn tribute to a woman whom Taymor views as an icon.

This is the same Gloria Steinem who, as we reported here in 2015, headed up a cockamamie “walk for peace” from North Korea to South Korea. Her partner in arms in this disgraceful stunt was Korean Solidary Committee head Christine Ahn, who is seen by many as a stalwart apologist for the Pyongyang regime. Steinem proved her cluelessness about the whole subject when she declared at a press conference that Korea is divided not because the north is a totalitarian prison state but because of the “Cold War mentality.”

As also noted here, Steinem is chummy with Angela Davis, the former Black Panther, accessory to murder, and Communist Party candidate for the Presidency of the U.S., whom Steinem appears to consider a feminist role model.

Then there’s Camille Paglia’s canny observations – which we’ve quoted – about “the simplistic level of Steinem’s thinking,” “that animus of hers against men,” and the fact that Steinem had “turned feminism into a covert adjunct of the Democratic party” (and thus, like many other members of the National Organization for Women, kept shamefully quiet during the Monica Lewinsky scandal).

This is the woman whom Julie Taymor decided was worthy of celebrating.

The film received the usual raves in the usual places. Yes, the reviewers acknowledged flaws, but because this is a loving tribute to a left-wing idol, the positive verdicts were pretty much predetermined. At Variety, Owen Gleiberman cheered: “Despite the teasing title, it’s not about several competing Glorias; it’s about how all the women Gloria Steinem met or knew, and whose pain and perception she absorbed, were Glorias….We come away moved by her journey, and with an enhanced appreciation for what she did, how she did it, and what it took.”

From Indie Wire: “Filmmaker Julie Taymor has never operated within conventional parameters, but then again, neither has her latest cinematic subject, feminist icon and political firebrand Gloria Steinem.” Indie Wire calls the film a “wonderfully inventive” account of the “inspirational” Steinem’s “extraordinary life.”

And so on. Ah well: given the politics of Hollywood, and the knee-jerk reverence on the left of the vapid Steinem — who taught millions of well-off American women to think of themselves as oppressed and to ignore the real oppression of women in other parts of the world — we knew this had to happen eventually.

Oh, one last thing: Bette Midler is in the picture too, playing the late Bella Abzug, a shrill, grating Manhattan congresswoman during the 1970s, when New York City was at its lowest ebb, in terms of crime and economy, and who was too busy screaming about the Equal Rights Amendment to do anything of note to address her city’s crisis. The film treats her as a heroine, too. At least the casting sounds right.

Posted on February 7, 2020February 7, 2020 by usefulstooges 5

Gloria Steinem, lightweight icon

Camille Paglia has neatly summed up the positive side of Gloria Steinem: “I hugely admired the early role that Steinem played in second-wave feminism because she was very good as a spokesperson in the 1970s. She had a very soothing manner that made it seem perfectly reasonable for people to adopt feminist principles…Also, I credit her for co-founding Ms. magazine and thereby contributing that very useful word, Ms., to the English language, which allows us to refer to a woman without signaling her marital status.”

But as it happens, it’s Paglia, too, who has best summed up what’s wrong with Steinem. For one thing, “that animus of hers against men.” For another, her lifelong fixation on the supposed oppression of upper-middle-class white American women such as herself, who in fact were, and are, among the most privileged people the world has ever seen.

Then there’s “the simplistic level of Steinem’s thinking,” as exemplified by her comment that “women reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.” (Or her attack on Paglia, about whom Steinem once actually said: “Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying he’s not anti-Semitic.”) Then there’s Steinem’s “having turned feminism into a covert adjunct of the Democratic party,” one consequence of which was that she hypocritically kept her mouth shut during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

In 2015, we reported on Steinem’s latest stratagem: a “walk for peace” from North Korea to South Korea, the point being, as she explained beforehand, “to call attention to this unresolved conflict that I suspect most people or many people have forgotten.” Or perhaps the point was to get her own name back in the headlines again, since she feared many people had forgotten her?

Steinem quickly made it clear that she understood nothing whatsoever about North Korea. She planned, she said, to meet with North Korean women so they could compare their “experiences” as women in different societies. As if women in North Korea could speak honestly about their experiences without risking execution! The Daily Beast ran an article by Lizzie Crocker headlined: “Is Gloria Steinem a Propaganda Tool For North Korea?” Indeed, it was interesting to note that Steinem, who had made a career out of savaging postwar America’s supposed mistreatment of the female sex, said nothing in her Korea remarks about the nightmarish abuse of both men and women in the Hermit Kingdom.

It was even more interesting to note that Steinem’s partner in this inane enterprise was Christine Ahn, head of something called the Korea Solidarity Committee and a shameless apologist for the Kim regime. To judge by Steinem’s remarks about Korea, she had swallowed wholesale everything Ahn had told her about the topic. Why is Korea divided? Not because the northern part is a totalitarian dictatorship governed by a bloodthirsty tyrant, but because of the “Cold War mentality,” Steinem pronounced.

After years of such pathetic stunts, Steinem should be an object of ridicule. Paglia’s view of her should be the world’s view of her. But no, she’s remained a darling of the cultural elite. She’s the subject of an upcoming Off-Broadway play, Gloria: A Life, in which she’ll be played by Christine Lahti. A New York Times article took us into “the cool tranquillity of Ms. Steinem’s Upper East Side duplex,” where Lahti and Steinem fielded softball questions about the production. (Presumably the obvious title for the play, Oppressed in an Upper East Side Duplex, was too long for the marquee.) The Times noted that Steinem is also the subject of not one but two forthcoming movies: My Life on the Road, starring Julianne Moore as Steinem, and An Uncivil War, with Carey Mulligan as Steinem.

In 2018, does the American playgoing and moviegoing public really want to see dramas about the purported heroism of Gloria Steinem? This is, after all, a woman who, in the Times piece, is actually quoted as saying “it isn’t just that we live in a patriarchy. The patriarchy lives in us.” Isn’t it clear by now that, as an intellectual, she’s a lightweight? That, as an activist, she’s as domesticated a creature as you could imagine? And that, as a so-called oppressed person, she’s the very model of privilege?

Posted on September 20, 2018September 20, 2018 by usefulstooges 1

Coming to a theater near you: a buddy movie about Marx and Engels!

Karl Marx would have turned 200 on May 5, and during the last couple of weeks we’ve been noting that more than a few bien pensant types on both sides of the Atlantic manage to ignore – or explain away – the disastrous history of the twentieth century and to view Marx’s legacy with fondness. On Tuesday we examined a recent piece in the Independent, the British broadsheet, arguing that Marx’s time has finally come; today we’ll look at another contribution to the Independent, this one by Kaleem Aftab, who interviews celebrated director Raoul Peck about his new film The Young Karl Marx.

The film is, by Aftab’s account, a hagiography – a loving account of the close friendship between Marx and Friedrich Engels, his collaborator on The Communist Manifesto. Aftab likens the movie to Walter Salles’s 2004 biopic The Motorcycle Diaries, a cinematic billet doux to Che Guevara. “Both films,” Aftab explains, “are more interested in the youthful antics of the protagonists than their later work and exploits.”

This makes sense, if you think about it: such films are intended not for mature, serious audiences who have faced the truth about Communism but for those who still romanticize it. The better, then, to view these figures in their early years, through the pink lens of youthful idealism and intellectual excitement. Better to observe the germination of the ideas than the bloody results thereof.

The other people we’ve been profiling during the past two weeks see Karl Marx as being more relevant now than he ever was. Peck agrees. Like others, he cites the 2008 financial crisis as definitive evidence of capitalism’s unworkability and inevitable failure, even as he refuses to recognize that the deterioration and collapse of one Communist regime after another demonstrates anything whatsoever. “You sum up the articles [by Marx] and it is exactly the description of the 2008 crisis,” says Peck, who was nominated for an Oscar for his 2016 documentary feature I Am Not Your Negro, about the author James Baldwin. “It’s like the children’s book of the history of capitalism and you can trace it until today. So what other proof do you need?”

August Diehl as Marx and Stefan Konarske as Engels in *The Young Karl Marx*

Peck’s “desire to connect to the present,” writes Aftab, “has led to him make a movie that at times seems like an overly theoretical political analysis, and in other moments like a fun bromance, capturing the hijinks of ordinary young men.” Terrific – a totalitarian buddy movie! Peck’s hope is “that young people will recognise themselves in the film” and take inspiration from it in their efforts to “fight back.” And precisely what, Aftab asks, is crying out “to be fought against right now?” Like others whom we’ve discussed this week, Peck’s answer can be reduced to a single word: Trump.

Posted on May 17, 2018May 5, 2018 by usefulstooges 3

Daniel Tutt, Islamophobia salesman

We’ve been looking at Daniel Tutt, who when he’s not teaching at Marymount University and publishing dense, pretentious academic papers celebrating postmodern Marxist philosophy is working hard trying to sell general audiences on Islam – sometimes via films or lectures or interviews, sometimes via pieces for popular media, such as the Huffington Post and something called the Islamic Monthly.

In these pieces, one of his signature moves is to start out by briefly mentioning a recent act of terrorism, and then to pivot quickly to the supposed anti-Muslim backlash thereto. One 2013 essay, for example, began as follows: “While the dust has yet to settle on the horrific Boston Marathon bombings by the Tsarnaev brothers, Muslims have already felt the impact of their association with Islam. We have witnessed a rise in Islamophobic discourse in the popular media and blogosphere….” (And the rest of the article, of course, was entirely about “Islamophobia.”) Two years later, he published a piece that began as follows: “In the wake of the tragic attacks in Paris and Beirut, Islamophobic rhetoric and hate crimes have already begun to surge. Across the country, we have politicians making calls to suspend refugee resettlement, hate crimes and mosque arsons have already begun to intensify…..”

Islamophobia! Throughout his general-audience oeuvre, that’s Tutt’s favorite topic. In one essay, published shortly after the 2016 elections and entitled “Islamophobia and the Coming Trump Era,” Tutt charged that “incidents of bullying, discrimination, and hate crimes directed toward Muslims, and those perceived to be [Muslims],” had risen since Trump’s election. He provided no evidence to support this claim, and made no mention of the recent rise in acts of jihadist terror. On the contrary, instead of recognizing that there are legitimate reasons for concern about Islamic ideology, Tutt disparaged what he described as a “far right” and “highly conspiratorial and radically racist” view that “Islam is an exceptionally intolerant and violent religion.”

He also offered up a bizarre theory – namely, that the presidency of Barack Obama, a black man, caused “white America” to experience “a climate of paranoia where Islamophobia functioned as the tip of the iceberg to a much wider fear over the ‘browning of America.’” This theory, of course, ignores the fact that Obama would never have been elected (and re-elected) president if millions of white Americans hadn’t voted for him. Nor does Tutt’s theory explain why a nationwide fear of the “browning of America” should manifest itself as Islamophobia rather than, say, as a fear of, or prejudice against, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’i, Jainists, or, for that matter, members of predominantly black Protestant denominations.

In a January 2016 academic essay, “Elements of Islamophobia: The State, Class and Capital,” Tutt served up some more original thought, arguing that American voters’ concerns about unlimited and unvetted Muslim immigration was “reminiscent of the infamous ‘Jewish problem’ that stoked rampant anti-Semitism during the first half of the twentieth century.” Of course, anti-Semitism is an ancient and irrational phenomenon; “Islamophobia” is a term invented in modern times by the Muslim Brotherhood to dismiss legitimate fears about explicit threats to Western freedom and security.

None of this, however, kept Tutt from maintaining, absurdly, that “today’s intensification of Islamophobia must be understood and diagnosed primarily, but not exclusively, as the outcome of capitalist exploitation” – or from applying theories about the roots of anti-Semitism posited by Marxist philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to current Western attitudes about Islam. In Tutt’s essay, jihadist terror all but disappears from the picture – as, unsurprisingly, do the sundry horrors of life under sharia law.

Posted on May 26, 2017May 17, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Lying about Islam: Daniel Tutt

Sometimes, on this site, one “useful stooge” leads to another. It’s not surprising. These stooges tend to move in packs. It’s that lockstep-ideology thing. Strength in numbers – or, actually, cowardice in numbers. The more Maoists, the merrier.

This year we’ve spent a good deal of time on Islamic apologist extraordinaire Jonathan A. C. Brown. One of his comrades and collaborators, it turns out, is a fellow named Daniel Tutt, who like many of today’s intellectuals, academics, and activists is what you might call a red-green type, combining Marx with Muhammed, Das Kapital with the Koran. Tutt’s résumé is packed with the names of various benign-sounding activities – “interfaith” this, “dialogue” that, organizations devoted to “peace” and “reconciliation” between Islam and whatever. We listed the names of some of these organizations yesterday. If they bring to mind the equally congenial-sounding names of various Soviet front groups of the Cold War era, well, there’s a very good reason for that.

Bottom line: this guy is a hardcore Islamic ideologist masquerading as a gentle bridge-builder.

One of the items he’s shilled for in his role as “Outreach Director” of the Unity Productions Foundation, which makes pro-Islam propaganda, is a video called American Muslims: Facts vs. Fiction. It’s an inexpensive, You Tube-friendly product that starts out with Muslims staring into the camera and citing various “stereotypes about Muslims.” For example: “Muslim women are oppressed.”

And: “The Koran teaches hate.” Sorry, but these aren’t “stereotypes”; they’re hard facts. No, not every Muslim woman is oppressed, and not every word of the Koran teaches hate. But hundreds of millions of Muslim women are treated as less than second-class citizens – according to Islam, they’re the property of their husbands; their testimony in court is worth half that of a man; their husbands can rape, beat, and divorce them at will; and so on.

And all that nastiness about women accounts for only a fraction of the hate in the Koran, a book that American Muslims consistently misrepresents. There are certain lines of the Koran that are routinely yanked out of context in order to make Islam look benign: this film quotes several of them reliably. One guy actually tells us that the idea that one should “show mercy to those on earth” is “the cornerstone of what Islam teaches.” Indeed, American Muslims lays on the lies from beginning to end. Among the film’s talking heads is Eli Clifton, co-author of Fear Inc., a 2011 “report” that demonizes honest critics of Islamic ideology as purveyors of hate. The film is whitewashing, pure and simple.

A more high-profile film fronted by Tutt is a 2011 documentary entitled Islamic Art: Mirror of the Invisible World. Premiered at the Kennedy Center, broadcast a few month later on PBS, and narrated by Susan Sarandon, it’s part of a larger, long-term enterprise called “the Bridging Cultures: Muslim Journeys bookshelf.” And what exactly is that? It’s an initiative that, among other things, provides “[f]ree books and films” about Islam to libraries – another way of saying that it packs the shelves of public libraries with its brainwashing materials.

And the suckers are falling for it. In a 2012 interview (see bel0w) with Terrilynn Chun of the American Library Association, Tutt complained that for the previous eleven years Americans had been inundated with messages and images associating Islam with violence (gee, wonder why?), and said that in order to counter those messages and images the UPF was providing “humanizing stories about Muslims” that “dispel stereotypes.” (“Great!” replied a cheery Chun.) He added that the UPF also supplies this stuff to schools. (“Wonderful!” said Chun.) And it also distributes them to museums: Islamic Art, he added, had already been screened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and several other major U.S. art museums (in addition to being in the collections of over 500 libraries worldwide).

Posted on May 25, 2017May 17, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Joris Ivens: Stalin’s and Mao’s Riefenstahl

Today, a quick look at Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens (1898-1989). He started out making short experimental films in which he sought to capture atmosphere, much in the way of an impressionist painter. He also helped establish Amsterdam as an early center of filmmaking, and helped bring directors like René Clair and Sergei Eisenstein to the city.

EH5408P c.1937-1938 Ernest Hemingway with a film cameraman and two soldiers during the Spanish Civil War, 1937-1938. Photographer unknown in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. — With Hemingway and two soldiers in Spain

Then, in 1929 and again in 1931, he went to the USSR. He was hooked. And he started making propaganda pictures. Song of Heroes (1931), about industry in the city of Magnitogorsk, promoted Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. In 1936 he relocated to the U.S., where the next year he screened his film The Spanish Earth at the White House. The movie, funded by a consortium of left-leaning writers including Lillian Hellman and John Dos Passos, was a paean to the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Ivens presented the Republicans as uniformly fighting for liberty – ignoring the fact that many so-called Republicans were, in fact, Marxists who enjoyed the support of the Kremlin and who sought to turn Spain into a Communist satellite of the Soviet Union. It was transparent wartime propaganda, but it attracted the participation of many top-flight talents, including Marc Blitzstein and Virgil Thomson, who composed the music, Ernest Hemingway, who wrote and read the voice-over narration, and Jean Renoir, who did the French-language voice-over.

Three years later, Ivens did the same favor for Mao Zedong that he had for Stalin in The Spanish Earth, releasing a film, The 400 Million, that told the story of the Second Sino-Japanese War, emphazing the contributions of Mao, his compadre Zhou Enlai, and their Communist cohorts while underplaying the role played by Chaing Kai-shek and his anti-Communist Nationalists.

In 1943, at the height of World War II, American director Frank Capra (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It’s a Wonderful Life), who had been asked by the U.S. War Department to make a series of films entitled Why We Fight, invited Ivens to direct a movie for the series about the Japanese. Ivens was soon fired, however. Why? For (no kidding) making the movie too pro-Japanese.

Ivens left the U.S. in the 1940s, and before long was living in Stalin’s newly conquered and Communized Eastern Europe. During the Vietnam War, he made a couple of pro-North Vietnam documentaries. In 1967, he won the Lenin Peace Prize. And he spent six years in the 1970s making How Yukong Moved the Mountains, a more than twelve-hour account of China’s Cultural Revolution, in which millions were removed from their jobs, torn from their homes and families, tortured, “re-educated,” and/or killed. As it happened, Ivens – by now a profoundly convinced Communist and close friend of Mao and Zhou – thoroughly approved.

It is telling to observe that Ivens’s lifelong cinematic efforts on behalf of Stalin and Mao did not prevent him from being treated in his homeland as a local hero. In 1989, he received a knighthood from the Dutch government. Shortly afterwards, he died. Such was the life of Stalin’s and Mao’s Leni Riefenstahl.

Posted on February 13, 2017January 16, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

Baader-Meinhof in film: celebration or indictment?

The 2008 movie The Baader Meinhof Complex runs two and a half hours, and it is as ambitious as it is long. It seeks to tell the history of the Baader-Meinhof Group, or Red Army Faction (RAF), as fully as possible – to include every act of terrorism and every important RAF personage. The production is fastidious: the filmmakers reportedly went out of their way to re-create events, whenever possible, in the very spots where they had taken place. The attention to period detail, and to other particulars, is remarkable, as is the effort to create rich, rounded portraits of the major figures of (at least) the RAF’s first generation.

The film – directed by Uli Edel from a script by himself and Bernd Eichinger, which is based on a book by Stefan Aust – was a huge hit in Germany. It was a nominee for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. There was, however, much debate as to whether or not it romanticized the terrorists. Some felt it portrayed RAF members as “Bonnie and Clyde-style heroes.” One film critic objected that Edel had given Andreas Baader “what he always wanted. Posthumously he has become the hero of a real action film.” Bettina Röhl called the film “the worst-case scenario – it would not be possible to top its hero worship.” The widow of banker Jurgen Ponto, who’d been assassinated by the RAF, protested the government’s financial support of the film by returning a Federal Cross of Merit. Michael Buback, son of a murdered federal prosecutor, complained that Edel had shown “little consideration…towards the family members” of the RAF’s victims.

Christopher Hitchens, however, praised the movie for not romanticizing the RAF. As he saw it, the film “interrogates and ultimately indicts (and convicts) the West German terrorists rather than the state and society which they sought to overthrow.” And Jorg Schleyer, son of another RAF victim, affirmed with admiration that Edel showed the RAF to be a “wantonly brutal band of murderers.”

BODY OF EVIDENCE, director Uli Edel, on set, 1993. ©MGM — Uli Edel

Well, which is it? On the one hand, the movie doesn’t stint on spelling out the main characters’ many flaws (including the fact that they’re cold-blooded killers). On the other hand, its use of cutaways to stock footage of the Vietnam War – bombings, terrified natives, etc. – seems to impute legitimacy to the RAF’s view of America as a cruel imperialist power. This impression is enhanced by the film’s almost total failure to remind the viewer that America was, in fact, at war with Communism, thanks to which East Germans were living under a totalitarian government under the thumb of the Kremlin. In the end, whether a particular viewer considers the characters in The Baader-Meinhof Complex sympathetic may depend mostly on that viewer’s own politics.

But the movie fails in at least one important, indisputable way: for whatever reason, it essentially omits the role of the Stasi in the history of the RAF. And without the Stasi, the film’s story, however crowded with accurate specifics, becomes a lie.

By contrast, consider Volker Schlöndorff’s 2000 movie The Legend of Rita. It’s the story of a well-off young West German woman, Rita Vogt (based in part on RAF member Inga Viett), who becomes involved in a RAF-like group because, as she puts it, “Riding horses, playing tennis or guzzling down salmon doesn’t interest me.” After she makes the front pages by killing a cop in France, she flees to East Germany. The Stasi’s RAF links are made clear from the start, and it’s the Stasi that gives her a new identity (and then yet another identity after the first one is blown).

There’s no doubt what Schlöndorff’s film wants us to make of Rita: she’s an oddball, as perversely happy with her new life in grim, oppressive East Germany than she was unhappy as an affluent citizen of the West. In the East, she’s grinning like a fool while everyone else is miserable. Ideology, clearly, is realer to her than reality. She doesn’t understand their attraction to the West: “Why do so many people want to leave here?” For their part, they mock the naïvete with which she contributes to a Sandinista solidarity fund: doesn’t she realize it’s a government scam?

When the Wall comes down, her colleagues’ newfound joy enrages her, and she lectures them about the value of what they’re losing: “This here was a great attempt at a revolution!” At the end, there’s no doubt about her utter foolishness. As a portrait of the RAF mentality, The Legend of Rita is shorter on documentary fact than The Baader Meinhof Complex, but scores far higher on moral clarity. Alas, one hesitates to say the same thing about its portrait of the Stasi mentality; to anyone familiar with the real Stasi, the consistent kindness of Rita’s Stasi contact is beyond improbable.

A third film merits mention here. Germany in Autumn (1978), the work of ten high-profile German directors, including Schlöndorff and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is a bizarre mishmash of images, staged scenes, documentary footage, and impromptu monologues and arguments, all directly or indirectly about the RAF; it concludes with the October 1977 funeral of Baader, Enslin, and gang member Jan-Carl Raspe, at which dozens of mourners raised their fists and screamed “Murderers!” at cops. The filmmakers obviously felt they were paying some sort of tribute to the RAF, or at least doing them the honor of tackling the issues they’d raised, but today the film serves mainly as a document in 1970s-era useful stoogery in West Germany, where for many members of the cultural elite democracy was fascism and Communism was liberation.

Posted on September 29, 2016September 26, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Useful Stooges