The junior
Senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears
and hatred of uninformed and credulous people that he has started a prairie
fire, which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.”
—J. William Fulbright, US senator, 1954
"It's a very important thing to learn to talk
to people you disagree with."
—Pete Seeger
"We must
not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think
the soul of America dies with it."
—Edward R. Murrow
"Seen
today, "The Manchurian Candidate" feels astonishingly contemporary; its
astringent political satire still bites, and its story has uncanny
contemporary echoes. The villains plan to exploit a terrorist act,
"rallying a nation of viewers to hysteria, to sweep us up into the White
House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy." The
plot cheerfully divides blame between right and left; it provides a
right-wing demagogue named Sen. John Iselin, who is clearly modeled on
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and makes him the puppet of his draconian wife,
who is in league with foreign communists. The plan: Use anti-communist
hysteria as a cover for a communist takeover."
—Roger Ebert
the full review
 |
| Bridge of Spies |
" Bridge of Spies is a tonic in polarized times.
It's
based on the true story of James Donovan, a Brooklyn lawyer who took on
the case of accused Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in 1957. Director Steven
Spielberg has crafted a complex film that makes you question the drive
to demonize adversaries and, even more, to break constitutional rules to
pursue punishment.
Played
with self-deprecating charm by two-time Academy Award winner Tom Hanks,
Donovan is a regular guy with a loving family, who happens to be a good
insurance lawyer. With the down-home decency of a Frank Capra-esque
hero, he succeeds more than he fails because he treats people as human
beings and appeals to others to do the same."
— From a review from the Dallas News
See my review of Bridge of Spies
For a tribute to Seeger's life and career, you might wish to read
Susan Green in
Critics at Large
We will be showing clips from the 2007 documentary
Peter Seeger: The Power of Song
Roger
Ebert says that the film is a tribute to the legendary singer and
composer who thought music could be a force for good, and proved it by
writing songs that have actually helped shape our times ("If I Had a
Hammer" and "Turn, Turn, Turn") and popularizing "We Shall Overcome" and
Woody Guthrie's unofficial national anthem, "This Land Is Your Land."
 |
| Edward R. Murrow |
In Good Night, and Good Luck, Director,
George Clooney, pays homage to one of the icons of
American broadcast journalism, Edward R. Murrow, in this fact-based
drama. In 1953, Murrow was one of the best-known newsmen on television
as host of both the talk
show Person to Person and the
pioneering investigate series See It Now.
Joseph McCarthy, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, was generating heated
controversy in the public and private sectors with his allegations that
Communists had risen to positions of power and influence in America.
Among them was an Air
Force pilot, Milo Radulovich, who had been cashiered out of the service
due to
McCarthy's charges that he was a Communist agent. However, Radulovich
had been
dismissed without a formal hearing of the charges, and he protested that
he was
innocent of any wrongdoing. Murrow decided to do a story on Radulovich's
case
questioning the legitimacy of his dismissal, which was seen by McCarthy
and his
supporters as an open challenge to his campaign. McCarthy responded by
accusing
Murrow of being a Communist, leading to a legendary installment of See It Now
in which both Murrow and McCarthy presented their sides of the story, which was
seen by many as the first step toward McCarthy's downfall. Meanwhile, Murrow
had to deal with CBS head William Paley, who was supportive of Murrow but
extremely wary of his controversial positions, while Murrow was also trying to
support fellow newsman Don Hollenbeck, battling charges against his own
political views, and working alongside Fred Friendly
The Prague Spring was a period of political
liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet
Union after World War II. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Alexander
Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia,
and continued until 21 August when the Soviet Union and other members of the
Warsaw Pact invaded the country to halt the reforms.
The Prague Spring reforms were a strong attempt by
Dubček to grant additional rights to the citizens of Czechoslovakia in an act
of partial decentralization of the economy and democratization. The freedoms
granted included a loosening of restrictions on the media, speech and travel.
The reforms, especially the decentralization of
administrative authority, were not received well by the Soviets, who, after
failed negotiations, sent half a million Warsaw Pact troops and tanks to occupy
the country.
A large wave of emigration swept the nation. A spirited
non-violent resistance was mounted throughout the country, involving attempted
fraternization, painting over and turning street signs (on one occasion an
entire invasion force from Poland was routed back out of the country after a
day's wandering), defiance of various curfews. While the Soviet military had
predicted that it would take four days to subdue the country the resistance
held out for eight months, and was only circumvented by diplomatic stratagems.
There were sporadic acts of violence and several suicides by self-immolation
(such as that of Jan Palach), but there was no military resistance. After the
invasion, Czechoslovakia entered a period of normalization: subsequent leaders
attempted to restore the political and economic values that had prevailed
before Dubček gained control of the Party. Gustáv Husák, who replaced Dubček and also
became president, reversed almost all of Dubček's reforms. Czechoslovakia
remained controlled until 1989, when the velvet revolution ended pro-Soviet
rule peacefully, undoubtedly drawing upon the successes of the non-violent
resistance twenty years earlier. The resistance also became an iconic example
of civilian-based defense, which, along with unarmed civilian peacekeeping
constitute the two ways that nonviolence can be and occasionally has been
applied directly to military or paramilitary threats.
I wrote a piece about the politics of the Danube which included my, and the people I encountered, impressions about Havel and
Dubcek
 |
| Vaclav Havel addressing a crowd in Prague's Wenceslas Square in 1989. |
 |
| Andrei Sakharov |
Andrei Sakharov is often called the "father of
the Soviet hydrogen bomb," but most people know him as one of the
twentieth century's most ardent and unrelenting champions of human rights and
freedoms. It was for his work as an outspoken dissident to the Soviet regime
that the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 1975. The citation
called him "the conscience of mankind" saying that he "has
fought not only against the abuse of power and violations of human dignity in
all its forms, but has in equal vigor fought for the ideal of a state founded
on the principle of justice for all." The Soviet authorities denied him
permission to go to Norway to receive his award.
Sakharov was recruited to work on the Soviet nuclear
weapons program in June 1948 by his professor Igor Tamm. Later he wrote,
"no one asked whether or not I wanted to take part in such work. I had no
real choice in the matter, but the concentration, total absorption and energy
that I brought to the task were my own." In a matter of months, the young
physics graduate student came up with a totally new idea for an H-bomb design,
one that he would call the "Layer Cake."
His work on the nuclear program ultimately led
Sakharov down the road toward dissent. Following the test of the first Soviet
superbomb in 1955, Sakharov became increasingly disturbed by the consequences
of his work: "When you see all of this yourself, something in you
changes," he wrote. "When you see the burned birds who are withering
on the scorched steppe, when you see how the shock wave blows away buildings
like houses of cards, when you feel the reek of splintered bricks, when you
sense melted glass, you immediately think of times of war... All of this
triggers an irrational yet very strong emotional impact. How not to start
thinking of one's responsibility at this point?"
In 1957 his concern about the biological hazards of
nuclear testing inspired him to write an article about the effects of low-level
radiation. In it he concluded that, the detonation of a one-megaton bomb would
create 10,000 human casualties. "Halting the tests," he wrote,
"will directly save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people."
Over the next ten years he became more and more concerned with civic issues.
And in 1968, while still working on the Soviet nuclear weapons program,
Sakharov wrote an essay that would thrust him into the international spotlight.
"Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence,
and Intellectual Freedom", attacked the Soviet political system. In it
Sakharov argued for a "democratic, pluralistic society free of intolerance
and dogmatism, a humanitarian society which would care for the Earth and its
future." A copy of the article was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and
published in the New York Times. By
the end of 1969 more than 18 million copies of the essay were in circulation
worldwide.
Following the publication of "Reflections," Sakharov was fired from the weapons program. He became
an increasingly vocal advocate of human rights and when he denounced the Soviet
military intervention in Afghanistan, the Soviet authorities were quick to
respond, banishing him to internal exile in Gorki in January 1980. His long
years of isolation finally ended in December 1986, when Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev invited Sakharov to return to Moscow.
Sakharov worked tirelessly to promote democracy in
the Soviet Union until the very last day of his life. He was elected to the
Congress of People's Deputies and appointed a member of the commission
responsible for drafting a new Soviet constitution. On the day he died,
December 14, 1989, he made a plea before the Soviet Congress for political
pluralism and a market economy. Later that evening his wife and fellow
dissident Elena Bonner found him dead in his study.
Anyone
interested in reading a novel about the dissident culture during the
Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras might wish to read my review of The Big Green Tent
As one of my top ten books of 2016, I wrote,
“Nina Willner has written a powerful, moving family
memoir spanning three generations divided by the Iron Curtain in Forty Autumns:
A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall. When
her mother, Hanna, escaped to Berlin's Western zone as a young woman in 1948,
she left behind her parents, siblings and the taint of suspicion that her
family carries for decades. Their separation widens after Hanna marries an
American army intelligence officer and moves to the United States. In describing
the life of her family in East Germany and their suffering under the Communists
– her grandfather was forced out of the teaching profession into impecunious
retirement and the isolation of internal exile – Willner delineates a grim
picture of an open-air prison. One of the most remarkable features of her
memoir is how Willner links her own family with the larger tableau of world
events to the extent that Gorbachev becomes the deux ex machina responsible for
tearing down the Wall and reuniting both sides of the family. What lingers are
the personal stories, especially exemplified by the author’s grandmother, Oma,
whose hopeful optimism and generous spirit determines a way to build a Family
Wall that offers the family sanctuary from the destructive forces of the
outside world, and the author’s aunt, Heidi, who subversively lives her life
with quiet dignity and integrity beneath the radar of the omniscient Stasi
secret police.”
For 28 years, the Berlin Wall split a city in two
and divided a nation with two million tons of concrete, 700,000 tons of steel,
attack dogs, tank traps, death strips and tripwires. While its dangers kept
most GDR citizens at bay, others were spurred on to overcome it, by digging
under it, hiding in car trunks, flying over it in a hot-air balloon, and even
surfing around it... Busting the Berlin Wall examines the most daring escapes,
and interviews former border guards, politicians, spies and escapees, and how
quickly it collapsed.
In The Lives
of Others, a true believer who has devoted his life to ferreting out
"dangerous" characters is thrown into a quandary when he investigates
a man who poses no threat. It's 1984, and Capt. Gerd Wiesler is an agent of the
Stasi, the East German Secret Police. Weisler carefully and dispassionately
investigates people who might be deemed some sort of threat to the state.
Shortly after Weisler's former classmate, Lt. Col. Grubitz, invites him to a
theatrical piece by celebrated East German playwright Georg Dreyman, Minister
Bruno Hempf informs Weisler that he suspects Dreyman of political dissidence,
and wonders if this renowned patriot is all that he seems to be. As it turns
out, Hempf has something of an ulterior motive for trying to pin something on
Dreyman: a deep-seated infatuation with Christa-Maria Sieland, Dreyman's
girlfriend. Nevertheless, Grubitz, who is anxious to further his career,
appoints Weisler to spy on the gentleman with his help. Weisler plants
listening devices in Dreyman's apartment and begins shadowing the writer. As
Weisler monitors Dreyman's daily life, however (from a secret surveillance
station in the gentleman's attic), he discovers the writer is one of the few
East Germans who genuinely believes in his leaders. This changes over time,
however, as Dreyman discovers that Christa-Maria is being blackmailed into a
sexual relationship with Hempf, and one of Dreyman's friends, stage director
Albert Jerska, is driven to suicide after himself being blackballed by the
government. Dreyman's loyalty thus shifts away from the East German government,
and he anonymously posts an anti-establishment piece in a major newspaper which
rouses the fury of government officials. Meanwhile, Weisler becomes deeply
emotionally drawn into the lives of Dreyman and Sieland, and becomes something
of an anti-establishment figure himself, embracing freedom of thought and
expression. One of the most powerful scenes is watching Weisler listening to
Dreyman playing a moving piano piece after hearing about his friend’s suicide.
The film raises the interesting question as to whether art can change people.
