the act of killing

The other night at Oakland’s New Parkway theater, I saw Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing”—a documentary so surreal, so bizarre, so truthful, I thought it might be fake.

The film, which is currently nominated for an academy award, follows perpetrators of the 1960’s Indonesian genocide as they recount, with pride, the killings they carried against their fellow Indonesians.  It is so disorienting that it had got to be staged, right? Nope.

Oppenheimer began working on this film by interviewing the survivors of the genocide, a topic illegal to discuss publicly, but the Indonesian government quickly shut him down.  At the suggestion and encouragement of the survivors and Indonesian human rights community, he began interviewing the perpetrators of the genocide.  He traveled the country for 2 years filming these mass killers boast openly about the hundreds of murders they’d personally committed.  They spoke not with remorse but celebration and self-satisfaction.  The 41st perpetrator he met was Anwar Congo, who he ended up following for 5 years, and around whom the film revolves.

“I chose to focus on Anwar because his trauma was closer to the surface,” Oppenheimer said in the Q&A afterward.  “I could see it the first day I met him.”

Anwar Congo

Watching the psychological undercurrents of this man carries the whole film.  He and his fellow war criminals decide to reenact their mass killings—the central narrative thread of the documentary—while maintaining total denial that was they did was wrong.  To witness his remorse almost, but never fully, rise to the surface is excruciating.

I didn’t get a chance to speak during our discussion after the film ended, so I thought I’d write what I wanted to say—to Joshua Oppenheimer and to us, a mostly white US audience sitting in the plush chairs of the New Parkway.

Joshua Oppenheimer

First of all, thank you for having the courage, compassion, and conviction to spend the 7 years it took to create this film.  I don’t know too much about Indonesia, and I definitely learned something.  It’s phenomenal that this film (which has screened thousands of times and is streaming free in Indonesia) has opened up a previously forbidden public conversation about the genocide upon which their modern society is founded.  Phenomenal.

But I’m from the United States, and so I found myself viewing this film as a US citizen. That’s what I know. And I couldn’t stop thinking about how this film is also deeply, deeply about the United States.  Perhaps more so than any film I’ve ever seen.

It’s not just that Congo’s entire “gangster” identity and killing techniques were inspired by the Hollywood films he and his fellow war criminals adored.  That, in between pulling a thin, sharp wire around his victims throats—too thin for them to grab—he was watching Hollywood films in movie theaters, getting inspired.  Or that Indonesian state media literally refers to him as a heroic “movie theater gangster.”

It’s not just that the US was supplementing it’s Hollywood exports with financial and military support for General Suharto and his paramilitary forces, under the guise of defeating (exterminating) communism.  That the CIA compiled lists of people for the death squads to target.

It’s about a mentality, a logic.  It’s when one of the perpetrators describes Guantanamo Bay as a “good idea, ” or says “How are we wrong?  The United States committed the same genocide.”

There it is.  The painful truth that he is not wrong.  That all these countries across the globe who use brutal military violence against their own people to “modernize” their economies are following the model of the “greatest, freest nation in the world”: The United States of America.  Genocide.  Unspeakable violence.

Oppenheimer pointed out that when he thought Congo would finally express his remorse, he forced himself more deeply into denial.  “I realized he was a pendulum, swinging back and forth more and more violently between almost-remorse and total emotional repression,” Oppenheimer said.

In the film, Congo ultimately chose denial.  In one of the final scenes, he stands amidst lush greenery, beautiful women dancers interspersed around him, all facing the camera, as a giant waterfall pours down behind him, and he holds out his hands in a large black gown like the caricature of an angel.   This is one of his self-directed scenes.  A man walks up to him and says, “Thank you for killing me and sending me to heaven.”  Congo is the all-knowing, all-powerful, benevolent mass murderer.

During this batshit crazy scene, I could not stop thinking about one thing:  Manifest Destiny.

The radiant, glory-filled, god-given gift of Anglo-America’s western expansion on regal horseback across the pristine virgin wilderness of North America—untouched land that was just waiting to become the greatness that would be the United States of America.

Genocide. Occupation. Unspeakable violence.

Anwar Congo is us.

Especially those of “us,” who are white, male, cisgender, hetero, citizens, wealthy, “American.”  The descendents and members of a nation so addicted to celebrating our “exceptionalism,” the you-better-not-fucking-tell-me-otherwise Greatness of our Nation.

The denial.  Pushed down so deep the only way to escape is to celebrate ourselves.  So we go on continuing the violence because we don’t know how to stop.  We are the Greatest, haven’t you heard?

In the end, it is not, as one audience member said, that “maybe the Indonesians just don’t have enough education.”  It is not that we should spend our time transphobically laughing at one of the war criminals who consistently dressed as a woman, as another audience member suggested.  It is not simply, as you said Mr. Oppenheimer (in an admittedly short question and answer period) that we must stay aware that our clothes are produced in places like Indonesia.

It is that Anwar Congo’s denial is our denial.  His celebration and laughter is our celebration and laughter.  When will we let our sins bubble to the surface?

Of course Anwar Congo is not a metaphor.  He a real man.   But your film—that is what is more, a mirror, a reflection of us.

So, my question for you is, as a fellow social justice filmmaker who is also white, male, and from the United States, “If you win an academy award, which you have a very good chance of doing, what will you say with your 60 seconds on a global stage?”

Reposted on Medium.

How Does John Brown’s Legacy Inform Us?

“If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood with the millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.”

                                                                                                                                                  -John Brown, before his execution

“ [Brown’s legacy is that] the cost of liberty is less than the price of oppression.”

                                                                                                                                              -W.E.B. Du Bois

Whether free or enslaved, what would you have done to end slavery?

It’s not an easy question to answer.  But for one free white man in the mid 1800’s, the answer was to sacrifice his life in an attempt to spark an uprising of enslaved black Americans.  Today is his birthday, and his story brings up salient questions about privilege, race, violence, and injustice that are relevant today more than ever.

On October 16, 1859, John Brown and a cadre of 21 men stormed the armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.  Their goal was to gather weapons, liberate enslaved Virginians, and create an ex-slave nation in the Allegheny mountains, where they’d protect themselves in forts and strongholds.  By stripping counties in Virginia of their economic capital, Brown hoped to create a domino effect of economic collapse that would destroy the South’s slaveocracy.

His plan failed.  Seventeen people died, including ten of his men, and the state of Virginia executed him.

But he left quite a legacy.  His action was one of the most instrumental in bringing the country into the Civil War that killed hundreds of thousands of people and ultimately ended slavery.  When Union soldiers marched into the battlefield, they sang “John Brown’s Body.”

What lessons can we learn from the infamous case of John Brown?

TERRORISM

One of the most controversial figures in U.S. history, many have called him the first domestic terrorist and a madman.  Indeed, he killed five men in Kansas, when the state was in bloody throes of whether it would be a free state or not.   But do those same people name the larger scale, state-endorsed terrorism that enslaved entire peoples for over two and a half centuries?

Brown himself observed, “Had I interceded…on behalf of the rich, powerful, and intelligent…it would have been right.  Every man in the court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.”

THE ROLE OF THE WHITE ALLY

Comparing him to the paternalism of other white Northern abolitionists, W.E.B. Du Bois writes, “John Brown worked not simply for Black Men—he worked with them; and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues, and felt, as few whites have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot.”

How does his example compare to white anti-racists today?

How do white anti-racists account for the paradox of potentially further invisibilizing people of color?  Denmark Vesey and Gabriel Prosser, for example, also attempted to lead slave rebellions, but they are not as famous.  Du Bois wanted to write a biography of Nat Turner or Fredrick Douglass but because of “editorial politics” he settled on John Brown.

THE ROLE OF NON-VIOLENCE AND VIOLENCE

Perhaps slavery would have ended through mass non-violent civil disobedience.  But failing to see that on the horizon and fearing that it may become too entrenched to become overthrown, Brown decided that insurrection, more than words and whether it failed or not, would loosen the roots of the slave system.

He was not without a plan.  Brown modeled his rebellion after the American Revolution, complete with fundraising in the North, drafting (with assistance) a Constitution and a Declaration of the Slave Population of the USA, and political representatives for a new government.  Yet against the resources of the state, and with a very small army, he did not succeed.

What do you think?  Did his actions speak louder than words? What is the role of aggressive, uncompromising, strategic protest against a violent system? In a society, where more African-American men are incarcerated, on probation, or parole than were enslaved during the time of John Brown’s insurrection, how does his legacy inform us?

(Written for Ella’s Voice.)