Jump, Jive, and Wail Against the Machine

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 53
Thomas Carter (director), Swing Kids

Imagine a world where a group of relatively well-off White teenagers adopted the culture, dance, and trappings of Black musicians. The teenagers pretend this adoption is apolitical, and their subculture is merely fun. But the racially segregated, authoritarian state sees this White embrace of Black culture as tantamount to treason. So they use vaguely written laws to force kids into mandatory social retraining. Some kids resist this conversion; others can’t.

Screenwriter Jonathan Marc Feldman and director Thomas Carter presented this movie in the Reagan/Bush I era’s immediate hangover. Their intended commentary on recent events was particularly unsubtle. This perhaps explains why critics greeted this movie with ambivalence; Roger Ebert, a dedicated acolyte of ars gratia artis, particularly hated it. Yet in subsequent decades, its commentary has become only more relevant, its message more prescient.

Peter Muller (Robert Sean Leonard) and his friends admire the freedom and authenticity of American and British pop culture over Germany during the ascendent Reich. They cut a rug in unlicensed dance clubs with music first recorded by Black and Jewish artists like Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. As often happens with new youth subcultures, their rebellion includes petty crime. Peter gets arrested, and sentenced to join the Hitler Youth.

The opening act really emphasizes the Swing Kids’ desire to avoid politics. The overwhelmingly White subculture simply yearns for the liberty they perceive in minority cultures, blind to the ways oppression shapes that culture. The Swing Kids refuse to take sides even as Germany begins the march to war. This even though many members are of conscription age: they’ll almost certainly be expected to carry arms for the authoritarian state.

After Peter is forced to join the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend, shortened to HJ), his fellow Swing Kid Thomas (Christian Bale) also joins, in a show of solidarity. They pursue a double life, keeping up with HJ ethics of athleticism, nationalism, and militarism by day. At night they don their flamboyant British suits and dance feverishly. They insist they can maintain that dualism, until the moment they can’t.

Their friend Arvid (Frank Whaley), who is Jewish-coded, plays a mean jazz guitar and admires Django Reinhart. Arvid makes bank playing underground clubs and basement dances. But in an autocratic surveillance state, it doesn’t take long before HJ thugs come calling. A back-street beating breaks several bones in Arvid’s hand, rendering him unable to play. Stuck alone in a shabby loft, Peter and Thomas must decide which side they’re on.

l-r: Frank Whaley, Christian Bale, and Robert Sean Leonard in Swing Kids

Feldman and Carter exaggerate the Swing Kids’ moral trajectory. Their early insistence on political innocence is so overwhelming that you initially wonder whether they’re deliberately deceiving themselves. But that willful ignorance gives way quickly. Thomas, surrounded by constant HJ propaganda, eventually starts to believe it. Peter, dragooned into government atrocities, goes the other direction and prepares for a confrontation.

This deliberately didactic theme didn’t help with critics. The movie’s gut-punch arc of moral specificity led some to disparage it as a meaningless weeper designed for children; Ebert, near his death, included this movie among his list of worst movies ever. Undoubtedly, it guides viewers with a heavy hand, and fears that its mostly young intended audience won’t get the message unless it’s heavily signposted.

Yet as educators and activists feud over how exactly to teach that audience about the war, this movie has gained second life. Its aggressively sentimental approach to the lessons the characters learn—especially Peter—reflects the betrayal students feel when they realize the history they’ve learned has been thoroughly whitewashed. Yes, this movie is unsubtle. But so is the discovery of the depths of cruelty humans repeatedly achieve.

It also forces the intended audience to examine itself. Just as Hamburg teenagers pinched Black swing culture, Memphis youths stole Black rock’n’roll, and Oakland kids filched hip-hop. In every case, White kids pretended their cooptation of Black culture was apolitical, that their use of the signs and signifiers of rebellion were party-time fun. White kids love Black culture, but generally need jolted to recognize the forces that shaped that culture.

One can question whether the Swing Kids subculture actually accomplished anything. Doomed resistance movements, from Wat Tyler’s rebellion to the Order of the White Rose to the Woodstock generation, are generally more celebrated after the battle is over. But in a conformist, autocratic state, the Swing Kids movement reminded its participants that they needed, ultimately, to answer to their own consciences. That’s one thing the state can’t take away.

Today’s world can stand to learn that lesson.

A Brief History of the Explosions of War

Jack Kelly, Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive That Changed the World

The weapons we use to fight wars are, in their own way, tools; and, like any other tools, somebody needs to make them. I remember learning in Ninth-Grade World History that anonymous Chinese scientists invented gunpowder, which subsequently made its way to Europe through means unknown. But high school never taught me who did the laborious work of compounding early handmade gunpowder, or what effect it had on their peoples.

Jack Kelly is both a pop historian and a historical novelist, dedicating his career to glamorizing largely forgotten corners of humanity’s past. His nonfiction works are unified by themes rather than by personalities. This volume traces the arc of gunpowder—known as “black powder” to shooters and historical reenactors, to distinguish it from modern synthetic, “smokeless” powder—from China in the Twelfth Century AD to the early Twentieth Century.

That’s not to say that Kelly doesn’t consider individuals and their influence. He introduces us to the potentates who brought gunpowder into warfare, from nameless Chinese alchemists, through to King Edward III, Sultan Mehmet of Constantinople, and Hernán Cortés (gunpowder and imperialism are inextricable). But also the early gunsmiths who fashioned the weapons these potentates used: early cannons were so elaborate, and so individual, that armies gave their guns individual, usually feminine, names.

Rather, with each personality that utilized gunpowder and improved guns, the themes of power and technology advance. To give just one example, artisanal workers needed to collect black powder ingredients and compound the powder manually. The need to standardize gunpowder and bring prices down helped princes kick-start the industrialization that defined rising capitalism. Besides a weapon, gunpowder was also a technological and economic driver.

It's probably uncontroversial to say that gunpowder, always a weapon, was never morally neutral. In Kelly’s telling, however, it also isn’t administratively neutral. Scaling up gunpowder production sufficiently to make it useful, required massive bureaucratic organization. The number of saltpeter farms, charcoal burners, and artisanal powder-makers necessary required massive advancements in government administration. Gunpowder arguably contributed to the development of the modern technocratic state.

Jack Kelly

Similarly, Kelly sees gunpowder as advancing the development of modern science. Artisanal powder-makers didn’t really understand how their product worked, and experimented casually with manufacturing techniques. But early chemists like Hooke and Boyle tested gunpowder and its ingredients to better understand how physical reality works. As “natural philosophy” gave way to experiment and documentation, black powder seems present at every stage. Gunpowder, Kelly suggests, was instrumental to Boyle’s discovery of oxygen.

These claims may seem far-fetched, and indeed, Kelly frequently performs the pop historian’s fallacy of assuming everything is explainable through whatever lens he currently employs. For instance, his history of chemistry overlooks the influence of those newfangled hydrocarbons that England found so valuable in rising heavy industry. His descriptions of lurid Renaissance theatre pyrotechnics overlooks that other period-specific innovation, gaslight. Kelly is somewhat overfond of the totalizing narrative, that seeks one cause for multiple effects.

However, he does support his claims with evidence and documentation. Sometimes that documentation is sketchy—the scanty records of Sultan Mehmet, to give one example, teem with mythmaking and hindsight bias. But Kelly uses the best available sources to construct a story supported by facts and evidence. That famous unlocked door might’ve made the fall of Constantinople inevitable, but the siege was powered by Mehmet’s cannons.

Kelly’s narrative continues through to modernity. Multiple technological advances stemmed from attempts to both use gunpowder, and protect against it. Engineers redesigned cities to withstand cannon fire. Industrial-age inventors like Samuel Colt (a textile maker) and Richard Gatling (an agronomist) are more famous for their improvements to firearms manufacture. DuPont Chemical was founded as a mass-scale powder mill driven by a water wheel.

Unsurprisingly, since Kelly doubles as a novelist, his history has a narrative through-line, the epic sweep of novelists like John Jakes and James Clavell. It’s difficult to avoid wondering if Kelly hasn’t somewhat sanded off false starts and simplified events to keep the story moving. Yet within that standard, Kelly does tell an engaging, well-sourced story. Even if events weren’t this morally concise, Kelly at least illuminates the trends.

It’s difficult to avoid noticing the quantity of “history” being written today by journalists, novelists, and attorneys, rather than credentialled historians. Much as I appreciate historians like Kevin M. Kruse or Greg Grandin, they aren’t producing the bulk of today’s accessible history. Timothy Egan, Richard Gergel, and now Jack Kelly present history as comprehensible, fast-moving, and relevant to today’s audiences, and that’s something modern readers need.

Those Who Pay the Price of War

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 118
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Although Germany performed the Holocaust, as we all know, iconic sites like Auschwitz and Sobibor are actually in Poland. Most victims of Hitler’s terror didn’t speak German. Most history students broadly know this, but seldom think about it. American historian Timothy Snyder made a connection that most Western scholars couldn’t have investigated before 1991: Germany conducted its purges on territory already softened by Stalin’s Great Terror.

Timothy Snyder specializes in Twentieth Century European history, focusing on the why strongman states like Germany and the Soviet Union turned into totalitarian dystopias. Commencing his career during the Soviet collapse, he had access to primary sources which prior historians never dreamed of. But he discovered something jarring: the worst Soviet and National Socialist excesses happened not at home, but in satellite states like Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Because both the Great Terror and most of the Holocaust took place in the bumper states between Russia and Germany, a thorough history wasn’t possible for decades. Both the physical artifacts and the necessary documents resided in Warsaw Pact nations. Western historians had only limited access, while Soviet-bloc historians were censored from a through history. Therefore an unvarnished history languished, waiting for someone to tell it thoroughly.

Stalin believed a combination of state-sponsored propaganda and force could collectivize peasant farming in a matter of weeks. Therefore he generated “othering language,” creating the social class of “kulaks,” enemies of Soviet economics whose supposed resource hoarding made them social criminals. This served greater Soviet aims of attempting to abolish national identities, remaking everyone into transnational Soviet citizens.

Whatever the ideological motivations, the consequence was famine. In the early 1930s, rural Ukrainian and Belorussian civilians died in Biblical numbers, even as Stalinist functionaries stole their grain and resold it on export markets. Starvation happened amid perfectly robust harvests, because famine isn’t a product of shortage, but usually of policy. Stalinists were simply okay if the “lumpenproletariat” were so hungry, they were reduced to grave-robbing and cannibalism.

Timothy Snyder

Although Westerners have long known about Stalin’s “Great Terror” in general terms, lack of press freedom kept outsiders from discovering the details at the time, and censorship concealed the worst from history for decades. Stalin claimed victory over his hated kulaks after approximately two years and rescinded his cruelest policies. Indeed, he did succeed at his deepest goals: shattering farmers’ ties to land and community, and driving national minorities into industrialized cities.

In Snyder’s painfully detailed telling, the Great Terror provided the blueprints Hitler used to perpetrate the Holocaust. Snyder carefully states that the two aren’t interchangeable events in history. Stalin inflicted his Terror upon his own citizens during peacetime, for instance, while Hitler inflicted the Holocaust upon conquered nations during war. Also, Stalin at least nominally served an ideological goal, while Hitler ruled according to his strongman whimsy.

Despite the differences, in Snyder’s telling, the similarities are glaring. The punitive conditions Stalin created in his gulags, Hitler copied in his labor camps. But Hitler exceeded Stalin, because he wasn’t circumscribed by Marxist doctrine. Where Stalin simply didn’t care if “superfluous workers” simply died, Hitler skipped the middleman of chance, and started killing. And the peoples he killed were mostly Polish, Lithuanian, and citizens of occupied Soviet territories.

Snyder takes an approach he admits is academically risky and impolitic. The accepted Holocaust narrative of the first half-century after World War II, he claims, needs revision. Our accepted narrative was written by internees at National Socialist labor camps like Auschwitz, and the prisoners held there, Snyder writes, had a disproportionate likelihood to survive. The reality, which Snyder describes in heartrending detail, is considerably worse and more gruesome.

This isn’t casual reading. Besides his historically dense and painful subject, Snyder’s style requires a strong constitution. He writes in long chapters that, despite their physical heft, have no discernable flab; his storytelling is dense, and provides few clear places to pause and ruminate. We must simply keep moving, much like the terror victims his story describes. He also mostly eschews interpretation until his conclusion, preferring specific details over synoptic morality.

Despite this difficulty, Snyder’s writing is eye-opening and emotionally moving. He rejects the standard Holocaust historiography, which is frequently as abstracted as a medieval morality play. Instead, he places the Holocaust in a historical context of strongman leaders who considere themselves scientists, and therefore unbound by conventional morality. He presents Stalin and Hitler as allies turned rivals, and history as a movement of forces that divulge their lessons only slowly, painfully, and at great human cost.

Also by Timothy Snyder:
A Short Handbook for Confronting Dictators

Burnt Offerings in Modern America

Aaron Bushnell

Yesterday afternoon, a man identified as an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst lit himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington. Firefighters smothered the flames and rushed the individual, tentatively identified as Aaron Bushnell, to a local hospital, but Bushnell died of his injuries. According to his manifesto, Bushnell described Israel’s ongoing barrage of Gaza as a “genocide,” and described his military participation as “complicity.”

Two years ago today, I published an essay entitled “War Is Not the Answer, Except When It Is.” I compared Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a war that remains ongoing, with Operation Desert Storm, America’s first military intervention in Iraq. An American response in Ukraine sure looks justified, I wrote, but it looked justified in Iraq, too. We now know the justification for war in Iraq was falsified by PR professionals.

PR surrounding the current conflagrations in Ukraine, Gaza, and Yemen have been spotty. After initial international furor, the Ukraine war has retreated from headlines, except when Republicans withhold funding for military support. America’s decision to jump into Yemen attracted initial outrage, but failed to sustain feelings. Only the Gaza conflict remains a reliable headline-grabber, and not necessarily for the right reasons.

The Gaza death toll threatens to exceed 30,000 this week. As the Netanyahu government forbids Palestinians to leave Gaza, but continues strafing civilian neighborhoods, the conflict increasingly resembles the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. Yet English-speaking journalists find themselves shackled to a pro-Israeli narrative. Public-facing writers for MSNBC and the BBC have found themselves benched, their stories spiked, for criticizing Israel.

Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation makes sense in historical context. From Vietnam to Tunisia, protestors have lit themselves on fire to force change in the public awareness, and to draw attention to widespread government corruption. Thích Quảng Đức’s suicide in Vietnam closely preceded the coup which overthrew President Dien’s illegal regime. Mohamed Bouazizi helped kick-start the Arab Spring, leading to pro-democracy revolutions.

Mehdi Hasan

Yet one cannot help questioning whether either death did any good. American involvement in Vietnam dragged on another decade after Thich’s death, while the Syrian civil war—which, like the Ukraine conflict, has lost Western front-page headlines—is currently well into its thirteenth year. If Aaron Bushnell’s death moves the needle for American public awareness, I applaud his sacrifice, yet I wonder whether it’s actually done any good.

Taken together, these facts force me to question who benefits from the current trajectory in American and world affairs. American silence on the Gaza atrocities has damaged the Biden Administration, but it hasn’t exactly won favor for opposition Republicans, who are aggressively pro-Netanyahu and pro-Putin. Networks losing their star journalists aren’t exactly seeing ratings boosts. Nobody but defense contractors profits from blood and destruction.

American presidents love overseas war. Because presidents also serve as commander-in-chief of the military, American military successes accrue to the President’s reputation, while defeats tarnish his name forever. Flag-waving, naming enemies, and ginning up nationalist slogans, help unify American voters around the state, and the President as head of state. The opposition party knows this, certainly, and will withhold money to deny the other side a win.

Except that hasn’t happened this time. Unlike Operation Iraqi Freedom, which certain candidates famously voted for before they voted against, American commitments in Ukraine and Israel have not produced massive national unity. Nobody’s flying flags and chanting “United We Stand” in facing down dictatorial right-wing regimes in Moscow or Jerusalem. George W. Bush parlayed Iraq into a second term, but Joe Biden is currently watching his coalition shatter.

Like Lyndon Johnson before him, we’re watching the Biden Administration snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. A fairly popular president with a relatively successful economic agenda (more on that to come) managed to alienate his own backers by supporting an unpopular war in an anti-democratic state. Just as Johnson’s personal collapse ushered in the manifestly criminal Nixon, Biden is currently holding the door for Donald Trump.

It’s tempting to describe Aaron Bushnell’s suicide as a sacrifice. But we often forget that, in origin, the word “sacrifice” doesn’t mean to give something up, it means to make something holy. Just as many early civilizations relinquished burnt offerings to petty, tyrannical gods as bribes to protect the people, Bushnell’s death represents a cosmic order that doesn’t protect the ordinary people from overwhelming whimsy on high.

For Bushnell’s death to actually sanctify America, we must start by asking ourselves: what in our country requires burnt offerings? What do we hold sacred, and why isn’t it helping?

Continued in Burnt Offerings in America, Part Two

Confess Your Crimes in Sand and Blood

Eric Jager, The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial By Combat

One rainy afternoon in January 1386, a crime transpired in the undefended castle overlooking the sleepy French hamlet of Capomesnil. Exactly what happened, and why, jeopardized the French legal system. Jean de Carrouges, a knight with a reputation for stroppy behavior and no aptitude for court intrigue, claimed his rival invaded his mother’s nearly abandoned château and savaged his wife. The rival, Jacques le Gris, a talented courtier and squire, denied everything.

UCLA medievalist Eric Jager stumbled upon the Carrouges casewhile researching another project. It struck his imagination because Carrouges’ accusations against le Gris escalated into violence. Not Red Wedding-ish violence that pulls audiences into mass media, but France’s sluggish late-medieval justice system. Carrouges, a minor aristocrat himself, believed his feudal liege ignored the crime for reasons of court politics, and appealed for a rare option: a “judicial duel.”

Jager reconstructs the events preceding this exceptional outcome—which would, though nobody knew this then, be the last trial by combat authorized by the French monarch. He also provides a guided tour through a distant nation that, if any ever has, deserves the name “foreign.” Though Jager name-checks places you could visit today, like Paris, Bordeaux, and England, the standards and traditions circumscribing everyday life differ wildly from ours.

Jean de Carrouges was an accomplished warrior, descended from accomplished warriors, amid the interminable slog of the Hundred Years’ War; he was knighted for distinguished combat services. But he proved a lousy courtier, ill-suited for house politics and prestation. Carrouges ascended quickly through the court of Count Pierre of Alençon, then fell equally quickly. His easily bruised honor required frequent satisfaction, and he burned bridges faster than he built them.

Jacques le Gris lacked Carrouges’ pedigree, but proved more adept at court politics. He and Carrouges began as allies, but as le Gris out-earned Count Pierre’s favor, Carrouges felt himself slighted. The two squires (before Carrouges’ knighthood) intermittently fought and reconciled. But by early 1386, Carrouges discovered his newly-minted knighthood meant nothing at court, and the courtiers found themselves irreconcilable. LeGris swore revenge on Carrouges’ household, and targeted his wife.

Eric Jager, Ph.D.

Reading this book, it’s impossible to miss how Carrouges’ world differs from ours. The government received its power from inheritances, not merit, and lesser courtiers received advancement based on personal connections, not competence or hard work. (Okay, maybe not so different from ours.) Because King Charles VI supposedly received his crown directly from God, “justice” meant whatever dribbled from the king’s lips, which immediately became holy writ.

Carrouges’ world turns on two liabilities: war and distance. Kings fight other kings, not to achieve any advantage, but because it’s what they do. Lesser nobles gain whatever limited fraction of power they possess by furthering that goal. Meanwhile, before motor vehicles and mass transportation, distances were truly huge. Twenty miles is an arduous overland slog which, depending on weather, requires a commitment of days; even light war requires months.

Therefore, Carrouges’ decision to appeal his lawsuit to Paris is no small obligation. But rape, it seems, was no small accusation, either. Despite the recent trend in “grimdark” medieval fantasy pitching rape as banal in feudal society, Jager notes that it remained a capital offense, at least among the nobility. Violating a titled lady’s virtue jeopardized the assurity of legitimate offspring, which threatened the entire system of male agnatic primogeniture.

Feudal hierarchies, in Jager’s telling, appear remarkably brittle. The state remains stable only while lords and vassals accept their place in the hierarchy and serve the aristocratic state. Therefore, whatever happened in Capomesnil in 1386 threatened the entire social order, since someone transgressed their roles. This is the archetypal “he-said, she-said” case, as nobody but le Gris and Lady Carrouges (and le Gris’ man) saw what actually happened.

When logical arguments fail, two trained warriors resolve their differences with weapons. But again, in defiance of paperback fiction, this is hardly an outburst of premodern savagery. A judicial duel required ceremony and strictures that make today’s courtrooms seem loosey-goosey. When we discuss modern courtrooms as “level playing fields,” we copy the rules of the dueling ground, tightly controlled to ensure nobody but God granted either combatant an advantage.

History records who, exactly, won this duel (though Jager plays coy). What matters more, in Jager’s telling, is reconstructing the world in which this event occurred, a world where invested noblemen believed their battles bespoke God’s favor, and might literally made right. A world where justice is both necessary, and costly. A world violently different from, yet also surprisingly much like, our own world.