Movie Review: "Kick-Ass"

Rarely have I seen a movie title that so aptly summarized the film's quality: lest anyone tell you differently, Kick-Ass does kick ass.


Now that we've gotten the obvious joke out of the way, we're free to look at the film itself, which is the most pleasant surprise I've had at the Cineplex since last summer's Up. Full disclosure: if you haven't guessed by now, I am a major comics/film geek who revels in the anticipation of each new funnybook adapted for the screen. Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Iron Man, the Hulk - I've closely followed these movies at every stage of production, eager to see how my favourite superheroes make the transition to live-action. With upcoming Green Lantern, Thor and Captain America films in the works, there's never been a better time to be a comics fan.

Despite the cinematic success of Marvel and DC's characters, there still remains the the danger of overkill. In a universe full of colourfully-costumed avengers, it's all too easy for the superhero genre to lapse into its component clichés - the origin story, the love interest, the supervillain, etc. Superhero films, like the comic books they were inspired by, have to constantly reinvent themselves to retain viewers' attention. We've seen recent examples: Iron Man utilized the comic talents of Robert Downey Jr. to create a genre hybrid that was somehow more lighthearted and more mature than any serious superhero film previously made; The Dark Knight, of course, took the genre to darker places than we'd previously seen, anchored by political undertones that made Heath Ledger's demented Joker into an analogy for terrorism and Batman's increasingly brutal methods of law enforcement - wiretapping, severe beatings, borderline torture - into a reflection of the post-9/11, post-PATRIOT Act American police state.

Into that postmodern zone of superhero stories now comes a more original tale. Kick-Ass is comparable in some ways to Watchmen in that it investigates the real-world ramifications of what it might be like to be a superhero. Alan Moore's opus argued that vigilantes like Rorschach and the Comedian were, on some level, borderline psychopaths. Yet the film version of Watchmen, despite some excellent performances (chiefly by Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach), was ultimately hindered by its overly close adherence to the source material. Perhaps a two and a half-hour film is incapable of accessing the same intellectual depth as the graphic novel, although it certainly wasn't for lack of trying.

Happily, Matthew Vaughan's version of Kick-Ass, though based on a graphic novel by Mark Millar, makes for a much more entertaining experience as a film. The plot concerns average high school nerd type Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), who decides to become the superhero Kick-Ass. Initially getting his Ass-Kicked, the character becomes a YouTube phenomenon after footage of him taking on three hoodlums circulates on the internet, which leads to a proliferation of new costumed vigilantes.

The most notable of these are Big Daddy and Hit-Girl, played respectively by arch-comic geek Nicolas Cage (who named his infant son Kal-El after Superman's Kryptonian name) and 11-year-old newcomer Chloe Grace Moretz. Hit-Girl has been the subject of some controversy; Roger Ebert gave the movie a withering one-star review based partly on the character, a little girl who is an expert in weapons, tactics, and killing bad guys. It's hard to argue with his moral objections:

Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? Will I seem hopelessly square if I find “Kick-Ass” morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let's say you're a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in. A movie camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case, it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere. Now tell me all about the context.

Ultimately, I have to defend the creative choice of the filmmakers by pointing to Hit-Girl as an example of how Kick-Ass defies genre expectations. The typical template for a superhero is a strong, muscular man - even when the character's alter ego is a bespectacled nerd, like Clark Kent or Peter Parker, he's still ripped. Depicting an 11-year-old girl as a violent vigilante plays with the audience's idea of what a hero should be, what that hero is up against, but also, perhaps, serves as a warning about the violent cultural ideals which, intentionally or not, we pass on to the next generation. So in that sense, Ebert was right in worrying about the messages this movie sends to young kids. But hey, it's rated R, so they shouldn't be watching it anyway.

Personally, I found Hit-Girl highly entertaining in the disconnect between her vulgarity and violence, and the character's precocious age. I saw it as satire, and while I understand Ebert's objections, I do not share them. Kids in movies are usually pretty annoying, but Moretz is a delight; she's like an 11-year-old female Charles Bronson with more acrobatics.

Kudos also has to go to Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy. This is the perfect role for Cage, who did not exactly set the screen on fire as Johnny Blaze in the more straightforward superhero adaptation Ghost Rider. The way he channels Adam West's Batman is much like the movie itself; simultaneously a parody of the superhero genre and a dark, edgy addition to the canon. While he acts like West's campy Batman, his actions are far closer to the psychopathic vigilante of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Christopher Mintz-Plasse, as Red Mist, takes his McLovin persona from Superbad and applies it to a character with more sinister motivations, a perfect supervillain if this thing gets a sequel (which it might, if boffo box office grosses are any indication). Perhaps most impressive was Mark Strong as drug kingpin Frank D'Amico. I'm aware of several villainous turns this British thespian has done before, but the way he melted into this role was impressive and bodes well for his upcoming turn as Sinestro to Ryan Reynolds' Green Lantern.

As Kick-Ass, Aaron Johnson is a likable protagonist that viewers can root for, since he essentially represents this movie's target audience - young males steeped in the fanboy culture of comics, sci-fi, superheroes, internet porn, and social anxiety. It all goes a long way towards establishing the character's everyman bona fides; the heroic image of his alter ego is a fair throw from the sheer luck which generally allows him to survive his violent encounters. Kick-Ass affects us because it reflects would really happen if any of us tried to become superheroes - we would end up severely injured. But with a little luck, a few cell-phone cameras and the power of the internet, a legend grows around Kick-Ass in which he appears to truly become the heroic figure he imagines himself as.

I loved this movie because it dealt with subject matter that is near and dear to my heart while applying it to a more-or-less real world environment. I will acknowledge that it lost much of its realism as time went on, primarily in the form of Hit-Girl - there's no way an 11-year-old girl could kill that many armed men and survive, no matter how well she was trained - but these are quibbles. What we have here is a relatively original superhero movie that simultaneously parodies, deconstructs and embraces the genre's conventions. The viewer is never totally sure how things are going to turn out, and it's that element of unpredictability that puts this movie over the top. Kick-Ass, indeed.

CNN's False Equivalency Problem

Anderson Cooper tonight teases a story on the teabaggers:

"Are they the last true Americans or a growing threat?"

Gotta love that fake balance...but CNN follows the formula more slavishly than any of its competitors. I didn't stay to watch the piece, but I'm assuming AC, per the format, hosted two spin doctors and left it to the viewer to decide. Because as we all know, there are two (and only two) sides to every story, and the truth always falls somewhere in-between. Just like when they "debate" climate change.

Battle Metal

Lately I've been enjoying the work of Finnish folk metal band Turisas. Their music has a very cinematic feel, underlined by the fact that there don't appear to be any traditional guitar solos at all; rather, solos are played on electric violin. Hey, I'm all for originality, and metal, like any genre, needs to evolve or risk descending into retro cliché. Vocalist Mathias Nygård has a bit of trouble hiding his thick Finnish accent, but that's not a huge issue given that their whole area of expertise is cheesy Euro-metal. "The Land of Hope and Glory", from debut album Battle Metal, is a nice example of the band pushing musical boundaries. The song starts off with an almost industrial-sounding beat, but the chanted vocals immediately place the listener in a timeless, mythical setting of ancient warriors and golden kingdoms. It's all a little over-the-top, but Turisas is far less guilty of overdoing the fromage than, say, Scottish pirate metal band Alestorm.

Sick of Hitler

Though members of my household subscribe to Maclean's, my encounters with the magazine are usually limited to complaining about Mark Steyn's latest column. Today, however, I laid eyes on the new issue and found a familiar face staring back at me:

My immediate reaction was an annoyed and audible groan. For some reason, I had believed that the American Tea Party movement and their extreme misuse/overuse of Hitler imagery in criticizing imaginary policies of the Obama administration had been enough to finally move Hitler out of public discourse for a while. Clearly, I was mistaken. Hitler has long moved past the point of being a mere historical figure and has become the very definition of political evil, but his constant mention in every rhetorical venue has, if anything, led to a dehistoricization of the man and his actions. Rather than looking at the circumstances that led to Hitler gaining political power and driving Europe into war, we imagine him as a kind of demon or monster separate from the society he lived in. Hitler is now the all-purpose point of comparison in arguments of all kinds (reductio ad Hitlerum), and the simplistic image of him as the personification of evil has reached new levels of ubiquity on the internet, where message board posters regularly find themselves captive to Godwin's Law ("as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1").

I'm sick of it! I'll admit that, like most people, I maintain a reserve of fascination for Hitler and Nazi Germany, because it is obviously an important issue to find out what could have driven an advanced, cultured society to embrace a racist demagogue as its unquestioned leader. But having read Ian Kershaw's masterly two-part Hitler biography, I have largely exhausted my interest in the Third Reich and have moved on to other issues. Given the fact that the Second World War was the bloodiest, most costly war in history, it's no surprise we should remain captivated by the single person most responsible. But the mention of Hitler has long descended into kitsch and cliché, with constant references to Nazi atrocities overshadowing mention of all other historical horrors.

It also reinforces our own sense of moral superiority and exceptionalism: many of the same tea partiers and conservatives who tie Hitler to Obama and their political enemies themselves embrace his most basic policies - extreme nationalism, wars of aggression, torture, hatred of outsiders (in Hitler's case, primarily Jews; with the teabaggers, liberals, blacks, immigrants, gays, etc.).

Yet because Hitler is viewed as evil incarnate, it is impossible for anyone to find flaws in themselves that Hitler may have shared. No one thinks of themselves as evil, and if Hitler=evil, we will concentrate on the aspects of his personality and politics that adhere to what we ourselves most despise. He has become a Rorschach test onto which we project our political fears. So while a progressive such as myself will fixate on the aforementioned beliefs - nationalism, war, xenophobia, authoritarianism - championed by Hitler that are shared by modern conservatives, right-wing hacks like Jonah Goldberg will point to more "left" Nazi policies - environmentalism, government work projects - and claim that modern American progressives are therefore the ideological descendants of midcentury European fascists. The obscuring of real history will only continue so long as we continue to view Hitler as a two-dimensional icon of evil rather than a flawed human being like ourselves.

With all that said, the Maclean's article itself isn't that bad. I assumed it was a sensationalist ploy to attract attention by featuring Hitler on the cover, and that it would also serve the magazine's political interests by linking Hitler's "resurgence" to Iran and the Palestinians somehow. But on the whole, the article was balanced and seemed to point to some real political developments (e.g. the recent electoral success of Hungary's far-right Jobbik party). Probably, the writer is overreaching in trying to establish a "trend story" - it would be political poison for any political party to openly associate itself with Hitler and/or Nazi ideology. Still, not as bad as it could have been.

Nevertheless, I'm very tired of hearing about Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Indisputably of vast historical importance, he still died 65 years ago. What can be said of "news organizations" that devote so much time and energy to fixating on the distant past?

Keith Jones and the Socialist Alternative

The dysfunctional state of Canadian politics may be a regular topic of discussion among the nation’s leading news outlets, but the system itself is rarely challenged. While the New Democratic Party is derided by conservative elites as “socialist”, its actual policies leave much to be desired among Canadian progressives (to note but a few examples: dropping all serious opposition to the war in Afghanistan, propping up the Harper government, rebranding itself as a “business-friendly” party dedicated to balancing budgets while the vast legions of unemployed continue to suffer).

The need for a challenge to political business as usual has rarely been more urgent. While Kingston has been insulated to some degree from the ravages of the Great Recession due to its large public sector workforce, the city has nevertheless suffered from the economic downturn. The local unemployment rate rose from 5.1% in February 2009 to 5.5% in February 2010, according to Statistics Canada. Well over 18,000 people live below the official poverty line, based on 2001 census numbers (the most recent data available for this area). And with one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, affordable housing has become increasingly hard to find.

But politically speaking, Kingston remains a Liberal stronghold, represented by Speaker of the House Peter Milliken federally and MPP John Gerretsen provincially. Voters looking for left alternatives are effectively tied to the NDP and the Green Party. More radical parties, such as the Communist Party of Canada, have abandoned Kingston, directing their supporters to vote either Liberal or NDP depending on the comparative strength of the Progressive Conservatives. The radical left, in effect, barely registers on the electoral radar, whether in Kingston or nationwide.

Hoping to fill that void is the Socialist Equality Party. The SEP is a Trotskyist party affiliated with the International Committee of the Fourth International. While originating in the United States, the party aims to create an independent working class political movement with an international perspective, based on the Marxian principle that “the workers have no country.”

The SEP’s youth wing, International Students for Social Equality, has a Queen’s chapter organized by history student Graham Beverley. On Wednesday, March 31, the ISSE invited Keith Jones, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada), to speak at Mackintosh-Corry Hall.

Jones is a regular writer for the World Socialist Web Site, the SEP’s primary means for communicating its ideas. A teacher for many years, Jones writes on Canadian and international issues for the WSWS, which analyzes world news from a Trotskyist perspective (for the uninitiated: Leon Trotsky was a leading figure in the Russian Revolution who was exiled from the USSR and eventually killed on Stalin’s orders. He and Stalin engaged in a power struggle after Lenin’s death partly based on differing ideas: Stalin’s “socialism in one country” vs. Trotsky’s “permanent revolution”. Trotskyists are staunch anti-Stalinists who harshly criticize the former USSR as led by a counterrevolutionary bureaucracy).

In sharp contrast to what it derides as the “reformist” tendencies of social democratic parties like the NDP, the British Labour Party or the German Social Democrats, the SEP follows a sharply anti-capitalist line. Their website explains:

The Socialist Equality Party is a political party of and for the working class. The SEP seeks not to reform capitalism, but to create a socialist, democratic and egalitarian society through the establishment of a workers’ government and the revolutionary transformation of the world economy. We seek to unify workers in the United States and internationally in the common struggle for socialism—that is, for equality and the rational and democratic utilization of the wealth of the planet.

Speaking at Queen’s to a small audience of half a dozen committed socialists (and one or two curious newbies), Jones presented a harrowing view of the Harper government rooted heavily in class analysis. He began:

It is the contention of the Socialist Equality Party, that this government both represents a continuation, in a certain sense, a natural evolution from the right-wing policies that were carried out by the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, but also that the Harper Conservative government represents something new…a further lurch to the right…and has carried out a series of significant attacks on democratic rights.

The Harper Conservatives have co-opted an aggressive style of partisan politics from U.S. Republicans (such as referring to NDP leader Jack Layton as “Taliban Jack”). In a climate of deepening inequality, Jones argued that Canada’s ruling elites have cultivated such reactionary appeals as a means of building a social base for their anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian agenda.

Recalling the 1993 federal election, Jones noted that the Liberals ran on a platform that included three main points:

1. Overturning the conservative policy of focusing on the deficit at the expense of jobs;
2. Eliminating the GST, and
3. Getting Canada out of NAFTA.

On this side of history, those pledges now look ridiculous, since the Liberals quickly used their electoral victory to begin dismantling the welfare state. Unemployment Insurance was reduced to Employment Insurance; today, less than half of workers are entitled to it. The haemorrhaging of Canada’s manufacturing sector also began under the Liberals.

The Chrétien government justified massive cuts to social spending by citing a supposed deficit crisis, with the same pattern playing out nationwide. In Ontario, the Conservative government of Mike Harris sharply reduced government spending; Harris initiated a draconian program of spending cuts, taxes on unions, and slashing welfare rates by 21% while cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy. In Quebec, Lucien Bouchard’s Bloc Quebecois carried out similar cuts with the collaboration of the trade unions.

While the SEP is committed to working with the trade unions, the party has long criticized the unions’ bureaucratic leadership, which it sees as having interests antithetical to those of the workers they claim to represent. In a recent example, the Canadian Auto Workers leadership collaborated with General Motors and the Canadian and U.S. governments to force its members to accept deep wage and benefit cuts.

Jones characterized government actions from 1995-2000 as a massive reversal of the social benefits won by workers in the years after World War II, when widespread anti-capitalist sentiment – bolstered by the traumatic experience of depression and war – compelled even Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King to run under the slogan “For a New Social Order”. In the immediate postwar era, a worldwide offensive of the working class produced universal healthcare for Canadians, as well as the American Civil Rights Act and Great Society programs. Protests against the war in Vietnam created a thriving counterculture that sufficiently unnerved the ruling classes to result in a reactionary backlash at the end of the 20^th century in the form of conservative rulers Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

By the end of the 1990s, the Liberals’ policies had borne the fruit of a balanced budget, but the tax system had been radically redesigned to serve the interests of the wealthy. Canadian fiscal policy now corresponds with Lenin’s observation that the state is “an apparatus for the domination of one class over another.”

The effects are visible in Harper’s recent budget and the austerity programs currently being pushed by governments worldwide. In Ontario, Premier Dalton McGuinty has introduced the harmonized sales tax, heavily favoured by big business because it transfers the tax burden from businesses to consumers. Kingston MPP and Environment Minister John Gerretsen supported the HST, but managed to conveniently miss the actual vote.

The Harper government has also built on the Chrétien-Martin legacy by increasing military spending. In 1999 Canada played a leading role in NATO’s campaign in Yugoslavia, and it was the Chrétien government that initiated Canada’s involvement in the Afghan War. While it did not officially sign on to the Iraq War, the Liberal government’s lack of support was characterized by Jones as an eleventh-hour decision finalized only when it became clear France and Germany would not support the invasion. The Chrétien government recognized that Canada’s global position might be jeopardized by flagrant U.S. unilateralism. Yet Canada played a larger role than many official members of the “coalition of the willing”; only two weeks prior to the invasion, Canadian military planners helped design the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign. Jones stated:

In effect, what is being said here is that if the Canadian ruling elite is going to be able to advance its interests on the world stage, it has to be an active participant in the division and redivision of the world, and certainly has to align its foreign policy even more closely with that of the United States.

It was a Liberal government that first attacked democratic rights by overturning key civil liberties in the heat of post-9/11 hysteria. Jones was careful not to overlook the role of current Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, a supposed human rights expert who supported the Iraq War and helped provide the intellectual framework to justify torture in his book The Lesser Evil.

Economically, the Harper government has continued Liberal tax cuts that transfer wealth to the already wealthy, as well as reducing the state’s fiscal capacity in order to erode social programs and thwart their further expansion. Harper has been a huge proponent of the discredited policy of deregulation; when the government was obliged to hire new meat inspectors for Canadian exports to the United States, Harper advocated “self-inspection” by companies. Deregulation, Jones noted, is intimately tied up with the government’s unhelpful attitude towards the tar sands and global warming.

Current events have followed a similar pattern in all capitalist countries. There has been a vast increase in social inequality, most marked in the United States, but by any measure an international phenomenon. In the fall of 2009, Western governments put up hundreds of billions of dollars to back up the same financial aristocracy that had mercilessly pushed an anti-working class agenda over the last few decades in the name of efficiency. Jones went on to say:

Recent months have proven to be extremely profitable for Canada’s banks, as it has banks in the United States, and of course these same banks are resisting tooth and nail any suggestion – not that they need to worry about it from the Harper government…that there should be increases in taxes because the banking system worldwide has benefited from state support.

The financial system has been held together; at one point there was serious concern it was going to completely collapse. It’s been held together by basically socializing the debt, by transforming the debt of these large financial institutions and making them into government debt. And now of course, what we’re seeing is all over the world, big business is demanding, and governments are delivering, massive budget cuts on the grounds that these debts are unsustainable. They have to be repaid, and who has to repay them? They’re going to have to be repaid by working people, in the form of cuts to social programs and social services, university tuition hikes, other fee hikes, and this is now beginning.

Jones cited austerity measures announced in recent weeks by the federal Conservative government, the Ontario government and the Quebec government, which he says will lead to a change in class relations at least as significant as those in 1995, as big business takes the wrecking ball towards whatever remains of the welfare state.

For example, The Globe and Mail – disparaged by Jones as the voice of Bay Street – has lately been talking about the “unsustainability” of Medicare. He summarized their view as, “we’ve got all these people that are getting old, we’ve got these massive debts, what the hell are we going to do? We need to find new sources of funding for health care.” The reality, he said, is that Canadian elites intend to use the crisis created in the health care system by government budget cuts to build up a popular constituency for the dismantling of Medicare and the promotion of private health care.

“There are two objectives behind this,” said Jones. “First, they want to transfer the burden of health care back onto the individual. And secondly, health care is a massive business, and they want all obstacles and impediments to making profit off of this business…removed.”

Such open class war, Jones declared, would provoke massive resistance by working people – resistance that must be guided by socialist principles.

Jones ended his lecture with a discussion of the political crisis of November/December 2008. He argued that while Harper succeeded in proroguing Parliament with the support of the Canadian elite, the programme of the potential Liberal-NDP coalition government would have been equally right-wing: fiscal responsibility as primary concern, implementing Harper’s corporate tax cuts, and staying in the Afghan War until 2011. Of course, like Harper, the Dion-led government would have taken “some” action to stimulate the economy – mainly to ward off social unrest and keep Canada competitive with other countries.

In rock ‘n’ roll terms: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Since the programme of the coalition government was so similar to Harper’s, why did Canadian elites so vehemently oppose it?

“The reason that they opposed it was, quite frankly, because they didn’t think it was necessary under these conditions,” said Jones. “Certainly they have had a situation where the NDP has had a share of power – not federally, but in various provinces – and while the NDP hasn’t necessarily done everything that big business has wanted, it certainly has shown itself to be a party that is devoted to the capitalist order in Canada and will carry out right-wing attacks against the working class, impose austerity measures and so forth. But big business didn’t want to see a government of this particular composition at this time, and it was quite prepared to see democratic rights – basic parliamentary norms – set aside to prevent it from coming to power.”

Jones posed the question to his audience: if elites will happily disregard democratic norms to serve their own interests, as in this case, what would they do in the face of a real challenge by the working class? The Liberals, the NDP and the trade unions were all willing to join in a right-wing programme and played possum after Harper shut down Parliament. These groups, Jones argued, are dedicated to preserving the existing order and serve as a “safety valve” for the bourgeoisie.

Jones pointed to the memoirs of NDP national campaign director Brian Topp, which detailed Liberal-NDP coalition negotiations in which the first priority was picking a cabinet, with policy a distant second. The NDP has been pushing for a coalition since 2004, and Layton continued to plead for one long after Ignatieff made it clear he was not interested. While the NDP feared an election, they also wanted to show big business that it had nothing to fear from an NDP government. Since September 2009, the NDP has supported the Conservatives after gaining minor concessions to unemployment benefits.

Jones urged students to help the working class break free from their nominal leadership, the NDP and the trade unions, which have become completely integrated into the capitalist establishment. Canadian youth, he stressed, were one of the primary social groups that could assist the working class in advancing a truly socialist programme.

The discussion period that followed weighed realistic strategies for advancing a socialist agenda in Canada. Asked what he thought of the Communist Party of Canada, Jones dismissed it as defending the legacy of Stalinism. While the CPC has admitted to certain mistakes by the Soviet Union and the CPC, it still holds that the political line of the Soviet leadership was basically correct. Historically, the CPC justified Stalinist opposition to the proletarian internationalism that was the hallmark of Leon Trotsky (and lately, the SEP). It promotes Canadian sovereignty from American imperialism, an overly nationalist perspective in the view of the internationally-minded Socialist Equality Party. The CPC supported the NDP-Liberal coalition and, according to Jones, appeared overly enthused by the election of Wall Street puppet Barack Obama. Finally, it has mainly devoted its energy to pressuring existing political parties (and therefore, in Marxist parlance, advocating a “reformist” stance”).

To borrow another phrase from Lenin, what is to be done? Over the past few decades, social democratic parties have steadily dismantled the very social programs they claimed showed that capitalism could be reformed. For Jones, the key task is to develop an independent, non-reformist political formulation to lead the working class.

The deepening of geopolitical conflict in the midst of the economic crisis, Jones predicted, would have a radicalizing effect. Unions in 2010 have a very different perspective than unions in the 1970s, let alone the more militant 1930s. Although there has been a “huge degeneration” in workers’ class consciousness, the basic idea of unions – that the rights of the working class can best be defended through collective bargaining – remains as viable as ever. But actual class struggle will always be an uphill battle; witness the widespread derision that DriveTest employees (represented by the United Steelworkers) faced when they went on strike last year.

Revolutionary socialists, it seems, must work outside existing state structures in order to achieve their desired end: a society based not on the pursuit of profit but on serving human needs.

Protesting the Commercial Seal Hunt

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged
by the way its animals are treated.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“I would like to see the 6 million seals, or whatever number is out there, killed and sold, or destroyed and burned. I do not care what happens to them…the more they kill the better I will love it.” – John Efford, Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Newfoundland and Labrador, 4 May 1998.

The protesters handed out buttons with the initials “S.O.S.”. Their plea was not “Save Our Souls”, but rather “Save Our Seals.”

Over 50 Kingstonian activists braved the cold and rain on Saturday, March 13 to protest the Canadian government’s support for the annual commercial seal hunt. Standing in front of City Hall at Confederation Basin, the protesters spent two hours waving their signs at passing cars. Enthusiastic shouts and hollers greeted all motorists who signalled their support with a friendly honk.

The government of Canada supports the commercial seal hunt to the tune of well over $20 million in direct and indirect subsidies. While the seal hunt’s defenders claim the brutal practice is essential to the economy – in particular, that of Newfoundland and Labrador – its opponents argue that the costs far outweigh any perceived benefits.

Indeed, in testimony before the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, some sealers have indicated that the hunt only provides 5-10% of their income, rather than the 35% claimed by the Canadian government. In 2008, the seal hunt accounted for 1.2% of the total landed value of Newfoundland fisheries, according to a 2006 Newfoundland and Labrador Statistics Agency report.

Official support for the seal hunt has also brought a wave of negative publicity to Canada internationally. With the European Union considering a ban on the trade of seal products, sealers selling their wares are increasingly looking to China and Korea. The bulk of seal pelts are used to make luxury fashion garments which have limited market appeal.

Vicky Deodato is a local activist who has been at the forefront of the local animal rights movement with her group Kingston Animal Trust. Speaking privately at Saturday’s gathering – billed as Kingston’s third annual demonstration against the commercial seal hunt – Deodato fired back at the government’s tactic of falsely portraying protesters as opponents of the unrelated Inuit seal hunt.

“The Canadian government is trying so hard to keep the seal hunt going that they’re misleading people and saying that it has to do with the Inuit seal hunt, which it does not,” she said. “This is the commercial seal hunt, and they’re doing everything they can to try to mix it up to make protesters look bad, that we’re trying to take money away from the Inuit.”

In reality, the protesters acknowledge seal meat as a necessary staple of the Inuit diet. Seal, Deodato allowed, is “what [Inuit] have to eat. I mean, they can’t grow things, they don’t have gardens, they can’t eat oranges and they can’t grow wheat.”

Furthermore, the Inuit take pride in using every part of the seal, whereas in the commercial hunt, “most of the seal meat and blubber is wasted; it’s left on the ice to rot.” This figure doesn’t even include the 26,000 seals who are “struck and lost” annually – wounded by a sealer’s blow or gunshot, but who escape or sink into water before they can be recovered.

Equating opposition to the commercial seal hunt with opposition to the Inuit hunt is a cynical ploy by pro-sealing forces to demonize and discredit those groups (Sea Shepherd, the International Fund for Animal Welfare) most active in the demonstrations. Why is the Canadian government so unanimously in favour of the seal hunt?

Predictably, it all comes down to politics. In order to win seats in Newfoundland and Labrador, all parties support the seal hunt in order to ensure that they have a chance of taking those seats. The commercial seal hunt mostly involves workers from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Quebec.

“It’s 6000 fishermen that are out of business, that aren’t working at this time of year, and the government pays for most of this through indirect ways,” said Deodato.

The government’s generous financial support for sealing is a poor match for the comparatively meager benefits earned by the sealers themselves. Deodato estimated the average sealer will receive a mere $2000 each year for participating in the hunt. The 2008 landed value of $6.9 million, divided amongst the estimated 7000 active sealers, meant that each sealer received on average only $1000.

Such paltry sums, Deodato felt, do little to justify the massive annual slaughter from either an economic or an animal rights perspective. Rather than spending tens of millions of dollars this year on promotion, subsidies, and “all the wining and dining they do to the officials,” she suggests a simpler solution – giving the money to poor communities directly.

“Just give them the damn $2000 each,” she said. “I don’t even understand it. Newfoundland is capable of so much more. They could do wind power out there, eco-tourism is huge; there’s so much they could be doing out there to raise money instead of this.”

For Deodato, the immense suffering inflicted on seal populations is indefensible. Her detailed descriptions of grotesque violence minced no words.

“About 92% of these seals that are killed are 4 weeks old or younger,” she said. “These are sentient beings whose mothers are 10 feet away watching their babies – that they just gave birth to, that they’re still nursing…being clubbed and skinned. I mean, this is a horrible thing that we’re doing. 100% at this time of year, I’m embarrassed to be Canadian.

“Forgetting that it’s less than 1% of Newfoundland’s gross domestic product, forget that the government then subsidizes it; it goes right down to how inhumane this entire thing is. If this was 300,000 puppies being clubbed barely unconscious and then skinned, you would have all of Canada standing up in arms.”

Even more alarming to Deodato was the method for killing gray seals, a hunt which occurs two weeks before the culling of harp seals.

“The gray seal has such a strong skull… a really thick cranium,” said Deodato. “They have to hit them so hard they break their baseball bats, and then they skin them.”

Though there is an official quota that theoretically limits the slaughter to around 300,000 seals each year, Deodato said there is little accountability. “Who’s going to enforce it?” she asks rhetorically. “The Canadian government is totally behind this.

“They consider them fish,” said Deodato, “or they call it a harvest, like they’re a grain for cereal. It’s a sentient mammal. They nurse their babies. This is just completely wrong. It breaks my heart, literally.”

Iraq, or: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Note: This is the first of a two-part series on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Today is my piece on why the war was wrong, and tomorrow my conservative friend Ethan Rabidoux's defense of the war will appear. Good luck, Rabidoux - you'll need it!

On March 20, 2003, the United States launched its much-hyped invasion of Iraq with the "Shock and Awe" bombing campaign. Seven years, $3 trillion, and over 1 million Iraqi and 5000 coalition deaths later, what is the result? The war has brought nothing but tragedy and human suffering to all but its powerful architects - the military-industrial complex, Big Oil, AIPAC, the neoconservatives. The war in Iraq is a festering sore on the American body politic and a stain on the consensus of international law that has prevailed since World War II. The Nuremberg Trials, it turns out, were only for show - victors' justice that had little to no bearing on the actual conduct of world military powers, as the following decades would prove. From the vantage point of 2010, the sinister motivations behind the Iraq War are more transparent than ever.


No less a figure than former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged that the much-ballyhooed "threat" of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was merely the most convenient pretext for launching a war he and his fellow neoconservatives from the Project for a New American Century had long craved. "The truth," said Wolfowitz, "is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." The spectre of WMDs falling into the hands of terrorists was an ideal weapon in the Bush administration's arsenal of rhetorical trickery. In the hysterical atmosphere of post-9/11 America, it pushed millions of people who should have known better into becoming war supporters.

I should know. The Iraq War, like 9/11, was a crucial marker on my road to becoming a journalist. The 2001 attacks were history-changing events that the media re-played over and over, pontificating on the possible ramifications. From that day onward I was glued to the television set and followed the news with unprecedented fervour and interest. However, my education in news and politics at this point was superficial and, as time would illustrate, hopelessly naive. As the Bush administration's focus (and that of its media lapdogs) turned to Iraq, I found myself swayed by contemporary voices who dangled the bogeyman of Saddam Hussein passing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. At this time I was 17 and my family subscribed to the conservative National Post, naturally a very pro-war newspaper. Despite its right-wing slant, I still maintain the Post to be well-written, if politically perverse. But at this important point in world history, I readily accepted its writers' justifications for war.

After all, if the powerful U.S. military could initiate regime change in Iraq, it might set the stage for a larger flowering of democracy in the Middle East. Yes, as embarrassed as I am to admit it now, I essentially adopted the neoconservative fantasy vision of the invasion of Iraq leading to a democratic Middle East. Perhaps it was that post-9/11 atmosphere, when 89% of Americans approved of George W. Bush's performance as president, but I was still in the mindset that the terrorist attacks had united Americans. There was a reason Bush was so popular at this time; his simplistic, black-and-white version of world events was the comfort food Americans craved. Yet their blind trust would have incredibly destructive consequences. Surely, I thought, leading politicians and the mainstream media couldn't be lying when they made such grave and substantive accusations...could they?

As I said, I was a little naive.

Certainly now, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it's easy to say the Iraq War was a mistake and more. In that sense, it was a learning experience for me. The buildup to the war was the low point of the corporate media, in which the final break of the Fourth Estate with its supposed ideals became complete. Barely even pretending any longer to check government power, the war helped expose pampered TV pundits as the mindless sycophants they were. Rather than challenging government spin, they merely repeated it and offered the most vivid example to date of stenographic journalism. As Glenn Greenwald has eloquently written, today's mainstream media is largely composed of royal courtiers who delight in court gossip to the exclusion of substantive policy issues. If you're wondering why the American media is so dead set against accountability for Bush administration officials complicit in torture and other war crimes, the answer is obvious: most prominent media figures cheered on those same crimes. They are as guilty as the politicians.

What really caused the Iraq War? The fact that Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the world, we were always assured, was purely coincidental. Of course, it was obvious even before the invasion that the war was all about oil. The global economy runs on petroleum, and the United States is one of the largest consumers of that precious resource. From an American perspective, it is absolutely vital to maintain the country's dominance over Middle Eastern oil supplies in the face of up-and-coming competitors like China.

While the American government in 2003 was assured of oil from Saudi Arabia - based on a special relationship wherein the U.S. turns a blind eye to Saudi human rights abuses while the Saudis keep the oil flowing - Iraq was a different story. Saddam Hussein had been a key American ally during the Reagan years - symbolized by special envoy Donald Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam Hussein - but Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait changed everything. President Bush the Elder, who had substantial business relationships with the Kuwaiti ruling family, immediately changed his tune and, embracing the opportunity to display U.S. military dominance in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, launched a full-on media campaign against the "new Hitler". The American-led multinational coalition stopped short of removing the Ba'athist regime when the flow of Kuwaiti oil was again assured, but Saddam remained a gadfly to American and Israeli ambitions in the Middle East. Sanctions imposed on Iraq by the Clinton administration killed half a million Iraqi children - a price Secretary of State Madeline Albright coldly said was "worth it" - but had the effect of strengthening Saddam's power rather than diminishing it.

The prospect of military force in the service of regime change thus became an ever more attractive option to hawks in the American government. Emboldened by the United States' status as sole superpower after the end of the Cold War, the self-proclaimed "masters of the universe" glowingly spoke of America in the imperial terms of Ancient Rome. The promise of "peace dividends" and cuts in defense spending that followed the Soviet collapse quickly ran up against the institutional inertia of the military-industrial complex, which came up with new excuses to keep the tax dollars flowing - chief among them terrorists and "rogue states", targets of official propaganda even before 9/11.

So sacrosanct is the American defense budget, and so ingrained in the American psyche is the tendency to frame everything in military terms (the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror) that, following the September 11 attacks, media and politicians immediately proclaimed that America was "under attack" and "at war", with events framed in the most militaristic terms possible. The decision to invade Afghanistan, and later Iraq, was made infinitely easier by the huge scale of the U.S. military and the simple odds that, if heavily armed enough, a state will more quickly resort to violence. Protracted wars also guaranteed ever-greater sums to the Pentagon. The American military budget is now completely out of control; Barack Obama's allotted 2010 budget for defense spending is the greatest in real terms since the Second World War. With the Great Recession in full sway and the military seemingly the only government service immune from draconian spending cuts, the colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan essentially serve the role of public works projects for the military.

Political considerations cannot be underestimated in the decision to go to war. Aside from the obvious economic interests of White House oilmen George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (who guaranteed his former company Halliburton a generous supply of no-bid contracts in the reconstruction of Iraq), the Bush administration helped shore up failing domestic support by doubling down on the mythology of the heroic "war president", the resolute commander-in-chief taking the fight to the terrorists "over there, so we don't have to fight them over here." The Republicans had swept the 2002 midterms by portraying Democrats as soft on terrorism, and they capitalized on that strategy in 2004 by continuing to question Democrats' patriotism and their commitment to keeping Americans safe from terrorists (which was equated with support for the unrelated Iraq War).

The irony, of course, is that the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq was completely bipartisan from the beginning. Throughout the decade, Democrats regularly gave left cover to the Republicans by diverting public anger from the war, continually supporting right-wing Bush administration policies and stripping away any remaining civil liberties. When Democrats finally recaptured the presidency in 2008, the fundamental flaws of the two-party system became every more apparent. Obama continued or expanded virtually every criminal policy of the Bush administration. While the President has made noises about pulling U.S. "combat troops" out of Iraq by 2011, Obama has always excelled at saying big things and doing very little. If the past is any indication, we can expect this rhetorical sleight-of-hand to portend years and years of continued war.

Iraq was more than a "mistake". Those who would use that word to refer to this crime of historical proportions reveal much about their notions of morality. Establishment figures in the 1960s such as Walter Cronkite only turned against Vietnam when it became clear the war was lost. But Iraq, like its historical predecessor Vietnam, is not wrong merely because it was an ill-advised drain on American blood and treasure. Rather, it is wrong because it is a transparent war of aggression against a nation that had not attacked the United States and had nothing to do with 9/11. Nuremberg decreed aggressive war to be the supreme international crime, because it is the overarching criminal act from which all the others (torture, rendition, etc.) originate. While the U.S. government is quick to accuse other countries of aggression - such as Russia during the 2008 South Ossetia War - it is taken for granted that America and Israel alone are permitted the use of force anywhere under any circumstances.

As much as concrete economic factors - the American lust for oil, feeding the military-industrial complex - and cynical political considerations motivated the Iraq War, it is worth considering the words of that arch-purveyor of establishment wisdom, the New York Times' own Thomas Friedman - not because his words are anything other than poorly-written claptrap, but because we can tell a lot about the view of the American elite through his inane bullshit. Friedman infamously admitted in a 2003 interview with Charlie Rose that the war's noble purpose was to make Iraqis "Suck. On. This", to show the world the United States meant business. "We could have hit Saudi Arabia," said Friedman. "Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could."

But even the war's original proponents must admit that it has failed on its own terms. Iraq is no Jeffersonian democracy, but an unstable cauldron of sectarian conflict riddled by corruption and bloody violence. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and the war has further overstretched the U.S. military. Iran is now more powerful a regional player than before; with its main rival, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, effectively eliminated, the mullahs can more easily exert their influence on neighbouring countries. And the war has destroyed America's reputation so thoroughly - compounded by atrocities such as Abu Ghraib - that the possibility of terrorist attacks on the United States has vastly increased. The war has not made America safer, it has not made the Middle East more democratic; it has only made the world a more violent, destructive place.

The human costs of the war spit in the face of any "dead-enders" who still claim to support it. Over 1 million Iraqis have died since the war began, as well as over 5000 coalition troops. The United Nations estimates that 2.2 million civilians have fled the country since 2003. According to UNHCR figures, over 4.7 million Iraqis have been displaced since the war began. The so-called "reconstruction" of Iraq is a long-running joke, a cover for the rapacious plundering of the country by American corporate interests. While doing little to help Iraqis, it has ensured gargantuan profits for politically-connected companies subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.

Seven years later, most Iraqis still cannot even depend on reliable food, water or electricity; the streets are still filled with garbage. Hundreds of civilians die every month in insurgent attacks or at the hand of coalition forces. Millions of families have been shattered, millions of children orphaned. The war continues to be a colossal drain on the U.S. treasury, diverting money from domestic needs such as health care (the lack of which actually kills 45,000 Americans per year). Anyone who defends this historical crime is either lying to themselves, profiting directly from it, or utterly incapable of empathy.

The Iraq War is, and has always been, strictly about money. Its defenders blind themselves to this simple fact - and the unimaginable suffering that greed still causes today.