[Peace-discuss] G. Monbiot on _Black Hawk Down_

[Margaret E. Kosal]

More on why America's #1 film suckz ...

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>go to http://www.guardian.co.uk
>
>Both saviour and victim
>Black Hawk Down creates a new and dangerous myth of American nationhood
>George Monbiot
>Monday January 28 2002
>The Guardian
>
>
>The more powerful a nation becomes, the more it asserts its victimhood. In 
>contemporary British eyes, the greatest atrocities of the 18th and 19th 
>centuries were those perpetrated on compatriots in the Black Hole of 
>Calcutta or during the Indian mutiny and the siege of Khartoum. The 
>extreme manifestations of the white man's burden, these events came to 
>symbolise the barbarism and ingratitude of the savage races the British 
>had sought to rescue from their darkness.
>
>Today the attack on New York is discussed as if it were the worst thing to 
>have happened to any nation in recent times. Few would deny that it was a 
>major atrocity, but we are required to offer the American people a unique 
>and exclusive sympathy. Now that demand is being extended to earlier 
>American losses.
>
>Black Hawk Down looks set to become one of the bestselling movies of all 
>time. Like all the films the British-born director Ridley Scott has made, 
>it is gripping, intense and beautifully shot. It is also a stunning 
>misrepresentation of what happened in Somalia.
>
>In 1992 the United States walked into Somalia with good intentions. George 
>Bush senior announced that America had come to do "God's work" in a nation 
>devastated by clan warfare and famine. But, as Scott Peterson's firsthand 
>account Me Against My Brother shows, the mission was doomed by 
>intelligence failures, partisan deployments and, ultimately, the belief 
>that you can bomb a nation into peace and prosperity.
>
>Before the US government handed over the administration of Somalia to the 
>United Nations in 1993, it had already made several fundamental mistakes. 
>It had backed the clan chiefs Mohamed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi against 
>another warlord, shoring up their power just as it had started to 
>collapse. It had failed to recognise that the competing clan chiefs were 
>ready to accept large-scale disarmament, if it were carried out 
>impartially. Far from resolving the conflict between the clans, the US 
>accidentally enhanced it.
>
>After the handover, the UN's Pakistani peacekeepers tried to seize 
>Aideed's radio station, which was broadcasting anti-UN propaganda. The 
>raid was bungled, and 25 of the soldiers were killed by Aideed's 
>supporters. A few days later, Pakistani troops fired on an unarmed crowd, 
>killing women and children. The United Nations force, commanded by a US 
>admiral, was drawn into a blood feud with Aideed's militia.
>
>As the feud escalated, US special forces were brought in to deal with the 
>man now described by American intelligence as "the Hitler of Somalia". 
>Aideed, who was certainly a ruthless and dangerous man but also just one 
>of several clan leaders competing for power in the country, was blamed for 
>all Somalia's troubles. The UN's peacekeeping mission had been transformed 
>into a partisan war.
>
>The special forces, over-confident and hopelessly ill-informed, raided, in 
>quick succession, the headquarters of the UN development programme, the 
>charity World Concern and the offices of Medecins sans Frontieres. They 
>managed to capture, among scores of innocent civilians and aid workers, 
>the chief of the UN's police force. But farce was soon repeated as 
>tragedy. When some of the most senior members of Aideed's clan gathered in 
>a building in Mogadishu to discuss a peace agreement with the United 
>Nations, the US forces, misinformed as ever, blew them up, killing 54 
>people. Thus they succeeded in making enemies of all the Somalis. The 
>special forces were harried by gunmen from all sides. In return, US troops 
>in the UN compound began firing missiles at residential areas.
>
>So the raid on one of Aideed's buildings on October 3 1993, which led to 
>the destruction of two Black Hawk helicopters and the deaths of 18 
>American soldiers, was just another round of America's grudge match with 
>the warlord. The troops who captured Aideed's officials were attacked by 
>everyone: gunmen came even from the rival militias to avenge the deaths of 
>the civilians the Americans had killed. The US special forces, with an 
>understandable but ruthless regard for their own safety, locked Somali 
>women and children into the house in which they were besieged.
>
>Ridley Scott says that he came to the project without politics, which is 
>what people often say when they subscribe to the dominant point of view. 
>The story he relates (with the help of the US department of defence and 
>the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff) is the story the 
>American people need to tell themselves.
>
>The purpose of the raid on October 3, Black Hawk Down suggests, was to 
>prevent Aideed's murderous forces from starving Somalia to death. No hint 
>is given of the feuding between him and the UN, other than the initial 
>attack on the Pakistani peacekeepers. There is no recognition that the 
>worst of the famine had passed, or that the US troops had long ceased to 
>be part of the solution. The US hostage-taking, even the crucial role 
>played by Malaysian soldiers in the Rangers' rescue, have been excised 
>from the record. Instead - and since September 11 this has become a 
>familiar theme - the attempt to capture Aideed's lieutenants was a battle 
>between good and evil, civilisation and barbarism.
>
>The Somalis in Black Hawk Down speak only to condemn themselves. They 
>display no emotions other than greed and the lust for blood. Their 
>appearances are accompanied by sinister Arab techno, while the US forces 
>are trailed by violins, oboes and vocals inspired by Enya. The American 
>troops display horrific wounds. They clutch photos of their loved ones and 
>ask to be remembered to their parents or their children as they die. The 
>Somalis drop like flies, killed cleanly, dispensable, unmourned.
>
>Some people have compared Black Hawk Down to the British film Zulu. There 
>is some justice in the comparison, but the Somalis here offer a far more 
>compelling personification of evil than the blundering, belligerent Zulus. 
>They are sinister, deceitful and inscrutable; more like the British 
>caricature of the Chinese during the opium wars.
>
>What we are witnessing in both Black Hawk Down and the current war against 
>terrorism is the creation of a new myth of nationhood. America is casting 
>itself simultaneously as the world's saviour and the world's victim; a 
>sacrificial messiah, on a mission to deliver the world from evil. This 
>myth contains incalculable dangers for everyone else on earth.
>
>To discharge its sense of unique grievance, the US government has hinted 
>at what may become an asymmetric world war. It is no coincidence that 
>Somalia comes close to the top of the list of nations it may be prepared 
>to attack. This war, if it materialises, will be led not by the generals 
>in their bunkers, but by the people who construct the story the nation 
>chooses to believe.
>
>  www.monbiot.com
>
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