When there's little of interest on the new releases shelf the best
thing to do is rent a classic. So the other week I took home
Mississippi Burning, the celebrated film about violence and racism in
the American south during the civil rights years. Starring Gene
Hackman and Willem Dafoe, the 1988 film was nominated for seven
Academy Awards.
I saw the movie in the theatre when it was released, but nearly 20
years later, with my post-9/11 eyes, the film has a completely
different resonance. I never realized that it presented such a strong
endorsement of state-sponsored torture, illegal detention and
coercion of terrorists. More, back in 1988 everybody -- including the
liberal elites of Hollywood -- seemed just fine with that. The movie
takes place in Mississippi in 1964, when Klansmen burned churches,
lynched people and generally terrorized the (black) population.
Hackman and Dafoe play the good guys, FBI agents investigating the
disappearance of three civil rights workers. They suspect the young
activists were murdered by the Klan, and also that the local sheriff,
his racist deputy and other community leaders were in on the
killings.
A small southern town like this one is tight-knit, with its own
customs and history. Outsiders are not welcome. This Mississippi town
is not unlike an Iraqi village or other insular, tribal community.
Everyone knows everyone else's business, but good luck getting
someone to talk to you. The FBI investigation is stymied.
Gene Hackman's character, Agent Anderson, is from Mississippi, and
knows how to extract information from the people. He kidnaps the town
mayor (that would be an "extraordinary rendition" in
post-9/11 lingo) and takes him to an isolated shack. The mayor (the
equivalent of a tribal elder) is threatened with castration and
presented with a razor blade and an empty paper cup that, he's told,
will hold his amputated scrotum if he doesn't divulge what he knows
about the Klan.
Surprise, he talks. The audience has no problem with this, because
the mayor, though not a Klan member, is, like all the townsfolk, a
backwoods racist bastard. We cheer handsome Special Agent Anderson
for taking off the gloves.
Another great scene: The FBI agents want to divide the Klansmen
against themselves, to introduce paranoia into their group (or
"cell") and make them suspect one another of betrayal. To
this end Anderson orchestrates a near-lynching of a Klansman, to get
him to give up his friends. The Klansman is so terrified that he
defecates in his pants, much to Anderson's amusement. A mock
execution? Humiliation? Psychological torture? Whatever. The point of
the movie is that war -- and the battle for civil rights is depicted
as a kind of war -- is messy. Plus, tobacco-chewing, squirrel-eating
rednecks who shoot college kids for the crime of registering black
voters don't deserve due process. Mississippi Burning is actually a
feel-good movie.
All of the tactics that the FBI use in Mississippi Burning, in
their fight against white racism, have been used by real-life
security agents in the fight against Islamist extremism. In August
2003, in Iraq, a U.S. military officer named Allen West took a
captured insurgent and, drawing a pistol, fired a round or two near
the prisoner's head. The mock execution worked: The insurgent told
details of an ambush that could have killed Lt.-Col. West and his
men.
The U.S. military laid criminal charges against Lt.-Col. West for
his irregular counter-insurgency tactics. Mississippi Burning was
awarded the Political Film Society's award for human rights. Recent
winners of this award include Atom Egoyan's film Ararat, about the
Armenian genocide, and Hotel Rwanda. To this day, Mississippi
Burning, owing to its depiction of black oppression in the segregated
south, is celebrated at human rights film festivals. This is strange
because Agent Anderson, in his effort to bring justice and security
to the south, employs methods that ought to horrify progressive types
who attend these festivals.
If you believe that civilized governments should not be in the
business of torture, intimidation and kidnapping, then the principle
ought to hold no matter who the bad guys are.
Double standards have always been a problem for professional
leftists and rightists. A pox on both, though I'd say that hypocrisy
reaches its highest expression in the anti-war left. They call
themselves peace activists yet march in rallies with Hezbollah flags.
They protest against "collective punishment" such as
terrorist profiling, yet can't denounce suicide bombings, the
ultimate in collective punishment.
I always remembered Mississippi Burning as a political statement,
and boy is it ever.
Leonard Stern is the Citizen's editorial pages editor. E-mail:
lstern@thecitizen.canwest.com
