Betrayed

3,034 words

Part 3 of 7 (Part 1, Part 2)

Translated by Ondrej Mann

Czech original

But okay, you can still find the right path, even if it’s midnight. — Stéphane Delorme

The first films featuring skinheads appeared in Britain in the early 1980s. These films lacked almost any actual political substance, however, and their protagonists belonged more to the realm of “youth rebellion”: somewhere between rockers, punks, and football hooligans; those whom sociologists study as “subcultures.” Out of respect for the performance of 20-year-old Tim Roth, however, let us at least mention the television film Made in Britain (1982, directed by Alain Clarke), or the tragicomedy Meantime (1984, Mike Leigh).[1]

At the end of the decade, the film Betrayed (1988, directed by Costa-Gavras) was made in the United States with the ambition of showing the full breadth and depth of grassroots resistance to the “Zionist Occupation Government” (ZOG). Catherine Weaver (played by Debra Winger), an undercover FBI agent, arrives in a village somewhere in the Midwest in order to get close to Gary, the owner of a local farm. Gary is suspected by the “feds” of being involved in the shooting of a Jewish radio host named Kraus, who for years had been brazenly and tastelessly attacking everything and everyone on the air, including Christianity and the white race. The straightforward, manly Gary (played by Tom Berenger), a widowed Vietnam veteran who is devoted to his family, initially charms Catherine, who refuses to believe he could be guilty. She quickly sees the light, however, when he invites her on a “black game hunt,” which turns out to be a nighttime hunt by Gary and his friends for a kidnapped black man who is released into a forest. Thanks to Gary’s growing blindness as he falls in love with her, Catherine gradually penetrates to the core of what turns out to be a nationwide Right-wing conspiracy.[2]

You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema here.

Betrayed refers to actual events: specifically, the assassination of Alan Berg[3] as well as a series of bank robberies which were carried out by members of The Order, also known as the Silent Brotherhood (Brüder Schweigen), as well as the subsequent indictment and trial of 13 activists who were allegedly involved in a “conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.”[4] The plot takes us to a camp where militias train, crosses are burned,[5] and cosplayers in SA uniforms sell their “Lugers” (although Gary chases them away “like idiots”) as well as heavier weapons, including mortars. We are also taken to a small church where the pastor preaches the bizarre ideology of Christian Identity (“white Americans as the true descendants of the lost tribes of Israel,” etc.), and we learn that its influence reaches very high into government circles.

This film by a Greek veteran of “political drama”[6] correctly emphasizes the conflict between the urban establishment on the two coasts and the common people in the heartland. This is highlighted in the following exchange:

Gary’s mother: It’s not the country I grew up in anymore. Evil is pushing out good, that’s how it is. It’s just filth and disgust everywhere.

Gary: It’s really hard here. The old are losing their past and the young are losing their farms.

Shorty (Gary’s neighbor): I don’t like fighting, either. But if we don’t defend ourselves, they’ll take everything from us, the whole country. Jews, judges, bankers, and politicians with black police and slant-eyed . . . I always just wanted to grow corn and raise my son. The bank took my farm, and Vietnam took my son. I have nothing left.

Everyone is opposed to the rule of banks and liberal America, which they see as having “niggers and faggots” at its forefront. Even Rachel, Gary’s six-year-old daughter, explains to Catherine what she has learned from her father: “We are the good guys, and so one day we’ll kill all the dirty niggers and all the Jews, and everything will be great . . .” Her father wants her to grow up in an America that is the same way it was in his childhood, during the 1950s and ‚60s. At the same time, however, he is already making use of his home computer and a modem (the Internet was not yet accessible to the public at the time) to get in contact with other activists, which he refers to as the “internal network” and the “American network of freedom.”

Debra Winger’s performance as a treacherous woman who “can do anything” is chilling at times, as is the statement by a black federal agent who, when asked how he feels after shooting a white suspect, replies, “Like when I wipe something off my shoe.”[7] But we have similar dialogue by Gary as well. After the nighttime hunt, Catherine says “I don’t want to hurt people,” to which Gary replies, in an attempt to reassure her, “They’re not people, they’re niggers.”

Luna Park (1992, Pavel Lungin), by contrast, is set amidst the collapse of the Soviet Empire at the beginning of the 1990s. It was made with French money, as Lungin explained: “For me, as a Russian, it is amazing that I can work with a small French production company: Ima, which has made a great effort to shoot a film with a contemporary theme in a country where neither cameras nor film stock are available.” Lungin, who is of Jewish origin, sets his film in the aftermath of the unsuccessful attempt by conservative forces to stage a coup in 1991 with the intention of putting a stop to the “democratization” process.[8]

You can order The Best of Trevor Lynch here

Its plot is simple: Andrei leads a group of “cleaners” in Moscow who want to drive not only Jews and homosexuals off the streets, but also punks, metalheads, and bikers, who they see as “collaborators” who slavishly imitate Western subcultures.[9] After one of these “actions,” however, he unexpectedly learns that he himself is of mixed race: his father was in fact a famous Jewish composer (and not a war hero who died in Afghanistan, as he had always thought. He decides to draw the ultimate conclusion from these findings and sets out to find his father. The real theme of Lungin’s film is therefore timeless: the identity crisis.[10]

In the same year, Romper Stomper (1992, Geoffrey Wright) was made in Australia, a film about a group of skinheads from the suburbs of Melbourne. Hando, Davey, Sonny, Bubs, Martin, and others live in abandoned warehouses and vacated factories — where their parents had probably once worked. Industry has since moved from Australia to Asia, and in the opposite direction, an increasing number of Vietnamese are coming to set up food stalls. “What do you want here?” asks Hando, the leader of the gang, before beating up three “gooks” in an underpass in the opening scene. As he breaks their bones, he mutters through clenched teeth:

I’ll tell you something, and remember it well. This is not your country! The only thing waiting for you here is pain. We don’t like you. Do you understand that? Do you understand? I hope so, because I don’t speak monkey.

It is mainly the skinheads who are in for pain, however, even though they defend their small territory from the “yellow invasion” with the ferocity of a pack of dingoes. The first trigger for the film’s events is when the local bar, which is clearly a substitute home for most of the skins, falls into enemy hands: a Vietnamese businessman buys it for his three sons. Their retaliatory crusade begins as a bloody street battle and then into a fight for their lives, as the “gooks” are joined by numerous reinforcements from the neighborhood armed with baseball bats and meat cleavers.

You can buy Irmin Vinson’s Some Thoughts on Hitler & Other Essays here.

Hando and Davey fight a second, even more destructive battle[11] when the slender blonde Gabe (“boxing — sex, sex — boxing”) suddenly comes between them in their masculine friendship. From that moment on, their consistently alternative lifestyle leads inexorably through robbery and murder to a fratricidal finale.

Wright’s skinheads, with their adrenaline-fueled fights, wild parties, brutality, and blunt rudeness, could be called almost any name except bourgeois.[12] These children of the working class are also unemployed, uneducated, and without opportunities.[13] The film asks the viewer whether it is precisely these “lost souls” who are still capable of spontaneous resistance[14] to colonization and the Great Replacement. In any case, they remain alone in their struggle, while the Vietnamese community demonstrates its traditional cohesion. No future for us?

This is exemplified in one particular exchange:

Dialogue on the “bridge” (or in Hando’s cubicle plastered with newspaper clippings and posters, crammed with souvenirs of the Reich, which the enraged “yellows” then set on fire):

Gabe: Why are you doing all this?

Hando: Because I don’t want to be a slave in my own country, because it’s not even our country anymore, because rich people and people in power have imported human trash, cheap labor, gooks, and there will be more. I want people to know that I’m proud of my past and my white race. One day, that will be the only thing I have left. See this map? All these buildings already belong to the gooks. A few years ago, it was all white. (picks up a book) Mein Kampf, you know it?

Gabe: That’s about war, right?

Hando (with an understanding smile): That was written by Adolf Hitler. Some people don’t want you to know his views on the world. It’s simply about the eternal struggle between the white race and its enemies. If you don’t know who the enemy is, you can’t win. Listen: “The great cultures of the past disappeared because the purity and strength of the original race was lost. It was contaminated by the seed of inferior races that their rulers brought in to work. The indisputable reason for their demise was racial blood poisoning. The blood of the race must be preserved, at all costs, pure.”

A few other details are worth noting. Davey is of German origin. Note the plastic swan in front of the garden cottage he lives in, where he is urrounded by ridiculously oversized, bourgeois Bavarian kitsch. This perhaps is an ironic reference to the innocence and purity of the Swan King, Ludwig II, who was likewise a stranger in the world of ordinary people.

The scenes of violence in the villa accompanied by opera music are said to be a tribute to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

Beneath all the grime and squalor of the suburbs, the story has the characteristics of an ancient tragedy. This only becomes clear after Hando, Davey, and Gabe finally leave the big city — and arrive on the rocky seashore.

Notes

[1] Although the convergence of certain groups of “skins” around SKA music, 2-Tone, and the then-new Oi! Movement — which emerged from punk — as well as with the National Front (NF) and similar “associations” began in the second half of the 1970s, skinheads began to organize as an independent political force about ten years later. The release dates of the albums Hail the New Dawn (1984) and Blood and Honour (1985) by the British band Skrewdriver, which was led by singer Ian Stuart, can be considered symbolic in this context. By this we mean that in 1982, skinheads as we know them today were still largely unknown in popular culture, but by a decade later this was no longer possible.

[2] The planned assassination of a prominent politician by this network is supposed to act as a signal for a series of other violent actions across the United States intended to produce social chaos. One of their plans involves shutting down the New York City electrical grid, after which “ten guys in police uniforms will then go to Harlem to shoot blacks. The blacks will revolt, thinking that this country belongs to them, and [the conspirators] will show them that it doesn’t.” Other planned attacks that are mentioned include a plan to “kill some fags“ in San Francisco, while in Chicago they intend to “put at least four sticks of dynamite in the courthouse.” The conspirators believe that this string of attacks will lead to the declaration of a state of emergency throughout the country and the subsequent rise of reactionary forces in the US Army in order to reestablish order.

[3] Oliver Stone made a film of his own that was likewise inspired by this case: Talk Radio (1988), about “a man who talked himself to death on his talk show.”

[4] Among them were Reverend Richard G. Butler, the leader of Aryan Nations; the organization’s ideologue Robert Miles (who considered the capitalist USA and Communist USSR to be “Satanic twins”); and Louis Beam as its “chief military strategist” (he had developed the concept of “leaderless resistance”). The federal government failed to convict any of the defendants, however.

[5] When it comes to films with an explicitly “Klan” theme, besides the classic The Birth of a Nation (1915, D. W. Griffith), we should also mention the adventure crime film The Klansman (1974, Terence Young) starring Lee Marvin, Richard Burton, and O. J. Simpson; as well as Mississippi Burning (1988, Alan Parker) with Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe. It is notable that both Young, who directed the first Bond films, and Parker, who is best known for Midnight Express (1978) and the equally “southern” Angel Heart (1987), secured star actors for their “anti-racist” roles, since the Klan characters are all played by unknown actors.

[6] Costa-Gavras is a hard-line Communist, but is nevertheless a good director (Betrayed is one of his weakest works). He first attracted significant attention in 1969 with the drama Z (1969), about the period preceding the coup d’état by the “Black Colonels” in Greece. A year later he filmed Artur London’s memoirs of the “trial of the anti-state conspiracy center” around R. Slánský in Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s, under the title The Confession. He followed this with State of Siege (1972), which is an indictment of CIA practices and a celebration of Left-wing guerrilla warfare in Latin America. That he remained true to his convictions is demonstrated by Capital (2012), which is a critical look at the world of international finance.

[7] That “something” was Wes (Ted Levine), leader of the Aryan Brotherhood at San Quentin Prison, a biker and “sodomite” whom Catherine instinctively distrusted from the outset and therefore had to be eliminated.

[8] This process of disintegration continued until Putin took office as President. In only the first two years after the collapse of the USSR, Russians lost all of the territory they had gained over the previous 250 years. 20 million of them suddenly found themselves outside the country’s borders. New oligarchs began to divide up the nation’s wealth. Under Yeltsin’s puppet leadership, the Russian state — “all the more servile to its former capitalist enemies, all the more ruthless to its own people” — was to become just another vassal of the US and the “global economy,” a “cheap source of raw materials for the West” on par with the former African colonies. This is likewise the essence of “democratization” as we know it today in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.

[9] Lungin combines two phenomena here. The first is the Lyuber movement* (Люберы, named after the town of Lyubertsy (Люберцы) near Moscow), which was a purely Soviet youth subculture dating back to the late 1970s, but that did not survive the end of the USSR). Its members, who were skilled in weightlifting, wrestling, and boxing, de facto helped the authorities suppress any emergence of the “Western way of life” in the streets (including, for example, the drinking of Coca-Cola). The second is Russian National Unity (Русское национальное единство, or RNE), which was founded by Alexander Barkashov in 1990. Its emblem was a swastika combined with the Star of Bethlehem. The film reportedly features actual “lyubers”; personal connections with RNE cannot be ruled out, but only in the case of individuals, given the differences between them. Some even fell into the criminal underworld, which the film likewise touches upon.

* Today, hardbass or Zenit St. Petersburg football fans, known as Landscrona, are perhaps somewhat reminiscent of this Russian peculiarity.

[10] The painful awareness of the insurmountable limits of one’s own ethnic (biological and cultural) identity is also the subject of The Believer (2001, Henry Bean), which we will discuss next time.

[11] The strong emotional bond between the two men (“I only have you, Davey,” says Hando, “we have to stick together”) is n often reduced by critics to “latent homosexuality,” and it must be admitted that director G. Wright plays into this interpretation in several scenes.

[12] Above all, however, they are deprived to varying degrees. Little Bubs exhibits the syndrome of an abused child of alcoholics, for whom the “gang” is simply a better family. Gabe comes from a wealthy, cultured family, but apparently her father sexually abused her and her mother committed suicide as a result. Davey is essentially a decent boy who lives with his grandmother, but his “dad is always on the road.” A psychologist would probably say that he is now seeking a paternal substitute in Hando (the scene where they buy the Hitlerjugend dagger, Hando’s care after a “binge,” etc.). Hando is fierce and authoritarian to the point of unbearability (including by practicing the art of manipulating “his people”), but when the group he leads falls apart, he loses his composure and confidence as well as the dignity that he undeniably exudes at the beginning. When Gabe calls him a “loser” after a botched robbery at her home, he immediately punches her.

[13] Hando despises “working for the system.” Many of his companions would find it difficult to find employment anyway, if only because — judging by their dialogue and behavior — they appear to be of limited intelligence, and Magoo’s submissive girlfriend seems downright stupid (and she is not alone). These people would have to — and in reality must — compete for work with immigrants of color, who are often given preferential treatment.

[14] This would correspond to, among other things, the New Left’s thesis which holds that after the bourgeoisification of the Western working class, the social basis for any future revolutionary activism must be found among the various marginalized groups and minorities. For example, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin recruited for the Red Army Faction among the “apprentice collectives” and juveniles from “reform schools” (some of whom actually provided them with significant logistical” support). Dr. Wolfgang Huber of the so-called Socialist Patient Collective even coined the slogan, “Madmen to arms!”