SACW - 13 Apr 2014 | Sri Lanka: Bodu Bala Sena on Warpath / Pakistan: wrong kind of tolerance / Is this the Bangladesh we wanted? / India: If Modi is elected, it will bode ill for future - Appeal; Bombers for a Cause? / Rwanda, Twenty Years Later / South Africa: Unite both the head and the hand / Lanzmann’s Shoah Project / Call for nomination - 2014 UNESCO Madanjeet Singh Prize

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 13 April 2014 - No. 2817 
[since 1996]
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Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: Bodu Bala Sena On The Warpath (Waruni Karunarathne)
2. TV discussion: Re-setting India, Sri Lanka relations | India’s World on Rajya Sabha TV
3. Pakistan: The wrong kind of tolerance (Edit, Daily Times)
4. Pakistan: HRCP slams threat to lawyer representing blasphemy accused
5. Taliban Provokes New Hunger for Education | Ashfaq Yusufzai
6. Is this the Bangladesh we wanted? Analyzing the Hindu Population Gap (2001-2011)
7. If Modi is elected, it will bode ill for India's future: Salman Rushdie, John McDonnell, Pragna Patel, Jayati Ghosh, Suresh Grover
8. India: Bombers for a Cause? | Subhash Gatade
9. India: Season of Discontent | Teesta Setalvad
10. India: BJP’s Communal Election Arithmetic | Prabir Purkayastha
11. India: The Gujarat muddle | Jean Drèze
12. India: Insulting Remarks by Narendra Modi Regarding Persons with Disabilities Reflects a Whole Mindset
13. India: Demographer Ashis Bose was a renaissance man
14. India 2014 Elections: Modi is unsure if the surf's up | Bharat Bhushan
15. Video: The Poison Chalice of Hindutva | Babu Gogineni
16. Book Review: Guha on Sunderland, Financing the Raj: the City of London and Colonial India, 1858-1940
17. Selections from Communalism Watch:
 - India: After the Law - Notes on Gujarat 2002 | Moyukh Chatterjee
 - Mitali Saran: Mr Modi's men
 - Modi Metrics : Will he run the country like he’s run his campaign—around himself? | Saba Naqvi
 - Modi's Private Life is none of our Business - Leave Jashodaben alone
 - India: Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri and the BJP
 - India: Deoband seminary shuts out politicians
 - India: Ladies shifting track – Cases of Madhu Kishwar and Kiran Bedi | Mukul Sinha
 - India: Text of Complaint filed with Election Commission re Policemen Shouting Pro Modi Solgans at polling station in Delhi on 10 April 2014
 - India: Development and doublespeak | Zoya Hasan
 - India : Reportage on Amit Shah the organiser for BJP
 - India 2014: BJP election Posters inside the Delhi Metro
 - “Muck Fodi” Mumbai Rapper A-List Song

::: FULL TEXT :::
18. India: Three reasons why Left is in deep trouble in Kerala | Rishi Majumder
19. When Gandhi was bypassed with respectful attention | K. R. A. Narasiah
20. Rwanda, Twenty Years Later | Samir Amin
21. South Africa: Unite both the head and the hand | Enver Motala, Salim Vally
22. Site of Memory: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Project | Aaron Cutler
23. Call for nomination for the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence (2014)

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1. SRI LANKA: BODU BALA SENA ON THE WARPATH
by Waruni Karunarathne
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The Bodu Bala Sena was at it again! This time they stormed a press conference and verbally abused a monk and a Muslim cleric over a resettlement issue and all this in front of the police officers who stood there doing nothing. 
http://www.sacw.net/article8338.html

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2. TV DISCUSSION: RE-SETTING INDIA, SRI LANKA RELATIONS | INDIA’S WORLD ON RAJYA SABHA TV
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http://www.sacw.net/article8336.html

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3. PAKISTAN: THE WRONG KIND OF TOLERANCE
Editorial, Daily Times
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Tolerance is a fine thing. However, there are limits that any sane society must prescribe, and the presence of autonomous, unaccountable entities that in all likelihood present a danger to the lives of citizens and the security of the state cannot be tolerated. Recently reports have emerged that in the event that peace talks fail, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) allies at religious seminaries in and around the capital, Islamabad, are ready to support the terrorists and help attacks on the city.
http://www.sacw.net/article8335.html

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4. PAKISTAN: HRCP SLAMS THREAT TO LAWYER REPRESENTING BLASPHEMY ACCUSED
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Lahore, April 10: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has voiced serious concern and indignation over threats extended to a senior lawyer representing a blasphemy accused inside a courtroom in the Multan Central Prison.
http://www.sacw.net/article8317.html

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5. TALIBAN PROVOKES NEW HUNGER FOR EDUCATION | Ashfaq Yusufzai
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Following scattered defiance of the Taliban earlier, a new wave of students is now heading for education in schools and colleges across the troubled north of Pakistan.
http://www.sacw.net/article8293.html

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6. IS THIS THE BANGLADESH WE WANTED? ANALYZING THE HINDU POPULATION GAP (2001-2011)
via alaldulal
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Is this the Bangladesh we wanted? Analyzing the Hindu Population Gap (2001-2011) by Garga Chatterjee and Naeem Mohaiemen for AlalODulal.org In October 2012, Prothom Alo published a frightening report that stated, in plain words, that over the last decade (which spans a BNP, an AL, and a Military “CTG” government), the Hindu population of Bangladesh […]
http://www.sacw.net/article8323.html

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7. IF MODI IS ELECTED, IT WILL BODE ILL FOR INDIA'S FUTURE: Salman Rushdie, Imran Khan, John McDonnell, Fiona Mactaggart, Pragna Patel, Jayati Ghosh, Suresh Grover
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Without questioning the validity of India's democratic election process, it is crucial to remember the role played by the Modi government in the horrifying events that took place in Gujarat in 2002. The Muslim minority were overwhelmingly the victims of pillage, murder and terror, resulting in the deaths of more than 2,000 men, women and children. Women, in particular, were subjected to brutal acts of violence and were left largely unprotected by the security forces. Although some members of Narendra Modi's government are now facing trial, Modi himself repeatedly refuses to accept any responsibility or to render an apology. Such a failure of moral character and political ethics on the part of Modi is incompatible with India's secular constitution, which, in advance of many constitutions across the world, is founded on pluralist principles and seeks fair and full representation for minorities. Were he to be elected prime minister, it would bode ill for India's future as a country that cherishes the ideals of inclusion and protection for all its peoples and communities.
http://www.sacw.net/article8318.html

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8. INDIA: BOMBERS FOR A CAUSE?
by Subhash Gatade
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Kagal, lies at the border of Karnataka and Maharashtra and has enough presence of Hindutva supremacist organisations there. And Karnataka itself has been witness to activities of rightwing Hindutva groups who are found to be keen to make the state an experimental lab for furthering their politics and establish its anti-secular agenda.
http://www.sacw.net/article8292.html

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9. INDIA: SEASON OF DISCONTENT
by Teesta Setalvad
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As we go forward into a long summer of election driven high temperatures, there are warnings that in desperation to make the numbers, desperate players will play the predictable, desperate communal card. Will our institutions be paralysed as in the past or rise to the occasion and deliver?
As for us, you and me, we would do well to remember. It is crucial more than now that we ensure that the forces of majoritarian communalism are decisively and resoundingly defeated. At the polls.
http://www.sacw.net/article8334.html

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10. INDIA: BJP’S COMMUNAL ELECTION ARITHMETIC | PRABIR PURKAYASTHA
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The first phase of elections are over with 111 seats going to polls on 7th and 10th. The BJP, which has a thin presence in these seats, now hope to pick up a substantial number. Its main calculation is that its Modi plank, buoyed up by unprecedented media advertisements including the Internet, a paid social media campaign and splashing Modi all over the country’s billboards has created a Modi “wave”. Nothing is more shameful in this campaign than what Amit Shah has done, which finally the Election Commission has stopped. In his every meeting in the riot-hit areas of western UP, Shah had the same message – this is the time for revenge, vote BJP. His speech – framed as it was by other Jat “leaders” before him, was clear. Riots in western UP are only because Muslims threaten “our” women.
http://www.sacw.net/article8333.html

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11. INDIA: THE GUJARAT MUDDLE
by Jean Drèze
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Why does Gujarat have indifferent social indicators, in spite of having enjoyed runaway economic growth and relatively high standards of governance?
http://www.sacw.net/article8322.html

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12. INDIA: INSULTING REMARKS BY NARENDRA MODI REGARDING PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES REFLECTS A WHOLE MINDSET
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The National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled (NPRD) strongly condemns the views expressed by Shri Narendra Modi at Jamshedpur yesterday while campaigning for the BJP there. It has been reported that the BJP's Prime Ministerial aspirant, speaking at an election rally said that "the country does not want a deaf and dumb, handicapped government". The observations by Mr. Modi reflect a hackneyed mindset that is biased against persons with disabilities.
http://www.sacw.net/article8318.html

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13. INDIA: DEMOGRAPHER ASHIS BOSE WAS A RENAISSANCE MAN
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With the death of Ashis Bose, India's foremost demographer, the academic community has lost one of its shining members who not only taught well and researched well but also talked to the powers that be: An inalienable quality of an intellectual.
http://www.sacw.net/article8312.html

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14. INDIA 2014 ELECTIONS: MODI IS UNSURE IF THE SURF'S UP | BHARAT BHUSHAN
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“If the wave has become a tsunami, why is the BJP's prime ministerial candidate playing safe by polarising voters along communal lines?”
http://www.sacw.net/article8306.html

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15. VIDEO: THE POISON CHALICE OF HINDUTVA
by Babu Gogineni
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The Poison Chalice of Hindutva | Babu Gogineni .Babu Gogineni is a Hyderabad-based Indian secular humanist and rationalist who has worked in London and other places. 
http://www.sacw.net/article8332.html

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16. BOOK REVIEW: GUHA ON SUNDERLAND, FINANCING THE RAJ: THE CITY OF LONDON AND COLONIAL INDIA, 1858-1940
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David Sunderland’s book is a detailed and careful study of the London operations that underpinned the finances of the Government of India (GoI) and related enterprises, notably the private-public partnerships that laid the foundation of India’s railway system. It covers the period from the formal takeover of Indian administration by the Crown in 1858 to the first years of World War II.
http://www.sacw.net/article8330.html

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17. SELECTIONS FROM COMMUNALISM WATCH
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India: After the Law - Notes on Gujarat 2002 | Moyukh Chatterjee
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-after-law-notes-on-gujarat-2002.html

Mitali Saran: Mr Modi's men
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/mitali-saran-mr-modis-men.html

Modi Metrics : Will he run the country like he’s run his campaign—around himself? | Saba Naqvi
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/modi-metrics-will-he-run-country-like.html

Modi's Private Life is none of our Business - Leave Jashodaben alone
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/modis-private-life-is-none-of-our.html

India: Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri and the BJP
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-baba-ramdev-and-sri-sri-and-bjp.html

India: Deoband seminary shuts out politicians
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-deoband-seminary-shuts-out.html

India: Ladies shifting track – Cases of Madhu Kishwar and Kiran Bedi | Mukul Sinha
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-ladies-shifting-track-cases-of.html

India: Text of Complaint filed with Election Commission re Policemen Shouting Pro Modi Solgans at polling station in Delhi on 10 April 2014
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-text-of-complaint-filed-with.html

India's 2014 Elections: History not with Gadkari the former chief of BJP
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/indias-2014-elections-history-not-with.html

India: Development and doublespeak | Zoya Hasan
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-development-and-doublespeak-zoya.html

India : Reportage on Amit Shah the organiser for BJP
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-reportage-on-amit-shah-organiser.html

2014 elections: Communal polarization gives BJP the edge in western UP | Asit Ranjan Mishra
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/2014-elections-communal-polarization.html

Modi's 2014 Election Campaign was like a personality cult created around a single national leader
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/modis-2014-election-campaign-was-like.html

Wag The Dog: Will the RSS be able to control Modi like it did Vajpayee? | Kay Benedict
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/wag-dog-will-rss-be-able-to-control.html

India 2014: BJP election Posters inside the Delhi Metro
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-2014-bjp-election-posters-inside.html

“Muck Fodi” Mumbai Rapper A-List Song
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/muck-fodi-mumbai-rapper-list-song.html

A moderate BJP?
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-moderate-bjp.html

Building a culture of tolerance | Vasundhara Sirnate
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/building-culture-of-tolerance.html

India 2014 elections: Think before you divide the secular vote
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-2014-elections-think-before-you.html
    
India: Press Release announces police complaint against Psephologist cum politician Yogendra Yadav by CSDS Prof Madhu Kishwar
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-press-release-announces-police.html
    

::: FULL TEXT & Select URLS:::
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18. INDIA: THREE REASONS WHY LEFT IS IN DEEP TROUBLE IN KERALA
by Rishi Majumder
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(DNA, 10 April 2014 | Place: Thiruvananthapruam)

As Kerala goes to polls, here is Rishi Majumder’s sweeping report on what has happened to the Left Democratic Front

Left leaders of the yesteryears at an LDF office in Kovalam. Image credit: Rishi Majumder

There is a deathly silence at the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)) headquarters at Thiruvananthapuram that makes you want to scream. Or pry. It is lunchtime and the mammoth five-storied structure, the nucleus of Left power in Kerala, is nearly empty. On the third floor, beyond a bold red hammer and sickle at its entrance, a dim corridor is lined on either side with locked doors – office cabins missing nameplates, each christened, instead, with tiny red digits: 40, 39, 38…

Red is the only colour you see. Alongside some of the doors are windows that offer a peek into boring offices with drab chairs, desks, shelves – and red curtains. On nails driven into the wall next to some doors hang keys attached to key chains with plastic red squares. Back at the entrance to the corridor, there is a square board with many hooks that hold more keys and more red squares.

It is hard to believe the Lok Sabha elections in Kerala are just days away. On the second floor of the building I find, at one end of a maze of vacant wooden cubicles, a man and woman working quietly on antiquated computer consoles.

Ground floor. A library. The librarian is seated with someone dressed so inconspicuously he is almost invisible – in faded white shirt and brown trousers. They are attempting a conversation, in monosyllabic whispers. Next to them are the complete works of EMS Namboodiripad – Left god, long dead – on a shelf. Next to these on the floor, against the wall, is placed delicately a large framed black and white photograph of another Left legend of the yesteryear: AK Gopalan. Next to him is an aquarium with goldfish, the most vibrant beings I have encountered at the office so far.

The first floor is connected to the main road via a slab of concrete, like a drawbridge to a fortress, stuck in time. The headquarters is at the corner of A Raghavan Road, a crossroad at which this monolith was built in 1979, 16 years after another crossroad –when the CPI (M) was formed as a breakaway from the Communist Party of India (CPI). The reasons cited for the split are innumerable, but if one were to sum things up simply, the former didn’t want to ally with the Congress. Today, the breakaway is the leader of the Left Democratic Front (LDF), which, along with the CPI and the other parties, form an opposition to the United Democratic Front (UDF), that is led by the Congress. The two fronts straddle Kerala politics. The BJP hasn’t been able to make a dent. Even with Narendra Modi’s recent valiant efforts at rallies and meetings, BJP leaders have only grown so bold as to suggest that they may aim for a vote-share of 9%-11% in the national polls.

Back in the building. A golden-brown hued impressionistic portrait of Namboodiripad, the father of the CPI (M), smiles into the distance from above the reception desk. At the desk is a wiry man buried deep in the Deshabhimani (literally, national pride), the party mouthpiece. In a waiting area, around a TV showing regional news, are some boys lounging on plastic chairs. It is in such a setting that the building’s ‘office secretary’, Sanjivan, appears, wearing a white mundu, a shirt and a veshti.

Sanjivan, who has been with the party for 24 of his 44 years, is a self-effacing man with a moustache and specks of grey hair. He abides by the silence that is the theme of this afternoon. “I cannot disclose how many rooms the headquarters has. That is not for public knowledge.” Instead, when I continue to prod, he guides me to the Chintha Weekly office, across the road. ‘Chintha’ or ponderous thought. Subtle is the Left.

Chintha Weekly is a magazine that was founded after the CPI (M) split, because the new party’s leaders needed a space to air their views which Deshabhimani had refused them back then. Since the two parties have reconciled it has become a place for unified intellectual Left commentary and essays in Malayalam (as opposed to more accessible reportage in the daily) and has been dubbed ‘teacher’ of the party.

The office of this magazine too, is mostly deserted. There are shelves and desks with a lot of paper, and no computers or laptops. CP Narayanan, CPI (M) Rajya Sabha MP and editor, a gentle man who is a clam arguer, is willing to talk.

Narayanan outlines the party’s plans for catching up. He scoffs at questions about why the Left hasn’t really gotten onto social media platforms like the BJP and the Congress. “The Left has always been in step with the latest technology when it comes to media,” he says. “We were among the first to move from the ‘flat-bed rotary’ to ‘circular rotary’ in printing, with the Deshabhimani. And then from the ‘rotary’ to ‘off-set’.” But: “Truth is, only a small percentage of the electorate is online.” Instead, the LDF’s propaganda strategy for this election hinges on two more rudimentary ideas.

First, the family. “We have comprised over 20,000 ‘booth committees’ – one for each booth. Each committee is holding three to five ‘family gatherings’ in the last two weeks before April 8, when campaigning has to stop.” Each gathering will have 20 families and about 60 people in all. They will be intimate settings that will comprise not of speeches but of discussions on local, state-level and national issues. The idea is that if a party is able to convince a family to vote for its candidate (in this case 60 to 100 families per booth), then each family will act as a powerful influencer with regard to other families it knows.

Second, regional TV. “We have identified about 15 Malayalam TV channels,” says Narayanan. “These channels have a high local viewership – especially among housewives.” The LDF has appointed a set of speakers who will be present on debates on each of these channels, everyday.

Both these discourses will essentially revolve around price-rise, corruption (the 2013 Solar Panel Scam that has been traced all the way to the Congress CM Oommen Chandy’s office) and the recommendations of the Kasturirangan Report on the Western Ghats which poses the classic environment versus livelihood conundrum for many.

What still remains, however, are the issues plaguing the Front itself.

Issue one: the outsiders
In and around Thiruvananthapuram, in posters on walls, on light posts, on hoardings at village festivals, everywhere, has sprung up the image of a near-bald, tall, dark man who is always grinning. In a way that is can hardly be coincidental, these images emerge, strategically, right next to similar posters and hoardings of Shashi Tharoor, the Congress candidate from the area.

Bennett Abraham matches his posters to a fault. He has a penchant for amicability. When you meet him for an interview he asks you to “take care of him” and grins. He listens to your questions while grinning and after each answer he grins. He has a positivity about him that’s indefatigable. “He keeps grinning all the time,” one of Tharoor’s aides said, his voice a mix of exasperation and mirth. “He was grinning through a debate he had with Dr Tharoor and Mr O Rajagopal (the BJP candidate). And in the middle of this very serious debate he began waving to someone he knew in the audience.”

Abraham is grinning and waving again, to no one in particular, from the top of his campaign vehicle. His hand rises, his lips spread, in tandem with the photographer next to him raising his camera.

Abraham is one of five new or independent candidates the Left has hosted this election. He has joined the CPI rather than stand as an independent with Left support. Poovachal Sudheer, a Poovachal Local Committee secretary with the CPI, had resigned at Abraham’s candidature and said to journalists on March 14 that it “was impossible” for him to work in “a party which has lost all Communist values”.

It is believed Abraham was nominated to secure the area’s Christian Nadar vote.

“To see a party which is avowedly atheist, avowedly Marxist and so on, openly campaigning on the basis of caste and clan is certainly to my mind a negative step in Kerala politics,” says Tharoor.

“It’s not like we’re nominating any Nadar,” says Narayanan. “He’s a medical doctor, a self made man. He was put in charge of a small dispensary and he worked and developed it into a hospital. He went to Christian Medical College, Vellore (a renowned institute).” He points to all the new candidates the Congress, the BJP and the AAP have inducted, at the time of elections, including Tharoor. “For purposes of legislation and government, the party needs specialists,” he says, referring to Abraham’s medical expertise.

The other new ‘Left’ candidates too have been strategically chosen, so as to be able to identify with a communities whose members exist in great numbers in their respective constituencies. There are two ex-congressmen: V Abdurahman, a Muslim standing from the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) stronghold Ponnani; and a Christian, Philipose Thomas, from Pathanamthitta which has a sizeable Christian population. Innocent, a Malayalam comic actor, is thought of as ideally positioned to bag the Catholic Christian votes in Chalakuddy. But Narayanan points out that he’s also president of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists. Also, he had been elected as a councillor, backed by the Left, as far back as 1979.

All of these candidates are independents. A fifth candidate, another Catholic Christian, former IAS officer Christy Fernandez, is the CPI(M)’s new inductee for Ernakulam, a prime seat with a significant Catholic population.

But in Kerala, proudly India’s most literate state, while voters may rally support for their respective castes or religions, they may not actually insist on having a representative from among themselves. As a boatman on the Kovalam backwaters says: “Even the Nadar community in Thiruvananthapuram will vote for Tharoor. They will vote for whoever can serve them better.”

The Left, with its traditional denial of communal ties, should understand this more than anyone. In Mallapuram, for instance, where the 2011 Census puts Muslims at 68.5% of the population (the second largest in any district in India), it has positioned against IUML heavyweight E Ahamed, PK Sainaba, a woman who refuses to wear the hijab even though she has invoked criticism on this count from many of the area’s conservatives. Contrast this with Ahamed, a minister of state for external affairs, who has put up billboards all over the constituency with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, among others, all exhorting the electorate to vote for him with the words ‘Let us be proud of this World Citizen’. Apparently the idea is that Ahamed has helped many constituency members who keep travelling to the Gulf on work.

Issue two: the violence
“Don’t you want to take revenge on them,” Kallur’s Congress MP and candidate K Sudhakaran was heard screaming into a microphone just last week. “Don’t we need to avenge the cold-blooded murder of TP Chandrasekharan? Of Shukkoor? The killing of Fasal? Of Navas?”

TP Chandrasekharan, the CPI (M) leader who broke away to form the Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP), was hacked to death on May 4, 2012, near Onchiyam, Vadakara. His is the most sensational murder to have hit Kerala’s headlines in recent times.

Abdul Shukkoor, 21, an IUML worker killed on February 20, 2012, by a mob at Keezhara.

Mohammed Fasal, 45, a National Development Front (NDF) worker and newspaper agent, was murdered on October 22, 2006, at Thalassery.

And finally Thaliyappadathu Navas, 40, was hacked to death in Perinjanam, a case of mistaken identity, on March 2, 2014 – barely over a month ago.

CPI (M) members have been accused or convicted for these killings, each so gruesome it would put the most abominable slasher movie to shame. The last, however, pushed events beyond the craziest bounds of tragicomedy. The police arrested CPI (M) leader NK Ramdas for allegedly hiring goons who killed Navas instead of BJP activist Kalladan Gireesh. Apparently, after the killing, Ramdashad organized a hartal to protest it, and collect funds for Navas.

Two of these murders were in Kannur, and so the Left has put up in the constituency, against ‘Tiger-of-Kannur’ Sudhakaran, a kind-faced, bespectacled, older lady who is an ex-health and family welfare minister. Watch PK Sreemathi, nicknamed ‘Teacher’, deliver a speech in gentle broken English accompanied with nervous laughter, and you will realize that she has possibly been put there not so much to win (this is her first LS contest), as to make Sudhakaran’s outrage seem perhaps a bit far-fetched.

Or not. Sainudheen, 2008, another murder where the accused are CPI (M) workers. “The Left have just become violent,” a cab driver in Thiruvananthapuram say simply, by way of explaining why he won’t vote for them. “Too violent.” The benefits of having a mass cadre comes with disadvantages – it’s almost impossible to control them.

And the same holds true for mass leaders. Last week the RMP demanded the arrest of CPI (M) Vadakara candidate AN Shamseer, for call records which indicated he and one of the convicts in the Chandrasekharan case had been in touch till the day before the murder.

This February, ex-Kerala Chief Minister VS Achutanandan had broken party protocol by writing a letter to Oommen Chandy, demanding a CBI probe into the Chandrasekharan case. This led to a storm within the party.

Luckily for the LDF things have been resolved now and the 90-year-old star campaigner – whose ire had been invoked by Rahul Gandhi asking Kerala’s voters if they wanted an octogenarian chief minister (Achutanandan retorted by calling Gandhi and his followers ‘Amul babies’) – is back to enthralling audiences at campaign rallies and meetings.

And then there are those that haven’t been able to reconcile their differences.

Issue three: the alliances
Of the 20 Lok Sabha seats, the CPI (M) has fielded candidates in 15, the CPI in four and the Janata Dal (S) in one. The Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), a Left ally for over 30 years, was denied the Kollam seat. The party walked out of the alliance and is now part of the UDF.

Now RSP leader NK Premachandran is contesting the seat, against MA Baby, the only CPI (M) Politburo member fighting these elections from Kerala. The Left may lose simply because the RSP will draw a lot of votes from LDF supporters because of old ties in the area.

But the Front has gained allies too. Just last month an alliance with a faction within the Communist Marxist Party (CMP) was formalized on March 22, in a rather simplistic fashion. KR Aravindakshan, who led the splitting faction, simply converted the CMP’s Kannur district committee office into an LDF cell. This new alliance could erode at least some of the support the original CMP offered to UDF’s Sudhakaran in Kannur (CMP founder MV Raghavan hails from here).

Meanwhile, posters of feisty 94-year-old KR Gowri Amma, advertising her support for LDF, have sprouted up all over Alappuzha, where Left candidate CB Chandrababu fights UDF’s KC Venugopal. The veteran leader declared a month ago her return to the left, which she had left in 1994 to form the Janadhipathya Samrakshana Samithi (UDF ally till this year). LDF leaders took great glee in terming Gowri Amma’s return, announced in Alappuzha where she was born, a “homecoming”.

“To have a united front there must be give and take,” says Narayanan. “The RSP was holding the Kollam LS seat till 1998 and it was only then that it was decided that the CPI(M) should take it over.”

He adds: “The CPI (M) is the strongest party in the front. But it cannot have everything.”

Indeed. The party lost the Kollam seat last polls, which was what prompted RSP’s Premachandran to insist on it this time round.

At a shack just outside the CPI(M) headquarters, lunch is being served to cadres. The shack owner, jolly, middle-aged, serves me a coffee. Hung on a wall in the shack is a colour photograph of a well-built, if over-weight, bespectacled man, in a mundu and white shirt and black sandals, holding a glass of black tea, sitting at this very shack.

“Baby,” says the shack-owner, beaming almost with coy pride, as if the politburo member who is Premchandran’s opponent were his offspring.

The picture is faded and seems to belong to another era though it must not have been taken long ago. The shack itself is just two years old. Baby keeps a straight face yet in one corner of his lips you can make out the shadow of a smile. In the midst of an election campaign that is an insane din of warring posters and hoardings, it radiates warmth, an everlasting calm.

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19. WHEN GANDHI WAS BYPASSED WITH RESPECTFUL ATTENTION
K. R. A. Narasiah
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(Book Reviews - The Hindu, April 7, 2014)

Mahatma Gandhi - The Congress and the Partition of India: D.C. Jha; KW Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 4676/21, I Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 595.

The book under review is the fourth edition of the title with additional information and comments spread over almost all the chapters. Eminently suitable to record the events as they took place during the period dealt with in the book, since the author Jha was with the Mahatma during the period immediately before the Indian Independence and the country’s partition and acquired first hand knowledge of what all he has chosen to record in this book. The author was in the party that accompanied Gandhi on the visit to Noakhali after the 1946 communal riots. He takes pain to reveal the passionate pursuit of the Mahatma to somehow stop dismembering India which was the desire of both England and Jinnah.

The book opens with the scene after the Second World War and Churchill’s adamant position regarding India’s independence. The first chapter lays the foundation for the book in which the author gives a clear picture of the events that preceded the independence of India. Though the narration is brief, no important point is left out of the scenario in which all the leaders of the movement appear along with the English people in their pivotal positions.

Gandhiji knew the partition would uproot millions of men and women with children from both sides of the divided country across the border; he foresaw the tragedy that would follow and strove hard to prevent such a separation taking place. The present generation will benefit from this chapter to understand history much better as in the following decades history has been twisted and retold in different forms to suit the necessity of times. Going through this narration one would be able at once to grasp where the country erred.

In the chapter Gandhi and Partition, the author records and rightly so by saying, “The curtain on the drama leading to partition had been rolled up by the Congress when abandoning its age-long stand against division of the country, on communal or religious lines, it demanded a few weeks before the arrival of the last Viceroy in March 1947, a partition of Punjab into Hindu and Muslim majority areas without consulting Gandhi.”

In the chapter, “Congress Breaches Gandhi’s Trust” the author explains how the Congress leaders allowed themselves to become willing partners with the British in dividing their motherland. He quotes Pyarelal Gandhi’s secretary: “The Congress dropped the pilot” Tired of going to prison again the leaders agreed to partition, said Nehru to his biographer Michael Brecher.

The seventh chapter is important in which the narration goes through the compelling need of the British to ram down the Indian throat the decision to divide the country and proclaimed to the world the ‘chief priests and elders’ of the Indian parties asked them to do so! That partition did happen in spite of Gandhi pleading not to shatter the beautiful mosaic of composite culture and heritage of the sub-continent is the tragedy, Gandhi’s advice having fallen on deaf ears.

Gandhi and Congress is a chapter in which the story unfolds as to how and why Gandhi did not succeed. Mountbatten had realised early that if he could not get the Muslim League to agree to keep India united, he would have to make the Congress leaders agree to its division. He found Gandhi unrelenting and found in Nehru a possible source to plough the decision through. Mountbatten being a clever diplomat as well, knew how he could use the good offices of Vallabhbhai Patel and Krishna Menon through V. P. Menon a trusted lieutenant of Patel. Mountbatten had found, the author says, “Nehru and Patel had no objection to put Gandhi on a pedestal, admired … consulted, listened to with respectful attention and bypassed” Very impressive point indeed!

The book must be read to understand Gandhi properly in connection with his stand on partition. The appendix has important papers like Gandhi’s last will and testament — completely forgotten now — and exchange of letters with various leaders, the British PM’s statement on Transfer of Power by June 1948 in February 20, 1947, and earlier introduction to the book by Dr. Mohan Dharia. The book is an excellent narration of a time that is not understood properly, especially for this generation to read and comprehend the phenomenon that was Gandhi.

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20. RWANDA, TWENTY YEARS LATER
by Samir Amin
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(MRzine - 9 April 2014)

Twenty years later, full light has not been thrown on the shooting down of the plane of the then president of Rwanda, Habyarimana.  The event was immediately followed by the genocide of the Tutsis by Hutu militias.  Two hypotheses remain to this day equally possible: 1) the plane was shot down by Hutu extremists, making a pretext of the event to initiate the planned cleansing as well as get rid of the president who opposed it; 2) the plane was shot down by Tutsis in order to provoke a massacre and obtain the pretext for their "liberation army" stationed in Uganda to "liberate" (or "invade") Rwanda, even if they may have underestimated the size of the massacre of which they would be the victims.

The tragedy is not an ethnic war as usually reported.  Hutus and Tutsis belong to the same nation, speak the same language.  "Hutu" is the name given to the majority (85%) of peasants submitted to the power of an aristocracy, called "Tutsi," who are the owners of numerous cattle and, being free from agricultural labor, devote their time to administering the country.  A system similar to the Hindu castes, without being as extreme: intermarriages are permitted.  The Germans ruled Rwanda, their colony, until 1919 through a compromise leaving to the local aristocracy its economic privileges, giving their choice an explanation according to which the Tutsis were a "superior race."  The national liberation movement was, for that reason, confused.  As elsewhere the local privileged classes (here the Tutsis), too, joined the demand for independence, hoping to maintain their positions, while many Hutu leaders combined independence with social demands aiming at removing the privileges of the Tutsis.  In Burundi a compromise was reached between those two views, but not in Rwanda, where the Hutus wholly captured the power.  As a result a number of Tutsi leaders emigrated to Uganda and organized in exile an "army" with the support of Uganda and the US.

France, Belgium, and the US have been involved in the region and therefore share responsibility for the tragedy.  In particular, France and Belgium, who supported the "Hutu" regime of Kigali, certainly could not have been unaware that the extremists in the regime were planning a genocide.  Nonetheless, replacing a government of the majority by a quasi-restoration of a power system ignoring it is not viable.  According to the Arusha agreement free, transparent, and fair elections should be held, whose results would certainly compel the regime now in power to at least make serious concessions to the vast Hutu majority.  Kagame does not accept that.  His military dictatorship must continue, supported by Washington.  The Western powers are interested not in the doubtful riches of Rwanda, but in the immense mineral resources of the eastern part of the neighboring Congo, in particular rare minerals.  The modernized army of Kagame, fully devoted from the very start to its US masters, is for that purpose a useful tool: it not only controls Rwanda but also operates in Congo with the pretext of chasing the Hutu remnants of the former Rwandan army; it even had the arrogant ambition of controlling Kinshasa, until Kabila abandoned his previous military supporter and started re-conquering the eastern provinces of Congo.  There had been times of tension between the US and France and Belgium, until the Europeans seemingly accepted the US command in the region.  But that command might be questioned.  African countries -- Uganda, the major ally of Washington in the region, first; then South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola -- have been supporting one or the other side, i.e. Kagame or Kabila.

The case of Rwanda is indeed tragic.  There are no signs of the region moving away from continuous wars and chaos allowing permanent imperialist interference and plunder of its resources.  The only acceptable solution would be diluting the violent inheritance of Rwanda through the building of a kind of loose "confederation" of the Great Lakes region, incorporating Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Congo (there are Hutu/Tutsi minorities in all these countries), pursuing a common sovereign project as distant as possible from the Western powers.  An immense task for the popular and democratic forces in the region.

Samir Amin is director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal.  Among his latest works are The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism and Three Essays on Marx's Value Theory, both published by Monthly Review Press in 2013.

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21. SOUTH AFRICA: UNITE BOTH THE HEAD AND THE HAND
by Enver Motala, Salim Vally
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(www.mg.co.za - 12 Apr 2014)

We can overcome education models that still entrench social divisions.

If the many South African educationalists of the past, ­including IB Tabata, WT Thibedi, Olive Schreiner, AC Jordan, Rick Turner, Ruth First, Steve Biko, Matthew Goniwe, Fatima Meer, Es’kia Mphahlele, Abu Asvat, Dennis Brutus and Neville Alexander, who represent the diverse political traditions of this country, are to be taken seriously, then the narrow, reductive and economistic ­perspective that is today the dominant approach drowning out ­important ideas on education and society must be rejected.

Their legacy gave rise to vibrant and vital education social movements in South Africa’s recent past, intended to instil in society the importance of knowledge as essential to the development of a citizenry – for the fullest expression of civic rights and responsibilities, for such elementary rights as numeracy and literacy, accessing public goods, making informed choices and, most importantly, for ensuring greater levels of democratic accountability of public representatives and organisations.

The purposeful education their legacy embraced recognises that the role of education and training involves understanding the many cultures, values and belief systems in society, rebutting “race”, gender, ethnic and other stereotypes; the ability to evaluate ideas and systems critically for transformative and critical thinking; and the ability to communicate socially and to work for oneself and for society – and indeed to stimulate “intellectual curiosity”. This is a vision that entails a potential role of education and training systems in which a framework for state-directed support for working-class and poor communities can be achieved and a wide range of socially useful activities that are amenable to educational interventions exist.

These include interventions in healthcare, early childhood development, care for the aged, frail and disabled, locally based economic activities, co-operative development initiatives, cultural initiatives, small-scale enterprise and other activities specifically directed at engaging communities in the process of development.

Many of these activities could have direct benefits for such communities and reduce the expectation that reliance on market-driven systems would produce the conditions for “labour absorption” and “higher participation rates” through formal employment. For instance, such communities could (and can) be engaged in a range of projects relating to areas such as primary health, the local economy, housing development, service infrastructure, land usage, recreation and cultural activities and support for schools.

Useful activities
Indeed, there are examples of communities that support the unemployed through finding useful activities such as childcare, community and school meal services, school renovation and maintenance of public spaces. These activities, if undertaken collectively, have the potential to graduate into co-operative forms of production and distribution.

Much more has to be done to realise the potential for co-operative forms of production and distribution and to understand the educational requirements of such forms of production, because here too there is a valuable history of worker co-operatives that provide the evidence and the potential for humanising and creative approaches to the formation of skills and competencies in developing societies. We hold the view that education can bring together the worlds of intellectual and physical labour, and overcome the separation of “head and hand” that characterises so much of the present education and training discourse – one that privileges abstraction relative to action and separates the academic from the vocational.

The distinguishing approach to the chapters in this book is its orientation to the question of unequal social relations in all societies dominated by the power of “market fundamentalism” and its ideological battering ram, neoliberal approaches to all social, economic, political and cultural questions. These approaches have no regard for their damning implications for the majority in many developing societies, characterised by the reality of social disempowerment, landlessness, poverty, low-wage and cultural entrapment.

These “citizens” (so-called) constitute if not a majority of the world population, then a very significant part of it. In our view, present approaches to the (ostensibly uncomplicated) nexus between education and work are insouciant about the influence of social power – that is, the entrenched inequality in the social relations that are extant in all ­fragmented and divided societies dominated by the influence of global corporate interests.

A useless mantra
These approaches avoid any purposive reflection on the implications of their framing conditions and fail to recognise its deeply structural characteristics. They continue to speak only abstractedly about issues of poverty, inequality and unemployment without engaging with their fundamental implications for any meaningful conception of the idea of transformation and change. As they do not address questions of unequal social power and its impacts, such discussions about poverty anbd its effects have assumed the status of a mantra having no clear relationship to the underlying causalities or structural impediments that stand as impregnable barriers to change.

This inability to recognise that underlying any possibility for genuine social transformation is the question of how members of society – whether they be classified racially or in gendered, social-class or geographic terms – occupy vastly differing social places and roles and consequently have vastly differing allocation of “capabilities”: they occupy social roles largely transfixed in time and bequeathed to succeeding generations of disempowered communities.

The idea that socially fragmented and divided societies can, without reference to the problem of entrenched power, deal with the impact and social reality of structural, personal and social inequalities and their implications for freedom and justice is naive and disingenuous, if not deliberately ­misleading. In this regard it is also our view that references to the power of the Constitution are not particularly helpful because they seek to cede to constitutional fiat the possibilities for addressing the structural attributes of unequal power. Although the Constitution is a hugely influential document, and its moral imperative has resulted in some far-reaching improvements in the conditions of some poor communities, it simply cannot resolve the fundamental contradictions that abide in a post-apartheid capitalist society and the underlying relations of power that characterise such a society.

Discussions about “successful” economies, invariably approached on the basis of the continued social differentiation and “special zones of economic activity” – in which ideas about equal rights must be suspended – hardly address the underlying conditions. Similarly, “youth subsidies” in which social conventions begin to be entrenched to make the idea of “less than equal” become an acceptable norm, “flexible labour conditions” as the basis of economic stimulation touted uncritically as the panacea to competitive economic performance are extremely retrogressive and harmful for any conception of social cohesion and justice.

Limits of present perspectives
From all of the above one can conclude that a tendentious way of framing the issue has taken precedence and that its influence is ubiquitous. It is the simplistic notion that in South Africa at this time education and training will resolve the problems of unemployment both because they will build economic capability and simultaneously resolve the problem of job creation. We point to the limits of the present perspectives, the overt and subliminal impact of the standpoint of the corporate world, the enchantment of the public media with their point of view and even academic discourses that speak uncritically about the benefits of supply-side interventions and ignore almost entirely the problem of low and muted demand – a social phenomenon inseparable from market-driven economic systems.

The objective of this volume is to provide not only a constructive critique about the limits of the present approaches on this issue but also a wider, more responsive and encompassing conceptual lens through which to examine education and the economy or work and schooling/post-schooling. We emphasise a view of education consonant with a vastly different society from one that which bears the unnerving stamp of global corporate agendas.

In our view, conventional approaches are likely to entrench the bifurcation of society along the cleavages that are currently self-evident, increase the powerlessness of those who are so incapacitated and marginalised while simultaneously continuing the process of enhancing social privilege and deepening the continuities of the country’s colonial and apartheid past. In this there is no hope for any alternative for the majority, only the entrenchment of their “unfreedom” and underdevelopment.

Enver Motala is adjunct professor at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and a researcher at the Nelson Mandela Institute for Education and Rural Development, University of Fort Hare. Associate Professor Salim Vally is director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation in the University of Johannesburg’s education faculty. This is an edited extract from the introduction to their co-edited book, Education, the Economy and Society, to be published soon by Unisa PressUnite both the head and the hand

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22. SITE OF MEMORY: CLAUDE LANZMANN’S SHOAH PROJECT 
by Aaron Cutler
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(Los Angeles Review of Books - April 8th, 2014) 

Thanks to Jonathan Rosenbaum for research help with this article.

I’m sorry, you accuse me of sidetracking all the time but one cannot understand things without their context.

— Benjamin Murmelstein, The Last of the Unjust (2013)

¤ 

AT THIS YEAR'S Berlin International Film Festival, a film called German Concentration Camps Factual Survey received its world premiere. The Allied Forces–commissioned work consisted primarily of footage shot during the 1945 liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camps, and had been left unfinished for more than 80 years before British Imperial War Museum staff members made the final edit. As the screen filled with cracked skulls, corpses in ditches, and gaunt, near-catatonic former prisoners, a male narrator explained what was being shown. Three members of the restoration team appeared before and after the screening to speak with the audience. They would not allow the film to be screened publicly, they said, without the chance for public conversation. Images like these needed context.

Discussions of the Holocaust often call for meta-discussions. Hitler’s project has become so culturally ubiquitous and so abused in its invocation that it is easy to confuse depictions for memories and representations for the thing itself. Context is vital for understanding the aims and accuracy of any Holocaust representation that one views, especially as the number of living survivors — and by extension, witnesses — dwindles. The goals behind a film like German Concentration Camps Factual Survey seem relatively unambiguous, more educational than artistic. Its makers’ first and foremost wish was to provide future generations with a record of what happened.

The French director Claude Lanzmann’s latest film, The Last of the Unjust, presents a different kind of historical record. It strives to convey subjective registers of the Holocaust through interwoven moments recorded during two time periods. The first set of scenes comes from an unearthed 1975 interview in Rome between a 49-year-old Lanzmann and the garrulous 70-year-old Austrian former rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein. The older man speaks perspicaciously about his role as the last surviving “Jewish Elder” (Judenälteste) and member of the Jewish Council (Judenrat) responsible during World War II for organizing what the Nazis considered their “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt in the former Czech Republic. The film’s second set of scenes comes from close to the present day. The 87-year-old Lanzmann, still able and alert, wanders the Terezin sites where camps and deportation trains used to exist. He reads aloud from the writings left behind by Murmelstein and others, and shares his own thoughts about the passage of time.

¤

The Last of the Unjust forms part of a larger project about memory, which Lanzmann has been working on for over 40 years. It began with a commission that Lanzmann, the child of Eastern European Jewish émigrés and a former French Resistance fighter, received in 1973 from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Ministry had been impressed by Lanzmann’s documentary Pourquoi Israël, which vibrantly surveyed the rhythms of daily life in the 25-year-old Jewish State, in whose right to exist Lanzmann passionately believed. The filmmaker’s assignment was to make a documentary about the reason for Israel’s existence: what had happened during the Second World War to Europe’s Jews.

Lanzmann had been deeply impressed in his youth by the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Lanzmann had lived as a lover for seven years and co-edited the intellectual journal Les Temps Modernes. Among Lanzmann’s formative intellectual experiences was a reading of Sartre’s book-length essay “Anti-Semite and Jew,” which famously argued: “It is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew.” As with many previously secular, casually integrated European Jews, Lanzmann was awakened by Nazism into claiming his Jewish identity, defining himself in relation to a terrible force.

Though the cinematographer of Lanzmann’s film project, William Lubtchansky, had lost his father at Auschwitz, the filmmaker himself did not have any nuclear family members killed in the camps. Even so, he understood from an early age that Nazism threatened him and his loved ones by challenging in an unprecedented way, the existence of their race. The Nazis did not want merely to kill the Jews, but to erase them. Lanzmann therefore believed that footage like the material seen in German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (much of which already existed publicly at that time) did not reflect a deeper truth. The piles of corpses offered presence when the dominant theme of the Final Solution was absence — the absences of tradition, of relief, of pleasure, of humanity. Archival footage could not show the disappearances of innumerable Jews inside the gas chambers. What troubled Lanzmann about the fate of so many was not death, but lack of life.  

To combat this problem of absence, Lanzmann, Lubtchansky, and the other members of the film crew made a restorative film. They traveled to multiple European countries, the United States, and Israel over the following 12 years in order to interview surviving concentration camp prisoners, Nazi party members who worked in the camps, and residents of villages where the camps had stood. They also filmed the natural landscapes where the camps were located — now depopulated fields that Lanzmann would call “non-sites of memory.” The resulting film premiered theatrically in 1985. Its four-movement structure, spanning nine-and-a-half hours, unfolded firmly in the present, with the filmmakers eschewing archive footage in order to focus on conversations with people transforming their past experiences into new ones.

Crucially, Lanzmann did not call this film Holocaust, already the name of a melodramatic TV miniseries and a term that Lanzmann refused both for its “sacrificial connotation” — the word literally denotes “large fires” — and for its co-optation by the mass media. He instead christened it Shoah, the Hebrew word for “catastrophe,” which had gained a second meaning among some Jews as a name for their greatest disaster. In the film, victims gained agency through telling their stories, an implication suggested with an opening title card from the Book of Isaiah: “I will give them an everlasting name.”

¤

Shoah appeared last year on a Criterion Collection home video release that features three subsequent Lanzmann films made from interview footage originally recorded for it. The main reason for all this materials’ exclusion was Lanzmann’s desire to make a film specifically about the process of exterminating the Jews that would only minimally address other aspects of the Third Reich’s rule. He based his approach on refusing to try to understand what had happened, believing, as Primo Levi wrote about the camps: “Here there is no why.” Rather, Lanzmann would address “what” and “how.”

Each of Shoah’s interviews proceeds in the manner laid out by one of Lanzmann’s interviewees, historian Raul Hilberg, early in the film. “In all of my work I have never begun by asking the big questions because I was always afraid I would come up with small answers,” says Hilberg, the author of a key reference book for Lanzmann, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). “I have preferred, therefore, to address these things which are minutiae or detail in order that I might then be able to put together, in a gestalt, a picture, which, if not an explanation, is at least a description, a more full description, of what transpired.”

Lanzmann follows Hilberg’s lead by avoiding the abstract and instead asking his interview subjects specific questions about the details of what happened to the Jews, building a micro-history of the exterminations over time. The camera often rests on a person’s face while Lanzmann asks what color the trains were, how bodies were gathered together in the camps, how the person survived it all, and other points of fact. When the person speaks in French, in German, or in English, Lanzmann responds in kind; when he or she speaks in Czech, in Hebrew, or in Polish, an overlapping offscreen translator’s voice builds a bridge between interviewee and interviewer. Repeated variations on simple phrases come to resonate more deeply each time they are uttered.

The film records the past and the present at the same time. As the camera patiently sits with people, the film plays out in time while existing beyond it, letting the words and silences create spaces for viewers to fill with their imaginations. Some scenes present voices without faces, allowing verbal descriptions to overlay a field where a camp once stood. In other scenes, words drop out altogether, leaving the viewer with a train moving forward past long, flat rows of grass.

¤

Shoah, which does not depict a single corpse or killing directly, has often been called the defining film about the destruction of Europe’s Jews. At the same time, it has been widely criticized for its scant discussion of the Nazis’ many non-Jewish victims (in keeping with Lanzmann’s tight focus on the Jewish exterminations), and its exaggerated representation of contemporary anti-Semitism among villagers in the towns where the camps formerly stood. (In response to this criticism, Lanzmann also shows Gentiles who are saddened to have lost their Jewish neighbors, and even some who tried to help them.)

One could also take issue with Lanzmann’s aggressive ways of getting his material, whether through staging scenes or relentlessly asking questions during their moments of doubt. Yet part of Lanzmann’s artistic integrity lies in his very willingness to expose himself — doing so from Shoah’s outset — providing viewers with the tools with which to judge him by foregrounding his own process of learning and struggling. “The structure of a film must determine its own intelligibility,” Lanzmann has said of Shoah, which presents its segments by topic rather than chronologically, reflecting Lanzmann’s process of reconstructing what took place.

The filmmaker’s onscreen presence emerges and recedes within the sheer vastness of Shoah’s canvas; Lanzmann plays everything from key support to co-protagonist in his four subsequent films directly related to Shoah, each of which features extended opening text that gives context for the material. (Lanzmann has also since made 1995’s Tsahal, a tribute to the Israeli military.) Prior to The Last of the Unjust, Lanzmann had made 1997’s A Visitor from the Living, which focused on an interview with former Swiss Red Cross representative Maurice Rossel about his 1944 visit to the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt; 2001’s Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4:00 P.M., which concentrated on the former Sobibor camp prisoner Yehuda Lerner’s blow-by-blow account of an attempted uprising; and 2010’s The Karski Report, which presented previously unused material from Lanzmann’s Shoah interview with the former Polish government spy Jan Karski about how world leaders, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, refused to respond directly to his news of the exterminations.

Within The Karski Report — which Lanzmann released in response to what he considered a slanderous book about Karski — both the filmmaker and Karski claim that many who knew about the Shoah did nothing to stop it because they could not believe that it was happening. This thought is also expressed by A Visitor to the Living’s figure of Rossel, who left Theresienstadt after an eight-hour visit and wrote a report minimizing its conditions. Rossel claimed that there were 400 deaths in the ghetto each month rather than the actual number of 5,000, and did not discuss deportations even though more than 100,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz and to Treblinka before and after his visit. “I couldn’t make up things I hadn’t seen,” the former humanitarian worker insists, continuing to justify what he wrote while Lanzmann corrects his facts. The incensed filmmaker finally switches tactics and responds by reading out loud from a “heartbreaking” document — a missive written by Rossel’s host and Theresienstadt Jewish Elder Paul Eppstein declaring that the ghetto would only survive through a full commitment to work.

Three months after Rossel’s visit, the Nazis murdered Eppstein, a fate that Benjamin Murmelstein recalls to Lanzmann in The Last of the Unjust. Both of Murmelstein’s Theresienstadt predecessors were murdered, in fact; this third and last Jewish Elder claims that he survived because, like Scheherezade, he could tell a good story. The short, fat, bespectacled charmer proceeds to narrate such a tale from his Roman balcony for Lanzmann. Murmelstein recalls with earthy humor his duties, which included teaching Adolf Eichmann the intricacies of mass emigration while planning how to rescue Theresienstadt’s Jews himself.

¤

Murmelstein did not appear at all in Shoah, despite being the first person that Lanzmann decided to film. Lanzmann kept his 14 hours of interview footage housed in the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum until he finally decided to make a film with it, claiming in Unjust’s opening text that, “I had no right to keep it to myself.” He states that for a long time he “backed away from the difficulties of constructing such a film.” Indeed, Murmelstein proves adept at avoiding imposed meanings, a verbal jouster who seems happy to talk with Lanzmann while nimbly dodging thesis statements.

The title The Last of the Unjust comes from Murmelstein’s description of himself. It pays ironic homage to André Schwarz-Bart’s 1959 novel The Last of the Just, an epic about a Jewish family whose final surviving member dies in Auschwitz. By contrast, Murmelstein was a Nazi collaborator who served 18 months in a Czech prison and afterward lived as a pariah in the eyes of many Jews. Among those who denounced him was the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who condemned the Jewish Elders as criminals playing cogs within the larger machine of Nazism’s “banality of evil.” Murmelstein explicitly rebukes Arendt by asserting that both he and Eichmann were intelligent men with free will who capably chose to kill or help others, and justifies his own work to Lanzmann as an effort to save his people under the worst possible circumstances. Accusations that he tried to starve fellow Jews, he claims, fail to recognize that he refused to let them die of typhus. He says, “An elder of the Jews must be condemned but cannot be judged.”

Murmelstein’s typically evasive characterization of the interview as “a belated epilogue to my activity during the period” can also be understood as Lanzmann’s justification for making this film, as though to try to come closer to resolving what Shoah started. At 210 minutes, The Last of the Unjust is the longest film that Lanzmann has made since Shoah, and similarly, the extended length enriches the sense that time has passed. Among the ways in which Unjust underlines this passage is through a direct juxtaposition. For the first time in Lanzmann’s Shoah films, moving images of the same person at markedly differently ages are shown. The person is Lanzmann himself, filmed as a dapper middle-aged man by William Lubtchansky, and as an old man in a sweat suit by Lubtchansky’s camera assistant on Shoah, Caroline Champetier, following the cinematographer’s death in 2010.

Lubtchansky passed away the year following the publication of Lanzmann’s memoir, The Patagonian Hare, much of which details their work on Shoah. Lanzmann begins his first film following his life story’s publication with the announcement that time is escaping him, as he stands at a train station where Jews were once transported and observes, “We cannot control the traffic.” This line gains weight if one considers that Lanzmann and his Shoah crew staged the earlier film’s train scenes, even renting the train to do it. The Last of the Unjust looks backward, even breaking a former Lanzmann taboo by presenting archival materials aside from the Murmelstein footage. Scenes play from a 1944 Nazi propaganda film called The Führer Gives a Gift of a Town to the Jews, filmed to promote Theresienstadt’s model image; paintings made by Jews who lived in Theresienstadt and were deported fill the screen, illustrating voyages taken both by living Jews and by corpses.

While virtually no filmed records exist of the extermination process (and Lanzmann has claimed that he would have shunned using them for Shoah even so), these images help give a fuller depiction of ghetto life than what Murmelstein alone can provide.

Despite Lanzmann’s claim in the Criterion interview accompanying Shoah that “my film is about those that can’t bear witness,” his epic is full of eyewitness testimony; by the time of The Last of the Unjust’s making, however, nearly every person featured in Shoah had died. The present-day scenes of the later film, in fact, pay tribute to many more deceased people than living survivors.. The spaces in Terezin that Lanzmann visits include sites formerly used by the Nazis as well as synagogues and memorials with long lists of the names of Jews murdered during the war. A cantor stands alone in a synagogue chanting the Mourner’s Kaddish, which is the Jewish prayer for the dead. The ranks of the departed remembered in Unjust include Murmelstein, who passed away in 1989, nearly 25 years before Lanzmann finished his film.

¤

It is the work of the living to give context for the dead, to name them as individuals and do what one can to create for them a second life. Lanzmann has worked throughout the life of his Shoah project to give particularity to the dead for the sake of the living, despite Murmelstein invoking the myth of Orpheus to him in 1975 as a warning: “Sometimes, looking back is not a good thing.” After much looking back, the record of their exchanges called The Last of the Unjust ends with a gaze into the future. Its final image consists of Murmelstein and Lanzmann, who have finished their interview, walking together toward the Arch of Titus, originally built after the destruction of the Jews’ Second Holy Temple. Murmelstein comments that, like a dinosaur blocking the highway, his eventual death will clear the way for younger people. Soon after, Lanzmann puts his arm around Murmelstein in a gesture of friendship.

Murmelstein earlier said that he has never gone to Israel and feels no desire to do so; for him, unlike for Lanzmann, the idea of a unified Jewry is no more than another myth. We therefore might watch their momentary bond at film’s end with confusion, unease, or even satisfaction from knowing what is to come. Murmelstein’s generation will be gone someday, and Lanzmann’s role will change: he will be not just an organizer of other people’s memories of the Shoah, but himself among its last survivors, giving meaning to his thoughts and those of others as tools for future use.

In memory of the members of the Berkowitz and Berkovic families who survived the concentration camps, and of my more than 100 relatives that died in them. 


 Aaron Cutler is a Jewish American film critic who lives in São Paulo with his wife, the artist Mariana Shellard.

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23. CALL FOR NOMINATION FOR THE UNESCO MADANJEET SINGH PRIZE FOR THE PROMOTION OF TOLERANCE AND NON-VIOLENCE (2014)
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Last date for the nomination is 2nd June, 2014
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002270/227034E.pdf (English)

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