Tag: Politics

Shin Godzilla

Shin Godzilla

シン・ゴジラ [Shin Godzilla] (2016)

Toho Pictures

Directors: Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi

Main Cast: Hiroki Hasegawa, Satomi Ishihara, Yutaka Takenouchi

A reboot of the Gojira/Godzilla franchise, this is really an excellent monster film.  The best parts are about political symbolism. Having watched a number of dumb big-budget Hollywood superhero films recently, I was troubled by how many relied on a frame of a “post-political” society, where all important political decisions are just handed out (down) by unseen technocrats. I thought it would be more interesting to show the deliberations of politicians. Well, Shin Godzilla does exactly that!

The Gojira/Godzilla franchise has shown many different sides of the monster, from an uncontrollable force of destruction, to a helper of humanity, to an object of scientific study. Aspects of this film draw upon some of the ways scientific inquiry was vaunted in the 1990s films. But there is a much more political and serious tone to this film.  Here, the monster is finally defeated by a mostly self-organized team of nerds that works together in parallel with the military to defeat the monster, following much destruction.

The political commentary in the film ranges from traditional franchise concerns about nuclear energy and weapons (Gojira/Godzilla in this film is a sea creature that self-mutates after eating nuclear waste, and is powered by nuclear fission), including the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi reactor meltdown, to post WWII pacifism (including Shinzō Abe‘s plan to re-write the Japanese constitution to step away from pacifism), the (real or perceived) subordinate relationship of Japan to U.S. political interests, corporatization and putting profits over people, and more. While the film is sometimes a bit ridiculous — often in a good, campy way, like the wonderfully unrealistic depiction of the monster with bulging eyes and a bulk that still resembles an actor in a rubber monster suit — mostly, this film is expertly delivered. Central to the story is the way it presents existing political institutions as being unable or unwilling to confront current circumstances.  The monster is a symbol of the internal contradictions of Japanese society (and capitalism). It would not be too much to say that this is one of the most Leninist films of its day!

Carl Hart Quote on the War on Drugs

Quote of Carl Hart from the interview “Neuroscientist Carl Hart: We Need to Stop Jeff Sessions from Escalating the Racist War on Drugs”:

CARL HART: Well, what it means is that he—well, as you know, under [former U.S. Attorney General] Eric Holder, Eric Holder has suggested—or his memo said that we shouldn’t engage in those mandatory minimums [i.e., mandatory minimum criminal prison sentences]. So he gave judges flexibility, whereas [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions is encouraging the judges to go back to mandatory minimum. What that means is that people will get harsher sentences for drug-related violations now. And what that means ultimately—as [Anthony] Papa has said, we all know the drug war didn’t work. That’s not entirely true, because the drug war did work for certain segments of our population. And that’s where the crux of this policy really needs to be interrogated. It allows—Jeff Sessions is allowing us or is using drug policy to separate the people who we like from the people who we don’t like. And it provides a way to go after those people we don’t like, usually poor minority folks, without explicitly saying we don’t like those people. And that’s how drug law—that’s how drug law or drug policy has been enforced in this country. And so, if we allow Sessions to turn back the hands of time, then shame on all of us. The blood is on all of our hands, because we know the consequences of his proposed actions.

(Emphasis added)

 

Bonus link: Mladen Dolar on “University Discourse”

Slavoj Žižek On Political Struggle

“Ernesto Laclau has conceptualized . . . the struggle for hegemony.  *** That is to say, class struggle is ultimately the struggle for the meaning of society ‘as such’, the struggle for which of the two classes will impose itself as the stand-in for society ‘as such’, thereby degrading its other into the stand-in for the non-Social (the destruction of, the threat to, society).

“To simplify: Does the masses’ struggle for emancipation pose a threat to civilization as such, since civilization can thrive only in a hierarchical social order?  Or is it that the ruling class is a parasite threatening to drag society into self-destruction, so that the only alternative to socialism is barbarism?”

Slavoj Žižek, Afterword to Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin From 1917 (pp. 209-10)

See also “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism” (“The struggle for ideological and political hegemony is thus always the struggle for the appropriation of the terms which are ‘spontaneously’ experienced as ‘apolitical’, as transcending political boundaries.”) and “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master,” Gaze and Voice as Love Objects: SIC 1 (1996) (“The question of the suitability of the term ‘class struggle’ to designate today’s dominant form of antagonism is here secondary, it concerns concrete social analysis; what matters is that the very constitution of social reality involves the ‘primordial repression’ of an antagonism, so that the ultimate support of the critique of ideology—the extra ideological point of reference that authorizes us to denounce the content of our immediate experience as ‘ideological’—is not ‘reality’ but the ‘repressed’ real of antagonism.”)

Bonus links: What Is to Be Done? (“the only choice is—either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology).”) and comments by Domenico Losurdo (“for [Niall] Ferguson as for today’s dominant ideology, there is no doubt: colonial domination and the bloodbath of world war are synonymous with normality, or even with psychological good health, while the October Revolution – opposed to all this – represents epidemic, the spread of madness.“) and The Fragile Absolute and “Fake News” and Annie Wood Besant, An Autobiography (1893) (“‘…Must there always be rich and poor?’ Some say that it must be so; that the palace and the slum will for ever exist as the light and the shadow. Not so do I believe. I believe that the poverty is the result of ignorance and of bad social arrangements, and that therefore it may be eradicated by knowledge and by social change.”) and The Closing Circle (“[Garrett] Hardin‘s logic is clear [in arguing for racist population control as a response to environmental degradation] . . . . Here, only faintly masked, is barbarism. It denies the equal right of all human inhabitants of the earth to a humane life.”) and “The Fools and the Wise” (“Almost two hundred years ago, Joseph Jacotot, thinker of intellectual emancipation, showed how anti-egalitarian folly was the basis of a society in which every inferior was able to find someone inferior to them and enjoy this superiority.”) and “Freud and the Political” and Πολιτικά [Politics] by Aristotle (basically one of the oldest works of political philosophy arguing for hierarchy, and a pillar of political conservatism: “government is a certain ordering of those who inhabit a city.”)

Contrasting examples: “Paying the Price for Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture” vs. “Social Democracy Is Good.  But Not Good Enough”; “GOD ALMIGHTY in his most holy and wise providence, hath soe disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in submission.” John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity (1630) vs. “The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind” (1754); “Barbarism Begins at Home in America” vs. Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism; “Broken Windows” vs. “Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People”; see also The Dreyfus Affair and Snowpiercer

Boaventura de Sousa Santos – Horizons Needed

“The reactionary project shares with rationalist and dogmatic extremism the notion that Western modernity has created too many human beings and that a distinction between humans and sub-humans is necessary, although it does not think that this should come from technical engineering interventions, whether they entail death or race improvement. It suffices that the inferiors be treated as inferior, whether they be women, black people, indigenous peoples, Muslims. The reactionary project never questions its own privilege and duty to decide who is superior and who is inferior. Humans have a right to have rights; sub-humans should be the object of philanthropy to prevent them from becoming dangerous and to defend them against themselves. They may have some rights, but they certainly must always have more duties than rights.” Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Horizons Needed”

Jonathan Feldman – Police Shootings, Neoliberal Scarcity Regimes and the Left

Link to an article by Jonathan Feldman:

“Police Shootings, Neoliberal Scarcity Regimes and the Left: Behind the Balch Springs, Texas Murder”

Bonus link: “How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence” (“It should be clear by now that the focus on racial disparity accepts the premise of neoliberal social justice that the problem of inequality is not its magnitude or intensity in general but whether or not it is distributed in a racially equitable way.”)