Prelude
I had a bad cold during the week the Persian Gulf War started. I spent the time reading Robert Fagles' new translation of Homer's The Iliad, a seminal poetic account of a long ago war fought in what is now western Turkey. I had the thick library book open against my thighs as the skies over Baghdad brightened with anti-aircraft fire. Air Forces of many nations pulverized Iraq for a month and a half. The brief ground war to expel the Iraqi occupation forces from Kuwait demonstrated the impracticality of relying on belief in the strength of huge numbers of troops who then get challenged by better equipped, more mobile, and more professionally trained adversaries. Kuwait's occupation by Iraq lasted half a year, but the aftereffects of those months are with us today in a region still blazing with metaphorical fires set by first world powers and lesser powers inconveniently located above vast amounts of oil.
Lektionen in Finsternis (Lessons of Darkness) is a documentary from 1992 by the German director Werner Herzog. Consisting mostly of long sweeping shots from a helicopter, images depict the blasted otherworldly landscapes of post-war Kuwait. Everything is oil, smoke, fire. Parts of J.R.R. Tolkien's Mordor must look like this. Oil field equipment sabotaged by retreating Iraqi forces following Saddam Hussein's orders to light up every oil well looks post-apocalyptic; dull brown metallic surfaces, work huts where Kuwaiti laborers once did their jobs--the sense of human habitation and activities looking aged, yet in actuality the proper functions of these places (that give us the substance that makes our cars go) just recently removed in time, all moving underneath Herzog's camera like a big paper getting rolled into oblivion.
Herzog narrates the film, just sparingly. Music from Prokoviev, Wagner, and other classical composers seem at times to be an ironic remark about what we're seeing. European classicism making sounds over a region of the world so tragically defined by European (and American) global political interests. These same interests, operational today, have no concern for the people of the Middle East. Herzog features two women who were horribly victimized by Iraqi forces during Hussein's occupation of Kuwait. One can barely get out her story of being forced to watch her two sons tortured to death. The other describes soldiers breaking down her door at night, physically assaulting her toddler son, and shooting her husband dead. The son only said one thing after this: "I don't ever want to talk."
Granted, these are war crimes committed by Iraqi forces, but Hussein, inquiring into whether the United States would object to his invasion of Kuwait, was told by Secretary of State James Baker (George H.W. Bush's best friend) that "We [the U.S.] have no opinion of your Arab-Arab conflicts."
Obviously, the Bush administration had an opinion, but they let Hussein invade Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Hussein had been a U.S. ally, receiving massive amounts of logistical American military assistance and equipment during his eight year war with Iran. Hussein invaded Kuwait, but the United States put the gun in his hand.
All these deceits are not talked about in American news media, for the most part. Americans unaware of history seem to just think "shit happens." As one watches Lessons of Darkness it's helpful, for the sake of gaining a full sense of consequences, which can translate to actions in the voting booth, to realize that the billowing smokes of Kuwaiti oil fires didn't just happen. Paths were chosen in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. power brokers made decisions to support motherfuckers like Saddam Hussein, cocksuckers like Osama bin Laden and Manuel Noriega. President Bush, in July 1990, could've leaned on Hussein and prevented him from invading Kuwait, but he let the Iraqi dictator do it, because, I think, Bush wanted to take the U.S. to war in the Middle East. His son continued the policy. We live with these actions of that father-son team of mass murderers.
I don't know what Herzog's views on this are. He presents his film with a poetic saddened eye, fascinated by the look of the horror, by the mundane moments, too, as when we overhear bits of technical talk between Texas oil field workers methodically putting out the fires and capping the wells, a truly impressive engineering feat that also made me wonder what the cancer rate is among these men.
At fifty-four minutes, the film is just the right length, allowing Herzog to linger with his camera, but also to make a series of cogent points and then get out of the way, leaving the viewer, if with nothing else, a sense of what a colossal man-made disaster looks like up close, a catastrophe caused by the designs of a very small number of ruthless human beings in the Western and Arab Worlds. Hussein was eventually executed, but not the others.
The political content of this piece is generated by me, not by Werner Herzog. Nonetheless, I've shared the emotions and thoughts I had while watching his beautiful and disturbing film.
Vic Neptune
I had a bad cold during the week the Persian Gulf War started. I spent the time reading Robert Fagles' new translation of Homer's The Iliad, a seminal poetic account of a long ago war fought in what is now western Turkey. I had the thick library book open against my thighs as the skies over Baghdad brightened with anti-aircraft fire. Air Forces of many nations pulverized Iraq for a month and a half. The brief ground war to expel the Iraqi occupation forces from Kuwait demonstrated the impracticality of relying on belief in the strength of huge numbers of troops who then get challenged by better equipped, more mobile, and more professionally trained adversaries. Kuwait's occupation by Iraq lasted half a year, but the aftereffects of those months are with us today in a region still blazing with metaphorical fires set by first world powers and lesser powers inconveniently located above vast amounts of oil.
Lektionen in Finsternis (Lessons of Darkness) is a documentary from 1992 by the German director Werner Herzog. Consisting mostly of long sweeping shots from a helicopter, images depict the blasted otherworldly landscapes of post-war Kuwait. Everything is oil, smoke, fire. Parts of J.R.R. Tolkien's Mordor must look like this. Oil field equipment sabotaged by retreating Iraqi forces following Saddam Hussein's orders to light up every oil well looks post-apocalyptic; dull brown metallic surfaces, work huts where Kuwaiti laborers once did their jobs--the sense of human habitation and activities looking aged, yet in actuality the proper functions of these places (that give us the substance that makes our cars go) just recently removed in time, all moving underneath Herzog's camera like a big paper getting rolled into oblivion.
Herzog narrates the film, just sparingly. Music from Prokoviev, Wagner, and other classical composers seem at times to be an ironic remark about what we're seeing. European classicism making sounds over a region of the world so tragically defined by European (and American) global political interests. These same interests, operational today, have no concern for the people of the Middle East. Herzog features two women who were horribly victimized by Iraqi forces during Hussein's occupation of Kuwait. One can barely get out her story of being forced to watch her two sons tortured to death. The other describes soldiers breaking down her door at night, physically assaulting her toddler son, and shooting her husband dead. The son only said one thing after this: "I don't ever want to talk."
Granted, these are war crimes committed by Iraqi forces, but Hussein, inquiring into whether the United States would object to his invasion of Kuwait, was told by Secretary of State James Baker (George H.W. Bush's best friend) that "We [the U.S.] have no opinion of your Arab-Arab conflicts."
Obviously, the Bush administration had an opinion, but they let Hussein invade Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Hussein had been a U.S. ally, receiving massive amounts of logistical American military assistance and equipment during his eight year war with Iran. Hussein invaded Kuwait, but the United States put the gun in his hand.
All these deceits are not talked about in American news media, for the most part. Americans unaware of history seem to just think "shit happens." As one watches Lessons of Darkness it's helpful, for the sake of gaining a full sense of consequences, which can translate to actions in the voting booth, to realize that the billowing smokes of Kuwaiti oil fires didn't just happen. Paths were chosen in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. power brokers made decisions to support motherfuckers like Saddam Hussein, cocksuckers like Osama bin Laden and Manuel Noriega. President Bush, in July 1990, could've leaned on Hussein and prevented him from invading Kuwait, but he let the Iraqi dictator do it, because, I think, Bush wanted to take the U.S. to war in the Middle East. His son continued the policy. We live with these actions of that father-son team of mass murderers.
I don't know what Herzog's views on this are. He presents his film with a poetic saddened eye, fascinated by the look of the horror, by the mundane moments, too, as when we overhear bits of technical talk between Texas oil field workers methodically putting out the fires and capping the wells, a truly impressive engineering feat that also made me wonder what the cancer rate is among these men.
At fifty-four minutes, the film is just the right length, allowing Herzog to linger with his camera, but also to make a series of cogent points and then get out of the way, leaving the viewer, if with nothing else, a sense of what a colossal man-made disaster looks like up close, a catastrophe caused by the designs of a very small number of ruthless human beings in the Western and Arab Worlds. Hussein was eventually executed, but not the others.
The political content of this piece is generated by me, not by Werner Herzog. Nonetheless, I've shared the emotions and thoughts I had while watching his beautiful and disturbing film.
Vic Neptune
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