Movie Review:

“The Trial of the Chicago 7,” written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. 140 minutes on Netflix

What makes this movie so relevant for today is the contrasting strategies portrayed. The movie makes the different ideologies clear. There were a lot of approaches to the Anti-War movement during the Vietnam invasion and not all of them are in this movie, but some critical ones were. With historical hindsight, we can evaluate them.

In 1969 leaders of the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, the newly formed Yippie Party, and one pacifist associated with the War Resisters League were put on trial for having crossed state lines in order to “incite a riot” at the Democratic Party National Convention. It was a political show trial staged by the Nixon Administration in hopes of dampening the anti-war fervor of the time.

We can dispense with Nixon’s nasty strategy easily: it failed. The anti-war movement did not diminish during or after the trial. What is much more interesting is the contrasting approaches of the defendants.

The strategy of the protagonist with the pacifist view was to appeal to people’s better nature and provide a good example of anti-war intelligence. He was the most reasonable of the bunch, or at least he seemed so until he slugged one of the bailiffs.

Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers was not involved in organizing the demonstrations. The Nixon “Justice” department apparently indicted him, as the script explains, just to scare the jurors. Seale doesn’t talk strategies with the other defendants, but his interactions with the judge showed his defiant attitude. During the trial, the Chicago Police murdered Fred Hampton, Chicago leader of the Panthers. The judge in the trial infamously had Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom.

The two “Yippies,” Abie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, steal the movie, as they did the publicity around the long trial, by joking and mocking the judicial system. Their goal, as gleefully explained in the movie, was to create a “cultural revolution.” Their antics were supposed to reveal the fundamental injustice of the war, the trial, and the entire American way of life. That would somehow lead to fundamental changes, but they were accused in the movie of being simple opportunists aggrandizing their own reputations and book sales.

Students for a Democratic Society was a mass movement. It didn’t last very long, but it had a tremendous impact on society and on the war in Vietnam while it lasted. Its main spokesperson in the movie was Tom Hayden who used his anti-war fame to gain a very successful career in California politics. Hayden explains that his movement’s goal was to win power through elections.

All of the defendants agreed on one thing: they wanted to end the war in Vietnam. In that regard, history explains to us that they were on the right track. The war in Vietnam is probably the only U.S. war whose extent was severely limited by popular dissent.

They also agreed that demonstrating at the Democratic Party Convention was a good tactic. The Democrats, after all, had started the war under the Kennedy Administration and carried it to fabulous extremes under Johnson. One could argue that the Chicago demonstrations helped defeat Hubert Humphrey and put Richard Nixon into the White House. Nixon then carried the war even further, but we have no historical way of evaluating what “Happy Warrior” Humphrey would have done.

The characters in the movie, especially Hayden and Hoffman, argue strategies. Viewers like you and I get to decide who was the most effective.

Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9 AM Central Time. I also podcast “Workers Beat Extra” on Soundcloud every Wednesday.  If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.

You can learn all the technicalities of the movie with the Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_the_Chicago_7

For a rave review of the movie’s artistic aspects, see https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-trial-of-the-chicago-7-movie-review-2020

TV Review: “Babylon Berlin” directed by Tom Tykwer. three seasons on Netflix

The biggest and most expensive TV series ever produced for German television is running in 100 countries around the world. There are a string of awards. Americans may have trouble with the dubbing and, possibly, with the German expressionism style. If we get involved in the period being depicted, though, we can answer some of our questions about German fascism and, maybe, get some insights into our own.

It isn’t just good entertainment, it’s also a profound learning experience for non-Germans in our historical period.

As we face incipient fascism in several nations and our own, we can profit from trying to understand Germany during the crumbling of the Weimar Republic and before the rise of Hitler. “The Nazis didn’t just fall from the sky,” explains one of the show’s creators. For all we know in America, they may as well have, because many of us don’t know squat.

The two main characters through all 3 seasons are police. He’s a morphine addict and she’s a part-time prostitute. His problems come from shell-shock during WWI, hers from abject poverty. Their combined flaws, compared to that of the general Berlin society around 1929, make them comparatively the healthiest people in the story.

The two of them carry out what might have been called ordinary police procedural drama. But it’s what happens in the background that really matters. They deal with the political/economic situation that helps us answer our questions about Nazis. For the serious questioner, the Wikipedia version explains the period.

In the first three TV seaons, the Nazis aren’t the major political players. Much more important are the monarchists who want to restore the Kaiser, destroy the communists, and make Germany a dominant military power once more. The monarchists sincerely believe that they would have won WWI had it not been for the “fifth column” of anti-war protesters at home. The Nazis agree with them on that, and both of them team up to malign and discredit the big communist movement.

For sheer anti-communism, it would be hard for anybody to beat the social democrats running the government during the Weimar Republic. They made an early deal with the monarchists in the army to destroy the Spartacist League (militant communists) in 1919. They succeeded and executed Rosa Luxemburg and Carl Leibnecht, the leadership way before this TV story begins.

Here, we have a big, rather amorphous, communist party, and a number of organizations opposing them: Trotskyists, monarchists, and the Weimar government itself. Confusing everything are the non-political but very powerful underworld gangsters. Our two police “heroes” are theoretically neutral as they stand up for law and order.

It’s the flapper era. Depravity is commonplace. The rich are disgusting; the poor are miserable. Nobody respects the government. Democracy is strange and alien to the Germans, and they can never forget that it was forced on them by the victors of WWI.

The Weimar government was never accepted by the German people. Their loyalties are divided among the anti-government organizations. As long as the economy is working, though, things go along. The third season ends with the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression.

I understand that shooting will begin soon on Season Four.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” program every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site