The shameful history of Vichy France
March 4th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
This weekend, together with 36 others, I attended a one-day course on Vichy France delivered by Sebastien Ardouin at London’s City Literary Institute. It was an immensely informative course backed up with a handout of 24 pages.
Vichy France was the so-called Free Zone of the country which operated from 1940 to 1944 under the increasingly dictatorial leadership of Marshal Phillipe Petain, the hero of Verdun in the First World War. Ardouin’s overall assessment of this period was as follows:
“State collaboration was a complete failure. In spite of what Vichy men declared (that they were playing a double game in order to protect the French population), collaboration did not spare France from economic exploitation, political repression, or other forms of sufferings. In relation to its population and resources, France was the occupied country that supplied Germany with the greatest amount of foodstuffs, commodities, and labour.
Racial persecutions developed, not only without any opposition from Vichy, but then went beyond what the Nazis demanded. In spite of concessions made by Vichy to the Nazis, Vichy could not preserve its independence and the French people were not treated better that populations in other occupied countries. Ultimately Vicy became an accomplice of the Reich and dishonoured France with its racial policy.”
More information on Vichy France here.
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A review of the remarkable Lebanese film “Capernaum”
March 3rd, 2019 by Roger Darlington
As well as being a town where Jesus performed miracles, Capernaum is the Arabic word for chaos and it is a kind of miracle that comes out of the chaos of a young boy’s life on the streets of Beirut in this remarkable work by Lebanese director Nadine Labaki.
Twelve year old Zain (played by Zain Al Rafeea) dotes on his 11 year old sister but, when she is forced to become a child bride, his outrage against his parents is so great that he leaves home, only to find himself responsible for a one year old infant called Rahil, the son of an undocumented Ethiopean mother who suddenly disappears. At a time when immigrants are so much in the news, this work brings home powerfully how precarious and indeed dangerous is the predicament of so many of them.
Rafeea is a non-professional actor and Syrian refugee who gives an utterly astonishing performance as the lead character in this immensely moving story, while somehow the baby demonstrates a range of emotions. The film was nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture and, in any other year when it was not up against the magnificent Roma”, it might well have won.
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The making of American power (2): the Cold War
March 1st, 2019 by Roger Darlington
This week, I attended week 2 of an eight-week evening class at London”s City Literary Institute. The title is “The making of American power: US foreign policy from the Cold War to Trump” and our lecturer is Jack Gain.
Week 2 of the course addressed Cold War power politics with the Soviet Union.
We talked a lot about the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. I was 14 years old at the time and really scared. At the time, it looked as if John Kennedy had faced down Nikita Khrushchev decisively, but it was only years later that it was revealed that the Soviet leader agreed to remove his missiles from Cuba in return for the Americans agreeing to remove (outdated) Jupiter missiles from Turkey at a later date.
The Cuban missile crisis showed that the weapons themselves are the problem. Britain is now in pole position to lead a “nuclear disarmament race”. In a 2009 letter to the Times, Field Marshal Lord Bramall and Generals Lord Ramsbotham and Sir Hugh Beach denounced Trident as “completely useless”.
Ditching the system may be a no-brainer for the generals, but not for politicians afraid of a public opinion that equates nuclear weapons with vague notions of “being strong”. And yet getting rid of Trident would gift the Treasury a windfall of more than £25bn – enough to finance a million affordable homes.
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ABSOLUTELY FREE: A WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF FILM MAGAZINES & BROCHURES
February 28th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Owing to the owner moving from a large house to a small flat, the following items are looking for a loving home:
- 474 film magazines: “Film Review” from January 1978 to December 2008 and “Empire” from July 2009 to December 2018
- 281 film brochures: popular movies of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s
These magazines and brochures are available free of charge if you can collect them from an address in north-west London. If you are interested, please e-mail me:
rogerdarlington@dsl.pipex.comPosted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
The song “Shallow” from “A Star Is Born”
February 27th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Looking at this week’s Academy Awards, I thought that “Green Book” and “Bohemian Rhapsody”, while good films, received too many awards, while I was sorry that “A Star Is Born” did not do better. The Lady Gaga song “Shallow” did deservedly win an award and you might like to listen to it below. If you’re not sure about the lyrics, here is an explanation of the words.
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Word of the day: gobbet
February 26th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
A gobbet — from the Middle English word for a chunk of meat — is an extract from a primary source put forward for analysis.
I’m doing a history course at the City Literary Institute in central London and our lecturer assigns us a gobbet each week to consider. It is literally a ‘chunk’ of history.
Posted in Cultural issues, History | Comments (0)
Not only does slavery still exist, but more people are enslaved than any other time in history
February 25th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
“The word “slavery” conjures up images of shackles and transatlantic ships – depictions that seem relegated firmly to the past. But more people are enslaved today than at any other time in history. Experts have calculated that roughly 13 million people were captured and sold as slaves between the 15th and 19th centuries; today, an estimated 40.3 million people – more than three times the figure during the transatlantic slave trade – are living in some form of modern slavery, according to the latest figures published by the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation.”
This is the shocking opening of a briefing on modern slavery published today by the “Guardian” newspaper.
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When 10,000 people turned up for a lecture on cosmology
February 25th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Actually it was called “a show” but it filled the SSE Arena at Wembley in north-west London on Sunday evening as people of all ages arrived for the sell-out performance. The show was titled “Universal Adventures In Space And Time World Tour 2019” and delivered by Professor Brian Cox of the University of Manchester and television fame with some support from guest Brian Ince.
The visuals were stunning with huge screens showing photographs of planets and galaxies taken from recent satellite launches and visualisations of various galactic phenomena such as a black hole and a supernova.
Cox is an assured and fluent presenter who spoke without any notes or aids. I feel that his first part explanations of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the nature of black holes were challenging to understand, but his part two expositions on the creation of the universe and the chances of life beyond our Earth were more intelligible.
Cox managed to convey powerfully just how small we are in relation to the universe as a whole and indeed suggested that it is widely accepted now that there are multiple universes, while emphasising just how special we are in being atoms that can think about atoms and possible unique in our universe. We have a great responsibility to live wisely on this small blue dot we call home.
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A review of the new film “If Beale Street Could Talk”
February 24th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Writer and director Barry Jenkins won the Academy Award for Best Picture with “Moonlight” and, two years later, he has another artistic success to his credit. Again he both writes and directs; again he uses James Laxton as cinematographer; again he adapts an existing work (this time a James Baldwin novel); again we have a starring vehicle for a roster of little-known black actors (only two small roles go to whites); and again the pace is slow and very measured.
This time the story is set in 1970s Harlem with the Beale Street of the title simply being a metaphor for anywhere that African-Americans struggle to live in an essentially white society where the odds are stacked against them. The style is plainer than in “Moonlight” and the narrative is quite slight for this achingly moving story of love between Trish (KiKi Layne), the teenage narrator who is pregnant, and Fonny (Stephan James), her older boyfriend who is in jail charged with a rape which he did not commit.
This is not a movie that will achieve great commercial success, but the art house crowd – which includes me – will love it as much as Trish and Fonny care for each other.
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The making of American power (1): the end of the Second World War
February 23rd, 2019 by Roger Darlington
This week, I started a new eight-week evening class at London”s City Literary Institute. The title is “The making of American power: US foreign policy from the Cold War to Trump” and our lecturer is Jack Gain.
Week 1 of the course discussed the nature of state power and the post-war reconstruction of Europe.
State power can be seen as a spectrum from hard power to soft power. Hard power involves the deployment of military and intelligence assets. Soft power is about the use of diplomacy and cultural forces. In between, one has economic options, whether positive such as trade agreements and preferential treatment or negative such as tariffs and sanctions. US foreign policy employs all of these options.
The post- Second World War foreign policy agenda of President Harry Truman involved the Marshall Plan of aid to Western European nations (the UK was the largest recipient with 24% of the total), support for European integration (leading eventually to the European Union), the creation of the United Nations (UN) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and the Bretton Woods financial system involving the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World bank.
Less visible was the co-operation of America’s security and intelligence agencies with those of its European allies with the first successes being intervention in the Italian election of 1948 and involvement in the Greek civil war of 1946-1949.
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