I haven’t been very happy with most of the film-related articles on the World Socialist Web Site, but their appraisal of the arrest of Roman Polanski is the best I have read so far, covering the actual facts and motivations behind it in detail. Definitely worth reading.
They’ve also put up a nice review of the first episode of the new season of Law & Order, which deals with the prosecution of those responsible for torture, and how a certain new administration blocks that prosecution. It’s fitting to read the two texts side by side, and see the real hypocrisy of current American politics: a deeply traumatized man who commited a crime a long time ago must be brought to “justice” (despite the acknowledgement that his trial was anything but fair, even by the victim), but people who laid the legal basis for “the right of the president to order a child’s testicles to be crushed to force his parent to talk” are left alone in the name of “looking forward, not back.” And the Law & Order episode doesn’t even cover half of it – if they did, it would have been ten days long.
Thank you, Mr. Obama. Bush must be very proud of you, you’ve been a good slave. If Malcolm X were here, he’d punch you in the face. And I suspect Martin Luther King would have to try really hard to prevent himself from doing the same.
