Tag: Myanmar

Movies As Universities: The Case of So Ends Our Night

So Ends Our Night is a riveting and moving 1941 movie version of Erich Remarque’s classic novel Flotsam (English, German: Liebe deinen Nächsten).

You may remember Remarque as the author of the international best-seller All Quiet on the Western Front, a big success in movie theatres of that time. Thomas Mann generally is considered the premier German writer of the twentieth century, and while that’s true in terms of prestige perhaps, Remarque is a more gripping German author.

Flotsam tells a great story about stateless refugees during the Nazi nightmare circa 1937. (One should immediately sense the resonance in our time with the millions of political and climate refugees, exiles, fugitives, and victim peoples like the Rohingya of Myanmar and the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, China, experiencing cultural genocide. We might extend this list to the Tutsis of Rwanda in 1994, the European Jews of World War II, and the Armenians of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire massacres. One could add the Chinese in Indonesia who experienced a genocidal pogrom in 1965. (Think of the movie, The Year of Living Dangerously with Mel Gibson.)

The movie So Ends Our Night, based on Remarque’s great work Flotsam, shows Fredric March and Glenn Ford playing supremely harried stateless refugees, hounded all through Europe, in a nightmare of life “without a country,” passport, visa, citizenship.

Glenn Ford is only half-Aryan and is in danger of being murdered by the Nazi crazies. Fredric March is not racially endangered, but as an opponent of Hitler’s regime and a dissenter could be murdered for that treason. Both are in a “having no passport” hell.

Between minutes 23 and 24 of this movie, March explains to Glenn Ford’s 19-year-old on the run like he is:

“Individuals or nations, it’s all the same, as long as they’re safe and comfortable they don’t give a hoot about what happens to anybody else.

There’s the misery of the world.

That’s why progress is so slow and things slip back so fast.”

With some reflection, you’ll probably see the deep point March makes about global history and “the way of the world” plainly expressed without camouflaging the truth.

You can learn quite a bit if you ponder this movie conversation, with both refugees sitting under a tree, harried and distressed, in a nightmarish emergency.

Thus, So Ends Our Night can be a movie-as-university for you and feed your meta intelligence.

Essay 56: Are There Deep Rhythms in History?

Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard wrote a very intriguing book in recent years with the title, This Time Is Different with the implication that fundamental discontinuities (i.e., this time is different) are questionable, if one looks deeply enough.  In the introduction of the book, the author raises the questions of “deep rhythms in history” without answering his own question.  Here’s a potential organizing principle: the world is always a system of violence directed at the weak. Take this entry from the Larousse Dictionary of World History:

Arawaks

The original inhabitants of the Bahamas (Lucayos) and the Greater Antilles (Taínos) who practiced a subsistence agriculture based on seafood, game, maize and cassava using Neolithic technology.  They live mainly in coastal settlements of large villages with caneyes (family houses) and bohios (chiefs’ houses) and had a hierarchical politico-religious structure based on a hereditary ruler, the cacique, who possessed a ceremonial stool (dulho).  A priestly caste-controlled worship of gods of place and nature (zemis) and ceremonies which led to heaven (coyaba). 

They were exterminated as a people by the Spaniards after 1519.

The words maize, tobacco, potato, hammock, canoe and hurricane all derive from the Arawak language.

If we think of the Rohingas of Myanmar, the Yazidis, the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the Darfur people in Sudan, of recent decades, we see a deep rhythm in history: the destruction of the unprotected.  Notice that the first Jewish ghetto in Europe (Venice) was established in 1516 around the time that the Arawak murders begin on a systematic basis.

This never-really-discussed basic rhythm of group violence has been glorified (e.g., The Iliad of Homer, the Aeneid of Virgil, the Old Testament, Scandinavian sagas, Japanese “war tales” such as the Heike Monogatari, etc.)

The omission in all education of this world-violence theme gives students a false sense of “how the world got to now.”