Our
Grief is Not a Cry for War
From David Zeiger, Producer/Director
of "Funny Old Guys" to my fellow IFP Market attendees
Normally,
I would not make a political statement at this event. But nothing
is "normal" anymore.
As
I sat in front of my TV that day, gripped as everyone in this
country was with pain, anguish, and horror, it dawned on me that
I have seen this before-the night I lay in front of my TV watching
the bombs and cruise missiles raining down on Baghdad the first
night of the Iraq war. But then we couldn't feel the terror of
the dying as the buildings crumbled, or see ourselves in those
buildings in the final moments. We never saw the unthinkable carnage
just one of those cruise missiles unleashes. What we saw and heard
were "pinpoint hits" and "collateral damage" (and it took Timothy
McVeigh to explain what that meant).
And
the question that posed itself to me is this:
If,
over the past 10 years, our government had not caused the deaths
of as many as one million Iraqis, a large percentage of them children
(as the UN estimates), through unrelenting bombing and a strangling
blockade; If we hadn't armed and financed the armies of
such "friendly" countries as Turkey-which has waged a brutal,
terrorist war against the Kurdish people-and Indonesia, responsible
for the recent slaughter in East Timor; If we didn't arm,
finance and encourage the brutal military occupation of the Palestinian
people in the West Bank; and If the relentless "globalization"
of profit hadn't driven millions of people in the Third World
into desperate poverty; would there even be an Osama
Bin Laden?
And
here is the greatest horror: what is being demanded of all of
us in America now. Absolute obedience to the war plans
of George Bush. Silence as our grief and anguish are twisted
and perverted into blind war fever while reporters are fired for
even the mildest of criticisms of the government. Patriotic
cheers as the FBI "protects the homeland" by sweeping through
Arab communities arresting hundreds for such crimes as having
a similar name as a hijacker (while they swear this is not a war
against all Muslims-nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
Because
it doesn't take much to realize that the war they are planning
will be a horrendous onslaught against anyone who dares
defy our military, political and economic control of the Middle
East. The slaughter we have seen on our own shores will pale next
to the one being readied for Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, and
who knows where else. And it will surely bring much more death
and devastation home as well.
This
is not a time for silence. As filmmakers we have a responsibility
to probe, to question, to doubt, and to risk censure for the truth.
As Tony Kushner so aptly told the L.A. Times recently, "There's
no shortage of feeling these days. But art also has an underrated
function of asking people to think, asking people to marry their
thought and feeling".
I
work with the Artists Network of Refuse and Resist, and if you
want to meet other artists who are struggling to find the ways
to respond to this terror and the terror to come, please contact
them in New York at 212-431-3681 (rnrarts@hotmail.com), and in
L.A. at 323-469-9227 (rmrartla@aol.com).
Senior
Year on PBS
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