ANDOR (2022): EPISODES 7-10

After the successful heist on Aldhani, Cassian Andor returns to Ferrix, where he fails to convince his stepmother Maarva to leave ahead of the inevitable imperial crackdown. Flush with 125,000 imperial credits, he moves to the planet of Niamos, a kind of space Cancún, and adopts the alias “Keef Girgo.” Cassian’s stay on Niamos doesn’t last long. Maarva was right. The empire is cracking down everywhere, and Andor has gotten careless. He gets picked up in a random police sweep, sentenced to 6 years in prison on a loitering charge, and sent to a slave labor colony on the planet Narkina 5, where unbeknown to anybody the empire has begun construction of the Death Star.

If Andor is science fiction set a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, anybody who has ever worked in an Amazon warehouse will immediately recognize the empire’s management techniques on Narkina 5. Cassian’s first day on the job begins before he’s even taken to his cell. There are seven floors in his building. Each floor has seven shifts. Each shift has seven teams who compete against one another to see who can produce the most. The winning team gets extra food, the equivalent of Amazon’s “swag bucks.” The losing team gets electrocuted, or “fried.” Andor’s manager, Kino Loy, is a fellow prisoner. If Kino bullies the man under him, it’s not because he’s evil, or particularly loves the empire, but because he’s obsessed with his “numbers.” Every cell has a “till,” a running count of how many days each prisoner has left inside. Kino has a little over nine months left. All he really wants to do is finish his time and get out.

If Andor arrived at Narkina 5 just another terrified detainee pleading that someone had made a mistake, it doesn’t take long for him to regain the resourcefulness that he showed during the heist on Aldhani. The prison colony at Narkina 5 is a surveillance state with floors that can be electrified at the touch of a button. On the surface, it’s a high-tech marvel, the perfect system of domination. In reality, as soon as as Kino and his fellow prisoners “give up hope,” stop looking at their tallies and counting the days the whole system collapses. Andor, a murderer and a thief, is a real criminal, but that’s not why he was arrested. He’s not in prison because he shot two corporate security guards or stole 80 million credits from the empire but because he got picked up in a random sweep designed to recruit slave labor for the construction of the Death Star. What’s more, it’s clear from the very beginning that neither Kino Loy nor any of his fellow prisoners are real criminals, but innocent working-class men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hardened criminals are easy to control, partly because they have no capability for solidarity. Ordinary men can be controlled by giving them hope, by making them live, not in the present but, in the future. Andor’s ridiculous 6-year sentence for loitering is no fluke. Every man at Narkina 5 is having his sentence “reevaluated.” The empire has made a fatal mistake. It has not only organized intelligent, resourceful men into work crews under natural leaders like Kino Loy, it has removed any incentive they have to cooperate. It has created the conditions for revolution.

The men who run the Empire aren’t stupid. They are just a bit behind schedule. They no longer want to maintain control through cooperation but through fear. Eventually, they will have the Death Star, a gigantic machine that can vaporize whole planets. Dedra Meero, played by Irish stage actress Denise Gough, represents the new order on Coruscant. One of Andor’s biggest strengths is the number of excellent character actors they were able to hire on location in the UK. Gough’s performance is extraordinary, a fully realized portrait of a fascist. Not only is she a pioneer in the use of torture, her smallest gestures, tone of voice, her most ordinary of personal interactions reflect a woman who has never been loved, who’s incapable of thinking of another human being in terms other than “where does that person rank in the imperial hierarchy” or “what can that person do for me.” Determined to track down the people who pulled off the heist on Aldhani by any means necessary, she quickly figures out that she’s dealing with an organized rebellion. Common criminals didn’t steal 80 million imperial credits any more than common criminals pulled off the Tiflis robbery in George in 1908. Dedra Meero knows that what she’s looking for is a well-organized conspiracy of space Bolsheviks. While she doesn’t quite yet know that it goes all the way up to fashionable antique dealers like Luthen Rael or Senators like Mon Mothra, she’s certain that Cassian Andor is the key to unraveling the entire organization. So she sets up shop on Ferrix and subjects anybody who might have information about the Aldhani robbery to a fiendish, high-tech form of torture that leaves them a shell of their former selves.

Probably the only performance in Andor better than Denise Gough’s is that of Andy Serkis, best known for playing Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies, as Kino Loy. Andor knows that it will take more than figuring out how the system on Narkina 5. He needs Kino to lead the revolution. Watching Kino begin to lose his faith in the system is a masterclass in acting. At first, he lashes out at anybody who undermines his hope that everything is going to work out as the empire promised. He’s in deep denial, but when an elderly prisoner, who had only 50 days left on his sentence, dies of a stroke, something in Kino snaps. He’s able to admit the truth about Narkina 5, that there’s only one way out, revolution or death. All Andor has to convince him of is that they do it immediately. The prison is understaffed because of the newly inflated sentences. If they wait, the empire will bring in enough men to make the system impregnable. Reluctantly, Kino Loy gives his go-ahead. The scene where he finally shouts “nobody is getting out” is as thrilling as anything I’ve seen on TV in a while, and he leads his shift, and then another, and another, up all 7 floors of the prison to the surface shouting “one way out. One way out.” Eventually, everybody escapes except Kino. Narkina 5 is in the middle of a lake, and he can’t swim. The mirror image of the ambitious Dedra Meero, he has sacrificed his own life for the lives of men he barely knows, the ultimate act of working-class solidarity no tyrannical regime can resist.

Final thought: Blink and you’ll miss the most innovative shot of the episode. As Kino and Andor lead the inmates on Narkina 5 to freedom, we see them from the perspective of one of the security monitors in the control room. They look like the dots from Orson Welles famous monologue from the movie The Third Man. Only the dots have broken out of prison. The dots are now agents of history.

Highway (2014)

Imtiaz Ali’s 2014 film Highway opens from the point of view of an anonymous driver. As the credits roll, we are taken on a journey through the vast countryside of India. We roll through a desert, past small towns, in and out of dense forests, and up a winding path into the snowy mountains. It is the very picture of mobility, if not necessarily freedom. Suddenly the movie shrinks to half the size of the frame, a crude but effective cinematic technique, and we meet Veera, a young woman in her late teens or early twenties preparing for her wedding. Veera lives in a house that recalls the mansion in Crazy Rich Asians, but it soon becomes obvious she is not a happy woman. As she runs into the street to her fiancée’s car, the movie expands back to full frame. “Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go,” she says to her fiancée, inviting him to take her on a late night drive, but he’s having none of it. He is a young, handsome man in his twenties, but he almost looks like a wax figure, already so committed to the idea of upper-class propriety that he might as well be Veera’s father instead of her future husband. Reluctantly he lets her get into the car. They go on a short drive. She wants it to be longer. He’s worried about traveling without bodyguards. She proposes that they run away to the mountains. He laughs it off as a ridiculous idea. They stop for gas. She gets out of the car, raises her cloak, and imagines she can fly. He continues to scold her. “Get in the car Veera. It’s not safe.” It’s not. Veera is startled by the sound of gunshots. The gas station is being robbed. One of the robbers grabs Veera and puts a gun to her head. Her fiancée remains in the car, not only paralyzed with fear, but smugly self-satisfied. “I warned you,” he says. “I warned you.” He doesn’t stay smug for very long. The robbers open the door, toss him out of the car onto the parking-lot, and take Veera along as an insurance policy.

What is the worst type of betrayal? History tells us it’s Judas turning Jesus over to the Sanhedrin, who would then turn the son of God over to the Romans to be crucified. But is it? Veera’s kidnapper Mahabir is a young man a few years older than her fiancée. He’s a brutal thug who throws her into the back of a truck, stuffs a rag into her mouth to silence her screams, and initially intends to sell her to sex traffickers. Just about his only good quality is that he sincerely hates the rich. He’s a potential revolutionary as much as he is a common criminal. In another life, Veera’s fiancée might have hired him as their body guard. Wealthy Indians, like in many countries in the world, would rather pay one half of the working class to guard them against the other half of the working class rather than establish the conditions where everybody could live in peace. In other movie, Veera might have had an affair with her bodyguard, who represented the decisive masculinity her upper-class husband didn’t have. In Highway, however, Veera and Mahabir end up living out the fantasy that she begged her fiancée to indulge, if only for a few hours.

Unlike the kidnappers in Luc Besson’s Taken, Mahabir is not a monster. In reality he has no intention of selling Veera to a pimp. He briefly toys with the idea of demanding a ransom from her parents, but he doesn’t quite seem to know exactly how to go about it. You can see him hesitate each time he stuffs the rag back into her mouth. When she asks if she can relieve herself in private he lets her, even though it gives her a chance to escape. Eventually he lets her go, but she returns. She has fallen in love, but why? It has to be more than just the fact that he’s young and good looking, and it’s more than just “Stockholm Syndrome.” Unlike the kidnappers in Taken, who have a well-developed system of contacts in France to traffic women, and who have paid off the French Secret Service to look the other way, Mahabir knows that he’s fucked, that he’s made the one mistake that always lands you in jail (or in the grave). He’s victimized the rich. He knows very well that he could have trafficked all the young, working-class women he could find and at most it would have meant giving the police a few bribes here and there. But Veera is not only a rich girl. She’s the daughter of a major oligarch, the kind of man who can snap his fingers and have any government jump at his command. If Veera returns to Mahabir every time she has a chance to escape, it might just be arrogance, the sense that she’s basically his death warrant, and wants to punish him for stuffing a rag in her mouth and holding a gun to her temple. In reality, by the end of the movie, she genuinely cares about him. She tells him to call his mother. His mother would be worried about him. They drive into t he mountains. He tries to let her go again. She comes back again. He’s no longer able to resist. She’s his kidnapper as much as he’s her kidnapper. They’re two young people in love who have kidnapped each other.

We also begin to notice that their journey has mirrored the journey of the truck in the credits. It will end up in the mountains, with Veera and Mahabir finding that little cabin Veera had fantasized about with her fiancée. It will also end up back in Veera’s father’s compound, with Veera boxed into a reduced frame, her dream of flight crushed for good. We know Mahabir’s death is coming, but it ends up being more surprising and brutal than we had expected. One moment they are looking at each other. The next moment, he’s clutching his lower back in pain as dozens of soldiers surround their cabin, and he’s shot multiple times. Veera screams out in pain. She’s not being rescued. She’s being kidnapped, and in a manner that causes her far more trauma than the kidnapping at the gas station. Mahabir is thrown onto a stretcher and taken to the morgue. Veera is drugged and taken back to her family. When she wakes up, her dream is over. She’s been dragged back to a reality far worse than Mahabir. It’s not the arranged marriage. Her fiancée is an uptight prig and a coward, but as we’ve seen from the first half hour, he’s not the real problem. She can manipulate him easily enough. There’s something much darker in Veera’s past than just an arranged marriage with a shallow twit.

Back with her family we finally learn what kind of betrayal is worse than that of Judas. When Veera was a little girl, she was molested by her uncle. He would call her downstairs, give her chocolate, sit her in his lap, and rape her. We see flashbacks to Veera as a little girl, to the days before she had her innocence stolen. Veera’s uncle warns her never to tell anybody. She does not listen to him. She tells her mother. But her mother betrays her, covers it up, tells Veera to do what her uncle has ordered her to do, stay silent. There is no greater betrayal than a parent who puts her own daughter in the hands of a pedophile. Very no longer cares about staying silent. She violently denounces her uncle in front of the whole family. She lets out an extended primal scream. At long last we know why she had no real urge to escape from the criminals who kidnapped her, and why it’s not just Stockholm Syndrome. They were just opportunists who wanted to make money, and who eventually regretted what they had done. Her mother was the genuine sex trafficker, willing to pimp out her own daughter to maintain her respectable position in ruling class society. Veera’s fiancée fails yet again. Even now he can’t defend the woman he was to spend the rest of his life with. The louder Veera screams, the less they react. At least with the gag in her mouth, she had the chance of removing it. But now she has no gag in her mouth and her screams go unheard. She leaves her family and her fiancée for a dull job at a canning factory, not her fantasy of being a shepherd’s wife, but the harsh reality of working class life. At least she’s no longer living a lie. In the last scene, we see Veera as a little girl along with Mahabir, now as a boy. Hindus don’t die and go to hell or heaven. They get reincarnated. Hopefully we are seeing a preview of the new life they were reborn into together.

ANDOR (2022): EPISODES 4-6

Episode 3 of Andor ended with Cassian Andor and Luthen Rael, played by Stellan Skarsgård, blasting their way out of Ferrix, and leaving Syril Karn and his corporate police detachment either dead or in a state of shock wondering what happened. Andor, who has no money or ship of his own, is essentially Luthen’s prisoner, dependent on the older man, not only for his ride out of Ferrix, but for food and shelter until they both figure out his next step. When Luthen suggests to Andor that he join a group of revolutionaries on the planet Aldhani to take part in the robbery of an imperial garrison, it’s more of an order than an opportunity. Andor, who doesn’t have much choice in the matter, agrees.

If you’re a student of the Russian Revolution and all of this sounds familiar, it’s no accident. In a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Andor’s creator Tony Gilroy explains that he based episodes 4-6 of the show on the opening of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book Young Stalin, and the infamous 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, where a heist organized by Lenin and led by Joseph Stalin, carried off 241,000 rubles from a caravan of armored cars making their way through  Erivansky Square in what is now the city of Tbilisi, Georgia. The robbery was not a success. Over 40 people, including a number of innocent bystanders, were killed. 241,000 rubles in 1907 was only the equivalent of about 3.4 million dollars today, and very little of it wound up being of much use. The Czar’s secret police had a record of the serial numbers of all the largest bills. What’s more the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party passed a resolution condemning the “participation in or assistance to all militant activity, including expropriations as disorganizing and demoralizing.”

Nevertheless, The Tiflis bank robbery was a defining event for the ruthless, violent group of revolutionaries who would later become known as the Bolsheviks. Luthen, like Lenin, is determined to bring down the empire by any means necessary, and to do that he needs a lot of resourceful young petty criminals like Cassian Andor. On the way to Aldhani we not only learn that Luthen knows pretty much everything about Cassian Andor, but that Andor is no stranger to revolution and guerilla warfare, having served as a cook for an insurgent army during his teenage years, and having quit in disgust over factional squabbles that saw his fellow revolutionaries fighting one another more than they fought the empire. That Luthen is willing to pay Cassian 125,000 imperial credits to join his team on Aldhani is a testament to Cassian’s potential as a future militant. When Luthen asks Cassian to choose an alias, a codename, and Cassian calls himself “Clem” after his stepfather, we see how Bolsheviks are made. Clem, a skilled thief and scavenger, a black man who was hanged in the town square on Ferrix by the empire, has become Clem, a member of the revolutionary vanguard.

Cassian’s salary is an immediate source of tension between Luthen and Vel, the leader of the revolutionary cell on Aldhani, a severe young woman played by Faye Marsay, “the waif” from Game of Thrones. The last thing she wants is a mercenary, whose high salary is guaranteed to cause resentment among the other members of the cell, but Luthen insists that she take him and she follows his orders. As she introduces Andor to his “comrades,” Cinta, a young dark-skinned woman whose entire family was murdered by stormtroopers, Karis Nemik, a young man in his 20s, and the group’s intellectual and revolutionary theorist, Taramyn, a tall, formidable looking black man and an ex-imperial storm trooper, Lieutenant Gorn, an imperial officer and Vel’s man on the inside, and Avrel, a white man in his 40s, an ex-con who immediately begins to antagonize Cassian Andor and foment discontent, we begin to see why Vel is in command. She’s authoritative but open-minded and curious. She breaks up fights by asking each man his opinion on the issues. She skillfully integrates Andor into the team while making sure her people keep an eye on him to make sure he’s trustworthy.

The mission on Aldhani is a classic heist movie played out in the most poetic of all setting, Glen Tilt Park in Perthshire, Scotland. If you can imagine Jean Pierre Melville crossed with Ossian, Oceans 11 in the Scottish Highlands, the Italian job in the middle of the Highland Clearances, you can begin to understand the narrative complexity and originality of Andor. The imperial garrison on Andor is a bit like any frontier garrison in a district being ethnically cleansed for the good of “progress.” If the Kenari people in the early episodes of Andor were indigenous Mexicans, the Dhanis are basically Highland Scots, fair-skinned, red or blonde-haired pre-industrial people the empire has been pushing south out of their native land for decades. Just like the Irish peasantry in 1847, or the Scots Highlanders after the Jacobite Rebellion, the Dhanis are squatting on land too valuable for their “primitive” way of life. For the imperial officers, administrators and bureaucrats at the garrison, Aldhani is considered a bad posting, a backwater they send you when your career isn’t going anywhere.

As we follow Luthen back to the imperial capital on the planet Coruscant, where the formidable revolutionary leader lives as the owner of an art gallery popular with the imperial elite, we immediately understand why nobody at the imperial garrison on Aldhani can appreciate the planet’s staggering natural beauty. Even the ruling class on Coruscant live in dull high rises decked out in sterile IKEA furniture. We also meet two new characters, Mon Mothma, a liberal Senator who’s working behind the scenes with Luthen to raise money for the oppressed, and Deedra Meero, an ambitious imperial intelligence officer who sees the imperial crackdown in the wake of the disaster on Ferrix as a chance to jump-start her career. Imperial society is the picture of corporate evil. The ruling class make banal small talk. Senior management plays mid-level managers off against one another. Mid-level managers bully their underlings. Everybody moves in a tight, clipped way that says “I’ve built a forcefield around myself against beauty and imagination.” Above all, everybody is spying on everybody. Luthen has organized the heist on Aldhani partly because his contact in the Senate, Mon Mothma, is no longer able to move money around in the official banking system. Even her chauffeur is an imperial spy.

Probably the biggest plot hole in Andor is the fact that the empire still uses hard currency, that there’s a Fort Knox full of imperial gold bars to steal on the planet Aldhani. Nobody in the United States in 2024 uses cash. Even back in 1907 in Russia, the Secret Police could render stolen bank notes useless by circulating their serial numbers. There’s no reason to believe that the empire wouldn’t simply deactivate stolen imperial credits and render the physical media as valueless as expired Walmart gift cards. What empire worth its weight in evil lets people use cash. The empire in Andor is still in transition. It’s the 1970s, not the 2010s. The system of repression has not yet been perfected. In the end, the imperial payroll in Andor is a McGuffin, the excuse to show how the revolutionary cell organized by Luther and Vel pull off the perfect heist, not because any of them has any kind of superpower or extraordinary skill, but simply because they train for it, and train for it, and train for it. They put themselves through the paces so many times that even at the end when they’re all ready to kill one another, they still manage to pull it off.

What makes the heist in Andor so original is that in order to make their getaway, Vel, Andor and their comrades exploit The Eye of Aldhani, a rare natural phenomenon, a once every three years meteor shower, which is the center of a traditional religious ceremony for the Dhani. They need to pilot their slow, bulk freighter past the luminous natural phenomenon before the imperial garrison’s tie fighters can blow them out of the sky. Karis Nemik, the team’s intellectual has modified an ancient navigational system that will pilot them through the awesome spectacle of light even as the electrical charges fry the sophisticated computers on the tie fighters. Everything about the heist requires perfect timing, nerves of steel, inside information, and precise mathematical calculation, but in the end, it’s the beauty of the Scottish Highlands that lets the rebels defeat the evil empire. Andor and his space Bolsheviks succeed where Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite Rebels failed. The Jacobite Rising of 1745 isn’t particularly well known in the United States, but if you’re a fan of the TV series Outlander you will see the connection immediately. It’s an astonishing moment of TV. Somehow Tony Gilroy has managed to insert Celtic romanticism in the middle of a dirty Bolshevik Revolution organized by squabbling sectarian murderers and thieves. Cassian Andor, the last descendent of an extinct Mesoamerican tribe and Karis Nemik, a young intellectual with salvaged technology from the distant past, outwit an entire imperial garrison and make off with a spaceship full of gold.

Andor has rescued Bolshevism from young Joseph Stalin and given it back to the ancient highland bards.

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Andor (2022): Episodes 1-3

The 2016 film Rogue One is perhaps the most divisive Star Wars movie of all. The Excellent film critic Deep Focus Lens absolutely hated it. I thought it was the best Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes back. Set immediately before the first scene of the original Star Wars, which I will never call A New Hope, Rogue One is the story of Jyn Erso, played by the British actress Felicity Jones, and Cassion Andor, played by the Mexican actor Diego Luna. While neither Jyn nor Cassian has ever been particularly popular with hardcore Star Wars fans, they are the real heroes of the whole saga, since they are the ones who steal the plans to the original Death Star. Without Jyn and Cassian, Luke Skywalker, force or no force, would not have been able to send a pair of torpedoes down the garbage shoot, and blow the giant planet killer to kingdom come.

Running for twelve episodes, and consisting of three feature length movies, the first of which I will review here, the Disney + miniseries Andor is the prequel to Rogue One, the origin story of Cassian Andor before he reluctantly teamed up with Jyn Erso. Andor is no super hero story. It’s not even really Star Wars. Rather, it is Star Wars without the force, light sabers, Jedi knights, emperors or princesses, 8 foot tall space wizards in black S&M gear, or swelling orchestral scores by John Williams. If the original Star Wars was classic 1930s Hollywood, Andor is a mixture of genres, a heist film, a prison escape film, a police procedural, all wrapped up in a gritty style that might best be called kitchen sink noir, a style best exemplified by the forgotten 1981 Sean Connery film Outland or the 1984 cult classic Streets of Fire. If someone told me there was a lost Bruce Springsteen album called Darkness on the Edge of Andor, I would believe you. In fact, compare Diego Luna to young Bruce Springsteen or young Michael Pare.

Andor opens on the “industrial planet” of Morlana One with Cassian walking down along causeway in the rain towards the red light district of a corporate office park. If you’ve been to Hoboken or Jersey City, you’ve seen this place. He walks into a bar you might be tempted to compare to the bar at the Mos Eisley spaceport in A New Hope, if the bar in the Mos Eisley spaceport got rid of the raucous music and only admitted humans. Naturally everybody in the bar, including a pair of corrupt, corporate security guards, think Cassian is there to get laid, but even though Cassian is very much the type of guy who would pay for sex, that’s not what he wants. Just the opposite, Cassian is looking for his younger sister, from whom he got separated on their home planet when their tribe — who are obvious stand ins for indigenous Mexicans — was wiped out by an imperial ship in an incident that looks a bit like the first time white men made contact with Native Americans back in 1492. Cassian, who was rescued by a white woman named Marva, and her black husband Clem, who we later learn was hanged by the Empire, is looking for his authentic self in a place that no longer exists, a planet that was made uninhabitable by an imperial mining disaster, for an indigenous culture nobody has ever heard of, for a little girl who has been dead for 25 or 30 years.

Finding no trace of his sister in the bar, Cassian walks back up the causeway to his ship, where he’s mugged by the two security men who had mistaken him for an easy victim. Diego Luna, who’s about 5’10” and 150 pounds, is no more imposing than Mark Hamill, who got bullied at the bar at the Mos Eisley Space Port until he was rescued by Obi Wan Kenobi and his light saber. It’s a fatal mistake. Cassian was brought up on the working-class planet of Ferrix by a pair of scavengers, and knows how to handle himself in a fight. He knocks one of the men to the ground, cracks his skull on the concrete and shoots the other as he begs for his life. What makes the scene so good is how believable the fight is. There are no fancy martial arts. Cassian isn’t even that strong. It’s just one sober man against two jackasses who have had too much to drink at the bar, and who have convinced themselves that they’re tougher than they really are. When Cassian gets back into his ship and goes back to Ferrix, it feels like he had just killed a pair of drunken New York City Police officers outside a bar in the East Village, and fled the scene of the crime to go back home to Newark or Elizabeth in New Jersey.

Back home in Ferrix, Cassian begins constructing an alibi he hopes will cover his tracks. Along the way he meet his ex-girlfriend Bix, that one perfect 10 you sometimes run into in a dreary blue collar city, her current boyfriend Timm, Cassian’s friend Brasso, a hulking giant who’s willing to cover for him, everybody who’s ever done Cassian a favor or lent him money, and above all Marva, Cassian’s formidable old step mother who will later appear in perhaps the most memorable scene in the series. While Cassian is planning his escape, arranging to sell a valuable piece of gear he had stolen from the empire to a shady buyer he contacts through Bix, we go back to Morlana One and meet the imperial authorities in charge of the crime, only they’re not the imperial authorities. They’re just a mid-level corporate security department, the local cops in the 1993 movie The Fugitive who bungle the case until Tommy Lee Jones takes over. The head supervisor accurately sizes up the case from the very beginning. Two corrupt security guards picked a fight with the wrong man. We also see that the Empire is basically New York in the 1970s or 1980s, the imperial core before sincere Nazis and authoritarians like Rudy Giuliani take over. People tolerate the Empire because they can carve out their little grift inside of it. The two security guards got to drink, and fuck, at an expensive whorehouse because they could use their authority to shake down an occasional customer for his wallet. If they got killed in the process, that was just too bad. Nobody was going to waste any time tracking down their murderer, but the times are changing.

When we meet Syril Karn, we don’t even need an introduction for he’s such a familiar character. Played by the American actor Kyle Soller, Syril is the ambitious young police officer, think Lieutenant Exley from LA Confidential or Elliot Ness from The Untouchables, who’s determined to root out the corruption of the city police department, and put it back on track as an official crime fighting organization. “They were two Morlana employees,” he tells his supervisor, who advises him just to let it go. “If I don’t solve their murder than I am not worthy of the uniform.” While Syril may be the villain of the first part of Andor, there’s nothing particularly evil about him. He’s just a dedicated police detective doing his job. He’s not likable like Kevin Costner or charismatic and macho like Clint Eastwood or even an intellectual like Sam Waterson in Law and Order, but he does do exactly what every good police detective does. He kicks his lazy subordinates in the ass and makes them earn their pay. He locks on the one clue Cassian was careless enough, or sincere enough, to let drop, that a man from the planet Kenari (think Oaxaca or Chiapas) was looking for his long lost sister in a whore house in Morlana One, and just methodically sifts through the details. It’s a long shot, but like in every police procedural, that long shot eventually leads right to a viable suspect.

It is a long shot. Marva has wisely covered up the fact that her step son is an indigenous Kenari. Diego Luna is a well-known Mexican actor who fully embraces Mexico’s indigenous heritage but he doesn’t look particularly indigenous. He looks like any mixed race, mostly white, upper-class Mexican. If you told me he was Greek, or Turkish, or Sicilian, or even French, I’d believe you. Ferrix, like Elizabeth New Jersey, Scranton PA, Buffalo, New York, or Chicago is a dirty old industrial city full of every ethnic group, race, nationality, religion, skin tone, facial feature, height, weight, build, physical appearance, and cultural eccentricity known to man, or whatever humans in the Star Wars universe are called. It’s exactly the kind of place where a man like Cassian would cling to whatever makes him different. I know, for example, that my name “Rogouski” is derived from a small city in Silesia on the border of Poland and Germany, that my mother’s ancestry is French Swiss and German, that my paternal grandmother was born in Lithuania. Yet I couldn’t tell you very much about any of those places. I’m as American as Cassian is a native of Ferrix. In this day and age of the “Landback” movement you better believe that if I were even 5% Cherokee I’d tell everybody about it. Cassian, of course, who adores his mother Marva, has wisely kept his ethnic heritage to himself, but of course he has told most of his girlfriends, including Bix. Who hasn’t told their boyfriend or girlfriend about that obscure little country they can claim as their homeland?

As Cassian is getting his alibi straight with Marva, we learn that he has not brought Bix home to meet her. That tells us that she was never really important to him, that she was the passive partner in their relationship, the one who admires more than is admired. Timm, on the other hand, who’s played by the Scottish actor James McArdle, knows that he is punching far above his weight category. He’s a dull working class bloke in a dull industrial city who has scored the hottest babe in town. This fact is such an important part of his identity, he’s terrified of losing it. He also knows that he’s living in Cassian’s shadow, the mysterious Hispanic bad boy who for some reason Bix is reluctantly willing to do a favor for every time he comes around and asks. Timm fears that as soon as Cassian wants her back, she’s his for the asking. Timm is also not particularly bright. He doesn’t realize that his best possible option is to let Cassian sell his stolen imperial electronics to Bix’s contact and let him get out of town for good. Timm is a young man who knows he’s the rebound guy, the warm body who will serve as a place holder until she finds something better. So he acts in an irrational manner. He calls up Syril Karn. You were looking for a man descended from the mysterious and now genocided people of Kenari? I have some information that might be of interest to you.

In the third episode of Andor, the first story arc of the series comes together in an explosive way. Syril taps another security officer, commandeers twelve soldiers, and heads to Ferrix to arrest his only suspect. We also meet Luthen Rael. Played by the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, he’s Ben Kenobi to Cassian’s Luke Skywalker, Alec Guinness to Mark Hamill, the wise old mentor the lost young man was seeking all along. Unlike Alec Guinness’s Ben Kenobi, however, Luthen is no kindly old space Jesus. He’s more like Lenin or Robespierre, a ruthless, cold revolutionary determined to bring down the empire by any means necessary. If that necessary means is using and exploiting an angry young man like Cassian, so be it. He wants the electronics, of course, but he’s more interested in Cassian himself, a thief clever enough talk walk in and out of imperial bases and just take what he wants. Cassian mistrusts Luther but he also has no trouble telling him how he can steal so many imperial components. He’s a nobody. The Empire doesn’t care about him. All he has to do is walk in and take what he wants. It’s New York City in the 1970s and anybody with the requisite lack of morals can probably steal enough to live a pretty good life.

But times are definitely changing. Syril Karn and his detachment reach Ferrix faster than anybody, even an experienced Bolshevik like Luthen, expected. They quickly take Marva hostage, arrest Bix, and trace Cassian to the spot where he and Luthen are arranging their transaction. It’s now too late. Cassian has to trust Luthen, who’s his only way out. As they shoot their way out of the city, as Timm foolishly dies trying to rescue Bix from Syril Karn’s officers, as Marva taunts her arresting officer with a promise of the revolution that awaits him, Luthen tells Cassian about a mission. The rebellion is now ready to infiltrate a frontier garrison and steal the payroll for an entire imperial sector. Is Cassian interested. The rebellion is ready to pay well, and what choice does Cassian have after all? In the next episode, soon to be reviewed here, we enter a new arc of the Andor series. Fans of Jean Pierre Melville or the Oceans 11 series will enjoy it.

The Narcissism of the Oppressor Class

Try to imagine for a second that we’re all Canadians. I’m a middle-class Anglophone Canadian in the old capital of Kingston, Ontario, a two hour drive from Syracuse, New York. One day I pick up the local newspaper, the Kingston Whig Standard, and learn that the provincial government of Quebec had mobilized the 2^nd Canadian Division, which then stormed into the Mohawk reservation of Akwesasne, killed all 14,000 residents, and buried them in mass graves. The next day protests erupted on college campuses all across Canada, the University of Toronto, McGill, the University of Ottawa and Queens University in Kingston. The students at Queens University had even set up a tent city with signs like “No More Genocide in Canada” or “Arrest François Legault for War Crimes.” A few of the signs were a bit nuttier. One or two of them expressed outright dislike for the French. “You can never trust a frog,” one sign said. “Die cheese-eating surrender monkey,” another read.

As the week went on, more and more mass graves at the Akwesasne Reservation began to appear on Tik Tok, snuck out of the province by brave local activists with cell phones. It was clear that the provincial government of Quebec had committed a genocide. As a typical Anglophone Canadian, a bit conservative and a bit racist, I was first inclined to doubt the news of the atrocities, but after awhile it became undeniable. The people of Quebec had gone mad, and in an orgy of white supremacist violence, were trying to cleanse the province of the First Nations. I began to feel my outrage grow. I also began to take a certain pride in the 18-22 year old college students who had been the first to call national attention to what had happened in Quebec. But that’s not how the media saw it. All across the English language media of Canada, all my fellow Anglophones, who had always had a problematic relationship with the French, could talk about nothing but the former lowly status of the Francophone working class in Quebec. Every day there was a new apology from the media for what the United Kingdom had done to these oppressed people. Soon it started to be considered racist to refer to French Canadians as “white.” Every day there was a new horror story about how someone got a dirty look for saying “bonjour” instead of “good morning.” One day at the local Tim Hortons I found myself behind a pair of French-speaking patrons. “Oh hurry up you fucking frogs,” I whispered under my breath. The next day woke up to see myself on tape that the security camera had taken. “Who is this racist?” the local reporter said. “Anybody with information contact the station immediately.”

Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it?

It may sound ludicrous, but that’s exactly what’s happening in the American media. The Palestinians in Gaza are among the poorest people in the world. For the past 6 months, the Israeli Defense Forces have pounded a densely populated area with American made weapons, killing tens of thousands of people and creating a famine that will doubtedly kill many thousands more. The Israeli government is committing a genocide with the full support of President Biden and all of the wealthy, powerful countries of the European Union. The entire American political and media class has remained silent, even as they uncover mass grave after mass grave. Finally, the student body at Columbia University, the very best and brightest 18-22 year olds America has to offer, erect a tent city on their campus. They are met with brutal repression. The NYPD storms the campus, and evicts their first encampment. They return even stronger than before, determined to resist the attempts of the university administration to silence them. The media begins a smear campaign, accusing the protesters, many of whom are Jewish themselves, of being anti-Semitic terrorists. Rich conservative Jews make it all about themselves, and the story becomes all about how one of the wealthiest, most secure populations in the United States, a country which has never had a tradition of anti-Semitism, feels “unsafe.”

It is the narcissism of the oppressor class on full display. Oddly enough, as a white American Christian, I finally understand how black people perceived people like me in 2020, when a nationwide wave of protests erupted against police brutality, and many white conservatives made it all about themselves. It shouldn’t be “Black Lives Matter,” they insisted, but “All Lives Matter.” There is nobody in Western society more afraid and more insecure than the oppressor class. As Malcolm X used to argue, it’s all about projection. White people in America are terrified of black people because they are terrified of the idea that they will someday be treated like black people. Jews in Israel and the United States remember that in the 1930s they were the Palestinians, a stateless people targeted by all the most powerful racial supremacists in Europe and North America for destruction. It always comes full circle, doesn’t it?

It’s OK to kill jews ’cause they don’t have any feelings

Back in the 1990s, I used to spend my Summers in Alaska, where I would work on industrial fishing trawlers in the Gulf of Alaska, or in Salmon canneries in Ketchikan or Petersburg. It was cold, dirty, nasty work. I spent weeks covered in blood and fish guts without showering. The pay was terrible, a few dollars above minimum wage, plus time and a half for overtime. One year I worked on a boat I will call the Alaskan Collaborator. The captain, a Scottish-American immigrant from Glasgow who I will refer to as Bonnie Prince Malcolm, was an actual Nazi. I’m not joking. He not only had a tattoo from the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne — his grandfather was a Highland Scot who crossed the Channel to volunteer for the French Nazi Party — he even asked me if my name ended in a “ski” or a “sky” before he would hire me. “The only thing you have to worry about with skis,” he would say, “is that dumb Polacks like you need a lot of patient supervision. Sit a ski in the back of the boat with a pile of fish and a knife, and the only thing you have to worry about is him cutting his finger off. But a sky is devious,” he would go on. “You never know what a sky is up to. Hire a sky and he’ll probably go home in the Fall and ask his daddy to give him the money to buy my boat. Welcome aboard Mr. Rogouski,” he added, shaking my hand, and pointing me to a couple of tax forms I had to fill out. “I’m glad you found your place at the bottom of society. Just remember, down here in the blood, gore, and fish guts. I’m the king. If you don’t like it, you better learn how to swim. Because one complaint and you go right over the side.”

As the Summer went on, as I sorted fish after fish, making sure to separate valuable king and sockeye salmon from the cheap pink salmon we could be sending to the cannery back home, I often thought about Bonnie Prince Malcolm and his Nazi tattoo. I rarely saw him after the initial interview since the owner-operators of industrial fish trawlers rarely if ever fraternize with their minimum-wage employees. I began to play a game with myself. I was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp, not a high-class German but a Ukrainian conscript who saw the Nazis as liberators because they both hated communists, and the fish were inmates in the Alaskan Collaborator death camp. King salmon were Aryans who had either fun afoul of the law or joined the communist party. Sockeye Salmon were Poles, retards, sexual deviants, or gypsies. Pink salmon were Jews, destined to be run through the “iron chink” (a politically incorrect name for the head-chopping machine in an Alaskan salmon cannery), put into aluminum cans, and baked in a retort oven until they were ready for consumption. “Found another dirty Bolshevik,” I would say, tossing a valuable King Salmon in the fresh frozen bucket. Sing me a song gypsy,” I would say to the Sockeye Salmon who followed him shortly after. “Jew, Jew, Jew,” I would spit out at each cheap pink salmon I passed on to be sent back home, decapitated, canned, and baked. “Jew. Jew. Jew.”

One day Bonnie Prince Malcolm dropped by for a visit.

“How’s everything going Mr. Polack,” he said, nodding his head as I continued to work. “You and the fish getting along?”

“I’m sending them back to the gas chambers,” I said.

“And that’s where they belong,” he said.

“Do you ever feel sorry for them?” I said.

“No,” he said. It’s like that Kurt Cobain song. “It’s OK to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings.”

As I watched Jonathan Glazer’s film Zone of Interest, I thought about my Summers in Alaska. Glazer’s earlier film, Under the Skin, starred Scarlett Johansson as an alien disguised as a beautiful woman sent to Earth to harvest voddissin, human meat, a very expensive delicacy on the aliens’ home planet. She would lure unsuspecting men to their deaths, where they would be taken back home and processed. Zone of Interest reads a bit like the Sequel to Under the Skin. Based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, and set in the home of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, it details the mundane everyday life of Höss as they manage the giant industrial death machine on the other side of the wall separating their beautiful suburban house from the gas chambers and crematoria. There’s nothing particularly evil about Höss and his family. He’s just another white-collar middle manager with a socially ambitious wife and kids who want to get into the right colleges. To be honest, if he ever met a character like Bonnie Prince Malcolm he would probably piss his pants in sheer terror.

We never see the minimum wage workers on the other side of the fence in Zone of Interest, the Kapos, Ukrainian collaborators, Polish slave laborers, or Aryan draftees who got unlucky enough to be transferred from the Western front to do the shit work in an Eastern European death camp, any more than we see the Jews, gypsies, retards, Polacks or communists. But I imagined them, not as humans, but as aliens, the working class of Scarlett Johannson’s home planet, the minimum wage schmucks like me who processed the voddissin for consumption. Occasionally a Sockeye or King Salmon would slip through, and a Jewish woman with an expensive fur coat that would be examined by Höss’ wife to determine whether or not she or any of her fellow Aryans wanted it. Höss, his wife, and his children, I decided, were also aliens, allowed to take on human form and manage a voddissin factory in Poland. At the end of Zone of Interest, we suddenly find ourselves in the Auschwitz Museum in 2023, the cleaning staff sweeping up after a hard day’s work, me hosing down the deck of the Alaskan Collaborator after sunset.

Jonathan Glazer, a British Jew born in London, had the best day of his life, along with the worst, last week at the Oscars. As he accepted the award for Best Foreign Film, he did something stupid, declared that the Palestinians in Gaza were not voddissin, pink salmon, Polacks, Gypsies, or retards, but human beings. There was nothing particularly radical about his speech. All he did was the equivalent of the Dixie Chicks when they declared that they were embarrassed that George W. Bush was President of the United States, or like a liberal Protestant Minister who declares that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson don’t speak for all Christians.

“Right now,” he said, “we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance. Thank you.”

Pretty tame stuff, but there are no innocent “can’t we all just get along” statements about the genocide in Gaza, at least where Israel and its propagandists are concerned. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, Jews have no more right, or obligation, to speak out against atrocities committed by the Israeli government than anybody else. Glazer chose to demonstrate his solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza, and for his trouble, he got “canceled” by the Israel Lobby.

“Hamas’s October 7 slaughter, mass sexual assault, and hostage-taking onslaught in southern Israel, and the consequent ongoing war, was the result of the terror group’s avowed antisemitic ideology and its implacable desire to kill Jews anywhere and everywhere and destroy the State of Israel,” David Horovitz writes in the Israel Times. “Not the consequence of an ostensible Israeli hijacking of Glazer’s and others’ Jewishness and the Holocaust in the cause of ‘occupation,” then, but the barbaric manifestation of a neighboring terrorist government’s absolute negation of Israel’s right to exist.”

Jonathan Glazer is not going to lose his career. At worst, he’ll probably get disinvited to a few parties in Beverly Hills. Next year, after the Palestinians have all been processed into cans and baked in retort ovens, everybody will realize how silly the whole controversy was. Glazer at least, said something, even if it was “as a Jew.” Good for him, but where were Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie, Greta Gerwig, and Christopher Nolan? Why didn’t they speak up about the genocide in Gaza? None of them should be let off the hook because they’re all blond, blue-eyed Aryans. As rich Westerners, it’s their genocide too. They should either own it or disavow it.

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious

In the Fall of 1964, a protest erupted at the University of California at Berkeley, the most elite public university in the world, and at the time tuition free, that is generally regarded as the beginning of the 1960s new left. Under its liberal Chancellor Clark Kerr, the university had become so successful that it probably surpassed the Ivy League for academic quality, but it all came at a price. It was also a training center for the military, defense industry and intelligence agencies, where California’s best and brightest public school graduates would prepare themselves for careers at Lockheed Martin or the State Department.

That Fall, Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense who would become Berkley’s most famous, and infamous, graduate in the late 1960s, had already mapped out a high-tech genocidal war in Vietnam where American planes would defoliate the country from above, and working-class draftees would keep track of their “body count” in the jungles below. But another, very different man, a 22-year-old graduate student name Mario Savio, a working-class Italian American Catholic from New York City, had enrolled at the university the previous fall. He had spent that Summer registering voters in the Jim Crow South, which at the time was probably as dangerous as serving in Vietnam, and had returned to liberal Northern California eager to share what he had learned with his fellow students.

The problem for Mario Savio and his fellow liberal idealists was that the University of California had a “no politics” rule on campus. In order to set up a table and give out leaflets, or just talk to other students, you had to be a member of an officially recognized Democrat or Republican club. The University also had a requirement for faculty members, a “loyalty oath” where you had to swear that you were never a member of the Communist Party. Four years before, in front of San Francisco City Hall, the San Francisco Police had brutally suppressed a protest against the House Unamerican Activities Committee, washing people down the steps with fire hoses, tear gassing and beating them. A confrontation had become inevitable. When a former graduate student named Jack Weinberg attempted to set up a table for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, he refused to show his ID to campus police, and was arrested, handcuffed and put into a squad car. Student activists, eager to try out their training in non-violent civil disobedience, quickly surrounded the car, and prevented it from moving. Eventually the crowd swelled to several thousand people. Weinberg would spend the next 32 hours in the back seat of the police car as student after student jumped up on the roof, now a makeshift speakers corner, to give a speech, the best known being Mario Savio’s.

And that’s what we have here. We have an autocracy which — which runs this university. It’s managed. We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, “Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?” That’s the answer.

 Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be —  have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!

And that — that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm

To be perfectly honest when I studied Mario Savio’s speech in an English 101 class in the 1980s at Rutgers, New Jersey’s shitty state university with an even shittier football team, I had always found it melodramatic. Berkeley wasn’t Northern Ireland or the Jim Crow South. Weinberg would be taken down to the campus police station. They would write him out a summons. He would pay a fine and that would be that. I didn’t realize at the time that the reason New Jersey’s somewhat less than elite flagship state university had a Classics department where you could study Latin and Greek, a well regarded philosophy department that would eventually be considered the best in the world, and top 25 programs in English and history, was precisely because an earlier generation of students had fought so hard to make sure higher education in America had not become a training center for the CIA and the Pentagon, a factory that processed teenagers to take their place in the American war machine. In 2024, things have gone backwards. The University of West Virginia, for example, has almost entirely abolished its liberal arts curriculum, a flagship state university without a French Department or a Comparative Literature Department.

Barnard College in New York City, the women’s division of Columbia University, is of course never going to abolish its Classics or French Departments for it serves an entirely different purpose from Rutgers or the University of West Virginia. The entire reason Barnard College exists is to train upper-class women to speak well, read deeply, write novels and poetry, and run the publishing industry in New York and NGO complex in Washington. Restrictions in the Ivy League have always been relatively few because it’s always been assumed that upper class Americans will always act in their own upper-class interests. That all changed last October 7, when Hamas broke out of the Gaza Strip and attacked Israeli settlements. Israel’s genocidal counter-offensive awakened a new generation of American student activists even at, or should I say, especially at ruling class institutions like Barnard. The Israel Lobby quickly counterattacked, forcing the Presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania to resign. The President of Columbia and the Dean of Barnard College, therefore, nervous about losing their jobs, have decided to ban all pro-Palestinian decorations on the doors of student dorm rooms at Barnard.

It’s the Fall of 1964 all over again.

(New York Times article is unlocked so there shouldn’t be a paywall.)

Students had also posted stickers and slogans supporting the Palestinian cause and naming the war in Gaza as a genocide. “Zionism is terrorism,” one student’s door sticker said.

Concerned that some students might feel intimidated by such messages, the Barnard administration has decided to enforce a ban on dorm door decorations altogether. Their removal was set to begin on Thursday, and all but “official items placed by the college” will be taken down, Leslie Grinage, the dean of the college, wrote in an email to students.

“While many decorations and fixtures on doors serve as a means of helpful communication amongst peers, we are also aware that some may have the unintended effect of isolating those who have different views and beliefs,” she wrote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/nyregion/campus-free-speech-barnard-columbia.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Zk0.w1-2.2PqpRWOP1eUd&smid=nytcore-android-share

Tis Pity She’s a Whore

There is something oddly satisfying about the moment when you read a news story and suddenly realize it’s not a news story at all, but an advertising campaign. The news itself is usually pretty trivial. In this case, a washed-up actress, down on her luck, goes online, sells some mildly racy photos, and makes enough money to pay off her house. What’s not to like?

When you look more closely you realize there’s quite a bit not to like. Drea de Matteo is a fellow Gen Xer, 52 years old. As much as I like my generation — we’re far less “woke” and a lot more fun than millennials — we’re not exactly young and sexy anymore. How exactly did a middle-aged woman make several hundred thousand dollars in 5 minutes selling sexy photos on the Internet?

That Drea de Matteo is selling nostalgia, not sex, wringing every dollar she can out of the valuable corporate property she was part of in the early 2000s, is no cause for concern. In fact, it’s cause for celebration. You go girl. But nostalgia isn’t all that Ms. de Matteo is selling, or why the corporate media is suddenly boosting her OnlyFans site. Drea de Matteo is also acting as a brand ambassador for a sleazy soft-core pornography channel, one that rewards already well-off, established media personalities, and exploits desperate young women. Her being 52-years-old is part of the ad campaign. How many 18-25 year-old girls are going to read about her success and think “gee. If a woman my mom’s age can make money selling nudes, why can’t I?”

When it comes to sex work, OnlyFans seems like a pretty good job. Strip down to your underwear in the comfort of your own home, snap a few selfies, post them on line, and wait for the money to start rolling in. The problem is that, except for a small elite with an already established brand in the corporate media, it doesn’t. In 2021, the top 1% earned 33% of the total gross merchandise value while the top 10% earned 73%. In other words, the bottom 89% split 4% of the revenue, accomplishing little but providing free content to a social media company, and putting photos online that will most likely not remain private forever, and will almost undoubtedly come back to haunt their creators in the future.

What’s more, OnlyFans, while relatively safe in and of itself, can often be a gateway to other, more dangerous kinds of sex work. How many naïve young women in these economically desperate times dreaming of being the next Mia Khalifa yet only making a few dollars a month will get a private message from a “professional photographer” offering to redo their portfolios for free and from there to meeting some friend at a bar somewhere who can introduce them to the “right connections?” Ending up as the “NUDES IN BIO” for some Russian troll on Twitter/X might be the least of your worries.

During her time on The Sopranos, Drea de Matteo played Adriana La Cerva, a young mafia wife who wasn’t particularly good at being a mafia wife. Eventually she ratted her drug addict of a husband Christopher Moltisanti and his sociopathic mentor Tony Soprano out to the FBI. We all know how she ended up. It’s one of the most disturbing scenes in a very disturbing series. Driven out to the woods by Silvio Dante, one of Tony Soprano’s lieutenants, a sleazy night club owner and sex trafficker by played Steven Van Zandt, the ugly guy in the E-Street Band, she’s shot in the back of the head while crawling on all fours begging for her life. It’s not that Adriana La Cerva was a particularly likeable character. She wasn’t. It’s that her end was far out of proportion to any evil she might have done. She sold some drugs and get entrapped by the feds into spying on her husband. Compared to most of the demons who inhabit the world of The Sopranos that qualifies her as a saint.

As far as I can tell, her murderer Silvio Dante is one of the most popular characters on the series, mainly because he seems mostly sane and level headed, at least compared to Jersey Italian berserkers like Richie Aprile, who cripples an innocent pizza shop owner by running him over with his car, or Ralph Cifaretto, who beats a pregnant 20-year-old stripper to death in a coked up rage. In reality, however, Silvio Dante is probably the most evil character in the series. Aprile and Cifaretto act like murderous thugs because they need to maintain an intimidating image among their fellow mobsters. Silvio Dante, on the other hand, mainly exploits women — nice work if you can get it — including the young stripper murdered by Ralph Cifaretto. After her death at his nightclub, Silvio carries on as if nothing ever happened, one more disposable body to be chopped up and fed to the sharks. It seemed fitting, therefore, that he would be the one chosen to murder Adriana La Cerva. As a sex trafficker and pimp, he knew exactly how to put her at ease before she finally realized what was going to happen, that she was going to die at the hands of one of her husband’s goons while desperately begging for her life.

It seems almost as fitting that 20 years later, out of her economic desperation, Drea de Matteo would become a Silvio Dante for the social media age, an unwitting if privileged spokesperson for the online sex industry, unknowingly putting young women at ease selling nudes on the Internet before some of them are dragged down into hellish world of a lot of real life Tony Sopranos, and Silvio Dantes.

About suffering they were never wrong the old masters

According to a tweet from an organization that appears to be connected with the Israeli Defense Force, about 1000 Palestinians in Gaza rushed an aid convey bringing food. Some appear to have been trampled by the mob. Others appeared to have been shot by Israeli soldiers. As always in these incidents it’s best to wait for a few days until all the facts come out before drawing any conclusions.

תיעוד אווירי של המבצע להכנסת סיוע הומניטארי לצפון רצועת עזה, המראה כיצד ההמון פלסטיני התנפל על המשאיות וכתוצאה מכך נהרגו עשרות מצפיפות, דוחק ודריסה>> pic.twitter.com/a7DqU9kKFB

— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) February 29, 2024

A translation of the Hebrew.

Aerial footage of the operation to bring humanitarian aid into the northern Gaza Strip, showing how the Palestinian crowd attacked the trucks and as a result dozens were killed from overcrowding, crowding and trampling

Looking at the video posted by the IDF Twitter account, I immediately thought of the movie The Third Man by Carol Reed.

It’s always worth revisiting. Harry Lime, Orson Welles, sells stolen and diluted penicillin on the black market. When confronted by his old friend, Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotton, he points to a crowd of people below. From the vantage point of the giant Ferris Wheel they’re both riding, the people look like dots. “Would it really bother you if one of those dots stopped moving?” he says.

Never forget that this is how the ruling class sees us all, not just Palestinians.