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JackRiddler » Sun Feb 25, 2018 10:09 pm wrote:.The happy-hopeful ending delivers two big lies. The first is predictable and, in context, of little consequence. It is practically compelled by economic and structural forces (see my book on The Political Economy of Marvel and Society, coming soon from Neverland Publishers).
brainpanhandler » Mon Feb 26, 2018 11:11 am wrote:Apparently there is a petition.
https://www.change.org/p/the-walt-disne ... ommunities
Like you I don't hold out much hope of even 1% of profits being invested in the African American community, let alone the 25% asked for in the petition.JackRiddler » Sun Feb 25, 2018 10:09 pm wrote:.The happy-hopeful ending delivers two big lies. The first is predictable and, in context, of little consequence. It is practically compelled by economic and structural forces (see my book on The Political Economy of Marvel and Society, coming soon from Neverland Publishers).
I guess I didn't see that coming, but it sounds intriguing.
JackRiddler » Mon Feb 26, 2018 5:32 pm wrote:Sorry, you can only buy the book using CosmiCoin, the new Cosmic Cube-based cryptocurrency. We are negotiating to add the Tesseract Coin, due for ICO next year.
Sounder » Thu Mar 01, 2018 2:56 am wrote:minime, you may need a medical checkup for that humor deficiency.
Black Atlantis
Asad Haider March 5, 2018A civil war between Black families was unfolding over aiding other Black people, and… the CIA’s shooting down of vessels carrying technology into the fight against an anti-black world order was hailed as a heroic moment… I kept wondering how I’d come to dance on the table for the CIA? The ones that helped destroy the dream of African liberation, that had a hand in the assassination of Lumumba, staged a coup against Nkrumah, tipped off the arrest that imprisoned Mandela, installed the vicious, nation-destroying Mobutu? Why not throw in the FBI and COINTELPRO as kindly white characters? Was this meant to be ironic? What meaning do we assign the fact that the possibility of a real life Wakanda in the resource-rich Congo and Ghana, and the promise of a Pan African quest for collective self-determination were precisely the threats that the CIA worked to suppress?
Ben Norton wrote:
I have been thinking about this for a while and I know there has been a lot of debate, but I just saw Black Panther again and this is my two cents: there is no question in my mind that Killmonger is the real hero and that T'Challa is the villain — and that the CIA was clearly involved in producing this movie.
SPOILER ALERT
T'Challa is a reactionary monarch who is only in power because he was born as a member of the ruling class. In fact, he is a rather incompetent and unprepared leader. Politically, he expressly opposes supporting national liberation movements throughout the world and solely believes in running his nation as an isolated autarky.
Killmonger is a revolutionary who grew up in poverty in Oakland and wants to use Wakanda's enormous wealth to support national liberation movements and arm the oppressed in their struggles against their colonialist, white supremacist, and capitalist oppressors.
Killmonger takes power legitimately and rightfully, by defeating T'Challa in a completely fair ritual battle that the latter consented to, and then immediately begins waging a revolution. Killmonger moves toward abolishing reactionary feudalism in Wakanda (he burns the heart-shaped herbs) and creates a kind of Comintern that will support liberation movements worldwide.
In response, the "hero" T'Challa literally teams up with a white CIA agent (YES, A WHITE CIA AGENT) to launch a military coup against the revolutionary Black nationalist who legitimately and rightfully took power from him.
The white CIA agent proceeds to shoot down all of the planes that were shipping advanced weapons to oppressed peoples across the globe. And T'Challa then murders the Black revolutionary leader who believes in supporting global anti-imperialist struggles.
And the moral and political takeway is that T'Challa has learned his lesson, and will become a respected and responsible international leader — by incorporating Wakanda into the international capitalist-imperialist system.
Instead of helping to fight imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism, T'Challa pledges at the United Nations (an imperialist institution with its origins in the explicitly colonial and white supremacist League of Nations) that he will use these global imperialist institutions and the capitalist market to help other colonized nations "develop," doubtless on neoliberal models.
The revolutionary Killmonger pledged solidarity and a new system in which the oppressed become the rulers; the reactionary monarch T'Challa pledges charity and reform.
In the final scene, when T'Challa reveals his grand plans to create a community center in Oakland, I almost thought it was satire for a moment. This is what the movie would have us believe is the preferable alternative to armed resistance.
In fact, Killmonger quite obviously seems to be based on Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton (it is noteworthy that, in the comics, Killmonger is supposed to be from Harlem, whereas the movie version makes him from Oakland). The film even clearly models the Wakandan throne after the wicker chair Newton famously posed in with a spear (and a gun).
This is not to endorse everything Killmonger did. He is clearly very brutal and quite authoritarian. But many revolutionaries throughout history have been equally ruthless — including historical revolutionary figures who have today even been accepted into the mainstream. Haitian revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to name just one example, oversaw some pretty grotesque actions that I would certainly not defend, but also indisputably helped emancipate millions of people from slavery and colonialism. The Allied Powers likewise committed some absolutely heinous war crimes in World War II, but they crushed genocidal fascist regimes.
It is grotesque and mind-blowingly racist that Marvel and Hollywood spent months selling this movie as pro-Black, when in reality it portrayed Black liberation as evil and villainous.
It is revolting and vomit-inducing that movie studios and the "entertainment industry" are exploiting popular culture to such a degree to depict a pro-imperialist film as the peak of social progress. But at the end of the day Hollywood is only interested in representation, not liberation.
Unfortunately none of this is surprising, considering Hollywood is and has always been a fundamentally capitalist and racist institution.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =3&theater
The narrator soon discovers that the Vril-ya are descendants of an antediluvian civilization called the Ana, who live in networks of subterranean caverns linked by tunnels. Originally surface dwellers, they had fled underground thousands of years ago to escape a massive flood and gained greater power by facing and dominating the harsh conditions of the Earth. The place where the narrator descended housed 12,000 families, one of the largest groups. Their society was a technologically supported Utopia, chief among their tools being an "all-permeating fluid" called "Vril", a latent source of energy that the spiritually elevated hosts are able to master through training of their will, to a degree that depended on their hereditary constitution. This mastery gave them access to an extraordinary force that could be controlled at will. It is this fluid that the Vril-ya employed to communicate with the narrator. The powers of the Vril included the ability to heal, change, and destroy beings and things; the destructive powers in particular were powerful, allowing a few young Vril-ya children to destroy entire cities if necessary.
Men (called An, pronounced "Arn") and women (called Gy, pronounced "Gee") have equal rights. The women are stronger and larger than the men.
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