Well, not in Joris Ivens’s cinematic universe. The Dutch director seemingly went out of his way to make this seem like just another civil war. To the extent that Franco’s fascist forces appear at all, they do so only at great distances. They’re in the distant buildings under siege by Republican forces, they’re the unseen aimers of the artillery shells that continuously rain down on Madrid, and they’re the Spanish traitors that are in league with those German and Italian baddies that keep turning up dead along the front line. Indeed, the audience sees more dead Italian soldiers than it does from dead soldiers from Franco’s Spanish forces. This attitude informs Ivens’s depiction of the Republican forces, too. Reading historical accounts of the Spanish Civil War, like George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, one gets a picture of a conflict awash in conflicting political philosophies. Republicans, anarchists, social democrats, classical liberals, and communists of every sectarian flavor all banded together to the fight fascists and medieval-minded conservatives of Franco’s forces, and occasionally, each other. But watching The Spanish Earth, this conflict might as well be in any other country in which a rambunctious military tried to grab power from a civilian government. The ideas were what made the stakes of the conflict so high, even in the eyes of contemporary observers, and so Ivens’s choice becomes all the more inexplicable

What he focuses on instead is the stick-to-itedness of regular Spanish people, from a tiny village up to big city Madrid, and similarly, on the aggressive regularity of the Republican army and its leaders. The film begins and ends in the fields of a tiny farming village to the Southwest of Madrid, where, the narrator (Ernest Hemingway, reading commentary he wrote with John Dos Passos) tells us, the locals are working to help feed the city. Their biggest foe is the land itself: harsh, inhospitable, and worst of all, unirrigated. In order to keep Madrid from starving, the villagers must irrigate the land and grow the needed onions and wine (seriously). This elevation of the non-combat elements of the war to equivalent status with the fighting itself may also strike American viewers as strange. Despite his background as a communist, Ivens isn’t channeling the agitprop Soviet tradition here, with its obsessive lionization of work, so much as he is bread-and-butter realism of government-sponsored British documentaries of the 1930s. During the Great Depression, British documentaries and propaganda films embodied the philosophy of the filmmaker and theorist John Grierson. A socialist, he believed that films could educate audiences about the state of politics and their own supposed exploitation. Films should show the working class, and show them in a way that working class audiences might gain insight about their own role in society. More than that, films should show the actual nuts and bolts of work. A Soviet filmmaker may show people working, but the heroes would be shoveling superhuman amounts of coal, defeating bourgeois supervillains and getting the girl to boot. Ivens sides with Grierson here: a movie about the struggle to build an irrigation ditch should actually show the monotonous and unromantic work that goes into such an endeavor, not bombard the audience with a 30 second montage followed by triumphal music and bronzed peasants high-fiving. What may seem like simple, apolitical wartime propaganda about keeping up spirit on the home front actually has a subtler political message which can be discerned in what Ivens shows and how he decides to show it.

The combat sequences are where the film shines, narratively and technically. For a film of the 1930s, the sound editing is superb. The moment early in the film in which scenes of village life are interrupted by the distant chatter of machine gun fire sets the tone for much of what comes after. The sound of gunfire becomes an auditory backdrop to whatever else happens to be taking place, usually complementing but occasionally driving scenes, as in a gripping sequence in which the camera follows Republican troops in a building fighting against Fascist troops ensconced in a blown-out hospital and university complex. My guess is that some of the sound was actually recorded simultaneously during the shooting (a difficult feat considering how bulky the equipment was then), but even if it does come from other sources, it sounds natural and enhances the action, rather than dilute it with obvious falseness. Much like the scenes in the village that humanized the peasants by showing us their mundane daily lives, the combat sequences prominently feature scenes of downtime. The army is also portrayed as a citizen army. One soldier a former stonemason, another a typesetter. A lawyer leading an assault on a Fascist position, who the narrator tells us quit his job to join the Republican army, was apparently killed during the course of the film. The crude filaments of a story even flare up during the combat sequences, as we follow a young soldier named Julian as he writes to his family from a break in building-to-building fighting, and ultimately, as he goes back to his village for a three day leave.

Somewhat out of place for much of the film is the score. Shots of troops mustering and walking to the front are predictably accompanied by uptempo marching band music, but other scenes feature music for no apparent reason. Why does a soldier fiddling with the bolt on his rifle need a clanging soundtrack? Who the hell knows. Perhaps it’s to cover up the lack of onsite recorded sound. Living in post-Eno world of ambient music, it’s easy to forget that filmmakers didn’t used to have moody background music to fill in the awkward silences.

Ivens’s style is more subdued than usual, but his distinctively poetic visuals occasionally seep through, especially near the film’s climax. He celebrates the triumph of Republican troops over a Fascist offensive with shots of trucks loaded with soldiers trundling from one side of the frame to the other. Back in the fields, the villagers finally complete their irrigation canal. The water rushes into the void and sloshes from one side of the frame to the other. This wasn’t just a victory for the military, he’s telling us, but one for the people, too. Both are critical to the war effort, and both struggled equally in their own way. Saccharine, simplistic? Of course. But this is a propaganda movie. Meaning aside, this is just a pleasant sequence of shots. They rhyme visually. It was these poetic juxtapositions that Ivens initially was  known for, and what his first film, Rain, is all about: finding beauty and similarity in completely different moments.

The Spanish Earth is worth watching for more than just its value as a historical curiosity. It’s well paced, even by contemporary standards, and many shots have a considered and thoughtful composition that would let them stand alone as photographs. The combat scenes are distinctive and seem modern; they more than make up for the sometimes boring propagandizing and toil-worship of the village scenes. The narration is something to be enjoyed, too. Following the Republican victory, Hemingway says “This is the moment that all the rest of war prepares for, when six men move forward into death to walk across a stretch of land and by their presence on it prove ‘This Earth is Ours.’” It’s an apolitical observation, in keeping with the film’s larger tone, and a very poignant one.

Around the middle of the film, after Ivens introduces the city of Madrid and its valiant defenders, there’s a brief shot of the cover of the novel Don Quixote. An unseen hand opens up the book and flips through the pages to an illustration of Quijote on horseback, and Ivens then cuts to an actual statue of Quixote somewhere in Madrid. An establishing shot puts the statue of Quijote against the big Spanish sky, his javelin in one hand and a Republican flag planted in the other by a patriotic vandal. Then there’s another shot of the statue from a different angle, and now the viewer sees that he’s flanked by a Sancho Panza statue, some leafless trees, and a low wall of sandbags. It’s a moment that crystallizes the mixture of admiration and regret that modern viewers of the film are likely to feel much more acutely than contemporary ones did. The Republicans lost, and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco that replaced them oppressed and murdered its way into the 1970s before dying with its strongman. We know, going into the film, that this is how it ends. Maybe Ivens saw this coming at the time and put in the scene with Quixote for that reason. The sequence is over before the audience can really process it, and Ivens soon returns to the farmers, politicians and soldiers that populate the main story, but one can’t help but feel that maybe Ivens knew that after all the romance of fighting for ideals and for the motherland, the Republican cause, like all good and romantic causes, was a doomed one.

It is impossible to speak of real human progress without acknowledging the need for radical redesign and enhancement of our biology. No matter how much we improve our external quality of life through social and economic reform, we will never stop the hedonic treadmill. Permanent gradients of bliss and universal empathy were, for most of biological history, maladaptive traits. The fact that human civilization is wrought with so much suffering is not solely a result of the inhumane economic and political systems in place all over the world. In truth, our neural hardware is designed for misery, pain, hate, and selfishness, as these experiences have been critical to survival.

This is not limited to humans, wild nature itself is a permanent state of immense suffering. Predation, disease, and fear are woven into the fabric of every animal’s life. At the same time, the institutions we have created are largely a manifestation of the very worst attributes of human nature. The most immense suffering could certainly be abolished through social change. It is undeniable that starvation, genocide, repression, and alienation contribute to a state of human misery that is far greater than it should be or would be otherwise. Indeed, the other side of human nature is love, empathy, justice, and altruism. But even if all the oppressive forces in the world were destroyed and replaced by open, participatory democratic institutions with a robust regard for human rights and social justice, the dark side of our nature would not simply disappear, and the aggregate increase in human happiness would be confined to its biological limits. Even given a society that heavily favors the more noble attributes of human beings to the point that behaving according to these attributes becomes a far superior reproductive strategy, it would take hundreds of thousands of years at the very least to affect a genetic change. No matter what we do, or how grand our visions of human potential, our own biology remains: the most oppressive institution of all.

However, humans are at a unique advantage in this situation. We have established such firm dominion over the natural world (to the point of systematically destroying it) that most of us have nothing to fear from it while under the umbrella of civilization. The greatest threat posed to humans is from humans. The limits of empathy and happiness are no longer defined by adaptivity to nature. This makes the redesign of our neural hardware not only viable in terms of survival but a moral imperative. Despite the best intentions, and the most favorable social conditions, human civilization will only truly progress beyond the misery prescribed by our biology when that biology is overhauled, and the human condition thorougly redefined.

It seems like a utopian idea, a sci-fi fantasy, that the best of human nature could be augmented, brought to the fore, and the worst of human nature abolished or marginalized. At the present time it is not technologically feasible to accomplish, but biotechnology is advancing at an exponential rate. That is the key word, exponential. When people speculate upon what will be possible in the future, they do so almost exclusively in a linear fashion. Exponential growth is an unintuitively powerful concept. It is not a matter of if, but when we have the technological capacity and knowledge of genetics and neural functioning to enable a radical redesign of the human condition. Indeed, enhancing the human condition has been attempted by degrees for centuries. The invention and (all too gradual) improvement of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anticonvulsants are in large part due to a shared desire to improve the human condition. Virtually all illicit drug consumption is due to one basic desire: to feel better than normal. However, drugs have a fatal limitation in that their mechanisms of action are confined to the “rules” of the existing neural architecture. Even if their action were permanent, they would still 1. never liberate the human condition from its evolutionary cage, the feedback mechanisms in our reward circuitry ensure that even our highest pleasures and most profound joys lose their sublime power in short order. Happiness, like suffering, evolved as a motivating device for survival. Unlike suffering, too much happiness makes surviving in wild nature difficult. 2. Even a hypothetical, advanced, highly-selective designer dopamine/serotonin agonist still carries the risk for negative and probably inevitable side-effects due to the way our neural circuitry is interconnected. There is only one way out of our evolutionary cage, out of Darwin’s long shadow: the intentional recalibration of the human condition through neurosurgery, nanotechnology, and genetic intervention.

For now, the transition into the posthuman condition remains speculative science. We don’t yet know what a posthuman neural architecture would be: what surgical adjustments would have to be made, how to make the changes “work”, the degree to which nanotech implants would be necessary in the transition, how genetic intervention can be accomplished in a manner consistent with respect for human rights, and how to organize such a massive program. Regardless, biotechnology is advancing at a grueling pace and in the (perhaps not too distant) future, this will become a very real prospect. This is perhaps the most distressing part of the situation. This technology, like all technology, will be developed whether or not we are prepared for its implications. What will be the implications if this technology is developed in a society similar to the one we live in today, replete with massive inequality, crumbling democratic institutions, endless war, austerity, and virtually unrestrained corporate power? It is not possible that the capitalist class, who will without a shred of doubt have control of this technology long before most of us are even aware of it, will have the interests of human progress, universal empathy, and abolition of suffering at heart when they implement it. Capitalism is motivated by profit and profit alone, and it is incompatible with a truly progressive vision of human civilization. There is only one possible outcome of a powerful capitalist class acquiring the power that advanced biotechnology entails: humans will be redesigned as perfect, obedient, consumer machines. Humans will have no choice in this, although with effective marketing it is likely that most *would* choose it; with the power of the puppet state and the monolithic corporate-controlled media at it’s disposal, the capitalist class will be able to create a fortified, global caste society that can never be challenged. In fact, with the power of this technology, people could be made to love whatever the ruling elite design them to love. This is a very sobering prospect because it means that if we don’t rise up and create accountable, participatory democratic institutions with the power to challenge corporate influence and if we don’t refuse to allow public universities to be used as proxies for the profit sector to obtain new marketable technology researched and developed at the taxpayer’s expense, then everything is lost forever. Once the posthuman transition under the elite agenda is made, resistance will be *biologically* impossible. The last war that humans will ever fight is a war for eternal heaven or eternal hell.

How shall I put it? Beauty – yes, beauty is like a decayed tooth. It rubs against one’s tongue, it hangs there, hurting one, insisting on its own existence. Finally it gets so that one cannot stand the pain and one goes to the dentist to have the tooth extracted.

Then, as one looks at the small, dirty, brown, blood-stained tooth lying in one’s hand, one’s thoughts are likely to be as follows: ‘Is this it? Is this all it was?’ That thing which caused me so much pain, which made me constantly fret about its existence, which was stubbornly rooted within me, is now merely a dead object.

I’ve labored to the top of this hill, and it’s taken half my life to get here and the other side slopes down. Today once again we’ll trust in the way heaven’s law compels but not always protects its human allies. Today he’ll teach me even more about the war between the self and the world, the self divided into the soul and body, the body usually acting as the traitor within the gates. He’ll lead me to that magic which we recognize in dreams that make the face of the sleeper relax.

There are many keen insights in this, but Žižek lumps so many things under the heading of “green capitalism” that the label becomes meaningless and does so in service of rather nihilistic conclusions. Žižek never clearly defines what “green capitalism” is but rather lets it stand in for a variety of things he dislikes: environmentalism, consumerism, contemporary business standards and anything else that might somewhere, someplace have been called “green” or “capitalist.” The kicker? There’s no way out, unless we replace the existing order entirely.

To the first point, he rightly castigates people who believe that the only thing wrong with voracious American consumption patterns is that they are not sustainable. We buy too much shit, and no matter how sustainable that becomes, real change won’t come until we have a more modest sense of what we’re entitled to, and dare I say it, a less materialistic view of what makes life meaningful. On the consumer side, buying green products is self-congratulatory and naive (in the sense that it won’t really solve anything); on the producer side, it’s often a cynical ploy to increase sales. Zizek is on point with all this. But consumerism and capitalism aren’t the same thing. Consumerism is necessarily predicated on the accumulation of more stuff. Coupled with American expectations, and to the exclusion of other philosophies, this is extraordinarily wasteful. Capitalism as such as not, is not wasteful. Capitalism does not require you buy increasingly large amounts of stuff for the rest of your life, it’s simply about generating value. That can come from material goods, but it can also come from services, and both are governed by competition. If consumers value not destroying the environment, then manufacturers and service-providers have an incentive to outdo each other in that respect.

Capitalism, and especially capitalism American-style, can be not so great, but it is all we have. What solutions do arise will inevitably come from a capitalist milieu. They will be imperfect. That may not be the land of milk and honey, but it’s something. Žižek, on the other hand, dwells in the realm of abstraction and possibilities. In his view, solutions tainted by the old order are no solutions at all. He therefore calls for a more genuinely just economic and political order. And he admonishes us to not throw in our lot with the world’s pragmatists, despite the fact that nearly all of the decisions we make in our daily lives are a choice from among imperfect solutions, rather than from a stark choice between “the right way” and “the wrong way.”

Žižek’s solutions don’t exist anywhere in the world and have no track record to evaluate. My Exhibit A comes from a country I’ve studied for the past 2 years: Indonesia. The thing that in my view stands to do the most to stop illegal logging (and legal logging, for that matter) in Indonesia in the next 20 years is the tech industry, American capitalism’s current golden baby. Kindles and iPads obviate the need for books. Much logging in Indonesia is done to secure raw materials for the paper industry. It’s possible that we’ll be the last generation to really think of books as something other than a piece of furniture or a nichey vanity object, and it’s because of the explosive popularity of e-readers. More forests and forest-dwelling creatures stand to be saved from this shift in demand than from most any grassroots efforts. Granted, this also means that the exploitation of mineral resources will probably increase. The transistors and chips in kindles and iPads also requiring exploiting some part of the environment. The net effect of this strikes me as less worse than the degradation caused by clearcutting of forests, which also gets compounded once sprawl creeps over the former wilderness. This is a function of market operations, not of green crusading.

Merely shifting around the sum total of evil on earth is never completely satisfying. Yet we should also bear in mind that there’s nothing historically unique about the moral quandary we face when we buy products that we know contribute to global suffering or environmental degradation. The difference is that we recognize it, and often feel guilty about it. If we want to criticize people who buy wedding rings as villains because the jewelry they bought was smelted in a dirty foundry with raw materials acquired through slave labor, that’s perfectly legitimate, but realize that we may also end up also condemning Russian peasants. By their very labor, they upheld the autocratic and brutal Tsardom. Steppe peoples were slaughtered, virgin forests were cut down, and all manner of other nasty things transpired. Everyone in the past would be guilty, and so would everyone in the present. Just like “green capitalism,” when a term becomes undefinably broad, it means there’s probably a problem with the term or with the question being asked.

My example about logging in Indonesia is a case of an unintended good resulting from market operations. Waiting around with fingers crossed hoping that market operations cause collateral justice is no solution either. I’d like to see a new class of businessmen who believe in things other than enriching themselves. We carry our values with us everywhere, and we shouldn’t be expected to check them at the doors of a shareholder meeting. I’d like to see a new class of investor that thinks of buying stock in a company as taking part in a larger cause, in addition to swelling their retirement kitty. I’m still an idealist. I may not have the managerial, marketing or financial acumen to practice what I preach in this case; my path is in the medical field. But American capitalism would look very different if more of the idealists among us would choose to create businesses that correspond to their ideals, rather than opting to live on a commune or wander the country’s campuses as an itinerant social critic.

There’s another more submerged issue here concerning how we think about nature. Again, I think Zizek is right when he (elsewhere, not in this video) characterizes our views of nature as sentimental and overly romantic. So long as we think that nature should be in a constant state of harmony and equilibrium, rather than one of instability occasionally punctuated by catastrophes, it’s going to be hard to stop fucking it up. We need to first think harder about what nature actually is, and then proceed from there to think about the ways in which we should preserve it and why. “Nature is not wasteful” and other silly canards that imply that nature operates with a set of principles worthy of emulation need to be jettisoned. Zizek’s view of nature is closer to the truth in my view; it’s like the filmmaker Werner Herzog’s, but shorn of Herzog’s odd quasi-mysticism. It’s a place of, in Herzog’s words, “chaos, hostility and murder.” Attempts to make a forest conform to some Disneyfied paradigm of what nature is can be just as bad as burning the forest down, and maybe even worse.

Anarcho-abolitionism?

A great deal of time was spent pondering how to begin this essay. Given the scope of the concepts at hand, there did not seem to be any way to properly introduce my ideas to the reader. So I decided to begin with the hackneyed postmodern device known as self-reference, thus absolving myself of the burdensome duty of being creative [end humor sequence]. Since most of the readership, which undoubtedly consists entirely of people I coaxed through facebook to follow a link here, is probably uninitiated in one or more of these concepts, it is necessary to explain each of them on the course presenting my own ideas.

What the H-E-double hockey sticks is anarchism anyway? In short, anarchism is a political philosophy promoting anarchy. The word “political” is used here only for the sake of clarity as to what domain of human experience we are discussing, that is, the domain of power relations. If we define politics as the exercise of power in a social context, we might conclude that anarchism is distinctly anti-political in nature. What is anarchy, then? Unfortunately, the term has been co-opted by so many different “political” and political factions (usually by using the prefix anarcho- in conjunction with another political philosophy that renders the anarchy part all but functionally irrelevant) that a precise definition of anarchy is elusive if not impossible. However, I’m going to attempt, ever so delicately, to construct a working definition. The most convenient way to begin this process is to define our terms negatively—to state what anarchy is not. Anarchy is not chaos.

What anarchy is—as Pierre-Joseph Prouhon, the first self-proclaimed anarchist, stated in his 1849 book Confessions of a Revolutionary, “Anarchy is order.” Anarchy, to Proudhon, was a state of society where every individual was liberated from the explicit tyranny of the state and the implicit tyranny of wage labor. Where each person owned the product of his or her labor and could buy or sell these products in a free market of voluntary transactions. Where social institutions consisted of free, non-hierarchical associations between individuals. No gods and no masters, to quote the man himself. Indeed, Proudhon’s vision of anarchy is a far cry from roving gangs of GG Allin fans dressed in bondage gear driving around on motorcycles and stealing gasoline from defenseless peasantfolk. Not only is anarchy order, order liberated from the inefficiencies and injustices of government, but it is flourishing. It is a system where a person can achieve their highest potential, unfettered by the burdens of arbitrary laws and law enforcement, exploitation of labor and creativity, and land monopolies that make subordinate employment a necessary condition for existence.

Today, much discrepancy exists between the far “wings” of anarchism: anarcho-capitalists on the far “right” generally define anarchism solely as the abolition of the state. At the risk of sounding glib, many anarcho-capitalists have no reservations about filling the vacuum left by the abolition of the state with every sort of private tyranny imaginable—corporatism, feudalism, etc.—based on absolutist property claims that could only be considered valid within the context of a system of state privilege (see my last essay, “The Ethics of SimCity”), thus creating what amounts to a de-facto state. Anarcho-communists on the far left tend to be completely indistinguishable from Marxists with the exception of favoring direct action over political. Sometimes. Anarcho-communists fall into the same trap of state apologetics that anarcho-capitalists do, though much more explicitly. As near as I can tell, anarcho-communists favor the abolition of capitalism as the primary means to anarchy and abolition of the state a secondary consideration at best. Contemporary anarchist thinker Alex Strekal explains these phenomena as overemphases on economic preference on the extreme left and right within the anarchist spectrum that marginalize anarchism itself (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2qaD1EmzAo). Still, this is all very confusing for someone that is trying to understand what anarchism is. But looking at the commonalities between the various strains of anarcho-isms, we can glean that what fundamentally characterizes anarchism is an opposition to authority and a desire for liberty. And that is precisely what attracted me to anarchism in the first place.

Recently, however, I’ve taken a great interest in the ethical theory of negative utilitarianism, originally conceived by Karl Popper and expanded upon most notably by David Pearce, the author of “The Hedonistic Imperative” (available online in full at http://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/tabconhi.htm). Negative utilitarianism is distinct from utilitarianism first formulated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in the 18^th century. Both theories are rooted in the hedonic principle, the seeking of pleasure and happiness and avoidance of pain and suffering that motivates the actions of sentient organisms. While utilitarianism propounds the ethical principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number”, negative utilitarianism propounds “the least suffering for the least number”. These two ethical theories at first appear to be opposite conclusions of the hedonic principle, but Karl Popper strongly believed that happiness and suffering are not symmetrical experiences in their ethical implications, contrary to the belief of the utilitarians. Pain avoidance (physical or psychological) is a much stronger drive in an organism than is pleasure-seeking; the unpleasant experience of suffering overshadows the rewards of happiness and it is only logical to assess the moral worth of each accordingly.

Utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number, is troubling in its possible implications. For example, if we are dealing with a population with access to a certain amount of resources, there is no logical reason why all of the resources could not be concentrated into the hands of a few. Maximizing the amount of resources each person had until increasing their wealth no longer increased pleasure or happiness, saturating their hedonic circuitry if you will, while leaving most people with little or nothing would in no way contradict the basic principle of the greatest good for the greatest number. The greatest number would simply be very small. Since the symmetry between happiness and suffering is assumed, one could argue that the vast happiness enjoyed by the privileged few justifies the suffering, the starvation and poverty, incurred upon the masses via this monopolization of resources. If this doesn’t seem blatantly wrong, then you either have no conscience or a severely distorted view of the nature of existence. This would only make sense if all of the people involved comprised a hive-mind that experienced the aggregate sum of all the pain and pleasure input by its individual agents. A preposterous scenario. This problem does not exist in negative utilitarianism. Since minimizing suffering is a higher priority than maximizing happiness and there is no qualitative symmetry between the two experiences, skewing the resource distribution in order to grant privilege is not morally equivalent to more egalitarian patterns of distribution.

We are speaking entirely in the abstract of course, as agents of an omnipotent state that utilizes individuals toward particular ends. What I’m attempting to do is essentially is establish common ground between anarchism and negative utilitarianism, or rather, place NU within the anarchist framework. The two are not necessarily incompatible since negative utilitarianism has no specific scope, what population is included within the least number experiencing the least suffering. Abolitionism, the eradication of suffering in all sentient life, can be seen as the logical conclusion of NU. This, however, does not mean that NU must be applied on a universal scale. In fact, since our reach is technically limited to the sentient life on Earth, it would be impossible to eradicate all suffering assuming that life exists elsewhere in the universe. This is why I say that NU has no specific scope, because it is impossible to carry out consistently as an ethical imperative since our capacity to reduce suffering is confined to our knowledge of other sentient beings in existence, physical access to them, and the technical ability to eliminate suffering. This physical limitation is not a problem if NU is viewed through an anarchist lens, where positive obligations do not exist. The ethical imperative then, the negative obligation, becomes simply to not inflict harm or suffering on other beings. This sounds vaguely like the non-aggression principle espoused by voluntaryists. A major difference here is that NU actually provides a philosophically valid basis for not inflicting suffering based on the hedonic principle whereas voluntaryists believe that the NAP is axiomatic without any philosophical basis for that belief. Another major difference is that NU provides an exception to the rule of not inflicting suffering when doing so would prevent greater suffering already being inflicted. For example, hunting down and killing, in the most painless manner possible, a known murderer to prevent further victimization would be a morally right course of action, even if doing so meant aggressing upon them when they had not harmed you in particular. Of course, you could not be forced to take that course of action, which is what makes this synthesis of anarchism and negative utilitarianism distinct from pure NU, where the ethical imperative is levied as a positive obligation. This would naturally lead to a state that is empowered to assure that suffering is minimized, but that would in practice lapse into what a state always is; a machine of tyranny that prevents flourishing and tramples dissent. Perhaps then, the anarchist approach to negative utilitarianism is much more consistent with the reduction of suffering than pure NU as obligation.

To sum up this synthesis as briefly as possible: the premise of negative utilitarianism can serve as a solid basis for ethics in anarchism. Suffering is an experience that can be and so often is unimaginably horrible to sentient organisms and its abolition is certainly a socially desirable goal. The consistent application of NU as an imposed obligation, though, is impossible and might even lapse into a state that acts counter to NU’s own goals. Certainly, the construction of a society where hierarchy and obligation are opposed would result in drastically reduced suffering. And the flourishing resulting from liberty, technological and social advancement, would be conducive to abolitionism, the abolishment of suffering in all sentient life through designer drugs, surgical, chemical, or nanotechnological manipulation of the limbic system, and ultimately, a radical redrafting of the genome. Thus anarchism could be seen as a strategy for negative utilitarianism. Frankly, I was surprised that the union of negative utilitarianism and anarchism was not (to my knowledge) already conceived of before I wrote this. Many of the conclusions I drew here may be met with criticism with negative utilitarians and anarchists alike (if anyone was actually reading this, I mean), but it seems to me that the goals of the two are not so different and a strategic synthesis of the two would be mutually beneficial. Constructive feedback is welcome.

Goats don't usually get this much to eat, but this one is high up in the Party.

The hermetically sealed theocracy-meets-Stalinist dictatorship of North Korea does not allow foreign reporters or filmmakers onto their territory. The state’s quasi-racist ideology shuns them – they might taint Korean purity. So, aside from the Chinese and Russian workers who necessarily do cross-border business, or the odd tourist from harmless countries like Switzerland, there are not many people who can talk about North Korea with the kind of first-hand experience that makes a documentary especially compelling. N. C. Heikin’s Kimjongilia skirts around those foreign middlemen and goes directly to the source: North Korean refugees who have successfully made it to South Korea. Their stories, told through filmed interviews, are harrowing, horrifying, and rarely have a happy ending.

The film, which takes its name from a flower named in honor of the Dear Leader, is built primarily around these interviews. And Heikin has chosen well: the interviewees represent a broad cross-section of North Korean society. Some, like a concert pianist and a highish-ranking military officer, come from privileged (relatively speaking) backgrounds. Others toiled away in squalid conditions as farmers. What these subjects have in common is their fate: most ended up in the system of concentration camps that crisscrosses North Korea. One unlucky soul was even born in a camp. For anyone who has read literature by authors who survived the Holocaust or the gulag system in the USSR, the picture that emerges will seem familiar. Life is, for the most part, tightly regimented, with a few little pockets of freedom. Creativity is extinguished.  The system as a whole forces people to exploit one another to survive. This is ugly but necessary viewing.

Heiken is to be commended for capturing the little details that convey some essential element of his interviewee’s humanity. The way the military officer, though controlled in his speech, wears an intense and angry look on his face when he talks about the government. The way that the man born in the concentration camp tents his hands over and over while he talks – maybe to hide a mutilated finger, maybe because it’s a deeply-ingrained gesture of submission, maybe for no reason at all. The way the voice of the woman who was sold into sexual slavery in China for 5 years remains steady, even when she discusses her risky escape. With some interviewees, the camera begins with a closeup on the eye before moving down to the mouth. Such artifice can be distracting and annoying when employed too often (see the first season Errol Morris’s documentary series First Person for a perfect example of this), but here its used sparingly enough that it retains its effectiveness. (It occurred to me later that it may also be a device to obscure the identity of some of the interviewees; elsewhere the director drenches them in shadow à la Unsolved Mysteries.) It is not hard to persuade an audience that Kim Jong-Il’s government is one of the most, if not the most, repugnant governments presently in existence. The difficult task is to put a human face on what that means without overwhelming the viewer. Heiken handles this task well.

Dogs in the Worker's Paradise do not wear such decadent garments.

This also comes in part from the film’s beautiful complementary visuals. Sometimes they are ironic. There are a lot of clips from the preposterous melodramas and propaganda films produced by the North Korean government, and Heiken juxtaposes them with the stark reality that the scene in question is attempting to whitewash. Other times, the complementary visuals amplify a mood. There are abstract scenes cut into the film featuring a dancer dressed in the iconic uniform of the female cops that direct Pyongyang’s non-existent traffic. These sequences are mesmerizing. The dancer’s jerky and increasingly tortured movements visually reinforce the tremendous struggles of many of the interviewees. These sequences are also, therefore, sometimes hard to watch. But they never go on so long that they steal attention from the interviewees or distract the viewer.

Films like Kimjongilia necessarily require potted histories and other types of expository storytelling. Rather than the somber wall of text approach, Heiken livens up these necessary presentations with kinetic text, images and short film clips. This can go horribly wrong, as in Robert Barry Ptolemy’s dreadful Transcendent Man, but here they work well. The visuals are well composed and attractive without being flashy. This again is a fine line, and Heiken walks it well. These visual components share a lot in common with some iconic opening and closing credits sequences that people have come to appreciate in their own right.

If you are already familiar with North Korea and the horrific way of life its citizens “enjoy,” Kimjongilia will not tell you anything you did not already know. There are no stunning revelations or insights. What it offers is perhaps more important than that, though. Anyone can marshal statistics and data to convince an audience of one thing or another, but without a human face, the effect remains effervescent. By contrast, the interviewees in this film leave an indelible impression. You may have known the North Korean government was cruel, but not this cruel. Kimjongilia is not always an easy watch, but to restrict one’s viewing to only what is easy is to close one’s self off from the true emotional power cinema can have.

National Weather Service don’t agree with Athens County’s ‘nado experts like me – they ain’t predicting any ‘nadoes. They may have book smarts, and I got the street smarts. A real ‘nado chaser doesn’t need barometers and other gismos. All they need is a full tank of gas, a 2 liter of Mountain Dew and nothing to lose. I just finished riveting a La-Z-Boy, an igloo cooler, and weather vane to the roof of a monster truck. ‘Nado mobile command center is go.

They say the first thing you learn when you start chasin’ ‘nadoes: make sure you grab a lid for your coffee. It’s a bumpy ride. You really don’t know what it feels like to be in an F5 ‘nado till you’ve personally ridden a double wide across the prairie at 288 miles per hour. One last thing about that double wide: it’s 600 feet in the air. Every ‘nado chaser thanks God for sending’ the Fujita scale and curses him for sendin’ F5 ‘nadoes.

Yeah, I’ve been in the ‘nado chasin’ game about 5 years now…and I’m talking about tornadoes, not the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. That works better when I say it out loud.

I once saw a ‘nado pass over a forest fire. That was the great towering spinferno of ‘98. Once saw a raging ‘nado strip the skin clean off a woman. Fortunately that woman was skeletal pundit Ann Coulter and no one noticed.
All the old ‘nado hands call newbies gusters. We do this because they usually die before we can learn their names. You can always tell a guster from a pro: they never keep a saddle handy. I’d like to see you ride a septic tank out of a storm without one! An F3 will put hair on a guster’s chest. An F5 will rip it off. It’s just the way of the ‘nado. Mandatory guster equipment: diaper, doppler radar. You wanna play with the big boys and earn your spurs? Face down a ‘nado stark naked.

I often ask myself what’s at stake huntin’ ‘nadoes. If we didn’t fight them out here, pretty soon they’d be poppin’ up in Boston and Los Angeles. I saw the freak Staten Island ‘nado last year. All the wiseguys pissed themselves. Me? I loaded a barometer into a crossbow. Try me, Mother Nature.
You may cherish your Blu-ray of “The Lion King.” But in a ‘nado, it’ll be your worst enemy. I once saw a copy of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” take a man’s head off.  And still there are those who seek entertainment in the shadow of a ‘nado. Some people ask me what I think of skateboarders building their ramps in ‘nado country for extra air. It’s damn foolish and damn brilliant. I respect a man who doesn’t fear a savage wall of wind. TV pundits may think dropping a mysterious old shaman into Libya to summon ‘nadoes against Gaddafi is a good idea – and their hubris will be their downfall. No one can ever control a ‘nado.

Ridin’ a ‘nado or having sex. Why not both?

Congress argues, walls get knocked down in Athens county. You know who benefits? Big ‘nado(s). If we keep fucking up the planet, mother nature will keep biting back. Or sucking. Or spinning. Or whatever the fuck it is ‘nadoes do. Time to face down the beast. I may get tornado fever or spinsanity, but what other fate befits an old ‘nado hand like me?

Actually I’m going to watch Top Chef instead.