Category Archives: Antiwar activism

Donald Sutherland! Donald Sutherland!

Two Hundred plus movies! How can I pick a favorite?

Breaking from the New York Times:

By Clyde Haberman

June 20, 2024Updated 3:23 p.m. ET

Donald Sutherland, whose ability to both charm and unsettle, both reassure and repulse, was amply displayed in scores of film roles as diverse as a laid-back battlefield surgeon in “M*A*S*H,” a ruthless Nazi spy in “Eye of the Needle,” a soulful father in “Ordinary People” and a strutting fascist in “1900,” died on Thursday in Miami. He was 88.

His son Kiefer Sutherland, the actor, announced the death on social media. CAA, the talent agency that represented Mr. Sutherland, said he had died in a hospital after an unspecified “long illness.” He had a home in Miami.

With his long face, droopy eyes, protruding ears and wolfish smile, the 6-foot-4 Mr. Sutherland was never anyone’s idea of a movie heartthrob. He often recalled that while growing up in eastern Canada, he once asked his mother if he was good-looking, only to be told, “No, but your face has a lot of character.” He recounted how he was once rejected for a film role by a producer who said: “This part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don’t look like you’ve lived next door to anyone.”

Yet across six decades, starting in the early 1960s, he appeared in nearly 200 films and television shows — some years he was in as many as half a dozen movies. “Klute,” “Six Degrees of Separation” and a 1978 remake of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” were just a few of his other showcases.

And he continued to work well into his last years, becoming familiar to younger audiences through roles in multiple installments of “The Hunger Games” franchise, alongside Brad Pitt in the space drama “Ad Astra” (2019) and as the title character in the Stephen King-inspired horror film “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” (2022).

Mr. Sutherland’s chameleonlike ability to be endearing in one role, menacing in another and just plain odd in yet a third appealed to directors, among them Federico Fellini, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci and Oliver Stone. . . .

 

In “Klute” (1971), another early triumph, Mr. Sutherland was a small-town policeman crossing paths with a big-city call girl played by Jane Fonda. He and Ms. Fonda then began an affair that lasted three years; their relationship dovetailed with his most conspicuous burst of political activism, which matched hers.

Image

A woman rests her head on the chest of a man as they lie in bed.
Mr. Sutherland as a police officer and Jane Fonda as a call girl in “Klute” (1971). Offscreen, they had an affair that lasted three years.Credit…Warner Bros., via Everett Collection

In 1971, he joined Ms. Fonda and other actors in a comedy troupe called F.T.A. that toured military towns, performing satirical sketches infused unmistakably with an anti-Vietnam War spirit. The group’s initials stood for Free the Army, though soldiers recognized a far less dainty meaning.

The One That Didn’t Get Away– FTA, Sutherland’s Vietnam era antiwar documentary with Jane Fonda and a vigorous, sharp-witted troupe, made a splash, but was gone in a flash.

Although Mr. Sutherland’s politics leaned leftward, he told Playboy: “I didn’t like doing anything political within the United States because I am, after all, Canadian.” But, he added, “there was a huge Canadian participation in the war, and so I felt, on this, I had a right.”

So  maybe I can pick a favorite film which was the one that very few people ever got to see:  FTA which is short for several other “memes,” from “Fun, Travel & Adventure,” an actual  recruiter’s slogan, to a protester’s “Free The Army,” to a disgruntled grunt soldier’s curse “F*ck The Army.”  The film of the title, according to Wikipedia,

“was released in July 1972, “within days of Fonda’s infamous visit to Hanoi” and seems to have suffered from the political fallout of Fonda’s travels. The film “was in theatres barely a week before it was pulled from circulation by its distributor, American International Pictures.” Even more, “[m]ost copies were destroyed”, which seems to indicate an attempt to prevent any future for the film. Many have suspected the film’s disappearance “was the result of government intervention.” According to Parker, the film’s director, “the film disappeared after Sam Arkoff, head of AIP, received a call from the White House.” David Zeiger, who has been involved in resurrecting the original film, has been quoted as saying he believes Parker. “There’s no proof, but I can’t think of another reasonable explanation for Sam Arkoff, a man who knew how to wring every penny out of a film, yanking one starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland from theaters at a big loss (and, apparently, destroying all of the prints, since none were ever found).”

The bravado of the top line of the mobie poster “The Show the Pentagon Couldn’t Stop “ is exaggerated: the troupe did did perform at several big bases to big applause from disgruntled, war-weary troops; but their tour was stopped before it was completed, and the movie vanished.

I’m on the government suppression side of this argument: I watched FTA during the Iraq war, on a rare, almost samizdat VHS tape, and the roaringly supportive reception Sutherland and Jane Fonda got from the soldiers they performed for was still  amazing; it must have driven the Pentagon brass and the Nixon White House bonkers. (Even the summary of the film in the Wikipedia entry makes exciting and subversive reading  more than 50 years later.)

Anyway, Sutherland and Fonda’s careers survived this flap, and he was a pleasure to watch almost every time. Two hundred movies, with top directors like Robert Altman to hacks to keep busy, that was quite a life, and quite a record.

 

“You May Say, They Are Dreamers – But They’re Not the Only Ones” — Israeli-Palestinian Peace Movement Reviving, Expects a Long Haul

‘We all share the same pain’: can the Israeli-Arab peace movement rebuild after 7 October?

As the conflict in Gaza continues, reconciliation may seem a distant dream, but on both sides there are those working for peace

Caitlin Kelly — Tue 21 May 2024
Supported by theguardian.org

On the morning of 7 October, as news emerged of the Hamas attack on Israeli communities near the Gaza border, Naama Barak Wolfman joined thousands of others frantically texting their friends and family. “Checking you’re alright,” she wrote to her colleague, Vivian Silver, a Canadian who spent decades working to foster peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

The text was never read. Silver was one of several peace activists killed that day, though news of her murder took nearly a month to reach Silver’s friends and family. Many believed the Women Wage Peace leader had been taken hostage, even picturing her negotiating with her captors.

“We couldn’t find the right words to express the pain, the hurt, and the terror. People on both sides were afraid,” Wolfman recalls. “You shut down, you close the windows. In Israel, that’s what everyone literally did for the first few months.”

Continue reading “You May Say, They Are Dreamers – But They’re Not the Only Ones” — Israeli-Palestinian Peace Movement Reviving, Expects a Long Haul

Flashbacks! I’m Having 1967 Anti-Draft Flashbacks! From Vietnam to Jerusalem

Sheesh! Did somebody slip one (or two) of those “new” cure-all psychedelic pills into my low-sodium tomato juice??

Must have, because I’m having wild and weird hallucinations from —I don’t know— 1967?  They’re full of long-haired young men shouting slogans against the draft.

I can tell they’re hallucinations because other than the hair, the protesters are dressed all alike in the most un-hip getup ever:  not a tie-dye in sight, nary a scrap of paisley, and no roaches anywhere. Maybe it’s a back alley scene from the Haight-Ashbury?

Also, the slogans seem to be aimed at overthrowing the government, but they’re all in some exotic local slang that, from the accents, sounds kind of —  kind of, like, maybe, Hebrew?

I know I’m delirious because I heard one of the longhairs talking English to some TV guy, and he  insisted they’re gonna make the revolution so they can all be free to — what?? Study Tarot? “Say what?” I asked. “Dude, like, the Age of Aquarius is so over.” He just grunted and flipped me off.

I must really be having a bum trip, I figured . . . .

Continue reading Flashbacks! I’m Having 1967 Anti-Draft Flashbacks! From Vietnam to Jerusalem

CNN: “It’s Complicated”— Why Israel’s peace activists are reevaluating their position on the war

CNN: Why Israel’s peace activists are reevaluating their position on the war

By Tara John and Lottie Beilin

Sun Dec 3 2023

Tel Aviv (CNN) — When human rights activist Ziv Stahl was awakened to the booms of rocket fire on October 7, while staying at her sister’s home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, she did not for a moment anticipate the scale of the terrorist attack unfolding around her. Nor did she imagine the horror she would feel when she later called the police, who “basically told me no one is coming.”

That day saw Hamas militants murder her sister-in-law and several prominent peace activists living in the kibbutz, one of the communities that bore the brunt of the attack on Israel. Continue reading CNN: “It’s Complicated”— Why Israel’s peace activists are reevaluating their position on the war

Jesus’ First Prophetic Proclamation: “Release To The Captives” —

Luke 4:16-21 King James Version

16  Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives . . .  

. . . and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[f]

20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

[NOTES: Muslims regard Jesus as one of the great prophets who brought divine guidance to humanity before Prophet Muhammad.

Jews traditionally reject Christian theological claims about Jesus. However, “Considering the historical Jesus, some modern Jewish thinkers have come to hold a more positive view of Jesus, arguing that he himself did not abandon Judaism and/or that he benefited non-Jews.” (Wikipedia )]