The Guardian 25 January, 2006
TV programs worth watching
Sun January 29 — Sat February 4
The first episode of the excellent series from US Public Broadcasting, Race: The Power Of An Illusion (ABC 8.35pm Mondays), screened last week. Despite the apparently obvious differences in "racial" characteristics evident in people from different parts of the world, the program argues that these differences are not innate or basic but are in evolutionary terms recently acquired traits. It also made the point that, despite that indisputable fact, in the USA the average white family has eight times the income of the average black family.
In the second episode, screening this week, the history of the creation and development of theories of race in the USA is traced, showing how they were devised and seized upon for economic reasons — to justify the system of slave labour, to make the seizure of Indian or Mexican land "moral" and "pre-ordained", to provide a popular rationale for empire building in the Americas and the Pacific.
The common fault of most US-made history programs is that they see US history as somehow isolated from or unaffected by the currents of ideas and developments in the rest of the world. They are curiously and almost exclusively "US-centric".
Although this series does not entirely avoid this failing, it makes a better stab at doing so than most.
Made for PBS by an outfit called California Newsreel, this is a well-written, well-researched and well-edited series that makes its non-sensational study of race in the USA more enthralling through a quiet, unrelenting reliance on the facts.
As a science historian notes, "we created the concept of race; we can unmake it". But not until the forces that profit from racism have been overcome, I suspect.
7/7 Attack On London (ABC 9.35pm Monday) is a blow-by-blow account of the suicide bomb attacks on London’s train and bus services that took place on July 7, 2005. The attacks killed 52 people (as well as the four bombers) and seriously injured hundreds more.
The program, comprising eye-witness accounts and re-enactment (with occasional snippets of footage from security cameras in railway car parks and the like), is a chilling depiction of what can result when you fail to correctly identify the cause of injustice.
The four young Muslim lads from England involved in this incident blamed the carnage in the Middle East on "the West", making no distinction between the ruling class in the West who profit from war and conquest and the working class who do not, who are in fact also victims of the ruling class.
To the four suicide bombers, "the people in the West" were to blame for imperialism’s attacks on the Middle East, so they targeted the people, on their way to work, indiscriminately.
Imperialism, of course, was not materially affected, it was in fact able to take the death and destruction on the Tube in its stride. Tony Blair was afforded another opportunity to take the high moral ground, shifting the blame to "Islamic terrorists" and enlisting the public’s support for his posture of "refusing to bow to terrorism".
As "you are there" programs go, this is a well-made one. I was particularly impressed by the young medical worker who, seeing people staggering out of a tube station covered in blood, commandeered the ground floor of a nearby major department store and with the help of the staff turned it into a medical aid station.
Things were running so efficiently there that when the emergency services eventually turned up, instead of trying to take over they humbly asked the leaders of the volunteer operation where they were required and went there.
Piracy In The Straits, screening in the Cutting Edge timeslot (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday), deals with the very real issue of piracy in the Malacca Strait, but confuses the issue by jumping on the terrorism bandwagon.
Each year 50,000 ships — carrying close to one quarter of the world’s international sea trade — pass through the eight hundred kilometre-long Malacca Strait (the body of water between Malaysia and Singapore on one side, and Indonesia and on the other) at four-minute intervals. In 2003, there were 445 piracy attacks in the Strait in which 88 seamen were injured, and 92 were killed or had disappeared.
Despite the risks to seafarers, the Malacca Strait remains the shortest, and thus the cheapest and preferred, route for shipping companies.
French captain René Lovack of the Debussy, the largest container ship in the world, that travels between northern Europe and south-east Asia via the Malacca Strait, says "Pirates usually operate from small boats and get on board by any means possible.
"In the case of a container ship, the pirates rely on an extensive network of relatives and friends who work in the shipping industry and have obtained access to customs and freight documents. If a ship is carrying money, gold ingots or televisions, they know. And they know exactly where the goods are located on the ship."
This could have provided the basis for an interesting program on organised crime and ship hijacking as opposed to truck hijacking. Instead, it is used as a springboard for justifying Singapore’s recent agreement with the US "to boost the US presence in South-East Asia and the Malacca Strait", on the tenuous grounds that "a maritime terrorist attack cannot be discounted".
Apparently these well-organised criminal gangs of pirates might "hijack a ship and turn it into a floating bomb". Yeah, sure they will.
In the early 1970s, Somalia was one of the countries of Africa that was seeking to take the socialist road, a friend of the Soviet Union and a progressive force in the Horn of Africa. Thanks to covert US and Saudi Arabian activity, the government was changed, war lords emerged and Somalia tried to invade neighbouring and socialist-oriented Ethiopia.
In 1991, the self-declared Republic of Somaliland broke away from Somalia. Now, after a ten-year civil war against the former dictator of Somalia, Mohammed Said Barre, Somaliland has its own government and people there are eager to have the world recognise them as an independent country.
They are in the middle of the worst drought they have had in 30 years and no international aid — medical or otherwise — is available to them, even emergency aid, because they are not recognised as a country.
Somaliland (SBS 8.00pm Friday) is the first episode of a five-part BBC series Holidays In Places That Don’t Exist , basically a plea to recognise all the "breakaway" states in the world, regardless of the reasons for their wanting to "break away".