The Guardian 1 February, 2006
TV programs worth watching
Sun February 5 — Sat February 11
Poor C S Lewis. He never had a chance really.
As Beyond Narnia: C S Lewis, screening on Compass (ABC 10.10pm Sunday), shows, his much vaunted fluctuations between atheist and Christian were as much the result of peer pressure as any "inner conviction".
As a child he was taught to believe in God, but after his mother died young of cancer, he decided he was an atheist. Later, he left boarding school to be educated by his father’s old tutor and was pleased to discover that he too was an atheist.
Lewis’s "atheism" however was more an expression of his disappointment with God for allowing his mother to die, than — in philosophical terms — the abandonment of idealism and metaphysics for materialism and dialectics.
When he lobbed into Oxford, first as a student and then from 1925 as a fellow of Magdalen College, he became part of a group of friends (the "Inklings") who met in his rooms and argued about literature and religion. One of them was another famous Christian don, J R R Tolkien.
Lewis was argued out of atheism fairly easily by his friends, and became what the ABC’s publicity for Beyond Narnia calls "this great religious thinker".
The film of his famous fantasy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, presently screening around the country (and well worth a look, incidentally), has very little overt religion in it. Elements of the plot appear to have been lifted from a book of Children’s Bible Stories but otherwise it’s just a clever fantasy.
Beyond Narnia, a dramatised documentary, on the other hand, is more overtly about Lewis’ religious beliefs. It emerges, however, as an honest, and therefore rather sad, study of a man whose quest to find something to believe in leads him back to his starting point, religion.
Norman Stone does a first rate job as writer and director, but it is British actor Anton Rogers as CS Lewis who really stands out.
In a centre-page article,The Spectre of Communism still haunts (some) in Europe, in last week’s Guardian, we reported on the latest major move to revive McCarthyism — this time in Europe.
The move took the form of a draft resolution — Need for international condemnation of the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes — for the meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) from January23-27.
The nominal author of the resolution is Swedish politician Göran Lindblad from the European People’s Party (Christian Democrat). However, in this time of intensified ruling class attacks world-wide, we can be sure that this extreme right-wing attack on the Communists was not Lindblad’s own idea.
The idea behind the PACE resolution is to equate Communism with Nazism, to provide a supra-national justification for banning not only the term Communist Party or the symbols of Communism (that is already the case in numerous East European countries), but to provide a stimulus to ban Communist parties altogether.
It is McCarthyism pure and simple, but on a Europe-wide scale. Naturally, there has been great opposition.
The world famous Greek composer and writer, Mikis Theodorakis, said in a statement: "The Council of Europe has decided to change history. To distort it by identifying the victims with the aggressors, the heroes with the criminals, and the Communists with the Nazis".
The Communist Parties of the Nordic countries pointed out that "Among those who have approved and support this condemnation are members of parliaments in countries that do not hesitate to persecute and imprison leaders of Communist parties and popular movements, while they close their eyes to — or directly participate in — glorifying Nazi symbols and Nazi war-criminals".
The draft resolution asserted that "the crimes committed by totalitarian communist regimes" were the result of Communist parties adhering to "the Marxist theory about the existence of class struggle".
But class struggle is not a "theory", it is fact, and the PACE resolution is a ruling class tactic in that struggle.
The Nordic Communist parties ask the pertinent question: "How can anyone believe that the Council of Europe are honestly concerned about human rights, when even within their own home, Europe, they have allowed CIA-planes to be filled with people without any rights, and flown to special prisons in order to be tortured?"
The Nordic Communist parties (from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) go on: "Communists are a part of the popular, democratic process and fight in every single country. We see this draft resolution as the beginning of an extensive condemnation and persecution of all democratic forces.
"Today the Communists; tomorrow unionists and people from the peace-movement? And the day after tomorrow?"
The PACE resolution is not the first attempt to foist anti-Communist resolutions on the Council of Europe or the European Union. Nor are such attempts isolated, or restricted to Europe.
They are backed up by the full propaganda arsenal of the bourgeoisie. As part of this drive, we have the ultra-Cold War propaganda of Poisoned (ABC 9.30pm Tuesday).
According to the program, "there is one place above all where poison has become the specialist tool of political assassination — Russia and the former Soviet countries. Once thought consigned to history with communism, the culture of assassination by poison is alive and well."
That should give you some idea of the line it takes. Naturally, "it really began with Stalin" — but, here’s a twist: the program says he was poisoned too!
So too was Viktor Yuschenko, now President of the Ukraine, whose wife is a former US State Department employee. Yushenko used his supposed poisoning as a vote getter during the Presidential campaign.
The "Soviet-trained Russian poisoners" are also targeting expatriate Russian billionaires living in London who consequently maintain "anti-poison security measures".
If you will pardon the pun, this is poisonous drivel. In a context of such anti-communist tripe, accusations about the equivalence of Communism and Nazism seem only natural. And that’s the way it is meant to be.
In what little space I have left, two other documentaries are worth watching. Riot On! in the Hot Docs timeslot (SBS 10.00pm Tuesday) is a study of some Bill Gates wannabes from Finland who believed they would become billionaires by creating an ingenious mobile phone company with 20 million dollars invested in them by sources as disparate as Nokia, News Corporation and the Bush and Bin Laden families.
But success lead to excess and the money-making exercise rapidly disintegrated into an orgy of wild parties, group sex sessions, naked wrestling, and executives running naked through the streets of Helsinki.
Riot On! recently won the Special Jury Commendation award at the Raindance Film Festival.
The Great Transatlantic Cable screening in the As It Happened timeslot (SBS 7.30pm Saturday) documents the gruelling attempts of Cyrus Field, a young, successful New York paper manufacturer, and his associates to lay a cable across the Atlantic.
A cable would need to be over two thousand miles long and be laid three miles deep. In 1858 no one had even manufactured a wire that long.
No ship could carry such a weight. The floor of the sea was a dark mystery. No one knew if an electric current could even be sent so far. The science of the day, in short, offered more questions than answers.
Writer Arthur C Clarke would later call it the Victorian equivalent of putting a man on the moon.