Ottawa Citizen
August 5, 2007 Sunday
Final Edition

Stories of brutality make for a feel-good movie

by Leonard Stern, Citizen Special

When there’s little of interest on the new releases shelf the best
thing to do is rent a classic. So the other week I took home
Mississippi Burning, the celebrated film about violence and racism in
the American south during the civil rights years. Starring Gene
Hackman and Willem Dafoe, the 1988 film was nominated for seven
Academy Awards.

I saw the movie in the theatre when it was released, but nearly 20
years later, with my post-9/11 eyes, the film has a completely
different resonance. I never realized that it presented such a strong
endorsement of state-sponsored torture, illegal detention and
coercion of terrorists. More, back in 1988 everybody — including the
liberal elites of Hollywood — seemed just fine with that. The movie
takes place in Mississippi in 1964, when Klansmen burned churches,
lynched people and generally terrorized the (black) population.
Hackman and Dafoe play the good guys, FBI agents investigating the
disappearance of three civil rights workers. They suspect the young
activists were murdered by the Klan, and also that the local sheriff,
his racist deputy and other community leaders were in on the
killings.

A small southern town like this one is tight-knit, with its own
customs and history. Outsiders are not welcome. This Mississippi town
is not unlike an Iraqi village or other insular, tribal community.
Everyone knows everyone else’s business, but good luck getting
someone to talk to you. The FBI investigation is stymied.

Gene Hackman’s character, Agent Anderson, is from Mississippi, and
knows how to extract information from the people. He kidnaps the town
mayor (that would be an "extraordinary rendition" in post-9/11 lingo)
and takes him to an isolated shack. The mayor (the equivalent of a
tribal elder) is threatened with castration and presented with a
razor blade and an empty paper cup that, he’s told, will hold his
amputated scrotum if he doesn’t divulge what he knows about the Klan.

Surprise, he talks. The audience has no problem with this, because
the mayor, though not a Klan member, is, like all the townsfolk, a
backwoods racist bastard. We cheer handsome Special Agent Anderson
for taking off the gloves.

Another great scene: The FBI agents want to divide the Klansmen
against themselves, to introduce paranoia into their group (or
"cell") and make them suspect one another of betrayal. To this end
Anderson orchestrates a near-lynching of a Klansman, to get him to
give up his friends. The Klansman is so terrified that he defecates
in his pants, much to Anderson’s amusement. A mock execution?
Humiliation? Psychological torture? Whatever. The point of the movie
is that war — and the battle for civil rights is depicted as a kind
of war — is messy. Plus, tobacco-chewing, squirrel-eating rednecks
who shoot college kids for the crime of registering black voters
don’t deserve due process. Mississippi Burning is actually a
feel-good movie.

All of the tactics that the FBI use in Mississippi Burning, in their
fight against white racism, have been used by real-life security
agents in the fight against Islamist extremism. In August 2003, in
Iraq, a U.S. military officer named Allen West took a captured
insurgent and, drawing a pistol, fired a round or two near the
prisoner’s head. The mock execution worked: The insurgent told
details of an ambush that could have killed Lt.-Col. West and his
men.

The U.S. military laid criminal charges against Lt.-Col. West for his
irregular counter-insurgency tactics. Mississippi Burning was awarded
the Political Film Society’s award for human rights. Recent winners
of this award include Atom Egoyan’s film Ararat, about the Armenian
genocide, and Hotel Rwanda. To this day, Mississippi Burning, owing
to its depiction of black oppression in the segregated south, is
celebrated at human rights film festivals. This is strange because
Agent Anderson, in his effort to bring justice and security to the
south, employs methods that ought to horrify progressive types who
attend these festivals.

If you believe that civilized governments should not be in the
business of torture, intimidation and kidnapping, then the principle
ought to hold no matter who the bad guys are.

Double standards have always been a problem for professional leftists
and rightists. A pox on both, though I’d say that hypocrisy reaches
its highest expression in the anti-war left. They call themselves
peace activists yet march in rallies with Hezbollah flags. They
protest against "collective punishment" such as terrorist profiling,
yet can’t denounce suicide bombings, the ultimate in collective
punishment.

I always remembered Mississippi Burning as a political statement, and
boy is it ever.