Review by Monbiot from Znet. A good review. I don't quite get why the movie is being compared to "Zulu," which was a pretty good anti-war movie directed by the blacklisted Cy Edenfield and nowhere near as racist as BHD...but that's a minor point. Perhaps it's because both moview were based on real battles...anyway...
Joanna B.
The more powerful a nation becomes, the more it asserts its victimhood. In contemporary
British eyes, the greatest atrocities of the 18th and 19th centuries were those perpetrated
on compatriots in the Black Hole of Calcutta or during the Indian mutiny and the siege of
Khartoum. The extreme manifestations of the white man's burden, these events came to
symbolise the barbarism and ingratitude of the savage races the British had sought to
rescue from their darkness.
Today the attack on New York is discussed as if it were the worst thing to have happened
to any nation in recent times. Few would deny that it was a major atrocity, but we are
required to offer the American people a unique and exclusive sympathy. Now that demand
is being extended to earlier American losses.
Black Hawk Down looks set to become one of the bestselling movies of all time. Like all
the films the British-born director Ridley Scott has made, it is gripping, intense and
beautifully shot. It is also a stunning misrepresentation of what happened in Somalia.
In 1992 the United States walked into Somalia with good intentions. George Bush senior
announced that America had come to do "God's work" in a nation devastated by clan
warfare and famine. But, as Scott Peterson's firsthand account Me Against My Brother
shows, the mission was doomed by intelligence failures, partisan deployments and,
ultimately, the belief that you can bomb a nation into peace and prosperity.
Before the US government handed over the administration of Somalia to the United
Nations in 1993, it had already made several fundamental mistakes. It had backed the
clan chiefs Mohamed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi against another warlord, shoring up
their power just as it had started to collapse. It had failed to recognise that the competing
clan chiefs were ready to accept largescale disarmament, if it were carried out impartially.
Far from resolving the conflict between the clans, the US accidentally enhanced it.
After the handover, the UN's Pakistani peacekeepers tried to seize Aideed's radio station,
which was broadcasting anti-UN propaganda. The raid was bungled, and 25 of the soldiers
were killed by Aideed's supporters. A few days later, Pakistani troops fired on an unarmed
crowd, killing women and children. The United Nations force, commanded by a US
admiral, was drawn into a blood feud with Aideed's militia.
As the feud escalated, US special forces were brought in to deal with the man now
described by American intelligence as "the Hitler of Somalia". Aideed, who was certainly
a ruthless and dangerous man, but also just one of several clan leaders competing for
power in the country, was blamed for all Somalia's troubles. The UN's peacekeeping
mission had been transformed into a partisan war.
The special forces, over-confident and hopelessly ill-informed, raided, in quick succession,
the headquarters of the UN Development Programme, the charity World Concern and the
offices of Medecins sans Frontieres. They managed to capture, among scores of innocent
civilians and aid workers, the chief of the UN's police force. But farce was soon repeated
as tragedy. When some of the most senior members of Aideed's clan gathered in a
building in Mogadishu to discuss a peace agreement with the United Nations, the US
forces, misinformed as ever, blew them up, killing 54 people. Thus they succeeded in
making enemies of all the Somalis. The special forces were harried by gunmen from all
sides. In return, US troops in the UN compound began firing missiles at residential areas.
So the raid on one of Aideed's buildings on October 3rd 1993, which led to the destruction
of two Black Hawk helicopters and the deaths of 18 American soldiers, was just another
round of America's grudge match with the warlord. The troops who captured Aideed's
officials were attacked by everyone: gunmen came even from the rival militias to avenge
the deaths of the civilians the Americans had killed. The US special forces, with an
understandable but ruthless regard for their own safety, locked Somali women and
children into the house in which they were beseiged.
Ridley Scott says that he came to the project without politics, which is what people often
say when they subscribe to the dominant point of view. The story he relates (with the help
of the US Department of Defense and the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff) is the
story the American people need to tell themselves.
The purpose of the raid on October 3rd, Black Hawk Down suggests, was to prevent
Aideed's murderous forces from starving Somalia to death. No hint is given of the feuding
between him and the UN, other than the initial attack on the Pakistani peacekeepers.
There is no recognition that the worst of the famine had passed, or that the US troops had
long ceased to be part of the solution. The US hostage-taking, even the crucial role played
by Malaysian soldiers in the Rangers' rescue, have been excised from the record. Instead
-- and since September 11th this has become a familiar theme -- the attempt to capture
Aideed's lieutenants was a battle between good and evil, civilisation and barbarism.
The Somalis in Black Hawk Down speak only to condemn themselves. They display no
emotions other than greed and the lust for blood. Their appearances are accompanied by
sinister Arab techno, while the US forces are trailed by violins, oboes and vocals inspired
by Enya. The American troops display horrific wounds. They clutch photos of their loved
ones and ask to be remembered to their parents or their children as they die. The Somalis
drop like flies, killed cleanly, dispensable, unmourned.
Some people have compared Black Hawk Down to the British film Zulu. There is some
justice in this comparison, but the Somalis here offer a far more compelling personification
of evil than the blundering, belligerent Zulus. They are sinister, deceitful and inscrutable;
more like the British caricature of the Chinese during the opium wars.
What we are witnessing in both Black Hawk Down and the current war against terrorism
is the creation of a new myth of nationhood. America is casting itself simultaneously as
the world's saviour and the world's victim; a sacrificial messiah, on a mission to deliver the
world from evil. This myth contains incalculable dangers for everyone else on earth.
To discharge its sense of unique grievance, the US government has hinted at what may
become an asymmetric world war. It is no coincidence that Somalia comes close to the
top of the list of nations it may be prepared to attack. This war, if it materialises, will be
led not by the generals in their bunkers, but by the people who construct the story the
nation chooses to believe.