Maria Margaronis | The Nation

Resentment against immigrants, even those seeking asylum, is at the boil.

Europe and the United States have begun to follow diverging scripts on the war.

The events of September 11, viewed from abroad.

A little way into the film version of Louis de Bernières's bestselling novel, set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during World War II, a group of villagers crowd around a list of casualties posted in the public square. Until this point we have seen only minstrel-show peasants, conversing in broken English and executing perfectly choreographed folk dances. But now an elderly man collapses with grief and cries out in his own language: "Oh god, oh god, my boy. My boy has been killed."

The moment feels real; while it lasts, contact is made with history. Then we are back in the fantasy world of director John Madden's Anglo-Hollywood confection, where all the women are brave and the children above average, the Italians love pasta and opera, and the Greeks are good-hearted and proud. The romance between moon-calf Nicolas Cage as a captain of the Italian occupying forces and smoldering Penelope Cruz as the local doctor's daughter is pure Hollywood creampuff: It could almost have been shot in the 1950s as a vehicle for Sophia Loren. Only John Hurt as Cruz's gnarled old dad manages to keep his accent straight and suggest some sort of interior life. The grueling final battles between German and Italian troops come as a relief: Here, again, the film borrows its power from the events it commemorates. Captain Corelli's Mandolin is promoted as a love story, but the only interesting thing about it is the history it mostly tries to treat as a backdrop.

When Mussolini fell in the autumn of 1943, Italian forces occupying Rhodes and the Ionian Islands refused to surrender their arms to the Germans. Instead they turned their guns on their former allies, sometimes assisted by Greeks who fought at their side. The gesture was heroic but hopeless. In Cephalonia thousands of Italians were captured and massacred by German firing squads; many more drowned when ships ferrying them to the mainland were scuttled by the Nazis. The film of Captain Corelli differs from de Bernières's novel in its account of these events, and especially of the part played in them by the Greek partisans. Both have been shaped by the protracted political struggle in Greece and abroad over the country's wartime past.

The civil war that followed Greece's occupation by the Axis powers has a special place in Anglo-American history. It was the hot war at the birth of the cold war, the moment that produced the Truman Doctrine to justify American intervention. The bitter fighting between the Communist-led mass resistance movement, which effectively controlled the country, and the forces of the British- and then American-backed government in exile tore villages and families apart and left political scars that have still not completely healed. Before the imposition of a repressive peace, American-made napalm was used by the Greek Air Force against its own people, and Britain decisively handed over the leadership of the postwar West to the United States. Afterward many thousands of suspected leftists were interned, tortured and executed. (Most of those who went into exile, in the Soviet bloc, were finally allowed to return in the early 1980s.) Greece suffered decades of right-wing rule shored up by the harassment and imprisonment of dissidents, culminating in the CIA-supported dictatorship of 1967-74.

Not surprisingly, popular accounts in English of the Greek war have been heavily ideological. In the 1980s, at the peak of Ronald Reagan's obsession with the Evil Empire, an impassioned account by the Greek-American journalist Nicholas Gage of his mother's murder by Communist guerrillas was hailed as a revelation and was duly made into a major motion picture. As the waning imperial power, Britain produced nothing to compare with this, unless you count the rather subtler memoirs of the brilliant Oxbridge boys parachuted into the Greek mountains to make contact with the resistance. Louis de Bernières's novel, first published in 1994, was in some ways a late excrescence of cold war culture. Though it claims to despise both Fascism and Communism, it offers a sympathetic portrait of Greece's prewar dictator Metaxas while caricaturing the partisans as a cowardly bunch of murderers, thieves and rapists too busy fighting their own people to bother with the Germans. (This last canard originates with Sir Reginald Leeper, His Majesty's wartime ambassador to the Greek government, who was anxious to discredit the resistance in London. In fact, the leftist partisans bore the brunt of the fighting against the Nazis.)

The book was a glittering success. As an antiwar novel written by a former soldier, it has a sure grip on its driving passion. Its stylish intelligence and historical sweep gave it highbrow credentials; its gripping narrative and rousing themes of love, death and loyalty insured mass-market appeal. Captain Corelli's Mandolin is the book Hugh Grant is reading at the end of the British yuppie comedy Notting Hill--an icon of intellectual aspiration. Like the work of John Fowles, who also used a Greek setting for his novel The Magus, it pleasurably engages the brain without the discomfort of aesthetic or moral challenges. Its detailed picture of a different yet familiar world is enticing and absorbing--and marred by surprisingly few howlers (Greek is not written in Cyrillic characters, nor are lambs roasted on Easter Saturday). De Bernières did his homework, and it shows.

Amid the general adulation no one seemed to notice or care about the novel's historical distortions, until the Morning Star accused de Bernières of "the most crude and brazen anti-communism." (De Bernières pulled no punches in his reponse: "How long are you people going to sit in the dark in an air pocket wanking each other off? Your ship has sunk, brothers. It was historically inevitable....") In Greece, too, the early reviews were positive--including the notice in the Communist newspaper Rizospastis, much to its later embarrassment. This may be partly because the Athenian publisher thought it prudent to excise passages like this one:

In Cephalonia the Communists began to deport awkward characters to concentration camps; from a safe distance they had watched the Nazis for years, and were well-versed in all the arts of atrocity and oppression. Hitler would have been proud of such assiduous pupils.

It is also because Greece is a small country accustomed to being worshiped for its past and patronized for its present; a successful British writer who had bothered to immerse himself in its culture and recent history was bound to be given the benefit of the doubt.

Still, it was not long before political antennae were set quivering, and the novel sparked a new skirmish in the long-running and highly coded argument about the civil war. The Greek left emerged from its long silence after 1974 with an understandable tendency to romanticize the partisans. The right has kept up a steady barrage of accusation about leftist atrocities. Over the past decade Greek historians have begun to escape the cold war vise and produce more nuanced and detailed studies of the conditions that led to polarization and violence on both sides. But in the overheated atmosphere of the Greek media, there is little room for such subtleties.

When news of the plan to film Captain Corelli on Cephalonia reached the island, hackles immediately went up. Like most of the Greek islands, Cephalonia leans left: Sixty percent of the vote goes to left-of-center parties, 12 percent to the Communists. Many former partisans are still alive. Vangelis Neochorotis, now 92, whose efforts, both in the resistance with his wife, Amalia, and in the Greek-Italian war of 1940-41, were rewarded with twenty-one years in prison, told the British journalist Seumas Milne, "De Bernières's book is an insult to the whole Greek people. But I believe it is also part of a global drive to rewrite history...to convince people that political and social change is a dead end and that if you struggle for a better world, it only leads to bloodshed, suffering and failure."

Neochorotis is not the only veteran of wartime Cephalonia who has spoken scathingly of de Bernières's novel. Ninety-year-old Amos Pampaloni, former general manager of the Italian Automobile Club, knows more than most about the events it draws on. His own story, told this spring in a BBC documentary, bears a striking resemblance to Captain Corelli's, and formed the basis for Marcello Venturi's The White Flag, an Italian novel published in the 1960s and mentioned in de Bernières's acknowledgments. During the war Pampaloni was a captain in charge of the 33rd artillery regiment, Acqui division, in Cephalonia. Like Corelli, he fell in love ("innocently," he emphasizes) with a Cephalonian girl; he played a key role in the Italians' decision to attack the Germans; and he was shot and left for dead among the corpses of his men by a German firing squad. Unlike Corelli, though, Pampaloni was rescued by the leftist partisans and spent a year with them fighting the Germans on the Greek mainland before returning to help liberate Cephalonia. Pampaloni movingly describes that year as one of the best in his life, an unforgettable time of idealism and solidarity. His memories may be tinged with the glow of nostalgia, but they should still give pause to anyone taken in by de Bernières's hatchet job.

In the end, faced with the prospect of caravansaries of film crews importing much-needed cash along with inevitable chaos, the Cephalonian authorities decided to cut a deal with Captain Corelli's British producers, and a committee of officials and historians was set up to vet the project. Assured that the film would be a pure love story--à la Doctor Zhivago--and would not touch on the civil war, they agreed that filming could go ahead. (They may also have been mollified by the choice of Shawn Slovo, daughter of South African activists Ruth First and Joe Slovo, to write the screenplay.) Judging by the credits, half the island found employment on the set, restoring houses, splicing cables and dressing the actors' hair. Donkeys (increasingly rare in Greece) were rented at a premium; fishermen ferried paparazzi to spot the stars who came to sun themselves on Cephalonia's newly famous beaches. Cafes and restaurants were renamed after the novel, and travel companies began to hawk Cephalonia as "Corelli's island."

The film is indeed considerably kinder to the partisans than de Bernières's book. Their main representative onscreen is Mandras, the jilted fiancé of Penelope Cruz's character, Pelagia, and though the way he is played by Christian Bale suggests that the guerrillas were a bunch of pouting postadolescents, he is not an unsympathetic figure. A scene from the novel in which Mandras returns from the mountains and rapes his former love was cut in postproduction. (For the sake of "balance" we are shown instead a young woman hanged by the partisans for kissing a German on the cheek; there were instances in Greece of women being killed for fraternizing with Nazis, though the more usual treatment, as in France, was a humiliating head-shaving.) Most important, resistance members are shown helping the Italians against the Germans, in spite of de Bernières's assertion that they "took no part, seeing no reason to shake themselves out of their parasitic lethargy"--a key restoration, one would imagine, for Cephalonia's veterans.

Still, it would be interesting to know what those veterans make of the film when it reaches Cephalonia. In hindsight, the wrangling over the resistance seems to have distracted everyone from a more fundamental point. Distortion is only one way of stealing history. As global culture homogenizes the world, places that have kept their identity unvarnished become valuable commodities; once discovered, their shelf life is brief. With Captain Corelli's Mandolin and its attendant tourist boomlet, Cephalonia has taken one more step toward becoming a simulacrum of itself. For a while, the ching of the cash registers will sugar the pill. But eventually the punters will move on to the next hot spot, leaving a hollow feeling in their wake.

'YO MAMA' IS A BIGOT

New York City

Arthur C. Danto contends that Renee Cox's Yo Mama's Last Supper is not anti-Catholic and deserves First Amendment protection ["In the Bosom of Jesus," May 28]. He should listen to the artist's own words and then reread the First Amendment. Renee Cox, debating me on CNN and other media outlets, made it clear that her art is designed to attack the Catholic Church. Her claims ranged from "the Catholic Church is all about money...about big business" to "40 percent of the slaveowners in the South were Catholic." As far as the First Amendment is concerned, she has a constitutional right to show her bigoted work. What she doesn't have is a right to the public purse. If taxpayers' money can't be used to further one's religion, how can it logically be permitted to be used to denigrate it?

PATRICK SCULLY
Director of Communications
Catholic League

DANTO REPLIES

New York City

My article on Renee Cox's Yo Mama's Last Supper concerned a photograph, rendered controversial by some ill-considered remarks by Mayor Giuliani to the effect that it was indecent and anti-Catholic. The burden of my analysis was that it is neither. Scully's letter is not about that picture, but about some ill-considered remarks the artist is alleged to have made on CNN. They have no bearing on the work or on First Amendment policies.

Scully's letter reminds me of nothing so much as the transcript of the trial in which the painter Paolo Veronese was brought up before the Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition in Venice in 1573 for having depicted Mary Magdalene in what is described there as "The Last Supper, which Jesus Christ took with his disciples in the house of Simon." The inquisitors wished to know whether Veronese felt that it was "fitting at the Last Supper of the Lord to paint buffoons, drunkards, Germans, dwarfs and similar vulgarities." Veronese said, "I paint pictures as I see fit and as well as my talent permits"--and he cited the precedent of Michelangelo, who painted "Our Lord, Jesus Christ, His Mother, St. John, St. Peter, and the Heavenly Host. They are all represented in the nude--even the Virgin Mary--and with little reverence."

The Holy Tribunal was an anticipatory version of the Decency Panel under Giuliani's counterreformation in New York. There was, of course, no First Amendment at the time. My own view is that a fair amount of tax money in Veronese's Venice went into the suppression of images; it instead goes into supporting their exhibition in New York today, for the larger intellectual benefit of our society, whatever the collateral opinions of the artists who make them.

One incidental issue puzzles me. In view of profound biblical paintings by such Protestant artists as Rembrandt, by what right do critics like Giuliani or Scully infer that images treating biblical incidents in ways they find displeasing are anti-Catholic rather than simply anti-Christian? It was the strategy of the Counter-Reformation to use images to strengthen faith. It was one strategy of early Protestantism to destroy images, based perhaps on the same psychology. By Rembrandt's time it was recognized that the church ought not to exercise a monopoly on religious representations. The taxpayers' money supports institutions that house painting after painting intended in their time to further the artists' religion, whether Catholic or Protestant. Where did Scully get the idea that this is contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment?

ARTHUR C. DANTO

JUDGING ART

San Antonio

Art Winslow is absolutely correct in his analysis of today's art environment ["The Wind She Blows," June 11]. If we continue losing independent art spaces we'll end up with mediocre art, and artists and intellectuals will be outcasts. But all is not gloomy! Here in San Antonio last May 15 the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center won an important legal battle. Federal Judge Orlando Garcia courageously ruled that our mayor and city council violated the US Constitution and Texas's Open Meeting Act when they conspired to defund the center's art projects. Read the ruling at www.nysd.uscourts.gov/courtweb/pdf/D05TXWC/01-05845.PDF.

ANTONIO C. CABRAL

THE MISSING LINK

New York City

Thanks to everyone who wrote in to recommend more "sites for sore eyes" ["Full-Court Press," June 4], as well as those of you who added to the count of obscene and abusive letters in support of Ralph Nader. Of the many recommendations I received, I am happy to add those below to the list of intelligent and occasionally funny places to go on the web for political good sense and, in the case of Consortium News, investigative reporting. Happy surfing.
smirkingchimp.com
www.bushwatch.com
www.rushiswrong.com
www.thespleen.com
www.oralmajorityonline.com
www.consortiumnews.com

ERIC ALTERMAN

SINS OF THE FATHER

London

Dusko Doder is right to correct the Greek Press Office's extremely partial account of Greece's relations with Macedonia ["Letters," June 4]. But he is wrong to blame Foreign Minister George Papandreou for the sins of his father, Andreas. Papandreou the younger has made serious efforts to move Greek foreign policy beyond the paranoid nationalism fostered by Papandreou senior. With Prime Minister Costas Simitis, he helped to broker the peaceful removal of Slobodan Milosevic despite the Serbian dictator's considerable popular support in Greece. Simitis and Papandreou have also been constructively involved in efforts to resolve the current crisis in Macedonia--it is, after all, in their interest to do so. The cause of peace in the Balkans is best served by giving credit where credit is due.

For the record, the Greek government never quite claimed, as Doder says, that "Macedonia has been a part of Greece for 3,200 years." At the peak of nationalist hysteria in the 1990s, posters of archeological artifacts from Greek Macedonia with the legend "Macedonia: Three thousand years of Greek history" were displayed for the benefit of foreign visitors. There were also posters proclaiming "Macedonia was Greece ever," obviously Englished by some subversive mole.

MARIA MARGARONIS

THE CRIMSON & THE BLACK

Washington, D.C.

Why are people surprised that Harvard is not acting in a socially just fashion [Benjamin L. McKean, "Harvard's Shame," May 21]? After all, the Harvard Corporation (which just inducted its first minority member and until a few years ago was an all-men's club) to its lasting shame never divested from South Africa (although it later gave Nelson Mandela an honorary degree). And when we alumni/ae successfully elected four petition candidates to the Board of Overseers on a prodivestment platform, the big U responded by changing the rules to make it far more difficult to elect someone not on the official slate.

It took a student strike back in 1969-70 to get the university to establish an African-American studies program. And, as the recent New York Times story on NYU's belated award to those protesting the collegiate sports world's "gentlemen's agreement" pointed out, Harvard, too, in the 1940s honored an opposing team's request not to field a black player. There's much more.

We can hope that Harvard will do the decent thing by way of a living wage for its employees, but I wouldn't count on it.

CHESTER HARTMAN
Poverty & Race Research Action Council

CAN WE AFFORD DAYCARE?

Cambridge, Mass.

It seems I'm a rare bird indeed: a feminist who doesn't think that daycare is necessarily a fabulous thing, particularly for kids under 2 ["Subject to Debate," May 14]. Katha Pollitt is correct, as usual, that the National Institute for Child Health and Development's recent study purporting to link immersion in daycare with aggressive behavior probably can't infer causality but will be used to hurt moms who want to work outside the home. But political agendas aside, let's face it: It's widely considered better, developmentally speaking, for children up to 2 (the age when they really have something to gain from socializing with their peers) to interact one on one with their caregiver.

In my house, the care of my infant daughter is split; my husband and I both have part-time jobs (mine offers benefits). For children's sake, I'd like the childcare debate to include a discussion of how to give more part-time workers access to health insurance and how to convince conservatives and progressives alike that except for breastfeeding, dads can do everything for children that moms can.

NELL BERAM

Tampa, Fla.

Thanks to Katha Pollitt for succinctly pointing out why research into the effects of daycare is misdirected. The investigations should rather focus on the pay rates for daycare workers and the difficulty all but the very rich have in finding daycare or preschools that come close to the care provided in France and other enlightened countries. I have been a teacher's aide in a school where a high percentage of the kids qualified for free lunch, and I've also worked in a suburban school. You can guess which kids showed the most hyperactivity and aggression. (It wasn't the ones who had been going to the best preschools.) Searching for preschools for my own two children, I realized that my whole salary wouldn't cover the cost of the schools that met my standards. The bottom line is money--for parents, for state-run daycare with well-paid, qualified teachers, for family leave.

MICHELLE BARRON

WHY, IT'S A SILVER BULLET...

Tucson

Way out here in the Arizona desert, this cowgirl had been waiting for someone to ride to her rescue. Wasn't too long ago the guys in the white hats looked to win the shootout at the OK Corral. Then they were ambushed. Ever since, daily scans of the horizon turned up nothing but coyotes.

Then out of nowhere, in a cloud of dust, rides the Lone Ranger: Senator Jim Jeffords! God bless you, sir. May you ride tall in the saddle and turn the right-wing stampede before it carries all of us over the cliff.

CANDACE MORICONI

As the election nears, the weather is rotten and the glow is off "New Labour."

London's new mayor is Thatcher's old nemesis. Is he also a leading indicator?

London

In Europe this September protest went populist with a vengeance. The truckers and farmers clogging roads and blockading fuel depots across the continent to protest petrol prices were no rainbow brigade of the disaffected but solid citoyens: middle-aged men with mortgages and beer bellies, deck chairs and thermos flasks. Their avatar, if they have one, is Monsieur Poujade, the conservative French bookseller who led a tax revolt of shopkeepers in the fifties and came to represent the political muscle of capitalism's squeezed middlemen. Leaderless, decentralized, linked by Internet and mobile phone, they have borrowed their tactics from the environmental and anticorporate movements of the past few years; so far, their impact has been much more dramatic. In France, where it all began, they quickly secured the promise of a 15 percent cut in fuel duty from Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In Britain they took government and media by surprise, threatened to paralyze the economy and the health service, and pushed the Labour Party down below the Tories in the polls for the first time since 1992.

This strange solidarity of the self-employed produced a rash of political paradoxes. Tabloids that have denounced every demonstration since Cromwell discovered the exhilaration of direct action ("Protest," said the Daily Mail, "is the lifeblood of democracy"). While Margaret Thatcher once demonized striking miners as the enemy within, her young ward William Hague hailed the truckers who stalled the country as "fine, upstanding citizens." And Prime Minister Tony Blair found that strikebusting laws passed by the Iron Lady and gratefully kept on the books were useless in this case, because the men picketing the oil refineries were not unionized. Mechanisms devised to control dissent as the old, industrial Britain was being dismantled are of limited use in the new world of virtual networks and unstable work. The oil refinery pickets numbered less than 2,500 across the country, and at some depots looked more like picnickers than protesters. They were able to bring the system to a halt in part because the tanker drivers who were meant to defy them are themselves contract workers with no fixed loyalties.

Of course, if the oil companies had wanted to break the protest, they would have found a way to do it before you could say Texaco. (Imagine if it had been Greenpeace or striking refinery workers at their gates.) Truckers demanding fuel tax cuts are allies, not enemies, of the oilmen, to whom less tax means more sales and a bigger margin for profits. In fact, the price of fuel has risen by 50 percent over the past eighteen months because the oil-producing countries have pushed up the price of crude; oil company profits have doubled. But though the "Dump the Pump" campaign began in Britain as a movement to boycott BP, it quickly veered right and turned its sights on the government, which claims 76 pence in duty and tax--the highest in Europe--on every pound spent on petrol. (In the States the car lobby won this battle before it was even joined: Americans pay 23 cents on the dollar in tax.) The truckers' crusade is partly an explosion of resentment by middle England against a government that wooed it, promised it the Earth--and now sits smugly in Westminster listening to focus groups and spouting homilies instead of making real improvements in the services everybody uses.

For Tony Blair the fuel crisis was truly the stuff of nightmare, calling up ghoulish memories of 1978's winter of discontent, when industrial action filled city streets with garbage and morgues (they say) with the unburied dead, ushering in the reign of Margaret Thatcher. For one ghastly week, New Labour's chief control freak watched helplessly as the country slid toward chaos and public sympathy flooded to the instigators. The tabloids he had courted cheered on the protesters; the corporate leaders he had buttered up smiled sweetly and averred there was nothing they could do. The mirage of Third Way consensus went up in a puff of diesel. Only Labour's traditional stalwarts, the trade union leaders, came through, helping to negotiate an end to the protest. Perhaps there's a lesson here.

The high tax on fuel (put in place initially by the Conservatives) serves a dual purpose: to raise revenue and to protect the environment. Indirect taxes are rarely progressive; this one falls disproportionately on the rural poor. Contrary to the impression fostered by the government's supporters, not all the fuel protesters are selfish, gas-guzzling throwbacks greedy for a bigger TV. If New Labour could stop pretending that the new Jerusalem can be built without taxing the rich; if it could stop thinking of the environment as an issue for sissies and make the green case for petrol tax (there is a golden opportunity in November's international climate change forum in the Hague); if it could even put real money into public transport and renewable energy, some good might come of this bizarre political moment. Otherwise, a warning has been served. Societies dependent on one privately hoarded commodity are vulnerable to all kinds of blackmail, and the new politics of protest is no longer the exclusive province of the anticorporate left.

Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce.... "Jesus," Molly said, her own plate empty, "gimme that.

As the international uprising against genetically engineered (GE) foods continues to grow, the worst fear of US government and business officials is that the commotion abroad will awaken American