Category Archives: Politics

***The Autobiography of Black Hawk

Posted on by
Black Hawk, American Indian

Black Hawk (wikimedia from: History of the Indian Tribes of North America)

By Black Hawk, narrated by Brett Barry — This short book—the full title of which is Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nation, Various Wars In Which He Has Been Engaged, and His Account of the Cause and General History of the Black Hawk War of 1832, His Surrender, and Travels Through the United States. Also Life, Death and Burial of the Old Chief, Together with a History of the Black Hawk War—was the first autobiography of an American Indian leader published in the United States and therefore something of a phenomenon when it appeared in 1833.

Black Hawk was born in 1767 on the Rock River in Illinois, as a member of the Sauk (Sac) tribe, which at that time populated lands east of the Mississippi River, in Illinois and Wisconsin. His reminiscences were edited by a local newspaper reporter, J. B. Patterson, and recount Black Hawk’s experiences with the French, the British, the American settlers, and other tribes.

What turned him against the Americans was an 1804 treaty, which an unauthorized group of Sauks signed, that unilaterally gave away their lands, providing American settlers the legal right (as if such niceties mattered) to appropriate them, and forcing the Indians to resettle to the west.

I found by that treaty, that all of the country east of the Mississippi, and south of Jeffreon [the Salt River in northern Missouri, a tributary of the Mississippi] was ceded to the United States for one thousand dollars a year. I will leave it to the people of the United States to say whether our nation was properly represented in this treaty? Or whether we received a fair compensation for the extent of country ceded by these four individuals?

Because of this opposition, Black Hawk fought with the British during the War of 1812. Twenty years later, when he was 65 years old and after a trail of broken promises, he led a band of Sauk warriors against settlers in Illinois and Wisconsin in the 1832 Black Hawk War.

Eventually, he was captured and gave up the warrior life. He traveled extensively in the United States on a government-sponsored tour, marveling at the size of the major cities, the railroads, the roads. In his attempts to negotiate with military leaders, provincial governors, and even the Great Father in Washington, he interacted personally with many of the leading politicians and military men of the day. President Andrew Jackson (a major character in NPR reporter Steve Inskeep’s recent book about another betrayal of the Indians) desired that Black Hawk and other chiefs see these sights, in order to convince them of the might of the United States.

Black Hawk provides his point of view quite clearly and compellingly. To no avail, of course. According to the University of Illinois Press, “Perhaps no Indian ever saw so much of American expansion or fought harder to prevent that expansion from driving his people to exile and death.” His prowess as a warrior chief is now honored by the U.S. military, which has named several ships after him, as well as the Black Hawk helicopter.

****Gun Street Girl

Posted on by
Ireland, street scene, Belfast

Belfast street (photo: Recuerdos de Pandora, Creative Commons license)

By Adrian McKinty, narrated by Gerard Doyle — Gun Street Girl takes place in Belfast, in the mid-1980s, and The Troubles provide a fine backdrop of tension and mayhem. It’s the fourth (yes!) of a planned trilogy, because McKinty—and his readers—couldn’t quite let Detective Sean Duffy go.

The complex plot grows out of actual events of the era, including missile thefts from aerospace company Short Brothers (a convoluted affair in real life) and the hostile environment created by the Thatcher-FitzGerald Anglo-Irish agreement. In the novel, Duffy is out of step as usual with his confreres in law enforcement, especially for being the rare Catholic in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. When a murder investigation takes Duffy and a new recruit to Oxford, England, they encounter a more generalized anti-Irish prejudice. The British coppers apparently believe the Irishmen will be satisfied to sit in their cozy b&b in Oxford (unless my ears mistook, referred to as “Morse-land,” in a nice homage) and drink whiskey. They are, of course, mistaken.

What has taken them to Oxford is the unraveling of a case that at first appears open-and-shut. A couple is found murdered, and it looks as if their son shot them then committed suicide. Under Duffy’s supervision, Detective Sergeant McCrabban is technically in charge of this investigation and is ready to close the books on it, but something’s not quite right. For one thing, no one really wants Duffy and McCrabban poking around in it.

Meanwhile, Duffy’s future with the R.U.C. faces an almost-certain dead-end, and MI5 agent Kate tries to recruit him for her agency. All things considered, a change of employer is more than a wee bit tempting. She’s the Gun Street girl, and, as Tom Waits would have it, Duffy will “never kiss a Gun Street girl again.”

Doyle has won numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile, and has a solid history narrating mysteries and thrillers. In this book, he must present various Irish and English accents and does so beautifully. I could listen to the book again just to hear him read it. Detective Duffy’s voice is crucial, since the story is told in first-person narration, and Doyle captures him—and McKinty’s dry, self-deprecating humor—beautifully.

A longer version of this review is available on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

*****The Orphan Master’s Son

Posted on by
Kim Jong Un, North Korea

Kim Jong Un, the Dear Leader (photo: petersnoopy, Creative Commons License)

By Adam Johnson – A prodigious creative imagination put together this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Few Americans have visited North Korea in recent decades; if they have, they’ve seen little other than what their minders are authorized to show them, and they’ve talked with no one outside their official itinerary. We cannot “see for ourselves” what living in such a massively regulated, brutal nation is like. In such a circumstance, it’s daunting to create a fully developed world, and it would be easy to create fictional characters who are two-dimensional, stereotypic. But Johnson has created such a world and peopled his book with true individuals who act believably, even when what they must do is unbelievably horrifying.

While the reader acquires a bone-chilling sense of North Korean life and how survival requires quick wits and artful deception, in no way does this novel feel like a political tract. What the reader comes to understand are the daily accommodations of action and speech and even thought that the system under Kim Jong Un, the Dear Leader, requires.

The first third of the book is about Jun Do (John Doe), the orphan master’s son who declares he is not an orphan. At various points, Jun Do has chances to escape, to defect to South Korea, to abandon ship in Japan, to hide out in the United States, but he doesn’t take them, in part because of the danger such an action would create for his companions and because (speaking of South Korea) “he was scared that if he saw it with his own eyes, his entire life would mean nothing. Stealing turnips from an old man who’d gone blind from hunger? That would have been for nothing. Sending another boy instead of himself to clean vats at the paint factory? For nothing.”

Yet the book is rich in both love and humor. Seeing Jun Do cope with the disconnect between reality and the government’s constant diet of lies can be simultaneously amusing and heart-breaking.

In the second part of the book, the narration alternates among several sources, and includes this story told by a young interrogator of political prisoners about the talk every father has with his son, “in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family”:

father and son

(photo: pixshark)

 I was eight when my father had this talk with me . . . [After denouncing the boy in a terrifying way] . . [m]y father said, “See, my mouth said that, but my hand, my hand was holding yours. If . . . someday you must say something like that to me, I will know it’s not really you. That’s inside. Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands.”

Some chapters of this section are told via the official and ubiquitous government loudspeakers, which blare constantly in homes, factories, and public places. The extent to which the population is taken in by these jingoistic broadcasts is unclear, since cracks in the façade of total loyalty to the Dear Leader are dangerous.

Regarding the relentless suffering, one character says, “When the Dear Leader wanted you to lose more, he gave you more to lose.” He gave Jun Do love in the person of actress Sun Moon, and contrary to the Dear Leader’s expectation, love saved them both.

Despite all the paranoia, torture, starvation, slave labor camps, and dark and dripping prison cells, incredibly, I found this beautifully written novel uplifting; it engenders the feeling that the North Koreans will ultimately free themselves from their repressive government because the burden of believing in it will become too great.

White Writing Black Writing White

Posted on by

At my writer’s group this week, we touched on the issues that arise when we try to write a character of a different race (or gender, or and so on). Coincidentally, a thoughtful essay by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda “Where Writers Go Wrong in Imagining the Lives of Others” is included in an early edition of LitHub. (If you’re interested in “the best of the literary Internet,” you may want to sign up for this e-publication, a new joint creation of Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. It looks promising.)

Rankine and Loffreda explore the difficulties inherent in any effort to imagine the lives of people who have had vastly different life experiences and social conditioning than one’s own. Most of their argument applies to white authors writing about people of color, but could apply to other fundamental differences of the sort that influence not only how people see the world but how the world sees them. (This last point is why stories about people who “pass” are so powerful. They know who they are, but no one else does, and they would be treated very differently if they did.)

Many white writers, the authors say, believe “it is against the nature of art itself to place limits on who or what I can imagine,” as if imagination “is not created by same web and matrix of history and culture” that made the writer. The result is an unconscious racial subjectivity that has the power to wound, to do damage, irrespective of whatever benign motivations the writer may have. There are risks. At the same time, they say, writers of color may pull their punches, unwilling to negotiate territory, develop characters, and explore situations outside whatever conventions the literary establishment endorses.

Nat Turner, slave

Nat Turner captured by Mr. Benjamin Phipps, a local farmer (graphic: en.wikipedia.org)

Writing authentically and deeply even about characters one presumably knows best (people “like me”) is a difficult endeavor. Writers who want to create characters of a vastly different point of view should ask themselves some basic questions, they say: why do I want to write such a character and to what purpose? Not can I and how can I? In other words, is the choice to write this character worth the risk of, essentially, getting it wrong and causing harm? What is needed, they say, is to expand the limits of imagination, even if escaping them is impossible, because “history is not an act of the imagination.” At the same time, as James Baldwin once observed, race is “our common history.”

A Slate article written in response to reviewers’ qualms about Michael Chabon’s 2012 novel Telegraph Avenue (a book I much liked, by the way), offers a somewhat different perspective. Among the book’s principal characters are the proprietors—one black and one white—of a used record store located on “the ragged fault line where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted.” Writing a black character in this setting is both appropriate and necessary, enabling an exploration of (among many other issues) the community divide and the shifting forces of gentrification, answering the “why” and “to what purpose” questions posed by Rankine and Loffreda.

The Slate piece, which is by Tanner Colby, reviews the history of this continuing debate, which crested with publication of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, told from the point of view of the eponymous former slave. For some years after the criticisms of Styron, white authors shied away from writing black characters, and Rankine and Loffreda agree that issues of “race” and “racism” frequently become entangled. Colby has a cynical view of such critiques: “If you convince white people that they’re not qualified to tackle race, if you scare them away from the issue, if you give them the slightest excuse to ignore it, they will be more than happy to ignore it. For as long as you’ll let them.”

My takeaway from this is that authors who write across racial/gender/other lines need to be hyperaware of the need to push beyond the limits of their own understanding of the world. I suspect that with practice, identifying one’s blind spots comes easier.

*****The International: A Novel of Belfast

Posted on by
hotel bar, barman

(photo: shankar s, creative commons license)

“If I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime,” writes Daniel Hamilton, an 18-year-old Belfast bartender and narrator of Glenn Patterson’s novel The International. The history he refers to is the meeting to launch the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), an organization formed to focus attention on discrimination against Northern Ireland’s mostly Catholic nationalist minority. We call the succeeding three decades of violence and despair The Troubles, and The International “is the best book about the Troubles ever written,” according to Irish author and Booker-Prize-winner Anne Enright.

Funny thing is, there’s almost no overt violence in this book, apart from the fact it’s set in a busy bar with lots of coming and going and football on the telly and political shenanigans where money changes hands and gay men and straight women hoping to meet someone and people who should have stopped drinking hours before ordering another and weddings upstairs in the hotel, at one of which the clergyman plays an accordion. In other words, enough latent violence in reserve to keep the average semi-sober person on his toes.

The principal action of the novel takes place during on Saturday evening, January 28, 1967, the night before the big meeting, larded with Danny Hamilton’s memories of other times and barroom encounters. His minutely observed portrayal of everyday life as seen from behind the bar is heartbreaking when, with the lens of hindsight, the reader knows how soon it will all be gone, sucked into a slowly unwinding catastrophe of bombs and gunfire.

Patterson’s writing style reflects the unadorned—and often wryly humorous—worldview of his young narrator, yet see how precisely he captures the sense of a departing wedding guest:

“You look like you enjoyed yourself,” I said.
He sucked air through his pursed lips and held a hand to his heart as though to say that any more enjoyment would have killed him.
“That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” I said.
“Great people,” he said and the hand on his heart became his word of honour. “Not a bit of side to a one of them.”

The novel’s only violence of the kind that would become all-too-familiar happened somewhat before the book begins, when four Catholic barmen from The International were shot leaving another bar, late at night. One died, creating the opening that Daniel filled.

The quote at the top of this piece opens the book, and these words about the barmen who died, Peter Ward, also age 18, help close it:

I can’t tell you much else about him, except that those who knew him thought the world of him. He is, I realise, an absence in this story. I wish it were not so, but guns do that, create holes which no amount of words can fill.

The Author

Princeton University, through the Fund for Irish Studies, brought Belfast author Glenn Patterson to campus last week. He talked about how his writing emphasizes history and politics and his deep sense of place. And, he said that “when history looks back at our present, it will see that what we thought we were at and what we were at, really, were entirely different.” This theme is borne out in a postscript to The International, where Patterson recounts going back to newspaper archives from 1967 to see what they’d made of the NICRA’s formation, and the answer was “scarcely nothing.” In that gap, the novel grew.

Charming, disarming, Patterson told stories and read from several works, include four of the five short literary interludes he was commissioned to write for Philip Hammond’s “Requiem for the Lost Souls of the Titanic,” which premiered April 14, 2012, the 100th anniversary of the night the ship—built in Belfast—sank. I regret I couldn’t find them online to share with you; they were extraordinary.

It still being (barely) March, the month of St. Patrick’s Day, also see: Glenn Patterson’s top 10 books about Belfast.

Related articles

**** 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina

Posted on by
New Orleans, Katrina

The New Orleans “bathtub ring” (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

By Chris Rose – This collection of newspaper columns from the New Orleans Times-Picayune in the days and months following Hurricane Katrina is, as the cover says, “a roller-coaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor”—whose shaky pilings are sunk into the physical, economic, and emotional debris of a devastated city.

Rose reports unflinchingly about the horrors and about the small personal triumphs the city’s residents experienced as they tried, not always successfully, to scrabble back to some kind of normalcy. Collectively, his writings probably better than anything else I’ve read answer the question people asked at the time, “Is New Orleans worth it?” His love of the city—its music, food, culture, and traditions, but mostly its people—soaks every page like floodwater.

The ongoing calamity didn’t stop when the wind and rain ceased, but went on and on in the form of poor government decision-making, ill-conceived emergency and reconstruction plans, rapacious utility companies and developers, loophole-seeking insurance schemes, lost possessions and people. To report on it, Rose got out and about, bicycling through the devastated areas, recording the citizenry’s stories. And some stories they were!

Rose’s close attention to these trials was not without its costs. A little more than two months after the disaster, he began one of his essays by quoting the people who said to him, “Everyone here is mentally ill now.” It took a while for him to recognize it—almost seven months—though his wife, his editor, his friends, and his readers tried to convince him much earlier, but he, too, was breaking under the strain. “I feel as if I have become the New Orleans poster boy for posttraumatic stress, chronicling my descent into madness for everyone to read,” he wrote in late March 2006. A few months later, he wrote about his yearlong battle with depression and what he was, finally, doing about it.

He’d been the city’s cheerleader, encouraging people to be strong and stand tall and celebrate what they still had, and his admission of needing serious help loosed a response from thousands. “It boggles the mind to think of how many among us are holding on by frayed threads, just barely, and trying to hide it as I was for so many months.” Even acknowledging that, he ended an essay about his depression with words of encouragement and purpose: “Find some way to shine a light. Together, maybe we’ll find our way out of this.”

New Orleans, Katrina

House destroyed, chandelier intact (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

This collection of essays is one of those compilations where the whole is so much more than the sum of the parts. Yes, there’s repetition among them; yes, his messages are often the same. But the reader cannot help but think that if only the people’s situation were improving faster, he wouldn’t have had to hammer his message home so hard and so often. I pictured him in many ways like the John Goodman character in the first season of Treme—outraged and caring and providing his testimony. The difference is that the real Chris Rose stuck it out.

NSA Chief Speaks in Princeton

Posted on by
Mike Rogers, NSA, military

Adm. Mike Rogers (photo: wikipedia)

Admiral Mike Rogers—Director, National Security Agency, and Commander, U.S. Cyber Command (the military’s centralized operational command for cyberspace operations)—spoke at Princeton University yesterday, part of an ongoing effort to establish greater understanding of the NSA mission and encourage private sector partnerships .

He kept his own remarks short, describing the missions of the two agencies he heads, in order to maximize time for audience questions. A key challenge he noted is assuring that efforts to manage the nation’s cyber-threats and foreign intelligence-gathering are appropriately balanced against “the inherent right to privacy” of the American people. In the late 1960s and early 1970s (the Watergate era), revelations of government spying on U.S. citizens led to two new mechanisms for privacy protection: FISA courts (authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and congressional oversight. Unfortunately, Rogers said, the public has lost confidence in both those approaches at a time when threats have rapidly escalated.

“Would we even be having this conversation if it weren’t for the whistleblowers?” an audience member asked.

Rogers responded, “I don’t know any whistleblowers. I only know of thieves who stole government information.” He went on to say that he wished he had that information back, because the loss of it has imperiled troops overseas and many other individuals and activities, as well as entailed considerable costs. He tells his staff that, if they see any information or process of gathering it that they consider illegal, immoral, or unethical, they should raise it within the chain of command, and it isn’t up to each individual person to pick and choose which laws to obey.

In deciding how to respond to a cyber-attack, his command uses the same principle of proportionality that the military does in general. The exact means of retaliation is a policy decision, not his alone. In North Korea’s hacking attack against Sony last November, for example, he urged the President to “think more broadly,” beyond just cyber-methods, and the U.S. government response to date includes economic sanctions against Pyongyang.

A questioner asked what happens when information amassed on foreigners includes information about Americans (“incidental” information). Rogers wouldn’t speak to whether the FBI or CIA access such information but said the NSA treats it differently, as to whether and how long it is kept, than it does information on foreigners.

Another controversy raised was the NSA’s practice of bulk data storage. Rogers said that at least some bulk data storage is necessary because the agency does not know now what may be useful down the road. There are limits on how long information is retained, but these are currently “more of an art than a science,” he said. A January report by an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that, at present, there are no screening methods that are a viable alternative to bulk data collection, although privacy protections can be strengthened.

How ISIS is Different

Posted on by
desert, man in desert

(photo: Ilker Ender, creative commons license)

The issue of terrorism and the response of secular societies to it is the sharp edge of international relations and of much current interest. Recently, this website has included my summary of Graeme Wood’s article in The Atlantic, “What ISIS Really Wants,” as well as a review of the book The Terrorist’s Dilemma, by Princeton professor Jacob Shapiro about how covert organizations organize themselves.

Putting these two analysis side-by-side, ISIS appears to be both fundamentally and functionally different from the “traditional” terrorist organizations Shapiro describes in a number of key ways, including:

  • traditional terrorist organizations, including al-Qa’ida, have political aims (getting Westerners out of the Arabian peninsula, etc.), whereas ISIS’s aims are religious
  • because of their political goals, traditional terrorist organizations have at least some interest in controlling ultra-violence, as it decreases their political capital, whereas ISIS is focused on establishing absolute, undiluted Sharia and the accompanying violence is part of the package
  • traditional terrorist organizations want to protect their leaders, whereas ISIS appears to court confrontation, or at least is not dissuaded from pursuing its tactics by fear of Western reprisal and
  • traditional terrorist organizations must operate “underground” in their host countries, so their activities—including communication with their agents in the field—always carry a security risk, whereas ISIS is operating in the open in its captured territories, and indeed must hold those territories in order to maintain the caliphate it has declared.

With respect to how an organization can behave when it has territory (a safe haven), ISIS does follow the pattern of traditional terrorist organizations by exploiting that benefit. In addition, traditional terrorist organizations suffer when there is a complete security vacuum and see the need to establish social institutions; not surprisingly, then, ISIS’s plans include a kind of social agenda (albeit along lines endorsed by Mohammed), though whether the organization can pull it off is another question.

These differences call for different approaches, not approaching ISIS like a spinoff al-Qa’ida or the Provisional IRA. This is new.

What ISIS Really Wants

Posted on by
world on fire

(photo: pixabay)

Graeme Wood’s penetrating article, “What ISIS Really Wants” in the March 2015 Atlantic tries to answer deceptively simple, yet strategically essential questions related to the intentions of ISIS’s self-declared caliphate and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Although the organization’s motives and aims apparently have eluded many Westerners, Wood says its propaganda machine, much of which operates online, makes those answers knowable.

According to Wood, analysis of these resources reveals that ISIS “rejects peace as a matter of principle,” hungers for genocide, is prevented by its religious views from adopting certain practices (even if they are key to its survival), and “considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.” Understanding ISIS’s beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment—its “dystopian alternate reality”—can help the West predict its actions and develop more effective countermeasures, Wood says.

Osama bin Laden operated a geographically diffuse network of relatively autonomous cells that had political aims, such as getting Westerners out of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. These cells operated more-or-less independently, in countries and territory they didn’t control, and attempting to exercise central authority over these scattered cells would have created a high security risk for al-Qaeda leaders.

In total contrast, ISIS has been able to seize and hold territory, thanks to the vacuum of authority in Syria and Iraq, and can therefore effectively implement a top-down, highly controlled structure. In fact, ISIS must continue to hang onto this territory in order to maintain the caliphate. But the key distinction between ISIS and al-Qaeda is that ISIS’s aims are religious, not political, and underpin “the group’s commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse,” Wood says.

We have diluted the meaning of this word with the snowpocalypse, the zombie apocalypse, and so on, but to ISIS, what they foresee is the original meaning: that is, the complete and final destruction of the world. With total annihilation looming, why not court death? What difference does one life–or a dozen, or a hundred–make?

Westerners have a difficult time accepting a theological basis for the mass executions, beheadings, stonings, crucifixions, and immolations taking place in the Middle East. Yet, secular societies should not dismiss ISIS followers as merely a congregation of disaffected Muslims from around the world (and some few from the United States). It is a mistake, Wood believes, to see ISIS as anything other than a religious, end-of-days group, built on a coherent (if controversial) interpretation of Islam, whose members follow the exact letter of the law, as they understand it.

Meanwhile, the politically correct “Islam is a religion of peace” mantra does not fit the brutal laws of war as laid out in the Koran, and which were developed during a violent era. Wood quotes Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel as saying that Islamic fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”

Wood says that the rest of the world must recognize ISIS’s “intellectual genealogy” if it is to react in ways “that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.”

This summary is based primarily on the introduction to this thought-provoking essay. Here is the link to the entirety.

The Last Sentence

Posted on by

The Last Sentence, Jesper Christensen, Torgny Segerstedt It was troubling to view Swedish director Jan Troell’s 2012 film (trailer) based on the experience of crusading journalist Torgny Segerstedt, so soon after the recent tragic events in Paris. Segerstedt was editor-in-chief of one of Sweden’s leading newspapers, and between 1933 when Hitler came to power and his own death in 1945, Segerstedt was a fierce opponent of Naziism, even though much of Sweden’s leadership, including the king, was determined to remain neutral and out of the war. The struggle for journalists’ right—some would say duty—to speak out despite risks to themselves and others has not ended.

Beautifully played by Jesper Christensen, Segerstedt left himself open to criticism and to the devaluing of his motivations by his long affair with a Jewish woman, wife of his publisher. Hollywood’s crusading journalists are noble and flawless (think All the President’s Men), their presumed moral authority overshadowing any rough spots in their personalities, whereas Segerstedt’s uncompromising character is pompous at times and unpleasant at others, he basks in his celebrity, and he’s downright cruel to his wife. “Easy to admire, but very hard to like,” said RogerEbert.com reviewer Glenn Kenny. Truth told, he loves his dogs best.

Producing this film in black and white may have symbolic significance or may be just the preferred Scandinavian style—the film is Swedish, after all. In another Bergman-like touch, Segerstedt sees and converses with the black-clad ghosts of his mother and other women. Slow-moving, like the clear stream (of words?) against which the opening and closing credits appear, there is only a fleeting soundtrack to support the action.

The film left me with a lot of unanswered questions. What happened with his writing? When the authorities demanded that a particular edition not be distributed because of its anti-Nazi editorial (which suggests they had imposed some censorship regime), Segerstedt printed it with a big white space where the editorial would have been. Nice. But we never learn whether he was allowed to continue writing after that (or how he was stopped) until a scene that takes place years later. How did the war affect the Swedish people? There’s little hint of that, beyond putting up blackout curtains. It seems they had electricity, they had food, petrol, champagne at New Year’s. It’s primarily the awareness of Nazi behavior that the viewer brings to the film that explains and justifies both Segerstedt’s simmering outrage and his country’s policy of appeasement. He and his mistress both have suicide plans, if it came to that, but in the absence of any tangible, on-screen threat, their preparations seem self-dramatizing and almost childish.

Segerstedt in a sense provides his own epitaph, which is also the Swedish title of the movie—“Judgment on the Dead”— based on a line from a famous Old Norse poem, which says the judgment on the dead is everlasting. History’s judgment on Segerstedt would be that he was of course right about the Nazis. And if, as the King believed, it would have been his fault if the Germans invaded the country, he would have been among the first to die. NPR’s Ella Taylor called the film “A richly detailed portrait of a great man riddled with flaws and undone by adulation.” Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 76%, audience score 44%.