#taking sides

The Age of Oppression

Taking Sides focuses on the postwar questioning of German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and asks a simple yet difficult to answer question: can you separate the art from the artist when that artist thrived under a fascist regime?

We talk about denazification, the uneasy role of artists under fascism, and why the film sometimes feels more interested in defending its subject than interrogating him.

It’s a quiet, talky film with not much going on, but the music's pretty?

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor"

- Quote by Desmond Tutu

That phrase appears on my Twitter page. People ask me what this means. I marched against the War in Iraq, posted news from Al Jazeera. In 1992, I visited former Yugoslavia and wrote about what I saw in an online publication called Miracles. I spoke about what I saw all over the country until I dropped from exhaustion. The attack on the World Trade Center and the war in Afghanistan caused me to pause: there was no stopping that war, so I kept silent.

I call myself a pacifist which means that I will not prepare for war or own weapons. I had a gun nut insist he was a pacifist because his guns deterred violence. He was unhappy when I told him he wasn't.

But it is not people like him who caused me to retire. I speak now of my fellow activists. They declared their opposition to war, but very few of them were pacifists. For example, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they decidedly took the side of Palestine and called for the abolition of Israel. In the Yugoslavia War, they called for the west to join Bosnia and Croatia in attacking Serbia. They were peace activists of convenience. People like me had no place in their movement.

So driven out by these, I no longer had a place. They did not seek to make peace by nonviolent means: they sought to oppose the United States or whatever major power waged the latest war. Their stand was based on politics rather than conscience.

The kind of action in war that I endorsed was similar to that performed by a Quaker Hospital in Vietnam. All wounded people - - regardless of side - - were welcome. A sign on the door told visitors to leave their guns outside because many of the people inside had been hurt by guns.

Another example was the Quaker Ambulance Corps in World War I. The medics picked up people on both sides and delivered them to the appropriate hospitals. In the Second World War, conservative politicians outlawed Americans from engaging in this kind of activity. It took many years for Quaker lobbyists to reverse the rider.

Peace activists rarely participate in this kind of action.

Pacifists help all victims of war. As I matured, I felt contempt for the leaders who used war as diplomacy. Then I started feeling contempt for the invaders and sympathy for the citizens and soldiers in their path.

Regarding the Ukraine war, I sympathize with Ukraine. I see Russian soldiers who are often picked up off the street as victims of Putin's bellicosity.

Pacifism is for the people. When I went to Yugoslavia, I began with a hatred for soldiers. This was a strange war. Soldiers fought all week and came home to rest. I could see darkness in their eyes, the exhaustion. That is when I began to see that they were also victims of wars.