Back to School: The Loyalist (short)

As more countries belatedly adopt Magnitsky-style sanctions, the question will start to arise regarding how the families of serial human rights abusers should be treated. They might technically be innocent of their parents’ crimes, but they still stood to benefit from their corruption. In most cases, they knew well enough. However, it is not clear just how well a North Korean music student studying in Switzerland understands her father and the regime he serves. He has come to test her loyalty and perhaps vice versa in Minji Kang’s short film, The Loyalist, which is available on Omeleto, as a potential supplement to that curriculum on North Korea you’re whipping up for your kids (like the NY Board of Ed would do it for you).

For years, Gen. Roh’s daughter Shilla has studied at a Swiss boarding school, where her angelic voice has garnered praise and encouragement. Frankly, it might be too angelic, since she has often been featured as a soloist in chorale performances of “Ave Maria.” Being nestled away in Freiburg has protected her from the insanity of her homeland, but it has also raised suspicions. The doctrinaire officer has come to verify she hasn’t shaken off her brainwashing and started to question the Kim dynastic regime and its Communist ideology. Rather awkwardly, she plans to ask permission to follow her musical dreams, no matter where that might take her. Obviously, something or someone will have to give here.

You might want to watch Loyalist before you program it for your teens and pre-teens, because there is a brief but shocking incident of violence. If you are not trying to shelter them from such imagery (rather excessively in our view), the film raises a host of important themes for discussion, first and foremost being the nature of totalitarian regimes. It helps personalize the dehumanizing demands made by collective ideologies for individual sacrifice, through the eyes of a teenaged character most kids should identify with.

Back to School: I Was There—Kate Adie on Tiananmen Square

BBC reporter Kate Adie filed eye-witness reports of the Tiananmen Square Massacre directly from the scene, but she won’t be returning anytime soon, because the CCP has banned her from re-entering the country. You would be correct to take that as a testimonial to the accuracy and integrity of her reports. Decades later Adie remains justifiably proud of her reporting. Now retired from the Beeb, Adie returned to the network to look back at the fateful events of 1989, adding personal and historical context in I Was There: Kate Adie on Tiananmen Square, directed and edited by Andy Webb, which would be a suitable video supplement to your pandemic-home-schooling lesson plans.

Hope was in the air during the year of 1989, unless you were a hardline Communist apparatchik. Gorbachev’s Glasnost reforms had spun out of his control. Ordinary citizens of Eastern Europe were demanding (and taking) greater freedoms. The same seemed poised to happen in China, but Deng and the CCP were more determined to maintain their hold on power and much less concerned with world opinion. Tragically, this became much more obvious in retrospect.

For a step-by-step chronicle of the demonstrations and subsequent brutal crackdown on Tiananmen Square, the definitive Tiananmen: The People vs. the Party is probably your best option. However, I Was There provides a good hour-long overview (the perfect length if you need to play a video for while you take a meeting). Adie also adds the perspective of a journalist who had to work around CCP censorship. Frankly, the mass killings at Tiananmen Square might be considered the stuff of rumor had Adie’s colleague not been able to successfully smuggle her footage out of China (they made five copies, four of which were intercepted at customs).

In fact, I Was There is better than most Tiananmen Square documentaries at covering the wider scope of the pro-democracy protests outside Beijing. Shortly after the massacre, Adie traveled to Xian in Shaanxi Province, where she found lingering physical signs similar protests had met a similarly violent fate, but people were only willing to talk about it in whispers, off camera.

Back to School: Sweden—Lessons for America

Which is more famous, Ingmar Bergman or Ikea? Whichever the case, they are both Swedish and their history undermines the faulty image many Americans have of Sweden as a socialist paradise. It isn’t socialist. It has a free and open capitalist economy that it balances with a welfare state. If you really want to make America more like Sweden, we can start by abolishing the minimum wage, because Sweden has none, nada, zippo. Swedish economist John Norberg gives Americans a cogent survey of Swedish economic history in Sweden: Lessons for America?, directed by James & Maureen Castle Tusty (who helmed the wonderful Singing Revolution), which is available on Prime and YouTube for your lesson planning consideration.

How could U.S. politicians who garnered disturbingly high vote totals have such an inaccurate impression of Sweden (and Scandinavia in general)? Basically, their information is at least twenty-five years out of date. Norberg gives more exact dates and figures, but essentially Sweden grew at an explosive rate from 1850 to 1960, due to free trade and low regulation, but its economy stagnated from 1960 to 1995, while it experimented with overt socialism. However, aggressive emergency deregulation measures were passed in the mid-1990s that led to a robust economic rebound.

At this point, somebody out there probably wants to make an objection based on Sweden’s renowned “socialized medicine.” Yes, the government pays for universal healthcare, but it mostly provided by the private sector, while a growing segment of the Swedish population is opting for private insurance instead, to avoid long waiting lists. Indeed, most of Sweden’s social service are provided by the private sector, including education. Unlike America, where your school is determined by your zip code, Sweden has a full voucher system. As a result, fifty percent of Swedish high schools are now private.

Back to School: Tell the World

How do you explain to your kids a family decision to boycott Disney’s Mulan? You could show them Frontline: China Undercover or this horrifying report from Australian ABC’s Four Corners. According to both sources, Beijing’s network of work camps and detention centers throughout Xinjiang (or East Turkestan) represents the largest systemic incarceration of a religious group since the Holocaust. Shockingly, it has now been revealed Mulan director Nikki Caro filmed extensively throughout the oppressed region. If you want to understand the extent and severity of Beijing’s campaign against Muslim Turkic minorities, watch Tell the World, directed and hosted by Sophie McNeill, which is available on Prime.

Tell the World is logically somewhat more Australian-centric than the Frontline report, because the country is home to a relatively large exiled Uyghur community and several Australian universities have collaborated on facial recognition software that racially profiles and tracks Turkic minorities (viewers are advised to watch Red Flags for more on that story). Sadly, nearly every ethnic Uyghur family is a broken home, because nearly every one of them has a family member who has disappeared or is being held incommunicado in a prison camp.

For all practical purposes, every Uyghur is a prisoner, in one way or another. According to MacNeill: “A UN panel says ‘the region resembles a massive internment camp.’” Beyond those who are confined in outright concentration camps (euphemistically called “re-education camps”), there are those working as involuntary laborers in factories and work camps. The children of these prisoners are consigned to orphanages, where they are brainwashed to reject their cultural and religious heritage. That is cultural genocide, plain and simple.

McNeill talks to several Uyghur Australians, whose stories are utterly devastating. However, the program is not simply anecdotal in nature. She also talks to researchers like Adrian Zenz, who has uncovered the vast scale of the oppression in Xinjiang by sleuthing through publicly available CCP government documents. He has found construction bids incorporating watchtowers, surveillance cameras, barbed wire, and containment walls. He also discovered purchases orders for bulk shipments of cattle prods. In addition, McNeill’s experts use satellite photography to document the systematic destruction of mosques.

This is some excellent reporting. Based on Tell the World and Red Flags, it seems safe to say Four Corners puts American network news magazines to shame. It is hard to image Caro and her cast and crew didn’t observe all the barbed wire around their shooting locations. The absence of mosques in a traditionally Muslim region should have also aroused their suspicions. However, there is no way they could have missed the apartheid-like system that forces Turkic minorities to endure regular sidewalk checkpoints, while Han Chinese are allowed freedom of movement.

Back to School: The Silent Revolution

Kids are not any safer living under oppressive regimes and ideologies than their parents are. That is a lesson all students should learn sooner rather than later, for all our sakes. In 1956 East Germany, the Stalinstadt senior class always basically knew the Communist government was vicious and unjust, but dramatic events will prove it beyond all doubt in Lars Kraume’s historically-based The Silent Revolution, which is a perfect supplement for your schooling-at-home lesson plans.

It all started when two high school seniors wanted to see German bombshell Marion Michael in the risqué (for the time) Liane, Jungle Goddess, naturally only screening in the morally decadent West (this is pre-Wall, when travel between East and West was not strictly forbidden). However, before the feature, Theo Lemke and Kurt Wachter are amazed by a newsreel accurately reporting the Soviet crackdown on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Lemke is the class clown and Wachter is the son of a local Party official. Neither fits the revolutionary profile (or rather “counter-revolutionary,” according to Party propagandists), but they are both electrified. On returning, they listen to West German radio with their classmates to confirm their reports.

At school, they decide to observe two minutes of silence to honor the fallen Hungarian freedom fighters. Essentially, it was Wachter’s idea, but a majority agreed to it. The only vehement no vote comes from Erik Babinsky, who believes he is the son of a martyred Communist partisan. However, the entire class is in huge trouble when the ministry gets wind of their silent protest. Following Franklin’s advice, the two “ringleaders” try to keep the class hanging together, so they do not hang separately, but the Communists will ruthlessly exploit any and all of the young students’ weaknesses.

Silent Revolution is an absolutely terrific film everyone ought to see, just because its great cinema. It is especially recommended for students, who can surely identify with the teen characters. It can help explain the nature of Communism, particularly with respects to the Hungarian Revolution and the divided Germany. The tragically ill-fated 1953 Uprising also casts a shadow over the events it dramatizes. Yet, Kraume’s adaptation of Dietrich Garstka’s book also addresses worthy themes like personal loyalty, family love and sacrifice, the demands of integrity, and the corrosive impact of lies and propaganda on society.

Back to School: America’s Musical Journey

Hey parents, it’s September. Have you finished your Fall lesson plans? After years of sneering at home-schooling, the media now thinks you ought to be doing it. Even with Board-of-Ed materials, you’re going to need supplements to keep your kids focused and learning, so we’ll offer a few video suggestions, from time to time. For a very general lesson in American music history, you can safely turn to MacGillivray Freeman, a leading producer of IMAX films for museum patrons. Currently available on Prime, Greg MacGillivray’s America’s Musical Journey ought to keep kids busy for 39-minutes while you take a meeting.

Your host will be Aloe Blacc, but our narrator is the ultimate voice of authority, Morgan Freeman. Blacc is in fact a good choice to be the film’s tour guide, because even though he is a hip hop-R&B-club-crossover, he is deeply steeped in jazz and Latin styles. He says all the right things about Louis Armstrong, who is clearly the central musical figure in Journey. However, it is a bit annoying he keeps choosing to perform “What a Wonderful World,” which was a posthumous hit for Armstrong, instead of a song that would have had more personal significance for the jazz icon, like “Black and Blue.”

It is fun to see Blacc get a walking tour of New Orleans courtesy of Jonathan Batiste, but it would have been nice to hear more from the pianist (who some viewers might recognize from appearances in Treme, Red Hook Summer, and Da Sweet Blood of Jesus). Dr. John gets even less screen-time, but at least we hear one of his licensed tracks.

Blacc follows the jazz story up to Chicago, meeting up with Ramsey Lewis, but seriously, how could MacGillivray cut away from his performance of “The In-Crowd,” which is still one of the coolest jazz tunes ever? In Chicago, Blacc also checks out a flash-mob dance set to his hit song “Wake Me Up,” one of several IMAX-friendly performance numbers. Later, there will be dancers rappelling across a skyscraper and sky-diving Elvis impersonators to keep kids interested.