Monday, December 05, 2011
The Xinjiang Procedure
Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.
Ethan Gutmann
The Weekly Standard
December 5, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 12
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
Falun Gong practitioners hold activity in front of Australian Foreign Ministry and ask for an end to the persecution. (2006)
To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more.
One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from Sun Yat-sen Medical University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar vehicles—clean, white, with smoked glass windows and prominent red crosses on the side. The police had ordered the medical team to stay inside for their safety. Indeed, the view from the side window of lines of ditches—some filled in, others freshly dug—suggested that the hilltop had served as a killing ground for years.
Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart.
With the acceleration of Chinese medical expertise over the last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer went to waste. It wasn’t public knowledge exactly, but Chinese medical schools taught that many otherwise wicked criminals volunteered their organs as a final penance.
Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work.
Male, 40-ish, Han Chinese. While the other retail organs in the van were slated for the profitable foreigner market, the doctor had seen the paperwork indicating this kidney was tissue-matched for transplant into a 50-year-old Chinese man. Without the transplant, that man would die. With it, the same man would rise miraculously from his hospital bed and go on to have a normal life for 25 years or so. By 2016, given all the anti-tissue-rejection drug advances in China, they could theoretically replace the liver, lungs, or heart—maybe buy that man another 10 to 15 years.
Body #3 had no special characteristics save an angry purple line on the neck. The doctor recognized the forensics. Sometimes the police would twist a wire around a prisoner’s throat to prevent him from speaking up in court. The doctor thought it through methodically. Maybe the police didn’t want this prisoner to talk because he had been a deranged killer, a thug, or mentally unstable. After all, the Chinese penal system was a daily sausage grinder, executing hardcore criminals on a massive scale. Yes, the young doctor knew the harvesting was wrong. Whatever crime had been committed, it would be nice if the prisoner’s body were allowed to rest forever. Yet was his surgical task that different from an obstetrician’s? Harvesting was rebirth, harvesting was life, as revolutionary an advance as antibiotics or steroids. Or maybe, he thought, they didn’t want this man to talk because he was a political prisoner.
Nineteen years later, in a secure European location, the doctor laid out the puzzle. He asked that I keep his identity a secret. Chinese medical authorities admit that the lion’s share of transplant organs originate with executions, but no mainland Chinese doctors, even in exile, will normally speak of performing such surgery. To do so would remind international medical authorities of an issue they would rather avoid—not China’s soaring execution rate or the exploitation of criminal organs, but rather the systematic elimination of China’s religious and political prisoners. Yet even if this doctor feared consequences to his family and his career, he did not fear embarrassing China, for he was born into an indigenous minority group, the Uighurs.
Every Uighur witness I approached over the course of two years—police, medical, and security personnel scattered across two continents—related compartmentalized fragments of information to me, often through halting translation. They acknowledged the risk to their careers, their families, and, in several cases, their lives. Their testimony reveals not just a procedure evolving to meet the lucrative medical demand for living organs, but the genesis of a wider atrocity.
Behind closed doors, the Uighurs call their vast region in China’s northwest corner (bordering on India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia) East Turkestan. The Uighurs are ethnically Turkic, not East Asian. They are Muslims with a smattering of Christians, and their language is more readily understood in Tashkent than in Beijing. By contrast, Beijing’s name for the so-called Autonomous Region, Xinjiang, literally translates as “new frontier.” When Mao invaded in 1949, Han Chinese constituted only 7 percent of the regional population. Following the flood of Communist party administrators, soldiers, shopkeepers, and construction corps, Han Chinese now constitute the majority. The party calculates that Xinjiang will be its top oil and natural gas production center by the end of this century.
To protect this investment, Beijing traditionally depicted all Uighur nationalists—violent rebels and non-violent activists alike—as CIA proxies. Shortly after 9/11, that conspiracy theory was tossed down the memory hole. Suddenly China was, and always has been, at war with al Qaeda-led Uighur terrorists. No matter how transparently opportunistic the switch, the American intelligence community saw an opening for Chinese cooperation in the war on terror, and signaled their acquiescence by allowing Chinese state security personnel into Guantánamo to interrogate Uighur detainees.
While it is difficult to know the strength of the claims of the detainees’ actual connections to al Qaeda, the basic facts are these: During the 1990s, when the Chinese drove the Uighur rebel training camps from neighboring countries such as Kazakhstan and Pakistan, some Uighurs fled to Afghanistan where a portion became Taliban soldiers. And yet, if the Chinese government claims that the Uighurs constitute their own Islamic fundamentalist problem, the fact is that I’ve never met a Uighur woman who won’t shake hands or a man who won’t have a drink with me. Nor does my Jewish-sounding name appear to make anyone flinch. In one of those vino veritas sessions, I asked a local Uighur leader if he was able to get any sort of assistance from groups such as the Islamic Human Rights Commission (where, as I found during a brief visit to their London offices, veiled women flinch from an extended male hand, drinks are forbidden, and my Jewish surname is a very big deal indeed). “Useless!” he snorted, returning to the vodka bottle.
So if Washington’s goal is to promote a reformed China, then taking Beijing’s word for who is a terrorist is to play into the party’s hands.
Xinjiang has long served as the party’s illicit laboratory: from the atmospheric nuclear testing in Lop Nur in the mid-sixties (resulting in a significant rise in cancers in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital) to the more recent creation in the Tarim Desert of what could well be the world’s largest labor camp, estimated to hold 50,000 Uighurs, hardcore criminals, and practitioners of Falun Gong. And when it comes to the first organ harvesting of political prisoners, Xinjiang was ground zero.
In 1989, not long after Nijat Abdureyimu turned 20, he graduated from Xinjiang Police School and was assigned to a special police force, Regiment No. 1 of the Urumqi Public Security Bureau. As one of the first Uighurs in a Chinese unit that specialized in “social security”—essentially squelching threats to the party—Nijat was employed as the good cop in Uighur interrogations, particularly the high-profile cases. I first met Nijat—thin, depressed, and watchful—in a crowded refugee camp on the outskirts of Rome.
Nijat explained to me that he was well aware that his Chinese colleagues kept him under constant surveillance. But Nijat presented the image they liked: the little brother with the guileless smile. By 1994 he had penetrated all of the government’s secret bastions: the detention center, its interrogation rooms, and the killing grounds. Along the way, he had witnessed his fair share of torture, executions, even a rape. So his curiosity was in the nature of professional interest when he questioned one of the Chinese cops who came back from an execution shaking his head. According to his colleague, it had been a normal procedure—the unwanted bodies kicked into a trench, the useful corpses hoisted into the harvesting vans, but then he heard something coming from a van, like a man screaming.
“Like someone was still alive?” Nijat remembers asking. “What kind of screams?”
“Like from hell.”
Nijat shrugged. The regiment had more than enough sloppiness to go around.
A few months later, three death row prisoners were being transported from detention to execution. Nijat had become friendly with one in particular, a very young man. As Nijat walked alongside, the young man turned to Nijat with eyes like saucers: “Why did you inject me?”
Nijat hadn’t injected him; the medical director had. But the director and some legal officials were watching the exchange, so Nijat lied smoothly: “It’s so you won’t feel much pain when they shoot you.”
The young man smiled faintly, and Nijat, sensing that he would never quite forget that look, waited until the execution was over to ask the medical director: “Why did you inject him?”
“Nijat, if you can transfer to some other section, then go as soon as possible.”
“What do you mean? Doctor, exactly what kind of medicine did you inject him with?”
“Nijat, do you have any beliefs?”
“Yes. Do you?”
“It was an anticoagulant, Nijat. And maybe we are all going to hell.”
I first met Enver Tohti—a soft-spoken, husky, Buddha of a man—through the informal Uighur network of London. I confess that my first impression was that he was just another emigré living in public housing. But Enver had a secret.
His story began on a Tuesday in June 1995, when he was a general surgeon in an Urumqi hospital. Enver recalled an unusual conversation with his immediate superior, the chief surgeon: “Enver, we are going to do something exciting. Have you ever done an operation in the field?”
“Not really. What do you want me to do?”
“Get a mobile team together and request an ambulance. Have everyone out front at nine tomorrow.”
On a cloudless Wednesday morning, Enver led two assistants and an anaesthesiologist into an ambulance and followed the chief surgeon’s car out of Urumqi going west. The ambulance had a picnic atmosphere until they realized they were entering the Western Mountain police district, which specialized in executing political dissidents. On a dirt road by a steep hill the chief surgeon pulled off, and came back to talk to Enver: “When you hear a gunshot, drive around the hill.”
“Can you tell us why we are here?”
“Enver, if you don’t want to know, don’t ask.”
“I want to know.”
“No. You don’t want to know.”
The chief surgeon gave him a quick, hard look as he returned to the car. Enver saw that beyond the hill there appeared to be some sort of armed police facility. People were milling about—civilians. Enver half-satirically suggested to the team that perhaps they were family members waiting to collect the body and pay for the bullet, and the team responded with increasingly sick jokes to break the tension. Then they heard a gunshot, possibly a volley, and drove around to the execution field.
Focusing on not making any sudden moves as he followed the chief surgeon’s car, Enver never really did get a good look. He briefly registered that there were 10, maybe 20 bodies lying at the base of the hill, but the armed police saw the ambulance and waved him over.
“This one. It’s this one.”
Sprawled on the blood-soaked ground was a man, around 30, dressed in navy blue overalls. All convicts were shaved, but this one had long hair.
“That’s him. We’ll operate on him.”
“Why are we operating?” Enver protested, feeling for the artery in the man’s neck. “Come on. This man is dead.”
Enver stiffened and corrected himself. “No. He’s not dead.”
“Operate then. Remove the liver and the kidneys. Now! Quick! Be quick!”
Following the chief surgeon’s directive, the team loaded the body into the ambulance. Enver felt himself going numb: Just cut the clothes off. Just strap the limbs to the table. Just open the body. He kept making attempts to follow normal procedure—sterilize, minimal exposure, sketch the cut. Enver glanced questioningly at the chief surgeon. “No anaesthesia,” said the chief surgeon. “No life support.”
The anaesthesiologist just stood there, arms folded—like some sort of ignorant peasant, Enver thought. Enver barked at him. “Why don’t you do something?”
“What exactly should I do, Enver? He’s already unconscious. If you cut, he’s not going to respond.”
But there was a response. As Enver’s scalpel went in, the man’s chest heaved spasmodically and then curled back again. Enver, a little frantic now, turned to the chief surgeon. “How far in should I cut?”
“You cut as wide and deep as possible. We are working against time.”
Enver worked fast, not bothering with clamps, cutting with his right hand, moving muscle and soft tissue aside with his left, slowing down only to make sure he excised the kidneys and liver cleanly. Even as Enver stitched the man back up—not internally, there was no point to that anymore, just so the body might look presentable—he sensed the man was still alive. I am a killer, Enver screamed inwardly. He did not dare to look at the face again, just as he imagined a killer would avoid looking at his victim.
The team drove back to Urumqi in silence.
On Thursday, the chief surgeon confronted Enver: “So. Yesterday. Did anything happen? Yesterday was a usual, normal day. Yes?”
Enver said yes, and it took years for him to understand that live organs had lower rejection rates in the new host, or that the bullet to the chest had—other than that first sickening lurch—acted like some sort of magical anaesthesia. He had done what he could; he had stitched the body back neatly for the family. And 15 years would elapse before Enver revealed what had happened that Wednesday.
As for Nijat, it wasn’t until 1996 that he put it together.
It happened just about midnight, well after the cell block lights were turned off. Nijat found himself hanging out in the detention compound’s administrative office with the medical director. Following a pause in the conversation, the director, in an odd voice, asked Nijat if he thought the place was haunted.
“Maybe it feels a little weird at night,” Nijat answered. “Why do you think that?”
“Because too many people have been killed here. And for all the wrong reasons.”
Nijat finally understood. The anticoagulant. The expensive “execution meals” for the regiment following a trip to the killing ground. The plainclothes agents in the cells who persuaded the prisoners to sign statements donating their organs to the state. And now the medical director was confirming it all: Those statements were real. They just didn’t take account of the fact that the prisoners would still be alive when they were cut up.
“Nijat, we really are going to hell.”
Nijat nodded, pulled on his beer, and didn’t bother to smile.
On February 2, 1997, Bahtiyar Shemshidin began wondering whether he was a policeman in name only. Two years before, the Chinese Public Security Bureau of the Western city of Ghulja recruited Bahtiyar for the drug enforcement division. It was a natural fit because Bahtiyar was tall, good-looking, and exuded effortless Uighur authority. Bahtiyar would ultimately make his way to Canada and freedom, but he had no trouble recalling his initial idealism; back then, Bahtiyar did not see himself as a Chinese collaborator but as an emergency responder.
For several years, heroin addiction had been creeping through the neighborhoods of Ghulja, striking down young Uighurs like a medieval plague. Yet inside the force, Bahtiyar quickly grasped that the Chinese heroin cartel was quietly protected, if not encouraged, by the authorities. Even his recruitment was a bait-and-switch. Instead of sending him after drug dealers, his Chinese superiors ordered him to investigate the Meshrep—a traditional Muslim get-together promoting clean living, sports, and Uighur music and dance. If the Meshrep had flowered like a traditional herbal remedy against the opiate invader, the Chinese authorities read it as a disguised attack on the Chinese state.
In early January 1997, on the eve of Ramadan, the entire Ghulja police force—Uighurs and Chinese alike—were suddenly ordered to surrender their guns “for inspection.” Now, almost a month later, the weapons were being released. But Bahtiyar’s gun was held back. Bahtiyar went to the Chinese bureaucrat who controlled supplies and asked after it. “Your gun has a problem,” Bahtiyar was told.
“When will you fix the problem?”
The bureaucrat shrugged, glanced at his list, and looked up at Bahtiyar with an unblinking stare that said: It is time for you to go. By the end of the day, Bahtiyar got it: Every Chinese officer had a gun. Every Uighur officer’s gun had a problem.
Three days later, Bahtiyar understood why. On February 5, approximately 1,000 Uighurs gathered in the center of Ghulja. The day before, the Chinese authorities arrested (and, it was claimed, severely abused) six women, all Muslim teachers, all participants in the Meshrep. The young men came without their winter coats to show they were unarmed, but, planned or unplanned, the Chinese police fired on the demonstrators.
Casualty counts of what is known as the Ghulja incident remain shaky. Bahtiyar recalls internal police estimates of 400 dead, but he didn’t see it; all Uighur policemen had been sent to the local jail “to interrogate prisoners” and were locked in the compound throughout the crisis. However, Bahtiyar did see Uighurs herded into the compound and thrown naked onto the snow—some bleeding, others with internal injuries. Ghulja’s main Uighur clinic was effectively shut down when a squad of Chinese special police arrested 10 of the doctors and destroyed the clinic’s ambulance. As the arrests mounted by late April, the jail became hopelessly overcrowded, and Uighur political prisoners were selected for daily executions. On April 24, Bahtiyar’s colleagues witnessed the killing of eight political prisoners; what struck them was the presence of doctors in “special vans for harvesting organs.”
In Europe I spoke with a nurse who worked in a major Ghulja hospital following the incident. Nervously requesting that I provide no personal details, she told me that the hospitals were forbidden to treat Uighur protesters. A doctor who bandaged an arm received a 15-year sentence, while another got 20 years, and hospital staff were told, “If you treat someone, you will get the same result.” The separation between the Uighur and Chinese medical personnel deepened: Chinese doctors would stockpile prescriptions rather than allow Uighur medical staff a key to the pharmacy, while Uighur patients were receiving 50 percent of their usual doses. If a Uighur couple had a second child, even if the birth was legally sanctioned, Chinese maternity doctors, she observed, administered an injection (described as an antibiotic) to the infant. The nurse could not recall a single instance of the same injection given to a Chinese baby. Within three days the infant would turn blue and die. Chinese staffers offered a rote explanation to Uighur mothers: Your baby was too weak, your baby could not handle the drug.
Shortly after the Ghulja incident, a young Uighur protester’s body returned home from a military hospital. Perhaps the fact that the abdomen was stitched up was just evidence of an autopsy, but it sparked another round of riots. After that, the corpses were wrapped, buried at gunpoint, and Chinese soldiers patrolled the cemeteries (one is not far from the current Urumqi airport). By June, the nurse was pulled into a new case: A young Uighur protester had been arrested and beaten severely. His family paid for his release, only to discover that their son had kidney damage. The family was told to visit a Chinese military hospital in Urumqi where the hospital staff laid it out: One kidney, 30,000 RMB (roughly $4,700). The kidney will be healthy, they were assured, because the transplant was to come from a 21-year-old Uighur male—the same profile as their son. The nurse learned that the “donor” was, in fact, a protester.
In the early autumn of 1997, fresh out of a blood-work tour in rural Xinjiang, a young Uighur doctor—let’s call him Murat—was pursuing a promising medical career in a large Urumqi hospital. Two years later he was planning his escape to Europe, where I met him some years after.
One day Murat’s instructor quietly informed him that five Chinese government officials—big guys, party members—had checked into the hospital with organ problems. Now he had a job for Murat: “Go to the Urumqi prison. The political wing, not the criminal side. Take blood samples. Small ones. Just to map out the different blood types. That’s all you have to do.”
“What about tissue matching?”
“Don’t worry about any of that, Murat. We’ll handle that later. Just map out the blood types.”
Clutching the authorization, and accompanied by an assistant from the hospital, Murat, slight and bookish, found himself facing approximately 15 prisoners, mostly tough-guy Uighurs in their late twenties. As the first prisoner sat down and saw the needle, the pleading began.
“You are a Uighur like me. Why are you going to hurt me?”
“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just taking blood.”
At the word “blood,” everything collapsed. The men howled and stampeded, the guards screaming and shoving them back into line. The prisoner shrieked that he was innocent. The Chinese guards grabbed his neck and squeezed it hard.
“It’s just for your health,” Murat said evenly, suddenly aware the hospital functionary was probably watching to make sure that Murat wasn’t too sympathetic. “It’s just for your health,” Murat said again and again as he drew blood.
When Murat returned to the hospital, he asked the instructor, “Were all those prisoners sentenced to death?”
“That’s right, Murat, that’s right. Yes. Just don’t ask any more questions. They are bad people—enemies of the country.”
But Murat kept asking questions, and over time, he learned the drill. Once they found a matching blood type, they would move to tissue matching. Then the political prisoner would get a bullet to the right side of the chest. Murat’s instructor would visit the execution site to match up blood samples. The officials would get their organs, rise from their beds, and check out.
Six months later, around the first anniversary of Ghulja, five new officials checked in. The instructor told Murat to go back to the political wing for fresh blood. This time, Murat was told that harvesting political prisoners was normal. A growing export. High volume. The military hospitals are leading the way.
By early 1999, Murat stopped hearing about harvesting political prisoners. Perhaps it was over, he thought.
Yet the Xinjiang procedure spread. By the end of 1999, the Uighur crackdown would be eclipsed by Chinese security’s largest-scale action since Mao: the elimination of Falun Gong. By my estimate up to three million Falun Gong practitioners would pass through the Chinese corrections system. Approximately 65,000 would be harvested, hearts still beating, before the 2008 Olympics. An unspecified, significantly smaller, number of House Christians and Tibetans likely met the same fate.
By Holocaust standards these are piddling numbers, so let’s be clear: China is not the land of the final solution. But it is the land of the expedient solution. Some will point to recent statements from the Chinese medical establishment admitting the obvious—China’s medical environment is not fully ethical—and see progress. Foreign investors suspect that eventually the Chinese might someday—or perhaps have already—abandon organ harvesting in favor of the much more lucrative pharmaceutical and clinical testing industries. The problem with these soothing narratives is that reports, some as recent as one year ago, suggest that the Chinese have not abandoned the Xinjiang procedure.
In July 2009, Urumqi exploded in bloody street riots between Uighurs and Han Chinese. The authorities massed troops in the regional capital, kicked out the Western journalists, shut down the Internet, and, over the next six months, quietly, mostly at night, rounded up Uighur males by the thousands. According to information leaked by Uighurs held in captivity, some prisoners were given physical examinations aimed solely at assessing the health of their retail organs. The signals may be faint, but they are consistent, and the conclusion is inescapable: China, a state rapidly approaching superpower status, has not just committed human rights abuses—that’s old news—but has, for over a decade, perverted the most trusted area of human expertise into performing what is, in the legal parlance of human rights, targeted elimination of a specific group.
Yet Nijat sits in refugee limbo in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, waiting for a country to offer him asylum. He confessed to me. He confessed to others. But in a world eager not to offend China, no state wants his confession. Enver made his way to an obscure seminar hosted by the House of Commons on Chinese human rights. When the MPs opened the floor to questions, Enver found himself standing up and speaking, for the first time, of killing a man. I took notes, but no British MP or their staffers could be bothered to take Enver’s number.
The implications are clear enough. Nothing but self-determination for the Uighurs can suffice. The Uighurs, numbering 13 million, are few, but they are also desperate. They may fight. War may come. On that day, as diplomats across the globe call for dialogue with Beijing, may every nation look to its origins and its conscience. For my part, if my Jewish-sounding name tells me anything, it is this: The dead may never be fully avenged, but no people can accept being fatally exploited forever.
Ethan Gutmann, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wishes to thank Jaya Gibson for research assistance and the Peder Wallenberg family for research support.
Ethan Gutmann
The Weekly Standard
December 5, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 12
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more.
One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from Sun Yat-sen Medical University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar vehicles—clean, white, with smoked glass windows and prominent red crosses on the side. The police had ordered the medical team to stay inside for their safety. Indeed, the view from the side window of lines of ditches—some filled in, others freshly dug—suggested that the hilltop had served as a killing ground for years.
Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart.
With the acceleration of Chinese medical expertise over the last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer went to waste. It wasn’t public knowledge exactly, but Chinese medical schools taught that many otherwise wicked criminals volunteered their organs as a final penance.
Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work.
Male, 40-ish, Han Chinese. While the other retail organs in the van were slated for the profitable foreigner market, the doctor had seen the paperwork indicating this kidney was tissue-matched for transplant into a 50-year-old Chinese man. Without the transplant, that man would die. With it, the same man would rise miraculously from his hospital bed and go on to have a normal life for 25 years or so. By 2016, given all the anti-tissue-rejection drug advances in China, they could theoretically replace the liver, lungs, or heart—maybe buy that man another 10 to 15 years.
Body #3 had no special characteristics save an angry purple line on the neck. The doctor recognized the forensics. Sometimes the police would twist a wire around a prisoner’s throat to prevent him from speaking up in court. The doctor thought it through methodically. Maybe the police didn’t want this prisoner to talk because he had been a deranged killer, a thug, or mentally unstable. After all, the Chinese penal system was a daily sausage grinder, executing hardcore criminals on a massive scale. Yes, the young doctor knew the harvesting was wrong. Whatever crime had been committed, it would be nice if the prisoner’s body were allowed to rest forever. Yet was his surgical task that different from an obstetrician’s? Harvesting was rebirth, harvesting was life, as revolutionary an advance as antibiotics or steroids. Or maybe, he thought, they didn’t want this man to talk because he was a political prisoner.
Nineteen years later, in a secure European location, the doctor laid out the puzzle. He asked that I keep his identity a secret. Chinese medical authorities admit that the lion’s share of transplant organs originate with executions, but no mainland Chinese doctors, even in exile, will normally speak of performing such surgery. To do so would remind international medical authorities of an issue they would rather avoid—not China’s soaring execution rate or the exploitation of criminal organs, but rather the systematic elimination of China’s religious and political prisoners. Yet even if this doctor feared consequences to his family and his career, he did not fear embarrassing China, for he was born into an indigenous minority group, the Uighurs.
Every Uighur witness I approached over the course of two years—police, medical, and security personnel scattered across two continents—related compartmentalized fragments of information to me, often through halting translation. They acknowledged the risk to their careers, their families, and, in several cases, their lives. Their testimony reveals not just a procedure evolving to meet the lucrative medical demand for living organs, but the genesis of a wider atrocity.
Behind closed doors, the Uighurs call their vast region in China’s northwest corner (bordering on India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia) East Turkestan. The Uighurs are ethnically Turkic, not East Asian. They are Muslims with a smattering of Christians, and their language is more readily understood in Tashkent than in Beijing. By contrast, Beijing’s name for the so-called Autonomous Region, Xinjiang, literally translates as “new frontier.” When Mao invaded in 1949, Han Chinese constituted only 7 percent of the regional population. Following the flood of Communist party administrators, soldiers, shopkeepers, and construction corps, Han Chinese now constitute the majority. The party calculates that Xinjiang will be its top oil and natural gas production center by the end of this century.
To protect this investment, Beijing traditionally depicted all Uighur nationalists—violent rebels and non-violent activists alike—as CIA proxies. Shortly after 9/11, that conspiracy theory was tossed down the memory hole. Suddenly China was, and always has been, at war with al Qaeda-led Uighur terrorists. No matter how transparently opportunistic the switch, the American intelligence community saw an opening for Chinese cooperation in the war on terror, and signaled their acquiescence by allowing Chinese state security personnel into Guantánamo to interrogate Uighur detainees.
While it is difficult to know the strength of the claims of the detainees’ actual connections to al Qaeda, the basic facts are these: During the 1990s, when the Chinese drove the Uighur rebel training camps from neighboring countries such as Kazakhstan and Pakistan, some Uighurs fled to Afghanistan where a portion became Taliban soldiers. And yet, if the Chinese government claims that the Uighurs constitute their own Islamic fundamentalist problem, the fact is that I’ve never met a Uighur woman who won’t shake hands or a man who won’t have a drink with me. Nor does my Jewish-sounding name appear to make anyone flinch. In one of those vino veritas sessions, I asked a local Uighur leader if he was able to get any sort of assistance from groups such as the Islamic Human Rights Commission (where, as I found during a brief visit to their London offices, veiled women flinch from an extended male hand, drinks are forbidden, and my Jewish surname is a very big deal indeed). “Useless!” he snorted, returning to the vodka bottle.
So if Washington’s goal is to promote a reformed China, then taking Beijing’s word for who is a terrorist is to play into the party’s hands.
Xinjiang has long served as the party’s illicit laboratory: from the atmospheric nuclear testing in Lop Nur in the mid-sixties (resulting in a significant rise in cancers in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital) to the more recent creation in the Tarim Desert of what could well be the world’s largest labor camp, estimated to hold 50,000 Uighurs, hardcore criminals, and practitioners of Falun Gong. And when it comes to the first organ harvesting of political prisoners, Xinjiang was ground zero.
In 1989, not long after Nijat Abdureyimu turned 20, he graduated from Xinjiang Police School and was assigned to a special police force, Regiment No. 1 of the Urumqi Public Security Bureau. As one of the first Uighurs in a Chinese unit that specialized in “social security”—essentially squelching threats to the party—Nijat was employed as the good cop in Uighur interrogations, particularly the high-profile cases. I first met Nijat—thin, depressed, and watchful—in a crowded refugee camp on the outskirts of Rome.
Nijat explained to me that he was well aware that his Chinese colleagues kept him under constant surveillance. But Nijat presented the image they liked: the little brother with the guileless smile. By 1994 he had penetrated all of the government’s secret bastions: the detention center, its interrogation rooms, and the killing grounds. Along the way, he had witnessed his fair share of torture, executions, even a rape. So his curiosity was in the nature of professional interest when he questioned one of the Chinese cops who came back from an execution shaking his head. According to his colleague, it had been a normal procedure—the unwanted bodies kicked into a trench, the useful corpses hoisted into the harvesting vans, but then he heard something coming from a van, like a man screaming.
“Like someone was still alive?” Nijat remembers asking. “What kind of screams?”
“Like from hell.”
Nijat shrugged. The regiment had more than enough sloppiness to go around.
A few months later, three death row prisoners were being transported from detention to execution. Nijat had become friendly with one in particular, a very young man. As Nijat walked alongside, the young man turned to Nijat with eyes like saucers: “Why did you inject me?”
Nijat hadn’t injected him; the medical director had. But the director and some legal officials were watching the exchange, so Nijat lied smoothly: “It’s so you won’t feel much pain when they shoot you.”
The young man smiled faintly, and Nijat, sensing that he would never quite forget that look, waited until the execution was over to ask the medical director: “Why did you inject him?”
“Nijat, if you can transfer to some other section, then go as soon as possible.”
“What do you mean? Doctor, exactly what kind of medicine did you inject him with?”
“Nijat, do you have any beliefs?”
“Yes. Do you?”
“It was an anticoagulant, Nijat. And maybe we are all going to hell.”
I first met Enver Tohti—a soft-spoken, husky, Buddha of a man—through the informal Uighur network of London. I confess that my first impression was that he was just another emigré living in public housing. But Enver had a secret.
“Not really. What do you want me to do?”
“Get a mobile team together and request an ambulance. Have everyone out front at nine tomorrow.”
On a cloudless Wednesday morning, Enver led two assistants and an anaesthesiologist into an ambulance and followed the chief surgeon’s car out of Urumqi going west. The ambulance had a picnic atmosphere until they realized they were entering the Western Mountain police district, which specialized in executing political dissidents. On a dirt road by a steep hill the chief surgeon pulled off, and came back to talk to Enver: “When you hear a gunshot, drive around the hill.”
“Can you tell us why we are here?”
“Enver, if you don’t want to know, don’t ask.”
“I want to know.”
“No. You don’t want to know.”
The chief surgeon gave him a quick, hard look as he returned to the car. Enver saw that beyond the hill there appeared to be some sort of armed police facility. People were milling about—civilians. Enver half-satirically suggested to the team that perhaps they were family members waiting to collect the body and pay for the bullet, and the team responded with increasingly sick jokes to break the tension. Then they heard a gunshot, possibly a volley, and drove around to the execution field.
Focusing on not making any sudden moves as he followed the chief surgeon’s car, Enver never really did get a good look. He briefly registered that there were 10, maybe 20 bodies lying at the base of the hill, but the armed police saw the ambulance and waved him over.
“This one. It’s this one.”
Sprawled on the blood-soaked ground was a man, around 30, dressed in navy blue overalls. All convicts were shaved, but this one had long hair.
“That’s him. We’ll operate on him.”
“Why are we operating?” Enver protested, feeling for the artery in the man’s neck. “Come on. This man is dead.”
Enver stiffened and corrected himself. “No. He’s not dead.”
“Operate then. Remove the liver and the kidneys. Now! Quick! Be quick!”
Following the chief surgeon’s directive, the team loaded the body into the ambulance. Enver felt himself going numb: Just cut the clothes off. Just strap the limbs to the table. Just open the body. He kept making attempts to follow normal procedure—sterilize, minimal exposure, sketch the cut. Enver glanced questioningly at the chief surgeon. “No anaesthesia,” said the chief surgeon. “No life support.”
The anaesthesiologist just stood there, arms folded—like some sort of ignorant peasant, Enver thought. Enver barked at him. “Why don’t you do something?”
“What exactly should I do, Enver? He’s already unconscious. If you cut, he’s not going to respond.”
But there was a response. As Enver’s scalpel went in, the man’s chest heaved spasmodically and then curled back again. Enver, a little frantic now, turned to the chief surgeon. “How far in should I cut?”
“You cut as wide and deep as possible. We are working against time.”
Enver worked fast, not bothering with clamps, cutting with his right hand, moving muscle and soft tissue aside with his left, slowing down only to make sure he excised the kidneys and liver cleanly. Even as Enver stitched the man back up—not internally, there was no point to that anymore, just so the body might look presentable—he sensed the man was still alive. I am a killer, Enver screamed inwardly. He did not dare to look at the face again, just as he imagined a killer would avoid looking at his victim.
The team drove back to Urumqi in silence.
On Thursday, the chief surgeon confronted Enver: “So. Yesterday. Did anything happen? Yesterday was a usual, normal day. Yes?”
Enver said yes, and it took years for him to understand that live organs had lower rejection rates in the new host, or that the bullet to the chest had—other than that first sickening lurch—acted like some sort of magical anaesthesia. He had done what he could; he had stitched the body back neatly for the family. And 15 years would elapse before Enver revealed what had happened that Wednesday.
As for Nijat, it wasn’t until 1996 that he put it together.
It happened just about midnight, well after the cell block lights were turned off. Nijat found himself hanging out in the detention compound’s administrative office with the medical director. Following a pause in the conversation, the director, in an odd voice, asked Nijat if he thought the place was haunted.
“Maybe it feels a little weird at night,” Nijat answered. “Why do you think that?”
“Because too many people have been killed here. And for all the wrong reasons.”
Nijat finally understood. The anticoagulant. The expensive “execution meals” for the regiment following a trip to the killing ground. The plainclothes agents in the cells who persuaded the prisoners to sign statements donating their organs to the state. And now the medical director was confirming it all: Those statements were real. They just didn’t take account of the fact that the prisoners would still be alive when they were cut up.
“Nijat, we really are going to hell.”
Nijat nodded, pulled on his beer, and didn’t bother to smile.
On February 2, 1997, Bahtiyar Shemshidin began wondering whether he was a policeman in name only. Two years before, the Chinese Public Security Bureau of the Western city of Ghulja recruited Bahtiyar for the drug enforcement division. It was a natural fit because Bahtiyar was tall, good-looking, and exuded effortless Uighur authority. Bahtiyar would ultimately make his way to Canada and freedom, but he had no trouble recalling his initial idealism; back then, Bahtiyar did not see himself as a Chinese collaborator but as an emergency responder.
For several years, heroin addiction had been creeping through the neighborhoods of Ghulja, striking down young Uighurs like a medieval plague. Yet inside the force, Bahtiyar quickly grasped that the Chinese heroin cartel was quietly protected, if not encouraged, by the authorities. Even his recruitment was a bait-and-switch. Instead of sending him after drug dealers, his Chinese superiors ordered him to investigate the Meshrep—a traditional Muslim get-together promoting clean living, sports, and Uighur music and dance. If the Meshrep had flowered like a traditional herbal remedy against the opiate invader, the Chinese authorities read it as a disguised attack on the Chinese state.
In early January 1997, on the eve of Ramadan, the entire Ghulja police force—Uighurs and Chinese alike—were suddenly ordered to surrender their guns “for inspection.” Now, almost a month later, the weapons were being released. But Bahtiyar’s gun was held back. Bahtiyar went to the Chinese bureaucrat who controlled supplies and asked after it. “Your gun has a problem,” Bahtiyar was told.
“When will you fix the problem?”
The bureaucrat shrugged, glanced at his list, and looked up at Bahtiyar with an unblinking stare that said: It is time for you to go. By the end of the day, Bahtiyar got it: Every Chinese officer had a gun. Every Uighur officer’s gun had a problem.
Three days later, Bahtiyar understood why. On February 5, approximately 1,000 Uighurs gathered in the center of Ghulja. The day before, the Chinese authorities arrested (and, it was claimed, severely abused) six women, all Muslim teachers, all participants in the Meshrep. The young men came without their winter coats to show they were unarmed, but, planned or unplanned, the Chinese police fired on the demonstrators.
Casualty counts of what is known as the Ghulja incident remain shaky. Bahtiyar recalls internal police estimates of 400 dead, but he didn’t see it; all Uighur policemen had been sent to the local jail “to interrogate prisoners” and were locked in the compound throughout the crisis. However, Bahtiyar did see Uighurs herded into the compound and thrown naked onto the snow—some bleeding, others with internal injuries. Ghulja’s main Uighur clinic was effectively shut down when a squad of Chinese special police arrested 10 of the doctors and destroyed the clinic’s ambulance. As the arrests mounted by late April, the jail became hopelessly overcrowded, and Uighur political prisoners were selected for daily executions. On April 24, Bahtiyar’s colleagues witnessed the killing of eight political prisoners; what struck them was the presence of doctors in “special vans for harvesting organs.”
In Europe I spoke with a nurse who worked in a major Ghulja hospital following the incident. Nervously requesting that I provide no personal details, she told me that the hospitals were forbidden to treat Uighur protesters. A doctor who bandaged an arm received a 15-year sentence, while another got 20 years, and hospital staff were told, “If you treat someone, you will get the same result.” The separation between the Uighur and Chinese medical personnel deepened: Chinese doctors would stockpile prescriptions rather than allow Uighur medical staff a key to the pharmacy, while Uighur patients were receiving 50 percent of their usual doses. If a Uighur couple had a second child, even if the birth was legally sanctioned, Chinese maternity doctors, she observed, administered an injection (described as an antibiotic) to the infant. The nurse could not recall a single instance of the same injection given to a Chinese baby. Within three days the infant would turn blue and die. Chinese staffers offered a rote explanation to Uighur mothers: Your baby was too weak, your baby could not handle the drug.
Shortly after the Ghulja incident, a young Uighur protester’s body returned home from a military hospital. Perhaps the fact that the abdomen was stitched up was just evidence of an autopsy, but it sparked another round of riots. After that, the corpses were wrapped, buried at gunpoint, and Chinese soldiers patrolled the cemeteries (one is not far from the current Urumqi airport). By June, the nurse was pulled into a new case: A young Uighur protester had been arrested and beaten severely. His family paid for his release, only to discover that their son had kidney damage. The family was told to visit a Chinese military hospital in Urumqi where the hospital staff laid it out: One kidney, 30,000 RMB (roughly $4,700). The kidney will be healthy, they were assured, because the transplant was to come from a 21-year-old Uighur male—the same profile as their son. The nurse learned that the “donor” was, in fact, a protester.
In the early autumn of 1997, fresh out of a blood-work tour in rural Xinjiang, a young Uighur doctor—let’s call him Murat—was pursuing a promising medical career in a large Urumqi hospital. Two years later he was planning his escape to Europe, where I met him some years after.
One day Murat’s instructor quietly informed him that five Chinese government officials—big guys, party members—had checked into the hospital with organ problems. Now he had a job for Murat: “Go to the Urumqi prison. The political wing, not the criminal side. Take blood samples. Small ones. Just to map out the different blood types. That’s all you have to do.”
“What about tissue matching?”
“Don’t worry about any of that, Murat. We’ll handle that later. Just map out the blood types.”
Clutching the authorization, and accompanied by an assistant from the hospital, Murat, slight and bookish, found himself facing approximately 15 prisoners, mostly tough-guy Uighurs in their late twenties. As the first prisoner sat down and saw the needle, the pleading began.
“You are a Uighur like me. Why are you going to hurt me?”
“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just taking blood.”
At the word “blood,” everything collapsed. The men howled and stampeded, the guards screaming and shoving them back into line. The prisoner shrieked that he was innocent. The Chinese guards grabbed his neck and squeezed it hard.
“It’s just for your health,” Murat said evenly, suddenly aware the hospital functionary was probably watching to make sure that Murat wasn’t too sympathetic. “It’s just for your health,” Murat said again and again as he drew blood.
When Murat returned to the hospital, he asked the instructor, “Were all those prisoners sentenced to death?”
“That’s right, Murat, that’s right. Yes. Just don’t ask any more questions. They are bad people—enemies of the country.”
But Murat kept asking questions, and over time, he learned the drill. Once they found a matching blood type, they would move to tissue matching. Then the political prisoner would get a bullet to the right side of the chest. Murat’s instructor would visit the execution site to match up blood samples. The officials would get their organs, rise from their beds, and check out.
Six months later, around the first anniversary of Ghulja, five new officials checked in. The instructor told Murat to go back to the political wing for fresh blood. This time, Murat was told that harvesting political prisoners was normal. A growing export. High volume. The military hospitals are leading the way.
By early 1999, Murat stopped hearing about harvesting political prisoners. Perhaps it was over, he thought.
Yet the Xinjiang procedure spread. By the end of 1999, the Uighur crackdown would be eclipsed by Chinese security’s largest-scale action since Mao: the elimination of Falun Gong. By my estimate up to three million Falun Gong practitioners would pass through the Chinese corrections system. Approximately 65,000 would be harvested, hearts still beating, before the 2008 Olympics. An unspecified, significantly smaller, number of House Christians and Tibetans likely met the same fate.
By Holocaust standards these are piddling numbers, so let’s be clear: China is not the land of the final solution. But it is the land of the expedient solution. Some will point to recent statements from the Chinese medical establishment admitting the obvious—China’s medical environment is not fully ethical—and see progress. Foreign investors suspect that eventually the Chinese might someday—or perhaps have already—abandon organ harvesting in favor of the much more lucrative pharmaceutical and clinical testing industries. The problem with these soothing narratives is that reports, some as recent as one year ago, suggest that the Chinese have not abandoned the Xinjiang procedure.
In July 2009, Urumqi exploded in bloody street riots between Uighurs and Han Chinese. The authorities massed troops in the regional capital, kicked out the Western journalists, shut down the Internet, and, over the next six months, quietly, mostly at night, rounded up Uighur males by the thousands. According to information leaked by Uighurs held in captivity, some prisoners were given physical examinations aimed solely at assessing the health of their retail organs. The signals may be faint, but they are consistent, and the conclusion is inescapable: China, a state rapidly approaching superpower status, has not just committed human rights abuses—that’s old news—but has, for over a decade, perverted the most trusted area of human expertise into performing what is, in the legal parlance of human rights, targeted elimination of a specific group.
Yet Nijat sits in refugee limbo in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, waiting for a country to offer him asylum. He confessed to me. He confessed to others. But in a world eager not to offend China, no state wants his confession. Enver made his way to an obscure seminar hosted by the House of Commons on Chinese human rights. When the MPs opened the floor to questions, Enver found himself standing up and speaking, for the first time, of killing a man. I took notes, but no British MP or their staffers could be bothered to take Enver’s number.
The implications are clear enough. Nothing but self-determination for the Uighurs can suffice. The Uighurs, numbering 13 million, are few, but they are also desperate. They may fight. War may come. On that day, as diplomats across the globe call for dialogue with Beijing, may every nation look to its origins and its conscience. For my part, if my Jewish-sounding name tells me anything, it is this: The dead may never be fully avenged, but no people can accept being fatally exploited forever.
Ethan Gutmann, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wishes to thank Jaya Gibson for research assistance and the Peder Wallenberg family for research support.
Friday, December 02, 2011
Arab Spring turning chilly for U.S.
By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
December 2, 2011
Election officials in Cairo on Wednesday counted ballots that were cast in the first round of parliamentary elections this week. (Amr Nabil/Associated Press)
I've been alarmed by the latest polls. No, not from Iowa and New Hampshire, although they're unnerving enough. It's the polls from Egypt. Foreign policy has not played a part in the U.S. presidential campaign, mainly because we're so broke that the electorate seems minded to take the view that if government is going to throw trillions of dollars down the toilet they'd rather it was an Al Gore-compliant Kohler model in Des Moines or Poughkeepsie than an outhouse in Waziristan. Alas, reality does not arrange its affairs quite so neatly, and the world that is arising in the second decade of the 21st century is increasingly inimical to American interests, and likely to prove even more expensive to boot.
In that sense, Egypt is instructive. Even in the giddy live-from-Tahrir-Square heyday of the "Arab Spring" and "Facebook Revolution," I was something of a skeptic. Back in February, I chanced to be on Fox News with Megyn Kelly within an hour or so of Mubarak's resignation. Over on CNN, Anderson Cooper was interviewing telegenic youthful idealists cooing about the flowering of a new democratic Egypt. Back on Fox, sourpuss Steyn was telling Megyn that this was "the unraveling of the American Middle East" and the emergence of a post-Western order in the region. In those days, I was so much of a pessimist I thought that in any election the Muslim Brotherhood would get a third of the votes and be the largest party in parliament. By the time the actual first results came through last week, the Brothers had racked up 40 percent of the vote – in Cairo and Alexandria, the big cities wherein, insofar as they exist, the secular Facebooking Anderson Cooper types reside. In second place were their principal rivals the Nour party, with up to 15 percent of the ballots. "Nour" translates into English as "the Even More Muslim Brotherhood."
As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, if that's how the urban sophisticates vote, wait till you see the upcountry results. By the time the rural vote emerges from the Nile Delta and Sinai early next month, the hard-core Islamists will be sitting pretty. In the so-called "Facebook Revolution," two-thirds of the Arab world's largest nation is voting for the hard, cruel, bigoted, misogynistic song of Shariah.
The short 90-year history of independent Egypt is that it got worse. Mubarak's Egypt was worse than King Farouk's Egypt, and what follows from last week's vote will be worse still. If you're a Westernized urban woman, a Coptic Christian or an Israeli diplomat with the goons pounding the doors of your embassy, you already know that. The Kingdom of Egypt in the three decades before the 1952 coup was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it was closer to a free-ish pluralist society than anything in the years since. In 1923, its Finance Minister was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a Member of Parliament, and a Jew. Couldn't happen today. Mr. Cattaui's grandson wrote to me recently from France, where the family now lives. In the unlikely event the forthcoming Muslim Brotherhood government wish to appoint a Jew as Finance Minister, there are very few left available. Indeed, Jews are so thin on the ground that those youthful idealists in Tahrir Square looking for Jews to club to a pulp have been forced to make do with sexually assaulting hapless gentiles like the CBS News reporter Lara Logan. It doesn't fit the narrative, so even Miss Logan's network colleagues preferred to look away. We have got used to the fact that Egypt is now a land without Jews. Soon it will be a land without Copts. We'll get used to that, too.
Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact two decades ago we have lived in a supposedly "unipolar" world. Yet somehow it doesn't seem like that, does it? The term Facebook Revolution presumes that technology marches in the cause of modernity. But in Khartoum a few years ago a citywide panic that shaking hands with infidels caused your penis to vanish was spread by text messaging. In London, young Muslim men used their cell phones to share Islamist snuff videos of Westerners being beheaded in Iraq. In les banlieues of France, satellite TV and the Internet enable third-generation Muslims to lead ever more dis-assimilated, segregated lives, immersed in an electronic pan-Islamic culture, to a degree that would have been impossible for their grandparents. To assume that Western technology in and of itself advances the cause of Western views on liberty or women's rights or gay rights is delusional.
Consider, for example, the "good" news from Afghanistan. A 19-year-old woman sentenced to 12 years in jail for the heinous crime of being brutally raped by a cousin was graciously released by President Karzai on condition that she marry her rapist. A few weeks ago, you may recall, I mentioned that the last Christian church in the nation had been razed to the ground last year, as the State Department noted in its report on "international" religious freedom. But Afghanistan is not "international" at all. It is an American client state whose repugnant leader is kept alive only by the protection of Western arms. Say what you like about Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood but at least their barbarous theocratic tyranny doesn't require vast numbers of NATO troops to build it.
I am not a Ron Paul isolationist. The United States has two reasonably benign neighbors, and the result is that 50 percent of Mexico's population has moved north of the border and 100 percent of every bad Canadian idea, from multiculturalism to government health care, has moved south of the border. So much for Fortress America. The idea of a 19th century isolationist republic holding the entire planet at bay is absurd. Indeed, even in the real 19th century, it was only possible because global order was maintained by the Royal Navy and Pax Britannica. If Ron Paul gets his way, who's going to pick up the slack for global order this time?
Nevertheless, my friends on the right currently fretting about potentially drastic cuts at the Pentagon need to look at that poor 19-year-old woman's wedding to her cousin rapist and ponder what it represents: In Afghanistan, the problem is not that we have spent insufficient money but that so much of it has been entirely wasted. History will be devastating in its indictment of us for our squandering of the "unipolar" moment. During those two decades, a China flush with American dollars has gobbled up global resources, a re-assertive Islam has used American military protection to advance its theocratic ambitions, the Mullahs in Tehran are going nuclear, knowing we lack the will to stop them, and even Russia is back in the game of geopolitical mischief-making. We are responsible for 43 percent of the planet's military spending. But if you spend on that scale without any strategic clarity or hardheaded calculation of your national interest, it is ultimately as decadent and useless as throwing money at Solyndra or Obamacare or any of the other domestic follies. A post-prosperity America will mean perforce a shrunken presence on the global stage. And we will not like the world we leave behind.
©MARK STEYN
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
December 2, 2011
I've been alarmed by the latest polls. No, not from Iowa and New Hampshire, although they're unnerving enough. It's the polls from Egypt. Foreign policy has not played a part in the U.S. presidential campaign, mainly because we're so broke that the electorate seems minded to take the view that if government is going to throw trillions of dollars down the toilet they'd rather it was an Al Gore-compliant Kohler model in Des Moines or Poughkeepsie than an outhouse in Waziristan. Alas, reality does not arrange its affairs quite so neatly, and the world that is arising in the second decade of the 21st century is increasingly inimical to American interests, and likely to prove even more expensive to boot.
In that sense, Egypt is instructive. Even in the giddy live-from-Tahrir-Square heyday of the "Arab Spring" and "Facebook Revolution," I was something of a skeptic. Back in February, I chanced to be on Fox News with Megyn Kelly within an hour or so of Mubarak's resignation. Over on CNN, Anderson Cooper was interviewing telegenic youthful idealists cooing about the flowering of a new democratic Egypt. Back on Fox, sourpuss Steyn was telling Megyn that this was "the unraveling of the American Middle East" and the emergence of a post-Western order in the region. In those days, I was so much of a pessimist I thought that in any election the Muslim Brotherhood would get a third of the votes and be the largest party in parliament. By the time the actual first results came through last week, the Brothers had racked up 40 percent of the vote – in Cairo and Alexandria, the big cities wherein, insofar as they exist, the secular Facebooking Anderson Cooper types reside. In second place were their principal rivals the Nour party, with up to 15 percent of the ballots. "Nour" translates into English as "the Even More Muslim Brotherhood."
As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, if that's how the urban sophisticates vote, wait till you see the upcountry results. By the time the rural vote emerges from the Nile Delta and Sinai early next month, the hard-core Islamists will be sitting pretty. In the so-called "Facebook Revolution," two-thirds of the Arab world's largest nation is voting for the hard, cruel, bigoted, misogynistic song of Shariah.
The short 90-year history of independent Egypt is that it got worse. Mubarak's Egypt was worse than King Farouk's Egypt, and what follows from last week's vote will be worse still. If you're a Westernized urban woman, a Coptic Christian or an Israeli diplomat with the goons pounding the doors of your embassy, you already know that. The Kingdom of Egypt in the three decades before the 1952 coup was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it was closer to a free-ish pluralist society than anything in the years since. In 1923, its Finance Minister was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a Member of Parliament, and a Jew. Couldn't happen today. Mr. Cattaui's grandson wrote to me recently from France, where the family now lives. In the unlikely event the forthcoming Muslim Brotherhood government wish to appoint a Jew as Finance Minister, there are very few left available. Indeed, Jews are so thin on the ground that those youthful idealists in Tahrir Square looking for Jews to club to a pulp have been forced to make do with sexually assaulting hapless gentiles like the CBS News reporter Lara Logan. It doesn't fit the narrative, so even Miss Logan's network colleagues preferred to look away. We have got used to the fact that Egypt is now a land without Jews. Soon it will be a land without Copts. We'll get used to that, too.
Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact two decades ago we have lived in a supposedly "unipolar" world. Yet somehow it doesn't seem like that, does it? The term Facebook Revolution presumes that technology marches in the cause of modernity. But in Khartoum a few years ago a citywide panic that shaking hands with infidels caused your penis to vanish was spread by text messaging. In London, young Muslim men used their cell phones to share Islamist snuff videos of Westerners being beheaded in Iraq. In les banlieues of France, satellite TV and the Internet enable third-generation Muslims to lead ever more dis-assimilated, segregated lives, immersed in an electronic pan-Islamic culture, to a degree that would have been impossible for their grandparents. To assume that Western technology in and of itself advances the cause of Western views on liberty or women's rights or gay rights is delusional.
Consider, for example, the "good" news from Afghanistan. A 19-year-old woman sentenced to 12 years in jail for the heinous crime of being brutally raped by a cousin was graciously released by President Karzai on condition that she marry her rapist. A few weeks ago, you may recall, I mentioned that the last Christian church in the nation had been razed to the ground last year, as the State Department noted in its report on "international" religious freedom. But Afghanistan is not "international" at all. It is an American client state whose repugnant leader is kept alive only by the protection of Western arms. Say what you like about Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood but at least their barbarous theocratic tyranny doesn't require vast numbers of NATO troops to build it.
I am not a Ron Paul isolationist. The United States has two reasonably benign neighbors, and the result is that 50 percent of Mexico's population has moved north of the border and 100 percent of every bad Canadian idea, from multiculturalism to government health care, has moved south of the border. So much for Fortress America. The idea of a 19th century isolationist republic holding the entire planet at bay is absurd. Indeed, even in the real 19th century, it was only possible because global order was maintained by the Royal Navy and Pax Britannica. If Ron Paul gets his way, who's going to pick up the slack for global order this time?
Nevertheless, my friends on the right currently fretting about potentially drastic cuts at the Pentagon need to look at that poor 19-year-old woman's wedding to her cousin rapist and ponder what it represents: In Afghanistan, the problem is not that we have spent insufficient money but that so much of it has been entirely wasted. History will be devastating in its indictment of us for our squandering of the "unipolar" moment. During those two decades, a China flush with American dollars has gobbled up global resources, a re-assertive Islam has used American military protection to advance its theocratic ambitions, the Mullahs in Tehran are going nuclear, knowing we lack the will to stop them, and even Russia is back in the game of geopolitical mischief-making. We are responsible for 43 percent of the planet's military spending. But if you spend on that scale without any strategic clarity or hardheaded calculation of your national interest, it is ultimately as decadent and useless as throwing money at Solyndra or Obamacare or any of the other domestic follies. A post-prosperity America will mean perforce a shrunken presence on the global stage. And we will not like the world we leave behind.
©MARK STEYN
The Problem with China Envy
What liberals want to copy is the authoritarianism.
By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 2, 2011
From left to right, Barack Obama, Henry Nichola of the AFL-CIO, Anna Burger of SEIU and the most frequent visitor to the White House before he resigned, Obama/SEIU Andy Stern.
In 2008, I wrote a book called “Liberal Fascism.” That title came from H. G. Wells, one of the most important socialist writers in the English language. He believed, as did his fellow Fabian socialists, that Western democratic capitalism had outlived its usefulness.
What was needed was a new, bold, forward-thinking system run by experts with access to the most modern techniques. For Wells, the label for such a system mattered less than the imperative that we implement a revolution-from-above. He admired how the Germans, Italians, and Russians were getting things done. In 1932, he proposed calling his revolutionary movement “enlightened Nazism” or “liberal fascism.”
Wells was hardly alone. Such arguments were being made in all the Western democracies, under a thousand different banners. Most progressives rejected terms like “fascist” or “Communist,” but they still touted foreign tyrannies as superior to the outmoded democratic capitalism of the 19th century.
Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, was a great fan of both Italian fascism and Soviet Communism. He returned from a trip to Russia to proclaim, “I have seen the future, and it works!”
Some things never change.
Andy Stern announced recently that he’s been to the future, and it works. In this case, the future resides in China, which he says has a superior economic system. “The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model — so successful in the 20th century — is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century.”
Who’s Andy Stern? He’s just the guy who, until last year, ran the Service Employees International Union, which under his leadership spent more than any organization to get Obama elected in 2008, some $28 million. Comparatively, Stern’s influence in the Democratic party eclipses that of, say, the allegedly sinister Koch brothers or anti-tax activist Grover Norquist among Republicans. Stern himself visited the White House more than any other person during Obama’s first year in office (53 times).
Stern sees the Chinese government’s allegedly keen ability to “plan” its way to prosperity as the new model for America. It is an argument of profound asininity. China had five-year plans before it started getting rich. Under the old five-year plans, China killed tens of millions of its own people and remained mired in poverty. What made China rich wasn’t planning, it was the decision to switch to markets (albeit corrupt ones). The planners were merely in charge of distributing the wealth that markets created.
Indeed, rapid economic growth always makes government planners look like geniuses when the reality is that the planners are more like self-proclaimed rainmakers who started dancing only after it started raining. When the rain stops, which it will, they’ll have much to answer for.
Oh, and what about labor? There’s one labor union in China, and it’s run by the government. (The Nazis had pretty much the same system.) Stern doesn’t seem to care.
More intriguingly, SEIU is a huge supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which, taken at its word, is most concerned with income inequality and the back-room corruption that comes from “crony capitalism.” And Stern touts China as the model for how to fix things? China has 115 billionaires and at least 115 million people living on a dollar a day or less. Nearly all of those billionaires got rich gaming a corrupt political system.
Obviously, the core problem with China envy is not economic but moral. To the extent that China’s economic planning “works,” it does so because China is an authoritarian country. (Japan has been planning its economy within democratic restraints and has been dying on the economic vine for nearly 20 years.) You can hit your building quota a lot more easily when you can shoot inconvenient people and trample property rights at will. The Three Gorges Dam displaced more than a million people who were given three choices: move, jail, death.
Stern joins a long list of liberals who’ve seen China embrace authoritarian capitalism and conclude that the secret to that success had to be the authoritarianism. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, my usual whipping boy in this department, has written thousands of words rhapsodizing about his “envy” of China. President Obama himself has said he’s envious of China’s president and has touted China’s infrastructure spending as something to emulate.
If you want to copy China because its authoritarian capitalism is better than our democratic capitalism, it seems pretty obvious that what you envy is the authoritarianism. H. G. Wells had a phrase for that.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can reach him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 2, 2011
In 2008, I wrote a book called “Liberal Fascism.” That title came from H. G. Wells, one of the most important socialist writers in the English language. He believed, as did his fellow Fabian socialists, that Western democratic capitalism had outlived its usefulness.
What was needed was a new, bold, forward-thinking system run by experts with access to the most modern techniques. For Wells, the label for such a system mattered less than the imperative that we implement a revolution-from-above. He admired how the Germans, Italians, and Russians were getting things done. In 1932, he proposed calling his revolutionary movement “enlightened Nazism” or “liberal fascism.”
Wells was hardly alone. Such arguments were being made in all the Western democracies, under a thousand different banners. Most progressives rejected terms like “fascist” or “Communist,” but they still touted foreign tyrannies as superior to the outmoded democratic capitalism of the 19th century.
Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, was a great fan of both Italian fascism and Soviet Communism. He returned from a trip to Russia to proclaim, “I have seen the future, and it works!”
Some things never change.
Andy Stern announced recently that he’s been to the future, and it works. In this case, the future resides in China, which he says has a superior economic system. “The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model — so successful in the 20th century — is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century.”
Who’s Andy Stern? He’s just the guy who, until last year, ran the Service Employees International Union, which under his leadership spent more than any organization to get Obama elected in 2008, some $28 million. Comparatively, Stern’s influence in the Democratic party eclipses that of, say, the allegedly sinister Koch brothers or anti-tax activist Grover Norquist among Republicans. Stern himself visited the White House more than any other person during Obama’s first year in office (53 times).
Stern sees the Chinese government’s allegedly keen ability to “plan” its way to prosperity as the new model for America. It is an argument of profound asininity. China had five-year plans before it started getting rich. Under the old five-year plans, China killed tens of millions of its own people and remained mired in poverty. What made China rich wasn’t planning, it was the decision to switch to markets (albeit corrupt ones). The planners were merely in charge of distributing the wealth that markets created.
Indeed, rapid economic growth always makes government planners look like geniuses when the reality is that the planners are more like self-proclaimed rainmakers who started dancing only after it started raining. When the rain stops, which it will, they’ll have much to answer for.
Oh, and what about labor? There’s one labor union in China, and it’s run by the government. (The Nazis had pretty much the same system.) Stern doesn’t seem to care.
More intriguingly, SEIU is a huge supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which, taken at its word, is most concerned with income inequality and the back-room corruption that comes from “crony capitalism.” And Stern touts China as the model for how to fix things? China has 115 billionaires and at least 115 million people living on a dollar a day or less. Nearly all of those billionaires got rich gaming a corrupt political system.
Obviously, the core problem with China envy is not economic but moral. To the extent that China’s economic planning “works,” it does so because China is an authoritarian country. (Japan has been planning its economy within democratic restraints and has been dying on the economic vine for nearly 20 years.) You can hit your building quota a lot more easily when you can shoot inconvenient people and trample property rights at will. The Three Gorges Dam displaced more than a million people who were given three choices: move, jail, death.
Stern joins a long list of liberals who’ve seen China embrace authoritarian capitalism and conclude that the secret to that success had to be the authoritarianism. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, my usual whipping boy in this department, has written thousands of words rhapsodizing about his “envy” of China. President Obama himself has said he’s envious of China’s president and has touted China’s infrastructure spending as something to emulate.
If you want to copy China because its authoritarian capitalism is better than our democratic capitalism, it seems pretty obvious that what you envy is the authoritarianism. H. G. Wells had a phrase for that.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can reach him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
The Climate Cataclysm Is Not Nigh
“We have some room to breathe,” a scientist reports.
By Charles C. W. Cooke
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 2, 2011 4:00 A.M.
In 1783, William Pitt warned the British Parliament about the dangers of those who would reflexively employ “necessity” as an argument in favor of their preferences. “Necessity,” Pitt exclaimed, “is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves!” These are wise words indeed. But in a purely Machiavellian sense, the tactic is also a risky one. Those who shout “or else!” tend to be left in the role of the boy who cried wolf if their apocalypse fails to turn up on time.
The environmental Left has long neglected Pitt’s admonition and is starting to pay the price. Having careered wantonly from “global cooling” to “global warming” to “climate change,” the greenies eventually settled on the rather dramatic “global climate chaos,” a neatly eschatological term that has the delicious benefit of being so vague as to be unfalsifiable. For years now we have been told that this week, or month, or year — or conference, or junket — is our last chance to save the world.
Such an approach is rapidly losing its efficacy. What the global downturn has done for prioritization, science is doing for perspective. Enter Andreas Schmittner, a professor at the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. Schmittner headed up a major study recently published in Science and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, which baldly concludes that the sort of doomsday scenario readily thrown around by the scaremongers is simply not rooted in reality. Following publication, Schmittner put his findings succinctly in an interview with The Australian: “very large changes” — of the sort we have grown to love hearing about from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — “can be ruled out [and] we have some room to breathe and time to figure out solutions to the problem.” (According to the study, that “problem” doesn’t seem to be too heinous, either. The international target is to keep temperature rises within 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century, by which point CO2 concentrations are expected to approximately double; Schmittner predicts that the probable outcome of doubling CO2 concentrations would be between 1.7 degrees Celsius and 2.6 degrees Celsius, not the 3–4 degree change predicted by the IPCC.)
Science has an established history of running new studies only when they significantly add to or contradict previously published work. While Schmittner is very clearly not arguing that global warming isn’t happening, nor that mankind does not play a role in changing the earth’s climate, there is simply no way to read the report without concluding that the apocalyptic narrative is dead in the water.
This determination is, in part, based upon the study’s less cynically selected frame of reference. “Many previous climate sensitivity studies have looked at the past only from 1850 through today, and not fully integrated paleoclimate data, especially on a global scale,” the research concludes, echoing a key and ever-present criticism leveled at alarmism. Put in layman’s terms, the conclusion is that if the climate were really so sensitive to change that doubled CO2 could yield cataclysmic warming, then, conversely, the low levels of carbon in the atmosphere 21,000 years ago should have precipitated a planet sufficiently icebound to extinguish all life. It didn’t.
“When you reconstruct sea and land surface temperatures from the peak of the last Ice Age 21,000 years ago — which is referred to as the Last Glacial Maximum — and compare it with climate model simulations of that period, you get a much different picture . . . If these paleoclimatic constraints apply to the future, as predicted by our model, the results imply less probability of extreme climatic change than previously thought.” In other words, we’re not all going to die.
By painting Armageddon as the price of inaction, the green lobby has sought to achieve two goals. First, focusing in on an extreme scenario allowed advocates more effectively to play the we-should-do-something-just-in-case card. Second, with all nuance removed from the discussion, even the slightest evidence in favor of an anthropogenic contribution to climate fluctuations could be tied to eschatological imagery, and “climate moderates” could be portrayed as being just as complicit in bringing about the end of the world as the evil deniers. “Necessity” would thus become the mother of intervention.
“The whole aim of practical politics,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” It is still a matter of debate whether there are any hobgoblins at all (the very existence of a “consensus” is rendered comical, given the existence of new papers such as Schmittner’s), but if they do exist, the tallest among them are disappearing at a rate of knots.
As they go, we must insist that so too do the invitations to be led to safety, for without necessity we have no reason to be slaves.
— Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate of National Review.
By Charles C. W. Cooke
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 2, 2011 4:00 A.M.
The environmental Left has long neglected Pitt’s admonition and is starting to pay the price. Having careered wantonly from “global cooling” to “global warming” to “climate change,” the greenies eventually settled on the rather dramatic “global climate chaos,” a neatly eschatological term that has the delicious benefit of being so vague as to be unfalsifiable. For years now we have been told that this week, or month, or year — or conference, or junket — is our last chance to save the world.
Such an approach is rapidly losing its efficacy. What the global downturn has done for prioritization, science is doing for perspective. Enter Andreas Schmittner, a professor at the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. Schmittner headed up a major study recently published in Science and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, which baldly concludes that the sort of doomsday scenario readily thrown around by the scaremongers is simply not rooted in reality. Following publication, Schmittner put his findings succinctly in an interview with The Australian: “very large changes” — of the sort we have grown to love hearing about from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — “can be ruled out [and] we have some room to breathe and time to figure out solutions to the problem.” (According to the study, that “problem” doesn’t seem to be too heinous, either. The international target is to keep temperature rises within 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century, by which point CO2 concentrations are expected to approximately double; Schmittner predicts that the probable outcome of doubling CO2 concentrations would be between 1.7 degrees Celsius and 2.6 degrees Celsius, not the 3–4 degree change predicted by the IPCC.)
Science has an established history of running new studies only when they significantly add to or contradict previously published work. While Schmittner is very clearly not arguing that global warming isn’t happening, nor that mankind does not play a role in changing the earth’s climate, there is simply no way to read the report without concluding that the apocalyptic narrative is dead in the water.
This determination is, in part, based upon the study’s less cynically selected frame of reference. “Many previous climate sensitivity studies have looked at the past only from 1850 through today, and not fully integrated paleoclimate data, especially on a global scale,” the research concludes, echoing a key and ever-present criticism leveled at alarmism. Put in layman’s terms, the conclusion is that if the climate were really so sensitive to change that doubled CO2 could yield cataclysmic warming, then, conversely, the low levels of carbon in the atmosphere 21,000 years ago should have precipitated a planet sufficiently icebound to extinguish all life. It didn’t.
“When you reconstruct sea and land surface temperatures from the peak of the last Ice Age 21,000 years ago — which is referred to as the Last Glacial Maximum — and compare it with climate model simulations of that period, you get a much different picture . . . If these paleoclimatic constraints apply to the future, as predicted by our model, the results imply less probability of extreme climatic change than previously thought.” In other words, we’re not all going to die.
By painting Armageddon as the price of inaction, the green lobby has sought to achieve two goals. First, focusing in on an extreme scenario allowed advocates more effectively to play the we-should-do-something-just-in-case card. Second, with all nuance removed from the discussion, even the slightest evidence in favor of an anthropogenic contribution to climate fluctuations could be tied to eschatological imagery, and “climate moderates” could be portrayed as being just as complicit in bringing about the end of the world as the evil deniers. “Necessity” would thus become the mother of intervention.
“The whole aim of practical politics,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” It is still a matter of debate whether there are any hobgoblins at all (the very existence of a “consensus” is rendered comical, given the existence of new papers such as Schmittner’s), but if they do exist, the tallest among them are disappearing at a rate of knots.
As they go, we must insist that so too do the invitations to be led to safety, for without necessity we have no reason to be slaves.
— Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate of National Review.
Thursday, December 01, 2011
ONCE YOU GO CONSERVATIVE BLACK, YOU BETTER WATCH YOUR BACK
By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
November 30, 2011
Herman Cain, Karen Kraushaar, Ginger White and Sharon Bialek
With the mainstream media giddily reporting on an alleged affair involving Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, how long can it be before they break the news that their 2004 vice presidential candidate conceived a "love child" with his mistress, Rielle Hunter?
The left is trying to destroy Cain with a miasma of hazy accusations leveled by three troubled women. Considered individually, the accusations are utterly unbelievable. They are even less credible taken together. This is how liberals destroy a man, out of nothing.
After the first round of baseless accusations against Cain, an endless stream of pundits rolled out the cliche -- as if it were the height of originality -- "This isn't he said-she said; it's he-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she–said."
Au contraire: We had two "shes" and only one "said."
Remember? Only two women were willing to give their names. And as soon as they did, we discovered that they were highly suspicious accusers with nothing more than their personal honor to support the allegations. Only one of the two would even say what Cain allegedly did.
The first one was Sharon Bialek, who claimed that Cain grabbed her crotch in a car.
Then we found out Bialek was in constant financial trouble, had been involved in a paternity lawsuit, was known as a "gold digger," had a string of debts and had twice filed for personal bankruptcy. Also, she admitted she knew Obama's dirty tricks specialist, David Axelrod, from living in the same building with him.
Her personal history is relevant because she produced no evidence. We had to take her word. (Which was not helped by seeing her standing with Gloria Allred.)
The second one, Karen Kraushaar, made unspecified allegations of a "hostile environment" when she was working for Cain, but refuses to say what those allegations were. This despite the fact that the National Restaurant Association waived her confidentiality agreement, thus allowing her to go public.
That's one "she," but no "said."
Cain said he had once told Kraushaar she was as tall as his wife -- which would be one of the more worthy sexual harassment claims settled by an American company in recent years.
Why won't she say? We're not talking about rape. Kraushaar can't say, "I don't want to relive being told I was the same height as his wife!" With all the nonsense that passes for a "hostile environment," either Kraushaar tells us what Cain allegedly did, or her blind accusation is worth less than nothing.
As if that weren't enough, then it turned out that Kraushaar had also filed a complaint at her next job just three years later, charging that a manager had circulated a sexually explicit joke email comparing computers to men and women. She demanded a raise and the right to work at home.
Maybe Kraushaar is the most unlucky woman in the world. But the simpler explanation is that she is not a credible witness on the workplace atmosphere.
And now we have Ginger White stepping forward to claim that she had a 13-year affair with Cain. Cain admits he was friends with White, but he categorically, adamantly denies having an affair with her.
White has the whole combo-platter of questionable accuser attributes: She's another financially troubled, twice-divorced, unemployed single mother, who has claimed sexual harassment in the past, declared bankruptcy once, was accused of stalking and had a libel judgment entered against her just this year. So far in 2011, she's had nine liens put on her property.
But we're supposed to ignore all of that because she's the third woman of questionable character to make an implausible allegation. Liberals say there's a pattern, but the only pattern is of their making far-fetched accusations of a sexual nature against Cain.
White's proof that she had a 13-year affair is that she has two of Cain's books signed by him -- one with the incriminating inscription, "Friends are forever! Everything else is a bonus," and the other, "Miss G, you have already made a 'big difference!' Stay focused as you pursue your next destination." (I know -- filthy!)
If that's proof of an affair, I've had thousands of them without even realizing it.
Also, White produced evidence that Cain had texted or called her cell phone 61 times during four non-consecutive months -- but did not reveal what those texts said. ("Would you please return my lawn mower?")
Again, if that's proof of an affair, I'm having hundreds of them at this very moment.
This is the sort of evidence you get with an actual sexual predator: Bill Clinton's accusers had gifts, taped phone conversations with him and a semen-stained dress.
Gennifer Flowers produced taped telephone calls with Clinton totaling thousands of words between them, with him counseling her on how to deny their affair: "If they ever hit you with it, just say no, and go on. There's nothing they can do ... But when they -- if somebody contacts you, I need to know ... All you got to do is deny it."
Paula Jones had multiple same-day witnesses -- including the state troopers who worked for Clinton and had already told the press about a "Paula" they brought to Clinton's hotel room. And that was for a single incident.
Monica Lewinsky had lots of gifts from Clinton, including a hat pin, two brooches, a marble bear figurine, a T-shirt from Martha's Vineyard and Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," all of which she mysteriously placed with Clinton's secretary, Betty Currie, during the investigation, as well as a semen-stained dress, which Monica kept.
Ginger White claims she had a 13-year affair with Cain -- and all she has are two books with inscriptions that could have been written to an auto mechanic who waited in line at a Cain book signing. Even her business partner during the alleged affair says White never mentioned Cain's name.
These women are like triple-A ball players with the stats being: number of bankruptcies, smallest bank account, number of liens, most false claims, number of children out of wedlock, degrees of separation from David Axelrod, total trips to human resources and so on.
That wouldn't be dispositive -- except for the fact that their only evidence is their word.
But this is how liberals dirty you up when they've got nothing: They launch a series of false accusations, knowing that Americans with busy lives won't follow each story to the end and notice that they were all blind alleys.
The liberal media is an old story, but it's still a big story when it comes to creating the impression of scandal out of thin air.
Most people say, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." I say, "Where there's smoke around a conservative, there are journalists furiously rubbing two sticks together."
COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER
http://www.anncoulter.com/
November 30, 2011
With the mainstream media giddily reporting on an alleged affair involving Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, how long can it be before they break the news that their 2004 vice presidential candidate conceived a "love child" with his mistress, Rielle Hunter?
The left is trying to destroy Cain with a miasma of hazy accusations leveled by three troubled women. Considered individually, the accusations are utterly unbelievable. They are even less credible taken together. This is how liberals destroy a man, out of nothing.
After the first round of baseless accusations against Cain, an endless stream of pundits rolled out the cliche -- as if it were the height of originality -- "This isn't he said-she said; it's he-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she–said."
Au contraire: We had two "shes" and only one "said."
Remember? Only two women were willing to give their names. And as soon as they did, we discovered that they were highly suspicious accusers with nothing more than their personal honor to support the allegations. Only one of the two would even say what Cain allegedly did.
The first one was Sharon Bialek, who claimed that Cain grabbed her crotch in a car.
Then we found out Bialek was in constant financial trouble, had been involved in a paternity lawsuit, was known as a "gold digger," had a string of debts and had twice filed for personal bankruptcy. Also, she admitted she knew Obama's dirty tricks specialist, David Axelrod, from living in the same building with him.
Her personal history is relevant because she produced no evidence. We had to take her word. (Which was not helped by seeing her standing with Gloria Allred.)
The second one, Karen Kraushaar, made unspecified allegations of a "hostile environment" when she was working for Cain, but refuses to say what those allegations were. This despite the fact that the National Restaurant Association waived her confidentiality agreement, thus allowing her to go public.
That's one "she," but no "said."
Cain said he had once told Kraushaar she was as tall as his wife -- which would be one of the more worthy sexual harassment claims settled by an American company in recent years.
Why won't she say? We're not talking about rape. Kraushaar can't say, "I don't want to relive being told I was the same height as his wife!" With all the nonsense that passes for a "hostile environment," either Kraushaar tells us what Cain allegedly did, or her blind accusation is worth less than nothing.
As if that weren't enough, then it turned out that Kraushaar had also filed a complaint at her next job just three years later, charging that a manager had circulated a sexually explicit joke email comparing computers to men and women. She demanded a raise and the right to work at home.
Maybe Kraushaar is the most unlucky woman in the world. But the simpler explanation is that she is not a credible witness on the workplace atmosphere.
And now we have Ginger White stepping forward to claim that she had a 13-year affair with Cain. Cain admits he was friends with White, but he categorically, adamantly denies having an affair with her.
White has the whole combo-platter of questionable accuser attributes: She's another financially troubled, twice-divorced, unemployed single mother, who has claimed sexual harassment in the past, declared bankruptcy once, was accused of stalking and had a libel judgment entered against her just this year. So far in 2011, she's had nine liens put on her property.
But we're supposed to ignore all of that because she's the third woman of questionable character to make an implausible allegation. Liberals say there's a pattern, but the only pattern is of their making far-fetched accusations of a sexual nature against Cain.
White's proof that she had a 13-year affair is that she has two of Cain's books signed by him -- one with the incriminating inscription, "Friends are forever! Everything else is a bonus," and the other, "Miss G, you have already made a 'big difference!' Stay focused as you pursue your next destination." (I know -- filthy!)
If that's proof of an affair, I've had thousands of them without even realizing it.
Also, White produced evidence that Cain had texted or called her cell phone 61 times during four non-consecutive months -- but did not reveal what those texts said. ("Would you please return my lawn mower?")
Again, if that's proof of an affair, I'm having hundreds of them at this very moment.
This is the sort of evidence you get with an actual sexual predator: Bill Clinton's accusers had gifts, taped phone conversations with him and a semen-stained dress.
Gennifer Flowers produced taped telephone calls with Clinton totaling thousands of words between them, with him counseling her on how to deny their affair: "If they ever hit you with it, just say no, and go on. There's nothing they can do ... But when they -- if somebody contacts you, I need to know ... All you got to do is deny it."
Paula Jones had multiple same-day witnesses -- including the state troopers who worked for Clinton and had already told the press about a "Paula" they brought to Clinton's hotel room. And that was for a single incident.
Monica Lewinsky had lots of gifts from Clinton, including a hat pin, two brooches, a marble bear figurine, a T-shirt from Martha's Vineyard and Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," all of which she mysteriously placed with Clinton's secretary, Betty Currie, during the investigation, as well as a semen-stained dress, which Monica kept.
Ginger White claims she had a 13-year affair with Cain -- and all she has are two books with inscriptions that could have been written to an auto mechanic who waited in line at a Cain book signing. Even her business partner during the alleged affair says White never mentioned Cain's name.
These women are like triple-A ball players with the stats being: number of bankruptcies, smallest bank account, number of liens, most false claims, number of children out of wedlock, degrees of separation from David Axelrod, total trips to human resources and so on.
That wouldn't be dispositive -- except for the fact that their only evidence is their word.
But this is how liberals dirty you up when they've got nothing: They launch a series of false accusations, knowing that Americans with busy lives won't follow each story to the end and notice that they were all blind alleys.
The liberal media is an old story, but it's still a big story when it comes to creating the impression of scandal out of thin air.
Most people say, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." I say, "Where there's smoke around a conservative, there are journalists furiously rubbing two sticks together."
COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Barney, Banking and Brothels
11/29/2011
Barney Frank and Chris Dodd
The man who was complicit in bringing the American economy to its knees in 2008 won’t go down as, well, the man who was complicit in bringing the American economy to its knees.
Not if the “mainstream” media has anything to do with it, that is.
After his announcement that he won’t seek reelection, the Washington Post heralded the disheveled congressman Barney Frank as leaving a “legacy that crosses from legislative cornerstones to political confrontations to a historic place as the nation’s most prominent gay lawmaker.”
The paper continued: “On the left, Frank was a hero both for his effort to rein in the nation’s largest banks and for his role in promoting gay rights, having been the first member of Congress to declare his sexual orientation while in office.”
Then there’s the New York Times. To them, even Frank’s opponents carried a great deal of respect for the rambling Massachusetts politician. While “bankers often disagreed with Mr. Frank’s policies,” said the Times, “many respected his command of arcane areas of finance, a rarity on Capitol Hill.”
Get a room, boys.
The Times also noted that the “pugnacious lawmaker was quick to lambaste the industry in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and was loathe to apologize when bankers complained about the harsh tone.”
Unlike the Times, the Washington Post did mention Frank’s, er, interesting partner choices over the years, one that resulted in the infamous “allegations involving his relationship with a male prostitute who worked out of the lawmaker’s Capitol Hill townhouse.” (Side note: The Washington Post frames the boyfriend as someone who “worked” out of Barney’s house? I guess that’s one way to put it. Another was that Barney Frank’s Washington, D.C., apartment was also operating as gay brothel, of which Frank denies he had any knowledge. Snort.)
But what both the Times and the Post conveniently leave out is how Barney Frank was vociferously supportive of increasing home ownership among folks who should’ve never bought a home in the first place, a policy that injected steroids into the housing bubble and eventually collapsed the financial sector.
And because Barney’s boys in the mainstream media omit his role in the housing crisis that ricocheted across the world in 2008, it’s time for us to go back to the videotape.
When Barney was the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, he outright dismissed the fact that the two lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were facing grave solvency issues. To the contrary, he argued before the committee that such claims were embellishments.
“I worry, frankly, that there's a tension here. The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see,” babbled Frank. “I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially and withstand some of the disaster scenarios.”
Fast-forward to today: The American people had to shell out $700 billion in bailout money, are still on the hook for Fannie and Freddie, and got a huge regulatory bomb called “Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection” dropped on an American economy already overtaxed and overregulated.
The media’s free pass to the slobbering congressman is even more egregious because Frank wasn’t just defending the status quo. He was pushing for Fannie and Freddie to accelerate the flow of risky loans.
“I would like to get Fannie and Freddie more deeply into low-income housing and possibly moving into something that is more explicitly a subsidy,” drooled Frank in a House Financial Services Committee hearing back in 2003. “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation toward subsidized housing,” he added.
And when the GOP tried bringing attention to the fact that politicians should be more vigilant (not “roll the dice”) with taxpayer money, Frank allowed his comrades on the House Financial Services Committee to accuse Republicans of conducting a “political lynching” of Franklin Raines, the former chairman of Fannie Mae who engaged in accounting fraud and raked in a whopping $91 million in compensation and bonuses in the process.
Yes, this scam artist who nearly topped off $100 million at Fannie Mae by cooking its books was being “lynched” by Republicans for making inquiries into Fannie’s viability.
Now that’s some lib logic for you!
The media will blow wet kisses at Barney Frank’s political career, a sad fact considering that he spent his days in Washington gambling away the money you and I work for as though he were playing a cheap slot machine in the Vegas airport.
Mr. Mattera is the editor of HUMAN EVENTS and the author of Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation (Simon & Schuster). He also hosts The Jason Mattera Show on News Talk Radio 77WABC. Previously, he was the Spokesman for Young America's Foundation and a TV correspondent for Michelle Malkin. Follow Jason on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Exit Barney Frank
The Editors
http://www.nationalreview.com/
November 29, 2011
Rep. Barney Frank will be remembered for three things: First, he was not only the first openly gay member of Congress but the first involved in a gay-prostitution scandal. Second, he said, “I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness” regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as exercised with regard to other government-affiliated agencies, preferring, as he memorably put it, to “roll the dice a little bit.” Third, he was co-author of the Frank-Dodd financial-reform legislation. Which is to say, Representative Frank will be remembered as an embarrassment, a reckless gambler, and a legislative malefactor.
Representative Frank was not much of a crusader on gay-rights issues, which was just as well. On the substance of those issues, he was on the wrong side. As a symbol, he was toxic — a powerful politician whose homosexual orientation was hardly the most remarkable feature of his private life, which included involvement with a gay hustler and convicted drug dealer whom the congressman was paying for sex, and who ended up running a prostitution operation out of the congressman’s home. Representative Frank was reprimanded by the House for making misleading statements to a Virginia prosecutor on behalf of the prostitute — whom the congressman eventually put on his own payroll — and for having fixed dozens of parking tickets on his behalf. Americans are broadly tolerant of homosexuality; they are rightly less tolerant of prostitution and political corruption. The congressman’s self-pitying account of the episode made the bad situation worse.
But though his private life spilled over into his public duties, it is as a champion of a different kind of pay-for-play operation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that the congressman did the most damage to the country. The government-backed mortgage giants were at the center of the housing bubble and the subsequent financial crisis. Representative Frank was a stalwart defender of the organizations, even after the government uncovered “extensive” fraud at Fannie Mae and found that Freddie Mac had illegally channeled funds to its political benefactors. Again, Representative Frank’s personal life intruded into the story: He was sexually involved with a Fannie Mae executive during a time when he was voting on laws affecting the organization. The final cost of the Fannie/Freddie bailouts will run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the real damage that the organizations did to the U.S. economy — and the world economy, for that matter — probably is incalculable.
In response to a financial crisis in which he was a significant figure, Representative Frank helped to craft a financial-reform law that bears his name. The drafting of Dodd-Frank began as a punitive measure, evolved into a dispensary of political favors, and in the end did little or nothing to address the problems that led to the 2008–09 crisis or to prevent similar crises in the future. Which means that we may have Barney Frank partly to thank not only for the last financial crisis but for the next one.
From his relatively petty transgressions related to his personal life to his more consequential role in enabling Fannie and Freddie, Representative Frank personifies a great deal of what is wrong with American public life. Though a highly intelligent man, he made the wrong decisions at every turn, and compounded his policy errors with the petty and vindictive style of his politics. Republicans will not miss him. Neither should his Democratic colleagues, his constituents, or the American public that will be paying off the cost of his errors and those of his allies, with interest, for a great many years. We hope that he will find in the obscurity of retirement the grace and wisdom that eluded him as an elected official, but we do not assume that it will be so.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
November 29, 2011
Rep. Barney Frank will be remembered for three things: First, he was not only the first openly gay member of Congress but the first involved in a gay-prostitution scandal. Second, he said, “I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness” regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as exercised with regard to other government-affiliated agencies, preferring, as he memorably put it, to “roll the dice a little bit.” Third, he was co-author of the Frank-Dodd financial-reform legislation. Which is to say, Representative Frank will be remembered as an embarrassment, a reckless gambler, and a legislative malefactor.
Representative Frank was not much of a crusader on gay-rights issues, which was just as well. On the substance of those issues, he was on the wrong side. As a symbol, he was toxic — a powerful politician whose homosexual orientation was hardly the most remarkable feature of his private life, which included involvement with a gay hustler and convicted drug dealer whom the congressman was paying for sex, and who ended up running a prostitution operation out of the congressman’s home. Representative Frank was reprimanded by the House for making misleading statements to a Virginia prosecutor on behalf of the prostitute — whom the congressman eventually put on his own payroll — and for having fixed dozens of parking tickets on his behalf. Americans are broadly tolerant of homosexuality; they are rightly less tolerant of prostitution and political corruption. The congressman’s self-pitying account of the episode made the bad situation worse.
But though his private life spilled over into his public duties, it is as a champion of a different kind of pay-for-play operation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that the congressman did the most damage to the country. The government-backed mortgage giants were at the center of the housing bubble and the subsequent financial crisis. Representative Frank was a stalwart defender of the organizations, even after the government uncovered “extensive” fraud at Fannie Mae and found that Freddie Mac had illegally channeled funds to its political benefactors. Again, Representative Frank’s personal life intruded into the story: He was sexually involved with a Fannie Mae executive during a time when he was voting on laws affecting the organization. The final cost of the Fannie/Freddie bailouts will run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the real damage that the organizations did to the U.S. economy — and the world economy, for that matter — probably is incalculable.
In response to a financial crisis in which he was a significant figure, Representative Frank helped to craft a financial-reform law that bears his name. The drafting of Dodd-Frank began as a punitive measure, evolved into a dispensary of political favors, and in the end did little or nothing to address the problems that led to the 2008–09 crisis or to prevent similar crises in the future. Which means that we may have Barney Frank partly to thank not only for the last financial crisis but for the next one.
From his relatively petty transgressions related to his personal life to his more consequential role in enabling Fannie and Freddie, Representative Frank personifies a great deal of what is wrong with American public life. Though a highly intelligent man, he made the wrong decisions at every turn, and compounded his policy errors with the petty and vindictive style of his politics. Republicans will not miss him. Neither should his Democratic colleagues, his constituents, or the American public that will be paying off the cost of his errors and those of his allies, with interest, for a great many years. We hope that he will find in the obscurity of retirement the grace and wisdom that eluded him as an elected official, but we do not assume that it will be so.
Film Reviews: "Hugo"
Hugo: Scorsese's Magnificent Dream Machine
Turning from violent men to a poignant waif, the director pays luminous tribute to old films—in his best new film of the millennium.
By Richard Corliss
http://entertainment.time.com/
November 22, 2011
The 3-D camera swoops over the rooftops of Paris, past the Eiffel Tower and toward Montmartre Station; it dips to cruise above the tracks and moves into the main hall, where an 11-year-old boy is forging his own furtive trek through the commuting crowds. No one knows that the boy, Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), is the station’s timekeeper: regulating the clocks, great and small, since his drunken uncle disappeared and left the job to a lad who must steal to live. Now the camera follows Hugo through the clockwork innards of Gare Montmartre, rushing to keep up but never losing pace or grace. The vertiginous ecstasy of these two magnificent tracking shots, no less than the boy’s solemn urgency, instantly alert moviegoers than Hugo is special, and so is Hugo.
Martin Scorsese made his rep as the fierce bard of American gangster machismo; from Mean Streets to The Departed he has sung the body choleric. (And, in his last feature film, Shutter Island, the mind chaotic.) So why would he make a movie of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick’s rhapsodically nostalgic children’s book?
Scorsese hasn’t put a kid at the center of one of his movies since the 1974 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, with another 11-year-old (Alfred Lutter’s Tommy). But that boy felt suffocated by his single mom’s demanding love; he suffered from a surfeit of parenting. Hugo has no parent: he was orphaned after his beloved father (Jude Law) died in a fire. His dad had been repairing a mysterious automaton, and Hugo needs to connect with him by finishing the job. As Scorsese has said, “It’s a story about the boy and his relationship with his dead father.” The living take up the work of the dead and, by completing it, justify and fulfill their joint labors.
The child is also fascinated by mechanical marvels like clocks, metal robots and moving pictures. Hugo has a staunch sibling in Scorsese, a life-long lover and preserver of classic films. The 69-year-old director has never lost his infant wonder at the spectacle of giant images in a darkened movie palace. From his earliest movie memories comes a film evoking the very earliest films: the Lumière brothers’ 1896 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, which so startled audiences with its immediacy that it can be called the first horror film, and Georges Méliès’ 1902 A Trip to the Moon, the legendary early fantasy film, in which a spaceship from Earth rockets onto the lunar surface and lodges, splat!, in the right eye of the Man in the Moon. Scorsese, sampling his eternal passion, encompasses a century and more of film legerdemain. That makes Hugo not only an act of devotion from a modern movie artist to the wizards who inspired him; it is also the director’s imaginary autobiography.
The young Marty suffered from asthma, which often kept him at home glued to old movies on TV. Hugo’s life is far more perilous. Fearful of being caught by the pompous station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), and with no way of cashing his uncle’s checks, Hugo works and hides in the clock tower, feeding himself by filching snacks from local shops. He also swipes machine parts from the toy store of stern, gloomy Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley). The boy’s friendship with Georges’ goddaughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) will help him unwrap amazing secrets, including the invention of movie magic.
Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan share Selznick’s belief that movies are both the stuff dreams are made of and the product of supreme technological expertise. The camera is a machine that makes art. Clockworker, magician, filmmaker — each, at his best, is an inspired handyman, a tinker and tinkerer of genius. Like magicians, filmmakers create illusions; the very act of movie projection is a trick, fooling the eyes into believing that the still frames exposed in the shutter for 1/24th of a second are moving pictures. And any movie studio is the stage for splendid Rube Goldberg-machine complexity that ascends into fantasy. “If you ever wondered where your dreams come from,” a famous filmmaker says, “this is where they are made.” It’s as if directors were inside our sleeping brains, fiddling with the machinery like clockmaker-elves, tapping our unconscious to mine images that beguile, terrify and astound us.
Since everyone including Scorsese has revealed the story’s secret, I will as well: the gruff Papa Georges, played with such pain and delicacy by Kingsley, is Méliès himself. After a decade’s sensational success making hundreds of short movies that delighted in a magician’s sense of the impossible made visible, the director-entrepreneur went bankrupt and was forced to sell his films to a manufacturer who melted the celluloid stock to make shoe heels. Méliès thought his life’s work was lost; the world thought he died in the Great War. Instead, he survived by running a small store in a train station, where he was discovered by a devoted film fancier, who helped rescue some of the master’s work. A recent compilation by Flicker Alley contains about 175 Méliès films—a miracle of both his inspiration and historians’ restoration. The Méliès story is the mostly factual background for the fictional Hugo’s tale.
Most boys’ adventure stories send their young heroes on far-flung journeys of self-discovery. Hugo travels no more than a mile from the station. He is both a modern child, with an automaton instead of a computer as his obsessive machine, and a Dickensian hero: a beautiful boy in terrible circumstances with the nourishing memory of a wonderful, lost parent. And the Gare Montmartre is his home, school, workhouse, prison and Quasimodo bell tower. As designed by Dante Ferretti (on the Shepperton Studio soundstage), the station is a cathedral of Deco splendor, no less magical than King’s Cross Station and its Track 9-3/4, the launch point to Hogwarts for another 11-year-old orphan, Harry Potter.
This world-within-a-world is populated with curious folks playing out their own little dramas of disappointment and romance. Among them are an elderly gentleman (The History Boys‘ Richard Griffiths) and his dowager friend (that English stage treasure, Frances de la Tour). Even the Station Inspector, who in story terms in the hounding Javert to Hugo’s jeune Jean Valjean, is not entirely forbidding. Baron Cohen’s rendition summons specters of both the French comic-auteur Jacques Tati and — in a homage so explicit it must be intentional — the persnickety authority figure so often played by Dudley Moore’s comedy partner Peter Cook. The Inspector is given a potential mate in the lovely sad-sack Lisette (Emily Mortimer), whom he pursues in and out of the station’s swank café, with a dance band conducted by…wait, is that dapper gent Johnny Depp?
Selznick’s book, a 500-pager with more pictures than chapters, and readable in an enthralling hour or so, served as the movie’s storyboards, paper prints or flip-book. It was inspired by the films of Méliès, the Lumière brothers, Harold Lloyd and René Clair and, from a later generation of dreamers, François Truffaut’s debut feature, The 400 Blows; the book’s Hugo is a ringer for Jean-Pierre Léaud, the 15-year-old who played Truffaut’s ragamuffin truant Antoine Doinel. Hugo is no less desperate, but as animated by Butterfield’s idealized, pre-Raphaelite beauty, he is a lost saint, not a lost scoundrel. Hugo has a mission, which will bring him a home, the gratitude of parent-figures and the companionship of Isabelle, a girl no less resourceful than he — and, in her Louise Brooks haircut, a silent-film goddess in her own right.
Scorsese had two missions of his own. One was to use his first children’s-film project to push 3-D beyond gimmickry (though his climactic restaging of Arrival of a Train comes close). The sharper images and more beckoning depths, gorgeously captured by cinematographer Robert Richardson, reveal the Montparnasse station as a magnificent fantasy coexisting with Hugo’s poignant reality. Scorsese also wanted to open viewers’ eyes to the sacred sorcery of the first great films. In an ecstatic primer for the young, and a reminder for their elders, Hugo and Isabelle flip through a book of movie history and images spring to life: the films of Lumière, the Edison company, Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks — the whole fabulous parade. Suggestion for FOOFS (Friends Of Old Films): this weekend, take in a double feature of Hugo and The Artist, another splendid new film that means to rekindle a nearly-century-old love affair for silent movies.
But Hugo is more than a love letter to film preservation, a charitable donation to movie lovers, critics included. It is a fable as sensitive and powerful as any Scorsese film since The Age of Innocence nearly two decades ago. Bursting with earned emotion, Hugo is a mechanism that comes to life at the turn of a key in the shape of a heart.
Inventing a World, Just Like Clockwork
NYT Critics' Pick
By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
Published: November 22, 2011
“Hugo,” an enchantment from Martin Scorsese, is the 3-D children’s movie that you might expect from the director of “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas.” It’s serious, beautiful, wise to the absurdity of life and in the embrace of a piercing longing. No one gets clubbed to death, but shadows loom, and a ferocious Doberman nearly lands in your lap. The movie is based on the book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” but is also very much an expression of the filmmaker’s movie love. Surely the name of its author, Brian Selznick, caught his eye: Mr. Selznick is related to David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind” — kismet for a cinematic inventor like Mr. Scorsese.
Mr. Scorsese’s fidelity to Mr. Selznick’s original story is very nearly complete, though this is also, emphatically, his own work. Gracefully adapted by John Logan, the movie involves a lonely, melancholic orphan, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), who in the early 1930s tends all the clocks in a Parisian train station. Seemingly abandoned by his uncle, the station’s official timekeeper (Ray Winstone), Hugo lives alone, deep in the station’s interior, in a dark, dusty, secret apartment that was built for employees. There, amid clocks, gears, pulleys, jars and purloined toys, he putters and sleeps and naturally dreams, mostly of fixing a delicate automaton that his dead father, a clockmaker (Jude Law), found once upon a time. The automaton is all that remains of a happy past.
Hugo has been repairing the automaton with mechanical parts salvaged from the toys he has stolen from a toy store in the station. All that he needs now to bring the windup figure to life — it sits frozen, with a pen at the ready, as if waiting for inspiration — is the key that will open its heart-shaped lock. After assorted stops and starts and quick getaways, Hugo finds the key during an adventure involving the toy-store owner and his goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz). A beloved, wanted child, she brings Hugo into her life, which is how he discovers that the cantankerous shopkeeper with the white goatee and sad, watchful eyes is Georges Méliès (a touching Ben Kingsley).
The name means nothing to Hugo and may not mean much to most contemporary viewers, but it means a great deal to this lovely movie. A magician turned moving-picture pioneer, Méliès (1861-1938) began his new career after seeing one of the first public film projections in Paris on Dec. 28, 1895. Until then, early moving pictures had been commercially exhibited on Kinetoscopes, peephole machines that enabled viewers to watch brief films, one person at a time. The image was tiny — less than two inches wide — and moving pictures didn’t become cinema as we know it until wizards like the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière created machines like the cinématographe, which projected larger-than-life images on screens that people watched as an audience.
While the Lumières dazzled with nonfiction films that they called actualités, Méliès enthralled with fantasies and trick films like “A Trip to the Moon” (1902). In this comic 16-minute science-fiction masterwork, a gaggle of scientists in knee breeches fly in a rocket to the Moon, where they encounter acrobatic creatures with lobster claws amid puffs of smoke and clever cinematic sleights of hand. In the film’s most famous image, the rocket lands splat in the eye of the Man in the Moon, causing him to squeeze out a fat tear. It was perhaps a prophetic image for Méliès, who, after falling out of fashion and into obscurity, ran a toy store in the Montparnasse station in Paris, which is where he was later rediscovered.
Mr. Selznick opens and closes his book with some soft pencil drawings of Earth’s Moon, that luminous disk on which so many human fantasies (the Man in the Moon included) have been projected. In the book the Moon is something of a screen against which Méliès’s most celebrated cinematic fantasy unfolds. Mr. Scorsese doesn’t exploit this lunar metaphor (perhaps he believes the Moon belongs to Méliès), yet he locates plenty of cinematic poetry here, particularly in the clock imagery, which comes to represent moviemaking itself. The secret is in the clockwork, Hugo’s father says to him in flashback, sounding like an auteurist. Time counts in “Hugo,” yes, but what matters more is that clocks are wound and oiled so that their numerous parts work together as one.
The movie itself is a well-lubricated machine, a trick entertainment and a wind-up toy, and it springs to life instantly in a series of sweeping opening aerial shots that plunge you into the choreographed bustle of the train station. The first time you see Hugo he’s peering out from behind a large wall clock at the human comedy in the station. He’s staring through a cutout in the clock face, an aperture through which he watches several characters who play supporting roles in a spectacle that is by turns slapstick, mystery, melodrama and romance, including the menacing station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), a friendly flower vendor (Emily Mortimer), a woman with a dachshund (Frances de la Tour) and her suitor (Richard Griffiths). When Hugo gazes at them, he’s viewer and director both.
So much happens in this initial whoosh that it feels as if you’d hitched a ride on a rocket too. After the camera divebombs through the station, it follows Hugo as he speeds down halls, a ladder, a chute, a staircase and yet more halls, bringing to mind a Busby Berkeley set and Henry Hill’s long walk into the nightclub in “Goodfellas.” The camera keeps moving, as does Hugo, who, chased by the station master and his Doberman, sprints past James Joyce and Django Reinhardt lookalikes. It’s Paris of the Modernist imagination, though really it’s movieland, where gears loom like those in “Modern Times” and a man who’s part machine oils his bits like the Tin Man (while longing for a heart).
Mr. Scorsese caps this busy introductory section with Hugo looking wistfully at the world from a window high in the station. The image mirrors a stunning shot in his film “Kundun,” in which the young, isolated Dalai Lama looks out across the city, and it also evokes Mr. Scorsese’s well-known recollections about being an asthmatic child who watched life from windows — windows that of course put a frame around the world. This is a story shared by all children, who begin as observers and turn (if all goes well) into participants. But “Hugo” is specifically about those observers of life who, perhaps out of loneliness and with desire, explore reality through its moving images, which is why it’s also about the creation of a cinematic imagination — Hugo’s, Méliès’s, Mr. Scorsese’s, ours.
“Hugo” is the tale of a boy, one of fiction’s sentimental orphans, and the world he invents, yet, unsurprisingly, its most heartfelt passages are about Méliès. The old filmmaker is as broken and in need of revival as the automaton, and while you can guess what happens, it’s the getting there — how the clock is wound — that surprises and often delights. Waves of melancholy wash over the story and keep the treacle at bay, as do the spasms of broad comedy, much of it nimbly executed by Mr. Baron Cohen. There is something poignant and paradoxical about Mr. Scorsese’s honoring a film pioneer in digital (and in 3-D, no less), yet these moving pictures belong to the same land of dreams that Méliès once explored, left for a time and entered once again through the love of the audience.
“Hugo” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). The death of a parent, some child peril and a fierce dog.
HUGO
Opens on Wednesday nationwide.
Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by John Logan, based on the novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” by Brian Selznick; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; music by Howard Shore; production design by Dante Ferretti; costumes by Sandy Powell; visual effects supervisor, Rob Legato; produced by Graham King, Tim Headington, Mr. Scorsese and Johnny Depp; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes.
WITH: Ben Kingsley (Pappa Georges/Georges Méliès), Sacha Baron Cohen (Station Inspector), Asa Butterfield (Hugo Cabret), Chloë Grace Moretz (Isabelle), Ray Winstone (Uncle Claude), Emily Mortimer (Lisette), Helen McCrory (Mama Jeanne), Christopher Lee (Monsieur Labisse), Michael Stuhlbarg (René Tabard), Frances de la Tour (Madame Emilie), Richard Griffiths (Monsieur Frick) and Jude Law (Hugo’s Father).
Hugo
BY ROGER EBERT
http://www.rogerebert.com/
November 21, 2011
"Hugo" is unlike any other film Martin Scorsese has ever made, and yet possibly the closest to his heart: a big-budget, family epic in 3-D, and in some ways, a mirror of his own life. We feel a great artist has been given command of the tools and resources he needs to make a movie about — movies. That he also makes it a fable that will be fascinating for (some, not all) children is a measure of what feeling went into it.
In broad terms, the story of his hero, Hugo Cabret, is Scorsese's own story. In Paris of the '30s, a bright young boy spends his childhood looking out at the world from a well-placed window, and schooling himself in the workings of artistic mechanisms. Hugo's father is in charge of the clocks at a cavernous Parisian train station. His dream is to complete an automaton, an automated man he found in a museum. He dies with it left unperfected.
Rather than be treated as an orphan, the boy hides himself in the maze of ladders, catwalks, passages and gears of the clockworks themselves, keeping them running right on time. He feeds himself with croissants snatched from station shops and begins to sneak off to the movies.
His life in the station is made complicated by a toy shop owner named Georges Melies. Yes, this grumpy old man, played by Ben Kingsley, is none other than the immortal French film pioneer, who was also the original inventor of the automaton. Hugo has no idea of this. The real Melies was a magician who made his first movies to play tricks on his audiences.
Leave it to Scorsese to make his first 3-D movie about the man who invented special effects. There is a parallel with the asthmatic Scorsese, living in Little Italy but not of it, observing life from the windows of his apartment, soaking up the cinema from television and local theaters, adopting great directors as his mentors, and in the case of Michael Powell, rescuing their careers after years of neglect.
The way "Hugo" deals with Melies is enchanting in itself, but the film's first half is devoted to the escapades of its young hero. In the way the film uses CGI and other techniques to create the train station and the city, the movie is breathtaking. The opening shot swoops above the vast cityscape of Paris and ends with Hugo (Asa Butterfield) peering out of an opening in a clock face far above the station floor. We follow his Dickensian adventures as he stays one step ahead of the choleric Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), in chase sequences through crowds of travelers. Hugo always manages to escape back to his refuge behind the walls and above the ceiling of the station.
His father (Jude Law), seen in flashbacks, has left behind notebooks, including his plans to finish the automaton. Hugo seems somewhat a genius with gears, screws, springs and levers, and the mechanical man is himself a steampunk masterwork of shining steel and brass.
One day Hugo is able to share his secret with a girl named Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who also lives in the station, and was raised by old Melies and his wife. She is introduced to Hugo's secret world, and he to hers — the books in the cavernous libraries she explores. These two bright kids are miles apart from the cute little pint-sized goofballs in most family pictures.
For a lover of cinema, the best scenes will come in the second half, as flashbacks trace the history and career of Georges Melies. you may have seen his most famous short film, "A Trip to the Moon" (1902), in which space voyagers enter a ship that is shot from a cannon toward the moon; the vessel pokes the Man in the Moon in the eye.
Scorsese has made documentaries about great films and directors, and here he brings those skills to storytelling. We see Melies (who built the first movie studio) using fantastical sets and bizarre costumes to make films with magical effects — all of them hand-tinted, frame by frame. And as the plot makes unlikely connections, the old man is able to discover that he is not forgotten, but indeed is honored as worthy of the Pantheon.
Not long ago, I saw a 3-D children's film about penguins. I thought it was a simpleminded use of the medium. Scorsese uses 3-D here as it should be used, not as a gimmick but as an enhancement of the total effect. Notice in particular his re-creation of the famous little film "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" (1897), by the Lumiere brothers. You've probably heard its legend: As a train rushes toward the camera, the audience panics and struggles to get out of its way. That is a shot which demonstrates the proper use of 3-D, which the Lumieres might have used had it been available.
"Hugo" celebrates the birth of the cinema and dramatizes Scorsese's personal pet cause, the preservation of old films. In one heartbreaking scene, we learn that Melies, convinced his time had passed and his work had been forgotten, melted down countless films so that their celluloid could be used to manufacture the heels of women's shoes. But they weren't all melted, and at the end of "Hugo, " we see that thanks to this boy, they never will be. Now there's a happy ending for you.
Cast & Credits
Hugo Cabret - Asa Butterfield
Isabelle - Chloë Grace Moretz
Lisette - Emily Mortimer
Georges Méliès - Ben Kingsley
Hugo's Father - Jude Law
Station inspector - Sacha Baron Cohen
Uncle Claude - Ray Winstone
Monsieur Labisse - Christopher Lee
Mama Jeanne - Helen McCrory
Rene Tabard - Michael Stuhlbarg
Madame Emilie - Frances de la Tour
Monsieur Frick - Richard Griffiths
Paramount presents a film directed by Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by John Logan, based on the novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick. Running time: 130 minutes. MPAA rating: PG (for mild thematic material, some action/peril and smoking).
Turning from violent men to a poignant waif, the director pays luminous tribute to old films—in his best new film of the millennium.
By Richard Corliss
http://entertainment.time.com/
November 22, 2011
Martin Scorsese made his rep as the fierce bard of American gangster machismo; from Mean Streets to The Departed he has sung the body choleric. (And, in his last feature film, Shutter Island, the mind chaotic.) So why would he make a movie of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick’s rhapsodically nostalgic children’s book?
Scorsese hasn’t put a kid at the center of one of his movies since the 1974 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, with another 11-year-old (Alfred Lutter’s Tommy). But that boy felt suffocated by his single mom’s demanding love; he suffered from a surfeit of parenting. Hugo has no parent: he was orphaned after his beloved father (Jude Law) died in a fire. His dad had been repairing a mysterious automaton, and Hugo needs to connect with him by finishing the job. As Scorsese has said, “It’s a story about the boy and his relationship with his dead father.” The living take up the work of the dead and, by completing it, justify and fulfill their joint labors.
The child is also fascinated by mechanical marvels like clocks, metal robots and moving pictures. Hugo has a staunch sibling in Scorsese, a life-long lover and preserver of classic films. The 69-year-old director has never lost his infant wonder at the spectacle of giant images in a darkened movie palace. From his earliest movie memories comes a film evoking the very earliest films: the Lumière brothers’ 1896 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, which so startled audiences with its immediacy that it can be called the first horror film, and Georges Méliès’ 1902 A Trip to the Moon, the legendary early fantasy film, in which a spaceship from Earth rockets onto the lunar surface and lodges, splat!, in the right eye of the Man in the Moon. Scorsese, sampling his eternal passion, encompasses a century and more of film legerdemain. That makes Hugo not only an act of devotion from a modern movie artist to the wizards who inspired him; it is also the director’s imaginary autobiography.
The young Marty suffered from asthma, which often kept him at home glued to old movies on TV. Hugo’s life is far more perilous. Fearful of being caught by the pompous station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), and with no way of cashing his uncle’s checks, Hugo works and hides in the clock tower, feeding himself by filching snacks from local shops. He also swipes machine parts from the toy store of stern, gloomy Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley). The boy’s friendship with Georges’ goddaughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) will help him unwrap amazing secrets, including the invention of movie magic.
Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan share Selznick’s belief that movies are both the stuff dreams are made of and the product of supreme technological expertise. The camera is a machine that makes art. Clockworker, magician, filmmaker — each, at his best, is an inspired handyman, a tinker and tinkerer of genius. Like magicians, filmmakers create illusions; the very act of movie projection is a trick, fooling the eyes into believing that the still frames exposed in the shutter for 1/24th of a second are moving pictures. And any movie studio is the stage for splendid Rube Goldberg-machine complexity that ascends into fantasy. “If you ever wondered where your dreams come from,” a famous filmmaker says, “this is where they are made.” It’s as if directors were inside our sleeping brains, fiddling with the machinery like clockmaker-elves, tapping our unconscious to mine images that beguile, terrify and astound us.
Since everyone including Scorsese has revealed the story’s secret, I will as well: the gruff Papa Georges, played with such pain and delicacy by Kingsley, is Méliès himself. After a decade’s sensational success making hundreds of short movies that delighted in a magician’s sense of the impossible made visible, the director-entrepreneur went bankrupt and was forced to sell his films to a manufacturer who melted the celluloid stock to make shoe heels. Méliès thought his life’s work was lost; the world thought he died in the Great War. Instead, he survived by running a small store in a train station, where he was discovered by a devoted film fancier, who helped rescue some of the master’s work. A recent compilation by Flicker Alley contains about 175 Méliès films—a miracle of both his inspiration and historians’ restoration. The Méliès story is the mostly factual background for the fictional Hugo’s tale.
Most boys’ adventure stories send their young heroes on far-flung journeys of self-discovery. Hugo travels no more than a mile from the station. He is both a modern child, with an automaton instead of a computer as his obsessive machine, and a Dickensian hero: a beautiful boy in terrible circumstances with the nourishing memory of a wonderful, lost parent. And the Gare Montmartre is his home, school, workhouse, prison and Quasimodo bell tower. As designed by Dante Ferretti (on the Shepperton Studio soundstage), the station is a cathedral of Deco splendor, no less magical than King’s Cross Station and its Track 9-3/4, the launch point to Hogwarts for another 11-year-old orphan, Harry Potter.
This world-within-a-world is populated with curious folks playing out their own little dramas of disappointment and romance. Among them are an elderly gentleman (The History Boys‘ Richard Griffiths) and his dowager friend (that English stage treasure, Frances de la Tour). Even the Station Inspector, who in story terms in the hounding Javert to Hugo’s jeune Jean Valjean, is not entirely forbidding. Baron Cohen’s rendition summons specters of both the French comic-auteur Jacques Tati and — in a homage so explicit it must be intentional — the persnickety authority figure so often played by Dudley Moore’s comedy partner Peter Cook. The Inspector is given a potential mate in the lovely sad-sack Lisette (Emily Mortimer), whom he pursues in and out of the station’s swank café, with a dance band conducted by…wait, is that dapper gent Johnny Depp?
Selznick’s book, a 500-pager with more pictures than chapters, and readable in an enthralling hour or so, served as the movie’s storyboards, paper prints or flip-book. It was inspired by the films of Méliès, the Lumière brothers, Harold Lloyd and René Clair and, from a later generation of dreamers, François Truffaut’s debut feature, The 400 Blows; the book’s Hugo is a ringer for Jean-Pierre Léaud, the 15-year-old who played Truffaut’s ragamuffin truant Antoine Doinel. Hugo is no less desperate, but as animated by Butterfield’s idealized, pre-Raphaelite beauty, he is a lost saint, not a lost scoundrel. Hugo has a mission, which will bring him a home, the gratitude of parent-figures and the companionship of Isabelle, a girl no less resourceful than he — and, in her Louise Brooks haircut, a silent-film goddess in her own right.
Scorsese had two missions of his own. One was to use his first children’s-film project to push 3-D beyond gimmickry (though his climactic restaging of Arrival of a Train comes close). The sharper images and more beckoning depths, gorgeously captured by cinematographer Robert Richardson, reveal the Montparnasse station as a magnificent fantasy coexisting with Hugo’s poignant reality. Scorsese also wanted to open viewers’ eyes to the sacred sorcery of the first great films. In an ecstatic primer for the young, and a reminder for their elders, Hugo and Isabelle flip through a book of movie history and images spring to life: the films of Lumière, the Edison company, Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks — the whole fabulous parade. Suggestion for FOOFS (Friends Of Old Films): this weekend, take in a double feature of Hugo and The Artist, another splendid new film that means to rekindle a nearly-century-old love affair for silent movies.
But Hugo is more than a love letter to film preservation, a charitable donation to movie lovers, critics included. It is a fable as sensitive and powerful as any Scorsese film since The Age of Innocence nearly two decades ago. Bursting with earned emotion, Hugo is a mechanism that comes to life at the turn of a key in the shape of a heart.
Inventing a World, Just Like Clockwork
NYT Critics' Pick
By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
Published: November 22, 2011
Mr. Scorsese’s fidelity to Mr. Selznick’s original story is very nearly complete, though this is also, emphatically, his own work. Gracefully adapted by John Logan, the movie involves a lonely, melancholic orphan, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), who in the early 1930s tends all the clocks in a Parisian train station. Seemingly abandoned by his uncle, the station’s official timekeeper (Ray Winstone), Hugo lives alone, deep in the station’s interior, in a dark, dusty, secret apartment that was built for employees. There, amid clocks, gears, pulleys, jars and purloined toys, he putters and sleeps and naturally dreams, mostly of fixing a delicate automaton that his dead father, a clockmaker (Jude Law), found once upon a time. The automaton is all that remains of a happy past.
Hugo has been repairing the automaton with mechanical parts salvaged from the toys he has stolen from a toy store in the station. All that he needs now to bring the windup figure to life — it sits frozen, with a pen at the ready, as if waiting for inspiration — is the key that will open its heart-shaped lock. After assorted stops and starts and quick getaways, Hugo finds the key during an adventure involving the toy-store owner and his goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz). A beloved, wanted child, she brings Hugo into her life, which is how he discovers that the cantankerous shopkeeper with the white goatee and sad, watchful eyes is Georges Méliès (a touching Ben Kingsley).
The name means nothing to Hugo and may not mean much to most contemporary viewers, but it means a great deal to this lovely movie. A magician turned moving-picture pioneer, Méliès (1861-1938) began his new career after seeing one of the first public film projections in Paris on Dec. 28, 1895. Until then, early moving pictures had been commercially exhibited on Kinetoscopes, peephole machines that enabled viewers to watch brief films, one person at a time. The image was tiny — less than two inches wide — and moving pictures didn’t become cinema as we know it until wizards like the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière created machines like the cinématographe, which projected larger-than-life images on screens that people watched as an audience.
While the Lumières dazzled with nonfiction films that they called actualités, Méliès enthralled with fantasies and trick films like “A Trip to the Moon” (1902). In this comic 16-minute science-fiction masterwork, a gaggle of scientists in knee breeches fly in a rocket to the Moon, where they encounter acrobatic creatures with lobster claws amid puffs of smoke and clever cinematic sleights of hand. In the film’s most famous image, the rocket lands splat in the eye of the Man in the Moon, causing him to squeeze out a fat tear. It was perhaps a prophetic image for Méliès, who, after falling out of fashion and into obscurity, ran a toy store in the Montparnasse station in Paris, which is where he was later rediscovered.
Mr. Selznick opens and closes his book with some soft pencil drawings of Earth’s Moon, that luminous disk on which so many human fantasies (the Man in the Moon included) have been projected. In the book the Moon is something of a screen against which Méliès’s most celebrated cinematic fantasy unfolds. Mr. Scorsese doesn’t exploit this lunar metaphor (perhaps he believes the Moon belongs to Méliès), yet he locates plenty of cinematic poetry here, particularly in the clock imagery, which comes to represent moviemaking itself. The secret is in the clockwork, Hugo’s father says to him in flashback, sounding like an auteurist. Time counts in “Hugo,” yes, but what matters more is that clocks are wound and oiled so that their numerous parts work together as one.
The movie itself is a well-lubricated machine, a trick entertainment and a wind-up toy, and it springs to life instantly in a series of sweeping opening aerial shots that plunge you into the choreographed bustle of the train station. The first time you see Hugo he’s peering out from behind a large wall clock at the human comedy in the station. He’s staring through a cutout in the clock face, an aperture through which he watches several characters who play supporting roles in a spectacle that is by turns slapstick, mystery, melodrama and romance, including the menacing station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), a friendly flower vendor (Emily Mortimer), a woman with a dachshund (Frances de la Tour) and her suitor (Richard Griffiths). When Hugo gazes at them, he’s viewer and director both.
So much happens in this initial whoosh that it feels as if you’d hitched a ride on a rocket too. After the camera divebombs through the station, it follows Hugo as he speeds down halls, a ladder, a chute, a staircase and yet more halls, bringing to mind a Busby Berkeley set and Henry Hill’s long walk into the nightclub in “Goodfellas.” The camera keeps moving, as does Hugo, who, chased by the station master and his Doberman, sprints past James Joyce and Django Reinhardt lookalikes. It’s Paris of the Modernist imagination, though really it’s movieland, where gears loom like those in “Modern Times” and a man who’s part machine oils his bits like the Tin Man (while longing for a heart).
Mr. Scorsese caps this busy introductory section with Hugo looking wistfully at the world from a window high in the station. The image mirrors a stunning shot in his film “Kundun,” in which the young, isolated Dalai Lama looks out across the city, and it also evokes Mr. Scorsese’s well-known recollections about being an asthmatic child who watched life from windows — windows that of course put a frame around the world. This is a story shared by all children, who begin as observers and turn (if all goes well) into participants. But “Hugo” is specifically about those observers of life who, perhaps out of loneliness and with desire, explore reality through its moving images, which is why it’s also about the creation of a cinematic imagination — Hugo’s, Méliès’s, Mr. Scorsese’s, ours.
“Hugo” is the tale of a boy, one of fiction’s sentimental orphans, and the world he invents, yet, unsurprisingly, its most heartfelt passages are about Méliès. The old filmmaker is as broken and in need of revival as the automaton, and while you can guess what happens, it’s the getting there — how the clock is wound — that surprises and often delights. Waves of melancholy wash over the story and keep the treacle at bay, as do the spasms of broad comedy, much of it nimbly executed by Mr. Baron Cohen. There is something poignant and paradoxical about Mr. Scorsese’s honoring a film pioneer in digital (and in 3-D, no less), yet these moving pictures belong to the same land of dreams that Méliès once explored, left for a time and entered once again through the love of the audience.
“Hugo” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). The death of a parent, some child peril and a fierce dog.
HUGO
Opens on Wednesday nationwide.
Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by John Logan, based on the novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” by Brian Selznick; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; music by Howard Shore; production design by Dante Ferretti; costumes by Sandy Powell; visual effects supervisor, Rob Legato; produced by Graham King, Tim Headington, Mr. Scorsese and Johnny Depp; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes.
WITH: Ben Kingsley (Pappa Georges/Georges Méliès), Sacha Baron Cohen (Station Inspector), Asa Butterfield (Hugo Cabret), Chloë Grace Moretz (Isabelle), Ray Winstone (Uncle Claude), Emily Mortimer (Lisette), Helen McCrory (Mama Jeanne), Christopher Lee (Monsieur Labisse), Michael Stuhlbarg (René Tabard), Frances de la Tour (Madame Emilie), Richard Griffiths (Monsieur Frick) and Jude Law (Hugo’s Father).
Hugo
BY ROGER EBERT
http://www.rogerebert.com/
November 21, 2011
In broad terms, the story of his hero, Hugo Cabret, is Scorsese's own story. In Paris of the '30s, a bright young boy spends his childhood looking out at the world from a well-placed window, and schooling himself in the workings of artistic mechanisms. Hugo's father is in charge of the clocks at a cavernous Parisian train station. His dream is to complete an automaton, an automated man he found in a museum. He dies with it left unperfected.
Rather than be treated as an orphan, the boy hides himself in the maze of ladders, catwalks, passages and gears of the clockworks themselves, keeping them running right on time. He feeds himself with croissants snatched from station shops and begins to sneak off to the movies.
His life in the station is made complicated by a toy shop owner named Georges Melies. Yes, this grumpy old man, played by Ben Kingsley, is none other than the immortal French film pioneer, who was also the original inventor of the automaton. Hugo has no idea of this. The real Melies was a magician who made his first movies to play tricks on his audiences.
Leave it to Scorsese to make his first 3-D movie about the man who invented special effects. There is a parallel with the asthmatic Scorsese, living in Little Italy but not of it, observing life from the windows of his apartment, soaking up the cinema from television and local theaters, adopting great directors as his mentors, and in the case of Michael Powell, rescuing their careers after years of neglect.
The way "Hugo" deals with Melies is enchanting in itself, but the film's first half is devoted to the escapades of its young hero. In the way the film uses CGI and other techniques to create the train station and the city, the movie is breathtaking. The opening shot swoops above the vast cityscape of Paris and ends with Hugo (Asa Butterfield) peering out of an opening in a clock face far above the station floor. We follow his Dickensian adventures as he stays one step ahead of the choleric Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), in chase sequences through crowds of travelers. Hugo always manages to escape back to his refuge behind the walls and above the ceiling of the station.
His father (Jude Law), seen in flashbacks, has left behind notebooks, including his plans to finish the automaton. Hugo seems somewhat a genius with gears, screws, springs and levers, and the mechanical man is himself a steampunk masterwork of shining steel and brass.
One day Hugo is able to share his secret with a girl named Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who also lives in the station, and was raised by old Melies and his wife. She is introduced to Hugo's secret world, and he to hers — the books in the cavernous libraries she explores. These two bright kids are miles apart from the cute little pint-sized goofballs in most family pictures.
For a lover of cinema, the best scenes will come in the second half, as flashbacks trace the history and career of Georges Melies. you may have seen his most famous short film, "A Trip to the Moon" (1902), in which space voyagers enter a ship that is shot from a cannon toward the moon; the vessel pokes the Man in the Moon in the eye.
Scorsese has made documentaries about great films and directors, and here he brings those skills to storytelling. We see Melies (who built the first movie studio) using fantastical sets and bizarre costumes to make films with magical effects — all of them hand-tinted, frame by frame. And as the plot makes unlikely connections, the old man is able to discover that he is not forgotten, but indeed is honored as worthy of the Pantheon.
Not long ago, I saw a 3-D children's film about penguins. I thought it was a simpleminded use of the medium. Scorsese uses 3-D here as it should be used, not as a gimmick but as an enhancement of the total effect. Notice in particular his re-creation of the famous little film "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" (1897), by the Lumiere brothers. You've probably heard its legend: As a train rushes toward the camera, the audience panics and struggles to get out of its way. That is a shot which demonstrates the proper use of 3-D, which the Lumieres might have used had it been available.
"Hugo" celebrates the birth of the cinema and dramatizes Scorsese's personal pet cause, the preservation of old films. In one heartbreaking scene, we learn that Melies, convinced his time had passed and his work had been forgotten, melted down countless films so that their celluloid could be used to manufacture the heels of women's shoes. But they weren't all melted, and at the end of "Hugo, " we see that thanks to this boy, they never will be. Now there's a happy ending for you.
Cast & Credits
Hugo Cabret - Asa Butterfield
Isabelle - Chloë Grace Moretz
Lisette - Emily Mortimer
Georges Méliès - Ben Kingsley
Hugo's Father - Jude Law
Station inspector - Sacha Baron Cohen
Uncle Claude - Ray Winstone
Monsieur Labisse - Christopher Lee
Mama Jeanne - Helen McCrory
Rene Tabard - Michael Stuhlbarg
Madame Emilie - Frances de la Tour
Monsieur Frick - Richard Griffiths
Paramount presents a film directed by Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by John Logan, based on the novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick. Running time: 130 minutes. MPAA rating: PG (for mild thematic material, some action/peril and smoking).
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