President-elect Obama with former Presidents Bush (41), Carter and Clinton and current President Bush at the WHite House on Jan. 7, 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Link of the day: John Pilger, master of the bitter truth, tells it like it is about the military takeover of the United States under the leadership  of the first black president. 

"Under the 'weak' Obama, militarism has risen perhaps as never before. With not a single tank on the White House lawn, a military coup has taken place in Washington. In 2008, while his liberal devotees dried their eyes, Obama accepted the entire Pentagon of his predecessor, George Bush: its wars and war crimes. As the constitution is replaced by an emerging police state, those who destroyed Iraq with shock and awe, piled up the rubble in Afghanistan and reduced Libya to a Hobbesian nightmare, are ascendant across the US administration. Behind their beribboned facade, more former US soldiers are killing themselves than are dying on battlefields. Last year 6,500 veterans took their own lives. Put out more flags.

"The historian Norman Pollack calls this "'iberal fascism': 'For goose-steppers substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.' "

Read Pilger's article here

My Log 385: Al Jazeera continues to make good documentaries about subjects that seem to be taboo to other networks

English: An Israeli M60 Patton destroyed in the Sinai. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When the cease fire came into effect, Israel had lost territory on the east side of the Suez Canal to Egypt – , but gained territory west of the canal and in the Golan Heights – . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Syrian T62 Tank at Yom-Kipur war עברית: טנק סורי נתוש(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Drowning Pool, US rock band whose music
 was used in torture in Guantanamo

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I don’t know if I am repeating myself, but the fact is, the Arab TV network, Al Jazeera, which can be bought for $3 a month in Canada, produces some of the most stimulating and pointed documentary programmes now available anywhere.

Today I watched a programme called Songs of War, which follows a man who for 40 years has been composing music to help children learn to read and write, for the famous programe Sesame Street.

Christophere Cerf, a mild-mannered middle-aged man, was shocked to learn that some of his songs had been used in Guantanamo Bay to breakdown prisoners so that they were be more amenable to interrogation, used in fact, as torture.

He set out to discover how music, which he had always thought of as a beneficent fore in human life, could have developed this dark side.

He sought out people who had been employed by the U.S.military machine as experts in the use of music as torture, and was told how it had become regular practice to subject prisoners to extremely loud music for hours at a time, to keep them awake and contribute to their sense of isolation as they were bound, shackled and subjected to music so loud and so pervasive that, as one would say, “you can’t hear yourself think.”

This, said one former army interrogator, is the ideal state in which to interrogate anyone. It is not just the music, but its use along with the sense of having been captured, hidden behind face masks, forced to wear gloves, deprived of every sensory experience usually available, that works the magic and strips a man to the bone, as it were.

The object, said one interrogator, is to disover the truth, to ensure that the prisoner will tell the truth, and by subjecting him to conditions that strip him of all his previous sense of huanity, that can, presumably, be achieved. Or at least that is how the military view it all.

Christopher Cerf discovered that the effects of music in its various forms had first been examined at McGill University, and is still being researched at the University of Montreal, one of whose researchers testified in French in the film on the way that the brain handles music.

A young former guard at Guantanamo, who had been so disturbed by what he saw and was involved enforcing, that he quit the army, began to talk publicly asbout his experiences, and was, when Cerf met him, unemployed and homeless, told of how prisoners were kept in one position for hour after hour, forced to sit on cold concrete floors while being bombasrded with music of all sorts, sometimes with two songs at once, creating a dissonance that the human brain finds difficult to deal with.  Later he interviewed a band called Drowning Pool whose music had been used at Guantanamo, but who had been forbidden from speaking about it publicly.

Cerf put himself throught he experience of interrogation in which, although it was only a simulated exercise and could not approach the prisoner’s real sense of isolation and dismay at simply being a prisoner, nevetheless caused him to begin to think like a helpless person, wondering whether, if he were to change his position for example to lie down, whether “they” would come and beat him. “So,” he concluded, “if it made me think like that, one an imagine the impact on a real prisoner.”

Others to whom he talked --- experts employed by universities in most cases --- said how music had been used as an instrument of war almost as long as war has existed. But the military men agreed it had not been used to any great effect until the Korean war, and in Vietnam, where battalions equipped to deliver music as ---- to quote one man, “acoustic artillery”,  had been broadcast back and forth by the contending armies.  In one street protest in Pittsburgh, he discovered that people had experienced something of the intense, painful results of broadcast signals which gave them a taste of what torture by music is like.

This is the sort of anti-estabishment documentary in which Al Jazeera has become expert in the last few years, and others that are being broadcast at the moment include a three-part series  about a war that took place  40 years ago, a war known to the Egyptians as the War in October, and to the Israelis as the Yom Kippur war. This is a war in which Syria and Egypt attacked Israel. It lasted only for three weeks, and was won by Israel, largely, according to what was revealed in the first two episodes, because of mistaken decisions taken by the Egyptian leadership under Sadat. I don’t know whether most other people were as ignorant of the facts as I was, but this series has rescued me from my assumption that the Arab forces were a hopeless sort of rabble unable to withstand the Israeli efficiency. They were, on the contrary, very much in the war with serious intent, and with a good deal of military effectiveness, even though eventually they lost.  A series like this, presented with every asppearane of objectivity and factual precision, is a real contribte to knowledge.

I suggest that anyone interested in keeping track of these documentaries --- not always easy, because Al Jazeera’s advertised schedules sometimes seem out of whack --- could keep tabs on the progrmames Wtness, Al Jazeera World, People and Power, Empire, and even the daily programme Inside Story which gathers experts from across the Middle East (and beyond) to discuss an issue of immediate relevance.  All of these programmes screen excellent shows that are a real contribution to public information.

My Log 384: Superb French film really gets under the skin of its 17-year-old schoolgirl character, as she struggles into womanhood; and a loopy doc unworthy of any festival

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I am lucky to live in Montreal directly upstairs from one of the best repertory cinemas in the city, the Cinema du Parc, which plays a role in most of the many film festivals held in Montreal. Recently it was part of  the large festival of Black Films, and currently it is one of  half a dozen venues for the 250 movies being screened by the Festival du Nouveau Cinema, now in its 42nd year. The Cinema  manages to keep up its own programmes, in which it offers many of the best current films, as well as producing retrospectives of classic films, such as the screening earlier in the year of all 44 of Woody Allen’s films, and the current revival of the best of Jacques Tati.

Yesterday I took in one of the Festival offerings, as well as the three-hour sensation, winner of the Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival this year, La vie d’Adele, alternatively called, in English, Blue is the Warmest Colour.

It is difficult not to feel obliged to write something about this latter film, not only because it features perhaps the most explicit  sequences of lesbian love-making  ever seen in a major motion picture, but because it is a movie, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, which succeeds in getting right under the skin of its heroine, a 17-year-old  high school girl, played with rivetting intensity byAdele Exarchopoulos, a 19-year-old actress on the way up in French cinema.

The movie opens with a group of schoolgirls hanging around gossiping  about boys, and the things that can happen between boys and girls. And --- though I have to confess a limited knowledge of this world --- these scenes seem so authentic as to be delightful to watch and listen to. Adele seems a normal girl, rather more shy than most of her friends, who find it difficult to convince her that a young Arabic-speaking man who is part of the student  group is hot for her.  The camera follows her through her first sexual experience with this young man, a budding actor, and through the breakup of their friendship, leaving her with the first tears rolling down her cheeks.

Pretty soon at a party she catches the eye of a woman with blue-tinted hair, a slightly older woman who turns out to be in her fourth year studying Fine Arts at the university. She is extraordinarily attractive, this woman, and when they get into a conversation one immediately begins to feel how strongly  Adele is drawn to her. When the woman turns up at her school on a later day, they get into conversation, and her obvious admiration for Adele  quickly turns into physical embraces, and eventually love-making. The actress playing this fascinating character is Lea Seydoux, a 28-year-old daughter of a family that, in real life, appears to own about half the French movie business, but the fact is, whatever influence she may have used to get this role, she carries it out with a panache that is quite astounding. From the first she exudes the sense that she is a predator, and yet not a dangerous one, a predator interested in her own pleasures, but willing to treat gently the younger woman who has fallen into her ambiance.

This is a remarkable performance by Lea Seydoux, a performacne so powerful that there is little doubt the movie gets its strength and truthfulness from her constant presence.  When, at about the midway point, she becomes less present, the movie seems also to dip into a more somnolent air.  

Adele, noticing her lover’s attraction to another woman, a heavily pregant one, permits herself a brief fling with a young man. She returns one day to Emma’s apartment to be confronted by a furious lover, accusing her of lying, of being a slut, a whore, telling her to get out, she never wants to see her again. Suddenly the lover has become a termagant, and this is one of the most ferociously effective rants I can remember seeing on the sreen in many years. The tears and entreaties of the abandoned girl do not move her. She slams the door on Adele’s face, shuts her out completely from her life, and the rest of the movie becomes almost anti-climactic as it follows Adele into the early days of a career as a teacher of young chidren.

The tedium of Adele’s life is relieved only once when Emma agrees to meet her for coffee: once again, Adele cannot disguise her continuing love, and is once again distressed to learn that, while maintaining a warm regard her, Emma says she no longer loves her --- she is with someone else now.

This is a remarkable tale drawn from a graphic novel --- which is the fancy name for a comic book these days --- and in its French name it seems to promise that the story will be continued in later films, this one having embraced only Chapters 1 and 2. 

It may be doubted whether these continuations will ever be achieved, because not long after the award of the Cannes prize, which went to Kechiche and his two main actresses, technicians who had worked on the film accused the director of harassment, unpaid work, and violations of  labour laws. And thereafter the two actresses also complained about the director’s behaviour during the shooting, describing the experience as “horrible”, and vowing never to work with him again.

As for the festival contribution to my day’s viewing, perhaps the less said the better. It was called CowJews and Indians, was made by an Americn Jew called Marc Halberstadt, whose idea was that he should demand restitution of the property seized from his family during the Nazi times in Germany. Then he had the thought that he himself was living on land that had been stolen from the Indians. So eventually he stitched together the idea that the Indians should try to get the Germans to pay them rent, thus cutting out the middle-man, namely, himself. This was a loopy idea, which resulted in his being thrown out of the premises he was claiming in Germany.

But then he had a further idea, that just as Europeans had violated Indians by sending them to the residential schools, to be made into copies of white men, so the Christians had made over the historical Jewish figure of Jesus into a white European image. He tried to get various German pastors to hang in their church a slightly comic Jewish-oriented portrait, and the end of it was that the Indians from Akwasasne and Lakota territory whom he had recruited in his campaign were sitting around discussing how they had been used by him for purposes which he had never really made clear to them.

A crazy project from the start, and hardly one that deserved inclusion in any festival.

My Log 384: Magnificent film on the Bhopal tragedy tells us more truth than we would like to acknowledge about the reality of our modern world

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: A protest rally against DOW, in Bhopal. An effigy of Anderson can be seen at the start of the rally. Photo taken from a building on Chola Road. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Dow Chemical banner, Bhopal, India. Français : Bannière Dow Chemical, Bhopal, Inde. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Bhopal, India (Photo credit: 350.org)

Of all the many accidents, attacks, fires, collapses and disasters to which the modern world has given rise, undoubtedly the most horrific has been the cloud of poison gas that overcame the city of Bhopal in, India on Dec 3 1984, arising from a pesticide plant run by the United States company Union Carbide.

Hundreds of its victims died in their beds, others while running about in the area of the factory, trying to escape the gas. Some estimates put the deaths during the three decades since the accident occurred at 25,000, and many thousands more have been irrevocably injured.

Since then the incident has become the poster-boy, as it were, for a wide range of some of the worst aspects of modern life. Probably the first of these is the chronic indifference of the wealth-owning elite everywhere to the poor. A close second must come the racism which has allowed the Western managers and owners responsible for the plant to simply ignore every attempt that has been made to bring them to justice.  (For example, the head man of Union Carbide at the time was an American called Warren Anderson. He flew to India in the early days of the incident, but he was greeted by a protesting crowd, was shuffled away by police, who announced they had arrested him, had ordered him to face trial, then had granted him bail, and allowed him to skip bail by getting back into his private pane at the first opportunity and returning to the United States, whose government has since then rejected all efforts made by India to have him extradited. Maybe this should have been recalled when the U.S. was making such a fuss about Russia having refused to extradite Edward Snowden recently. There is, in fact, a long list running over many decades, of U.S. refusal to extradite anyone they did not want to extradite, just as Russia did this year.)

As recently as two or three years ago, and probably still, for all I know, Anderson is living in opulent retirement in Long Island, while tens of thousands of victims of his company’s negligence continue to suffer, 29 years after the event, in Bhopal, hundreds and hundreds of their children still, at birth exhibiting terrible physical and mental deformities.

This whole story is told with magnificent fidelity in a film, Bhopali, made by a man called Van Maximilian Carlson that was screened on Saturday night by Cinema Politica, Concordia University’s excellent winter series of documentary films bearing political messages.

To make a long story short, the factory was fairly quickly closed and abandoned, but its ruins, heavily polluted with all manner of chemicals, were left to stand and impregnate the local water table with its chemicals. Incredibly, until very recenty, all effortts to persuade either the companies involved or the local governments to clean up this disgusting pollution had failed, and people have been forced to drink water that they know is impregnated with a variety of poisons that have resulted in deformed births for so many of their children. Efforts made to bring the company to justice have been unavailing: indeed, as is usually the case in industrial accidents, it is not always clear who should be sued, since the Union Carbide factory was not even at the time of the accident, a wholly owned subsidiary of the company, but had already been sold to Indian owners, and has since been sold to another Indian company. Meantime Union Carbide has been bought and absorbed by Dow Chemical, this merger resulting in formation of the world’s largest chemical company, at which time  Dow became responsible for the liabilities of the original company.

The film-makers, though they were able to shoot in the affected area of the city quite freely, and to interview the wretched victims --- surely among the poorest people on earth --- of the accident, tried but failed to have anyone from the company respond to their requests for interviews.

This is also par for the course: companies are notoriously shy of people inqiring into their affairs, especially those in the United States and Canada.

A bright new effiicent hospital has been built in Bhopal, but the victims of the disaster have discovered that it will not treat them unless they pay the fees upfront.  So the only place they could turn to for help was a clinic called the Chingari clinic, operating in small, crowded quarters, and on an extremely limited budget, that has been able to give some help to the unfortunate chidren born subsequent to this disaster, without charge.  The international campaign of support of the Bhopal victims apparently has  managed to direct additional funds to the heroic people who have been running this clinic throughout these years when the combined power and wealth of western industry and government has treated them with such chilling indifference.

I have to say here, as someone who has made his share of protest films in the past, that this film is an absolutely magnificent plea for help for these people. Not a false note has been struck in it from first to last, and the rather small audience that gathered to watch it on Saturday sat rivetted to the screen as it unfolded its terrible tale.

When the film ended, I was reminded  of an experience I had in the theatre in the 1960s when the Royal Shakespeare company director Peter Brook staged a version of Rolf Hochhuth’s play, The Representative, which deals with relations between the Pope and the Jews during the war. That play began as one entered the theatre and was  confronted by two vast doors across the stage, doors of a gas-oven, which, when they opened, ensured that the whole action should be seen as taking place within that terrifying place. When the play ended, for the only time in my experience, the audience sat in utter silence for three minutes, too moved to applaud, too stirred to even react.  I had something the same feeling on Saturday night when the end of the movie wass greeted by a thin scattering of applause from an audience whose absorption in the movie could not be doubted.

Most  of us stayed as we don’t always do, to hear and take part in the discussion headed by people who have had personal experience in Bhopal, and who have spent now decades trying to work out the most effective way in which they can help the victims of this terrible event.

My Log 383: Concordia students mobilizing a big effort against climate change for a small likely result

Concordia University, Hall Building and McConnell Library Building, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dhaka (Photo credit: eGuide Travel)

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The first articles I wrote having to do with the environment were in 1958, for The Montreal Star. The series was about Pollution, a subject that was so little known at the time that I was advised to assume no one knew anything about it.

It was then I discovered that the Ottawa river was a cesspool into which every small and large town along  its banks poured its raw sewage --- totally untreated.

It was exactly 30 at that time, and for the next half-century or so I kept at it, writing books, pamphlets and making films about the various ways in which human beings have worked to destroy the beautiful Earth on which we live.

Environmentalists now are a major force in almost every country in the world, but I have become more or less convinced along the way that the battle we have all been so earnestly fighting is one that we cannot expect to win. We are opposing the combined forces of the world’s wealth-owners, the corporations they own and direct, and the goverments they control.

It’s  a good fight, and it is probably worth keeping at it, simply for the minor victories we can win from time to time. Occsionally a more enlightened government has been elected here and there that passes legislation that temporarily makes things better. But eventually  that government has been replaced by a government  of the Barbarians, and they have enthusiastically begun to strip away the defences previously erected.

This is by way of introduction to a piece about a lecture I attended last night, a lecture  given by a 26-year-old student of Concordia University in Montreal, to a tiny audience of moslty grey-headed people, who, like me, have never lost that last smidgen of residual hope that a better day could be around the corner.

The lecture was part of a series running throughout the winter by a group called Citizens in Action, organized by a Concordia lecturer called Nadia Alexan, a woman with a European background, I believe. The subject of the lecture was “”Divestment from Fossil Fuel Industries”  which is thought to be essential on a broad scale throughout our society if the worst effects of the growing crisis of climate change are to be avoided.

The lecturer was Anthony Garoufalis Auger, and I have to say that his presentation was excellent, his argument crystal clear, and his facts indisputable. He spoke about the coalition formed by students to persuade the university’s governing board of the need to divest from its investment in companies dealing in dirty forms of energy, because these are contributing to the growing impact of climate change.

When it was over I had two or three thoughts which I did not bother to express duiring the question and answer period, because they were slightly irrelevant to the subject.

 First, was the small scale of the intervention that  the Coalition is demanding. Concordia University has an investment fund of about $100 million, made up of contributions from alumni and other sources. But only $11 million of this is invested in energy companies. So the huge mobilizing job that the students are confronting as they gear up for their great confrontation is all being directed towards a scale of action that, placed against the total of investment in energy, is almost laughably tiny.

Nevertheless a young woman student who was in the audience made a very eloquent case for the proposed action: it was necessary, she said, for people to accept their responsibility for their contribution to the coming climate change, and to work to change such things as are open to them to change.  I could not argue with that, but it left me wondering, all the same, whether so much energy as they were mobilizing could not have been better expended on a bigger target.

It made me think of what I wrote some weeks ago about an excellent film I saw which deplored the impersonality of the modern megalopolis and investigated ways in which to overcome that particular disadvantage of modern life. In that film they dealt with many cities, including Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where they applied the criteria they had established in other cities as they tried to work out what could best be done. In fact they had nothing positive to report from Dhaka, but what struck me forcefully was that they had not even mentioned over-population as a contributory factor in the problems of Bangladesh. Put together with last night’s concentration of immense effort for very little result, it made me wonder whether this has not, perhaps, become a mark of the environmental movement, the expenditure of immense energy to very little result.

I did not want to rain on the young man’s parade: he didn’t deserve that. And in any case, some other members of the audience contributed enough dissentient opinion to do for one evening, especially one advocate of nuclear energy, which he claimed was the best answer to the production of clean energy. How anyone with his eyes open could believe that astonishes me, in face of the by now well-known drastic and widespread damage caused when a nuclear power station does blow up.

A second thought I carried away came as a consequence of one of the older audience members quoting to the young man some of the results obtained by Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute that he founded in 1982. What was striking was that the young man had never heard of Lovins, who, when I was involved in this issue forty years ago was the boy-wonder of the environmental movement. He is now 65, but he has been active ever since, and his Institute --- built according to the best environmental standards so that it needs none of the usual energy inputs  to keep it ticking over --- has recently been advising President Obama that the United States already has the technology to beat the climate change challenge. In just one of their many surprising claims, they say that more efficient use of energy alone could save 44 per cent of projected 2050 electricity needs, at lower cost. That is not so surprising to me, because I remember forty years back when the Cree of James Bay were battling the Hydro-Quebec takeover of their lands, an energy consulting company in New York produced a report for them claiming that if only Quebec would get serious about improving efficiency of the use of energy by building refits and the like, none of the James Bay power was even needed. But it did make me wonder if all the energy the Concordia students are pouring into diverting $11 million from energy investment might not be better employed in pressing for more efficient use of the energy they are presently using.

I can’t help ending this piece by quoting one of Lovins’s most pithy statements. “Economics,” he said in one speech I heard him deliver, “is a form of brain disease.”

And so say all of us.

My Log 382, October 8 2013: GMO foods, nuclear power, unfavorably dissected in Cinema Politica’s latest offering

Monsanto (Photo credit: Grumbler %-|)

T-shirt against GMO food. The logo is not copyrighted. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Concordia University has started again its laudable Cinema Politica series, and its third offering of this tenth year on Monday evening featured  a French film called Tous Cobayes?, or, in English, All of Us Guinea-Pigs Now?

This film, made by Jean-Paul Jaud last year, is a root-and-branch attack on the whole idea of Genetically Modified Organisms (or GMO) when applied to the growing of food.

This is still an extremely controversial subject, and the man whose work this film is built on, Prof. Gilles-Eric Seralini, of Caen University in France, is probably the most controversial figure in the global movement around this subject.

In fact, the global application of GMO to the growing of food crops is one of those subjects that arouses knee-jerk responses among most people who have any interest in it.  The major company responsible for development of the genetic modifications involved, Monsanto, has become a swear word among a certain section of the population, and it is hardly possible any longer to take a moderate position as between being pro-Monsanto and anti-Monsanto.

The fact is that Monsanto and the other companies involved seem to be overwhelmingly winning the day in this battle: GMO food is being grown throughout the world, with effects on people’s health, and the health of society in general, that are at the centre of the argument.

 Prof  Seralini, a microbiologist, has conducted a number of experimeNts on rats that were fed corn genetically modified to be resistent to pesticides, because, they have been manipulated to actually contain the pesticide  within their  physical structure. His results, when published, have been roundly criticized by many scientists and major scientific bodies, just as they have been supported by others. He has claimed that these GMO foods have been allowed into circulation without being subject to adequate testing to indicate their effects. The main argument he has used is that the 90-day trials normally undertaken by the companies have not been long enough to give any worthwhie result. So last night’s film was about a long-term, two-year study he conducted on a large number of rats which, as was shown in the film, developed major, deforming tumours as a result of the food they were fed. He compared them against a control group, in the approved manner, but there were things about the way his study was finally released to the public that aroused the ire of some scientists, and his methodology was also criticized.

 Of course,  from the point of view of a layman like myself (and most other people) this is complicated by the power of the companies, industries and governments that stand behind this GMO science. These are the wealth-owners who, in effect, control most governments throughout the capitalist world, and the suspicion is that many --- some would say, most --- of the scientists who agree with GMO science are in some way controlled by, bought by or dominated by the money forces that are profiting from it.  People are suspicious about things like that in these days, so it is difficult for someone like myself, preternaturally suspicious as I am of the corporate world, not to have a bias in favour of the brave people who are opposing having this science forced on them in their everyday work and lives.

M. Jaud’s film makes no pretence at being objective or even-handed: I had no objection to that because in my day I made films rather like this one, and my rationale thirty years ago still pertains today, even perhaps more so. In most cases --- certainly in these subjects under discussion in this fim,  GMO foods and nuclear power ---- the people one is fighting against are funded up to the hilt, have thousands of employees including vast public relations departments whose very purpose is to make the case for the corporate view of the world, and in such circumstances why should a film-maker who has an hour in which to argue his case be expected to provided twenty minutes or half an hour of his time to spokesmen for the other side?

I didn’t object to that in the film, but, looking acak on it I do feel that the film should have been produced by Cinema Politica with more context for the guidance of its audience.  Most of what I have written about the widespread opinions criticizing Prof. Seralini and all his works I have discovered from other sources: Cinema Politica did not provide me with any suggestion that what we had been watching was in any way a matter for dispute by reputable authorities, and I think they should have done. (I have to add here, I left when the film finished: so far as I could tell, no post-film discussion was intended, and if one took place after I left what I have just said would no longer apply).

The second part of the film was an attack on nuclear power. With this argument I wholeheartedly agreed. Much of what they showed dealt with the victims of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, consequent on the disastrous tsunami. The proponents of nuclear power always argue that it is safe, safer than coal-fired or oil-powered electricity stations, for example. The unfortunate fact is, however, that when an accident does occur, and there have been several of them, it can have a disastrous impact on millions of people, over a huge area of land. It can, in fact, poison land and make it unsafe for habitation for decades to come. And not only that, but when the time comes to decommission even a nuclear power station that has operated for years without accident,  the real problem begins, which is that its radio-active materials have to be guarded for thousands of years if they aren’t to irrevocably damage tens of thousands of people.

Why any sane society would strike that Faustian bargain just to get electricity, which can be generated by safer means, is beyond me. And M. Jaud’s film makes that case so convincingly as to be beyond argument.
In the midst of the argument, The /guardian, always a reliable source, ran a blog saying that whatever the objections to M. /seralini, the issue cannot be swept under the carpet. /they outlined the half dozen or so masin objections to his research, along with his response:

My Log 382, October 8 2013

GMO foods, nuclear power, unfavoraby dissected in Cinema Politica’s latest offering

Concordia University has started its laudable Cinema Politica series, and its third offering of this tenth year on Monday evening featured  a French film called Tous Cobayes?, or, in English, All of Us Guinea-Pigs Now?

This film, made by Jean-Paul Jaud last year, is a root-and-branch attack on the whole idea of Genetically Modified Organisms (or GMO) when applied to the growing of food.

This is still an extremely controversial subject, and the man whose work this film is built on, Prof. Gilles-Eric Seralini, of Caen University in France, is probably the most controversial figure in the global movement around this subject.

In fact, the global application of GMO to the growing of food crops is one of those subjects that arouses knee-jerk responses among most people who have any interest in it.  The major company responsible for development of the genetic modifications involved, Monsanto, has become a swear word among a certain section of the population, and it is hardly possible any longer to take a moderate position as between being pro-Monsanto and anti-Monsanto.

The fact is that Monsanto and the other companies involved seem to be overwhelmingly winning the day in this battle: GMO food is being grown throughout the world, with effects on people’s health, and the health of society in general, that are at the centre of the argument.

 Prof  Seralini, a microbiologist, has conducted a number of experimeNts on rats that were fed corn genetically modified to be resistent to pesticides, because, they have been manipulated to actually contain the pesticide  within their  physical structure. His results, when published, have been roundly criticized by many scientists and major scientific bodies, just as they have been supported by others. He has claimed that these GMO foods have been allowed into circulation without being subject to adequate testing to indicate their effects. The main argument he has used is that the 90-day trials normally undertaken by the companies have not been long enough to give any worthwhie result. So last night’s film was about a long-term, two-year study he conducted on a large number of rats which, as was shown in the film, developed major, deforming tumours as a result of the food they were fed. He compared them against a control group, in the approved manner, but there were things about the way his study was finally released to the public that aroused the ire of some scientists, and his methodology was also criticized.

 Of course,  from the point of view of a layman like myself (and most other people) this is complicated by the power of the companies, industries and governments that stand behind this GMO science. These are the wealth-owners who, in effect, control most governments throughout the capitalist world, and the suspicion is that many --- some would say, most --- of the scientists who agree with GMO science are in some way controlled by, bought by or dominated by the money forces that are profiting from it.  People are suspicious about things like that in these days, so it is difficult for someone like myself, preternaturally suspicious as I am of the corporate world, not to have a bias in favour of the brave people who are opposing having this science forced on them in their everyday work and lives.

M. Jaud’s film makes no pretence at being objective or even-handed: I had no objection to that because in my day I made films rather like this one, and my rationale thirty years ago still pertains today, even perhaps more so. In most cases --- certainly in these subjects under discussion in this fim,  GMO foods and nuclear power ---- the people one is fighting against are funded up to the hilt, have thousands of employees including vast public relations departments whose very purpose is to make the case for the corporate view of the world, and in such circumstances why should a film-maker who has an hour in which to argue his case be expected to provided twenty minutes or half an hour of his time to spokesmen for the other side?

I didn’t object to that in the film, but, looking acak on it I do feel that the film should have been produced by Cinema Politica with more context for the guidance of its audience.  Most of what I have written about the widespread opinions criticizing Prof. Seralini and all his works I have discovered from other sources: Cinema Politica did not provide me with any suggestion that what we had been watching was in any way a matter for dispute by reputable authorities, and I think they should have done. (I have to add here, I left when the film finished: so far as I could tell, no post-film discussion was intended, and if one took place after I left what I have just said would no longer apply).

The second part of the film was an attack on nuclear power. With this argument I wholeheartedly agreed. Much of what they showed dealt with the victims of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, consequent on the disastrous tsunami. The proponents of nuclear power always argue that it is safe, safer than coal-fired or oil-powered electricity stations, for example. The unfortunate fact is, however, that when an accident does occur, and there have been several of them, it can have a disastrous impact on millions of people, over a huge area of land. It can, in fact, poison land and make it unsafe for habitation for decades to come. And not only that, but when the time comes to decommission even a nuclear power station that has operated for years without accident,  the real problem begins, which is that its radio-active materials have to be guarded for thousands of years if they aren’t to irrevocably damage tens of thousands of people.

Why any sane society would strike that Faustian bargain just to get electricity, which can be generated by safer means, is beyond me. And M. Jaud’s film makes that case so convincingly as to be beyond argument.

                  

The British newspaper The Guardian, in a blog they published recently, asserted that the GMO issue cannot be swept under the carpet. They provided a list of the major objections to Prof. Seralini's work, and his responses to them: 

1. The French researchers were accused of using the Sprague Dawley rat strain which is said to be prone to developing cancers. In response Séralini and his team say these are the same rats as used by Monsanto in the 90-day trials which it used to get authorisation for its maize. This strain of rat has been used in most animal feeding trials to evaluate the safety of GM foods, and their results have long been used by the biotech industry to secure approval to market GM products.

2. The sample size of rats was said to be too small. Séralini responded that six is the OECD recommended protocol for GM food safety toxicology studies and he had based his study on the toxicity part of OECD protocol no. 453. This states that for a cancer trial you need a minimum of 50 animals of each sex per test group but for a toxicity trial a minimum of 10 per sex suffices. Monsanto used 20 rats of each sex per group in its feeding trials but only analysed 10, the same number as Séralini.

3. No data was given about the rats' food intake. Seralini says the rats were allowed to eat as much food as they liked.

4. Séralini has not released the raw data from the trial. In response he says he won't release it until the data underpinning Monsanto's authorisation of NK603 in Europe is also made public.

5. His funding was provided by an anti-biotechnology organisation whose scientific board Séralini heads. But he counters that almost all GM research is funded by corporates or by pro-biotech institutio