cflpeace

I saw "Mission to Moscow" tonight and was amazed that Warner Brothers made it. What a welcome relief! Like most of my generation, I was raised under McCarthyism, which made everything about the U.S.A. to be saintly and everything from the U.S.S.R. to be the devil itself. I learned the word "propaganda" was anything the Communists put out; I would be an adult before it would occur to me that everything I heard about "Communism" and "Socialism" was all Capitalist propaganda, taught to me by the Capitalist press in an era in which anyone saying anything to the contrary suffered grave consequences.

Much independent reading and traveling later, I came to see that the land that I had been taught to blindly pledge my allegiance to was accurately described by Dr. Martin Luther King as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, my own government." The Capitalists lied to me! So how do I know all they told me about Stalin and the Soviet Union was true? I have friends who've been there, but I've never have.

Ah! But I have been Nicaragua six times and found it to be the opposite of what I've been told by the Capitalist press. Later, I've visited Cuba eight times and it definitely doesn't resemble anything we're told about it. I spent two and a half decades teaching in innercity and found the lives I shared in there have been slandered by the same Capitalist press. So why should I believe them about the Soviet Union? I know that Communism is not at all what we're told it's about. It's about trying to free the 99% from the 1% while the 1% is using the power of the military, the media, and all the politicians they own to crush it in any way possible.

Does that mean that Stalin was a saint? No, it doesn't. But he also certainly wasn't Hitler.

I don't know how much the film glosses over, but I think it is really important that we who were raised in the propaganda of the Capitalist regime see films like this that show the opposite viewpoint - and see them with an open mind.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the reviewers I just read weren't able to do that.

As one of those who are the last to leave the theatre after a movie, I sit and watch all the credits, looking for names of women, as well as those of different cultures. Rarely do I see a woman's name in the director of photography, but this film shows we've been steadily breaking in.

It is a fascinating celebration of that struggle. And it's not just about US women, though that history would be exciting in itself. But discovering women filmmakers from Afghanistan to México, seeing a woman document Mao's regular trips to the Chinese countryside to be with the peasants, meeting a woman in India who became a cinematographer after first seeing pictures moving "in a box," seeing women cover wars, hearing one woman's unique way of stopping sexual harassment - this is a well-rounded and remarkably universal study.

This delightful movie has so many twists of plot as it gets the characters mixed into seemingly unresolvable conflicts.

But in the meantime, it raises issues that, for some, just might be difficult to endure having raised, particularly the examination of prejudice. Racial prejudice gets in there, but just general prejudices and superstitions get laid out there to be challenged.

It's a Cuban movie in which Cuban artists raise these issues for Cuban audiences - but it's also universal. It comes from the people that Nelson Mandela praised as "unparalleled" for their "consistent commitment to the systematic eradication of racism;" almost a decade later they created this film to encourage us - there and throughout the world - to look even deeper into ourselves.

And to have fun at the same time. Fun story, great acting and directing. Enjoy!