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| Image from my friend Bosch Fawstin |
In 2004,
former Hollywood heartthrob Robert Redford executive-produced The Motorcycle
Diaries, a cinematic love
letter to the young Ché Guevara.
In 2007 he directed the talky anti-war bore Lions
for Lambs, starring himself as an activist professor who is appalled when
two of his students enlist and fight in Afghanistan instead of protesting our
involvement here at home. The 2010 movie The
Conspirator was Redford’s thinly-veiled
attack on Bush’s war on terror posing as a docudrama about the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Now Redford sets the sights of his cinematic activism
on idealizing the domestic terrorists of the Weather
Underground.
Redford, founder of the Sundance
Institute, and a progressive activist with connections
to the leftist puppetmaster George Soros, produced and directed the new
film The Company You Keep from a
screenplay adapted from a 2004 novel by Neil Gordon. In addition, Redford also
stars in the movie as an attorney whose former identity as a Weatherman radical
is exposed by a pushy journalist hungry for a career-launching story. Still
wanted thirty years later for a deadly bank robbery in his militant past, Redford’s
character goes on the run to prove his innocence by finding the real shooter
and convincing her to give herself up.
Along the way he reaches out to old comrades, fugitives like
himself who have also created new identities and lives for themselves, like the
professor who teaches Marx and anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon in his popular
class. They are all – including the two women (played by Julie Christie and –
surprise! – Code Pink
ally Susan
Sarandon) who are the most unrepentantly violent of the gang – painted as
idealists who simply got carried away in their resistance to the United States
government, which they believed was committing genocide abroad and murderous
suppression of dissent at home. “We made mistakes, but we were right,” a smug
Sarandon’s character tells the journalist.
That quote could sum up the theme of the movie. The Company You Keep pays lip service to
rejecting the movement’s violent excesses; for example, when the journalist
himself begins to display an empathy with the radicals after listening to
Sarandon’s moral pontification, an FBI agent warns him, “Terrorists justify
terrorism. Don’t get confused here.” But at the same time the movie absolves
those who participated in that violence – and who would do it all over again –
by minimizing it as passionate excess. “People make mistakes,” says Redford’s
character, who is clearly the voice of moral authority in the film. Of course people make mistakes – this is
the most facile truism of all time. But most people know better than to set off
bombs to kill innocent people, which is not simply a bad choice or youthful
indiscretion – it’s terrorism, and
those who try to absolve them of it are terrorist sympathizers.
Redford’s co-producer on the project, Nicolas Chartier, described
The Company You Keep as “an
edge-of-your-seat thriller about real Americans who stood for their beliefs,
thinking they were patriots and defending their country’s ideals against their
government.”
Real Americans who stood for their beliefs? Patriots? The Weather Underground never considered
themselves patriots. They penned a Declaration of a State of War against
America – or as they spelled it, AmeriKKKa. They advocated the overthrow of
capitalism. They aspired to take over the U.S. government, establish re-education
camps for their opponents, and were prepared to kill as many as 25 million “diehard
capitalists” who were incapable of being reformed. They sought to launch a race
war. They weren’t “defending their country’s ideals” – they were seeking to
eradicate them.
As The
Blaze notes, some of the terrorist group’s most prominent members remain
belligerent and unrepentant to this day, including its co-founder Bernadine
Dohrn, who calls the American government “the real terrorist” in
this interview from November 2010. Her husband, Weather Underground
co-founder and President Obama’s old
friend Bill
Ayers, now a radical academic like his wife, still
has not denounced the group’s violence. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he
famously said in 2001. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Despite this, they are now considered influential and
respected members of the academic community, which speaks volumes about the
ideological slant of our institutions of higher learning. Ron Radosh points out
in his
piece about the movie that Weatherman Kathy Boudin — who served 22 years
for her role as the getaway driver in a deadly 1981 Brinks robbery — was
recently made adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work
and also appointed a scholar-in-residence at New York University. Radosh quotes
David
Horowitz as pointing out that Boudin, on whom Susan Sarandon’s character is
obviously based, is a “murderess who betted the cold-blooded massacre of three
law-enforcement officers, including the first African-American on the Nyack
police force; a woman whose actions left nine children fatherless and who has
shown no genuine remorse for that.”
Robert Redford knows that today’s young generations learn
about history, when they learn about it at all, from either Howard
Zinn or Hollywood. The progressive propaganda that runs through movies like
The Company You Keep shapes their
perspective on the past. Considering that the movie has earned barely
half a million dollars in its first two weekends, it’s not shaping that
perspective for very many people – so far. But it will live on, on DVD and
television, and perhaps be recommended in classrooms, further rehabilitating
the reputations of unrepentant killers.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 4/17/13)
