TERROR'S ADVOCATE (L'AVOCAT DE LA TERREUR)
http://www.citypaper.net/movies/movie.php/id/60207/
by Sam Adams
Nov 8 - 14, 2007
Barbet Schreoder's portrait of controversial French attorney Jacques
Vergès begins with a disclaimer that the movie's point of view may
diverge from that of its subjects, which would be fair enough if it
actually had a discernable point of view. Vergès, something like the
French William Kunstler, is famous (or notorious) for his
associations with violent political radicals, from Algerian bombers
to Carlos the Jackal. His preferred strategy is what he calls the
"rupture defense," which involves attacking the trial court's
legitimacy at every turn, a tactic that successfully freed the
accused Algerian bomber Djamila Bouhired, whom Vergès later married.
(A variant on the defense was later employed, with notably less
success, by the Chicago Seven.) Schroeder follows Vergès' trail
through his eight-year disappearance in the 1970s, and up to the
infamous decision to defend Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, a
decision he somehow sees as an outgrowth of his lifelong
anti-colonialist stance. Grinning and puffing on a cigar, Vergès
dodges every punch Schroeder throws, and the movie spends so much
time tracing the convoluted web of underground factions that surround
him, from the Baader-Meinhof to a Swiss neo-Nazi, that it often loses
sight of its primary target. Schroeder seems to think Vergès'
villainy is self-evident, but that doesn't relieve him of the burden of proof.
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Terror's Advocate
http://reason.com/news/show/123292.html
The unsurprising confluence of far-left and far-right
Michael C. Moynihan
November 1, 2007
The first frames of Terror's Advocatedirector Barbet Schroeder's
engrossing, dispassionate study of Jacques Vergès, France's infamous
lawyer-to-the-beastlyare ceded to a fragile Cambodian pensioner
wearing the high-cropped haircut of a 1950's-era American teenager.
With calm conviction, Saloth Sarbetter known by his nom-de-genocide
Pol Potsets the tone of the document to follow: Monsieur Vergès,
Saloth assures his interlocutor, is indeed a decent man, a man he
holds in high esteem. So within minutes of reclining into their
seats, viewers will sense that Jacques Vergès, friend of Mao and
Carlos the Jackal, is already drowning; his Khmer character witness,
with whom he studied at the Sorbonne and, rumor has it, conspired to
take over Cambodia, graciously throws him a life preserver made of stone.
Cut back to Vergès, sitting in his opulent Paris office, puffing on a
Cuban cigar, enveloped in smoke and tacky objects d'art bequeathed to
him by various African tyrants. In the style of David Irving, he
gently concedes that while some bad things happened during the
evacuation of Phnom Penh, there was certainly no deliberate genocide
by Pol Pot's cadres. Flashing a crooked grin, he assures the audience
that under scholarly scrutiny the number of deaths commonly
attributed to the communist Khmer Rougeestimated at 1.7 millionjust
"doesn't tally." In the film's only deliberate repudiation of Vergès,
Schroeder's camera rebuts this absurdity with a quick tracking shot
across a row of fractured skulls, neatly stacked.
Terror's Advocate is a rambling, two-and-a-half hour recapitulation
of Jacques Vergès' moral, intellectual and legal defense of various
post-war terrorist movements, beginning with a detailed explication
of his involvement in the FLN struggle to free Algeria from French
occupation. Schroeder scrupulously avoids passing judgment on his
subject, instead shepherding the viewer on a gruesome terror tour
with Vergèsthe Zelig of far-left revolutionary violenceas guide.
Along the way, we discover a formidable legal tactician who has
proffered his considerable courtroom talent to thuggish leaders like
Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein and the both clumsy and brutal
Baader-Meinhof terrorists; a terrorist supporter, if not direct
participant, who went underground for eight unexplained years; a
fulminating anti-Zionist with uncomfortable ties to the European Nazi
movement.
Born to a Vietnamese mother and French father, Jacques Vergès, it
seems beyond dispute, was regularly treated as a second-class citizen
upon returning to his father's native country; the French colonial
presence in his mother's native country too had a galvanizing effect
on his political worldview. Schroeder cites Vergès's reaction to the
Sétif massacre, during which his countrymen killed thousands of
Algerians on the day of Nazi Germany's surrender, as the pivotal
moment in his political development-though his ideological path was
likely foreordained, as Vergès joined the Communist Party before the
Second World War.
Writing at his Atlantic Monthly blog, Andrew Sullivan posited that
what Vergès's background "reveals is that terrorism itselfespecially
in its modern varietyis rooted in the deepest sense of indignity and
dishonor that afflicts many cultures reduced to servility by
colonialism or indigenous pathologies. Vergès' profound anger from
growing up in the developing world and righteous resistance to the
French occupation of Algeria fuels his career of defending evil in
the courtroom. You can see in this movie how violence begets more
violence, how evil propels more evil, and how easy it is in advancing
a cause to become morally corrupted by anger." A friend interviewed
by Schroeder agrees, arguing that Vergès development was "born angry,
born colonized."
But this argument can't satisfactorily explain why Vergès, son of a
diplomat and beneficiary of France's most prestigious university
education, accepted the murder of civilians as a precondition of
colonial liberation. Neither does it explain why so many other,
less-fortunate victims of colonial Franceor colonial
whereveravoided colluding with terrorists like Carlos to attack
civilian targets in Western Europe. And rather than a presenting a
stultifying, implausible morality playin which the colonized asks
the foreboding Leninist question "What is to be done?"Schroeder's
film adds a disruptive wrinkle, ignored by Sullivan and most other
critics: Vergès seemingly incongruous defense of Klaus Barbie, the
Vichy-based Gestapo officer known as the "Butcher of Lyon." It is at
this point that the screen fills with friends and colleagues who,
while previously exculpating those who engage in revolutionary
violence, now question Vergès moral seriousness, for it was his
friend François Genoud, a Swiss Nazi and funder of Arab terrorism,
that enlisted him to Barbie's defense.
Because of the Barbie case, Los Angeles Times reviewer Kenneth Turan
sees Vergès as a "complex and contradictory character"an allusion to
both his leftist ideology and his close relationship with Josef
Goebbels old chum Genoud. The Barbie/Genoud saga, when considered
next to his hard leftism, qualifies Vergès as "bottomlessly
enigmatic," says Variety's review.
But there is nothing complex, contradictory or enigmatic about it.
Without a hand-holding narrator, one can be forgiven for missing the
obvious: rather than being motivated solely by the righteous anger of
the oppressed, as Sullivan suggests, or politically conflicted, as
many others have argued, it is not difficult to ascribe to Vergès a
virulent strain of anti-Semitism that transcends traditional
political labels. It is one thing to believe, as he argues throughout
the film, that every loathsome despot deserves a fair trial (though
one gets the sense that Vergès would decline to defend a tyrant like
Augusto Pinochet), and quite another to accept the case of Klaus
Barbie on the advice of an outspoken Nazi-who is a "brother" in the
struggle against Israel.
To believe that Vergès's political views are "contradictory," one
must believe the argument of Vergès client and former lover, Red Army
Faction (RAF) terrorist Magdalena Kopp. When interviewed by
Schroeder, the dour Kopp reaches for her generation's Nuremberg
defense: they were merely ordinary Germans, radicalized by the crimes
of their parents' generation, though she fails to recognize her
single degree of separation, via Vergès and Carlos, to those very murderers.
Rather, if one looks at the ideological meeting points of the
European radical left and right, it is increasingly evident that
there exist more commonalities than differences. (It should be
explicitly noted that such ideological confluence affects only the
extreme left and right, not those, say, critical of Israeli policy in
general.) In Germany, former hard-left student leader Bernd Rabehl
now inhabits the fringes of nationalist right-wing politics. Klaus
Reiner Roehl, ex-husband of terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, too has
migrated from the radical left to the radical right, contributing to
the "post-fascist" newspaper Junge Freiheit. Former Baader-Meinhof
terrorist Horst Mahler now acts as legal counsel for the neo-Nazi
political party NPD, whose views on Israel and the United States are
nearly identical to those put forth by his comrades in the RAF. (In
one scene in Terror's Advocate, repentant RAF terrorist Hans Joachim
Klein describes being spirited to Libya after the 1975 attack on OPEC
headquarters in Vienna. Upon discovering that Klein was German, one
Libyan comrade expressed his fondness for Adolf Hitler.) In an online
diary entry, Holocaust denier David Irving describes his shock at
discovering this convergence: "I like more and more of what The
Guardian, this left-wing liberal British newspaper has to say; and
its Sunday sister, The Observer. Perhaps I am really left-wing after
all, a socialist, as was the aforementioned artist and statesman
[Adolf Hitler]." It's worth noting here what is not mentioned in
Terror's Advocate, that Vergès also defended Holocaust denier Roger
Garaudy, himself an ex-Marxist revolutionary.
And yet, Jacques Vergès supposed straddling of ideologies is Terror's
Advocate's hook; gasping audiences wonder how a man who believes in
the liberation struggle of Third World can sidle up with those who
believe in Hitlerian fascism.
But the skillful lawyer, the defender of the indefensible, is no
match for the skillful documentarian, and Vergès unwittinglyand
persuasivelyargues for the prosecution.
Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.
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