Peter Watkins� Punishment Park; or, First Philippic Against Barack Obama

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In 1971, as Nixon continued his rampage through Southeast Asia, one year after the Kent State Massacre and two years after the Chicago PD and the FBI assassinated Black Panther Fred Hampton in his bed, the British filmmaker Peter Watkins released a documentary-style film called Punishment Park.  In the film, Nixon has declared the US to be in a state of insurrection and has empowered the forces of law and order to round up dissidents or those suspected of being likely to engage in subversive activities, and subject them to phony tribunals.  In the tribunals, the dissidents are given a choice between lengthy incarceration in an American prison or a three-day ordeal in one of the country�s newly established �punishment parks,� in which prisoners are released into the desert so that police and military units can gain valuable training experience by tracking them down.  The prisoners, who have no supplies, neither food nor water, are supposed to reach (ironically enough) an American flag, the general location of which they�ve been given in advance.  They have a two-hour head start and then the authorities will hop in their jeeps and chase after them.  They theoretically won�t be subjected to violence, but any attempt on their part to resist the officers or to escape from the course will result in military/police violence, up to and including killing.  If they reach the flag, their sentences will be nullified and they�ll be released.

The American flag, the perverse depiction of which in Punishment Park reminds one of Nagisa Oshima's decontstruction of the Japanese flag throughout much of his oeuvre.

The movie is ostensibly being filmed by a British film crew who are making a television documentary, and occasionally a chipper British voice can be heard asking participants on both sides what they think of the situation.  The film intercuts between scenes from the individual trials of a select group of defendants and their experiences in a punishment park, where the perverse game of capture-the-flag quickly reveals itself to be death sentence, as their dehydrated bodies deteriorate in the desert sun and as the authorities pick them off. 

Fred Hampton, before his assassination at the age of 21.

Here's law-enforcement in action in Watkins's film:

This is probably the last thing Hampton saw before he was murdered.

In many ways, this is a cin�ma v�rit� take on the basic premise of Kinji Fukasaku�s Battle Royale, or the American rip-off, The Hunger Games (or so I gather; I haven�t seen the latter).  What distinguishes Watkins� film from these two other examples is that, while Battle Royale and The Hunger Gamesare set in some dystopian future, Punishment Park is set in the here-and-now of 1971, with Nixon as president.  Given the potential for the escalation of the war in Southeast Asia, which had already been raging for almost a decade at this point (we mustn�t forget that the US started bombing targets in South Vietnam in 1962, under President Kennedy), and given the increasing militancy of the various anti-establishment movements, and the perception of the unraveling of law and order in the United States, and finally, given the willingness of the Nixon administration and COINTELPRO anti-subversive operations to completely disregard people�s fundamental civil and human rights, the scenario presented in Punishment Park wouldn�t have seemed all that far-fetched.

The film also presents an international situation that wasn�t outside the realm of possibility.  As our dissidents are being tried and sent off to be slaughtered, we hear snatches of radio news broadcasts which suggest that the North Koreans are shelling Seoul (as this film was made only three years after the USS Pueblo incident and the North Korean raid on the Blue House, which attempted to kill South Korean President Park Chung-hee, this was certainly plausible).  The broadcasts also describe a massive escalation of the war in Southeast Asia, with the implication that China is only days away from entering the war (it also mentions the presence in Southeast Asia of troops from Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, who participation in the war as American allies tends to be neglected in most accounts of the conflict).  So it�s under this situation of impending cataclysm that Nixon feels he can dispense with human and constitutional rights and start rounding up, abusing, and murdering American citizens as he pleases.

Good thing that�s all in the past, right?  In the modern-day United States, the government would never use international threats as an excuse to completely erode civil liberties, stigmatize and in some cases criminalize dissent, and even assassinate American citizens, right?

Oh, but they do!  I initially thought to myself, �Wow, Punishment Park sure is a grim warning of things to come,� but then I realized that plenty of this shit is already happening.  Now, I�ll spare you the litany of the crimes of the Bush administration, because they�re already well-known and there was a time when so-called liberals and progressives were happy to publicly condemn and repudiate them (I also won�t discuss American government crimes against citizens of other countries, because those could fill any number of blogs posts; for our purposes here, I will focus more narrowly on government crimes against American citizens).  But then Obama got elected, and suddenly all of Bush�s crimes, and even worse, have become acceptable to most �liberals,� because it�s Obama doing them, and that makes it ok.

Perhaps you�ll recall the case of Jose Padilla, the so-called �Dirty Bomber,� an American citizen whom Bush unilaterally stripped of his civil rights and detained without charge as an enemy combatant because he was accused of plotting to set off a radiological bomb.  Well, his detention sparked an uproar�because the president doesn�t have the right to detain an American citizen without charge!�and the government was eventually forced to charge him with something, although it should be noted that their allegations against him kept changing; they eventually dropped the dirty bomb accusation because of a lack of evidence; they then accused him of plotting to bomb apartment complexes; they dropped that because of lack of evidence; finally they got him on some vague charges of conspiracy to travel overseas to commit terrorism.  By the time of his eventual conviction and sentencing, he had spent so much time incarcerated in isolation that it had seriously warped his mind, and his lawyer argued that he was not competent to stand trial, not that the prosecutors or the judge gave a shit.

So Bush believed he had the right to detain citizens without trial, and the so-called Left was outraged.  Well, Obama believes he has the right to execute American citizens, including minors, without trial and, when this gets mentioned at all, it tends to receive bipartisan support.  On September 30, 2011, upon President Obama�s orders, the U.S. citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were murdered in a Predator drone strike in Yemen.  Now, the administration alleged that these two were terrorists, but they never provided any evidence for it.  They argued that it would have been difficult to arrest them in the lawless tribal areas of Yemen where they were resident, but arrest them for what? The US had never charged them with any crime.  And even if they had, you don�t get to just murder a fugitive because you�re finding it difficult to arrest him (also, if they could deploy a SEAL team into the heart of Pakistan, I don�t see why they couldn�t send one to Yemen; granted, the SEAL team killed the unarmed bin Laden�I�m not saying I feel bad for him, I�m just saying they could have arrested him and brought him to trial, which is generally what you�re supposed to do in a country that respects the rule of law, but that�s another issue�so maybe that wouldn�t have been much of a better outcome for al-Awlaki and Khan).  So yeah, back in September of last year, Barack Obama ordered the extra-judicial killing of two American citizens, for whom he was judge, jury, and executioner.

Two weeks later, another American drone strike in Yemen murdered Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar al-Awlaki�s 16-year-old son, also an American citizen, who had been in the country trying to find his father (who hadn�t been charged with any crime, remember, but who was understandably on the run because he knew that hisgovernment was trying to kill him).  Abdulrahman was killed along with nine other people, including his 17-year-old cousin.  The US government was allegedly trying to kill a suspected Egyptian terrorist, but he either wasn�t present at the scene or escaped unharmed.  Now, unlike his father, there had never been any allegations that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a terrorist; the only justification for his death (not that the US media bothered to seek one) was something along the lines of, �Whoops, collateral damage.�

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki

So Obama murdered these three American citizens and he got away with it.  In fact, most people in the American media class applauded him for it (at least they applauded the killings of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan; I don�t think they gave a shit about al-Awlaki�s son).  I think it helped Obama to legitimize these killings that they took place in another country�and a Third World, Muslim country at that�and that his victims were Muslims with Muslim-y sounding names.  Had he chosen to blow up white Christian fugitives (and their children) in the Canadian wilderness, I suspect there would have been a greater backlash, at least for the time being (as an example, there was a greater backlash when the government shot and killed the wife and son of gun-toting white survivalist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge in 1991.  But he was white and Christian and had a European name, and this was on American territory, so it was �different.�)  But now Obama has set the precedent that the president can unilaterally kill any American citizen he wants to, so long as he deems that citizen to be a threat (and the criteria that he and his close advisers use to reach that determination are confidential, of course).  Now that the president has established that he can kill American citizens and get away with it, what�s to stop him from doing so under other circumstances? How long until a US president (Obama, Romney, Santorum, all the future presidents who will be empowered to do this by Obama�s precedent) kills an American citizen on US soil, or kills a citizen for purposes not related to Islamic militancy, or some combination thereof?

Truly, of all the awful things Obama has done during his presidency, this is probably the worst (or at least in the top three).  I don�t understand how liberals or progressives or whatever they want to call themselves can be aware of these murders and support Obama in good conscience.  Some of them I suspect are just ignorant of them.  Certainly, the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki received almost no press coverage.  But how can you people who were outraged by Bush�s crimes justify Obama�s crimes, which are even worse?  Hell, how can you justify the perpetration of these crimes by anyone, regardless of their politics?  This is murder.  Barack Obama is a murderer (Christ, I sound like Glenn Greenwald here).

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki again.  Still doesn't look like a terrorist.  Just looks like a kid, in fact.  The next time you're defending Obama, remember this kid's face.

And then if we look at Obama�s persecution of dissidents (including the mental tortures inflicted upon Bradley Manning, who, if he is the primary Wikileaker, has exposed more crimes in high places than anyone in recent memory) and his illegal expansion of the American �War on Terror� in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia�and the Philippines, which saw a US airstrike in March� and Mali, whose Islamist insurgency (blowback from Obama�s unconstitutional war in Libya) will probably provide the excuse for the next US military attack, and we can find in Obama another Nixon (although Nixon didn�t attack as many countries).

So bearing all this in mind, I can say that Punishment Park is one of the most prescient political films I�ve ever seen.  In playing �what-if� with the Nixon administration, Peter Watkins anticipated by forty years many of the crimes of Barack Obama.